Not at all. We're in the post-truth era. Anything you dislike can be denied and dismissed, and nothing anyone says will convince you otherwise. There's no objective truth, just what you prefer and therefore insist must be.
It is, mostly, hysteria. The problem is that we're just assuming processed foods are bad period, but even if you don't eat processed foods you can eat a very poor diet.
Burgers aren't processed, fried chicken isn't processed. And, you don't need to process food to make it "addictive". People who think you need chemicals and additives to make addictive food are just stupid, frankly.
Take whatever food, douse it in salt, deep fry it in fat, and boom: you have a 2,000 calorie meal that sets off every dopamine receptor in your brain. All natural. No processing needed.
The real harm isn't processed foods, it's hyper-palatable foods. Foods that are extremely delicious, addictive, and easy to overeat. Some are processed, some are not.
Take, for example, high-fiber tortillas. Those are ultra-processed, those aren't from God. But, 98% of Americans do not eat enough fiber. Fiber can lower your risk of obesity and heart disease. The high-fiber tortillas can be a great addition to your diet. They're not hyper-palatable - you're not gonna sit there and crave them like a drug and then eat 2,000 calories worth of high-fiber tortillas.
These studies are legitimately worthless, and I'll explain why.
1. Ultra-processed foods contain a lot of hyper-palatable foods. You have to understand that UP foods is an absurdly broad category.
When you measure the harm of UP foods, you're not measure the harm of UP foods - you're measuring the harm of hyper-palatable foods, because naturally those are the foods people gravitate towards. Because they taste good and are easy to eat and overeat.
You also have to understand that UP foods are associated with poorer people, which get significantly worse medical care and just have overall worse lives. What you could be measuring is that poor people are more depressed - which, yeah duh.
The key problem here is that nutritional studies are almost always observation, NOT double-blind. Because following people for decades in a double-blind study where you control their diet is very, very, very hard and expensive.
If you just replaced all the UP food with burgers and fried chicken, would those people be better off? No. So you shouldn't be so confident you're measuring what you think you're measuring.
2. All sugar is bad, period. It's not HFCS that's causing liver disease, it's sugar in the absence of fiber. We know sugar causes liver disease.
If we want to decrease this, we must lean into Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners. They are better than sugar, period. Straight up, Aspartame is healthier than any sugar, including table sugar you put in your morning coffee.
1. If you had read the study, you'd know that they control for sociodemographic factors, lifestyle and health-related behaviors. So your point doesn't hold.
2. Second article says it's fructose specifically. And the ultra-processed form allows instant assimilation of it, far from the classic forms found in nature. They also allow to add much more of it. See: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-hig...
1. No actually it does hold - these are still observational studies.
Which means they are looking at people who already don't eat UP foods and comparing them to people who do. But UP foods are more likely to be hyper-palatable.
So you're comparing foods that are likely to be hyper-palatable to those that aren't. That's what you're measuring.
If you conduct a double-blind study where you compare UP foods that are NOT hyper-palatable to non UP foods that are NOT hyper-palatable you won't find a difference. Such a study does not exist, because it's almost impossible to do.
People who are already health conscious will be healthier. You're not forcing anyone to eat healthier, so you're not measuring anything valuable.
2. HFCS is 60% fructose, sugar is 50% fructose. Does that 10% increase make a difference? Yes. But it's miniscule. If you replace all HFCS with sugar, you lower your fructose intake only a tiny bit.
Also appeal to nature is stupid. It's just dumb and nobody cares about that.
1. If most UP foods are hyper-palatable and this is the problem (not for instance, the fact that most have very high glycemic indexes, among other things), then it's fair to use UP as a proxy. It's fair to say that, when addressing obesity, it's better to avoid UP foods as they are too palatable for our archaic body.
Besides the study doesn't studies obesity (it is a control), but depression, which isn't linked to food being palatable or not.
2. Sugar is itself a highly processed food. HFCS contains more fructose, which saturates faster the intestine's absorption capacity.
Sugar is mostly derived from beetroot and sugar cane. Of course you can get diabetes from fruits or sugar beets alone, that said it's much harder than from eating UP foods.
Yeah I'm amazed people with a functioning brain can even entertain that kind of bullshit. Then again, I'm assuming they have a well-functioning brain, maybe that's the real issue.
You don't even need to prepare food for it to be extremely delicious and easy to overeat: nuts are SO good that before you know it, you ate your full daily caloric requirements (for not very active people). At around 600kcal per 100g it is really easy.
The thing is that in nature you have to collect and get the nuts out of their shell, so it's a time and labor-intensive thing, it would be much harder to abuse it "naturally", but it still possible with time/patience (but I would venture that if it took that much effort to get it ready, you would rather avoid wasting it by overeating).
I don't like "ultra-processed" food that much but that's mostly because I find them too expensive for what they bring and the taste/texture is generally too caricatural and one dimensional, not exactly very interesting or satisfying. But people buy this because it's cheaper than the good stuff and they would rather not put the effort into preparing the good stuff.
Because it detracts and discourages some very healthy processed foods while not addressing any actual issues.
Again, is eating burgers and fried chicken the solution? Those are not processed. So if you just tell people to not eat processed foods, you haven't helped them at all.
For many people, a healthy and achievable diet will include processed foods, such as high-fiber bread alternatives. A diet of only whole foods is not achievable for most people, so it's not good advice.
Many people are clearly going overboard and using processed foods as an excuse for making the naturalistic fallacy. (Or maybe today we would say that processed foods are used as a "thought terminating cliche".)