Doctor who sounded alarm on ultra-processed food urges tougher action
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"too much sugar is bad" is already enough to express things like "drinking coca cola is unhealthy": since coca cola is high in calories but low in nutrients. It's easy to consume more calories than the body burns by drinking coca cola.
AFAIU, the argument as presented is that "ultra-processed" foods are unhealthy, because the processing makes you want to eat the food more.
I feel the argument against "ultra-processed" is in agreement with "limit consuming food that's low-satiation, low-nutrition, calorie-dense"; but then focuses on "ultra-processing bad", seemingly because processing leads to those bad things.
Where are you getting that info from? The chemistry doesn’t add up.
But, again, "diet soda causes weight gain" doesn't explain how drinking more diet soda would lead to weight gain. Whereas "people who drank more diet soda also ate more (than those who drank less diet soda)" seems both plausible, and would explain the result.
One could naturally make UPFs that are entirely boring, but his would they compete on the consumer market with UPFs like the diet cola?
Young people forget how contentious the idea that "tobacco causes cancer" was back in the day. The "circunstancial evidence" was overwhelming[1], so naturally the industry did all it could to muddle the water, in the shape of making money flow towards people who were already predisposed against targeting tobacco. So the thought is: since theres an industry profiting from UPFs, the same will happen around the debate on whether UPFs cause problems.
[1] because the evidence was almost always observational from which you cannot conclude causation, unlike with randomized controlled trials, like with UPFs. They mention to this in the article.
Things like vitamin supplements and protein powders could also be considered ultra processed consumables/foods, but those are products that have been engineered to make it easier to get more of that vitamin or protein respectively into one's diet. The foods that are really at the root of the issue here are products that have been engineered for one purpose alone, profit, to get you to eat more of them. The evidence suggests that humans have gotten so good at this, engineering foods to make you want to eat more of them, that it appears to hijack our natural system of hunger response which tells us to stop eating when we've had enough, leading to weight gain. There isn't evidence for this yet, but I highly suspect the companies involved know this and may have purposefully muddied the waters about the cause of rising obesity, pushing claims that it's caused by people living too sedentary of lives, or people lacking discipline and self control, to shift blame of their negligence and exploitation to the very victims of their crimes.
Ultra-processed food is better described as a chemical soup that is turned into something resembling food. A good barometer is whether or not the ingredient list makes sense to a lay person. Bagged chips, candy bars, white bread, sodas, energy drinks, etc are all considered ultra-processed.
I agree there needs to be more education. There are several documentaries on this you can find with a trivial Youtube search. The conclusion most of them reach is that the food lobby is so strong (here in America) that research rarely gets out. The companies responsible have an army of morally and ethically bankrupt PhDs pumping out garbage research to lower the SNR enough to muddy the waters. Ultra processed food companies are more-or-less the modern equivalent of the Tobacco lobby.
As a final note on news - you should take a look at who is giving advertising money to the major news companies and movie studios. As always - follow the money. They'd never bite the hand that feeds.
http://www.iea.usp.br/pessoas/pasta-pessoac/carlos-augusto-m...
Is there such thing as toxic skepticism, where the need to shoot holes in something to virtue signal being too smart to believe the presented journalistic narrative leads to misinformation through worse "research" than the journalist performed?