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Comment by chneu | Hacker News Reader

Be aware that the science on this is evolving pretty quickly.

A study came out recently that showed when folks ate a designed diet, one with and one without UPFs, they found the UPF diets resulted in a few additional lbs of weight gain.

The study accounted for a ton of variables. It showed that UPF calories lead to weight gain when consuming the same number of unprocessed calories.

https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(25)...

I think, at the current moment, there is enough evidence to support guidelines to avoid UPFs for the most part. Idk about banning but I do think it'll eventually get there, at least in schools. But who knows? American lunches are garbage in the first place

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I’m not an absolutist on this myself, if convincing evidence comes out then I’m happy to change my mind. I have no horse in this race besides wanting people to stay healthy. I’m just not currently convinced the UPF category adds much to our existing dietary guidelines.

Avoiding UPFs can serve as a reasonable heuristic as it can help you avoid HFSS foods, but you could also easily make some adverse switches following such advice.

I’m not sure that study really supports the inference you’re making re: calories and weight gain. The UPF diet had ~15g fibre/1000kcal less than the MP diet, so for an individual consuming 2500kcal/day there’s a 150kcal difference of energy per day that doesn’t seem to be accounted for by the studies methods (could be missing this in their calcs though?).

So yeah, if we don’t equate things like this, things look bad for UPFs. But what is the “UPF” category adding here. We don’t need it to know that if more calories are consumed as fibre in an otherwise calorie-equated diet, you’ll lose weight relative to the low fibre diet.

It is worth viewing the actual meals here in "Data S2" in their supplemental materials.

Do these look like 1:1 substitutions where the only controlled variable is processing?

Exactly. This isn’t a study that shows us UPF adds anything over what we already understand about dietary composition.

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