What even is an ultra-processed food?
Ultra-processed foods — UPFs — are the new thing that we love to hate. It is hard to go a week without hearing a new terrifying fact about UPFs to haunt your brain. UPFs are apparently causing pretty much every health problem that is plaguing humanity, and are a specific target of the new pseudoscience team heading the White House.
And new headlines seem to support all of this concern. According to the latest research, you lose double as much weight by eating minimally-processed foods as UPFs, even if the UPFs adhere to all of the dietary guidelines. If true, this would mean that there is something inherent in UPFs that makes them particularly dangerous for our health, beyond all of the usual calorie counting and micronutrients that we usually care about.
Fortunately for all of us who enjoy the occasional potato chip, the study was flawed. If you look very closely at the research, what this study really seems to show is that people eat more better-tasting food. This is, perhaps, unsurprising, and makes a lot of the concern over UPFs seem deeply silly.