Crying wolf
I don’t think my opinion about ultra-processed foods is a secret. I’ve written about it ad nauseam. Not only is there no evidence that categorising food by processing is superior to the old-fashioned idea of using food composition – shoehorning in a new category distracts from many of the real problems we currently face in nutrition. Increasing fibre intake across the population — most of us don’t achieve the recommended 30 g/d – would arguably have a greater benefit to health than avoiding healthy UPFs. (Unhealthy UPFs are already covered by all current guidelines.)
The ambiguous definition and the constantly shifting goalposts of UPF make research difficult and expensive. We need to move beyond observational data, which simply does not work for UPF — but currently we have almost no clinical data supporting the claim that ultraprocessed foods are really unhealthy.
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Originally published on Substack.