u/Izhachok

Michael mentioned a study that showed that ultraprocessed food consumption as a percentage of total diet correlates significantly with health outcomes only when it is measured by grams of food, not by calories. Of course this could be a statistical fluke, but it also seems like it could essentially be a measure of vegetable and fiber consumption. A lot of vegetables are so much less calorie dense than foods that would be classified as “ultraprocessed,” so eating lots of vegetables wouldn’t show up strongly in the calorie metrics, but it would show up in the mass metrics, with people who eat lots of vegetables reporting processed foods as a lesser percentage of their diet by mass but having a similar percentage of their diet by calories made up of processed foods compared to people who don’t eat vegetables. More generally, fiber doesn’t provide any calories accessible by the human digestive system, but it is so important for both gut health and metabolic health. So, I wonder if that study is more a measure of the effects of not eating vegetables/fiber and less a measure of the effects of eating processed foods. I haven’t looked up the actual study to see how the authors discussed the results, though.