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.
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.