> Processed food is, in a sense, pre digested.
While true, this is also the case with all cooking, which makes it difficult to separate the various other things.
Don't get me wrong, the older I get the more negligence I see in corporations promoting their new things, so I'm now absolutely on-board with a cautious and conservative set of testing requirements for novel foods.
This is just to say that the boundary condition for such novelty isn't what most people think it is.
The processing is done with a purpose.
> All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption
Source?
Processed food is, in a sense, pre digested. The simple fact that e.g. starches and sugars are unbound from the cells that contained them before any of it hits the mucous linings of your mouth and duodenum dramatically changes the food’s physiological effects. And it’s difficult to undo the gastric, gastrobiomic, metabolic, cellular and other effects of UPFs with an otherwise-healthy diet.