There’s an excellent discussion of the most recent RCT on UPF foods with its author here ( https://sigmanutrition.com/episode577/ ). Not only is the study itself very interesting, but it does a great job going over the evidence landscape on UPFs and food at the current point in time. Dr Dicken is very clear that at the moment, in his view, they have insufficient evidence to make policy decisions like this, a view tha…
Be aware that the science on this is evolving pretty quickly. A study came out recently that showed when folks ate a designed diet, one with and one without UPFs, they found the UPF diets resulted in a few additional lbs of weight gain. The study accounted for a ton of variables. It showed that UPF calories lead to weight gain when consuming the same number of unprocessed calories. https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolis…
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.