Yeah. It's this. For all the media obsession about a new "ultra-processed" category, it's the same old boring dietary conclusions: salt is bad, sugar is bad, saturated fat is mostly bad.
You don't have to know anything about how food was "processed", you can still just look at the label.
Whenever I point out no cardiologists seem to agree on or recommend keto, these same people say “oh they will eventually, they’ll see they’ve been wrong”
It’s a little annoying how something as basic as food produces such large disagreements among experts. Makes me wonder what we really know.
IMHO that's an oversimplification on two counts: one being that people are different. I think I can remember that factor being denied in the past by medical practitioners, but I could be wrong. The view was, it's a physical fact that there's so-and-so many calories in a given piece of food, and the outcome will be identical for everyone. I don't think we believe that to be true any more.
The other can be explained with oatmeal. Oatmeal is a traditional way to get something readily edible out of oats. Oatmeal comes in any number of variations, and if you like to, you can grind them down to a powder. Do you think that all these different forms have the same nutritional effects?
Oats will differ from oatmeal slightly because of the steaming involved in production, but other than that, they're just altered in physical shape: they're flattened and they differ in particle size. Essentially, the smaller the particles, the less digestive work the body has to perform on a given amount of intake, and one should fully expect different effects although their nutritional components—fats, carbohydrates, proteins—will remain constant (assuming proper processing).
Different types of oatmeal will lend themselves to different culinary methods, and I think just as in the kitchen, so in the stomach they will behave differently.
One aspect of Ultra-Processed foods—and I myself am not sure at all whether this is just the next food scare or something to be taken serious, as a category—would appear that the industry has all the incentives to favor small particle sizes. I think the ultimate dream of a food processing engineer must be to assemble all products from reliable streams of standardized small particles, preferably liquids really. It's not unlike boards pressed from wood chips being cheaper than boards from solid wood (the more affordable of which are really assembled from slats these days).
Now, satiety is a huge component for the general public maintaining a healthy weight. But it’s not the same mechanism as them somehow being different nutritionally. It’s the reason why GLP1 antagonists work. They don’t somehow make you burn more calories, they just make you feel full easier. Foods that naturally have that effect will have the same benefit.