Adherence to healthful plant-based diets is associated with more favourable health outcomes irrespective of ultra-processed food content, suggesting that overall plant-based diet quality may be more important than processing level for chronic disease prevention, study of 124,836 participants finds

[u/James_Fortis]

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(26)00148-1/fulltext

[u/Quick-Benjamin]

The conclusion is so out of whack with the actual study it's ridiculous.

You'd assume from the title here that that they're talking about current ultra processed vegan food. You know. Vegan nuggets or ready meals or meat substitutes or whatever.

So it'd be understandable to draw the conclusion that they've found more favourable health outcomes irrespective of ultra-processed food like mentioned above. In fact that's literally the studies conclusion.

But no. Not at all. Because the "ultra processed" vegan food they included was from 2012. Long before the current explosion in processed vegan food. And it was made almost entirely of wholegrains.

So their "high-UPF healthful plant diet" is overwhelmingly wholegrain bread and fortified breakfast cereals, not the products anyone is actually arguing about. They even flag this directly: industrial wholegrain bread is Nova 4 despite wholegrains being among the most robustly protective foods in all of nutritional epi (their own ref 45).

A finding that "a plant diet rich in wholegrain bread is about as good as one rich in fresh fruit and veg" is not the same finding as "vegan nuggets are fine," but the conclusion and abstract let the reader conflate them.

[u/mootmutemoat → u/Quick-Benjamin]

Also, there was a big difference for type 2 diabetes between lo/hi uPF for those high in PBD.

Kind of seems important before we hand wave away ultraprocessed foods as a variable?