I think sugar and karragenan is an interesting comparison. Adding karragenan is UP. Karragenan is made by adding alkaline to dryed seaweed. It's a traditional ingredient. Sugar is not UP, although juicing, drying, crystallizing, and filtering should qualify it as UP? I just don't understand it.

But can such mechanisms ever be tied to ultra-processed foods? To me, it seems to be a category error. If the mechanism is partly hyper-palatibility, what about the UPFs that's not hyper-palatable. If it is softness, what about the hard UPFs?

Another snippet from the Lancet review mentions the mechanisms, see picture. I'm looking forward to comments on this Lancet series. The framing of the series seems entirely uncritical, so I wondered whether it was peer-reviewed, but it seems it was.

My impression is that statisticians share that view; they see themselves as mathematicians, not methodologists. A statistician friend said that, in stats conferences, quant methods people are aliens who tell exotic stories about how statistics is used in the wild. 😅

And the joy you can read between the lines as all the science is explained in the GitHub repo readme! ❤️ Good vibe!