In my opinion, people focus too much on vague science they don't understand. All we have as far as I know, are a few fairly weak studies showing a weak correlat

In my opinion, people focus too much on vague science they don't understand. All we have as far as I know, are a few fairly weak studies showing a weak correlation between ultra-processed foods consumption and certain diseases like colon cancer. They look at multiple diseases which drastically increases the odds of false positives, they use a broad definition of ultra processed food, they base their study on people's own answers and their end result only shows a marginal increase in certain diseases like for the control group they observe a tiny effect like a 20% increase in colon cancer for the processed food consumers. This means if 5/1000 people in the control group get this disease, it's 6/1000 for processed food consumers. It's basically nothing. It is highly likely to be caused by random variance. This type of research is not mature enough to base life decisions on. It is a hint that there might be something worth looking into but that's all there is to it. Most people don't know nearly enough to have any sort of informed opinion on this topic. We as a society don't know whether processed food is bad, nor how bad it might be, we just think it might be so it's frustrating when people cite shitty popsci articles as if they're facts. The one thing we can say for sure is that we haven't observed any significant effect in the studies we have done. For all intents and purposes, eating processed food is as far as we know completely safe. Certainly much safer than consuming alcohol.