There are many other factors that could be relevant here.
As the article says, ultra-processed food tends to be low in nutrients. Given the little we know, that seems as likely a cause as anything else here.
Also, these are not randomized studies, as they also mention. So it is possible that, say, frozen meals are used more by a higher-risk population for other reasons (like cost), and this is just a correlation.
”Lab rats gain more weight from human foods than they do from rat chow with similar nutritional properties because obesity doesn’t come from fat or carbohydrate content, but from contaminants in the food, and human food has more contaminants than the rat chow does, likely from packaging and processing.
Processed foods end up with more contaminants in them — for example, there are 4x more phthalates in Kraft mac and cheese powders than in block cheese, string cheese, and cottage cheese. Another example are these results from the FDA, as reported by the AP. In terms of explaining why the cafeteria diet is so fattening, it’s especially illustrative that grocery store chocolate cake was an extreme outlier, with concentrations of PFPeA more than 100 times higher than chocolate milk.”
Granted, that’s about phthalates, which are widely used as plasticizers, but the same routes apply for PFAS.
