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We read with great interest the paper by Cordova et al. 1 on the incidence of multimorbidity for cancer and cardiometabolic diseases in the EPIC cohort in relation to the consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPF). We believe that the data presented do not fully support the conclusions of the article. The extreme heterogeneity found in the association between the consumption of the different subgroups of UPF and the clinical events observed during followup is clear and shows, in our opinion, that interpreting the effects of food on the basis of its degree of processing, at least in terms of its association with the risk of multimorbidity, is not useful and can be misleading.

The authors conclude that “our results suggest that higher consumption of UPF increases the risk of cancer and cardiometabolic multimorbidity”, but their data only show that consumption of foods of animal origin and sugary or artificially sweetened …