We get these disturbing posts on our phones these days. I think of them as "horror clickbait," stories that are so disturbing we have to read more. I can't do anything about many of the stories, but I can help a little with the ones to do with our health. The clickbait story was that processed food will shorten your life . By how much? Oh, about 14%. That sounds terrible until you take a step back and do a little math. 14% of a human life... that's...round to 70 years, round down to 10%... and you have at least seven years of your life lost to processed food. That's pretty dramatic. For comparison, smoking like a chimney your whole life will drop your expected span by about ten years . Are we really saying eating processed food is as bad as chain smoking? Then I went looking for the study. It's not a great format. A survey of English eaters . And a fairly arbitrary splitting up of food into minimally processed, processed, and ultra-processed food. By arbi...