It’s not quite Memorial Day and still you sometimes see them. By Labor Day, they’ll be everywhere - and annoying.

By Columbus ... um, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, you’ll be so sick of them that setting sail in search of a New World will tempt you to no end. Especially since the end of this incessant onslaught is still 23 days away.

So what’s the unnamed cause of this upcoming unpleasantness? Being subjected to the surfeit of political ads leading up to the presidential election.

I can’t believe there’s a Democrat, Republican, or Independent alive who actually enjoys viewing them. But then again, I don’t believe these ads affect the election, either.

According to Brett R. Gordon, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University, and Wesley R. Hartmann, the same at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, though, I’m sadly mistaken.

They teamed up for a paper published by Marketing Science in 2013 that analyzed the effect of advertising on the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. It found the effect in 2000 to be significant.

So much so that if there had been no campaign advertising and “all other factors held constant, three states’ electoral votes would have changed parties in 2000 ... [T]his shift would have resulted in a different president.”

While four years of Al Gore instead of George W. Bush would’ve created at least a few changes in the good old US of A, Gordon and Hartmann’s paper has not altered my distaste for political ads. It has, however, given me a greater appreciation of their power, as well as something else.

The impetus to once again lobby for healthy eating - and campaign against ultra-processed foods. Gone is my fear of leaning too heavily on that topic now that I know doing so could be effective and lead to a most desirous result.

A higher quality and a longer life for you.

A bit more than two weeks ago, BMJ published a paper that calls for “limiting consumption of certain types of ultra-processed foods for long-term health,” specifically “ready-to-eat-products” consisting of meat, poultry, or seafood, as well as sugar-sweetened beverages. It’s an assessment based on 30 years’ worth of information culled from more than 113,000 health professionals.

Author’s note: Artificially sweetened beverages are also cited in the paper but fall outside of the scope of this article. What this author will also note is that the authors of the study are far less critical of UPFs than you might imagine.

They believe not all UPFs need to be restricted because once overall diet quality was considered, the link between early death and UPFs was not as pronounced.

Which is exactly what you’d expect, isn’t it?

Something else you should expect comes from a paper published in BMJ about two months earlier. “That greater exposure to ultra-processed foods” - regardless of how the exposure is measured - “was consistently associated with a higher risk of adverse health outcomes.”

Now this paper’s a monstrous meta-analysis, reviewing 45 studies that encompass nearly 10 million people. Lead author Melissa Lane, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Food & Mood Centre at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, told CNN it found “strong evidence” between a higher risk of cardiovascular disease-related death and common mental health disorders.

In both cases, the increased risk is about 50 percent.

The meta-analysis also discovered a high intake of UPFs increased the risk of early death from any cause by 20 percent.

While these two studies are not really conflicting, they could create such feelings about UPFs. If that’s your case, consider the explanation and advice Dana Hunnes, PhD, a senior dietitian supervisor at RR-UCLA Medical Center - who was not involved in either study - offered in an article written by Elizabeth Pratt for Medical News Today.

That it’s not “feasible” to be “fully ascetic and eat 100 percent healthy all the time,” so eating UPFs on occasion is fine. “Less though, is always better.”

That’s true not only if your goal is to be healthier and live longer but also if you want to maintain a certain weight. And it’s true for a rather simple reason.

Processed foods are easier for your body to digest than foods consumed in their natural state, which means less diet-induced thermogenesis - the burning of calories to produce the heat required to digest food and thereby increases your resting metabolic rate - takes place. A lot less when the foods are ultra-processed and then compared to natural ones.

Up to 50 percent less in certain comparisons.

One final thought: Since there’s no universally accepted definition of UPFs, a good way to end is with how I recognize them.

They are purchased foods you can’t recreate in your own kitchen, containing ingredients you’re unsure how to pronounce - even though you’re sure of their function. To create a long shelf life, be ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat, and work in concert with added sugars and fat (in most instances) to make you want to eat more.