“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”

That’s one of the many things the loquacious, albeit grammatically challenged, Muhammad Ali said to explain why he refused to fight in the Vietnam War. The three-time world heavyweight boxing champion’s words came to mind after reading ones by another Ali, one who’s still with us and an MD.

Mir Ali, a bariatric surgeon and medical director of MemorialCare Surgical Weight Loss Center at Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, CA said, “These findings provide further evidence to advise patients to reduce their intake of ultra-processed foods.”

The findings he’s referring to come from a study that links eating UPFs to a potential health problem in the muscles you may know little about — and one I dare you to say three times fast. But even if your tongue never twists on, “Fat infiltration, fat infiltration, fat infiltration,” what the medical world calls intermuscular adipose tissue, that success sheds no light on the problem IMAT presents or why a famous war objector’s proclamation merits mention today.

The latter’s because I’m well aware of how frequently I write about UPFs and that it’s never complimentarily.

Despite that, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them ultra-processed foods.” I might even be persuaded to eat a few to keep from being incarcerated — or becoming a soldier.

So if there’s ever something positive to report about UPFs, I will. But I feel duty bound to write about any health study findings that could affect you, so just two weeks ago you read about one done at Tulane University that added yet another reason to limit your consumption of them.

In addition, that is, to the fact UPFs have been strongly linked to an increased risk of chronic, diet-related diseases and premature death, as well as obesity, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, depression, and high blood pressure.

The Tulane study found subjects who ate the most UPFs had a “marked decrease” in bone mineral density when compared to those who ate the least.

Now you’ll learn of another recent UPFs study, the one Mir Ali comments upon in a Medical News Today article. It appears in the April issue of Radiology and focuses on the effect UPF consumption has on people at risk for knee osteoarthritis.

Researchers from Turkey, Germany, and the United States worked together to further analyze data originally accrued as part of the Osteoarthritis Initiative on 615 participants who averaged 60 years of age. Nearly all participants were obese or overweight at the time of the study, and every single one was at risk for knee osteoarthritis.

Since “thigh muscle functionality is crucial for knee stability,” MRIs of the thighs were taken as part of the original study. The follow-up study used those images to see how much fat had infiltrated the participants’ thigh muscles and then reviewed their diets.

The researchers found high UPF consumption in both the males and females “was associated with higher muscle fat content on thigh MRI scans.”

Their paper acknowledges this discovery doesn’t prove cause and effect or that the same results would be found in other muscle groups. It does note, however, that the typical American actually consumes more UPFs than the study participants self-reported.

So while your knees may not be giving you any problems right now, a study published in August 2025 in Cell Reports still deserves notice. For it finds, as study leader Daniel Kopinke explains in a University of Florida press release about it, that IMAT “is an active driver of declining muscle function” and disrupts the healing and regeneration of injured muscles.

Moreover, having a high amount of IMAT is seen as a strong indicator of poor health and has been linked to heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, neuromuscular disorders like Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS. The correlation between IMAT and ALS is so strong, in fact, many doctors use IMAT to gauge the progression of the disease.

While all this makes it easy to see why you don’t want your muscles to house a high degree of fat, what’s not as easy to ascertain is exactly how much of it you have there.

The best way to measure that, a DEXA scan, costs $150 to $400 without insurance, and a doctor is unlikely to okay one solely for this information.

There’s a strong correlation between overall body fat percentage and IMAT, however, so knowing that serves as a useful substitute. It’s info you can get easily from a smart scale, but a good one’s going to cost you at least $100 — and the info is questionable.

For instance, the conclusion to a 2021 observational study determined “smart scales are not accurate for body composition and should not replace DEXA in patient care.”

So why opt for a no-cost alternative that yields results just as accurate as body-fat calipers? The U.S. Navy’s body fat estimation formula.

All you need to do so is a tape measure, a standard scale, and access to one of the free online sites that perform the necessary calculations after you measure your neck, waist, and hips if you’re a female.