How Ultra-Processed Foods Impact Your Body: More Calories, Weight Gain

• Ultra-processed foods are associated with all kinds of poor health.
• But perhaps they’re not all equally bad.
• Ongoing research suggests that adding larger amounts of foods to ultra-processed diets may help.

It’s no secret that ultra-processed foods are not the best for our health.

“What we’re trying to figure out is what it is about ultra-processed foods that causes overconsumption and weight gain,” metabolic researcher Kevin Hall recently told Business Insider.

Mr. Hall works at the National Institutes of Health, where he conducts unusual experiments. He took people into a tightly controlled food lab for a month and fed them four different meals (one unprocessed and three ultra-processed, but all containing the same levels of important nutrients). tested how it affected people’s hunger, satiety, calorie burn, and weight. Fat gain and loss.

Although his research is still ongoing, he has shared some early results with colleagues in the United States and Europe.

Early findings provide some hints as to why UPF not only leads to weight gain but also makes it difficult to shed fat. This study also shows that simple adjustments can make a big difference. Perhaps, Hall says, you don’t need to cut out ultra-processed foods to eat a satisfying, relatively healthy diet.

Patients who ate an ultra-processed diet gained 2 pounds per week

When Hall’s patients changed their diets, their caloric intake changed dramatically.

After one week of eating an unprocessed diet rich in fresh vegetables, beans, legumes, and whole grains, participants ate an average of 2,700 calories per day. They also tended to lose slightly more weight, losing about a pound of fat.

Things changed when they switched to an 80% ultra-processed diet. The amount of food served is the same and the levels of sugar, salt, fat, carbohydrates, protein, and fiber are the same.

The patients ended up eating more food to achieve the same level of satiety, consuming an average of about 3,700 calories per day. When consuming ultra-processed foods, patients gained more than 2 pounds per week.

The results, while still preliminary, were even more surprising than Hall’s previous experiments in which patients consumed an extra 500 calories per day on an ultra-processed diet.

People may not even feel like they are eating more when they consume these ultra-processed foods. Generally, each bite of ultra-processed foods is much higher in calories than homemade meals.

Adding water makes ultra-processed foods ‘healthier’

Eliminating ultra-processed foods is not realistic in the United States, Hall said. But what if we could make the Western diet even worse?

In hopes of reducing people’s weight gain and improving satiety with fewer calories, Hall (and his team of clinical chefs) designed two new meals to test.

Both diets were 80% ultra-processed, but with some key adjustments.

In the first new diet, researchers reduced the amount of so-called “hyperpalatable foods,” foods that combine sugar, salt, and fat in ways not normally found in nature (rich, salty ice cream, donuts, or vegetable cream sauce).

Addiction researcher Terra Fazzino coined the term “hyperpalatability” as a way to collect data about the appeal of junk food. She hypothesizes that highly palatable ultra-processed foods confuse our minds, driving people to eat more than they otherwise would.

But Hall’s new study found that wasn’t true. Patients who cut down on highly palatable foods gained more than a pound in a week while saving just 200 calories per day.

For the second meal, the chefs again reduced the amount of ultra-palatable foods, but at the same time increased the water content and made people’s ultra-processed diets less energy-dense. Often this meant adding larger amounts of non-starchy vegetables, like side salads, to ultra-processed plates.

“Basically, you add chunks that are very low in calories,” Hall told BI. “It’s typically a low-starchy vegetable.”

Eating an ultra-processed diet with fewer energy-dense foods and By cutting back on less palatable foods, people lost about 1 pound per week. united nationsProcessed food. They also ate about 830 fewer calories per day, which was very close to consuming 1,000 fewer calories on an unprocessed diet.

“Okay, we’ve solved this problem, this is great,” Hall said when he first revealed the new results at a presentation at Imperial College in London in November.

However, there was a catch.

“We decided to look at changes in body composition, so we threw in a little monkey wrench,” Hall said.

The problem we haven’t solved yet: Achieving adequate weight loss.

Only those who consumed a 100% unprocessed diet lost body fat.

On the “healthier” ultra-processed diet, people lost about 1 pound per week, but that was from fat-free weight. That means the weight of muscle, bone, tissue, or just water.

Hall doesn’t yet know why this is happening, but he suspects it has something to do with the “digestibility” of ultra-processed foods, or how they’re handled in our bodies compared to whole foods. states.

“If we can learn what those mechanisms are, really smart people who are inventive food technologists and scientists might be able to redesign some of these foods,” he told BI. Ta.

“There are a lot of stories and hypotheses that sound reasonable, but we won’t know until we actually do the research to test them.”

5 easy ways to make today’s meals healthier

It’s still too early to say exactly why people eat more calories and store more fat with ultra-processed foods, but Hall hopes to use his early findings to suggest some It states that you can make an educated guess.

Here are some tips:

• Add volume to any meal by adding vegetables to your plate. Maybe a salad would be good. You could also add some boiled broccoli or carrots. It doesn’t have to be fresh. It’s fine even if frozen.

• Choose whole grains like oatmeal, brown rice, and quinoa.

• Be aware of the amount of sugar in things like yogurt, granola, and salad dressings and try to limit your intake. (Olive oil makes a great dressing; it’s rich in healthy fats and beneficial plant compounds.)

• Prioritize satiating, nutritious foods that are known to have health benefits, such as eggs (even the ultra-processed liquid variety may be okay).

“The food may have strange additives or ingredients that aren’t good for you,” Hall says. “There’s no science on it yet, but I think if we apply what we know, we can make educated choices.”