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Study Finds Ultra-Processed Foods Drive Weight Gain

181 points by tshannon 7y ago

ryeights 7y ago
...duh? Hasn't it been known for years that processed foods are engineered to be more addictive and thus more fattening?
challenger22 7y ago
I often wonder how much the difficulty of chewing a food effects how healthy its consumers are. Processed foods are "pre-chewed" and easy to eat very quickly.
- asark 7y ago
  A lot of foods that are really bad for you are kind of a pain to make. Potato chips. Fried chicken. Anything deep fried, really. Coffee cake. Chocolate chip cookies aren't hard but aren't exactly make-on-a-whim either and require resting the dough for a good long while if you want them to be really good. Most stuff that's easy to eat within minutes of a craving without having it prepared in advance are whole fruit or salads or something like that. Nuts are probably among the worst ready-to-eat foods but at least they're full of protein and vitamins, and arguably their eat-quickly-ability is well balanced with their nutrition level if you buy them in the shell, which prevents tossing back whole handfuls at once. The truly bad stuff takes planning, unless you buy it already made. [EDIT] oh man, crackers! A fair amount of effort for a pretty small yield in a home kitchen, even using electric mixers and such. Enough of a pain you'd hesitate to just eat them as-is rather than using them as one part of a larger meal. But a whole box is a couple bucks at the store....
  - amluto 7y ago
    Fried chicken is not all that bad. Properly deep fried food absorbs a surprisingly small amount of oil.
  - matchbok 7y ago
    My rule lately for junk/bad food: I only eat it if I take the time to make it myself. Works pretty well!
jniedrauer 7y ago
I'm not a scientist, and my experience is anecdotal. But there is something very very wrong with most of the food in our grocery stores. I had nearly debilitating GI issues and body composition problems until I completely cut out processed foods and started cooking from scratch. My symptoms cleared up within weeks, I lost 35 lbs almost effortlessly, and I've never felt better. I think what we're feeding the general public is a health hazard and should be much more strongly regulated.
- brightball 7y ago
  Similar here. For me I was able to correct most GI issue and lost 16lbs just by cutting out gluten. I don’t have celiac, but the effect was undeniable.
  - amluto 7y ago
    It’s very hard to just cut out gluten since almost no one eats straight gluten as a major part of their diet, unless they really really love tempeh. My personal hypothesis is that most non-celiac people who do this and get a major benefit actually get the benefit from removing wheat from their diet. This is consistent with people who entirely incorrectly claim that sourdough bread is GF. Traditional sourdoughs give bacteria and yeasts a lot of time to eat various sugars and starches.
    - tunesmith 7y ago
      Tempeh isn't gluten, you might be thinking of seitan.
      - amluto 7y ago
        Indeed. Whoops!
    - astura 7y ago
      Tempeh is fermented soybeans; seitan is wheat gluten.
    - 7y ago
ChuckMcM 7y ago
This is pretty interesting, the paper is here: https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)30248-7 https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)... I liked the experimental method, two weeks on one diet the two weeks on the other without restricting food intake. I've been doing some dieting of late and made the facetious conclusion that if you limit your diet choices to only foods you don't particularly like to eat, you lose weight :-). But the converse of people working very hard to make their food really tasty (generally by adding sugar and salt according to the paper) people consume more than they need. I'm not sure what we could do about it though, we can encourage better eating choices but there is a limit on how much that works.
- benj111 7y ago
  Well yes, that's kind of the problem. Our monkey brains go mad for energy dense food ie sugar and fat. That's a good motivator to stick your bare hand in a bee hive, or hunt down a Mammoth with a pointy stick. Doesn't work so well in the modern day, when a salad is what we should really be eating.
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    Not just sugar and fat though; eat plain bread made without any salt or seasoning; you will eat less than bread made other ways. Same for unseasoned potatoes.
    - ChuckMcM 7y ago
      And there is a really interesting effect I've noticed which I think of 'sugar blindness' which is that when I stopped eating a lot of sweet things my taste buds became more attuned to the taste of sweet. So things that weren't sweet before, are now. Its really an odd thing to experience.
      - danmaz74 7y ago
        Anedoctically, it's a thing the other way around too. When I moved to the UK from Italy, lots of foods tasted too sweet to me. After a year here, I don't feel that any more.
sparrish 7y ago
That's cause they taste so darn good you want to eat more of them.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  > Study participants were allowed to eat as much or as little as they wanted, but ended up eating way more of the ultra-processed meals, even though they didn't rate them as being tastier than the unprocessed meals.
  - goda90 7y ago
    Tastier is pretty subjective, and they weren't comparing them side by side. But something can probably be said about shifting tastes as you eat a certain kind of food repeatedly. I know if I'm eating healthy for awhile, then have a super rich dessert, it overwhelms me, as if my taste buds have adapted towards the healthy food.
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      Sure, but the article also explains things like how the appetite-suppressing hormone was found in much higher levels in the group consuming unprocessed foods. So I think I'd focus on facts like that before circling back to "well, it was probably tastier, they just didn't know it."
- jniedrauer 7y ago
  Similarly to how addictive products like cigarettes cause considerable harm to society, food with additives to make it "taste so darn good" can cause great harm. As a simple example, potato chips are carefully engineered to cause overconsumption. Why is that not seen for what it is? Causing direct harm to consumers through the use of addictive products.
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    Could you say that comfortable chairs are causing direct harm to consumers by encouraging a sedentary lifestyle, and the more comfortable the chair is engineered to be, the worse this effect is? Potato chips which aren't nice, won't be good potato chips. Potato chips which are as nice as they can be will be indistinguishable from engineered to be moreish potato chips. Would America's love affair with cars be different if the government mandates that no car can cost more than $15,000 or be sold at a loss so they must all be small and basic, may not exceed 35mph, must be unheated, uncushioned and have no audio systems, but that public transport must be spacious, clean, well maintained, fast, on-time, subsidised, not overcrowded, etc.?
goda90 7y ago
While I'm sure they're considerably better than processed foods, I wonder how the whole fruits, grains, and vegetables that have been selectively bred, or genetically modified to be all about tastiness(or growth speed, shelf life, etc) would stack up against other strains. All tomatoes can't possibly be equal, so it'd be interesting to see studies like this, but comparing a roma tomato, vs heirloom or something.
- devoply 7y ago
  I have also been wondering how this revolution of ethical imitation meat products is going to play with processed foods... as these are also quite processed foods. ingredient list from a mock salami product: water, vital wheat gluten, isolated soy protein, tofu (water, soybeans), spices, natural flavors (including autolyzed yeast extract), salt, wheat starch, garlic and onion powder, evaporated cane juice, vitamins & minerals (dipotassium phosphate, dimagnesium phosphate, zinc oxide, ferric orthophosphate, calcium panthothenate, thiamin hydrochloride, cyanocobalamin, iron oxide), carrageenan, beet powder and extractive of paprika (for color).
  - jniedrauer 7y ago
    You can make seitan from scratch. I start with vital wheat gluten (and chickpea flour and nutritional yeast), which is technically a processed product. But you could start with flour if you wanted to. The end result is a product with 3 or 4 simple ingredients, compared to that fairly large list of unknowns.
    - dao- 7y ago
      I think this is missing the point. Yes you can make seitan from scratch, but it's not necessarily going to be better since seitan with its main ingredient being gluten contains little fiber either way. On the other hand, chickpea flour may be processed, but if the process preserves the fiber, that's not really a problem. The lack of fiber in /most/ processed foods makes you eat more of these.
- cwkoss 7y ago
matthewaveryusa 7y ago
Isn't this study a bit unfair in that the ultra-processed diet was 508 calories more per day than the minimally processed one?
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  That's how many extra calories one group ate than the other. It wasn't prescribed. The article explains reasons why, like how the appetite-suppressing hormone was found in much different levels between the two groups.
- cygaril 7y ago
  Including the effect of the choices people make is much more informative for deciding on public policy or personal food shopping choices. Imposing calorie restrictions in the experiment that wouldn't be there in real life would make the results much less applicable.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
What's the measurable difference between "processed" and "ultra-processed" foods?
- narag 7y ago
  "Processed" doesn't sound bad enough.
- noelsusman 7y ago
  https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/2A9776922A28F8F757BDA32C3266AC2A/S1368980017000234a.pdf/un_decade_of_nutrition_the_nova_food_classification_and_the_trouble_with_ultraprocessing.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c... See page 5 of the pdf.
johnkpaul 7y ago
This paper seems to assume that "ultra-processed" is a previously defined term. Is there an agreed upon definition somewhere?
- jolmg 7y ago
  There's a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_food That links to a report from a United Nations organization that also uses the term: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4690e.pdf http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4690e.pdf On page 30, there's a section titled "Group 4: Ultra-processed food and drink products" which describes what an ultra-processed food or drink is. That PDF also has 10 references to papers that use the term in their title.
  - wcunning 7y ago
    Wikipedia article linked also says "As of 2018 the concept is loose and evolving" linking to a newer article than the UN report, so why would I think this paper used the UN definition? The Wikipedia article further goes on to state "The utility of the NOVA classification has been subject to criticism. However, a 2018 publication from the founders of the NOVA classification uncovered misleading and incorrect statements in the critical appraisal, as well as non-disclosed conflicts of interest." Basically, I don't see a terribly agreed upon definition. Things point several ways, and the GP's concern about definition is entirely valid.
    - denzil_correa 7y ago
      > so why would I think this paper used the UN definition? Because if you read the paper from the OP link, the authors cite that their definition of ultra-processed food is from Monteiro et al 2008 viz. the same UN definition the OP refers to which is widely agreed upon.
mlrtime 7y ago
Here is two pieces of diet advice: 1) At the grocery store, shop the edges (Fruit, Vegetables, Meat, Fish) just stay away from things with a nutrition label. 2) Don't drink calories. Water, Tea, Coffee (no artificial sweeteners). Fixes most peoples problems.
- ramblerman 7y ago
  stevia should be fine, imo
  - mlrtime 7y ago
    I agree, but I wanted to give advice that is healthy and easy to follow. You don't need to look at any labels. Just eat real food.
dfxm12 7y ago
Study participants on the ultra-processed diet ate an average of 508 calories more per day and ended up gaining an average of 2 pounds over a two-week period. Is this a fair trial? Popular science [0] claims that ~3500 calories equals a pound. Well, 508 extra calories a day for 14 days = 7112 calories, or about 2 pounds worth of calories. Edit: whoops! I was missing the fact that the people in the trial controlled how much they ate themselves. I incorrectly assumed that they were given the food. 0 - https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-depth/calories/art-20048065 https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-...
- jjeaff 7y ago
  Isn't that the point? Calories are calories, ultra-processed or not. But people eating processed foods will end up eating more calories over all.
- buzzdenver 7y ago
  Point of the study was to show that "eating a diet made up of ultra-processed foods actually drives people to overeat and gain weight compared with a diet made up of whole or minimally processed foods".
  - LanceH 7y ago
    Eating easy to acquire, tasty food drives weight gain over more difficult to prepare, more expensive, less tasty food.
- noelsusman 7y ago
  It is calories in calories out, as always, but the point is that the processed diet drives more calorie consumption. The same people were given both diets and told to eat as much or as little as they wanted. They consumed more calories when given the processed diet, and thus gained weight.
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    "calories in calories out" That's too simple. Some foods digest better than others. I can eat the same calories from potato chips or a lentil dish but my digestion and later on weight change will be very different.
mixedCase 7y ago
For a study that mentions keto/low-carb diets directly a few times I would've loved to see a group consuming these "ultra-processed foods" but selecting only from those with low glycemic index/carb count.
- mcfunk 7y ago
  Me too, since keto wisdom is that highly processed oils (e.g. seed and "vegetable" oils) should be eliminated, presumably from some hormonal impact, but I've never seen any research on that. It's not hard to avoid canola oil usually, so I don't think much of it.
  - syn0byte 7y ago
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11417387 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11417387 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20930468 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20930468 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4365303/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4365303/
babyslothzoo 7y ago
This should have been obvious to anyone for ages now. Ultra processed foods are almost always significantly higher in calories.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  Shouldn't the "obvious" conclusion be that you'd eat less of them, because you got enough calories sooner?
paulsutter 7y ago
"Hyper-palatable" is probably a better label than "Ultra-processed". The problem isn't the processing, the problem is that its just hard to stop eating food like Doritos, chocolate chip cookies, etc. And while I love simple food like lentil soup, yet feel no compulsion to eat more than a serving.
- julianapostate 7y ago
  the article points out that even foods that you might not consider hyper-palatable but are processed, like sausage still seem to follow the pattern.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  I once read an article where they interviewed food scientists for something like Doritos and they had very intricate science around foods that don't satisfy you so you keep eating. In one sense it was really interesting how sophisticated these foods actually are but on the other hans it's amazing how much damage they are doing to the health of the country.
xchaotic 7y ago
Basically processed food is much more dense in calories so you can easily eat more calories than you need. You'd have to eat a lot of vegetables and salad to get calories. The study is new, but the conclusion is ' hacker diet' - people eating processed food ate more calories than they burned so they gained weight. If you want to lose weight just burn more calories than you eat. Usually the easiest solution is a mix of better diet and some moderate exercise regime that burns some calories and increases your metabolism.
jedrek 7y ago
The basic problem with processed foods is that they mimic the qualities of natural foods. If you leave kids to eat whatever they want with an abundance of food, they will create a perfectly balanced, healthy diet. They did a study of this in the 1950s and the kids who had certain vitamin deficiencies would naturally even go for the fish oil they needed to supplement their levels back up. Take something as simple as bacon flavored potato chips: you eat them, and your body thinks it's getting the protein it needs, but it's not, it's getting something that mimics protein. But your body's kind of dumb, so it wants more chips, because they should have protein in them! Almost every obese person out there is someone who's had their natural feedback loop completely destroyed by learned behavior. They don't feel "full" the way people without eating issues do.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  Add to that our sedentary but stressful lifestyle. When I am backpacking for a few days I don't eat much and have almost no food cravings. But as soon as I am in the office I start eating all kinds of crap I would normally never touch. I think the same happens to kids in school being forced to sit still for hours. "Almost every obese person out there is someone who's had their natural feedback loop completely destroyed by learned behavior. They don't feel "full" the way people without eating issues do. " I am really sorry for kids that grow up on frozen dinners and junk food. I have read that your food tastes develop in the first few years so if your parents have bad food habits you have a very good chance to be imprinted with them for a life time.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    I have had some mild success with "do not talk to me about food except at mealtimes" in conjunction with "canonical mealtime is between 6 and 8 PM, and absolutely nothing past 10 PM". What I really need now is an AR ad-blocker--like Joo-Janta context-sensitive sunglasses--that will detect food-related advertisements and displays in the real world and blot them out with black rectangles and/or white noise. Being hungry stimulates appetite, but so too does just thinking about food. And after priming my awareness of it, nearly everyone around me does something or other to make me think about food, and quite a lot are doing it intentionally, to get at my money. (Even just reading this thread is sort of screwing me up for the rest of the day.) I get the sense that Pavlov's dogs might get fat if someone followed them around all the time, continually ringing that bell. Even my office has that stupid kitchenette right outside the door, with people frequently in there messing with the coffee and fridge and microwave. So then I close my door and blot out the world, and I can easily ride out hours 11 through 20 of fasting. Unless someone sends "donuts in the lab" over e-mail, or "Food Truck X is in the parking lot until 12:00". Aargh. So now I'm sitting here with one part of my brain telling itself, "No, you are not really hungry. That's the spoiled punk asshole part of your brain trying to get you to eat by injecting obsessive thoughts about food." Any little thing can set that douchebag off, and then it's a fight for the entire rest of the day. When out alone in the wild, or isolated in a sealed box, no one cares whether you eat or starve, so that "go eat something" lobe never gets triggered externally. But the instant you're back, there's that 20-foot-tall Big Mac on a billboard telling you what exit to take. Even if you don't get off and buy one, it wakes up the appetite jerk, who starts offering unhelpful alternative suggestions. And it only shuts up after continuously whining for many hours, or when sleeping.
mullingitover 7y ago
Refined sugar and alcohol are the worst for me. I can easily stay in my target BMI range without doing any diet plan apart from eliminating these two things. The refined sugar especially seems to aggravate my appetite. It's been shown that drinking a sugared soft drink before a meal increases the amount of food you'll eat, and that's definitely been my experience. At the beginning of this month I eliminated sugar and alcohol from my diet. No other change, and I've lost 5 lbs so far. In the past I've used this diet hack for longer stretches and easily dropped ~30 lbs in four months.
jonplackett 7y ago
Processed food is not really food. It’s just designed to be really, really cheap to make (so usually bad quality ingredients + sugar), sell for a premium based on marketing (often bullshit health claims like added vitamins c or just nice cartoons), sit on a shelf for ages without going rotten (lots of preservatives, or more sugar and definitely no fibre to help level out that sugar spike) and be very morish (more added sugar / caffeine / salt). It’s a product designed by a big corporation to make them as much money as possible. At no point is anyone thinking about making food. It’s hardly a surprise that it’s non-functional as actual nutrition, and equally unsurprising it’s going to make you ill. But some of it does taste pretty good.
MagicPropmaker 7y ago
Note: > "But is it something about the highly processed nature of these foods itself that drives people to overeat?" It's still _overeating_ that drives weight gain. It's just easier to do with highly processed foods that are calorie dense and not "psychologically" filling....
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  "Overeating drives weight gain" is like "more movement on the gas pedal causes speeding". Yes, but uninteresting. "Loud rock music makes people drive faster" is not saying the same thing, and is interesting. Even if it reduces back to "they're going faster because they move the gas pedal more".
gwbas1c 7y ago
But processed foods taste so good... It reminds me of what a friend, who'd been through AA said: She can abstain from alcohol, drugs, and sex. But she can't stop eating.
sebringj 7y ago
I would guess based on what I've read the absorption rate of energy is too fast with highly processed food, while the opposite, eating fibrous plant material seems to be very good for you as you have a far slower energy intake, in relative terms.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  Working understanding at this point for me is highly processed food results in chronically high insulin levels. Insulin signals your cells to convert glucose to fat and store it. Insulin also inhibits leptin receptors which tell your brain to keep your pie hole closed. Likely your gastro-intestinal nervous system also has a good idea of how much reserves it has stored. Processed food confuses it.
  - sebringj 7y ago
    So I like your details... so in this case, the "intake" being too fast results in the body storing the excess energy as fat. I noticed that I feel more tired in general when I eat this kind of fast food crap. Side note on top of this I started skipping breakfast now so have a built in fasting period each day and my energy has gone way up in terms of being present.
wcunning 7y ago
20 people for 14 days on one diet then 14 days on another. I don't see how this is a terribly illuminating study. This is not sufficient time or statistical sample to extrapolate to, well, really anything. What confounding factors were unrevealed by the small sample size? What structural problems are introduced by such a short time span? We need to either collectively start ignoring these studies on somebody's 5 fraternity brothers over a weekend, or we need to start demanding more people, longer time horizons and better controls for confounding factors. I'm pretty disappointed to see NPR hocking this crap or Cell publishing it.
quantguy11959 7y ago
Did they control for food taste and preferences ? It could simply be the processed food happened to taste better as well. Not sure if pleasantness and familiarity cover that.
gcb0 7y ago
Also in the news: water is wet.
buildzr 7y ago
It's interesting that the "ultra-processed" food example they give here is quesadillas, refried beans and diet lemonade. Not exactly the typical example of pre-packaged cookies and chips. Another interesting thing is they're saying that stir-fried beef and veggies over basmati rice was not as processed. Both examples include meat, veggies and carbs (rice vs bread), is the simple addition of cheese enough to make quesadillas "ultra-processed"? The form factor? I certainly would never have come to that conclusion on my own. Is there a guide for this? We need some better definitions here, maybe it's a little too cynical of me, but I'm wondering if all this study discovered is which foods tasted better.
- Malician 7y ago
  The quesadillas have, like most frozen foods in the grocery store, their calories primarily come from highly processed corn/wheat. I suspect that's a big part of the issue.
  - buildzr 7y ago
    They don't say anything about the quesadillas being frozen in the article at least - but regardless, I'd say it's probably a similar amount to the calories from rice in a stir fry on rice dish. I eat about 1/2 cup (uncooked) of rice with my stirfry typically, ~350 calories compare with the flour tortillas I normally use at under 200 calories each. Most basmati rice is white which I'd say is just about as "processed" as most flour. I'm not sure what the exact definition of "processed" being used is though so I can't say for certain. But both are being stripped of outer layer, mixed with water and cooked. I suppose you need a tablespoon or so of oil to cook the tortillas but I'm assuming you're sautéing the veggies for the stir fry in oil too. I just don't get what processed means in this context.
jhallenworld 7y ago
Here is the paper: https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)30248-7 https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)... I'm comparing with the Nurses Health Study results: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Mozaffarian%2C+D.%2C+et+al.%2C+Changes+in+diet+and+lifestyle+and+long-term+weight+gain+in+women+and+men.+N+Engl+J+Med%2C+2011.+364%2825%29%3A+p.+2392-404 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Mozaffarian%2C+D.%....
m3kw9 7y ago
Tastes good, cost less, uses substitute ingredients that is higher in calories but less nutrition, in turn it digests faster causing you to eat more. That’s processed foods.
emanuensis 7y ago
Easy to digest food for us ... is also easy to digest for bacteria, so they can forget about us and go straight to the source: https://phys.org/news/2019-05-overfed-bacteria-people-sick.html https://phys.org/news/2019-05-overfed-bacteria-people-sick.h...
- aitchnyu 7y ago
  Reminds me of the manufactured sugar that feeds C Difficile strains in our guts and kills people. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/01/the-curious-case-of-a-boring-sugar-that-may-have-unleashed-a-savage-plague/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/01/the-curious-case-of-...
chrchr 7y ago
I wondered what exactly they meant by "ultra-processed" foods. I looked into it, and found that they were using the NOVA classification system: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova It has a reasonable explanation of what is meant by ultra-processed.
tolstoshev 7y ago
I suspect emulsifiers are playing a bigger role than people realize. They wash away your gut mucus layer so that bacteria can't live there. This study didn't get much attention when it came out, but I think it will prove to be prophetic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940336/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940336/
fitnesshealth 7y ago
Many Study Says that Ultra Processed Foods Drive weight gain, but according to BMJ published processed foods contain 90% Added sugar, and that increase type 2 diabetes or heart disease. Here is https://www.fitnesshealthforever.com/ https://www.fitnesshealthforever.com/ many health awareness tips for people. Ultra Processed Foods Lists 1. Boxed cake mix 2. Soft drinks 3. Packaged bread and buns 4. Fast food burgers 5. Instant noodles 6. Energy bars that is some ultra processed food list that is also shown on NOVA report.

181 points by tshannon 7y ago

...duh? Hasn't it been known for years that processed foods are engineered to be more addictive and thus more fattening?

challenger22 7y ago

I often wonder how much the difficulty of chewing a food effects how healthy its consumers are. Processed foods are "pre-chewed" and easy to eat very quickly.

asark 7y ago
A lot of foods that are really bad for you are kind of a pain to make. Potato chips. Fried chicken. Anything deep fried, really. Coffee cake. Chocolate chip cookies aren't hard but aren't exactly make-on-a-whim either and require resting the dough for a good long while if you want them to be really good. Most stuff that's easy to eat within minutes of a craving without having it prepared in advance are whole fruit or salads or something like that. Nuts are probably among the worst ready-to-eat foods but at least they're full of protein and vitamins, and arguably their eat-quickly-ability is well balanced with their nutrition level if you buy them in the shell, which prevents tossing back whole handfuls at once. The truly bad stuff takes planning, unless you buy it already made. [EDIT] oh man, crackers! A fair amount of effort for a pretty small yield in a home kitchen, even using electric mixers and such. Enough of a pain you'd hesitate to just eat them as-is rather than using them as one part of a larger meal. But a whole box is a couple bucks at the store....
- amluto 7y ago
  Fried chicken is not all that bad. Properly deep fried food absorbs a surprisingly small amount of oil.
- matchbok 7y ago
  My rule lately for junk/bad food: I only eat it if I take the time to make it myself. Works pretty well!

jniedrauer 7y ago

I'm not a scientist, and my experience is anecdotal. But there is something very very wrong with most of the food in our grocery stores. I had nearly debilitating GI issues and body composition problems until I completely cut out processed foods and started cooking from scratch. My symptoms cleared up within weeks, I lost 35 lbs almost effortlessly, and I've never felt better. I think what we're feeding the general public is a health hazard and should be much more strongly regulated.

brightball 7y ago
Similar here. For me I was able to correct most GI issue and lost 16lbs just by cutting out gluten. I don’t have celiac, but the effect was undeniable.
- amluto 7y ago
  It’s very hard to just cut out gluten since almost no one eats straight gluten as a major part of their diet, unless they really really love tempeh. My personal hypothesis is that most non-celiac people who do this and get a major benefit actually get the benefit from removing wheat from their diet. This is consistent with people who entirely incorrectly claim that sourdough bread is GF. Traditional sourdoughs give bacteria and yeasts a lot of time to eat various sugars and starches.
  - tunesmith 7y ago
    Tempeh isn't gluten, you might be thinking of seitan.
    - amluto 7y ago
      Indeed. Whoops!
  - astura 7y ago
    Tempeh is fermented soybeans; seitan is wheat gluten.
  - 7y ago

ChuckMcM 7y ago

This is pretty interesting, the paper is here: https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)30248-7 https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)... I liked the experimental method, two weeks on one diet the two weeks on the other without restricting food intake. I've been doing some dieting of late and made the facetious conclusion that if you limit your diet choices to only foods you don't particularly like to eat, you lose weight :-). But the converse of people working very hard to make their food really tasty (generally by adding sugar and salt according to the paper) people consume more than they need. I'm not sure what we could do about it though, we can encourage better eating choices but there is a limit on how much that works.

benj111 7y ago
Well yes, that's kind of the problem. Our monkey brains go mad for energy dense food ie sugar and fat. That's a good motivator to stick your bare hand in a bee hive, or hunt down a Mammoth with a pointy stick. Doesn't work so well in the modern day, when a salad is what we should really be eating.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  Not just sugar and fat though; eat plain bread made without any salt or seasoning; you will eat less than bread made other ways. Same for unseasoned potatoes.
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    And there is a really interesting effect I've noticed which I think of 'sugar blindness' which is that when I stopped eating a lot of sweet things my taste buds became more attuned to the taste of sweet. So things that weren't sweet before, are now. Its really an odd thing to experience.
    - danmaz74 7y ago
      Anedoctically, it's a thing the other way around too. When I moved to the UK from Italy, lots of foods tasted too sweet to me. After a year here, I don't feel that any more.

sparrish 7y ago

That's cause they taste so darn good you want to eat more of them.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
> Study participants were allowed to eat as much or as little as they wanted, but ended up eating way more of the ultra-processed meals, even though they didn't rate them as being tastier than the unprocessed meals.
- goda90 7y ago
  Tastier is pretty subjective, and they weren't comparing them side by side. But something can probably be said about shifting tastes as you eat a certain kind of food repeatedly. I know if I'm eating healthy for awhile, then have a super rich dessert, it overwhelms me, as if my taste buds have adapted towards the healthy food.
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    Sure, but the article also explains things like how the appetite-suppressing hormone was found in much higher levels in the group consuming unprocessed foods. So I think I'd focus on facts like that before circling back to "well, it was probably tastier, they just didn't know it."
jniedrauer 7y ago
Similarly to how addictive products like cigarettes cause considerable harm to society, food with additives to make it "taste so darn good" can cause great harm. As a simple example, potato chips are carefully engineered to cause overconsumption. Why is that not seen for what it is? Causing direct harm to consumers through the use of addictive products.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  Could you say that comfortable chairs are causing direct harm to consumers by encouraging a sedentary lifestyle, and the more comfortable the chair is engineered to be, the worse this effect is? Potato chips which aren't nice, won't be good potato chips. Potato chips which are as nice as they can be will be indistinguishable from engineered to be moreish potato chips. Would America's love affair with cars be different if the government mandates that no car can cost more than $15,000 or be sold at a loss so they must all be small and basic, may not exceed 35mph, must be unheated, uncushioned and have no audio systems, but that public transport must be spacious, clean, well maintained, fast, on-time, subsidised, not overcrowded, etc.?

goda90 7y ago

While I'm sure they're considerably better than processed foods, I wonder how the whole fruits, grains, and vegetables that have been selectively bred, or genetically modified to be all about tastiness(or growth speed, shelf life, etc) would stack up against other strains. All tomatoes can't possibly be equal, so it'd be interesting to see studies like this, but comparing a roma tomato, vs heirloom or something.

devoply 7y ago
I have also been wondering how this revolution of ethical imitation meat products is going to play with processed foods... as these are also quite processed foods. ingredient list from a mock salami product: water, vital wheat gluten, isolated soy protein, tofu (water, soybeans), spices, natural flavors (including autolyzed yeast extract), salt, wheat starch, garlic and onion powder, evaporated cane juice, vitamins & minerals (dipotassium phosphate, dimagnesium phosphate, zinc oxide, ferric orthophosphate, calcium panthothenate, thiamin hydrochloride, cyanocobalamin, iron oxide), carrageenan, beet powder and extractive of paprika (for color).
- jniedrauer 7y ago
  You can make seitan from scratch. I start with vital wheat gluten (and chickpea flour and nutritional yeast), which is technically a processed product. But you could start with flour if you wanted to. The end result is a product with 3 or 4 simple ingredients, compared to that fairly large list of unknowns.
  - dao- 7y ago
    I think this is missing the point. Yes you can make seitan from scratch, but it's not necessarily going to be better since seitan with its main ingredient being gluten contains little fiber either way. On the other hand, chickpea flour may be processed, but if the process preserves the fiber, that's not really a problem. The lack of fiber in /most/ processed foods makes you eat more of these.
cwkoss 7y ago

matthewaveryusa 7y ago

Isn't this study a bit unfair in that the ultra-processed diet was 508 calories more per day than the minimally processed one?

hombre_fatal 7y ago
That's how many extra calories one group ate than the other. It wasn't prescribed. The article explains reasons why, like how the appetite-suppressing hormone was found in much different levels between the two groups.
cygaril 7y ago
Including the effect of the choices people make is much more informative for deciding on public policy or personal food shopping choices. Imposing calorie restrictions in the experiment that wouldn't be there in real life would make the results much less applicable.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

What's the measurable difference between "processed" and "ultra-processed" foods?

narag 7y ago
"Processed" doesn't sound bad enough.
noelsusman 7y ago
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/2A9776922A28F8F757BDA32C3266AC2A/S1368980017000234a.pdf/un_decade_of_nutrition_the_nova_food_classification_and_the_trouble_with_ultraprocessing.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c... See page 5 of the pdf.

johnkpaul 7y ago

This paper seems to assume that "ultra-processed" is a previously defined term. Is there an agreed upon definition somewhere?

jolmg 7y ago
There's a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_food That links to a report from a United Nations organization that also uses the term: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4690e.pdf http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4690e.pdf On page 30, there's a section titled "Group 4: Ultra-processed food and drink products" which describes what an ultra-processed food or drink is. That PDF also has 10 references to papers that use the term in their title.
- wcunning 7y ago
  Wikipedia article linked also says "As of 2018 the concept is loose and evolving" linking to a newer article than the UN report, so why would I think this paper used the UN definition? The Wikipedia article further goes on to state "The utility of the NOVA classification has been subject to criticism. However, a 2018 publication from the founders of the NOVA classification uncovered misleading and incorrect statements in the critical appraisal, as well as non-disclosed conflicts of interest." Basically, I don't see a terribly agreed upon definition. Things point several ways, and the GP's concern about definition is entirely valid.
  - denzil_correa 7y ago
    > so why would I think this paper used the UN definition? Because if you read the paper from the OP link, the authors cite that their definition of ultra-processed food is from Monteiro et al 2008 viz. the same UN definition the OP refers to which is widely agreed upon.

mlrtime 7y ago

Here is two pieces of diet advice: 1) At the grocery store, shop the edges (Fruit, Vegetables, Meat, Fish) just stay away from things with a nutrition label. 2) Don't drink calories. Water, Tea, Coffee (no artificial sweeteners). Fixes most peoples problems.

ramblerman 7y ago
stevia should be fine, imo
- mlrtime 7y ago
  I agree, but I wanted to give advice that is healthy and easy to follow. You don't need to look at any labels. Just eat real food.

dfxm12 7y ago

Study participants on the ultra-processed diet ate an average of 508 calories more per day and ended up gaining an average of 2 pounds over a two-week period. Is this a fair trial? Popular science [0] claims that ~3500 calories equals a pound. Well, 508 extra calories a day for 14 days = 7112 calories, or about 2 pounds worth of calories. Edit: whoops! I was missing the fact that the people in the trial controlled how much they ate themselves. I incorrectly assumed that they were given the food. 0 - https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-depth/calories/art-20048065 https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-...

jjeaff 7y ago
Isn't that the point? Calories are calories, ultra-processed or not. But people eating processed foods will end up eating more calories over all.
buzzdenver 7y ago
Point of the study was to show that "eating a diet made up of ultra-processed foods actually drives people to overeat and gain weight compared with a diet made up of whole or minimally processed foods".
- LanceH 7y ago
  Eating easy to acquire, tasty food drives weight gain over more difficult to prepare, more expensive, less tasty food.
noelsusman 7y ago
It is calories in calories out, as always, but the point is that the processed diet drives more calorie consumption. The same people were given both diets and told to eat as much or as little as they wanted. They consumed more calories when given the processed diet, and thus gained weight.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  "calories in calories out" That's too simple. Some foods digest better than others. I can eat the same calories from potato chips or a lentil dish but my digestion and later on weight change will be very different.

mixedCase 7y ago

For a study that mentions keto/low-carb diets directly a few times I would've loved to see a group consuming these "ultra-processed foods" but selecting only from those with low glycemic index/carb count.

mcfunk 7y ago
Me too, since keto wisdom is that highly processed oils (e.g. seed and "vegetable" oils) should be eliminated, presumably from some hormonal impact, but I've never seen any research on that. It's not hard to avoid canola oil usually, so I don't think much of it.
- syn0byte 7y ago
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11417387 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11417387 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20930468 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20930468 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4365303/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4365303/

babyslothzoo 7y ago

This should have been obvious to anyone for ages now. Ultra processed foods are almost always significantly higher in calories.

jodrellblank 7y ago
Shouldn't the "obvious" conclusion be that you'd eat less of them, because you got enough calories sooner?

paulsutter 7y ago

"Hyper-palatable" is probably a better label than "Ultra-processed". The problem isn't the processing, the problem is that its just hard to stop eating food like Doritos, chocolate chip cookies, etc. And while I love simple food like lentil soup, yet feel no compulsion to eat more than a serving.

julianapostate 7y ago
the article points out that even foods that you might not consider hyper-palatable but are processed, like sausage still seem to follow the pattern.
maxxxxx 7y ago
I once read an article where they interviewed food scientists for something like Doritos and they had very intricate science around foods that don't satisfy you so you keep eating. In one sense it was really interesting how sophisticated these foods actually are but on the other hans it's amazing how much damage they are doing to the health of the country.

xchaotic 7y ago

Basically processed food is much more dense in calories so you can easily eat more calories than you need. You'd have to eat a lot of vegetables and salad to get calories. The study is new, but the conclusion is ' hacker diet' - people eating processed food ate more calories than they burned so they gained weight. If you want to lose weight just burn more calories than you eat. Usually the easiest solution is a mix of better diet and some moderate exercise regime that burns some calories and increases your metabolism.

jedrek 7y ago

The basic problem with processed foods is that they mimic the qualities of natural foods. If you leave kids to eat whatever they want with an abundance of food, they will create a perfectly balanced, healthy diet. They did a study of this in the 1950s and the kids who had certain vitamin deficiencies would naturally even go for the fish oil they needed to supplement their levels back up. Take something as simple as bacon flavored potato chips: you eat them, and your body thinks it's getting the protein it needs, but it's not, it's getting something that mimics protein. But your body's kind of dumb, so it wants more chips, because they should have protein in them! Almost every obese person out there is someone who's had their natural feedback loop completely destroyed by learned behavior. They don't feel "full" the way people without eating issues do.

maxxxxx 7y ago
Add to that our sedentary but stressful lifestyle. When I am backpacking for a few days I don't eat much and have almost no food cravings. But as soon as I am in the office I start eating all kinds of crap I would normally never touch. I think the same happens to kids in school being forced to sit still for hours. "Almost every obese person out there is someone who's had their natural feedback loop completely destroyed by learned behavior. They don't feel "full" the way people without eating issues do. " I am really sorry for kids that grow up on frozen dinners and junk food. I have read that your food tastes develop in the first few years so if your parents have bad food habits you have a very good chance to be imprinted with them for a life time.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  I have had some mild success with "do not talk to me about food except at mealtimes" in conjunction with "canonical mealtime is between 6 and 8 PM, and absolutely nothing past 10 PM". What I really need now is an AR ad-blocker--like Joo-Janta context-sensitive sunglasses--that will detect food-related advertisements and displays in the real world and blot them out with black rectangles and/or white noise. Being hungry stimulates appetite, but so too does just thinking about food. And after priming my awareness of it, nearly everyone around me does something or other to make me think about food, and quite a lot are doing it intentionally, to get at my money. (Even just reading this thread is sort of screwing me up for the rest of the day.) I get the sense that Pavlov's dogs might get fat if someone followed them around all the time, continually ringing that bell. Even my office has that stupid kitchenette right outside the door, with people frequently in there messing with the coffee and fridge and microwave. So then I close my door and blot out the world, and I can easily ride out hours 11 through 20 of fasting. Unless someone sends "donuts in the lab" over e-mail, or "Food Truck X is in the parking lot until 12:00". Aargh. So now I'm sitting here with one part of my brain telling itself, "No, you are not really hungry. That's the spoiled punk asshole part of your brain trying to get you to eat by injecting obsessive thoughts about food." Any little thing can set that douchebag off, and then it's a fight for the entire rest of the day. When out alone in the wild, or isolated in a sealed box, no one cares whether you eat or starve, so that "go eat something" lobe never gets triggered externally. But the instant you're back, there's that 20-foot-tall Big Mac on a billboard telling you what exit to take. Even if you don't get off and buy one, it wakes up the appetite jerk, who starts offering unhelpful alternative suggestions. And it only shuts up after continuously whining for many hours, or when sleeping.

mullingitover 7y ago

Refined sugar and alcohol are the worst for me. I can easily stay in my target BMI range without doing any diet plan apart from eliminating these two things. The refined sugar especially seems to aggravate my appetite. It's been shown that drinking a sugared soft drink before a meal increases the amount of food you'll eat, and that's definitely been my experience. At the beginning of this month I eliminated sugar and alcohol from my diet. No other change, and I've lost 5 lbs so far. In the past I've used this diet hack for longer stretches and easily dropped ~30 lbs in four months.

jonplackett 7y ago

Processed food is not really food. It’s just designed to be really, really cheap to make (so usually bad quality ingredients + sugar), sell for a premium based on marketing (often bullshit health claims like added vitamins c or just nice cartoons), sit on a shelf for ages without going rotten (lots of preservatives, or more sugar and definitely no fibre to help level out that sugar spike) and be very morish (more added sugar / caffeine / salt). It’s a product designed by a big corporation to make them as much money as possible. At no point is anyone thinking about making food. It’s hardly a surprise that it’s non-functional as actual nutrition, and equally unsurprising it’s going to make you ill. But some of it does taste pretty good.

MagicPropmaker 7y ago

Note: > "But is it something about the highly processed nature of these foods itself that drives people to overeat?" It's still _overeating_ that drives weight gain. It's just easier to do with highly processed foods that are calorie dense and not "psychologically" filling....

jodrellblank 7y ago
"Overeating drives weight gain" is like "more movement on the gas pedal causes speeding". Yes, but uninteresting. "Loud rock music makes people drive faster" is not saying the same thing, and is interesting. Even if it reduces back to "they're going faster because they move the gas pedal more".

gwbas1c 7y ago

But processed foods taste so good... It reminds me of what a friend, who'd been through AA said: She can abstain from alcohol, drugs, and sex. But she can't stop eating.

sebringj 7y ago

I would guess based on what I've read the absorption rate of energy is too fast with highly processed food, while the opposite, eating fibrous plant material seems to be very good for you as you have a far slower energy intake, in relative terms.

Gibbon1 7y ago
Working understanding at this point for me is highly processed food results in chronically high insulin levels. Insulin signals your cells to convert glucose to fat and store it. Insulin also inhibits leptin receptors which tell your brain to keep your pie hole closed. Likely your gastro-intestinal nervous system also has a good idea of how much reserves it has stored. Processed food confuses it.
- sebringj 7y ago
  So I like your details... so in this case, the "intake" being too fast results in the body storing the excess energy as fat. I noticed that I feel more tired in general when I eat this kind of fast food crap. Side note on top of this I started skipping breakfast now so have a built in fasting period each day and my energy has gone way up in terms of being present.

wcunning 7y ago

20 people for 14 days on one diet then 14 days on another. I don't see how this is a terribly illuminating study. This is not sufficient time or statistical sample to extrapolate to, well, really anything. What confounding factors were unrevealed by the small sample size? What structural problems are introduced by such a short time span? We need to either collectively start ignoring these studies on somebody's 5 fraternity brothers over a weekend, or we need to start demanding more people, longer time horizons and better controls for confounding factors. I'm pretty disappointed to see NPR hocking this crap or Cell publishing it.

quantguy11959 7y ago

Did they control for food taste and preferences ? It could simply be the processed food happened to taste better as well. Not sure if pleasantness and familiarity cover that.

gcb0 7y ago

Also in the news: water is wet.

buildzr 7y ago

It's interesting that the "ultra-processed" food example they give here is quesadillas, refried beans and diet lemonade. Not exactly the typical example of pre-packaged cookies and chips. Another interesting thing is they're saying that stir-fried beef and veggies over basmati rice was not as processed. Both examples include meat, veggies and carbs (rice vs bread), is the simple addition of cheese enough to make quesadillas "ultra-processed"? The form factor? I certainly would never have come to that conclusion on my own. Is there a guide for this? We need some better definitions here, maybe it's a little too cynical of me, but I'm wondering if all this study discovered is which foods tasted better.

Malician 7y ago
The quesadillas have, like most frozen foods in the grocery store, their calories primarily come from highly processed corn/wheat. I suspect that's a big part of the issue.
- buildzr 7y ago
  They don't say anything about the quesadillas being frozen in the article at least - but regardless, I'd say it's probably a similar amount to the calories from rice in a stir fry on rice dish. I eat about 1/2 cup (uncooked) of rice with my stirfry typically, ~350 calories compare with the flour tortillas I normally use at under 200 calories each. Most basmati rice is white which I'd say is just about as "processed" as most flour. I'm not sure what the exact definition of "processed" being used is though so I can't say for certain. But both are being stripped of outer layer, mixed with water and cooked. I suppose you need a tablespoon or so of oil to cook the tortillas but I'm assuming you're sautéing the veggies for the stir fry in oil too. I just don't get what processed means in this context.

jhallenworld 7y ago

Here is the paper: https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)30248-7 https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)... I'm comparing with the Nurses Health Study results: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Mozaffarian%2C+D.%2C+et+al.%2C+Changes+in+diet+and+lifestyle+and+long-term+weight+gain+in+women+and+men.+N+Engl+J+Med%2C+2011.+364%2825%29%3A+p.+2392-404 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Mozaffarian%2C+D.%....

m3kw9 7y ago

Tastes good, cost less, uses substitute ingredients that is higher in calories but less nutrition, in turn it digests faster causing you to eat more. That’s processed foods.

emanuensis 7y ago

Easy to digest food for us ... is also easy to digest for bacteria, so they can forget about us and go straight to the source: https://phys.org/news/2019-05-overfed-bacteria-people-sick.html https://phys.org/news/2019-05-overfed-bacteria-people-sick.h...

aitchnyu 7y ago
Reminds me of the manufactured sugar that feeds C Difficile strains in our guts and kills people. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/01/the-curious-case-of-a-boring-sugar-that-may-have-unleashed-a-savage-plague/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/01/the-curious-case-of-...

chrchr 7y ago

I wondered what exactly they meant by "ultra-processed" foods. I looked into it, and found that they were using the NOVA classification system: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova It has a reasonable explanation of what is meant by ultra-processed.

tolstoshev 7y ago

I suspect emulsifiers are playing a bigger role than people realize. They wash away your gut mucus layer so that bacteria can't live there. This study didn't get much attention when it came out, but I think it will prove to be prophetic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940336/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940336/

fitnesshealth 7y ago

Many Study Says that Ultra Processed Foods Drive weight gain, but according to BMJ published processed foods contain 90% Added sugar, and that increase type 2 diabetes or heart disease. Here is https://www.fitnesshealthforever.com/ https://www.fitnesshealthforever.com/ many health awareness tips for people. Ultra Processed Foods Lists 1. Boxed cake mix 2. Soft drinks 3. Packaged bread and buns 4. Fast food burgers 5. Instant noodles 6. Energy bars that is some ultra processed food list that is also shown on NOVA report.