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Ultraprocessed Foods – A New Theory of Obesity

• SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  This seems to make a lot of sense, and removes that ridiculous notion that somehow removing a single element from our diet is what will lead to weight loss - the foods that people gain weights on are the foods that give us mixed signals to their quality and quantity of calories. It's hard to not feel you've eaten a lot of calories roast beef when you've eaten a lot of roast beef, but it's much easier to lose track of how many chips you've eaten, and harder to match that to the relative amount of calories consumed.
  • epx 7y ago
    Makes sense. I'm on a low-carb diet for almost 10 years, it was the only one that worked for me, as has worked for my dad (he follows it since he was 33, now he is 73 and strong as an ox). One side-effect of this diet is look for better food - most if not all processed foods have carbs, so you are forced to eat vegetables, different meats, etc. to avoid food boredom. I ate more fish and lettuce in the first year of diet than in my whole previous life.
    • SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      And I had luck with calorie counting - by actually weighing and recording everything I didn't overeat (though I was hungry), even though the food I ate was partially ultra processed.
      • mmcgaha 7y ago
        I know that the net calories consumed/burned is what determines my weight, but the benefit of a low carb diet (only speaking for me) is that I am not hungry. I lost 50 pounds in the first six months and have been at the same weight for 18 months.
        • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
          There's a bit more to it than that. First, it's calories absorbed, not consumed. That is, if I eat calories in a form that's harder to digest, my body may not get all the calories out of it that are in the food. I think that this is one of the deals with processed food - the processing makes it easier for your body to extract the calories from the food. The calories were already there, but they're processed into a form that your body can use more easily. Second, some foods (at least for some people) have some effect on metabolism, so that calories consumed is not totally independent of calories burned.
          • oarabbus_ 7y ago
            Well, you are "anti-conflating" the latter and former. They are describing the same mechanism, not two separate ones.
      • bena 7y ago
        The point is that carbohydrates are calorie dense. You don't need to eat a lot of them to get a lot of calories. Fish is one of the least calorie dense meats. Vegetables and fruits are some of the least calorie dense foods. It's nearly impossible to eat enough lettuce in a day to go over your daily recommended calories. It just won't fit. So, in a lot of ways, keto, paleo, vegan, Mediterranean diets are all sneaky ways to cut out a major source of calories. You don't have to count them because just the way you're eating is taking care of that aspect. But if you want to eat Twinkies exclusively, you can do that as long as you eat only so many.
        • alexhutcheson 7y ago
          Fat is 2.25x as calorie dense (Cal/g) as carbs.
          • bena 7y ago
            And? We already eat fat pretty sparingly. Whereas with sugar, you can color it and fluff it up and people will eat a giant cloud of it. So, when you point out where I said those diets cut out all major source rather than a major source, feel free to continue.
        • SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
          Fat is more calorically dense than sugar, and your examples are all low in fat as well - vegetables and fruits have more carbs than either protein or fats - and the high calorie examples (ie. Avacado) of those categories are high in fat. Fish has few fats and no sugars. The most calorific cuts of meat aren't that way because they are sugary, it's because they are fatty. It's just that fats lead to satiety quicker than carbs, but I'll bet if you ate pork belly for every meal you'd find that you could and would get fat on that.
          • bena 7y ago
            I didn't say they excluded all major source. I said a major source. Yes, paleo and keto (I think) don't exclude fat, but they are excluding a major source of calories. Because we do need some fat in our diet or else we go into rabbit starvation. There's nothing really in bread or refined sugar that we need that we aren't getting from somewhere else.
    • benj111 7y ago
      So would you say it's the low carbiness of the diet, or the high variety of healthy thinginess of the diet that led the weight loss/ whatever? Perhaps your current diet + healthy carbs would still help you achieve your goals?
      • derg 7y ago
        Not the op here, but I have been doing low-carb off and on (i get into deep ruts of depression frequently enough that messes with it and I occasionally fall off the wagon) for the past 2 years, and for me personally the strictness of the carb count works for me better than the healthiness of the food I am eating. I limit myself to 30g of total carbs (minus fiber) a day so it forces me to be more honest with myself. If I am at 25g for the day and I need to make dinner for instance, it basically forces me to always pick the low carb version of a meal (veggies + meat). I hope to one day be able to transition to a diet with more healthy carbs, but in the process I am focusing on working on better habits and losing weight.
        • tzs 7y ago
          That's something like under 5% of your calories from carbs, assuming a 2500 calories per day diet. Have you tried other amounts between that and 60% or so that is typical in the United States? Personally, I found that about 35% gave me most of the same benefits people claim for the much lower carb diets, without the hassle of having to put a lot of work into food choice to achieve it. At 35%, a lot of "ordinary" foods can be tweaked easily to fit. Sandwich is 50%? Get it with regular mayo instead of lite mayo, or make it double meat, or both...and you can get it to under 35%. At 5%, that sandwich is right out. As are burgers, pizza, pasta...basically most of the mainstream diet is out, and since most food infrastructure is geared toward serving people on the mainstream diet, that can be a big pain.
          • derg 7y ago
            I have played around with the amount of carbs, right now my level is where it's at for weight loss, but I am planning on scaling up once I get closer to my goal weight. But yes, food can be a pain (I have been craving pizza and fries for the longest damn time). My other goal aside from losing weight is learning what foods I _do_ like since having been a picky eater, means I defaulted to the mainstream diet and never strayed far from it which was negatively impacting my health and weight. On the plus side, while it can be slightly more expensive grocery wise, it basically closes any eating out for the most part, so I can save money.
  • heymijo 7y ago
    A category of food that had escaped me as highly processed was food at specific kinds of restaurants. David Kessler has an eye opening chapter "A visit to Chili's" in his book, The End of Overeating. Everything they serve at chili's, even seemingly innocuous things like a chicken breast meal have been made or modified to make them hyper-palatable, easy to chew, swallow, and overeat. For non-American's, chili's is a sit down chain restaurant where you order off a menu. Other comparable restaurants are Applebee's, and TGI Fridays. https://www.chilis.com/ https://www.chilis.com/
    • grawprog 7y ago
      I'm curious as to how fast food being highly processed escaped you. It's fairly obvious just by the texture and taste of most food at those places that it's highly processed into some form far from what it originally was. If you take a bite into just about any chicken Burger, nugget, strip, boneless wing, whatever, from any fast food place and inside is just a formless, whitish pinkish mush. That's not what chicken's supposed to look like. It's also something that's been repeatedly said in media and other places since at least I was a kid in the 90's. Most things in fast food places come premade and frozen from some factory somewhere and usually just fried up either in oil or on a 'grill'. Almost nothing is actually prepared in those places. Though, if you're in Canada, A&W serves real eggs and Bacon and stuff for breakfast and their onion rings are actually cut and prepared in store(though the batter and breading aren't). Everything else though came preprepared.
      • colordrops 7y ago
        I didn't notice either until my 30s. The reason for me is that I grew up on highly processed and packaged foods, and places like Chilis seemed to serve more "whole" foods in comparison to a lot of the junk I was eating. It wasn't until I did a lot of reading and cooking that I understood the difference.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • heymijo 7y ago
  • nordsieck 7y ago
    > This seems to make a lot of sense, and removes that ridiculous notion that somehow removing a single element from our diet is what will lead to weight loss - the foods that people gain weights on are the foods that give us mixed signals to their quality and quantity of calories. It's hard to not feel you've eaten a lot of calories roast beef when you've eaten a lot of roast beef, but it's much easier to lose track of how many chips you've eaten, and harder to match that to the relative amount of calories consumed. It doesn't make sense at all. There is quite a bit of research on satiety - how full foods make you feel. It's actually quite straight forward: Protein, water and fiber make you feel full. Carbs do not. Mostly fat does not (you need a certain minimum amount of fat in your diet). You feel full after eating a lot of roast beef, because it's got tons of protein in it, not because it's not "processed". You can gorge on chips because they are carbs and fat and have almost no protein, not because they the process of creating the chips confuses your body. Guess what? You can gorge just as heavily on homemade 4-ingredient bread (technically slightly less if you use bread flour, which is high in protein).
    • mediaman 7y ago
      Go read the study. The data from this study doesn't support your statement. They matched the carb content (and sugar, fat, etc) of the "highly processed" and "less processed" groups' food offerings. The highly processed ate significantly more, even though both had plenty of carbs available.
      • nordsieck 7y ago
        > The data from this study doesn't support your statement. I think you're wrong. > The increased energy intake during the ultra-processed diet resulted from consuming greater quantities of carbohydrate (280 ± 54 kcal/day; p < 0.0001) and fat (230 ± 53 kcal/day; p = 0.0004), but not protein (
        2 ± 12 kcal/day; p = 0.85) (Figure 2B). The remarkable stability of absolute protein intake between the diets, along with the slight reduction in overall protein provided in the ultra-processed versus the unprocessed diet (14% versus 15.6% of calories, respectively) (Table 1), suggests that the protein leverage hypothesis could partially explain the increase in energy intake with the ultra-processed diet in an attempt to maintain a constant protein intake (Martı´nez Steele et al., 2018; Simpson and Raubenheimer, 2005). https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/pdf/S1550-4131(19)30248-7.pdf https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/pdf/S1550-4131(19)30248... Yes, they matched the meals, but the meals weren't made of homogenous goo. Participants could eat as much as they wanted of the parts they wanted.
  • specialp 7y ago
    Indigenous people of South America chewed on coca leaves for 1000s of years. Then humans started processing it into cocaine. It became a problem then. We have effectively done the same thing to foods. Extracted the sugars and fats into refined form and combined them to create tasty but energy dense food with not much other nutrition.
  • markk 7y ago
    Agreed. Seems to me the simplest explanation is that our bodies were calibrated over years of evolution eating "real" foods. Processed foods of any kind are significantly less likely to have the correct energy/satiety ratio.
  • _the_inflator 7y ago
    It is not the weight loss alone. Look on the inside of the body. Ateries clog - and this is due to animal food.
• magwa101 7y ago
  Sugar, now go away.
• wincy 7y ago
  I’ve been fascinated by the fact that I know several people who have become vegan, lost weight, and feel better. But I also know many people who have gone low carb, or even eat nothing but meat, and are also losing weight and report feeling much better. I’ve been wondering what they both share in common, and suspected that both forms of dietary restriction mean cutting out most hyper palatable ultraprocessed foods. It’s an interesting article, I hope to see more research on the subject.
  • maxharris 7y ago
    Fructose. That's what's missing. It's much healthier when it's bound up in a lot of fiber, as you find it in unprocessed fruit. The soluble and insoluble fiber form a protective barrier that reduces the total amount and rate at which it is absorbed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yda8RtOcVFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yda8RtOcVFU
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • on_and_off 7y ago
      I wonder why all the allusions to sugar are downvoted in these comments ? Anecdotal, but moving to the US, the insane amount of sugar that is put in every form of food is very scary.
      • londons_explore 7y ago
        Bread in the USA tastes like cake in the rest of the world!
        • mingabunga 7y ago
          I agree, was in the US recently and so many foods are much sweeter than in other countries. USA is really good at sugar. Even the ice cream was much sweeter - looking at you Ben and Jerry's. I bought some organic almond butter, and it had sugar in it! Why?!
• jascii 7y ago
  I would love to read the original publication. I'm curious if/how they factored in the use of high fructose corn syrup which is known to suppress satiation response and is common is processed foods. Allas; the original paper is paywalled behind elsevier: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31269427 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31269427 You'd think that since it was publicly funded the public should be able to read it.. Edit: previous link was an erratum. Original:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31105044 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31105044
  • SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    They pointed out also artificial sweeteners causing confusion in the response. It's not one smoking gun, it's a ton that end up all counting as "ultraprocessed food". I'm sure if we dumped out HFCS something else in there would end up performing the same function.
    • jascii 7y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if lots of sweeteners/sugars suppressed the satiation response to some degree. I guess it is beneficial to fruit bearing plants to get us to spread lots of seeds..
• adrianN 7y ago
  Lab animals are getting fatter too, even though they're on a very controlled diet[1]. I think there is some factor we don't understand yet. [1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2010.1890 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.201...
  • capableweb 7y ago
    Would be interesting to see if these animals were located only in the US or if this is a worldwide phenomena
  • joker3 7y ago
    It's very likely climate change-related: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/07/climate-change-food-crops-nutrition https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/07/climate-...
    • derg 7y ago
      This is an aspect of climate change I had never even considered. Thanks for the link!
    • arrosenberg 7y ago
      Industrial farming also produces less nutritious food generally. Plants can uptake 20+ minerals from the soil, but industrial farms only add the 3 that directly fuel growth - Nitrogen, Potassium, and Phosphorus. You get taller, faster, less nutrient-rich crops.
      • qes 7y ago
        > industrial farms only add the 3 that directly fuel growth - Nitrogen, Potassium, and Phosphorus Source? I don't industrial farm, but I highly doubt that as plants suffer significantly when they lack micro-nutrients.
        • arrosenberg 7y ago
• asjw 7y ago
  new
• pesmhey 7y ago
  It’s probably fiber? Is there any literature in the effect of fiber on satiety?
  • moate 7y ago
    Yes. Like, a ton. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fiber+on+satiety&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fiber+on+satiety&hl=en&...
  • oraknabo 7y ago
    Fiber has been one of the top factors in my own weight control. I've been vegan since the mid 90s, but was slowly adding extra pounds each year. I decided to go on an "if it doesn't have fiber, don't eat it" diet a few years back and lost 60 lbs in 6 months. It massively cut down the sugar and oil in my diet and has consistently helped me control my blood sugar. One thing I learned is that satiety isn't just about the meal you just ate or how full your stomach just got. If your blood sugar spikes, no matter how big a meal you had or if you ate 4000 calories in one sitting, you'll be hungry again in 3 or 4 hours. Eating a high fiber diet, I can just eat one meal a day or even skip a few days of eating without ever feeling the kind of gnawing hunger I used to get within a few hours of having a full meal. Aside from blood sugar, fiber is also important because high fiber foods, especially ones with any water content, are usually the lowest calorie density foods and you can eat much larger quantities than you can with highly processed foods. You have to be more careful of highly dehydrated ones like whole grain crackers and dried fruit, but they're still far better and harder to abuse than chips & candy.
• Izkata 7y ago
  There's one aspect of this that's very lazily written: what exactly they mean when they say people ate "more" food. The big open question for me - and what I've long thought was one of the main contributors - is caloric density. Were these people eating roughly the same volume of food, which just happened to have more calories when ultraprocessed? Or is the density about the same, and they are actually consuming a larger volume?
  • jgwil2 7y ago
    I think they mean total calories. My understanding is that the body has a sense of the caloric density of unprocessed foods, and adjusts the appetite accordingly (as in the example given for honey or other natural sugars; the taste prepares the body for the calorie load). But ultraprocessed foods confuse the body's ability to do this, causing people to eat more overall calories than they otherwise would, regardless of density.
• notadoc 7y ago
  Taking in more calories than are used causes weight gain. Using more calories than are consumed causes weight loss. This is rudimentary physics, there are no new theories needed to explain it.
  • badfrog 7y ago
    Your premise is true, but drastically oversimplified. And your conclusion doesn't follow at all. It's clear that there's a huge public health problem with obesity that needs to be corrected. In order to correct it, we need to know why it's happening. Is something causing people to consume more calories than before? Is something causing them to use fewer calories? The "classic" answer is that people are lazy and gluttonous, but there's a distinct possibility that other factors are in play making people crave food more.
    • tathougies 7y ago
      > Is something causing people to consume more calories than before? Yes. For most of human history, food was scarce. People regularly died from starvation. Today, that is no longer the case. Despite the outrage industry's continued and tired claims that hunger is at all time highs, etc, the truth of the matter is that most people in developed countries -- far more than ever before -- have access to all the nutrition they need at a price they can afford. Unfortunately, people are not used to that availability, and thus are not able to process it rationally. Instead we binge eat. For example, there is a free box of bagels today at work and I'm going to have one now because cream cheese... yum!
  • chooseaname 7y ago
    Yes, and the sub heading of the article basically says this. > “Ultraprocessed” foods seem to trigger neural signals that make us want more and more calories, unlike other foods in the Western diet Eating more calories than burning them isn't being set aside by the new theory.
  • UnFleshedOne 7y ago
    Falling down faster than you go sideways causes crashes. Falling down slower than going sideways causes getting into orbit. This is rudimentary physics, there are no new theories needed. Except, well, if you want to actually do any rocketeering.
• dmcclurg 7y ago
  Is this study biased in the sense that people who cook for themselves are not represented? Does the hospital staff order everything in?
• badfrog 7y ago
  Unfortunately, there's no clear definition of ultraprocessed. Like is factory-made whole wheat break ultraprocessed? Canned pinto beans? Artisan cheese? Factory cheese?
  • magic_beans 7y ago
    > Unfortunately, there's no clear definition of ultraprocessed. Like is factory-made whole wheat break ultraprocessed? Canned pinto beans? Artisan cheese? Factory cheese? The article defines "processed" and "unprocessed": Processed foods add a few substances such as sugar, fat, and salt to natural food products, with the goal of improving preservation or sharpening taste. The category includes canned vegetables and fish, cured and salted meats, cheeses, and fermented drinks such as wine and beer. Unprocessed foods are the edible parts of plants (such as seeds or roots or leaves) and animals (such as meat and eggs). The main processing of this food type is freezing, drying or pasteurizing to extend storage life. Salts, sugars, oils and fats are not added. And the nature of ultraprocessed food: Ultraprocessed foods often contain a combination of nutritive and nonnutritive sweeteners that, Small says, produces surprising metabolic effects that result in a particularly potent reinforcement effect. That is, eating them causes us to want more of these foods.
    • mrob 7y ago
      >Unprocessed foods are the edible parts of plants (such as seeds or roots or leaves) and animals (such as meat and eggs). The main processing of this food type is freezing, drying or pasteurizing to extend storage life. But the example picture includes white flour, which is wheat processed to make it more palatable. The removal of the wheatgerm does increase shelf-life, but this is only a side effect. If the processing was really intended to maximize shelf-life then it would be processed into polished grains like rice or barley is, not into flour.
    • Bartweiss 7y ago
      This... doesn't really define ultraprocessed. The article tries several times, but the definitions conflict with each other and with the examples given. The first definition of ultraprocessed is "industrial food formulations made up mostly or entirely of ingredients... that are not found in a similar form and combination in nature". That includes a lot of merely 'processed' foods. A highly aged cheese will have basically no naturally-occurring ingredients left, and any bread with leavening and refined flour fails "form and combination found in nature". Similarly, the fat and salt flavors of strong cheese, or the sweetened flavors of a pastry with sugar, go beyond "sharpening taste" to creating entirely new nonnatural flavors. We can all apply the Potter Stewart test to say that Twinkies are ultraprocessed and sharp cheddar isn't, so I don't meant to be pedantic here. But I think this loose definition points to genuinely important unresolved questions. Where on the scale from sausage to Twinkie does the problem start? Is it really true that an Entenmann's coffee cake causes vastly different eating habits than equal access to a home-made version? Can we isolate the difference? Above all, which differences actually drive this? 'Ultraprocessed' is not a food additive but a loose class of recipes, and it'd be nice to reduce that to a distinction we could put on a label. The problem probably doesn't isolate to any one additive or alteration, but we should be able to find something more concrete than a vague naturalistic appeal. The study in question has some promising work in that direction, like controlling for energy density. Outright added calories are a long-standing suspect (since we're likely to use the same amount of e.g. spaghetti sauce despite store-bought versions having far more sugar), but Hall's work suggests that the problem persists even without that. I'd very much like to see more of these studies to replicate the effect and extract a more substantive definition of 'ultraprocessed'.
• tehjoker 7y ago
  Under capitalism, food is produced to be sold in as great quantity as possible, and therefore is designed to be addicting by their producers, large and small. It is possible to design food production to be healthy instead of craving driven.
  • merpnderp 7y ago
    Why inject the politics? Are you saying that all our problems would go away if we just had someone taking away our choices and telling us what to eat? They could plan out food production centrally. In five year plans. And people would would definitely no longer over eat.....
    • UnFleshedOne 7y ago
      Actually planned economies often do solve the problem of food over-abundance rather nicely... "Communism is like food -- not everybody gets it". Funnies aside capitalism without regulation quickly devolves into oligarchy. So throwing few more regulations is fine. You can always buy bags of sugar yourself and eat it with a spoon if you prefer.
    • tehjoker 7y ago
      I injected it because there is an explanation for why our food is designed this way and it is economic in nature. I think this is a bad thing, you might think that the system is good, but it's important to point it out and not pretend otherwise.
• zubspace 7y ago
  One experiment [1] with rats, which made sense to me, went like this: Some rats got a lot of sugar and did not gain weight. Another group got a lot a fat and gained some weight. A third group got a 50:50 ratio of sugar and fat and gained a substantial amount of weight. This is one of the reasons why some people (like me) can eat cake made of 50% sugar and butter nearly endlessly. It's an unnatural combination and somehow transitions our brains into zombie mode where we never feel satiated. For that reason you can find that combination in a lot of processed food... [1] https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/43673/5050-sugar-fat-mixture https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/43673/5050-sugar...
  • dehrmann 7y ago
    Put a bag of sugar in front of me, meh. Or a stick of butter, meh. Those sugar-butter coated cashews from Trader Joe's (or just caramel) and I'll eat half the bag.
  • jdm2212 7y ago
    Sugar in isolation makes me feel lightheaded and a bit nauseous. Fat in isolation fills me up immediately. But together... yeah, I'll take that second (and third, and fourth) slice of cake.
  • chrisco255 7y ago
    Rat metabolism and human metabolism aren't 1:1 There's fundamental differences between those two species in liver function and other organs. And that study conflicts with this study, which shows a high-carb diet does have an impact on rat obesity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4497311/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4497311/
  • AlexTWithBeard 7y ago
    Ah, ye goode olde bliss point! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)
  • nuxi 7y ago
    Mother's milk contains ~4.5% fat, ~7% sugar and ~1% protein. It's not exactly 50:50 sugar/fat ratio, but it's pretty close, so I wouldn't call the combination unnatural. Maybe we've been "trained" from birth on what the "optimal" combination is...
• scythe 7y ago
  It seems like the typical "macronutrient analysis" does not provide a good metric for a food being "ultraprocessed" because in order to get the fat/carbohydrate/protein numbers, we essentially ultraprocess (in fact burn) the food while measuring it! Fat is extracted, protein is recorded by nitrogen content, and carbohydrates are counted by the weight difference in a calorimeter. A few commenters have pointed to "dietary fiber" as that number on a food label which might warn of "ultraprocessing". This is reasonably close because the definition of fiber is actually dependent on digestion. It might be important to remember that fiber is properly understood as a metric, i.e. "indigestible fraction", rather than as a substance per se. For example, pureeing a piece of fruit reduces the satiety effect of consuming it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019566630800620X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019566630... This is a rather simple and compelling demonstration that simple substance-content analysis does not tell you everything you need to know about what you're eating. TFA also comes close to explaining, in my opinion, the strange phenomenon with fad diets where they seem to work well for early adopters and not so well after they catch on. In the early stages of a fad diet, food manufacturers haven't caught on, and dieters are forced to prepare food from scratch. In the later stages, you buy the frozen bag of "paleo" chicken nuggets from the freezer aisle or you unseal a quart of "vegan" milk in the morning when you have coffee. These products are not the same thing eaten by someone who cut up raw chicken and rolled it in cashew flour, or someone who blended their own almond-milk.
  • nickpsecurity 7y ago
    "the strange phenomenon with fad diets where they seem to work well for early adopters and not so well after they catch on. In the early stages of a fad diet, food manufacturers haven't caught on, and dieters are forced to prepare food from scratch. In the later stages, you buy the frozen bag of "paleo" chicken nuggets from the freezer aisle or you unseal a quart of "vegan" milk in the morning when you have coffee. These products are not the same thing eaten by someone who cut up raw chicken and rolled it in cashew flour, or someone who blended their own almond-milk. " This is a great hypothesis that's worth testing. I'd love to see some market research evaluating how many people at the real thing in specific amounts vs shifted to processed foods that merely had the label. Then, also if they overate those foods due to the convenience or taste.
• dkarl 7y ago
  I don't know why people concentrate on the amount of processing and de- and re-construction of food when it seems obvious that many foods are engineered to make them easy and compelling to consume in large quantities. Ice cream is not heavily processed compared to the kind of protein bars that aspiring bodybuilders eat, but you can easily binge thousands of calories of ice cream in a single sitting. It's not so easy to binge protein bars, despite companies doing their chemical best to make them taste like candy. Or compare those protein bars to the sweet, easy-to-eat bars (can't find brand names now) at Whole Foods that brag about having a small number of minimally processed ingredients. If you cram something full of honey or figs you can make it dangerously easy to feed your demons with while still being "natural" and "minimally processed." You won't see expensive bars sold to health-conscious well-off people implicated in the obesity epidemic, but that's a matter of class, not nutrition. Why bother obsessing over abstract, ill-defined distinctions like "processed" or "ultraprocessed" instead of teaching people to recognize that companies are systematically and scientifically exploiting our human weaknesses for profit and ruining our health in the process? Educate people to look at a Snickers bar, or a bar full of honey and dried fruit from their fru-fru grocery store, and see a cold, calculated, predatory attack. Food companies attack the weaknesses in our eating behavior the way a lion seeks out the neck of a wildebeest. The lion doesn't specifically want the wildebeest to suffer and die; it just wants to eat its flesh. Likewise, Mars Inc. does not specifically want Americans to suffer from obesity and diabetes; it just wants to sell a lot of candy bars. I suspect the obsession with these distinctions is motivated by the desire to find a positive story to address the obesity crisis with. Negative stories about food and eating are hard to sell to the public, who by and large (heh) just want to enjoy their food in an uncomplicated way. Not to mention that many people working in public health see them as a risk factor for eating disorders. Stigmatizing a category of food is a positive story because it promises us that once this subset of food is out of the picture, we can have an easy, healthy, uncomplicated relationship with food, without any need to address our own behavior. It locates the entire problem in a category of inanimate substances that can be purged from our world. It's a much happier story than saying we have desires and tendencies that don't always serve us, and that some of the most powerful forces in our society seem bent on making sure those desires and tendencies lead us to the worst possible place. But I suspect that eventually we'll have to face up to that, like we did with the tobacco industry, except that we'll have to accept the existence of the food industry and an indefinite, partly adversarial relationship with it.
• katsura 7y ago
  But this begs the question for me, if you can count the calories of these ultraprocessed foods can they still contribute to a healthy lifestyle? I mean, let's consider that I eat ultraprocessed all the time, but in my calorie range, so I don't get obese; is it less healthy than for example vegan diet, or it doesn't matter that much?
  • drdrey 7y ago
    It's not just calories, if you mostly ultraprocessed foods you're also probably lacking in vitamins, minerals, healthy fats, fiber, phytochemicals, get too much sodium, etc.
  • hx87 7y ago
    > but in my calorie range That's the difficult part--the insulin spikes from ultraprocessed food will make you hungrier and eat more as well as lower your basal metabolism. "Calorie range" is a moving target.
• ccffph 7y ago
  This is not new at all. Ultraprocessed foods are usually supplemented with oils that increase inflammation and cause a variety of health issues. The guy who opened me up to this is PD Mangan, who I found out about from Taleb. https://twitter.com/Mangan150 https://twitter.com/Mangan150 Let me dump some info though for more discussion. A Western-like fat diet is sufficient to induce a gradual enhancement in fat mass over generations. This study used mice and bred them over 4 generations. Each generation became fatter than the previous one. http://www.jlr.org/content/51/8/2352.full http://www.jlr.org/content/51/8/2352.full What was the key element of this “Western-like fat diet”? A high ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids. The omega-6 is due to a high amount of linoleic acid, of which seed oils contain a large amount. The results show that high-fat diets, when that fat is composed largely of linoleic acid, made mice fat and that epigenetic changes likely drove the increase in fat mass over generations. Notably, at a time where overweightness and obesity have steadily increased over generations in most industrialized countries, consumption of LA and ARA has increased. In France, an increase of 250% and 230%, respectively, occurred from 1960 to 2000. The consumption of large amounts of linoleic acid, mainly from seed oils, is something new in the world. Humans didn’t evolve eating that much, which is around 10-fold higher than dietary requirements. Decreasing the linoleic acid content to 1% of the diet reversed the obesogenic property of the high-fat diet. Adding omega-3 fatty acids of the type in fish and fish oil also reversed the obesogenic properties of the diet. Excess linoleic acid induces inflammation, a key factor in chronic disease such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2012.38 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2012.38 The modern Western diet has been consumed in developed English speaking countries for the last 50 years, and is now gradually being adopted in Eastern and developing countries. These nutrition transitions are typified by an increased intake of high linoleic acid (LA) plant oils, due to their abundance and low price, resulting in an increase in the PUFA n-6:n-3 ratio. This increase in LA above what is estimated to be required is hypothesised to be implicated in the increased rates of obesity and other associated non-communicable diseases which occur following a transition to a modern Westernised diet. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132672 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269696521_A_high_fat_diet_rich_in_corn_oil_reduces_spontaneous_locomotor_activity_and_induces_insulin_resistance_in_mice https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269696521_A_high_fa... Soybean oil and other seed oils are in almost all ultra-processed foods. They might also be linked to the depression epidemic. Men in the highest tertile (third) of linoleic acid intake had more than double the risk of depression. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19427349?dopt=Abstract https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19427349?dopt=Abstract We saw above that linoleic acid leads to fat accumulation and insulin resistance. People in the highest tertile of visceral fat had 6 times the risk of colorectal cancer as those in the lowest. Insulin resistance was associated with up to 4 times the risk. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19837793 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19837793 High waist circumference is associated with 2 to 3 times the risk of colorectal cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7847643 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7847643 One of the worst ingredients found in ultra-processed food is seed oil. Soybean oil is the most common. Seed oils cause obesity and increase the risk of chronic disease, like cancer. https://blog.aicr.org/2017/06/13/processed-foods-calories-and-nutrients-americans-alarming-diet/ https://blog.aicr.org/2017/06/13/processed-foods-calories-an... The average American eats more than half of calories as ultra-processed food. To stay lean and healthy, you must avoid the ultra-processed junk that passes for food among average people. Eat whole, minimally processed foods. Meat, fish, eggs, fermented dairy, non-starchy vegetables.
• dehrmann 7y ago
  > Dietitians scrupulously matched the ultraprocessed and processed meals for calories, energy density, fat, carbohydrate, protein, sugars, sodium and fiber. Hopefully they accounted for bioavailability of nutrients. The way I've seen this framed is you'll get more energy from powdered rice than an equivalent amount of whole rice.
  • hnick 7y ago
    That's my opinion too. In many cases 'processing' is basically pre-digestion, it makes things more available. Simple to process (for our bodies) often means tastier since it's preferable in a calorie-poor environment. I didn't see preservatives in that list. Though some of the items like salt and sugar are preservatives, added preservatives also abound in processed foods. Since the goal of preservatives is to basically kill bacteria/fungus to prolong shelf life that would presumably have an impact on our gut flora, which recent studies have shown is actually fairly important to our digestion and weight gain.
• mumblemumble 7y ago
  I'm curious how it is that the bag of flour and the box of pasta ended up in the "unprocessed food" photo, but the loaves of bread ended up in the "processed food" photo.
  • aidenn0 7y ago
    Some bread is basically [flour, water, yeast] which wouldn't count as ultraprocessed, but the top hits for whole-weat and white bread respectively for bread at on instacart have ingredients listed below (notice both contain sweeteners, oils and salt, with the whole-wheat bread having 3 different sweeteners and the white bread just good-old HFCS). The first hit for dried pasta contained two types of flour, plus typical flour fortifications. Whole Wheat Flour, Water, Sugar, Wheat Gluten, Raisin Juice Concentrate, Soybean Oil, Yeast, Cultured Wheat Flour, Molasses, Salt, Soy Lecithin, Grain Vinegar, Citric Acid, Soy, Whey. Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Yeast. Contains 2% or Less of: Soybean Oil, Salt, Soy Flour, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Ammonium Sulfate, Calcium Sulfate, Ascorbic Acid, Calcium Propionate (Preservative), Enzymes Sources (for some reason instacart had some ingredient lists and ralphs' website had others but neither had ingredient list for both): https://www.instacart.com/store/items/item_152519229 https://www.instacart.com/store/items/item_152519229 https://www.ralphs.com/p/kroger-enriched-white-sandwich-bread/0001111000160 https://www.ralphs.com/p/kroger-enriched-white-sandwich-brea... https://www.ralphs.com/p/barilla-farfalle-pasta/0007680850108 https://www.ralphs.com/p/barilla-farfalle-pasta/000768085010...
    • mumblemumble 7y ago
      Right, but I'm talking just processed vs unprocessed. The breads in the pictures looked like they probably weren't heavily processed, but even if they're just flour, water, salt, and yeast, I'd still count de-germing and milling the wheat to make flour as kinds of processing. The fermentation is also at least arguably a form of processing, as is kneading to develop the gluten.
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  "Sure, meal portions today are larger, food more abundant, and many of us are eating more calories than people did decades ago. But with temptations so plentiful, almost all Americans could be overeating—yet a good number do not. That, Hall thinks, is the real nutrition mystery: What factors, for some people, might be acting to override the body’s inborn satiety mechanisms that otherwise keep our eating in check?" 1) everything they listed, 2) food tasting good > "my body is adequately satiated". This is not a mystery. We just don't want to admit that our food is very tasty, we're serving our people too much food, and that we have no self control. The body may have an "inborn satiety mechanism", but that doesn't mean it rules our brain. My body sends me pain when I run too much and my knees hurt. Do I stop running? Not if running makes me feel good.
• acruns 7y ago
  Smaller portion size. Of any foods. Of course, I am not a scientist.
  • quickthrower2 7y ago
    The problem is control, especially when there is an over abundance of food, mostly crap (it takes some effort to find the good food) that is tasty and addictive. Then you have alcohol, alcohol advertising and culture, food eating in culture (from dating at restaurants, to pizza for the team, visiting someones house and they make a 3 course meal and it's rude not to finish). Basically losing weight or not drinking alcohol requires some degree of pushing aside social norms and not fitting in. Arguing with people and making them slightly confused, angry or concerned. Being an asshole (even though really you are not, you just want to choose what to eat). In the UK it's madness. Not drinking at Friday lunchtime would be seen as weird if you have been seen drinking before. It also means literally throwing away food in the bin to go to landfill. Someone gave you chocs for your birthday? In they go. Yeah "smaller portion size" is simple but not easy!
• ggregoire 7y ago
  Is it a new theory tho? There is a chapter about this topic in The 4-Hour Body (2010). And I'm pretty sure Tim Ferriss isn't the author of the theory so it was known before this book.
  • woodandsteel 7y ago
    I have no expertise here, but from what I understand what is new is Hall was the first to do an experiment with the needed rigor.
• dragontamer 7y ago
  Apparently this is a picture of ultraprocessed foods: https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/2019/scientificamerican1019-38-I3.jpg https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/201... This seems like nonsense. There's baby formula in the top right corner: were they really feeding baby formula to grown adults in the lab trials? Or did the authors of this piece just grab a bunch of foods from the grocery store and assumed they were related to the study? I want a link to the actual study. Pictures like the above just piss me off. There's a lot of issues in health-reporting and diet reporting. Lots of "Ultraprocessed" discussion going on, but there's no definition of what "ultraprocessed" is. -------- EDIT: Here's the next photo: https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/2019/scientificamerican1019-38-I4(1).jpg https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/201... Are you seriously telling me that __canned peas__ are highly processed? That's ridiculous. Especially in the face of highly-refined, enriched, white-flour in the "unprocessed" food picture. Look: I get that Spam and frozen-pizza are "ultraprocessed" foods. But canned peas and Goya chickpeas are processed? Who made these photographs? They fed Spam to people in hospital, and these images are drawing conclusions about canned peas. ------------- I think there's something to be said about "Spam is bad for you" (actual study) vs "We fed Spam to 20 people in a hospital for 2 weeks, and we've concluded that Frosted Flakes and canned peas are bad for you". Unfortunately, this article feels a lot like the latter conclusion.
  • agentdrtran 7y ago
    SA either just used these stock images or their graphics person threw it together, I wouldn't guess it has any real link to the study.
  • Lazare 7y ago
    https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.cmet.2019.05.008/attachment/f7d43756-3f67-4557-8322-59a9d143d63c/mmc1 https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.cmet.2019.05.008/attachme... There's a PDF of the actual menu, although it's just as random. Apparently wheat flour pasta is unprocessed, but a wheat flour tortilla is ultra-processed, sure, okay.
    • dragontamer 7y ago
• pkaye 7y ago
  Would something like the Impossible Burger patty be considered ultraprocessed?
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • pr0tonic 7y ago
    Yes, absolutely.
    • MuffinFlavored 7y ago
      Does this mean that it isn't technically "healthy" for you?
      • asokoloski 7y ago
        Yep. In fact, in order to make it more meat-like, they added a chemical called "heme" (it's what makes meat seem "bloody"). There's evidence that heme is a carcinogen. And of course the burgers include large amounts of saturated fat in the form of coconut oil. All that said -- it's probably no worse than a meat burger, but it doesn't hurt animals, and it doesn't contribute to global warming, so if the choice is between that and beef, go nuts!
        • skohan 7y ago
          But it might be much worse than a beef burger from a health perspective. Grass-fed beef in moderate quantities in the context of the right diet can be very healthy for you.
          • MuffinFlavored 7y ago
            > in moderate quantities in the context of the right diet How much grass-fed beef should an average person consume in a day/week/month?
      • 7y ago
• bArray 7y ago
  I think it's more that ultra-processed foods typically have high amounts of sugars and carbs. Any diet where you remove sugar and carbs, you'll see weight loss. Diabetics demonstrate that our relationship with food is much more complex than most people think - for example, diabetics don't have to inject insulin if eating white cheddar cheese. People should generally eat more protein in the form of meat, eggs, fish, nuts, cheese, etc. You feel fuller and with a little exercise you can quite easily turn it into muscle.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• bjornsing 7y ago
  > “I have the freedom to change my mind. Basically, I have the privilege to be persuaded by data.” So this is considered a “privilege” among researchers and scientists in this day and age... It used to be what separated science from pseudoscience.
• woodandsteel 7y ago
  The multi-trillion dollar world ultraprocessed food industry is going to go into high gear to try to trick the public into believing that eating ultraprocessed foods is just fine and the fault for the obesity epidemic lies entirely elsewhere. In fact, I would say it is already doing it.
• kazinator 7y ago
  > Subjecting more people to the strict study regimen at this preliminary stage, Hall says, “would be unethical.”) What? They aren't being whacked with hammers or given electric shocks. And, regarding "more people", whatever is unethical for 500 people is unethical for 5.
• ineedasername 7y ago
  An important distinction in the article: It doesn't say that you gain more weight by eating processed foods, but that eating processed foods makes you want to eat more. In other words, calories from processed foods are not more powerful weight gainers, the impact on obesity is related to how it effects satiety & appetite.
• notafraudster 7y ago
  The mechanism is plausible and the preliminary studies seem suggestive, but I read the article and I still can't tell you a workable definition of "processed", nor what the mechanism is beyond "artificial sweeteners screw with satiety" and "junk supermarket food is high in calories". The latter is clearly irrelevant since the studies referenced presumably keep caloric intake constant in an inpatient hospital setting. The former is a result I remember reading about as a teenager literally decades ago. So what is the article pitching? What is "processing" and how does it contribute to confusing gut-brain signalling? The article lists kinds of food that we all agree are "processed", but I have no idea why I think they're "processed" the same way a dumb ML model might correctly classify something as a cow while having a nonsense mapping from feature space to outcome. Not trolling. Can someone list a set of specific ingredients or techniques which are constituent of "processing", and how these things are connected to the article's mechanism? I am aware of past mixed research on artificial sweeteners and satiety, but clearly that's both an older finding and a mixed one, so the article is alluding to something more that isn't explained.
  • vinceguidry 7y ago
    I read the article very carefully for that definition, and found that the conclusion of the study is nothing more and nothing less than "processed foods make you want to eat more" and that's what caused them to gain weight. They didn't control for calorie intake at all. I feel dumber having bothered to read it. News flash, food that tastes good makes people want to eat more of it and that will make you gain weight. Film at 11. Shit I could have told them that. Every last Cajun in Lafayette is bigger than a whale, why? Because Cajun food is the best damn tasting food in the whole country. They should have added in my grandma's rice dressing and seafood gumbo as a third category. Would have blown 'processed food' right out of the water.
    • notafraudster 7y ago
      If you're correct and the pitch is simply that the category "processed" means "high calories relative to satiety", then the pitch is tautologically true and maybe not so useful. LOL. Thanks for confirming I'm not crazy in missing a more robust definition.
• dilap 7y ago
  An interesting observation, but the description of how the effect might work was a bit hand-wavy. A very precise and plausible explanation of the effect at the level of specific hormones released can be found here: https://www.bbdnutrition.com/2018/06/08/the-perils-of-food-processing-how-the-preparation-of-food-affects-how-quickly-it-is-absorbed/ https://www.bbdnutrition.com/2018/06/08/the-perils-of-food-p... Another likely cause is that highly-processed foods often contain seed oils, which usually have high levels of linoleic acid. One of the effects of linoleic acid (amongst many others) is to increase appetite: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30261617 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30261617
• MikeGale 7y ago
  An important area on which a lot of nonsense is published. By some analyses over 80% nonsense. (When I look at the other material you often can't take any action based on it anyway.) Some interesting observations in these comments, much better than you usually see. Could even kick off an HN diet study? Detailed recording of everything that can be sensibly noted, you pick the dietary changes and do it for a long, long time. Something like that might cut through the clutter?
• rakeshsrr 7y ago
  Vegan or Meat eater doesn't matter. It is always the amount and type (processed or non-processed/fresh) food that we consume is what makes an individual to gain or lose weight. I have reduced my weight without altering the type of food that I take with the following steps 1. Eat when you are hungry 2. Even when you are hungry, eat only a medium portion(your stomach can be half filled). 3. Reduce sugar in take (any form of sugar) 4. Include physical activities in your daily work / home life. Walking via stairs, cycling or walking to work etc.. you don’t necessarily need to do any dedicated exercise routines (well if u have time, its good to do). 5. Do not consume food after 7 pm. ( can take small portion of regional fruit if you are really hungry). 6. Most importantly, get a good sleep (10pm to 5am). 7. Get rid of all the measuring apps that you have in your phone, fitness, calorie calculator.. these are useless. Every human is unique in their nature and each individual needs certain amount of energy to do a work(differs from individual to individual) .. so we cannot set a common standard (BMI ) for all. Always have time to cook fresh food on daily basis. I am from southern part of India and its very easy here to get fresh fruits, veggies, meat on daily basis. Mostly importantly, we buy on daily means and cook for the day. We never carry/food for the next day. Almost zero processed/frozen food. I believe processed food are the root cause for most of the health related issue that we face now a days.
• xvilka 7y ago
  Would have been nice if they checked not only low-carb, but also a "no-carb" diet a.k.a. keto diet.
• nearbuy 7y ago
  Why is whole milk considered ultraprocessed and skim milk considered unprocessed? Whole milk is literally what you would get if you didn't process milk. Why are canned corn and green beans ultraprocessed? They contain nothing but corn/beans and a touch of salt. If the salt is the problem, why do the unprocessed meals have added salt? It looks like for the unprocessed meals, they chose a bunch of high in vegetables and whole grains, high fiber meals and chose a bunch of high calorie foods for the ultraprocessed meals [1]. No surprise people ate more calories when given the high calorie foods. They say "dietitians scrupulously matched the ultraprocessed and processed meals for calories", but also that people were told to each as much as they like. What does that even mean? The calories can only be the same if you fix the quantity. They don't define "ultraprocessed" or provide any mechanism for weight gain that would apply to their very varied selection of "ultraprocessed" foods. The term "processed" is used to scare people about food, but the term is so broad that there can't possibly be a single mechanism by which various processed food would be unhealthy. Processing includes cutting, grinding, heating, cooking, mixing, adding ingredients, drying, deboning... basically anything you do to food. It's one thing to say a specific process, like adding sodium nitrite, is harmful. Making a blanket statement that all cutting, cooking and combining of foods is bad should raise a bit more skepticism. If the article has a more specific definition of processed, they should mention it because their choices seem pretty arbitrary. [1] Study meals: https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.cmet.2019.05.008/attachment/f7d43756-3f67-4557-8322-59a9d143d63c/mmc1 https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.cmet.2019.05.008/attachme...
  • vertigolimbo 7y ago
    edit: referenced article includes daily menu and in ultraprocessed menu you can find "Whole milk (Cloverland) with NutriSource fiber". I think it's not the milk, it's the addition of fiber what makes it ultraprocessed.
    • Udik 7y ago
      Yes, but still: how much of the fiber makes the milk "ultraprocessed"? 10% in weight? 1%? One part in a million? To be scientific, how do you measure the ultraprocessed-ness of foods?
• Shorel 7y ago
  I think this method of actually measuring and cataloguing the food consumed instead of relying in a poll is the way forward. We should repeat this kind of studies. This methodology should be encouraged. I just have a small doubt about a particular point: it mentions 'a very low carbohydrate ratio'. But this is not clear at all. Is 30% of carbohydrates very low? So far some studies actually claim this. Is it 5% of carbohydrates, like the ketogenic diet proponents claim is necessary to be in a ketogenic state? For me, the proportion of carbohydrates that can be considered very low actually makes too big a difference to not to dive further.
• collyw 7y ago
  The obvious quick test to this question would be to look at countries where they have a lot less processed foods. India as I understand has rising levels of obesity, yet their food seems a lot less processed than western diets - though someone may have more accurate information than me.
• victor106 7y ago
  Reading through most of the comments, a common theme for weight loss, seems to be cut out snacking in between meals and be mindful of what you eat (vegan or vegetarian or meat)