This past Tuesday apparently was Ultra-Processed Food Study Release Day; two studies– one big and one small– were released for the consideration of the Internet. Both of them have bad news about the effects of eating ultra-processed foods: they result in weight gain and contribute to earlier death.
First of all, what is “ultra-processed food”? Yoni Freedhoff, in his Weighty Matters blog, offers two definitions: one fancy, one non-fancy. The fancy one is this:
“formulations mostly of cheap industrial sources of dietary energy and nutrients plus additives, using a series of processes”
What does this mean? “think of them as the boxes and jars of ready-to-eat and ready-to-heat foods.” Okay. Not that we really need these definitions. As US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said in 1964 about the definition of obscenity, “I know it when I see it”.
Back to the studies. Here’s CNN on the big study:
…the researchers enlisted the help of 44,551 French adults 45 and older for two years. Their average age was 57, and nearly 73% of the participants were women. All provided 24-hour dietary records every six months in addition to completing questionnaires about their health (including body-mass index and other measurements), physical activities and sociodemographics. The researchers calculated each participant’s overall dietary intake and consumption of ultraprocessed foods.
Over the study period, 602 participants died. After adjusting for factors such as smoking, the researchers calculated an associated 14% higher risk of early death for each 10% increase in the proportionof ultraprocessed foods consumed.
This study doesn’t investigate why ultra-processed foods increase mortality risk; maybe it’s the chemicals in the packaging, or other features of the manufacturing processes.
The small study, however, provides some interesting detail for further study. Here are its details, courtesy of Yoni Freedhoff:
[Researchers] admitted 10 male and 10 female weight stable adults as inpatients to the Metabolic Clinical Research Unit at the NIH where they lived for 28 days. They were randomly assigned to either the ultra-processed or unprocessed diet for 2 weeks at which point they crossed over to the other diet for two weeks.
During each diet arm, participants were offered 3 daily meals and they were instructed to eat as much or as little of them as they wanted. Menus were designed to be matched for total calories, energy density, macronutrients, fibre, sugar, and sodium, but differed in the percentage of calories coming from ultra-processed sources.
When consuming ultra-processed food diets people ate on average 508 more calories per day. And not surprisingly given this finding, people gained weight on the ultra-processed diet (1.7lbs in just 2 weeks) and lost weight on the flip side (2.4lbs in just 2 weeks).
He adds, “Wow! That’s huge!” Yes, it is. But you might think, this isn’t surprising. People love junky food, and it’s designed to be addictive. Well, the researchers found that the participants didn’t find the ultra-processed food tastier. They just ate more of it. But why?
Here’s something I hadn’t heard about: the protein leverage hypothesis. The idea is that the participants ate more of the ultra-processed foods because their bodies wanted more protein. The amount of protein they consumed on both diets was about the same (also surprising), but the processed stuff had less protein in it, so they ate more to compensate. Of course they didn’t know this– it just happened. Wow. Here’s Yoni again with more detail:
[The researchers] believe might help to explain up to 50% of the increased caloric intake by way of something called the protein leverage hypothesis which suggests our bodies attempt to maintain a constant protein intake, and so people consuming less protein from ultra-processed foods may be eating more of them to try to maintain some predetermined physiologically-desired/governed protein intake.
We don’t know if this hypothesis is true, but if it is, that is very very interesting news about human metabolism.
I’m still chewing on this, so more as the story unfolds.
Fascinating. So much we don’t understand.
Yes. Several years ago when the DSM V was being written there was some movement on a Food Addiction diagnosis, however, the movement was stalled because giant processed food corporations would have to label their products as known addictive substances. Teasing out which food products have been chemically engineered to a level requiring a a warning label gets into proprietary industry recipes as well as the potential for all major cereal brands to ripped from the hands of children for their own safety. Not my Sugar Smack mom! I mean really, who have we been kidding this whole time?
The DSM settled on Binge Eating Disorder which, especially in light of one research study after another proving these foods are designed to make us eat more, is a diagnosis that blames the consumer for becoming addicted to a known addictive substance. But since the products don’t come with warning labels we either don’t know any better or find it easier to fool ourselves.
The icing on the cake? A few weeks before the new DSM came out, MarketWatch reported on stock sales for the new big pharma drug Vyvanse created specifically to treat, guess what? Binge Eating Disorder. How the hell were big pharma and their investors already profiting from a diagnosis that technically didn’t exist yet, not to mention is an inaccurate description of the problem!
So, I have many thoughts on this topic. Deep breath. Thanks.
Much we don’t know, but one thing we do know–big corporations (I’m looking at you Cargill and all your centrifuges creating processed food and all your corporate giant friends) are NOT making and marketing food for our good, but for their own profit. In the same way consumers are blamed for not recycling properly, when it is corporations who ought to be rethinking packaging; it is consumers (eaters) being blamed for the food they are offered.