By Anna @ Adobe Stock
Just how bad are ultra-processed foods? They’re in every store, and Americans eat them all the time, but many don’t know how bad they are for your health. Jonel Aleccia of the Associated Press reports:
Here’s the tricky part. Many studies suggest that diets high in such foods are linked to negative health outcomes. But these kinds of studies can’t say whether the foods are the cause of the negative effects — or whether there’s something else about the people who eat these foods that might be responsible.
At the same time, ultraprocessed foods, as a group, tend to have higher amounts of sodium, saturated fat and sugar, and tend to be lower in fiber and protein. It’s not clear whether it’s just these nutrients that are driving the effects.
Hall and his colleagues were the first to conduct a small but influential experiment that directly compared the results of eating similar diets made of ultraprocessed versus unprocessed foods.
Published in 2019, the research included 20 adults who went to live at an NIH center for a month. They received diets of ultraprocessed and unprocessed foods matched for calories, sugar, fat, fiber and macronutrients for two weeks each and were told to eat as much as they liked.
When participants ate the diet of ultraprocessed foods, they consumed about 500 calories per day more than when they ate unprocessed foods, researchers found — and they gained an average of about 2 pounds (1 kilogram) during the study period. When they ate only unprocessed foods for the same amount of time, they lost about 2 pounds.
Hall is conducting a more detailed study now, but the process is slow and costly and results aren’t expected until late next year. He and others argue that such definitive research is needed to determine exactly how ultraprocessed foods affect consumption.
Read more here.
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