How ultra-processed foods affect your body: More calories, weight gain

• Ultra-processed foods are associated with all kinds of bad health outcomes.
• But maybe they’re not all that bad.
• An ongoing study suggests that adding more high-volume foods to your ultra-processed diet may help.

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

“What we’re trying to figure out is, very specifically, what is it about ultra-processed foods that seems to promote overeating and weight gain?” Metabolism researcher Kevin Hall recently told Business Insider.

Hall works at the National Institutes of Health, where he is conducting an unusual experiment. It brings people into a tightly controlled food lab for a month and tests how four different diets – one raw and three processed, but all with the same levels of key nutrients – affect hunger, satiety, consumption of calories, weight. fat gain and loss.

While his study is still ongoing, he has shared some initial results with colleagues in the US and Europe.

The early findings offer some clues as to why UPFs may not only lead to weight gain, but also make it difficult to shed fat. The study is also showing that simple changes can make a big difference. Maybe, says Hall, you don’t need to cut out ultra-processed foods to have a satisfying and relatively healthy plate of food.

On an ultra-processed diet, patients gained 2 kg per week

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

During their week of raw meals, full of fresh vegetables, beans, legumes and whole grains, participants ate an average of 2,700 calories per day. They also tended to lose some weight, about a pound of fat.

This changed when they switched to an 80% ultra-processed diet. The same amount of food provided, the same levels of sugar, salt, fat, carbohydrates, protein and fiber on the plate.

The patients ended up consuming more food to achieve the same level of satiety – ingesting an average of about 3,700 calories per day. On ultra-processed foods, patients’ weight increased by over two kilograms in a single week.

The results, while still preliminary, are even more surprising than the last experiment Hall did this way, when patients ate an extra 500 calories a day on ultra-processed diets.

People may not feel like they are eating more when they consume those ultra-processed meals. In general, each bite of ultra-processed food is much more calorie-dense than a home-cooked meal.

Adding ‘healthier’ moisture to ultra-processed meals

Eliminating ultra-processed foods is not realistic in the US, Hall said. But what if you could make a Western diet less bad?

Hoping to reduce people’s weight gain and improve satiety with fewer calories, Hall (and his team of clinical chefs) created two new diets to test this time around.

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

In the first new diet, researchers reduced the amount of so-called “hyper-palatable foods”—foods that combine sugar, salt, and fat in ways not usually seen in nature (think: rich, salty ice cream, a donut , or vegetables in cream sauce).

Addiction researcher Tera Fazzino coined the term “hyper-likable” as a way to collect data on junk food incontinence. She hypothesizes that ultra-tasty processed foods can mess with our minds and lead people to eat more than they otherwise would.

But that wasn’t true in Hall’s new study. Patients who gave up super tasty foods saved themselves only 200 calories a day and gained over 1 kg per week.

In the second diet, the chefs again reduced the amount of hyper-palatable foods, but also increased the moisture content of people’s ultra-processed meals, making them less energy-dense. Often, this meant adding more high-volume, non-starchy vegetables as a side salad to the ultra-processed dish.

“Basically, add very low calorie mass,” Hall told BI. “These are usually non-starchy vegetables.”

On an ultra-processed diet with less energy-dense foods AND Less tasty items, people lost about a pound in a week – as in iprocessed diet. They also consumed about 830 fewer calories per day, very close to the 1,000 fewer calories consumed on the raw diet.

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

However, there was a catch.

“There was a bit of monkey wrenching because we decided to look at body composition changes,” Hall said.

Nuts We Didn’t Crack: Achieving the Right Kind of Weight Loss

Only people on the 100% raw diet lost body fat.

On the “healthiest” ultra-processed diet, people lost about a pound of weight a week, but it came from lean mass. That means muscle, bone, tissue, or maybe just water weight.

Hall isn’t sure yet why this is happening, but he says it may have something to do with the “digestibility” of ultra-processed foods—in other words, how they’re handled inside our bodies, compared to whole foods. .

“If we can learn what those mechanisms are, then really smart people who are genius food technologists and scientists can re-engineer some of these foods,” he told BI.

“There are so many narratives and hypotheses that seem reasonable, but until you do the studies to test it, then you don’t know.”

5 easy ways to make your meals healthier today

While it’s still too early to say for sure why people eat more calories and store more fat on ultra-processed diets, Hall says we can already start using his early findings to make some educated guesses.

Here are some tips:

• Bulk up a meal, every meal, by adding some vegetables to your plate. It can be salad. It could be a side of cooked broccoli or some carrots. They don’t have to be fresh. Frozen is good too.

• Choose whole grains, such as oatmeal, brown rice and quinoa.

• Pay attention to the amount of added sugar in items such as yogurt, granola and salad dressings, and try to limit the amount you consume. (Olive oil makes a great dressing and is packed with healthy fats and beneficial plant compounds.)

• Prioritize filling, nutrient-dense foods that we know are associated with good health, like eggs (even the ultra-processed runny kind can be good).

“It’s possible there’s some weird additive or some ingredient in that food that’s not good for you,” Hall said. “We don’t have the science of it yet, but by applying what we know, I think you can still make educated choices.”