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- Processed foods have long been linked to shorter life spans and increased cancer cases.
- Groundbreaking research from the US National Institutes of Health suggests for the first time that the relationship is causal: no matter how nutritious they are, processed foods lead people to eat more and gain weight.
- Scientists still aren’t sure why this is the case, but they think there may be something unique about the way our hormones interact with processed foods. Plus, we typically eat them faster than unprocessed meals, which means the body has less time to stop and register when it’s full.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Too much sugar, too much salt, and too much fat.
We’ve all been told for years that these are the culprits responsible for soaring obesity rates and expanding waistlines.
But new groundbreaking research performed at a state-of-the-art nutrition lab in Maryland reveals the nutritional value of what we eat may not matter nearly as much as how fresh our food is in the first place.
Nutrition experts at the National Institutes of Health have some of the first evidence (published Thursday in the journal Cell Metabolism) that there is something inherently bad about the way our bodies take in processed, ready-to-eat and ready-to-heat foods, and it makes us eat substantially more food every day and get fatter over time than we would if we were eating fresh, home-cooked meals more regularly.
"I was surprised that we actually saw a very large effect," lead researcher Kevin Hall from the National Institutes of Health told Business Insider.
Researchers turned people into lab rats to better study their eating behaviors
For the study, Hall did something unusual: he put human participants into a hyper-controlled laboratory setting, where they ate all their meals in isolation for 28 days under strict medical observation. All the while, scientists measured changes in the participants’ insulin sensitivity, appetite, glucose, and a host of other metabolic and physical measurements.
Researchers at the Bethesda Metabolic Clinical Research Unit enrolled just 10 men and 10 women into the study, feeding the participants both ultra-processed and fresh diets in two week increments.
Some participants used their lab time to study for board exams, while others simply played video games, Hall said.
"People often think of this as a way to kind of take time away from the day-to-day stresses of everyday life, and focus on something, and have all their meals prepared for them," he said.
The patients’ diets were precisely matched, so that regardless of whether people were offered processed or unprocessed meals, they were given exactly the same amount of protein, fat, carbs, salt, and sugar to eat. Participants were instructed to eat as much food as they liked within allotted 60-minute meal windows. They spent two weeks eating a processed diet, and then switched and did two more weeks eating fresh meals.
Something remarkable happened, and it wasn’t at all what the researchers expected.
People who ate processed foods consumed about 500 more calories a day
Participants consumed, on average, 500 more calories a day on the ultra-processed diet, when meals included foods like hot dogs, freezer pancakes, canned chili, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Processed food-eaters also gained about two pounds in those two weeks. Regardless of the patients’ weight or sex, they consumed more carbs and ate more fat on a processed food diet.
"It’s a very big difference, and it’s an important difference," Hall said. "There really is a causal relationship between ultra-processed foods and how many calories people choose to eat."
The find goes along with what long-term studies in free-roaming humans at home have suggested: eating more processed and packaged foods is not good for us. Processed food consumption ups a person’s odds of dying and developing all kinds of cancers.
The difference between processed and unprocessed meals is subtle on the surface. Both diet groups ate cereals, eggs, beans, and pastas. However, in the unprocessed group, the ingredients were fresher, there were no additives or preservatives in the meals. Additionally, whole foods and unrefined ingredients were used (eggs and potatoes were prepared from scratch, for example).
If participants eating unprocessed meals ate black beans, they were cooked from dried beans, not popped out of a can like in the ultra-processed meals. The unprocessed breakfasts included yogurt, nuts, and plenty of fresh fruit. Lunch might be a spinach salad tossed with chicken breast, apples, and bulgur topped off with sunflower seeds.
This is not to say that everything on the "unprocessed" menu was made from scratch. Quinoa breakfast cereal was on offer, and frozen berries and corn were allowed on the unprocessed meal plans.
Hall et al./Cell Metabolism
Scientists still aren’t sure why people are tempted to eat more on ultra-processed diet plans, especially because they tend to rate the tastiness of the processed and unprocessed food about the same. But they think there may be something about the way unprocessed, whole foods interact with hormones that helps us suppress our appetites and pay better attention to natural cues that we’re full.
Another possibility is that we tend to eat processed foods faster, so our bodies don’t have time to register when we’re full until we’ve overeaten.
"The point is that our paper doesn’t answer that question," as Hall said.
Hall et al./Cell Metabolism
There is something to be said for the sheer convenience of pre-packaged foods. Hall, a father of chicken nugget-eating toddlers himself, understands the what-to-eat conundrum well.
"One has to be cognizant of the fact that people are living their day to day lives," he said. "Ultra-processed food has a lot of advantages in terms of its convenience. It’s cheap, it sticks around for a while, you don’t have to have all the fresh ingredients on hand, which might spoil. You don’t have to have all the equipment to prepare these meals from scratch."
Still, he says trying to cut back on processed foods is a good idea, especially if you’re trying to manage your weight.
That strategy isn’t cheap, however. Ultra-processed meals in this study were priced around $106 per week, while the unprocessed options were a costlier $151.
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See Also:
- ‘That may well be the future’: Companies have poured $8.5 billion into creating a new version of a cutting-edge, highly personalized cancer treatment
- 8 ways that drinking coffee is connected to better health and a longer life
- High-fat diets like keto are nearly impossible to maintain, research suggests — but there’s an easier way to eat well
SEE ALSO: A study of more than 100,000 people has found that one food group is closely linked with cancer
Source: Business Insider – hbrueck@businessinsider.com (Hilary Brueck)