Ultraprocessed Foods – A New Theory of Obesity

Re:Ultraprocessed Foods – A New Theory of Obesity by nordsieck on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @01:28PM (#21072978)

> 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).

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Re:Ultraprocessed Foods – A New Theory of Obesity by mediaman on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @02:10PM (#21073472)

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.

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Re:Ultraprocessed Foods – A New Theory of Obesity by nordsieck on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @02:49PM (#21073895)

> 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...

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.

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Re:Ultraprocessed Foods – A New Theory of Obesity by mediaman on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @03:29PM (#21074386)

Yes, exactly: there were plenty of carbs available to both groups, but those with the highly processed variety ate more of those carbs than those without, suggesting that it's not the availability of the carbs but rather the degree of processing that makes the person eat more of what's available.

Though I would agree that this evidence leaves the possibility that carbs in general are less sating, but that highly processed carbs are even worse, and so the degree of processing would still be linked to weight gain.

It's not clear if that's because there's some sort of stomach-brain "signal" that's getting confused, or because highly processed foods are designed to taste maximally good versus less processed and so people eat more.

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