Ultra-Processed Foods more fattening

https://gizmodo.com/a-new-diet-study-confirms-your-worst-suspicions-about-u-1834818556

Ed Cara
May 16, 2019

A U.S. government-led trial may confirm the worst fears of anyone whose diet starts and ends in the frozen food aisle. It suggests that people who mostly eat ultra-processed foods will take in more calories and gain more weight than those who stick to mostly unprocessed foods—even if the two diets start off with the same amounts of fat, carbs, and other nutrients.

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There’s some debate as what exactly qualifies as an ultra-processed food. But Hall and his team decided to abide by guidelines developed by the United Nations, which take into account the different types of industrialized processing a food or ingredient goes through before it ends up on our plate. An example of an ultra-processed breakfast, highlighted by the authors, might include pancakes, sausages, and hash browns, while a mostly unprocessed breakfast would contain blueberries, raw nuts, and oatmeal.

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Dietitians created the meals for each diet, and designed them to roughly match in terms of total calories, macronutrients like fat and sugar, sodium, and fiber. But importantly, the volunteers were told to eat as much or little as they wanted. Together with freely available snacks, each person had the option to eat up to twice as many daily calories as they would likely need to stay at their current weight, based on a preliminary screening.

The team’s final results were striking. On the ultra-processed diet, the volunteers ate an average of 500 extra calories a day, gained body fat and about a pound of weight by the two-week mark; on the unprocessed diet, they lost body fat and dropped that same pound.