Currently, many nutrition scientists blame the world’s obesity pandemic to overeating fats or carbohydrates. However, a new theory of obesity by a nutrition researcher, Kevin Hall, revealed that ultraprocessed food such as chicken nuggets and instant soup mixes seem to trigger neural signals that make us want to eat more and more.
But Hall, who works at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, where he runs the Integrative Physiology section, has run experiments that point fingers at a different culprit. His studies suggest that a dramatic shift in how we make the food we eat—pulling ingredients apart and then reconstituting them into things like frosted snack cakes and ready-to-eat meals from the supermarket freezer—bears the brunt of the blame. This “ultraprocessed” food, he and a growing number of other scientists think, disrupts gut-brain signals that normally tell us that we have had enough, and this failed signaling leads to overeating.
Hall’s study showed that people ate hundreds more calories of ultraprocessed than unprocessed foods and the participants chowing down on the ultraprocessed foods gained two pounds in just two weeks!
“Hall’s study is seminal—really as good a clinical trial as you can get,” says Barry M. Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who focuses on diet and obesity. “His was the first to prove that ultraprocessed foods are not only highly seductive but that people tend to eat more of them.” The work has been well received, although it is possible that the carefully controlled experiment does not apply to the messy way people mix food types in the real world.
Photo Credit: NOVA. The Star Shines Bright / Jamie Chung