Why processed food makes people fat: calorie density and taste
- In a diet face-off between ultra-processed versus minimally processed food, those who ate the former consumed 500 more calories per day
- Researchers suggest it has a lot to do with people deciding how much to eat by gauging the amount of food, not its calorie content
For many years, I’ve steadfastly clung to a position for which there has been almost no evidence: processed food is the root of obesity.
This doesn’t mean that processed food is the sole cause. There’s also the ubiquity of food, changing social mores and what is probably a more sedentary lifestyle (though evidence for that, too, is surprisingly hard to come by). It also doesn’t mean that all processed food is bad. Whole-grain bread and cereal are excellent, and there are good versions of such things as frozen pizza and jarred pasta sauce. Also wine.
What it does mean is that modern industrial food processing – and only modern industrial food processing – has enabled the manufacture of the cheap, convenient, calorie-dense foods engineered to appeal to us that have become staples of our obesogenic diets. By one estimate, nearly 60 per cent of our calories come from ultra-processed food.
The case is that as our environment changed to surround us with delicious, cheap, convenient, calorie-dense food that’s specifically designed to be irresistible, we couldn’t resist it.
Now, the very first randomised controlled trial of ultra-processed food versus minimally processed food is here.