«You will eat twice as many calories as you need»
The human digestive system has evolved to break down whole foods. And many ultra-processed foods are made from raw foods that have been broken down into molecules and reassembled. Creating «pre-digested» foods destroys nutrients and can cause overeating. Why do many people overeat chips, cereals, cakes, puddings and other ultra-processed foods, despite knowing that these foods can be unhealthy?
This may be due to manufacturing processes that “pre-digest” raw food ingredients — by creating ultra-processed foods that bypass the body's signals of fullness, CNN reports.
What does «pre-digested» mean? To produce cheap, tasty food that is conveniently packaged, staple food crops such as corn, wheat and potatoes are broken down into their molecular components — starchy flour, protein isolates, fats and oils — or what manufacturers call “suspensions”.
“The bulk of what is extracted is the starch slurry, a milky mixture of starch and water, but we also extract proteins and fibers,” says a video explanation of the process from Starch Europe, part of the European Starch Industry Association.
“Approximately half of the starch suspension is used for the production of sugars based on starch and other derivatives, says this material. – They are formed by hydrolysis, a process similar to human digestion.
Then, with the help of artificial colors, flavors and glue-like emulsifiers, these suspensions are heated, ground, molded or extruded into any food product the manufacturer can come up with .
Add just the right ratio of sugar, salt and fat designed to tickle our taste buds, and the result is ultra-processed food that is virtually impossible to digest, says infectious disease specialist Dr Chris van Tulleken, associate professor at University College London.
“It can be pizza if you put a little cheese and tomatoes on top. It could be a burger bun. This could be a cereal bar, breakfast cereal, ice cream or confectionery — they all have the same list of basic raw ingredients,» said Van Tulleken, a BBC correspondent and author of the 2023 book The Ultra-Processed People: Why We All Eat What Isn't Food… and Why We Don't can we stop?”
“It’s the illusion of food,” he added. “But it’s really expensive and difficult for a food company to make real, whole food, and it’s much cheaper for food companies to destroy real food, turn it into molecules, and then reassemble it to make whatever they want.”
< According to experts, ultra-processed food is quickly and easily digested, similar to the regurgitated food that mother birds feed to their chicks in the nest. But the human digestive system is structured differently.
Starting with teeth designed for tearing food apart, the human gastrointestinal system has evolved to break down whole foods into various nutritional components, absorb those vitamins, minerals and trace elements, and then excrete indigestible debris and fiber in the form of stool.
However, when food doesn't pass through the digestive system as Mother Nature intended, the body loses the ability to send satiety signals to the brain, says Dr. David Katz, a preventative and lifestyle medicine specialist who founded the nonprofit True Health Initiative, a global coalition of experts. , focused on evidence-based lifestyle medicine.
“Essentially, you bypass the action of the stretch receptors in the stomach, explains Dr. Katz. – Before your stretch receptors can tell you, “Hey, we've had enough,” you'll have eaten twice as many calories as you need.”
An estimated 73% of food in the United States is ultra-processed. However, it has been difficult to pinpoint the underlying effects of such foods on the body because almost all nutritional studies are observational in nature. It is difficult to conduct a randomized clinical trial, considered the gold standard of research, by forcing people to eat only certain foods.
However, a clinical study published in 2019 showed just that. Twenty healthy volunteers were isolated from the outside world for one month. For two weeks they ate only ultra-processed foods. For the remaining two weeks, they ate a diet consisting of minimally processed foods.
Breakfast at an ultraprocessed diet may consist of store-bought cereal, flavored yogurt, or blueberry muffins.
During the other two weeks, the same 20 people ate meals made with minimally processed foods — breakfast during this period could consist of plain Greek yogurt with walnuts and pieces of fruit.
According to Hall, each diet contained the same amount of calories, sugars, fiber, fat, salt and carbohydrates — the only difference was that one diet consisted only of ultra-processed foods.
Over two weeks, participants on the ultra-processed diet gained an average of 0.9 kilograms. They lost an equivalent amount of weight while on the minimally processed diet.
“On the ultraprocessed diet, people ate about 500 more calories per day, and they ate faster, ,” Hall notes. “This is the first study to demonstrate in a controlled environment that ultra-processed foods cause people to consume too many calories and gain weight.”
Hall is conducting new research aimed at understanding the main reasons for weight gain from ultra-processed foods, such as their «increased palatability,» or palatability due to their high sugar, salt and fat content.
“I think the importance of this kind of research is that until we really understand the mechanisms by which ultra-processed foods cause people to overeat calories and gain weight,” says Hall, “developing policies to reformulate these ultra-processed foods preventing them from having this effect will be extremely difficult.”
There is another problem with products that break down and reassemble — they may no longer contain the nutrients our bodies need, says Julia Menichetti, principal investigator and associate faculty member at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
“We consume more calories, but they are less rich in micronutrients,” says Giulia Menichetti.
Disruption of the chemical and physical structure of the cells in food or its matrix can damage or even eliminate many of the nutrients contained in that food , says Anthony Fardet, senior researcher at the French National Institute of Agricultural Research in Paris.
“By fracking food in much the same way we refine oil, we have completely destroyed the food matrix, and this is associated with many times higher risk of chronic disease and early mortality, as well as poorer health around the world,” notes Fardet, who studies research into preventive, holistic, and sustainable diets.
According to research conducted by this expert, these ultra-processed foods are less filling than minimally processed foods and help raise blood sugar levels.
Other studies have linked diets high in ultra-processed foods to an increased risk of cancer, heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes and depression.
“Before World War II, before we began using these new manufacturing processes, we have never seen such high levels of chronic disease worldwide,” says Fardet. “So the question is what degree of processing remains compatible with the sustainability of the human food system and global health.”
Humans have been processing food for centuries — the first evidence of fermentation was discovered about 13,000 years ago. Simply peeling an apple, potato or carrot, sautéing tomatoes to make a sauce, adding salt to bake and preserve meat, or canning produce grown in the summer for use in the winter are all ways to process foods.
Processing can often be beneficial because some plants have tough cell walls that trap vitamins, minerals and trace elements, making them less available to the human body. For example, when the cell walls of asparagus are weakened by steaming, vitamins A, C, E, K and B-complex folic acid become more available for absorption by the body.
Simmering tomatoes increases levels of an antioxidant called lycopene, which is thought to improve bone health and reduce the risk of heart disease. Cooked carrots release more beta-carotene, an antioxidant that the body uses to make vitamin A. However, overcooking vegetables can destroy some of the same nutrients — Vitamin C, for example, is extremely sensitive to heat.
However, the ingredients used in many ultra-processed foods have been subjected to much more heat than just a small amount of heat. For example, modified starch extracted from slurry «may be fried or steamed or treated with certain chemicals that help give it special properties,» according to a Starch Europe video.
“They are used in food preparation, for example, to increase their resistance to changes in cooking temperature, as well as to extend shelf life,” the video says. — A small portion of the starch or residue left over from production is fermented and distilled into bioethanol to produce biofuels or disinfectants.
This process results in “virtually zero waste of our precious agricultural raw materials,” the video says. and the technology is efficient and cost-effective, creating shelf-stable foods that make our lives easier.
But we pay a price, says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food research and public health at New York University University, who has written books on food industry policy. “The food industry has created an environment where you need to eat more,— that’s what she has to do,” she notes. – And it's fun — the foods have a pleasurable effect on your brain's reward centers and your hormones and things like that, so it's very difficult for people to stop eating them. On the other hand, I would say that people who are trying to control their weight in the modern food environment are fighting the entire food system alone. It's hard to do.»
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