Two meals are served. Same calories, same protein, fat, and carbs—even the glycemic index is matched to one decimal place. People eat each for eight weeks: one group loses 2.06 percent of their weight, the other just 1.05 percent.
There’s only one difference. Processing. One diet is ultra-processed; the other is freshly prepared.
Most people’s first thought is that junk food is high in calories. That’s not actually it. Match the calories, and your body still keeps two different sets of books. Two.
In last year’s randomized crossover trial in Nature Medicine, 55 adults followed two diets for eight weeks each. Both were carefully designed to meet healthy-eating guidelines. Improvements in weight, fat mass, visceral fat rating, systolic blood pressure, and glycated hemoglobin were all more pronounced on the less-processed diet.
The study in Nature Metabolism this year went even further. Fifty-seven young adults at a healthy weight were given two meals, each with 300 calories—exactly the same. One was made from turkey sausage, instant mashed potatoes, and crackers; the other from boiled eggs, a banana, and a handful of dried cranberries.
They matched 12 things one by one: total weight, energy density, the proportions of the three macronutrients, dietary fiber, sodium, glycemic load. Every difference was kept within 1.6 percent.
The result was genuinely surprising. No difference in blood sugar.
But the area under the insulin curve was higher after the ultra-processed meal, starting 40 minutes after eating and staying high for two hours. Same calories, but the body secreted more insulin, carbohydrate oxidation was suppressed, and fat oxidation increased. Participants’ own ratings—their liking of the food, how filling they expected it to be, and how much they’d be willing to pay—were almost identical.
Their brains couldn’t tell the difference. Their blood could.
An earlier study’s results were especially clear. The U.S. National Institutes of Health confined two groups of people in a metabolic ward and let them eat as much as they wanted, while matching calories and nutrients. The group eating ultra-processed food unknowingly ate an extra 500 calories a day. After two weeks, they’d gained nearly a kilogram; the other group lost about the same amount.
The reason isn’t mysterious. It’s soft, mushy, and takes little chewing. You eat a meal twice as fast, and before the satiety signals reach your brain, the plate is already empty.
I think the saying “eat badly and you’ll get fat” needs an update: “eat cheaply and you’ll get fat.” What’s the difference? The price.
Healthy eating costs about $1.50 more per day than the least healthy diet, according to the estimate in that BMJ Open meta-analysis. The latest estimate puts the gap at $2.15. Two dollars a day adds up to more than $700 a year. For a family trying to raise kids and pay rent, this isn’t a choice at all.
What you’re paying for is calories. The food comes along for the ride.
That $19.99 meal deal on your way home from work has an ingredient list that could fill 30 lines. Look at the ingredients on the back: that string of words you can’t pronounce is why it’s cheap. Cheap food doesn’t need to negotiate with you about taste. It just bypasses you altogether.
What blockchains do best is turn self-reported information into something verifiable. How much was transferred, when, and to which address—anyone can check. I’ve thought about that.
But nutrition just doesn’t fit on a blockchain. How could it?
You can look up how many coins an address has transferred. You’ll never know what the person behind that address ate last night. Scan a food-traceability QR code and you can find out where a product came from and which batch it belongs to—but not what that bite did to your insulin.
There’s another gap, and nobody has filled it yet. Ultra-processed foods account for 58 percent of daily calories in the U.S. and more than half in the U.K. Across 22 European countries, the figure ranges from 14 to 44 percent. China still has no precise nationwide figures. There’s only a trend you can make out from e-commerce sales rankings: instant meals, snacks, drinks, and convenience foods are at the top.
Anyway, there’s no definitive answer. But your own ledger already has last night’s bag of chips written in it.
#减脂 #UltraProcessedFoods
$BTC $USDC $VET
There’s only one difference. Processing. One diet is ultra-processed; the other is freshly prepared.
Most people’s first thought is that junk food is high in calories. That’s not actually it. Match the calories, and your body still keeps two different sets of books. Two.
In last year’s randomized crossover trial in Nature Medicine, 55 adults followed two diets for eight weeks each. Both were carefully designed to meet healthy-eating guidelines. Improvements in weight, fat mass, visceral fat rating, systolic blood pressure, and glycated hemoglobin were all more pronounced on the less-processed diet.
The study in Nature Metabolism this year went even further. Fifty-seven young adults at a healthy weight were given two meals, each with 300 calories—exactly the same. One was made from turkey sausage, instant mashed potatoes, and crackers; the other from boiled eggs, a banana, and a handful of dried cranberries.
They matched 12 things one by one: total weight, energy density, the proportions of the three macronutrients, dietary fiber, sodium, glycemic load. Every difference was kept within 1.6 percent.
The result was genuinely surprising. No difference in blood sugar.
But the area under the insulin curve was higher after the ultra-processed meal, starting 40 minutes after eating and staying high for two hours. Same calories, but the body secreted more insulin, carbohydrate oxidation was suppressed, and fat oxidation increased. Participants’ own ratings—their liking of the food, how filling they expected it to be, and how much they’d be willing to pay—were almost identical.
Their brains couldn’t tell the difference. Their blood could.
An earlier study’s results were especially clear. The U.S. National Institutes of Health confined two groups of people in a metabolic ward and let them eat as much as they wanted, while matching calories and nutrients. The group eating ultra-processed food unknowingly ate an extra 500 calories a day. After two weeks, they’d gained nearly a kilogram; the other group lost about the same amount.
The reason isn’t mysterious. It’s soft, mushy, and takes little chewing. You eat a meal twice as fast, and before the satiety signals reach your brain, the plate is already empty.
I think the saying “eat badly and you’ll get fat” needs an update: “eat cheaply and you’ll get fat.” What’s the difference? The price.
Healthy eating costs about $1.50 more per day than the least healthy diet, according to the estimate in that BMJ Open meta-analysis. The latest estimate puts the gap at $2.15. Two dollars a day adds up to more than $700 a year. For a family trying to raise kids and pay rent, this isn’t a choice at all.
What you’re paying for is calories. The food comes along for the ride.
That $19.99 meal deal on your way home from work has an ingredient list that could fill 30 lines. Look at the ingredients on the back: that string of words you can’t pronounce is why it’s cheap. Cheap food doesn’t need to negotiate with you about taste. It just bypasses you altogether.
What blockchains do best is turn self-reported information into something verifiable. How much was transferred, when, and to which address—anyone can check. I’ve thought about that.
But nutrition just doesn’t fit on a blockchain. How could it?
You can look up how many coins an address has transferred. You’ll never know what the person behind that address ate last night. Scan a food-traceability QR code and you can find out where a product came from and which batch it belongs to—but not what that bite did to your insulin.
There’s another gap, and nobody has filled it yet. Ultra-processed foods account for 58 percent of daily calories in the U.S. and more than half in the U.K. Across 22 European countries, the figure ranges from 14 to 44 percent. China still has no precise nationwide figures. There’s only a trend you can make out from e-commerce sales rankings: instant meals, snacks, drinks, and convenience foods are at the top.
Anyway, there’s no definitive answer. But your own ledger already has last night’s bag of chips written in it.
#减脂 #UltraProcessedFoods
$BTC $USDC $VET