Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 18 January 2024 — 1400 words/5 minutes
According to the American Medical Association, in an article that is part of JAMA’s “What Doctors Wish Patients Knew™” series:
“Research has shown that diets high in ultraprocessed foods are linked to more than 30 health conditions, according to an umbrella review of meta-analyses that was published in The BMJ. Meanwhile, more exposure to ultraprocessed foods was associated with a higher risk of dying from any cause. There were also strong ties with higher consumption and cardiovascular disease-related deaths, mental health disorders and type 2 diabetes.”
This statement is based on reviews of many published nutritional epidemiology studies (hundreds of them). There were 45 review studies or meta-analyses on UPFs published in 2024 alone.
Nutritional Epidemiology?
World-class statistician, William “Matt” Briggs, author of the book “Uncertainty: The Soul of Modeling, Probability & Statistics”, tells us, in no uncertain terms, that:
“Epidemiology is the field which officially mistakes correlations for causations.”
This is a very serious accusation. It is also true. And it gets worse and worse. It does so as a result of the very definition and practices of nutritional epidemiology:
“Nutritional Epidemiology
Nutritional epidemiology is the application of epidemiological methods to the study of how diet is related to health and disease in humans at the population level. … Epidemiologists investigate how nutrition affects the occurrence of disease by collecting data on and comparing large groups of people. Statistical methods are employed to estimate the extent to which a factor influences risk of disease in a population. This estimate is often expressed as a measure of association.”
“In epidemiological research, diet can be studied at different levels comprising intake of nutrients, foods, food groups, and/or patterns. These exposures can be measured by directly ascertaining what people eat (e.g., through the administration of questionnaires), by measuring markers of intake in biological specimens, or by estimating body size and the relative size of body compartments.”
“The exposure measure of interest in nutritional epidemiology is usually long-term diet, since the effects of intake on most health outcomes, especially those related to noncommunicable diseases, are likely to occur over extended periods.”
The abstract of that chapter from the Encyclopedia of Food and Health, 2016, reads more succinctly:
“Nutritional epidemiology is the application of epidemiological methods to the study of how diet is related to health and disease in humans at the population level. This article reviews key issues in the field of nutritional epidemiology, including a description of methods to assess dietary intake, sources of variability in diet, the relevance of total energy intake to epidemiological analyses, and errors that may arise in measuring dietary exposures.”
The problems of nutritional epidemiology appear obvious at once:
1. “…the study of how diet is related to health and disease in humans at the population level.”
If these population-level relationships are attempted to be applied to individuals, we encounter the ecological fallacy: a logical error that occurs when you make assumptions about individuals based on group data.
2. “… This estimate — extent to which a factor influences risk of disease in a population — is often expressed as a measure of association.”
A measure of association, a correlation, is not a risk – it is a statistic. True risks come from exposure to a causal factor and its dose, and for that, researchers need to measure the dose received by an individual who has had an exposure to an hypothesized causal factor. Hypothesized causal factors need to be backed by biological plausibility.
For UPFs, ideas such as the purposes for certain processing steps or corporate ownership of the manufacturer of a food item cannot be, and are not, biologically plausible causal factors for the myriad of negative effects claimed for UPF consumption.
3. “…These exposures can be measured by directly ascertaining what people eat (e.g., through the administration of questionnaires)…”
Exposure can be directly measured, but Food Frequency Questionnaires (FFQs) and 24-hour dietary recalls (24HRs) do not directly measure exposure to or dosages of foods in a person’s diet. They are, at very best, vague estimates of dietary intake. Many nutritional epidemiological studies are based on a single “in the last year…”-type Food Frequency Questionnaire. Or even on a single, 24-hr Dietary recall. These FFQs are then treated as real-world exposures and dosages. Often participants are subsequently assumed to have the same diet over the following years or even, in some cases, decades.
4. “The exposure measure of interest in nutritional epidemiology is usually long-term diet,…”
As in the previous point above, the exposure to the measure of interest, in the present case, UPFs, is almost never actually measured in any scientifically defensible way. And, except in one or two clinical trials, dose, in practice, was never measured.
5. “…sources of variability in diet”…. “and errors that may arise in measuring dietary exposures.”
People’s diets do not remain the same for years and decades. And diet is a very difficult thing to measure outside of an institutional setting. Changes in marital status, age, becoming a parent, moving from university to professional life, changes in economic status, changes in employment, moving from one region or country to another – all these and many more factors directly change the day-to-day diets of most people.
How does this all apply to the studies on Ultraprocessed Foods?
In Modern Scientific Controversies: The War on Food: Part 2, What are UPFs?, we saw that the titular question was very difficult to answer definitively. The definition is vague and based on nutritionally irrelevant factors, primarily relying on the “NOVA food groups: definition according to the extent and purpose of food processing”, such as the purposes of processing steps used in the food manufacturing: ensuring product longevity, taste, palatability, enjoyable textures, etc.
And, for that reason, exactly which diet items on diet questionnaires [FFQs/24HRs] were to be counted as UPFs in the various research efforts have varied over time and were often subjective [as in “influenced by or based on personal beliefs or feelings, rather than based on facts”] and thus different in each study.
None of the items in the lists of UPFs are distinct foods with distinct nutritional qualities – nutritional value is not considered in the definitions. The items on the UPFs lists do not share common ingredients. The items on the UPFs lists do not share common processes. Many anti-UPF claims contain heavy doses of anti-transnational corporatism.
In fact, the whole subject is scientifically unsuitable for investigation. To be scientifically sensible, the food item (or food group) to which study participants are to be, or have been, exposed at some dosage level must be measurable and, if a number of items are being considered to be a group, the items must be commensurable—it must be a homogeneous group—a group of like things.
It is impossible to measure the “purposes-ness” or the “ownership-by-transnational-corporation-ness” of varied items for sale in the grocery store. There is no acceptable metric for those concepts. It is impossible to measure the relative “UPF-ness” of items sold in grocery stores, such as these ubiquitous grocery-store breads for instance:
We can only scientifically be interested in the dosage received of the particular dietary item of interest and that dosage needs to be measured. Dosage is not a binary measure – not yes/no.
Even known poisons depend on the dosage – some have benefits from very small doses while larger doses kill – this is called hormesis.
All the UPF prospective cohort and observational studies (cross-sectional, case-control, and cohort) and the review and meta-analyses and even the huge umbrella review of epidemiological meta-analyses (Lane et al. 2024) suffer from the faults detailed above.
And what is the result of all that?
A pseudo-science fad — the anti-UPF movement — that has infected nearly
every level of the health and nutrition science world.
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Author’s Comment:
Let me speak as plainly as I dare: the anti-UPF movement is pure “Fad Science”. It is wasting untold research monies to bolster an ideological fight targeting the foods produced by transnational corporations on the trumped-up idea that they share something bad hidden somehow in “the extent and purpose of food processing”.
There are some voices trying to stem the rush to condemn all UPFs.
Please, it is important to understand that UPFs does NOT MEAN JUNK FOOD. That is an entirely different concept and classification.
Nor are UPFs the same as foods containing “additives” or ”artificial colors” or ”preservatives” — foods can be and are classified as UPFs even when lacking those.
UPFs are such an all-encompassing classification that it basically includes “nearly everything sold in your grocery store in a package, plastic bag, or box”.
The anti-UPF movement is a War on Food.
Thanks for reading.
# # # # #
Accurate quote by Briggs: “Epidemiology is the field which officially mistakes correlations for causations.” A corollary might be: all science is becoming epidemiology.
Still, with regard to the fad of attack on UPFs, there often is some essence to fads which is true. Perhaps insignificant, I’d still hazard to say that no one ever died from lack of Red Dye #3.
Scissor ==> In a future Part of this series, I will cover what is true in the studies in UPFs…but in advance I warn readers that there is nothing new…the studies only show things we already knew.
Be careful. On the one hand the study of diet is seriously lacking in medical science. with pharmaceuticals being the answer to most issues, and this is often tragic when diet can do wonders. There are very real studies on processed seed oils, and the very high carb diets, and sugar diets, and there are very real reasons for the high and growing issues with diabetic disease, and increased cancers and heart disease.
On the other hand there appears to be some movement to blame diet for the sudden, post MRNA vaccine correlated acceleration in disparate diseases, (some of the same diseases mentioned,that are associated with the “standard American diet”) on the food industry, possibly to shelter the potential liability of both a man made virus, and the potential harms of a man made “cure”. In other words while diet has been and is a contributing factor, it is not responsible for the sudden recent acceleration in those same diseases.
I think the understanding of autophagy and the benefits of a low carb diet and avoiding processed seed oils and sugars are very real, and there have been many many double blind studies on all of this. There are also many many medical doctors that have come to this understanding.
When of the disadvantages of living in the “information” age, is there is to much information, and if one does not accept the truth dejour, then the everything else, is literally everything else, with endless disparate opinions, articles and “studies”.
Dr Robert Malone has a decent and short article a few days ago on the processed seed oils referred to…
https://www.malone.news/p/the-real-villain-behind-americas
However it is true that the use of sugar has changed more then the article articulates. A comment pointed out that, “After WWII, the annual consumption of sugar was about 60 lbs. per year per capita and it was mostly cane sugar. Fast forward to today and it is above 150 lbs. per capita and the majority of it is liquid corn syrup which is cheaper that cane sugar and is used almost exclusively in soft drinks”
“Climate Science” is the field which officially mistakes video games for emperical data.
Climate science is where predictions of climate doom, wrong for 50 years in a row, are claimed to be science. They are climate astrology.
The issue is not if someone has died from LACK of Red dye #3, rather it’s whether or not someone has gotten cancer from consuming Red Dye #3.
Hey we got heart healthy Cheerios 😉
Look, eating cheap food makes you poor, ok? It’s obvious!
Well researched and articulated. Thanks Kip.
Fortunately we still have some freedom to choose our individual food source in the face of questionable research.
Unfortunately we have less freedom to choose our energy source in the face of questionable research.
“
EpidemiologyClimastrology is the field which officially mistakes correlations for causations.”David ==> If you are adept at reading Probability Formulas you might look at William “Matt” Briggs’ series “The Excesses & Errors Of Epidemiology” — warning to readers — the series is a difficult read if probability formulas give you a headache!
Very insightful.
I second David. More than that – I’m copying this article into my group of favorites. I am so tired of hearing that this food or that is bad for you – only to have another article a few years later that says the opposite. I have very intelligent friends who are constantly telling me of one study or another that condemns what I am eating/drinking or how I prepare my food. (Don’t use a microwave oven! It’ll change your food into poison! Microwaved water will kill plants!).
This shows how the studies are flawed. I knew it was something like this – just couldn’t put my finger on it!
“UPFs are such an all-encompassing classification”
Should that be “UPFs IS such an all-encompassing classification”?
or “UPF
sIS such an all-encompassing classification”Jeff ==> My ex-professional word-level magazine editor usually edits these essays — when she doesn’t, little technical-english things slip through.
I’ll re-consult with her on that point. It pivots on whether one considers “UPFs” a singular class name or a plural.
I don’t think this is resolvable, as it is like the British English use of the plural for corporate entities—General Electric are reporting their earnings 1 January. It is more a matter of arbitrary tradition.
Tom ==> Yesterday, my editor-wife read me a list of iron-clad English rules that have been relaxed or abandoned, like split-infinitives. She has agreed to stop asking me to correct them in my writing.
If you read my stuff here a lot, you may have noticed that I often write as if I am speaking to an audience and less like I am writing a report on something.
Good point, Tom. The are vs is thing always grates, me being an Appalachian hills type.
I regard such things to be like accents. It can be annoying, as when people from India cannot understand my California accent on “help lines” based there. Mostly I just tolerate it.
The accent issue works both ways. I have a slight hearing impairment, enough for the VA to give me hearing aids, which don’t help, but not enough to give me a disability rating. I often have difficulty understanding people with strong accents — even the accent of a Scotsman, despite my name.
Interesting…
Should we be worried about vegan ultra processed foods?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241011-what-explains-increasing-anxiety-about-ultra-processed-plant-based-foods
Switching to a plant-based diet can help fight climate change, UN experts have said.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49238749
The UN recommends it.
“The UN recommends it.”
That serves as a gigantic warning label.
Don’t touch it with a barge pole…
Strat ==> “The UN recommends it” — The UN’s World Health Organization has been colonized by radical leftish-liberal-progressives who are, as a class, compulsively inclined to jump on each and every popular band-wagon. WHO has gone all-in on the anti-UPF thing.
Oh, I do realise that, Kip. The trouble is these people never think anything through.
strat ==> Pielke Jr. calls this the desire the guaranteed winner thing.
Strativarius — Everybody is different — a reality ignored by way too many people who should know better. There are people — probably not all that many but some — who genuinely can’t handle vegetable protein. Forcing such an individual onto a vegetable diet would be beyond stupid. OTOH, there are people, and I’m one, who can’t deal with meat. In my case the problem is medication resistant gout. As a result, I consume quite a bit of unquestionably ultra processed vegetable protein. A lot of vegetable based protein products are truly dreadful, but quite a few taste pretty good. Are they healthy? For me, I see no reason to think they aren’t. It’s lunch time. I think I’ll go microwave a Beyond burger with Swiss Cheese and mushrooms.
This whole UPF thing brings to mind H. L. Menken, “For every complex problem there is a solution which is clear, simple and wrong.”
Don ==> H. L. Menken, “For every complex problem there is a solution which is clear, simple and wrong.”
And this is a huge problem in the world of science today. SCIENCE™ as an institution wants to appear God-like by making pronouncements of those clear and simple solutions to the world’s problems. And abhors admitting that “We just don’t know.”
Who will get attention?
A scientist who predicts the average temperature in 100 years to two decimal places or someone who says “No one knows”?
So very true
I follow Dr Shawn Baker and listened as many people got rid of gout via a carnivore diet. Too bad you can’t eat meat. It contains all the necessary nutrients for humans.
don,
Have you looked at the amount of oxalates in your diet? While some people can consume large quantities of food high in oxalic acid and othe oxalates, others more sensitive can suffer symptoms almost identical with gout!
Interesting. And quite plausible. Although my serum urates seem to be pretty high. But maybe urate tests are sensitive to Oxalic acid as well as Uric acid. I’ll check it out. Thanks
When I lived on the farm we would take fresh cow’s milk to the house and use it. The only processing was filtering through cheese cloth. Now people are going to jail for making fresh milk available.
When ice cream is UPF we know they have gone too far.
mkelly ==> Any attack on premium-grade real whole milk ice cream is a crime against humanity!
Following this week’s news of Red #3 I looked at several things in my food group. 😬 My favorite ice cream has both #40 and #3. My first thoughts were, I wonder what the dose of each is, and why both.
Until I was eight or thereabouts we had fresh milk delivered to the door, well you had to go out with a jug to get it, by horse and cart, then the government declared that that milk was unhealthy and must be pasteurized. The taste changed and I never drank milk again. I’m still here 69 years later, according to the government I should have died before age eight.
They include Bacon too, a process that goes bad centuries, it has been industrialised but good old fashioned dry cured bacon is easily found.
I think Twinkies and Velveeta are the only foods that don’t go bad after centuries. 😎
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist. I think you meant, “a process that goes back centuries”.)
Whew! It has now been over 40 years since I once worked for a medical/laboratory manufacturer where I installed and serviced capital equipment in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was also at the beginning of the Biotech industry where many of the giants of today were in small buildings not much larger than a garage.
A couple of my accounts were the USDA where they had live-in testing of certain foods. That is that the volunteer participants were in small dormitories and not able to leave for the duration of the study. I remember talking with a couple of the participants where the food being tested was salmon, which they had in all three meals each day. They did say that the meals were quite good, it was just that they were getting rather tired of the salmon and really wanted a candy bar.
derbrix ==> Yep, hard to do diet studies…even my grand-daughter would pause at salmon three times a day!
I certainly agree that it’s absurd to think that who sells a food product or what their motivation may be would have an impact on the health effects of eating the product. If an indigenous paraplegic lesbian of color living next door sells me a tainted non-GMO organic burrito and I get salmonella poisoning, I’m no better off than eating at Taco Bell.
Kip=> typo
Rich ==> Got me! Tricky things, those little letters….
I’ve never seen a paraplegic working at Taco Bell.
How about firemen?
https://youtu.be/oY2tGRROksw
Rich ==> And I thought you meant working at Taco Bell…..
No, fire fighters from the non-bipedal-normative community.
I ate Taco Bell food – once.
Gad you recovered !!!
Kip, for more on correlations, I suggest you consult Spurious Correlations at https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations. The site provides nearly 6,000 correlations one being between Bachelor’s Degrees Awarded in Psychology with the number of groundskeepers in Idaho, The R2 is 0.98. Hard to get better than that.
Denis ==> Good reference for a little hilarity.
I agree that the concept of UPF is not useful, if one is trying to categorize healthy and unhealthy foods and diets. The real question is what kind of processing and with what results.
Bread, for instance, in terms of processing from the original grain, is very highly processed. But what makes some breads more palatable and digestible isn’t the number of steps, is whether its fast rise and high yeast and additives or long fermented bread made only from flour, yeast, water and salt. Take cassava as another example – its processing involves repeated steps, but its essential to safety. So its not how much processing.
But I am reluctant simply to dismiss the idea that something has gone very wrong with modern diets, and that the proliferation of ready cooked meals and dishes has a big role in it. You just have to look at the obesity and diabetes numbers to agree with this.
The question is how to characterize what to avoid, and what to include. Some better way than what we are doing now must be found.
michel ==> “something has gone very wrong with modern diets” Yes and Maybe. Some people, many people, eat diets that are not in the best interest of their long-term health.
The issue is a Public Health concern versus a Individual Diet concern. The rise in population level obesity can only be Public Health. My or your being grossly overweight (obese) is Individual Health. Population-level diet vs. Individual Diet.
But Obesity is not solely a diet issue — and changing diets does not universally solve obesity. See mine on the Obesity Epidemic. One must dig deep to get to the real science which underpins my conclusions — but the conclusion is backed by the science, and obesity experts know that diet alone does not equal obesity. Nor does “getting more exercise”. The advent of Wegovy and Ozempic injectables for weight-loss highlight this point — they alter the body’s handling of blood sugar and fats.
The answer may just simply be affluence — people may just generally have too much money and are thus able to eat whatever and as much as they choose– in other words, they indulge themselves — which may often be just plain too much.
But, it is unlikely that the processes used in modern food manufacture are responsible.
I think the processes may have a role. My expression was a bit careless, I don’t mean that if you prepare a dish with the identical ingredients in a factory or a home kitchen the results will be nutritionally very different. I mean processes in a wider sense. The problem is that isn’t what happens, the dishes end up being very different.
The evidence from healthy, long lived populations seems to be that general preparation of meals from scratch, from (mainly) raw ingredients leads to a population of people who live longer, are not obese, don’t suffer from diabetes etc. Or at least, far fewer are than in the US and UK generally
The question we have to answer is why are the UK and the US so different, and is it to do with how they eat. I am sure its to do with activity as well, but what about diet?
There is a great difference if you are cooking for a small family unit and if you are a product manager of a given prepared food brand. The brand manager’s incentive is sales, and he and the team have every kind of additive and process they feel like using at their disposal, and the tins or packets or cartons come off a production line in huge quantities, so these are large financial bets with cost of ingredients very important and exactly measurable..
Family cooking is with a much more limited range of additives – probably few or none, only herbs and spices. Its with standard kitchen ingredients and little opportunity to substitute to cut costs. You may, for instance, replace some of the parmesan in the recipe with aged cheddar, but you are not going to have at your disposal any of the really creative food tech ways of reducing the cheese expense while preserving the flavor. You are also not going to have the myriad different derivatives of soy and corn which dominate the prepared food landscape. And you are probably not going to add sugar to just about everything in sight, it simply will not occur to you. And you are not carefully tuning your dish to a first taste hit with a view to volume sales. You will not feel the need to add anything like as much salt. You are just trying to get a healthy and appetizing meal on the table.
Now, some factory food is compatible with such an approach – canned vegetables and beans for instance, in little but water and salt. But most is not.
I think its a reasonable hypothesis that the move to increasing amounts of pre-prepared dishes and less cooking from scratch has led to very different recipes and ingredients being used for what are nominally the same dishes, and that this process has interacted with our tastes so that individual choices lead to the consumption of much sweeter, saltier meals with lots of soy and corn derivatives, and that this change is (along with reduced activity) part of the reason for the rise in obesity and its associated unhealths.
michel ==> Well,now you’re talking. Do note though that each of these additives, or most of them, have undergone careful testing, and/or are being tested,over and over,and so far no smoking guns have been found.
There is always the possibility of some synergy between two otherwise generally safe ingredients.
As we’ll see in the next Part, they have found that only the sugars and the processed/red meats had any harm signal at all. When they remove the items with tons of added sugar and the processed meats, UPFs showed no harmful effects.
Do note though that each of these additives, or most of them, have undergone careful testing, and/or are being tested,over and over,and so far no smoking guns have been found.
People may be looking in the wrong place. There may be nothing harmful about the ingredients in themselves, either alone or in combination. But that may not be the really important issue. The important issue may be the effect they all have on dietary choices. What they affect (as well as cost) is palatability and maybe satiety.
The experiment you would have to do would be present something like the same quite large range of foods both with and without the additives, and then see what people chose to eat, how much and in what combinations.
The classic example of this: people used to talk about being ‘egg bound’. The theory was eating eggs caused constipation – something about the eggs.. Of course, it does not. But there may be something to the idea all the same, they are very filling and very low in fibre, so eating a lot of eggs could conceivably change the overall diet through dietary choices in a way that makes constipation more likely.
Nothing wrong with suspecting modern diets are suboptimal. Maybe they are. But don’t overlook alternative explanations. Thanks to modern medicines, people are living longer. Poor blood sugar management (diabetes) tends to increase with age. Quite likely unrelated to diet. And don’t overlook improved diagnostics as a partial cause of increasing numbers of diabetics.
Obesity. Well, if you continue to eat like a teenager and adopt a sedentary lifestyle, you’ll likely gain weight. A lot of it. That looks to be a cultural problem, not a nutritional problem. And as Kip will likely tell you, they moved the goal posts for obesity a few decades ago, resulting in an instant dramatic increase in obesity in the US.
And don’t overlook the widespread use of cortico-steroids (e,g, Prednisone) in modern medicine, Those drugs do help a lot of medical problems. Sometimes dramatically. But they also cause many people to put on weight and they often play hell with blood glucose management. My guess would be that they aren’t the only widespread medications with not entirely benign side-affects.
Don ==> All very good points. As for BMI, there is now a strong movement to abandon BMI and use something else…I will be writing about that soon along with Obesity and Ozempic/Wegovy.
A lot of societal problems are being caused by the tendency of people to fail to give up adolescence in many different ways.
I think this is true – but I also think you have to ask whether what’s available from the food industry has interacted with tastes to make individual restraint more difficult and this more rare.
michel ==> Humans have suffered from overindulgence for as long as we have written records — and certainly before that as well. Some people will eat more of something that they love than is “good” for them.
My younger brother, as a child, discovered cake mixes with frosting in the box as well. He would bake a cake, frost it, and eat the entire thing himself……at least once a week.
I realized decades ago that most people don’t ‘grow up;’ they just grow old and wrinkled.
It is not necessarily true that today’s aging population is more likely to get fat than in generations past. If anything today’s youth are much more likely to be obese than in generations past, and I think that is mostly driven by kids not playing outdoors, in sports, long walks and bike rides because they’ve got their noses stuck in their phone screens nearly every waking hour.
Some people today, aged or young, may have more sedentary lifestyles than their forebears, but not necessarily so with the large numbers of adult people who work out or stay physically active in recreational activities. People today also tend to be healthier at advanced ages than in times past due to improved medical care, particularly prescription drugs, and major social changes such as vastly reduced incidence of smoking. When I was a kid 60 some years ago, virtually every adult male smoked and more than half of women smoked. Today only 14% of adults smoke. That has had a huge impact on the incidence of cancers, emphysema, and cardiovascular disease.
There are so many variables that don’t stop hacks from drawing vast conclusions based on scant data or biased studies; the state of nutritional knowledge of most people including researchers is unreliable, heavily corrupted and biased. Plus weight loss is a huge industry today with many more charlatans selling bogus diets and books than there is useful advice.
The shade cast on processed foods is mostly nothing but anti-business/anti-capitalist propaganda.
It seems to me that the obesity pandemic showed up after the widespread introduction of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in most processed food. I realize that it is anecdotal.
I have found that Coca Cola produces sodas that substitute sucrose for HFCS and produces sodas that are caffeine-free. However, I have not been able to find any caffeine-free sucrose-based sodas. I can’t tell the difference in taste, but if the ‘unobtanium’ variety were available I would prefer it.
I too am reluctant to dismiss out of hand the idea that something could be wrong with the foods we eat, given the shape so many of us are in. But I basically reject the irrational idea that physically processing food makes it unhealthy. Sure, cooking involves chemical reactions and boiling may leach out some beneficial components. But is it a significant effect? Even if significant, is it necessarily harmful? (Much like global warming). Cooking often makes food more digestible after all.
Something is wrong with our health. Personally I think it’s mostly an inadequate amount of exercise as the first problem and then an excess amount of food, and then an excess of simple sugars vs proteins and fats.
After that, I am open to being persuaded that seed oils might not be good for us or that pesticides and preservatives that are bad for insects and bacteria are probably not harmless to humans. But is there a significant effect and do the benefits outweigh the harms? (Much like fossil fuels)
The idea that evil tobacco companies transferred their mad scientists to the food companies that they acquired and proceeded to addict us to Cheetos is a conspiracy theory too far for me.
Rich ==> “evil tobacco companies transferred their mad scientists to the food companies that they acquired and proceeded to addict us to Cheetos is a conspiracy theory” — and yet, that is the basic underlying premise of the anti-UPF movement.
The questions of preservatives and pesticides in our diets have been investigated to death and very little evidence of clinical harm has been found for any of it. Seed oils? meaning, I presume, palm oil specifically, again — no real evidence that I have seen — only rumor and accusations.
An of course, preservatives are used to keep food safe for humans to eat — and benefits far outweigh any possible risks (which have not been found even in deep studies.)
Maybe it is just Dylan: “something is happening here but you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?…”
Regarding cooked seed oils, I disagree…
”
Evidence from Scientific Literature:“The connection between seed oil consumption and obesity is not merely theoretical but is backed by scientific research. For instance, a study published in Nature explored how high linoleic acid diets in rodents led to obesity without an increase in caloric intake, suggesting that the type of fat consumed is as crucial as the quantity. This study found that animals fed diets high in linoleic acid from soybean oil gained significantly more weight than those fed diets high in saturated fats, despite identical calorie intake (Nature).
Another pivotal animal study conducted at the University of California, Davis, focused on the metabolic effects of oxidized linoleic acid. The research showed that when mice were fed diets containing oxidized seed oils, they not only gained weight but also exhibited signs of metabolic syndrome, including insulin resistance and increased fat mass. The study concluded that the oxidation products from seed oils could be a direct cause of obesity and related metabolic diseases (UC Davis).
Further Animal Studies:Research from the Journal of Lipid Research also corroborates these findings. In an experiment, rats were given diets where the fat source was predominantly linoleic acid-rich seed oils. Over time, these rats developed greater adiposity and insulin resistance compared to those fed diets with fats like coconut oil or olive oil, which are lower in PUFAs. The study highlighted that the metabolic disturbances were not solely due to caloric content but were linked to the specific fatty acid profile of the oils (Journal of Lipid Research).
Furthermore, a study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition examined the effects of dietary linoleic acid on human subjects. While not directly measuring obesity, it found that high linoleic acid intake was associated with increased markers of inflammation and oxidative stress, which are known precursors to obesity and metabolic syndrome (The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition).
These studies collectively paint a picture where seed oils, through various biochemical pathways, contribute significantly to the obesity epidemic, challenging the long-held belief that sugar alone is to blame. By examining the primary sources and animal model research, we can see a consistent pattern where seed oils, particularly when oxidized, have a profound effect on metabolic health, urging a reevaluation of our dietary guidelines and consumption habits.
The Fried Food Fallacy:Fried foods, often highlighted as highly obesogenic, provide a clear example of how seed oils contribute to obesity. However, the conversation usually stops at “fried foods are bad” without specifying why:
There are many more. Also there are many doctors like this gentlmen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuOvn4UqznU
that have had great success with treating diabetics, a success they rarely had with traditional treatments.
Do you use MedCram to study medical research from around the world? https://www.medcram.com/collections
The founder is a bit of a medical savant with medical degrees in four or five fields.
Thanks, David.
That was quite interesting.
I largely agree with this. I don’t think there is any conspiracy. I do think however that there are incentives at work which don’t necessarily favor healthy foods from food companies.
michel ==> And you may be right….but at the same time every large food company has scores of nutritionists that strive to find ways to make the foods nutritionally sound (even if some are too sugary by nature).
The two times I have been to New Zealand (30-years ago the last time) I found it quite refreshing that the NZ sodas were not as sugary as American sodas. I became quite fond of Lemon & Paeroae the short time I was there.
Yes, unsurprisingly we’re more or less on the same page.
Just as with the Climate ‘Hoax’, it’s not a formal conspiracy with secret handshakes. It’s a series of individual incentives that drive behaviors harmful to society as a whole (and disincentives that protect the narrative that lays the golden eggs).
Hi Kip
Very interesting, thanks!
There are a number of people who have jumped on the UPFs bandwagon.
Joseph Mercola DO is among the “naturopaths” who have done so. His shtick at the moment is PUFAs (polyunsaturated fatty acids).
I think sometimes his motto should be…Everything is bad for you in its own way.
Mac ==> Joseph Mercola is something else — but what he isn’t is a reputable source of health information. Over his career he has had many many different things that he claimed were the cause of all health evil and that quitting them would restore the golden age of health.
“Golden age of health”
Right. US life expectancy has increased pretty steadily since 1860. From 40 to almost 80. Exactly when in that interval was that “golden age”?
True, yet the majority of that increase was from stopping early young deaths. The differences in the statistics of how long one may live once the reached say 50, then 60 then 70, are much reduced. And yes, modern science, and increased CO2, has made food abundant, and many many now pay attention to the need for exercise, and more and more are getting outdoors. (These are healthy trends indeed.)
In addition the extended life at the end, is often unhealthy and extended through modern process like dialysis and many many other medical procedures not formally available. That rates of diabetics, heart disease, and cancer are increasing is not easily debated. India is a prime of example of changing modern carb diet and processed seed oil diet having a negative impact on a population.
Kip==> How do you assess Dr. Steven Gundry who is the most visible crusader against lectins? My scam meter is triggered by anyone who shows up relentlessly in online ads.
Rich ==> In my opinion, and this is based on three years of university pre-med in the late 1960s heavy on physiology and bio-chem — lectins are an entire class of biological proteins found in both plants and used in human physiology for a great many diverse processes. Plant lectins, to which Gundry objects, are too wide a category (like UPFs) to be classified together.
Ricin (from the castor bean – which grew in my childhood backyard) — is deadly in very small doses. Other lectins are necessary for proper human bodily functions….
So, like with UPFs, very little to zero high quality evidence of any harm
Joe, have you ever heard of “Eat right for your blood type?” Many years ago I read the book and it makes sense. What’s one man’s meat is another man’s poison. For my blood type it said don’t eat shellfish. Well when I became 60 years old (33 years ago) I ate surf and turf in the Bahamas and wound up in the emergency room. From that day on I avoided all crustaceans and have had no problems since.
Albert ==> But maybe not for the reason you think. Many people, including my daughter, are dangerously allergic to raw and cooked sea foods (raw is worse for her). I had to evacuate her from our boat by dinghy early one morning, her face purple and swollen up like a balloon, to an ambulance onshore. Saved her life but was in hospital 36 hours. Now carries an epi-pen everywhere. She had eaten ‘raw’ sea-food ceviche the night before at a party.
I would contend that much of the processed food sold in American grocery stores is pretty friggin bad for you, not because it’s processed by transnational corporations but because many of the most common ingredients are poison. Seed oils, sugars and quasi-sugars like maltodextrin and corn syrup, some natural components like lectins and oxalic acids – these things are highly inflammatory and really, really bad for you, period.
Note that the entire food pyramid in general, and specifically the war on saturated fat, was established based on completely erroneous, even backwards, epidemiology. When saturated fat was demonized in the 1960s and 1970s, we began the terrible descent in nutritional standards that have led directly to our current epidemics of obesity, type-2 diabetes, autism, Alzheimers and more opaque issues like “metabolic syndrome” and “systemic autoinflammatory disease”. In 1960, these health issues were almost unheard of. Saturated fat is one of our most basic nutritional needs, especially for brain function, and the things we’ve replaced it with are killing us.
Research “Dr. Ancel Keys” or read “The Big Fat Surprise” by Nina Teicholtz for an even more detailed history of how the USDA food pyramid was developed based on very poor science. There are some amazing parallels between bad nutrition science and bad climate science!
Joe ==> “Seed oils, sugars and quasi-sugars like maltodextrin and corn syrup” are not poison, they are foods. There is zero-to-little evidence that they are “inflammatory” in any clinically important way.
The USDA Food Pyramid has almost no effect on the diet of free-living Americans – some slight effect on school lunches. It has always been influenced by special interests dairy states, ranching states, etc.
The reasons that some disorders were unknown in 1960 is because they had not been invented yet … all the symptoms and conditions occurred in people, but not the names.
Things high in lectins
Things high in oxalic acid/oxalates:
Which of these were “unheard of in 1960”?
Are we having a chickpea and chia epidemic? I don’t think so.
Thanks Kip.
“ People’s diets do not remain the same for years and decades.”
After decades of consuming sugared cola, I quit by tapering off over a month. This followed several week-long trail work trips into wilderness areas when I had to take caffeine pills along, those being less heavy than the cola.
John ==> In the last four decades, my family have been 80% self-sufficient homesteaders, suburban parents, I have been an employee of Big Tech (eating delicious corporate cafeteria food twice a day) and home meals dictated by very health-food conscious wife. Followed by a decade living on out sailboat in the 3rd World (basically, no refrigeration,no freezer — minimal galley).
Try to imagine me taking a FFQ on those many abrupt and huge changes in diet!
The present situation in UPF started when Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds entered the food business in the 80’s.
One needs to examine how that happened to understand this movement, For many years
the tobacco companies were able to push their product because they able to claim that
tobacco was not addictive. When that changed and it was determined that tobacco was
indeed addictive and also the #1 cause of premature death that led to them entering the
processed food business. For years big tobacco was able to claim cigarettes were not addictive
because if someone quit they didn’t experience the withdrawal physical symptoms of someone on narcotics had when they went through withdrawal. The withdrawal is anxiety and cravings. It
also needs to be shown how big tobacco marketed their products to young children. This was
done for several reasons, one being as tobacco users were dying they needed to replace their
customer base. I remember “candy cigarettes” from the 50’s. The thing that really needs
to be understood is that Big Tobacco is an evil, despicable operation. And what they have done
with our processed food industry parallels what they did in the tobacco arena. They’ve made
UPF addictive just like they did with tobacco. What medical professionals call metabolic syndrome in todays is a direct result of their involvement. So Kip please explain
how Big Tobacco didn’t alter the UPF using their methods they used with
cigarettes. Their are several papers that document this well.
Mr Ed ==> I’m afraid that you have supplied the “conspiracist’s view” quite clearly. And there are various chemicals that are truly addictive to humans: Cocaine, Methamphetamine, Opioids including Fentanyl , Alcohol (more for some people than others), Nicotine. There may be others, but these are the main items for true addiction. There are some behaviors that seem to be truly addictive for some people: gambling, high risk dangerous activities, sex.
The UPF conspiracy theory would mean that white bread, made by thousands of bakeries across America, have somehow been secretly made addictive. Sausages and hot dogs, equally so. See my Part 2 for the items considered UPFs. Tobacco companies do not make all those products and NONE of them are medically addictive — not even Lay’s Potato Chips.
You see, addictiveness needs biological plausibility. The Big Food Evil Conspiracy says that foods that promote dopamine production are addictive. This is FALSE.
All pleasurable experiences, including eating, cause the production of dopamine as a self-reward.
Of course food companies make foods that people will enjoy eating…and we wouldn’t want them to make foods that we would find unpleasant or a chore to consume.
Foods intended for children are marketed to children. That’s a business practice that has sometimes been abused. But, I have raised 4 children, and contributed to raising 2 grandchildren, and have not found myself forced into feeding them things that are not good for them, despite rather relentless advertising. Kids, if left to themselves, would often just eat candy and cake — kids LIKE sweet things — fast easy energy. Doesn’t mean we adults have to make it their staff of life.
So, repeated accusations are not evidence. Company ownership by transnationals that used to be in the tobacco business is not evidence. It is just fodder for conspiracy theories. And those theories are unfortunately very very popular.
Big tobacco made their products more addictive through various means and used
the same techniques on processed food when they bought into the food industry. The
techniques used are well documented. The number of cigarette smokers are half of
what there were 50 yrs ago but the amount of health issues related to tobacco have doubled. It’s the modifying to tobacco done the the tobacco companies.
This also has been well documented in the healthcare industry, hyper-palatable is what they call it. A huge rise in obesity and diet related health issues coincided with big tobacco’s purchase of the food company’s in the late 80’s to early 2000’s. This not
a “War on Food” but a “War on our Children”. All of the addictive things you listed
are natural items that have been modified..
Mr Ed ==> We are blessed to live in the United States where folks are [mostly] allowed to have their own ideas and beliefs about things.
It was the production of tobacco in this country that started the slave
trade. That relationship continues in other parts of the world even today.
Phillip Morris entered the food business in 1970 and within a decade
over 80% of their earnings were from processed food. Today over
70% of all our food eaten is processed food. There is a psychologist
who did a video on Utube about addiction in food and the effects on
the health of the public…you might want to watch it…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0UWKV6jJ3k
U.S. Tobacco Companies Flooded the U.S. Food Supply with Hyper-palatable Foods
There is more to the addiction field then you may think…
https://youtu.be/kN83jppeI7Q?si=abBptmdl9Q_KF4aU
Highly recommended, from a very successful doctor with an active practice.
Kip, if you watch this, you will need to get at least 33 minutes in to really start to grasp the depth of what he is saying, and understand the scientific evidence behind the addiction process, which I do not think you understand well. Yes, he talks about dopamine, but it is far more then that, and the evidence is there.
I remember “candy cigarettes” from the 50’s.
Even later than that, I remember them from the 70’s. Didn’t influence me at all, I’ve never smoked. It was candy.
Why not start by considering macronutrient intake as a first start on assessing the relationship between diet and health. Over the past 60-odd years, the period in which metabolic syndrome has become rampant, the big changes are increased seed oils, decreased animal fats, increased carbohydrate.
Additives may be bad or good, but the fact they cannot be “seen” makes them into the kind of threats humans are particularly sensitive to – much like radiation from nuclear plants, or as the old prayer book put it, “Goolies and Ghoasties and Long legged creatures and Things that go bump in the night: Dear Lord Deliver Us.”
Fran ==> You ask a very good question: “Why not start by considering macronutrient intake as a first start on assessing the relationship between diet and health?”
The answer is that the real important nutrition questions a have already been asked and answered. That’s how we discovered the 13 essential vitamins and assorted essential minerals. And how we discovered the balance between proteins, carbs and fiber.
Medicine is not continuously trying to find the cause of measles — it has been found and a vaccine (several) developed that when administered properly in a population, it virtually eliminates the measles threat.
But in the field of nutrition they have been left to try to find some way to blame food for bad health — that’s what their field is about — and they cannot accept that they have accomplished MOST of that already — bad health is caused by inadequate essential vitamins, minerals, basic nutritional components (protein, carbs, fiber) and some of the myriad micro-nutrients.
Nutritional epidemiology, with all its faults, is the result of that floundering about in the weeds. IMHO.
Interesting series, Kip! It seems that the definition of UPF is so vague as to be pretty useless for any rational discussion! If you can lump Hostess Twinkies and Honey Nut Cheerios in with traditional pemmican and some venison summer sausage then you’ve got a subject too broad to work with! Looking at the macronutrients and the number of additives in a product is much more informative; but the USDA Food Pyramid is an obsolete piece of junk, based epidemiological studies and hand waving pseudoscience!
There is a wide spectrum of human genotypes that vary in their sensitivity to certain foods; but in general, if you want to get fat, eat lots of simple carbs like glucose, HFC, pasta and bread; and if you want to get lean, eat lots of meat, fish, healthy fats and oils, and leafy green vegetables; and increase the amount of time your insulin level is low with periods of fasting! Exercise is very important for health, but it doesn’t help you lose much weight, especially if you are eating garbage!
Abo ==> Yes, there are sensible ways to eat available to those who can afford to be choosey. Not everyone can be. In the United States today, the very poor can not afford a wide variety of fresh vegetables and fruits….in my local grocery, an single orange was going for 99 cents — but that’s cheaper than a candy bar!
millions of folk eat horrible diets and eat out out regularly. It is not extremely expensive to eat healthy.
Very nice Kip, you are doing important work.
Yes, correlation is not causation, but finding a correlation can be a useful starting point.
Mike ==> and they have with these studies — foods with lots and lots of sugar and processed meats seem to have negative effects — but we already knew that. The sugar issue is because of its connection to overweight/obesity and the processed meat issue is still obscure and ‘iffy’.
When you look at what is waddling in front of you in the supermarket line and see what’s in the shopping trolley you get a clue about what is wrong.
Carbs are NOT an essential macronutrient although some carb containing foods may contain essential vitamins and minerals.
This article is an excuse for the crap that is foisted on the public misleadingly called “food”.
Cut the carbs, sugar, bread, pasta etc) and you will lose weight without even trying and vastly reduce your risk of Type 2 diabetes or even cure it.
Yes this subject is difficult to treat scientifically but the history of the last 50 years, the engrossing of the mass of much of the population, the government food pyramid and personal experience tell me there is something in this.
As for the slights against “conspiracy theorists”, this is plain stupid after the last 5 years. By the time any lockdowns started the data from the Diamond Princess was in. 7 or 8 deaths on a cruise ship with 3500 people for 5 weeks, likely an older more morbid sample than the general population. There never was a need for lockdowns nor the dangerous fake “vaccines”.
Again personal experience, but of the people in my circle who took the “vax”, many have had medical problems they never had before. Rapid onset cataracts, vertigo, auto immune problems etc. The ones who didn’t haven’t had problems.
Hi Mike, see my comment above linked here…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/01/18/modern-scientific-controversies-the-war-on-food-part-3-upfs-what-are-they-measuring/#comment-4025732
Kip — if you are still reading comments on this thread, I”d like to add a few.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting and well thought out articles. I look forward to the next
Don ==> Good questions/points:
Thanks for your thoughtful comments.
Kip — I almost forgot about this. https://slate.com/life/2025/01/ultraprocessed-foods-healthy-energy-fear-trader-joes.html You probably are aware of it, but if not it’s a good, readable contrarian view on UPFs by a nutritionist.
Don ==> Thanks for the link.
400 words?
It seemed like 4000 words
Stop complaining about the grossly expanded definition of junk foods and the usual poor science of most nutritional studies.
There have been some great studies of diets and diabetes from the 1950s and 1960s (see last paragraph).
The conclusions were that a low fat diet to lose weight worked no better than a low carb diet to lose weight. If you burned more calories than you ate, you would lose weight and that is very important for Type 2 diabetes. Very important for other diseases too.
The main lesson from nutrition studies is that overweight and obesity lead to bad medical outcomes, as measured by BMI and waist size versus height.
Of course there are huge confounding variables of exercise and genetics. So this is not precise.
But if you are 4 feet tall and weigh 495 lbs., like author Hansen, you are doomed. And so is Mrs. Hansen.
The bottom line is that if you are fat you are less likely to be healthy. You need to eat fewer calories and exercise more. If cutting down on junk foods helps you lose weight then do that.
You may want to follow
The Greene Food Triangle:
Write a list of your favorite foods:
Hamburgers
Pizza
Chili
Salami
Cheese
Ice Cream
Potato Chips
No kale, Brussel’s sprouts or tofu
Then draw a triangle around the list
That is The Greene Food Triangle.
Definitive studies done in the 1950s and ’60s by Jules Hirsch of Rockefeller University and Rudolph Leibel of Columbia, which tested whether calories from different sources have different effects. The investigators hospitalized their subjects and gave them controlled diets in which the carbohydrate content varied from zero to 85 percent, and the fat content varied inversely from 85 percent to zero. Protein was held steady at 15 percent. They asked how many calories of what kind were needed to maintain the subjects’ weight. As it turned out, the composition of the diet made no difference.
Richard ==> You needn’t repeat it, I got it the first time. 1400 words, someone nicked the “1”.
Again, I can’t quite distinguish between your serious and joke-y comments above.
Just eating fewer calories and exercising more does not cure obesity — it will help most people lose those extra 10-15 pounds — but will not, for most people, allow an obese person to become a non-obese person.
And,yes, what exact diet one eats, for anyone eating anything near a sensible, well-rounded diet doesn’t matter.
400 words?
It seemed like 4000 words
Stop complaining about the grossly expanded definition of junk foods and the usual poor science of most nutritional studies.
There have been some great studies of diets and diabetes from the 1950s and 1960s (see last paragraph).
The conclusions were that a low fat diet to lose weight worked no better than a low carb diet to lose weight. If you burned more calories than you ate, you would lose weight and that is very important for Type 2 diabetes. Very important for other diseases too.
The main lesson from nutrition studies is that overweight and obesity lead to bad medical outcomes, as measured by BMI and waist size versus height.
Of course there are huge confounding variables of exercise and genetics. So this is not precise.
But if you are 4 feet tall and weigh 495 lbs., like author Hansen, you are doomed. And so is Mrs. Hansen.
The bottom line is that if you are fat you are less likely to be healthy. You need to eat fewer calories and exercise more. If cutting down on junk foods helps you lose weight then do that.
You may want to follow
The Greene Food Triangle:
Write a list of your favorite foods:
Hamburgers
Pizza
Chili
Salami
Cheese
Ice Cream
Potato Chips
No kale, Brussel’s sprouts or tofu
Then draw a triangle around the list
That is The Greene Food Triangle.
Definitive studies done in the 1950s and ’60s by Jules Hirsch of Rockefeller University and Rudolph Leibel of Columbia, which tested whether calories from different sources have different effects. The investigators hospitalized their subjects and gave them controlled diets in which the carbohydrate content varied from zero to 85 percent, and the fat content varied inversely from 85 percent to zero. Protein was held steady at 15 percent. They asked how many calories of what kind were needed to maintain the subjects’ weight. As it turned out, the composition of the diet made no difference.
Everyone must eat The Vegetables of Color Diet. Not to be called The Colored Vegetables Diet, which would be racist.
Eat a variety of different color vegetables during a day.
But do not eat foods with the colors
red, orange, yellow, green, and indigo at the same meal. They are the colors of the gay rainbow pride flag. Eat those colors at the same meal and you will become gay and sing show tunes in the shower. This valuable advice is based on my intensive internet research for the past five minutes.
Surely it should be obvious that companies and corporations that produce and sell products are motivated to maximize their profits and increase sales.
Therefore, companies that process and sell food will try to make such food as tasty and palatable as possible in order to increase demand.
The following article addresses how this is done.
“How hyperpalatable foods are developed
They engage teams of scientists who harness the power of neuroscience to engineer foods we can’t stop eating.
By studying the responses that are triggered in the brain from the moment a food hits the tongue, they can tweak their formulations until they’re entirely irresistible.”
https://www.joincitro.com.au/news/how-food-is-engineered-to-keep-us-eating#:~:text=They%20engage%20teams%20of%20scientists,until%20they're%20entirely%20irresistible
It’s difficult to have conversations with people who are overweight, because they tend to feel insulted. However, I have tried, and the impression I get is that overweight people tend to be in denial about the fundamental cause of their excessive body mass, and sometimes even in denial that they are overweight.
When I point out that it is impossible to become overweight without eating too much, because, if it were possible, that would defy the laws of Physics, the response is usually. “It’s my genetics. I don’t eat any more than my friend who weighs much less than me.”
I then point out that it’s true that genetics affects every moment of our entire lives, and that genetics can determine whether or not we will become overweight when we eat too much. I then try to explain that, whilst it is possible to eat too much and not become overweight, because of one’s genetics, it’s not possible to become overweight without eating too much, because one cannot create matter (body fat) from nothing.
The body’s ability to turn the excess food that is consumed, into fat reserves, is a survival mechanism that would have been very useful in the early development of Homo Sapiens when food supplies were often disrupted due to changing weather events.
In our modern societies, there is not only a continuous and reliable supply of food, which makes redundant the survival advantage of temporarilly increasing weight, we also have a food industry that encourages the over-consumption of food.
The obvious solution, of course, in order to lose weight, is to fast. Unfortunately, if one has become overweight because one takes so much pleasure in the consumption of flavour-enhanced foods, then dealing with the hunger pangs that occur when trying to fast, is too difficult for many people.
My recommendation would be to progress gradually. Initially, refrain from snacks between meals until one gets used to it, then reduce the number of main meals each day, such as having only two meals a day instead of 3, then, after the body has got used to that, eat only one meal a day, making sure that the single meal is not larger than usual.
Eating one meal a day would be described as intermittent fasting. After the body has got used to that, try eating nothing for 24 hours, say once a week.
If one is seriously overweight, say obese, then fasting for more that 24 hours might be required. I believe it’s safe to fast for around 10 continuous days, drinking just water, preferably natural mineral water.
Vincent ==> I do know that all that sounds “oh so sensible”…it just doesn’t happen to be supported by the literature on obesity. But very careful studies on obesity have shown that it is very very hard (not easy — not just eat less, exercise more) to turn an obese person into a non-obese person and keep them that way.
Even with the new drug weight-loss interventions, Ozempic and Wegovy (semaglutide), it is necessary to have careful oversight on diet and continued life-style support. Patients can drop tremendous amounts of weight — but if they stop the medication, even if they stay on the controlled diets and life-style support, the weight comes back.
Years ago, I wrote The Obesity Epidemic, There has been few new findings since then — the major one being the semaglutides mention above.
“But very careful studies on obesity have shown that it is very very hard (not easy — not just eat less, exercise more) to turn an obese person into a non-obese person and keep them that way.”
Thanks for responding to my comment, Kip. I’ve just read your old article that you referenced, “Modern Scientific Controversies Part 4: The Obesity Epidemic”.
I agree with your comment above that it’s very very hard for an obese person to become a non-obese person. However, that doesn’t negate the scientific fact that obesity can only occur as a result of eating too much food, and that eating no food (fasting) must result in a loss of weight. I bet you can’t find any study that falsifies this.
The difficulty many people have in losing weight, relates to their lack of self-control. A state of obesity usually occurs gradually, over many years of over-consumption. To reverse that condition of obesity, without frequent or prolonged periods of fasting, would require an under-consumption of food over a similar number of years, assuming the degree of under-consumption is proportional to the degree of over-consumption, and assuming that everything else is similar, such as the degree of regular exercise.
If the obese person were to just change their eating habits to what is considered to be a normal diet, they would probably not lose any weight. They would merely stop increasing their weight.
Vincent ==> If it were only that easy. It is true, as you point out, that it is possible to starve an obese person into being a normal weight person — it has been in gulags and concentrations camps for a hundred years. But if they survive, their body, according to obesity studies will work their way back into their former weights (or near so).
And, yes, that sounds a bit crazy — but it is what obesity science and its literature has found — and boy-oh-boy did they try to make those findings support your view. It just wasn’t possible, reality was against it.
And, yes, because it is counter-intuitive, it seems a little nutty when said out loud.
But until there are careful studies that find otherwise (and there have been a lot of studies) — I am willing to accept “We just don’t know how that can be so.”
“But if they survive, their body, according to obesity studies will work their way back into their former weights (or near so).”
Kip, the above is a very confusing statement. It’s a bit like ‘climate alarmists’ claiming that an extreme weather event is due to climate change. They are confusing climate with weather.
It’s impossible for the body to work its way back to its former weight unless the person works his way back to over-indulging in tasty food.
In other words, the real problem is a lack of self control.
The fundamental scientific principle, that one cannot become overweight without eating too much, remains a rock-solid principle, as Stephen Hawking understood, and as anyone with a knowledge of basic Physics should understand.
In order to address this problem, we need to understand what factors contribute to such a ‘lack of self-control’. The processing of food to make it as tasty as possible, is obviously a major contributing factor.
The two things I discovered a while back which have made cooking from scratch more of a pleasure and less of a chore were:
michel ===> The knife I’ve heard of, I have friends at the Culinary Institute of America (referred to locally as the CIA)…But a “pressure saute pan”?