A 20-year-old college student from Florida named Sam Srisatta spent a month last autumn residing in a public hospital here, playing video games and letting researchers record every bite he took.
Srisatta devoured large portions of salad, meatballs, and spaghetti sauce as part of a nutrition research that sought to investigate the health implications of ultraprocessed meals. These problematic items now make up over 70% of the food supply in the United States. For one day, he let reporters from The Associated Press accompany him.
Three dozen people, including Srisatta, spent $5,000 to spend a month living a science-based lifestyle. “Today my lunch was chicken nuggets, some chips, some ketchup,” Srisatta said. I felt accomplished, you know.
Nutrition expert Kevin Hall of the National Institutes of Health is spearheading the much-anticipated study that aims to determine what exactly made the nuggets so delicious.
That process has to be better understood, so “what we hope to do is figure out what those mechanisms are,” Hall explained.
To determine if ultraprocessed meals contribute to increased calorie consumption and weight gain—possibly resulting in obesity and other well-documented health problems—Hall’s study uses continuous patient measures instead of self-reported data. What does it mean if they do?
The answers are urgently needed since Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has prioritized nutrition and chronic illness.
Kennedy has long blamed processed foods for the epidemic of chronic ailments that plagues the United States, especially among youngsters. During his confirmation hearing before the Senate, he declared his intention to “make them sick” by eliminating certain items from school lunches.
In the last several decades, both the prevalence of obesity and other diet-related illnesses and the consumption of ultraprocessed foods have skyrocketed worldwide.
Fast food is usually mass-produced, inexpensive, and full of chemicals and additives that you wouldn’t find in a home kitchen. It’s also heavy in fat, salt, and sugar. Frozen pizzas, ice cream, drink, and sugary cereals and chips are a few examples.
It is unclear from the available research whether the detrimental health consequences of ultraprocessed meals are due to the processing itself or to the nutrients they contain.
Hall and colleagues conducted a small investigation in 2019 and discovered that compared to a comparable diet of unprocessed foods, participants who ate ultraprocessed items consumed around 500 calories more per day.
This new study intends to build upon and extend previous studies on the impacts of ultraprocessed meals, as well as to put up and evaluate alternative hypotheses. An appealing mix of fat, sugar, salt, and carbs is present in some of these meals, which makes them hard to refuse and leads to overeating. The second is that you can eat more of these meals without noticing because they have more calories per mouthful.
To uncover these answers, the estimated multimillion-dollar project relies on the expertise of nutrition and health specialists as well as the willingness of volunteers like Srisatta to discover, collect, and evaluate the data.
Srisatta routinely donated up to fourteen vials of blood while at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and he wore wrist, ankle, and waist monitors to record his every motion. A small room equipped with sensors to monitor his body’s use of food, drink, and air was his metabolic chamber, and he spent 24 hours there once a week. He could go outside, but only under close observation so that his goodies wouldn’t go flying.
This isn’t going to hurt too much, Srisatta assured.
He was free to eat anything he wanted. Sara Turner, a nutritionist from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), noted that the study’s specific dietary needs were met by the three meals sent to his room daily. Srisatta and the other participants received their meals from a crew in the NIH building’s basement who meticulously measured, weighed, cut, and prepared them.
In spite of the fact that it must be visually appealing and tasty, “the challenge is getting all the nutrients to work,” Turner remarked.
Though we won’t know for sure until later this year, the trial’s fascinating preliminary results have us excited. Hall stated at a November scientific conference that the first 18 study participants gained weight due to eating an ultraprocessed diet that was 1,000 calories higher per day than those who ate minimally processed items. This diet was especially hyperpalatable and energy rich.
According to Hall, even when items were deemed ultraprocessed, consumption decreased when such traits were altered. The remaining participants have not yet finished providing data, which must be completed, processed, and then published in a peer-reviewed publication.
The preliminary findings, according to Hall, “despite the fact that they’re still eating a diet that is more than 80% of calories from ultraprocessed food,” imply that “you can almost normalize” calorie consumption.
The procedures and results of Hall’s study are not universally accepted.
The 2019 study by Hall was “fundamentally flawed by its short duration” (about one month), according to Dr. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital. The ability to temporarily alter people’s eating habits has been known to scientists for some years, but he warned that this impact would be short-lived.
Ludwig, who has long maintained that eating plenty of processed carbs is the “prime dietary culprit” and that concentrating on such items’ processing is “distracting,” stated, “If they were persistent, we would have the answer to obesity.”
Larger, more rigorous trials with “washout” intervals between diets of varying durations (at least two months) were his demand. “We waste our energy, we mislead the science” if this does not happen, according to Ludwig.
Nutritionist and food policy specialist Marion Nestle expressed concern that the trials were too brief.
She explained in an email that Hall requires additional resources to run lengthier research with more participants in order to address the issue.
Senate records show that nutrition research receives around $2 billion annually from the NIH, or around 5% of the entire budget.
Additionally, the agency reduced the capacity of the metabolic unit, which is where these studies are conducted, thereby limiting the number of beds that researchers are required to share. Hall is limited to studying a maximum of two persons at the center at once, so the research procedure will take longer than expected. Another two subjects are scheduled to enroll next month.
The trial’s subjects, including Srisatta, a Florida resident with aspirations of becoming an emergency department physician, expressed a strong desire to learn more about the effects of processed foods on human health.
“I mean, most people are aware that processed foods are bad for you, aren’t they?” he said. According to him, it is crucial to provide evidence in a way that the public can readily understand.
Questions concerning Kennedy’s intentions for NIH nutrition research were unanswered by HHS officials. President Trump and his billionaire advisor Elon Musk are directing a wave of cost cuts that are affecting the department and many others in the federal government.
Former federal food policy advisor for three different administrations Jerold Mande has shown his support for Kennedy’s initiatives to combat diet-related illnesses. A 50-bed facility, which he has advocated, would allow government nutrition specialists to house and feed enough research participants, such as Srisatta, to conduct comprehensive studies on the effects of different diets on human health.
“Better science is necessary if we are to restore health to the United States and combat chronic diseases,” Mande remarked.