{"id":559,"date":"2015-03-01T15:34:26","date_gmt":"2015-03-01T15:34:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aaronniederhelman.com\/index.php\/2015\/03\/01\/two-new-clues-to-why-processed-food-makes-us-fat\/"},"modified":"2015-03-01T15:34:26","modified_gmt":"2015-03-01T15:34:26","slug":"two-new-clues-to-why-processed-food-makes-us-fat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.aaronniederhelman.com\/index.php\/2015\/03\/01\/two-new-clues-to-why-processed-food-makes-us-fat\/","title":{"rendered":"Two new clues to why processed food makes us fat (ill)!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two new clues to why processed food makes us fat (ill)!<\/a><\/p>\n

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Two new studies show why highly processed foods really may be our dietary downfall.<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s no secret that more people are overweight or obese than not these days. But the question continues to be why the rates are increasing, despite so much public health knowledge about healthy eating and exercise. While overeating is not technically an addiction, it certainly mirrors the disorder in many ways. And as such, it\u2019s the brain and behavior research that\u2019s really providing some of the best clues into the obesity crisis. This may not be so surprising, since after all it\u2019s the brain, rather than the belly, that controls our relationships with food. Now, a new study does a formal assessment of which foods are the most \u201caddictive\u201d to humans. And it\u2019s exactly the ones you\u2019d think.<\/p>\n

In the new study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, the authors argue that, like drugs, when foods are very highly processed, they start to become more \u201cpotent,\u201d and, therefore, addictive.<\/b>\u00a0<\/p>\n

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For instance, chewing a coca leaf doesn\u2019t give a very strong high, but condensing it into cocaine and making it snort-able sure does. So too with foods whose elements are refined and combined in various clever ways \u2013 food labs spend lots of time on these calculations \u2013 until they become very \u201chigh-potency.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAddictive substances are rarely in their natural state,\u201d the authors of the new study point out, \u201cbut have been altered or processed in a manner that increases their abuse potential. For example, grapes are processed into wine and poppies are refined into opium. A similar process may be occurring within our food supply.\u201d<\/p>\n

To this look at the processed food effect in humans, the team had participants gauge their tendencies toward food addiction by filling out the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which asks people to rate phrases like, \u201cOver time, I have found that I need to eat more and more of certain foods to get the feeling I want, such as reduced negative emotions or increased pleasure\u201d and \u201cI spend a lot of time feeling sluggish or fatigued from overeating.\u201d They also had people make a series of choices about which of two foods they felt they\u2019d have the most trouble controlling themselves around \u2013 for instance a muffin vs. salmon. From these results, the team composed a list of foods from most to least addictive.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, at the top of the list were foods that are high in bothfat and refined carbs: Pizza, chocolate, potato chips, cookies, and ice cream. In the middle of the list were generally foods that are high in either fat orcarbs. And brown rice, apples, beans, carrots, and cucumber fell at the bottom.<\/p>\n

The ranking suggests that it\u2019s really the combination of fat and carbs that makes food addictive. And this is probably because our brains are not used to coming across foods that are both high in fat and high in sugar \u2013 natural foods are usually high in just one or the other. So putting these two ingredients together into some wondrously unnatural and magical combination makes the brain go wild. \u201cIt is plausible that like drugs of abuse,\u201d say the authors, \u201cthese highly processed foods may be more likely to trigger addictive-like biological and behavioral responses due to their unnaturally high levels of reward.\u201d<\/p>\n

To make matters worse, processed foods often have additives that can themselves cause weight gain from another angle: Gut microbes.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

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Another newstudy, in Nature, found that emulsifiers \u2013 \u201cdetergent-like\u201d compounds used to keep foods like mayonnaise from separating into its separate parts, oil and water \u2013 even at low doses caused massive disruption to the gut bacteria of lab mice. The two common emulsifiers used in the study, polysorbate 80 and carboxymethylcellulsos, also triggered obesity, metabolic syndrome, and inflammatory bowel disease. Since more research has suggested that our gut bacteria are critical to our health and body weight (earlier this month a woman with a fecal transplant reported a huge weight gain in the months following), the new study adds an interesting piece to the puzzle, suggesting that certain food additives may also play a role in their health.<\/p>\n

For years, experts have been telling us to drop the highly-processed foods in favor of as many natural and plant-based foods as possible. The public seems to belistening, at least a little, as sales of \u201cfake foods\u201d are starting to fall off. So if you can, choose foods that are unprocessed as possible and have few or no additives. And if you\u2019re going to indulge, try to pick foods that arejust fatty or just carby. If you go for foods that include high amounts of both delectable ingredients, your brain may treat it like a drug, and just keep wanting more.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two new clues to why processed food makes us fat (ill)! Two new studies show why highly processed foods really may be our dietary downfall. It\u2019s no secret that more people are overweight or obese than not these days. But the question continues to be why the rates are increasing, despite so much public health […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[62],"class_list":["post-559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-link","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-processed-food","post_format-post-format-link"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.aaronniederhelman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.aaronniederhelman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.aaronniederhelman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.aaronniederhelman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.aaronniederhelman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.aaronniederhelman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.aaronniederhelman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.aaronniederhelman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.aaronniederhelman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}