Sam Srisatta, a 20-year-old college student in Florida, spent a month living inside a government hospital here last fall, playing video games and allowing scientists to document every food bite that went to his mouth.
From the large salad bowls to the plates and spaghetti sauce, Sisatta made his way through a nutritional study aimed at understanding the health effects of ultraproced foods, the controversial tariff that now accounts for more than 70% of the US food supply.
He allowed the Associated Press to label for a day.
“Today my lunch was chicken nugges, some chips, some ketchup,” Sisisatta said, one of three dozen participants pays $ 5,000 each to devote 28 days to their life.
“It was pretty fulfilling.”
Exacting exactly what made those nugges so satisfying is the purpose of widely foreseen research led by the National Institute of Health Food Researcher Kevin Hall.
“What we hope to do is understand what those mechanisms are so we can better understand that process,” Hall said.
The study study relies on 24/7 patients’ measurements, rather than self-reported data, to investigate whether ultraproced foods make people eat more calories and gain weight, potentially leading to overweight and other well-documented health problems. And if they do it, how?
At a time when Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It has made food and chronic disease a major advantage, the answers cannot come soon.
Kennedy has constantly aimed at elaborate foods as the main culprit after a number of diseases affected by Americans, especially children.
He pledged to a hearing of the Senate’s confirmation to focus on removing such foods from the school’s school lunch because they “make them sick”.
Ultraproced foods have exploded in the US and elsewhere in recent decades, as well as overweight and other diet -related diseases also increase.
Foods, which are often rich in fat, sodium and sugar, are usually cheap, mass produced and contain added colors and chemicals not found in a home kitchen.
Think of sugar and potato chips, frozen pizza, soda and ice cream.
Studies have linked foods ultraproced with the negative effects of health, but if it is current food processing – rather than nutrients they contain or something else – remains unsafe.
A small 2019 analysis by Hall and his colleagues found that ultraproced foods made participants ate about 500 calories a day more than when they ate a matching diet with raw food.
The new study aims to copy and expand that research – and test new theories about the effects of ultraproced foods.
One is that some of the foods contain irresistible combinations of ingredients – fat, sugar, sodium and carbohydrates – that cause people to eat more.
The other is that foods contain more calories for bite, enabling consumption more without understanding it.
The harassment of these responses requires the readiness of volunteers such as Srisatta and the knowledge of the health and diet experts they identify, collect and analyze the data after the valued multimillion-dol study.
During his month in Nih, Sisatta sporting his hand monitoring, ankle and waist to follow his every movement, and regularly renounced 14 blood vials.
Once a week, he spent 24 hours inside a metabolic room, a small room equipped with sensors to measure how his body was using food, water and air.
He was allowed to go out, but only with supervision to prevent any strange snack.
“Actually don’t feel so bad,” Sisisatta said.
He could eat as much or as little as he liked.
The food went to his room three times a day were created to meet the correct study requirements, said Sara Turner, dietician Nih who designed the food plan.
In the basement of the NIH building, a carefully measured team weighed, cut and cooked food before sending them to Sisatta and other participants.
“The challenge is getting all nutrients to work, but it still has to be delicious and look good,” Turner said.
The results from the court are expected later this year, but the preliminary results are intriguing.
At a scientific conference in November, Hall reported that the first 18 trial participants ate about 1,000 calories a day more an ultraprocedted diet that was particularly hyperparally and dense energy than those who eaten minimal processed foods, leading to weight gain.
When those qualities were modified, consumption descended, even if foods were considered ultraprocedted, Hall said.
The data is still being collected from the remaining participants and must be completed, analyzed and published in a reviewed journal by colleagues.
However, early results suggest that “you can almost normalize” energy intake, “despite the fact that they are still eating a diet that is more than 80% of calories from ultraproced food,” Hall to the audience.
Not everyone agrees with the methods of trouble, or the implications of his research.
Dr. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and researcher at the Boston Children’s Hospital, criticized the 2019 Hall study as “essential flaws from his short duration” – about a month.
Scientists have long known that it is possible for people to eat more or less for short periods of time, but those effects quickly fade, he said.
“If they were persistent, we would have the answer to being overweight,” said Ludwig, who has argued for years that consuming highly elaborate carbohydrates is “the main dietary culprit” and the focus on food processing is “distraction”.
He called for larger, better designed studies, lasting at least two months, with “washing” periods that separates the effects of one diet from the other. Otherwise, “we spend our energy, we deceive science,” Ludwig said.
Concerns about the short length of studies may be valuable, said Marion Nestle, a nutritionist and food policy expert.
“To solve it, Hall needs funds to conduct longer studies with more people,” she said in an email.
NIH spends about $ 2 billion a year, about 5% of its total budget, for food research, according to Senate documents.
At the same time, the agency reduced the capacity of the metabolic unit where investigators conduct such studies, reducing the number of beds to be divided among researchers.
The two participants now registered in the center and both planned for the next month are most of the halls can study at any time, adding months to the research process.
Srisatta, a volunteer in Florida who hopes to become an emergency room physician, said the participation in the trial let the thirsty know more about how processed foods affect human health.
“I mean. I think everyone knows it’s better not to eat processed foods, right?” He said.
“But having evidence to support it in ways the public can easily digest,” he said.
HHS officials did not answer questions about Kennedy’s goals about NiH food research.
The agency, like many others in the federal government, is being replaced by the wave of cost reduction led by President Donald Trump and his billionaire Elon Musk.
Jerold Mande, a former Federal Food Policy Advisor in three administrations, said he supports Kennedy’s goals for addressing diet -related diseases.
It has pushed a proposal for a 50 -bed structure where government food scientists can accommodate and nourish many study volunteers like Sisatta to strictly determine how specific diets affect human health.
“If you are going to make America healthy again and address chronic illness, we need better science to do it,” Mande said.
#governments #study #understand #health #effects #ultraproced #food
Image Source : nypost.com