A new study found that people shed twice as much weight eating home-cooked meals compared to store-bought ultraprocessed foods that were considered healthy.
While the weight loss from the latest research was not substantial, only 2% of the participants’ baseline weight, the study itself was only eight weeks in length.
“Though a 2% reduction may not seem very big, that is only over eight weeks and without people trying to actively reduce their intake,” Samuel Dicken, a research fellow at the Department of Behavioral Science and Health and the Centre for Obesity Research at University College London, said.
“If we scaled these results up over the course of a year, we’d expect to see a 13% weight reduction in men and a 9% reduction in women.”
Study coauthor and former senior investigator at the US National Institutes of Health, Dr. Kevin Hall, said the latest findings show that even when people follow nutritional guidelines, minimally processed foods result in more weight loss.
The study examined 50 people spending eight weeks on two separate, healthy diets. In both diets, participants were told to eat as much or as little of a 4,000 daily allowance of meals or snacks.
The first diet involved UPFs, while the second was comprised of minimally processed foods. Notably, even the UPF diet met the UK’s official government nutritional guidelines.
In other words, even the UPF diet was considered ‘healthy’, at least in the eyes of certain nutritional standards.
Both diets resulted in participants eating fewer calories than normal, but the drop was 120 fewer calories for the UPF diet and 290 fewer calories for the minimally processed diet.
Of course, this is far from the first study to show the downsides of ultraprocessed foods.
Last month, The Dallas Express reported on a study published in Nature that found the texture, high energy density, and hyperpalatability of UPFs can drive people to overeat them. The study found UPF consumption impacts ingestive behaviors and disrupts satiety signals and food reward systems.