Nutrition
How Your Brain Sabotages You
A landmark study reveals: ultra-processed foods hijack our reward system like true addiction—we unconsciously eat 500 extra calories daily.
Nutrition
A landmark study reveals: ultra-processed foods hijack our reward system like true addiction—we unconsciously eat 500 extra calories daily.
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The perhaps most expressive human study on "metabolic dysregulation in humans" comes from the renowned Hall Lab of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, Bethesda (USA).
It was published in 2019 in the equally renowned scientific journal Cell Metabolism. This work is so important and decisive for us that we repeatedly highlight it in our articles.
To find out what a typical Western, highly processed diet does to people, researcher Kevin Hall and his team confined 20 people in a ward of a medical facility.
Over two weeks, they could eat either highly or minimally processed food. In the first case, for example, sausages with white bread. In the second case, it was, among other things, a salad with chicken breast and fruit.
As clever as they were—yet maximally challenging to implement—the meals of both dietary forms were matched for calories, energy density, macronutrients, sugar, salt, and fiber. They wanted to deliberately exclude these factors.
However, the extreme result could not be avoided: the 20 participants ate approximately 500 extra calories per day under highly processed food. Just like that. Clearly, the system of nutrient sensing became dysregulated under highly processed food.
Later, in a lecture, Hall sought explanations for these grave consequences—as nutritionists typically do when confronted with the multitude of metabolic dysregulations in our society.
An important factor is described in detail in a "recent study" published in The BMJ (British Medical Journal).
The authors show that refined foods, primarily the combination of refined carbohydrates and added fats—think pizza, döner kebab, pastries from the bakery, and so on—meet all DSM-5 criteria according to the Yale Food Addiction Score to classify them as addictive.
Neurochemically, they activate the brain's reward system the same way as other addictive substances, like nicotine and alcohol. With the subtle difference that pastries and cheese pretzels enriched with fat and sugar are part of everyday life for many, many people like drinking water. They don't yet know about their addiction.
By definition, one is "addicted" when, despite knowledge of grave consequences, one shows continued consumption or intensified craving and loses control of one's own behavior.
Addictive substances essentially bypass the function of our brain's control centers. With the consequences known from chronic alcohol consumption (fatty liver, cirrhosis, etc.) and cigarette smoke (10–20× more frequent lung cancer).
Anyone who has always wondered why our society becomes increasingly metabolically sick despite growing awareness might eventually come to realize that there may be real food addiction that disables, for example, our natural nutrient sensing, as in Hall's human experiment.
And that's so fascinating. Because it shows: We are blind. We are blind to adequately controlling our eating behavior under highly processed food. We can do it as little as someone who smokes and drinks. Except here, everyone "knows" it's an addiction.
More on this topic in our recent blog post and in our new YouTube video.
PS: Beware of emotional reactions ("But...!!!")—this emotional surge could confirm exactly what is described here in the text.
PSII: Isn't that fascinating? There's a good reason why people rarely argue about legumes, but get quite nervous when you tell them something negative about white flour.
