Bethesda, MD
From salads to large bowls to matte balls and spaghetti sauce platters, Sersta presented its way through a nutritional study aimed at understanding the health effects of ultraprased foods, a controversial rent which is now calculated. More than 70 % US food supplies. It allowed the associate press to tag for a day.
“Today, my lunch chicken nogs, some chips, some ketchup,” said Saritata, one of the three dozen participants paid $ 5,000 each to devote 28 days of his life to science. “It was a lot of fulfillment.”
Making these nogs so satisfactory is to check that the national health nutritionist researcher Kevin Hall is the target of a widespread research.
Hall said, “What we hope to do is to find out what those mechanisms are so that we can better understand the process.”
The hall study relies on patients’ 24/7 measurements rather than self -informed data, to investigate that ultra -processed foods can cause people to eat more calories and increase weight gain, possibly moving forward. Obesity And issues related to other health documents. And, if they do, how?
At a time when Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior has made nutrition and chronic illness an important priority, answers may not come soon.
Kennedy has repeatedly targeted processed foods as the main culprit behind a number of diseases that hurt Americans, especially children. He made a commitment to a Senate Verification hearing Children’s School School Focusing on removing such foods from eating because they are “making them sick.”
In recent decades, ultrapassed foods have exploded anywhere else, as the rate of obesity and other dietary diseases has increased.
Foods, which are often high amounts of fat, sodium and sugar, are usually cheap, widely produced and contained colors and chemicals that are not found in the kitchen of the house. Think about sugar grains and potato chips, frozen pizza, sodas and ice cream.
Studies have linked Ultraposised Foods The negative effects of health, but whether it is the actual processing of nutrients – instead of nutrients or something else – uncertain.
A little 2019 analysis Hall and his colleagues found that ultraporosted foods paved the way to eating about 500 500 calories a day when they eaten non -implemented foods.
The purpose of the new study is to transmit and expand this research – and to examine new theories about the effects of ultrapassed foods. One is that some foods contain irreparable combination of ingredients – fat, sugar, sodium and carbohydrates – which people eat more. Entertain. Second, foods have more calories per cutting, which makes it possible to use more without realizing it.
In order to tamper with these answers, it is important to know the consent of volunteers such as volunteers and health and food experts who identify, collect and analyze data behind an estimated multi -million dollar study.
During his month in the NIH, Sersta released monitors on his wrists, ankles and waist to track each of his movement, and regularly dropped blood to 14 glasses. Once a week, he spent 24 hours inside a metabolic chamber, a small room in which his body was using food, water and air. He was allowed to go out, but only with supervision to prevent any breakfast.
“It doesn’t really feel so bad.”
He could eat as much as he liked. NIH Dieteshin Sara Turner, who designed the Food Plan, said that the wheels in her room were prepared three times a day three times a day. In the basement of the NIH Building, a team carefully measured, weighing, cut and cooked foods to Seresta and other participants.
“The challenge is getting all the nutrients to work, but it still needs to be hungry and good looks,” said Turner.
The results of the trial are expected later this year, but preliminary results are interesting. At a scientific conference in November, Hall reported that the first 18 trial participants ate a thousand calories a day, which was an ultraplastable diet, especially hyperplantable and energy -dense that eats minimal processing foods, causing weight gain.
Hall said that when these features were edited, consumption was reduced, even if food items were considered ultraprocessed. Data is still being collected from the rest of the participants and must complete, analyze and publish in a peer review journal.
Hall told the audience, yet, preliminary results show that “you can almost make almost normal” energy amount, “despite the fact that they are still eating a diet that contains more than 80 % calories from eating ultrapassed.”
Not everyone disagrees the methods of the hall, or the implications of research.
Dr. David Ludogg, an endocrinologist and researcher of the Boston Children’s Hospital, criticized the Hall’s 2019 study as “basic flaws” – about a month. He said that scientists have long been aware that people are possible to get less or less for a short period of time, but these effects are eliminated rapidly.
“If they were permanent, we would have the answer to obesity,” said Lud Wig, who has been argued for years that the use of highly processed carbohydrates is a “prime nutritionist” and focusing on processing food is “annoying”.
He called for large, better designed studies, which lasted for at least two months, in which the effects of a diet with “washout” periods were separated from the next. “Otherwise,” we waste our energy, we mislead science, “said Lud Wig.
Nutritionist and food policy expert Marian Nestlé said concerns about the short length of the study may be correct.
“To solve this, the hall needs financial support to get longer education with more and more people,” he said in an email.
According to the Senate documents, NIH spends about $ 2 billion a year, about 5 % of its total budget, nutritional research.
At the same time, the agency reduced the capacity of the metabolic unit where investigators conduct such studies, which reduces the number of beds that need to be shared among the researchers. Both participants now enrolled in the center and both planned for the next month can read the highest hall at a time, which increases months in the research process.
Seresta, a Florida volunteer, who hopes to become an emergency room physician, said that taking part in the trial was desperate to find out more about how processed foods affect human health.
“I mean, I understand that everyone knows that processed foods are better than not eating, okay?” He said. “But there is evidence that people can easily digest,” he said.
HHS officials did not answer questions about Kennedy’s intentions for nutrition research in NIH. Due to a wave of deductions in the direction of President Donald Trump and his billionaire assistant Elon Musk, the agency, like many others in the federal government, is being affected.
Former Federal Food Policy Advisor in three administration Jerold Mande said he supports Kennedy’s diet -related diseases. He has made a suggestion for the convenience of 50 beds, where public nutrition scientists can strictly decide how many study volunteers like Seersta can affect how a specific diet affects human health.
“If you are going to make the United States healthy again and you are going to deal with a chronic illness, we need better science,” said Mande.
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