Consumption of ultra-processed foods and health status: a systematic review and meta-analysis
It illustrates yet another major error in nutrition research.
There are a few key words which flag a given publication for me as junk. If I see "reward" it signifies that the authors consider that certain foods force re-consumption and that such overeaten food has to be stored as fat. High "reward" overcomes the normal control of metabolism which has existed for millenia. This concept is junk to me.
The second phrase which alerts me is the "caloric density" of food. People really do think that you can trick metabolism in to overconsumption. That people and rats are programmed to (say) eat 100 mouthfuls per day. Put more calories in to each mouthful and you get fat. Another junk concept.
Now we have ultra processed food as the next junk term. Let's play a thought experiment.
Given a saucepan, a cooker, some milk, some rennet and a cheesecloth I think it's quite possible your granny might be able to put together something resembling a casein rich cheese-precursor. Somehow I doubt that she could produce a freeze dried pack of lab grade casein powder, so I think we can consider such a powder to be an ultra processed food component.
Sucrose can be extracted from beets or cane without too much technology but modern sucrose coming out of something resembling the Cantley sugar beet factory in Norfolk might be considered as ultra processed, never mind the smell. So might raw refined corn starch.
If you work at Sigma Aldrich you can take soya bean oil and convert it by an unknown (to me) and undoubtedly very, very clever technique in to tricaprylin, a triplet of octanoic acid molecules attached to a glycerol backbone. I challenge your granny to even extract the soybean oil from the soya beans, let alone convert it to tricaprylin. So I think we can suggest that this interesting oil is more than a little ultra processed.
Mix these components up and supply them to a lab in Japan to feed to some rats. We can merely look at the end weights from this paper:
Effects of Different Fatty Acid Chain Lengths on Fatty Acid Oxidation-Related Protein Expression Levels in Rat Skeletal Muscles
Feed one set of rats on crapinabag, which is about as un-processed as anything fed to a lab-rat ever gets.
Feed the next set on the tricaprylin mix, 60% of calories as this fat with generous casein, sucrose and cornstarch.
A final set can be fed with the same ultra-processed diet as the tricaprylin rats but with the soya bean oil left as soya bean oil.
Which rats get fattest? Okay, soya bean oil it is.
Which rats stay slimmest? Tricky. Whole food crapinabag or ultra-processed synthetic caprylic acid based syntho-food?
Well, I'd hardly be posting this if the ultra-processed food came out badly, now would I?
Here's Table 2
So, "whole food" SC crapinabag fed rats ended up at 239g bodyweight, seriously ultra-processed octanoate based MCFA at 216g, seriously ultra-processed soya bean oil based LCFA at 244g.
It's not the ultra processing. It's the effect on insulin, insulin signalling and the ability to resist insulin signalling when the resistance to that signal is physiologically appropriate. None of which was looked at in the paper, it was about something else.
Of course these are the PUFA levels:
The crapinabag was 11% fat, I think we can assume around just over half of that was linoleic acid, probably with a little alpha linolenic acid thrown in.
The 60% of calories as fat in the ultra processed diets both provided the same ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 but the absolute levels of total PUFA were around 3% for the MCFA fed rats and around 34% PUFA in the LCFA group.
The numbers speak for themselves.
What appears to matter is how capable adipocytes are to say "no" to extra in-coming calories. There are obviously a ton of down stream effects of distended adipocytes. Looking at PUFA combined with insulin shows how they get fat.
I'm the last person to suggest junk made of sucrose and starch are problem free but you have to be very careful of processed vs unprocessed as terminology when applied to foods. It's not likely to be as simple as it looks.
Peter
PS tricaprylin is interesting in its own right as it is weird stuff, but today I'm just looking at processed vs unprocessed. I hope no one would suggest that tricaprylin is an un processed food component.
I think what the ultra-processed designation is grasping for is "food scientifically designed to induce hyperphagia for profit". The mechanism doesn't really matter to the people paying the food scientists working for the corporations, just if their product is mode addictive, and more inductive of overeating in humans. It is possible to do the opposite, food which nobody would overeat, but where's the money in that? It would probably taste like crap.
ReplyDeleteHi, Abu Dhabi,
ReplyDeleteIn the first paper Peter references, the first reference seeks to define "ultra-processed" food:
"Processes and ingredients used to manufacture ultra-processed foods are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf-life, emphatic branding), convenient (ready-to-consume), hyper-palatable products liable to displace all other NOVA food groups, notably unprocessed or minimally processed foods."
Your definition certainly implies something like that.
But one of the uses for tricaprilyn is "as an alternative energy source to glucose for patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease.". Note this is not an FDA-approved use.
Personally, if I were trying to mitigate Alzheimer's by replacing glucose with caprylic acid, I would just drink coconut milk. Still, it's hard to describe tricaprylin as "food scientifically designed to induce hyperphagia for profit" however hyper_processed it might be. That seems to be the irony in Peter's post.
Yes, I tend to feel that the cookie dough made with tricaprylin wouldn't taste that different from the cookie dough made with soya bean oil. But soya bean oil is "rewarding" to 244g while tricaprylin is"non-rewarding" to 216g. We are actually looking at processes which "lose" calories in to adipocytes. Lost calories are replaced by over eating due to hunger, a simple physiological state of inadequate calories in the blood as perceived by the hypothalamus. You can do this with processed or unprocessed foods, it is determined by the number of double bonds in your lipid supply combined with the degree of elevation of insulin levels.
ReplyDeletePeter
Early on in my low carb life when I was researching ketogenic diets, I ran across Axona, which at the time was a new product for Alzheimer's patients marketed as a "medical food". Its main ingredient is tricaprylin. Sounded interesting at the time, but as Bob says, you may be better off just drinking coconut milk.
ReplyDeleteBob and cave, caprylic acid is ketoegenic. Coconut oil is minimally so, though it is not without its benefits. Might be ketogenic if you upper the dose enough I guess.
ReplyDeletehttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32351966/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29955698/
Peter
Thanks for the correction, Peter. While I was actually starting to pursue access to Axona at one point, in an attempt to address a peripheral neuropathy condition, it was very expensive and, of course, not covered by insurance in the US.
ReplyDeleteI seem to have had the misapprehension that all MCT's are similarly ketogenic. They certainly seem to be marketed, as in "MCT oil", that way. Not really surprising things are more complicated than that.
ReplyDeleteThanks for setting me straight. I hope this article, which is more for a general audience, is reasonably accurate.
"The 60% of calories as fat in the ultra processed diets both provided the same ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 but the absolute levels of total PUFA were around 3% for the MCFA fed rats and around 34% PUFA in the LCFA group."
ReplyDeleteBut I'm guessing the 3% PUFA MCFA fed rats ended up with more EPA, DHA or both in serum fractions than the 34% PUFA LCFA fed rats.
George, I agree with you on that, absolutely. In their brain too. And if the ratio had been one part LA to two parts ALA on a 3% PUFA background then possibly even more so... Makes you wonder if rats followed humans to scavenge mammoth fat as we co-evolved!
ReplyDeletePeter