The Only Important Diet Tip
“Fast food is popular because it’s convenient, it’s cheap, and it tastes good. But the real cost of eating fast food never appears on the menu. ”
Key Takeaways
You’ve had enough. You’re tired of empty promises, hopeless “hacks”, and failed fitness forays.
The most important diet tip - limit ultra-processed foods.
If followed, you will be more likely to:
Consume fewer calories
Maintain a healthy weight
Increase intake of nutrient-dense foods
Reduce risk of chronic disease
Engineers and marketers of ultra-processed food make it extremely tough to stick to a diet that consists primarily of minimally-processed foods.
The key to reducing your intake of ultra-processed foods is simple but not easy: decrease your exposure to them.
Full Story
You’ve had enough. You’re tired of empty promises, hopeless “hacks”, and failed fitness forays. You’ve been told that all you need to do to achieve your goals is:
Cut carbs- keto is the key!
Abolish animal products - vegan is vital!
Shake sugar - sugar-free is superior!
You’ve heard it all and you know it doesn’t work. But you’re still maybe, kinda looking for a secret.
I understand. You have a job, friends, and Netflix to watch. You don’t have the extra time or energy to learn the ins and outs of human physiology and behavior change.
While long term success requires:
Acquiring background knowledge
Implementing systems
Establishing sustainable habits
…Short-term fixes promise to be:
Simple
Easy
Give you results right NOW
Because they offer simplification, quick health hits will always be the more enticing option. Unfortunately for you and your 30 Day Celery Juice Detox, the majority of these short term tricks don’t work. Most one-line health mantras won’t help you lose weight, gain muscle, or improve your health. That being said, there is one tip that - regardless of your goal - will do wonders for your health and longevity.
The Most Important Diet Tip - Limit Ultra-Processed Foods
I don’t blame you. You were never meant to turn down the donuts, pass on the pizza, or skip the soda. In fact, we are biologically hardwired to crave these foods and take advantage (i.e. shove them down our gullet) every time the opportunity is presented!
For most of human history, foods that tickled our taste buds to such an extent were extremely rare and important. Before, if we were able to find and consume calorie dense foods often, it meant the ability to prevent starving to death. That’s a really great thing! More time to hunt, reproduce, and pass on our genes.
It’s not a mystery why we are designed to appreciate highly palatable foods. Their consumption was truly the difference between life and death for the majority of time humans have roamed this Earth. But now, this desire to consume calorie dense treats is killing us. In the modern food environment of abundance, we must betray our instincts and instead focus our efforts against consuming too much. Gee thanks, Evolution!
4 Reasons
“Limit Ultra-Processed Foods” is the most important diet tip because, if followed, you will be more likely to:
Consume fewer calories
Maintain a healthy weight
Increase intake of nutrient-dense foods
Reduce risk of chronic disease
Allow me to explain.
Quick Caveat
Ultra-Processed vs. Processed vs. Unprocessed Foods
There is a significant difference between processed food and ultra-processed foods.
Unprocessed - Foods that come directly from the source. Spinach from your garden, a deer that you hunted, etc.
Processed- Foods that resemble their unprocessed state as found in nature. Frozen blueberries, meat or fish from the market, etc.
Ultra-processed- high amounts of added sugar, food coloring, and other additives. Fruit Loops, Mountain Dew, bon bons, etc.
Nearly every food item, from boxes of blackberries to cans of black beans, is processed (1).
These types of foods will make up the majority of your healthy diet. Ultra-processed foods, on the other hand, have been engineered and doctored to such an extent that they don’t resemble any food available in nature. As Micheal Pollan would say about ultra-processed foods,
“Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”
It’s these foods that cause us to eat more, move less, and develop chronic diseases.
Consume Fewer Calories
When was the last time you felt sick to your stomach from eating too many carrots? Unless you’re actually a bunch of rabbits stacked up under a trench coat impersonating a human, I’d bet your answer is “never”. It is significantly easier to over-consume ultra-processed foods than it is minimally processed, whole foods. For instance, take:
Plain boiled potatoes vs. pepperoni pizza
Cauliflower vs. Cheese Puffs
Apples vs. apple pie
These comparisons speak for themselves. Whole foods have built-in barriers, such as fiber and overall volume of food, that make it much easier to stop eating them when you feel full. Ultra-processed foods, on the other hand, are hyper-palatable, don’t take long to chew, and don’t make you feel full nearly as quickly compared to whole foods.
This very well designed and controlled study in 20 people showed that an ultra-processed diet resulted in the consumption of 500 more calories each day compared to an unprocessed diet (3). It doesn’t make sense to extrapolate over the long term based on the results because the study duration was only 14 days, but for fun, I’m going to anyway. If you were to consume 500 extra calories per day for an entire year, the additional intake would amount to an eye-popping 26,000 calories.
To be clear, the study does not show that eating ultra-processed foods compared to eating whole foods will lead to an extra 26,000 calories consumed per year. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting thought experiment about the appetite inducing effects and the high caloric density of a diet that consists primarily of ultra-processed foods.
Unsurprisingly, other researchers, based on observational data, have drawn a similar conclusion: reducing your consumption of highly processed foods appears to be an effective way to consume fewer calories (4, 5, 6).
2. Maintain a Healthy Weight
I’ll go ahead and state the obvious - If reducing your intake of ultra-processed foods decreases your daily caloric intake, you’ll be significantly more likely to maintain a healthy weight. Let me break it down.
By sticking to mostly whole foods, you will naturally consume fewer calories and feel more satisfied. Do you know what you get when you add:
Consuming fewer calories +
Feeling full faster +
Feeling more satisfied?
You got it! You get an easier time maintaining a healthy body weight.
You know that study that found that an ultra-processed diet led to more calories consumed per day? Unsurprisingly, they also found that the group consuming the ultra-processed gained significantly more weight than the unprocessed group (7).
Other studies have found a relationship between ultra-processed food intake and obesity. This review found that the majority of studies showed ultra-processed food intake to be associated with obesity and metabolic syndrome as well as higher levels of fasting glucose and blood pressure (8). And this 2020 study from the UK found that those who consumed the highest amounts of ultra-processed foods were significantly more likely to be obese (9).
If you’re filling up on the bad, you have no room for the good! Not only is high consumption of ultra-processed foods more likely to make you obese, it results in less desire, money, and time for the consumption of nutrient-dense foods.
3. Increase Intake of Nutrient-Dense Foods
“I can’t cut out ultra-processed foods, I’ll starve!” I’m not a mind reader, but if your diet consists mainly of frozen waffles, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizza you may be feeling fearful of transitioning to a life of salads, egg whites, and green juice.
If you feel this way, you would likely benefit immensely from increasing your intake of healthy foods
It’s not all salads, egg whites, and green juice! There are thousands of delicious minimally processed foods and recipes. You have options!
Instead of focusing on the foods you’d consume less often by following the “Limit Ultra-Processed Foods” diet tip, shift your focus to all of the foods you can enjoy more often. By consuming fewer ultra-processed foods, you create significantly more room in your daily caloric budget for foods that add value to your health rather than detract from it.
For instance, the following food groups are still on the table (hopefully figuratively and literally):
Fruits (including avocados)
Vegetables (including potatoes)
Meat
Fish
Nuts + Seeds
Legumes
Minimally Processed Grains (oats, rice, quinoa, etc.)
Oils (stick primarily to olive, avocado, and coconut)
Each category of real food offers individual health-promoting effects - eating more of them is beneficial for various aspects of your health and wellbeing! As you have heard me say ad nauseam, focusing on addition (eating more “healthy” food) rather than restriction (“John says I can’t eat pizza anymore! That guy can take a hike”) will always be the more enjoyable and sustainable approach.
4. Reduce risk of chronic disease
There is an association between intake of ultra-processed foods and a host of chronic diseases. Your risk of:
Being overweight
Being obese
Metabolic disease
Hypertension
Depression
Cancer
All Cause Mortality
…have all been shown to increase with higher intakes of ultra-processed foods (10-13)
It’s important to remember that just because a relationship exists with ultra-processed food intake and rates of chronic disease does not mean that it is causative. That being said, it is not unreasonable to speculate that a high intake of hyper-palatable foods may lead to overconsumption of calories and, subsequently, a higher bodyweight and increased risk of chronic disease.
To be clear, there is no inherent harm caused by any single instance of eating an ultra-processed food. It is when your diet consists entirely of ultra-processed foods, for weeks, months, and years at a time that health problems begin to arise.
But John, What About “If It Fits Your Macros?”
If It Fits Your Macros (IIFYM, for short) is a popular diet philosophy that prioritizes total calorie intake and macronutrient ratios (protein, fat, carbs) over food composition (i.e. a diet of highly processed foods vs. minimally processed whole foods).
IIFYM is a double-edged sword. For some, it is a wonderful ideology that allows them to be flexible with including treats into a primarily nutrient dense diet. For others, it serves as an excuse to consider a diet exclusively of Pop Tarts (the poster IIFYM food) and protein shakes to be a healthy diet, as long as they hit their calorie and macronutrient targets.
Based on personality type and food behaviors (i.e. “I can stop after just one cookie” vs. “one cookie means the entire sleeve!”), IIFYM can be either a useful tool or an impediment to living a healthy life. In general, whether or not one follows the IIFYM principles, consuming lower amounts of ultra-processed foods is always a good idea.
Wrap Up - Us Against Them
The modern food environment of ultra-processed food abundance incites many battles:
You vs. the cookies, potato chips, pizza etc. (they have a lot of soldiers on their side)
You vs. your hunger cues and cravings
You vs. social situations saturated with highly palatable sweets and treats
You vs. the engineers and marketers of the ultra-processed foods
This last battle, between us and the food engineers and marketers, might just be the most interesting.
The engineers of ultra-processed foods take advantage of millions of years of calorie scarcity and manipulate it to make us consume as much as possible. Then, the marketers tug on your needs and fears to make you believe that consuming their product will fulfill your every desire. They both make it extremely tough to stick to a diet that consists primarily of minimally-processed foods.
The food corporations that make your favorite chips or cupcakes care about money, not about the overall health of our species. The more you buy - and eat - the more money they make.
The key to reducing your intake of ultra-processed foods is simple but not easy: decrease your exposure to them. We all know that once we pop we can’t stop, and now we know that it’s not even our fault. The solution that applies to every super delicious, heavily-processed junk food is to not pop in the first place! By reducing the frequency of occasions you indulge in ultra-processed foods, you will find it much easier to establish and maintain healthy habits.
What? You were expecting an ad for a magic supplement or a link to buy my ebook? None of that nonsense here at Solokas Focus. Just an effective, 4 word tip that will help you attain and maintain optimal health.
If you’d like assistance setting up your food environment for success, I’m always here to help!
