One health expert says there’s one type of food you need to avoid if you want to lose weight and drastically improve your health.
dr Michael Mosley has decades of experience in the health and nutrition fields and is a regular TV presenter on the benefits of good nutrition and a healthy lifestyle.
The doctor is credited with popularizing the 5:2 diet and has written a number of books on food, health, nutrition, lifestyle and nutrition.
writing in Sunday times Mosley, whose latest book is The Fast 800 Keto, had advised that if you want to shrink your waistline, there’s one type of food you should throw away.
He says carbohydrates like potatoes and rice, as well as sugar and fats, aren’t the problem — because average weight has gone up while consumption of these foods has gone down.
He said: “In my view, so many people struggle with weight because we eat too much ultra-processed foods, the kind of colorfully packaged, aggressively marketed products that fill our supermarket shelves.”
He cites a 2009 study by the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil that looked at the effects of ultra-processed foods like store-bought nuggets, pizzas, cookies and cereals.
Mosley said that by 2014, 57% of our calories came from ultra-processed foods, adding, “There are a number of studies that suggest eating more ultra-processed foods increases the risk of blood pressure, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some cancers increased .”
In 2020, Dr. Mosley for a documentary on a diet that includes more ultra-processed foods.
He said: “I soon started sleeping poorly, snoring loudly and feeling a lot more lethargic than usual. Within a few days my blood sugar levels started to rise alarmingly.
“I was more anxious than usual and that contributed to my needing more comfort food. After two weeks I had gained 3 kg, my waist had grown by about 3 cm and my blood sugar had entered the diabetic range. My blood pressure had also gone up to 140/90.”
dr Chris van Tulleken ran a similar experiment for the BBC with similar results, which also showed that food rewired his brain to become “addicted”.
dr Mosley says the foods are designed to make you want to eat more of them — and they’re low in protein.
Eating light protein makes you want more, he said.
dr Mosley says there’s a quick way to see if the food you’re buying is ultra-processed.
He said: “Read the label. If there are more than five ingredients and they have numbers or names you don’t recognize, the food is probably ultra-processed.”