Inside the government study trying to understand the health effects of ultraprocessed foods

Sam Srisatta, a 20-year-old Florida college student, spent a month living inside a government hospital here last fall, playing video games and allowing scientists to document every morsel of food that went into his mouth.From big bowls of salad to platters of meatballs and spaghetti sauce, Srisatta noshed his way through a nutrition study aimed at understanding the health effects of ultraprocessed foods, the controversial fare that now accounts for more than 70% of the U.S.food supply.

He allowed The Associated Press to tag along for a day.“Today my lunch was chicken nuggets, some chips, some ketchup,” said Srisatta, one of three dozen participants paid $5,000 each to devote 28 days of their lives to science.“It was pretty fulfilling.”Examining exactly what made those nuggets so satisfying is the goal of the widely anticipated research led by National Institutes of Health nutrition researcher Kevin Hall.“What we hope to do is figure out what those mechanisms are so that we can better understand that process,” Hall said.Hall’s study relies on 24/7 measurements of patients, rather than self-reported data, to investigate whether ultraprocessed foods cause people to eat more calories and gain weight, potentially leading to obesity and other well-documented health problems.

And, if they do, how?At a time when Health Secretary Robert F.Kennedy Jr.

has made nutrition and chronic disease a key priority, the answers can’t come soon enough.Kennedy has repeatedly targeted processed foods as the primary culprit behind a range of diseases that afflict Americans, particularly children.He vowed in a Senate confirmation hearing to focus on removing such foods from school lunches for kids because they’re “making them sick.”Ultraprocessed foods have exploded in the U.S.

and elsewhere in recent decades, just as rates of obesity and other diet-related diseases also rise.The foods, which are often high in fat, sodium and sugar, are typically cheap, mass-p...