The inconvenient truth about convenience food

Could cutting ultra-processed food from your diet be as effective as a gastric band surgery? NHS obesity expert Dr Saira Hameed thinks so

Losing weight can be a tough enough battle, and all the conflicting information that’s out there does not help. Almost every patient I see in my specialist NHS weight-loss clinic feels confused.

How have we arrived at a place where eating, which was so straightforward for our grandparents, has become such a minefield?

One reason is that food has become unnecessarily complicated. Instead of eating simple, single ingredient foods, such as chicken, milk and apples, more than half the food we consume is either processed or ultra-processed.

Ultra-processed food (UPF) includes breads containing lots of additives and fillers, ready meals, sugary breakfast cereals, biscuits, crisps and soft drinks.

It can be easy to think of these foods as being bad for us simply because they contain empty calories, but scientists have now shown that UPF is unhealthy beyond its high calorie content. In a game-changing experiment, people ate a UPF diet for two weeks consisting of foods like white-bread sandwiches, diet fizzy drinks and ready meals.

They spent the following two weeks eating unprocessed foods like baked cod, almonds and blueberries. Importantly, the two diets contained the same number of calories.

The researchers found when people followed the UPF diet they overate by 500 calories a day and gained almost two pounds in two weeks. When they switched to the unprocessed diet, they naturally ate less and lost the weight they had gained.

There’s one ingredient that is found in almost all UPF, which drives overeating and weight gain: sugar.

It’s what gives us a hit or “high” through a rush of a brain chemical called dopamine. The part of your brain that produces these pleasure signals – your reward centre – is the same part of your brain that is stimulated by drugs like cocaine. Research suggests that sweet taste might be even more alluring than cocaine, with lab rats choosing to drink sweetened water over a hit of intravenous cocaine when given a choice. It’s no wonder that once we start eating ultra-processed, sugary snacks it’s hard to stop.

UPFs have been deliberately engineered by big food companies to target your brain’s reward centre and keep you coming back for more. It’s almost impossible to exert willpower because these foods are designed to hack your brain’s biology.

In general, our grandparents did not eat foods like this and lived at a healthy weight. UPF, with its complicated labelling, dubious ingredients and sugar highs has made eating confusing, difficult and could well be keeping you at a weight you don’t want to be.

Armed with this new knowledge, many of my patients have been able to lose weight and reclaim their health. In fact, many of them have lost as much weight as those who have gastric band surgery. You can too. Here’s how:

1 Say no to ‘inconvenience’ food

UPF can feel like the easy option because it is sold to us as “convenience” food that saves us time.

Mentally rebrand UPF as “inconvenience” food because eating it results in the inconvenience of weight gain as well as the daily inconvenience of bloating, headaches, lack of energy and low mood. You can get into the habit of recognising an inconvenience food by checking ingredients.

If you do come across a dubious-sounding substance, ask yourself these three questions:

 Can I pronounce this ingredient?

 Do I understand what this ingredient is?

 Is this an ingredient that a home cook would have in their kitchen?

If you answer no to any of these, give that food a miss. Be kind to yourself. You deserve better.

2 Eat the real convenience food

These are whole foods that don’t come with a list of odd ingredients. When you buy broccoli, there are no ingredients. It’s broccoli.

The same applies, for example, to eggs, chicken, milk and strawberries. These are the foods that we were designed to eat – no complex ingredients, no decoding, no tricks.

These foods are the real convenience foods because it is convenient to eat delicious, nourishing food that supports you to lose weight and makes you feel good.

3 Know your ingredients

The best way to get UPF out of your kitchen is to cook your own food from scratch, using ingredients that your body recognises as food.

Sometimes my patients have worried that eating in this way has to be expensive or time-consuming. In fact, many go on to tell me that in just a few minutes, they can cook a spinach and mushroom omelette for far less than the cost of a supermarket pizza. Eating roasted vegetables with feta takes minimal prep and is less expensive than a ready meal.

UPFs are engineered by big food firms to target your brain’s reward centre

4 Free yourself from UPF brain hits

One of the best things about home cooking is it does not exploit your brain’s pleasure rush reward centre. Food tastes good, but you can easily choose to stop eating it. For many of my patients this is a revelation.

For most people, willpower and self-discipline will never be enough to overcome UPF’s brain pleasure rush. Instead, freedom from overeating comes from rejecting ultra-processed foods completely from your diet.

■■Dr Saira Hameed is a consultant endocrinologist with a sub-speciality in obesity medicine at Imperial College London. Her book, The Full Diet (£14.99; Penguin Michael Joseph), is out now