Kevin Hall

Again, they're not being advertised to them.

They're not having to buy or purchase the food or make the food or anything like that.

Just something about the meals that we gave to them led them to consume more than 500 calories a day on average than when the same people were exposed to the food environment that didn't contain these foods.

When they were in the ultra-processed food environments, they were gaining weight and gaining body fat.

They didn't know about these measurements.

They were wearing loose-fitting scrubs.

They couldn't tell if their clothes were getting tighter or looser.

And when they went to the ultra-processed food environment, they spontaneously lost weight and lost body fat.

And so it did seem to be even over and above these broader environmental consequences of our food environment and how it's changed.

There seemed to be something about the foods themselves that we were presenting to these folks that led them to over consume calories and gain weight.

Yeah, great question.

So you're pointing out something that's really fundamental that I think a lot of folks still have this mythology about that they control everything that they eat and that this is just a matter of willpower.

The fact of the matter isn't something that we've learned through almost a century of work now is that food intake is a biologically controlled phenomenon and that we actually try to regulate our body weight through this symphony of internal signals

that somehow integrate with environmental cues in ways to basically generate a weight at which we are regulating i know you had randy seeley and as a guest on your podcast before he's been working on what is it that determines where that body weight is defended

And what are those internal signals and how do they act in the brain in order to give rise to this?

And I think one of the fundamental questions that we still don't quite have answers to is what is it about ultra processed foods?

What is it about the calorie density of the foods?

What is it about how the nutrients and flavor pairings that might be disrupted in ultra processed foods with certain additives, how that might affect the gut brain signaling that is one of the pathways of this biological symphony of signals that are integrated in our brains.

to control our food intake over long time periods?

How does that interact with hormones like leptin, which are being secreted by fat cells over long periods of time to give our brains the index of how much stored energy do we have on board to be able to kind of do things like have babies or go for long sort of, you know, adventures out into the wilderness to explore new areas of the world?