UK doctor switches to 80% ULTRA-processed food diet for 30 days 🍔🍕🍟 BBC

i'm going to switch from my normal healthy diet it's pretty healthy i eat about 20 ultra processed food to an 80 ultra processed food diet and that is the same diet sounds extreme but it's the same diet that around one in five people in the uk eat so i want to find out if changing just doing nothing but changing the proportion of ultra processed food in my diet has any effect on my health my experiment will be run by one of britain's top obesity experts to make sure the results will be scientifically valid my first

meal is a national favorite fried chicken [Music] it's the end of the first day i don't want any anyone to interrupt my oh my god it was really good how about hot it's crunchy on the outside and salty quite peppery the chicken's moist what makes it ultra processed is the chemicals that are added like monosodium glutamate sodium phosphates and spice extracts to name just a few is it good it's like tickling some weird bit of my brain it's like crisps this is my crisps oh yeah exactly it would be impossible for me to not eat

i've eaten three of these [Music] the reason i ate these lasagnas the whole time is because they're tasty they are really quick i've got to admire the science that goes into this sort of stringy stringy cheesy bits i know i'm going to finish this and immediately want another one this is all in the name of science [Music] my observation is simply this is delicious and if i was served this in some amazing fancy restaurant as a dessert that i'd never experienced before i think it was a bit of sort of culinary genius you get the

bowl of dry cereal you pour on the milk the milk goes brown the texture changes it's all snapping and crackling you know an amazing bit of food engineering [Music] the rules of my experiment are that i eat whenever i feel hungry which is what i always do but previously that meant eating three meals a day with the occasional snack now i find myself craving food much more often [Music] i'm entering week two of my changed diet now what i'm having lyra is a stuffed crust meat feast pizza encourage her sorry i never would have thought

of this but when you read this very long list of ingredients it just makes you think much more deeply about like what am i tasting and what are they trying to get me to taste and how does this all feel in my mouth this is definitely what the scientific paper is called sorry hyper-polishable so it's just really really really eatable delicious food it's really hard to stop eating part of that is because it's so soft it's like it's got a crunchy bit hmm what you don't have to do hard i'm not getting tired you are

a poon baby i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna pick you up so you can poo in comfort sorry i'm having the opposite problem from baby sasha i don't know what this is about this is just a video of me not having a poo but needing a poo i'm definitely gonna get piles [Music] and i'm also taking my diet on holiday [Music] i've gone camping i spent the whole day eating motorway junk and went to bed in my head also in the camper van with the brothers-in-law and the brother i wonder if i'm gonna get physically

used to it so i don't wake up every morning feeling hungover because of the salt and the sugar and that and the fact i haven't done a poo in 48 hours [Music] it's one of my five a day so it's healthy and it's actually got it's actually green on the traffic light system for saturation sugars so this has all the appearances of a healthy meal some foods that look pretty healthy can still count as ultra processed foods because they're industrially produced and have multiple chemicals in the ingredients list our fiber source of protein gluten free

i'm three weeks into my 80 ultra processed food diet to measure how it affects my body and there's only seven days to go time for some pudding flavored with delicious potassium sorbate you can really taste the potassium sorbate i'm not enjoying it but i can't stop it's not like married it's um four a.m i've had to come to the kitchen i can't sleep i've got a heartburn i've got a headache i feel like eating more food it's nice having a cat when you're up at night well let's start with how you were when we started

so four weeks ago magnificent what would you say a standard man in early middle age yeah that is you after i have the increasing man boob and also your stomach is looks quite yeah your weight went up by 6.5 kilograms in four weeks that's quite a lot isn't it and your body mass index went up by two points which took you into the overweight range and then the body fat went up by three kilos if the weight gain continued at that rate for six months i would gain six stone next are my hormone levels i'm

particularly interested in the ones that tell my body if i'm hungry or full have they changed and what we found is that the hunger hormone in your blood went up by 30 percent once you've been on the diet so that's why i felt hungrier yes and what about the hormone that makes me feel full we saw a decrease in the fullness hormone so you've got a double whammy you've got an increase in the hunger hormone and a decrease in the hormone that's telling your brain that you've eaten finally professor batam wants to know if eating

a high ultra processed food diet has affected my brain we've repeated the scan from a month ago to compare the results blue is how areas of your brain talk to each other before the diet and the red are the new functional connections in your brain after four weeks on the diet so everything that's red is a new connection between parts of your brain that wasn't there before comparing these scans has revealed that my diet has linked up the reward centers of my brain with the areas that drive repetitive automatic behavior so eating ultra processed food

has become something my brain simply tells me to do without me even wanting it shockingly this is something you might see in a person with addiction if you just took people and scanned them at four week intervals you don't normally see a bunch of connections change that that does seem to be a real result yeah this is terrifying isn't it i mean i really really didn't expect this when i came in this morning no surprise i was surprised by the changes in the mri scan really surprised with just four weeks my concern is that children's

brains are still developing and they're much more malleable than mine which means the changes are likely to be even greater there are lots of children in this country who are on my diet from a very early age do we have any idea what that's doing to them no but the other thing is chris i'm a mum and when i look at what i've been feeding my children then actually they were having quite a lot of ultra-processed food really even as a obesity expert it's made me far more aware about what i'm actually giving my children

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