A health expert says there is 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 health and nutrition and is a regular presenter on TV, explaining the benefits of a good diet and healthy lifetsyle.
The doctor is credited with popularising the 5:2 diet and has written a number of books on food, health, nutrition, lifestyle and diet.
Writing in the Sunday Times Mosley, whose latest book is The Fast 800 Keto, had advised there is one type of food you should ditch if you want to shrink your waist.
He says carbohydrates like potato and rice, as well as sugar, and fats are not the problem – because average weights have been going up while consumption of those foods is going down.
He said: “In my view the reason so many people struggle with weight is that we are eating too much ultra-processed food, the sort of brightly packaged, aggressively marketed products that fill our supermarket shelves.”
He quotes a 2009 study from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil which looked at the impact of ultra-processed foods, such as shop-bought nuggets, pizzas, biscuits and cereals.
Mosley said by 2014 57% of our calories were coming from ultra-processed food adding: “There have been a number of studies that suggest eating more ultra-processed food increases your risk of blood pressure, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some cancers.”
In 2020 Dr Mosley switched to a diet higher in ultra-processed food for a documentary.
He said: “I soon started sleeping badly, snoring loudly, and I felt far more lethargic than normal. Within a few days my blood sugar levels started to rise, alarmingly.
“I was more anxious than normal, and that contributed to my need for more comfort food. After two weeks I had put on 3kg, my waist had expanded by about 3cm and my blood sugar levels had gone into the diabetic range. My blood pressure had also soared to 140/90.”
Dr Chris van Tulleken did a similar experiment for the BBC with similar results, which also showed his brain was rewired by the food to become ‘addicted’.
Dr Mosley says the foods are designed to make you want to eat more of them – and are low in protein.
Protein-light food makes you want to binge more, he said.
Dr Mosley says there is a quick way to see if the food you are buying is ultra processed.
He said: “Read the label. If there are more than five ingredients, and those include numbers or have names you don’t recognise, the food is likely to be ultra-processed.”
