Dr Michael Mosley's diet change to lose weight quickly and reduce high blood pressure
Dr Michael Mosley has said that cutting one thing from your diet can lead to quick weight loss - and also remove a substantial amount of unhealthy additives such as salt. Speaking on his BBC Podcast Just One Thing the healthy eating expert interviewed a nutrition scientist about research which has been done into the impact of processed food and what happens if you switch to a more home-cooked diet.
He said a study of over 11,000 people found that those who ate home-cooked meals more than five times a week were 28% less likely to be overweight than those who cook from scratch three times a week or less. Speaking on the show doctor Emily Leming, a nutrition scientist at King’s College London said ultra-processed foods tend to really be defined by three things. They tend to be packaged foods, foods that you would find on the shelves in the supermarket, they tend to have a long list of ingredients and also they tend to have ingredients that we don’t necessarily recognize in the kitchen such as emulsifiers and additives.
Whole foods are fruits and vegetables or yoghurt that haven’t necessarily had lots of additives. She said: “A key thing to remember about these arch processed foods is that they’re really made and engineered to taste delicious. And we know that the things that make foods taste good, it’s higher sugar and higher fat and those aren’t necessarily bad things in themselves. But they do tend to mean that it’s much easier for us to go over our energy needs. And that’s when it becomes a problem.”
She told Dr Mosley that a landmark study gave 20 people two different diets - one was given ultra-processed food and the other a minimally processed diet with lots of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, beans and legumes. She explained: “And what they found was that when they were on the ultra-processed diet, they ended up eating 500 calories more a day than when they were on the mainly processed diet. So in this actual study, they weren’t able to show why this was happening. But there have been two studies since and what they’ve really highlighted is that actually it’s that we’re eating these foods much quicker and we’re not necessarily perhaps getting this signal back to our brains that we feel full.
“Then I saw at the end of the study that the people on that processed food diet gained 1 kg. And the people when they were on the minimally processed diet, they lost a kilo.”
She added that with salt which is bad for blood pressure, most people are eating double the recommended limits and added: “And 70% of the salt we eat isn’t actually from sprinkling salt on food is actually from foods like arch processed foods that have this salt that’s already hidden inside of it. “
Dr Mosley said: “Eating home-cooked meals could reduce the amount of calories you consume and improve your mental health. Not to mention having a significant impact on your gut microbiome.”