A nutrition expert has revealed what happened when he got his university student son to eat nothing but McDonald’s for ten days as a test. Appearing on diet guru Michael Mosley’s BBC podcast this month, Professor Tim Spector said that he wanted to see the impact of eating nothing but ultra processed food would have on someone.
Mr Spector, who didn’t name his son, revealed that he was studying at Aberystwyth University. He explained that the UK was in the grip of a food crisis because people are eating far too much ‘ultra processed’ food.
He told Mr Mosley how his experiment started - and how by the end he looked ‘terrible’. Prof Spector explained: “He hadn’t got much money and he actually liked going to McDonald’s. He said ‘I’d love to eat McDonald’s for 10 days - eating all my meals there sounds perfect.
“His student friends were very jealous. But it didn’t quite work out so well for him. So after four days he wanted to stop. He was feeling rather unwell and wasn’t doing very well academically but did even worse at that time.”
“He came back after four days and said ‘I’d like to give up’ and I said ‘no way’. He did carry on. He actually got less hungry interestingly. It started to get to him. He did put on weight. He looked terrible.”
Scientific experiments were carried out and they discovered also that he’d ‘lost’ 30 -40 per cent of his species in his gut microbes. He added: “It is a great example of what the British public are doing of eating 57 per cent on average of all their calories as ultra processed. It’s nearly 70 per cent in kids and that’s an average so you think many people are eating over 90 per cent of all their calories as ultra processed foods.
“They are knocking out their gut microbes. They are increasing their appetite. They’re lowering their mood. Is it really a surprise we’re such a sick nation.” He explained by making it cheaper, advertising it and having it in schools people were being actively encouraged to eat ultra processed foods.”
Prof Spector added that people didn’t realise that food billed as ‘low calorie’ and healthy were often the worst for being ultra processed: “On an individual level I also think it’s important to realise it’s not the fat, the sugar, the salt, that we thought it was the only thing important, it’s the processing -it’s the fact that these are fake foods. They don’t contain natural ingredients - they contain extracts of natural ingredients put together in a factory, looking like edible food substance and added flavourings.
“In the UK we have the highest intake of ultra processed foods in Europe and it’s not a coincidence we have the highest rates of childhood obesity and adult obesity and all these consequences. It’s been estimated it costs us about £58 billion a year in those associated health costs. “
Michael Mosley explained his tip for spotting what ultra processed food is: “I was once advised to never eat anything you can buy in a petrol station as a simple guide to what processed food is.”
