Supported by
By Alice Callahan
Photographs via Lexey Swall
Alice Callahan spent two days at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and interviewed more than a dozen researchers on ultra-processed foods.
It’s nine in the morning on a Friday in March and Ernest Jones III is hungry.
From a hospital bed at a National Institutes of Health facility in Maryland, she tasted her food tray: Honey-walnut Cheerios with fiber-fortified total milk, a blueberry bun wrapped in plastic and margarine.
“Simple, old school,” one of those “old-time Saturday morning breakfasts,” said Mr. Jones, 38, who is reading to be a pastor.
He is halfway through his 28-day stay at the NIH, and Mr. Jones is one of 36 other people participating in a nutritional trial that is expected to conclude by the end of 2025. For a month each, researchers will test participants’ blood, track their weight and body fat, measure the calories they burn, and feed them 3 carefully designed meals a day.
The subjects don’t know it, but their task is to answer some of the most pressing questions in nutrition: Are ultra-processed foods harmful to health?Are they a major factor in weight gain and obesity?And why is it so easy to eat?
If researchers can answer those questions, they say, there could possibly be tactics to make ultra-processed foods healthier.
We are recovering the content of the article.
Allow JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience as we determine access. If you’re in Reader mode, log out and log in to your Times account or subscribe to the full Times.
Thank you for your patience as we determine access.
Already a subscriber? Sign in.
Do you want all the Times? Subscribe.
Advert