We are on a steady diet of studies with a seemingly singular aim: to persuade us ultra-processed foods are really, really bad for us. We get the point. But the nourishment for our brains from this unbalanced research diet seems deficient. The latest is an RCT that shows us oatmeal made from scratch is a healthier breakfast than chocolate milk and candy.

Not for a minute would we dispute this finding. Oatmeal is our breakfast of choice. We make it from scratch with steel-cut oats almost every day.

But we are less certain about other things that this new publication of a randomized crossover trial tells us. It compares three weeks of an ultra-processed food diet to three weeks of minimally-processed foods. The study enrolled 43 persons and divided them into two groups. One group of 21 received adequate calories on each diet. The other 22 received an excess of calories as compared to their estimated energy expenditure.

Exploratory Secondary Outcomes

All of the outcomes reported in this study are “a subset of exploratory secondary outcomes defined in the protocol registered on ClinicalTrials.gov with identifier NCT05368194.” The primary purpose the study that generated all the data for this analysis was to look at a measure (DNA methylation) of epigenetic changes in sperm from these four diets. We cannot find a publication of those primary outcome results.

So what we have here is a selective analysis of a large array secondary outcomes. It is chock-full of interesting observations.

Great Clickbait and Sweeping Conclusions

Anahad O’Connor seized on the clickbait potential of this study for the Washington Post. He writes:

“A small but rigorous new study found that eating ultra-processed foods caused otherwise healthy men to quickly gain body fat and led to reductions in their sex hormones. The men also seemed to have accumulated higher levels of a chemical found in plastics and food packaging.”

He got one thing right. It was a small study. But about the description as “rigorous” we are not so sure. Yes, this was likely a careful study for its primary purpose – examining epigenetic changes in sperm. But the outcome of that experiment is not reported in this paper or anywhere else.

Is it a rigorous study of ultra-processed foods? A look at two diets in the study leaves us with doubts. The study compares an ultra-processed breakfast of chocolate milk and candy to a minimally-processed breakfast of oat and chia seed porridge.

Scanning the food in these two diets makes us think that this comparison tilts toward extreme. We see a super-healthy diet versus one filled with food that any competent parent would recognize as junk. Somehow that does not feel like a rigorous study to support sweeping conclusions about ultra-processed foods.

It’s more of a study of bad food choices.

Click here for the study and here for O’Connor’s reporting.

Naturally Flavored Pumpkin Spice Creme Cookies, photograph by Ted Kyle / ConscienHealth