Hyperpalatable food

Tim, tell us about the fourth and final study.

The final study to discuss is from, uh, Tera Fanzino's group in the US that have been studying this concept of hyperpalatable foods.

And a hyperpalatable food is a food that's been deliberately produced, uh, to override our, um, fullness signals and at the same time excite our reward centers.

So changing that normal balance that we have between sort of, uh, fullness and reward.

And what this group tested was whether foods that contained this magic combination of the salts and the fats in these exact proportions, which have been worked out by these brilliant scientists, uh, actually made a difference in real life.

And they told 29 participants to basically take pictures of their food for four days using an app a bit like Zoe's so that it would capture the foods, and then they then analyzed those foods and saw how many of them were what we call hyperpalatable by this definition.

And it turned out that those, uh, people that were having hyperpalatable foods were, uh, overeating, uh, by about, uh, 300 calories, um, per day, more than the people who were having the non-hyperpalatable foods.

And it didn't matter how hungry or not they were at the beginning.

So where do we go from here? When it comes to kids' nutrition, ultra-processed foods are always a hot topic.

But Jennifer would prefer we focus on something a little different, hyperpalatable foods.

And that distinction matters.

So let's get into it.

But we also want them to be in their body, living their best life, able to enjoy food, able to really engage with all these things.

And when we have both of those, we can have a healthy kid.

And so that is always what I like to say before we start talking about, quote, hyperpalatable foods.

Processed food is a trendy term.

And if we are restricting, that makes the hyperpalatability of the foods even worse, because now we are in a starved state.

So the nutrition that these hyperpalatable foods are promising seems even more so, and like more necessary, even though they don't actually give us those things, than normally if we were to be in a fed state.

This reminds me of like when I was pregnant with my son.

I [laughs] I had started to learn how to like dissect what it was that I was craving, because I was so...