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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 about ultra-processed foods.
It’s nine o’clock 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 “Saturday morning breakfasts of old,” 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 expected to conclude by the end of 2025. For a month each, researchers They 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 your health? Are they a major factor in weight gain and obesity? And why is it so easy to eat? a lot?
If researchers can answer those questions, they say, there could possibly be tactics to make ultra-processed foods healthier.
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