Lack of protein, processed foods the cause of obesity, academic says

Processed foods and our sedentary lifestyles are to blame for the obesity epidemic, a University of Sydney professor has said in an article published in The Sydney Morning Herald.

“The obesity problem is best understood not as the result of eating too much of a single nutrient, but because of the way highly processed foods have skewed the proportions of nutrients in our diets,” Professor Stephen Simpson wrote in the SMH article. Professor Simpson is academic director of the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney.

“Our diet is out of balance with our physiology, and the consequences are dire. We are losing the language of food and delegating our nutrition to the processed food industries, whose primary motivation is not our better health.”

The decreasing quantity of protein in processed foods is driving us to eat more, Professor Simpson says, as our bodies tell us to eat more to ensure adequate protein intake.

Processed food is cheaper to produce when protein is replaced with carbohydrates and fats, Professor Simpson says. “Food manufacturers have a financial incentive to replace protein with cheaper forms of calories,” he wrote.

While Professor Simpson was critical of processed food, he did acknowledge that sedentary lifestyles also play a role in the increasing incidence of obesity in the developed world.

The full article is available here.