Food Policy Expert Challenged Himself to Eat Ultra-Processed Foods for a Month- Ended Up Quitting in 5 Days
The advent of modernity has impacted the food industry more than ever. Food policy expert Gavin Wren took up the challenge to survive by only eating ultra-processed foods (UPF) for a month. As exciting as it sounds, he failed miserably after only five days of the experiment and with drastic implications. Wren is popular for his bizarre diet challenges on social media. Speaking of his experience with all of the diets he has taken up until now, the UK-based expert flagged the all-UPF diet as the worst while the vegan and Mediterranean diets were marked as his favorites. Switching from his usually whole-foods diet regime, Wren recalled having “great fun” with the UPF diet initially. It usually included chips, fast food, cake, and other fatty foods.
He told Business Insider, “A tube of Pringles is just addictive. So I'd just eat half of it, put it on the side, say, 'Right, I'll leave that for another time,' and then half an hour later I'm there finishing the tube." Wren shared that he was already over-eating within the first few days of the challenge. Moreover, his diet regime was loaded with “excessive” amounts of calories and alarming levels of fat and sugar.
By the third day, Wren remembered feeling a “hangover” without even consuming any alcohol the day before. Negative feelings piled up as he felt lazy due to his low energy levels. Wren described, "After a few days, my mood, my energy, and my mental health were just going down and down and down, and it was a real struggle.” Finally, the diet challenge started affecting his daily lifestyle. He could not concentrate on work or perform his usual exercises at the gym. “My brain was really struggling to do normal things…I went to the gym, and I was just dead, just like no energy or anything. I felt terrible," the expert, who vouches for food policy reforms, said. The next few days were challenging as Wren struggled to cope with usual activities and ended up quitting the experiment for good.
As a food policy expert, Wren performs these challenges to stumble on the diet regime best suited for his health and in the run, has tried out the most popular diets for a month, including the Paleo diet. But the UPF diet regime, Wren realized, was not for him. However, his findings of the UPF regime aligned with many of the research studies previously conducted. A 2019 study found that people leaning in on the UPF diet tend to overeat. People with UPF diets ate nearly 500 kilocalories more a day in comparison to whole food diets, per the study published in the journal Cell Metabolism. In addition, the sugar and saturated fats content was greater than the processed and whole-food meals combined.
While it was not determined how UPF diets result in overeating, another study found a link between the diets and poor mental health. Consuming more fruits and green vegetables had a significant impact on better mental well-being, per a 2023 study published in the journal National Library of Medicine. Whereas, researchers at the University of Paris determined that UPF diets predisposed a person to higher risks of depression, in 2019. JAMA Neurology published findings of another project that showed that consuming these ultra-processed foods related to declined brain function and higher cognitive decline.