IF YOU feel like your diet has completely gone to pot during lockdown, you probably aren鈥檛 alone. Stress and boredom are known risk factors for overeating, and there is emerging evidence that many people, in the UK at least, are struggling to resist the comforts of food. Medical authorities are already worried about a parallel pandemic of mental illness. Maybe they should add weight gain to the list.
An unhealthy diet is often blamed on poor choices and a lack of willpower. These can play a part, but new research on appetite tells us that they are far from the whole story.
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Appetite is conventionally viewed as a single, powerful drive to eat. But it isn鈥檛 so simple. Some animals, including humans, appear to actually have five separate appetites that work together to calibrate an individual鈥檚 food intake.
That set-up works in natural food environments, but many people stopped living in such an environment decades ago. 鈥淯ltraprocessed foods鈥� made from cheap fats and carbs 鈥� which are pulverised, mixed with additives and then cooked up into finished products 鈥� now make up more than half of the typical Western diet and are the quintessential lockdown foods: ready meals, savoury snacks and ice cream.
鈥淯ltraprocessed foods are quintessential lockdown fare: ready meals, savoury snacks and ice cream鈥�
These foods have long been blamed for diet-related diseases, and they are guilty as charged. Yet not for the reasons we assume. Ultraprocessed foods tend to be high in fats and sugar, but while they are low in protein, they tend to taste as if they are high in protein. This subtlety has crashed our five-appetite system and is why our instinct to eat the correct amount of protein may now be leading us to gorge on junk.
It turns out that understanding all your different appetites is crucial. Whether you choose to act on the knowledge now or after the lockdown is, of course, up to you.
