What if I told you there are only four bad foods? (Just four.)
What if I told you these four foods are the root of the obesity epidemic, causing people to overeat and get fat on a massive scale?
What if I told you that no human population is adapted to these foods, so they probably aren’t healthy for anyone to eat in large amounts—but that they make up a staggering proportion of our total food intake?
I’m going to tell you. After a systematic analysis of nutrition, anthropology, physiology, obesity research, metabolism, and the US food supply, without further adieu, I give you The Fat Four:
These are the only four foods that are unequivocally “bad,” “unhealthy,” and “fattening.”
Just these four.
Added sugar, added oil, white flour, and processed meat.
The Fat Four.
If a food isn’t made with one of these four, it’s probably fine.
On the other hand, a food is “junk food” precisely because it has one or more of these four. A food is “fattening” precisely because it has one or more of these four.
Every. Single. Time.
Pizza? White flour and added sugar (the dough and the sauce).
Candy bars? Added sugar (and usually white flour and vegetable oil, too).
Chicken nuggets? Processed meat and white flour.
Cake? White flour and added sugar (and usually vegetable oil).
French fries? Vegetable oil. (Added oil.)
Potato chips? Vegetable oil. (Added oil.)
Any chip in a crinkly bag? Vegetable oil.
Bacon? Processed meat.
Pie? White flour and added sugar (and usually oil).
Muffins? White flour and added sugar (and usually oil).
Donuts? White flour and added sugar (and usually oil).
Slim Jims? Processed meat.
Chicken wings? Vegetable oil and white flour (and thus: processed meat).
Ice cream? Added sugar (and usually vegetable oil).
All of these foods are fattening because of the Fat Four.
There is nothing else holding them together.
But it’s hardly just obvious junk foods like these. Every day, due to misconceptions and deceptive marketing, untold millions of people around the world eat foods that they believe are basically “not fattening,” “healthy,” or even “slimming” —but that are actually infested with The Fat Four.
Let’s see some examples.
Virtually every single breakfast cereal? Added sugar.
(This includes cereals marketed as healthy, like Kashi GOLEAN Crunch!, which is high in added sugar.155)
Any non-whole-grain bread? White flour.
Most “100% Whole-Wheat” breads? Added sugar and often added oil.156
Almost any “bar”? Added sugar.
(Protein bars are candy bars with added protein.)
Granola? Added sugar (and oil, in Nature Valley’s case157).
Most yogurt? Added sugar.
Any non-whole-grain pasta? White flour.
Most pasta sauce? Added sugar.
Most nuts? Vegetable oil.
Any salad dressing? Vegetable oil.
In other words, if you think you’re not eating the Fat Four on a regular basis, you probably need to think again. Unless you make a specific effort not to eat the Fat Four, you almost inevitably will—because they’re everywhere.
The Fat Four have slithered onto most of the shelves in your health-food store, almost every shelf of your supermarket, and every single shelf of your convenience mart.
Ubiquitous almost doesn’t do them justice. Any food with a long ingredients list will almost always have one of the Fat Four. In fact, the Fat Four are such a fixture on ingredients lists that the easiest way to avoid them is simply to avoid foods that have ingredients lists.
Let’s see what makes the Fat Four so bad.
Barren Wastelands
The Fat Four are highly processed, and devoid of nutrients. Added sugar and refined vegetable oil are barren nutritional wastelands with nutrient tables so full of zeros that it makes you wonder if you’re reading the vitamin and mineral content of a food or a piece of cardboard.158,159
White flour is marginally better, but it’s still nutritionally bankrupt compared to whole-wheat flour.160
Every time you eat one of these ingredients, you’re depriving your body of nutrients that it was evolved to have.
We’re not evolved to eat nutritionally crippled foods.
No One Is Adapted
While 10,000-odd years was enough time for many populations to adapt to grains and dairy, the Fat Four have only been widely eaten for about 200 years.
This wasn’t nearly enough time for people to adapt.
There is no evolutionary precedent for these foods.
Added sugar has only been available to most people since the early 1800s.161 White flour wasn’t widely available until about 1880, when roller mills were introduced.162 Refined vegetable oil wasn’t eaten on a large scale until the early 20th century.163
(Canola oil was invented—yes, invented—in the 1970s.164)
We are completely unadapted to these foods.
But these foods are the majority of what we currently eat.165
See the problem?
The Art of Processed Food
Not only are we not adapted to the Fat Four themselves, but we’re also completely unadapted to the way they’re processed into food. Added sugar, added oil, and white flour are the primary colors of the processed-food palette from which food corporations paint their tantalizing products.
These three ingredients are added to foods scientifically, in precise amounts derived from trial and error, food-testing panels, and countless prototypes to produce optimal “bliss points” that keeps us coming back again and again.166
And again.
For example, before Dr. Pepper unleashed their “Cherry Vanilla” flavor in 2004, they had tested 61 prototypes and conducted 3,904 taste tests. They carefully documented these taste tests and fed the data through advanced statistical software that helped them calibrate the exact amounts of sugar and flavorings to add.167
After all that, the new flavor wasn’t even terribly successful.
(That’s how stiff the competition is.)
We’re not adapted to this sort of food engineering. Like addictive drugs, processed foods are designed to hit our pleasure centers in unnatural ways.
And they are less filling per calorie.168
This makes them fattening.
Easy to Break Down
It takes energy—calories—to digest food. The amount of calories it takes ranges from 0% to 30% of the total calories in the food itself, depending on the food’s allotment of fat, carbs, and protein (protein takes the most calories to digest).169
Added sugar, white flour, and vegetable oil are so heavily refined that they’re relatively easy for our bodies to digest.
This isn’t good. It means we burn significantly fewer calories digesting them. A 2010 study found that people burned 47% fewer calories (73 calories vs. 137 calories) digesting a meal of processed food versus a meal of whole food.170 (The meals were matched for calories, and close in macros.)
Those differences add up.
Processed Meat
Unlike the other members of the Fat Four, processed meat isn’t usually an ingredient, but a type of food—like chicken nuggets, bologna, salami, bacon, General Tso’s chicken, etc.
Processed meat is bad because it has astronomical amounts of salt. And it’s bad because it’s often significantly lower in protein than unprocessed meat, which makes it less filling171 (and more fattening). And it’s bad because it’s often doused in white flour and sugar and fried in oil to make something like General Tso’s chicken or chicken tenders with barbecue sauce.
Processed meat is bad because it has nitrite, which can produce nitrosamines in the stomach, which might cause cancer.172,173,174
Processed meat is bad because it’s consistently associated with terrible health outcomes.175,176,177,178,179
Most of the Time
Cutting the Fat Four from your regular diet is probably the best nutritional decision you can ever make—for your weight, health, and life. It’s far more powerful than simply eating more of some “superfood” plant.
Focus on cutting the Fat Four from your regular diet. This means the diet you eat most of the time—most days of the week. You don’t have to be some kind of puritan to do this.
You can still eat anything you want, sometimes.
In practice, “sometimes” means once or even twice a week.
Our metabolisms seem to be regulated by what we eat most of the time. You just have to make sure your regular, most-days diet is good. (That it doesn’t contain the Fat Four.)
Eating whole foods on work days and letting loose a bit on the weekend can be a helpful guide.
If your regular diet doesn’t contain the Fat Four, you might be surprised with what you can get away with.
Take-Home
A good diet is more defined by what you don’t eat than what you do eat. Eliminating the Fat Four from your regular diet is the foundation of a healthy diet and a healthier body weight.
The Fat Four have transformed our diets, created a new constellation of diseases, and made hundreds of millions of people fat.
No one is adapted to eating the Fat Four in large amounts.
Get them in your head, and out of your regular diet.
The Fat Four don’t usually go by these names, or show up in red on ingredients lists. Instead, they’re deceitful, full of serpent wiles, often hiding in places we don’t expect—like healthy-looking food.
Let’s get into the gory details of the Fat Four.
References
155. “Kashi® GOLEAN Crunch Cereal,” Ingredients. Kashi. https://www.kashi.com/our-foods/cold-cereal/kashi-golean-crunch-cereal
156. “Whole Grains: 100% Whole Wheat,” Orowheat. https://www.oroweat.com/products/sliced-breads/whole-grains/100-whole- wheat?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_dafuvyp3AIVAtRkCh2TyAHWEAAYASAAEgLScv
157. “Oats ’N Honey Granola Crunch,” Ingredients. Nature Valley. https://www.naturevalley.com/product/granola-oats-n- honey-granola-crunch/
158. “Sugars, granulated [sucrose].” Self Nutrition Data. https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/sweets/5592/2
159. “Oil, Soybean, Salad or Cooking,” Self Nutrition Data https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fats-and-oils/507/2
160. “Nutrients in Wheat Flour: Whole, Refined and Enriched,” Whole Grains Council. https://wholegrainscouncil.org/whole-grains-101/what-is-a-whole-grain
161. Cordain, Loren. “Implications of Plio-Pleistocene Hominin Diets for Modern Humans.” In Evolution of the Human Diet. The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable, edited by P.S. Ungar, 363-83. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 2007
162. Ibid.
163. Ibid.
164. “The History of Canola,” Canola Council of Canada. https://www.canolacouncil.org/oil-and-meal/what-is-canola/the-history-of-canola/
165. Poti et al., “Is the Degree of Food Processing and Convenience Linked with the Nutritional Quality of Foods Purchased by US Households?” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2015): doi: 10.3945/ajcn.114.100925
166. Moss, Michael. Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. New York: Random House, 2014. Kindle File, Location 508.
167. Ibid., Location 804-815, 991.
168. Holt et al., “A Satiety Index of Common Foods,” European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 49, no. 9 (1996): 675-690.
169. Leidy et al., “The Role of Protein in Weight Loss and Maintenance,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 101, no. 6 (2015): 1320S-1329S.
170. Barr, S., and Wright, J., “Postprandial Energy Expenditure in Whole-Food and Processed-Food Meals: Implications for Daily Energy Expenditure,” Food & Nutrition Research 54 (2010): doi: 10.3402/fnr.v54i0.5144.
171. Paddon-Jones et al., “Protein, Weight Management, and Satiety,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 87, no.5 (2008): 1158S-1561S.
172. Oostindjer et al., “The Role of Red and Processed Meat in Colorectal Cancer Development: A Perspective,” Meat Science 97, no. 4 (2014): 583-96.
173. Santarelli et al., “Processed Meat and Colorectal Cancer: A Review of Epidemiologic and Experimental Evidence,” Nutrition and Cancer 60, no. 2 (2008): 131-44.
174. Larsson et al., “Processed Meat Consumption, Dietary Nitrosamines and Stomach Cancer Risk in a Cohort of Swedish Women,” International Journal of Cancer 119, no. 4 (2006): 915-9.
175. Rohrmann et al., “Meat Consumption and Mortality—Results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition,” BMC Medicine 11, no. 63 (2013): doi:10.1186/1741-7015-11-63
176. Schwingshackl et al., “Food Groups and Risk of All-Cause Mortality: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Prospective Studies,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2017): ajcn153148.
177. Larsson, S., and Orsini, Nicola, “Red Meat and Processed Meat Consumption and All-Cause Mortality: A Meta-Analysis,” American Journal of Epidemiology 179, no. 3 (2014): 282-89.
178. Micha et al., “Red and Processed Meat Consumption and Risk of Incident Coronary Heart Disease, Stroke, and Diabetes Mellitus: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Circulation 121, no. 21 (2010): 2271-2283.
179. Chan et al., “Red and Processed Meat and Colorectal Cancer Incidence: Meta-Analysis of Prospective Studies,” PLOS One 6, no. 6 (2011): e20456.
What if I told you there are only four bad foods? (Just four.)
What if I told you these four foods are the root of the obesity epidemic, causing people to overeat and get fat on a massive scale?
What if I told you that no human population is adapted to these foods, so they probably aren’t healthy for anyone to eat in large amounts—but that they make up a staggering proportion of our total food intake?
I’m going to tell you. After a systematic analysis of nutrition, anthropology, physiology, obesity research, metabolism, and the US food supply, without further adieu, I give you The Fat Four:
These are the only four foods that are unequivocally “bad,” “unhealthy,” and “fattening.”
Just these four.
Added sugar, added oil, white flour, and processed meat.
The Fat Four.
If a food isn’t made with one of these four, it’s probably fine.
On the other hand, a food is “junk food” precisely because it has one or more of these four. A food is “fattening” precisely because it has one or more of these four.
Every. Single. Time.
Pizza? White flour and added sugar (the dough and the sauce).
Candy bars? Added sugar (and usually white flour and vegetable oil, too).
Chicken nuggets? Processed meat and white flour.
Cake? White flour and added sugar (and usually vegetable oil).
French fries? Vegetable oil. (Added oil.)
Potato chips? Vegetable oil. (Added oil.)
Any chip in a crinkly bag? Vegetable oil.
Bacon? Processed meat.
Pie? White flour and added sugar (and usually oil).
Muffins? White flour and added sugar (and usually oil).
Donuts? White flour and added sugar (and usually oil).
Slim Jims? Processed meat.
Chicken wings? Vegetable oil and white flour (and thus: processed meat).
Ice cream? Added sugar (and usually vegetable oil).
All of these foods are fattening because of the Fat Four.
There is nothing else holding them together.
But it’s hardly just obvious junk foods like these. Every day, due to misconceptions and deceptive marketing, untold millions of people around the world eat foods that they believe are basically “not fattening,” “healthy,” or even “slimming” —but that are actually infested with The Fat Four.
Let’s see some examples.
Virtually every single breakfast cereal? Added sugar.
(This includes cereals marketed as healthy, like Kashi GOLEAN Crunch!, which is high in added sugar.155)
Any non-whole-grain bread? White flour.
Most “100% Whole-Wheat” breads? Added sugar and often added oil.156
Almost any “bar”? Added sugar.
(Protein bars are candy bars with added protein.)
Granola? Added sugar (and oil, in Nature Valley’s case157).
Most yogurt? Added sugar.
Any non-whole-grain pasta? White flour.
Most pasta sauce? Added sugar.
Most nuts? Vegetable oil.
Any salad dressing? Vegetable oil.
In other words, if you think you’re not eating the Fat Four on a regular basis, you probably need to think again. Unless you make a specific effort not to eat the Fat Four, you almost inevitably will—because they’re everywhere.
The Fat Four have slithered onto most of the shelves in your health-food store, almost every shelf of your supermarket, and every single shelf of your convenience mart.
Ubiquitous almost doesn’t do them justice. Any food with a long ingredients list will almost always have one of the Fat Four. In fact, the Fat Four are such a fixture on ingredients lists that the easiest way to avoid them is simply to avoid foods that have ingredients lists.
Let’s see what makes the Fat Four so bad.
Barren Wastelands
The Fat Four are highly processed, and devoid of nutrients. Added sugar and refined vegetable oil are barren nutritional wastelands with nutrient tables so full of zeros that it makes you wonder if you’re reading the vitamin and mineral content of a food or a piece of cardboard.158,159
White flour is marginally better, but it’s still nutritionally bankrupt compared to whole-wheat flour.160
Every time you eat one of these ingredients, you’re depriving your body of nutrients that it was evolved to have.
We’re not evolved to eat nutritionally crippled foods.
No One Is Adapted
While 10,000-odd years was enough time for many populations to adapt to grains and dairy, the Fat Four have only been widely eaten for about 200 years.
This wasn’t nearly enough time for people to adapt.
There is no evolutionary precedent for these foods.
Added sugar has only been available to most people since the early 1800s.161 White flour wasn’t widely available until about 1880, when roller mills were introduced.162 Refined vegetable oil wasn’t eaten on a large scale until the early 20th century.163
(Canola oil was invented—yes, invented—in the 1970s.164)
We are completely unadapted to these foods.
But these foods are the majority of what we currently eat.165
See the problem?
The Art of Processed Food
Not only are we not adapted to the Fat Four themselves, but we’re also completely unadapted to the way they’re processed into food. Added sugar, added oil, and white flour are the primary colors of the processed-food palette from which food corporations paint their tantalizing products.
These three ingredients are added to foods scientifically, in precise amounts derived from trial and error, food-testing panels, and countless prototypes to produce optimal “bliss points” that keeps us coming back again and again.166
And again.
For example, before Dr. Pepper unleashed their “Cherry Vanilla” flavor in 2004, they had tested 61 prototypes and conducted 3,904 taste tests. They carefully documented these taste tests and fed the data through advanced statistical software that helped them calibrate the exact amounts of sugar and flavorings to add.167
After all that, the new flavor wasn’t even terribly successful.
(That’s how stiff the competition is.)
We’re not adapted to this sort of food engineering. Like addictive drugs, processed foods are designed to hit our pleasure centers in unnatural ways.
And they are less filling per calorie.168
This makes them fattening.
Easy to Break Down
It takes energy—calories—to digest food. The amount of calories it takes ranges from 0% to 30% of the total calories in the food itself, depending on the food’s allotment of fat, carbs, and protein (protein takes the most calories to digest).169
Added sugar, white flour, and vegetable oil are so heavily refined that they’re relatively easy for our bodies to digest.
This isn’t good. It means we burn significantly fewer calories digesting them. A 2010 study found that people burned 47% fewer calories (73 calories vs. 137 calories) digesting a meal of processed food versus a meal of whole food.170 (The meals were matched for calories, and close in macros.)
Those differences add up.
Processed Meat
Unlike the other members of the Fat Four, processed meat isn’t usually an ingredient, but a type of food—like chicken nuggets, bologna, salami, bacon, General Tso’s chicken, etc.
Processed meat is bad because it has astronomical amounts of salt. And it’s bad because it’s often significantly lower in protein than unprocessed meat, which makes it less filling171 (and more fattening). And it’s bad because it’s often doused in white flour and sugar and fried in oil to make something like General Tso’s chicken or chicken tenders with barbecue sauce.
Processed meat is bad because it has nitrite, which can produce nitrosamines in the stomach, which might cause cancer.172,173,174
Processed meat is bad because it’s consistently associated with terrible health outcomes.175,176,177,178,179
Most of the Time
Cutting the Fat Four from your regular diet is probably the best nutritional decision you can ever make—for your weight, health, and life. It’s far more powerful than simply eating more of some “superfood” plant.
Focus on cutting the Fat Four from your regular diet. This means the diet you eat most of the time—most days of the week. You don’t have to be some kind of puritan to do this.
You can still eat anything you want, sometimes.
In practice, “sometimes” means once or even twice a week.
Our metabolisms seem to be regulated by what we eat most of the time. You just have to make sure your regular, most-days diet is good. (That it doesn’t contain the Fat Four.)
Eating whole foods on work days and letting loose a bit on the weekend can be a helpful guide.
If your regular diet doesn’t contain the Fat Four, you might be surprised with what you can get away with.
Take-Home
A good diet is more defined by what you don’t eat than what you do eat. Eliminating the Fat Four from your regular diet is the foundation of a healthy diet and a healthier body weight.
The Fat Four have transformed our diets, created a new constellation of diseases, and made hundreds of millions of people fat.
No one is adapted to eating the Fat Four in large amounts.
Get them in your head, and out of your regular diet.
The Fat Four don’t usually go by these names, or show up in red on ingredients lists. Instead, they’re deceitful, full of serpent wiles, often hiding in places we don’t expect—like healthy-looking food.
Let’s get into the gory details of the Fat Four.
References
155. “Kashi® GOLEAN Crunch Cereal,” Ingredients. Kashi. https://www.kashi.com/our-foods/cold-cereal/kashi-golean-crunch-cereal
156. “Whole Grains: 100% Whole Wheat,” Orowheat. https://www.oroweat.com/products/sliced-breads/whole-grains/100-whole- wheat?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_dafuvyp3AIVAtRkCh2TyAHWEAAYASAAEgLScv
157. “Oats ’N Honey Granola Crunch,” Ingredients. Nature Valley. https://www.naturevalley.com/product/granola-oats-n- honey-granola-crunch/
158. “Sugars, granulated [sucrose].” Self Nutrition Data. https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/sweets/5592/2
159. “Oil, Soybean, Salad or Cooking,” Self Nutrition Data https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fats-and-oils/507/2
160. “Nutrients in Wheat Flour: Whole, Refined and Enriched,” Whole Grains Council. https://wholegrainscouncil.org/whole-grains-101/what-is-a-whole-grain
161. Cordain, Loren. “Implications of Plio-Pleistocene Hominin Diets for Modern Humans.” In Evolution of the Human Diet. The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable, edited by P.S. Ungar, 363-83. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 2007
162. Ibid.
163. Ibid.
164. “The History of Canola,” Canola Council of Canada. https://www.canolacouncil.org/oil-and-meal/what-is-canola/the-history-of-canola/
165. Poti et al., “Is the Degree of Food Processing and Convenience Linked with the Nutritional Quality of Foods Purchased by US Households?” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2015): doi: 10.3945/ajcn.114.100925
166. Moss, Michael. Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. New York: Random House, 2014. Kindle File, Location 508.
167. Ibid., Location 804-815, 991.
168. Holt et al., “A Satiety Index of Common Foods,” European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 49, no. 9 (1996): 675-690.
169. Leidy et al., “The Role of Protein in Weight Loss and Maintenance,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 101, no. 6 (2015): 1320S-1329S.
170. Barr, S., and Wright, J., “Postprandial Energy Expenditure in Whole-Food and Processed-Food Meals: Implications for Daily Energy Expenditure,” Food & Nutrition Research 54 (2010): doi: 10.3402/fnr.v54i0.5144.
171. Paddon-Jones et al., “Protein, Weight Management, and Satiety,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 87, no.5 (2008): 1158S-1561S.
172. Oostindjer et al., “The Role of Red and Processed Meat in Colorectal Cancer Development: A Perspective,” Meat Science 97, no. 4 (2014): 583-96.
173. Santarelli et al., “Processed Meat and Colorectal Cancer: A Review of Epidemiologic and Experimental Evidence,” Nutrition and Cancer 60, no. 2 (2008): 131-44.
174. Larsson et al., “Processed Meat Consumption, Dietary Nitrosamines and Stomach Cancer Risk in a Cohort of Swedish Women,” International Journal of Cancer 119, no. 4 (2006): 915-9.
175. Rohrmann et al., “Meat Consumption and Mortality—Results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition,” BMC Medicine 11, no. 63 (2013): doi:10.1186/1741-7015-11-63
176. Schwingshackl et al., “Food Groups and Risk of All-Cause Mortality: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Prospective Studies,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2017): ajcn153148.
177. Larsson, S., and Orsini, Nicola, “Red Meat and Processed Meat Consumption and All-Cause Mortality: A Meta-Analysis,” American Journal of Epidemiology 179, no. 3 (2014): 282-89.
178. Micha et al., “Red and Processed Meat Consumption and Risk of Incident Coronary Heart Disease, Stroke, and Diabetes Mellitus: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Circulation 121, no. 21 (2010): 2271-2283.
179. Chan et al., “Red and Processed Meat and Colorectal Cancer Incidence: Meta-Analysis of Prospective Studies,” PLOS One 6, no. 6 (2011): e20456.