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Why the industry wanted it
Companies wanted to tie exercise to weight loss so they could keep selling sugary ultra-processed foods and drinks. They could then blame childhood obesity on a lack of playgrounds. It also explains why Coke and Pepsi are always at the Olympics, associating themselves with sport.
Where the money went
They gave hundreds of millions to physiology, sports, and nutrition departments to research that area. It was hard to get anyone to study how sugary drinks cause weight gain or other problems, and government money for nutrition has been abysmally poor.
What it shaped
The first controlled trial of ultra-processed food came only about three years ago, though the food has been around for 30 or 40 years. That doesn't necessarily distort research in an evil way. It points researchers toward the areas the lobby wants them in, and away from sugars and even artificial sweeteners.
How does funding shape nutrition study results?
In a 2007 paper in PLoS Medicine, Lenard Lesser and colleagues reviewed 206 studies of soft drinks, juice, and milk. Studies funded entirely by industry were four to eight times more likely to reach conclusions favorable to the sponsor than studies with no industry funding.
Why is exercise easier to study than diet?
Exercise can be supervised in a lab, with duration and intensity measured directly. Diet trials need someone to control or record everything a person eats, and self-reports are prone to error. Studies using doubly labeled water have found that people commonly underreport how much they eat. Controlled feeding trials of the kind that test ultra-processed food require housing volunteers for weeks, which is expensive.
Why did the first ultra-processed food trial take so long?
Carlos Monteiro proposed the NOVA classification, which defines ultra-processed food, only in 2009, and the term did not enter mainstream nutrition research until the 2010s. Kevin Hall's trial at the US National Institutes of Health, published in Cell Metabolism in 2019, is widely cited as the first controlled feeding trial of ultra-processed food. It had 20 adults eat ultra-processed or unprocessed diets for two weeks each.
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