The US Government Paid People $5,000 to Eat Junk Food for a Month

A 20-year-old Florida college student named Sam Srisatta lived the dream life—if ever so briefly.

For a month, he ate rich, fatty, ultra-processed foods to find out what happens to our bodies when we jam them full of bad stuff like chips, sugary cereals, and delicious chicken nuggets. Srisatta is the guinea pig. The mad scientist at the core is a researcher named Kevin Hall from the National Institutes of Health.

Hall wants to know why ultra-processed foods might cause people to eat more and gain weight. Srisatta, along with three dozen other participants, were paid $5,000 to devote a month of their life to science—which in this case meant eating a ton of junk food.

Eating Junk Food for Science—A Dream Job or a Total Nightmare?

To be fair, for as much of a dream is that sounds like, there are elements of that sound a little nightmarish.

In the name of science, Srisatta had to get his blood drawn often, and for long stretches so they could collect up to 14 vials at a time. For one 24-hour period every week he had to live inside of a metabolic chamber, an airtight room wherein he was slapped with a bunch of sensors that monitored how his body processed food.

He was occasionally allowed to go outside but he was closely monitored to make sure he wasn’t snacking outside of the studies parameters. The study’s early findings suggest that when foods are hyper-palatable and calorie-dense, participants tend to consume more, leading to weight gain.

However, when those characteristics were altered, consumption dropped, even with ultra-processed foods. The full results of the study are still a ways away, but so far it seems to indicate that high flavor high fat ultra-processed foods might lead to overeating.

More than 70 percent of the US food supply is made up of ultra-processed foods, which is defined as a food product that is packed with refined ingredients and additives. It should be noted that just because something is overprocessed does not automatically mean it’s bad for you. There are yogurts out there that are considered ultra-processed but are still nutritionally valuable, for instance.

While some of these additives are tossed in to make them more craveable to keep you coming back for more while jamming your system with an overabundance of calories, others are there just to make sure that the food remains shelf-stable.

The United States is a gigantic country with a lot of people to feed, and companies want to make sure their products are going in your stomach and not the garbage if, say, a loaf of bread expires two days after it hits a grocery store shelf. All that is to say that there are practical and impractical reasons foods are ultra-processed.

It’s not some giant evil conspiracy. It’s capitalism mixing with the realities of the food supply chain.