Strick to the real Stuff

People try all sorts of strategies to lose weight-extreme diets, grueling workouts, and every supplement promising quick results. But a new study in Nature Medicine shows that cooking mini- mally processed meals from scratch beats relying on ultra-processed, ready-made foods. Researchers split 55 adults into two groups and put them on nutritionally matched diets. One group started with eight weeks of minimally processed foods like vegetables, oats, butter, and meat, then switched to ultra- processed foods after a four-week washout. The other group followed the same diets in reverse. Both groups lost weight, but partici- pants on the minimally processed diet lost twice as much as when on the ultra-processed plan. In other words, stick to the real stuff.