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Randomized trial · measured other health measures

Trial in 20 adults checking whether diet order mattered for ultra-processed food results

Sciarrillo and colleagues · The American journal of clinical nutrition · 2024

Original title: Diet order significantly affects energy balance for diets varying in macronutrients but not ultraprocessing in crossover studies without a washout period.

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What the study found

No direction

In the ultra-processed vs minimally processed study, the order of the two diets made no clear difference to energy intake, body weight or body fat. Order did matter in a separate low-carb vs low-fat study.

The study at a glance

Type of study
Randomized trial
Who or what was studied
20 people · 20 adults in the ultra-processed food crossover study (plus 20 in a low-carb vs low-fat study)
What was tested
Did the order of diets (minimally processed then ultra-processed, or the reverse) change results, 2 weeks each with no break
What it measured
Several kinds of outcomes
How long
4 weeks
Trial registration
NCT03878108, NCT03407053
Who has a stake
No disclosure in PubMed
No disclosure in PubMed.
Journal
The American journal of clinical nutrition, 2024
Source
PubMed record 39163976. This page is based on the abstract only.

How much this study counts

  • ✓Randomized: people were put into groups by chance, so the groups start out alike.
  • –Small: 20 people. Small trials can miss real effects or find chance ones.
  • –Short: 4 weeks. Longer-term effects are unknown.
  • •Measured several kinds of outcomes.
  • •The PubMed record has no conflict-of-interest statement.
  • •Summarized from the PubMed abstract only. The full paper may hold details the abstract leaves out.

✓ Strength– Limit• Note

These points come from fixed rules about the type of study, its size and length, what it measured, and who has a stake. Every study on Digestery gets the same rules.

Where this study sits

Each dot is one on-topic paper on this question. Steps near the top answer the question more directly.

↑ Stronger evidence

  1. Trials in people: death and chronic disease

    2

    1 no difference, 1 harm

  2. Trials in people: other measures

    3

    1 mixed, 1 no direction, 1 harm

    ↑ This study is the ringed dot

  3. Trials in people: lab tests or safety

    1

    1 mixed

  4. Population studies

    17

    1 mixed, 16 harm

  5. Blood levels and genes

    0

    None among the papers we read.

↓ Weaker evidence

  • Points to benefit
  • Mixed
  • No difference
  • No direction
  • Points to harm

How it fits with the other research

The short answer to “Are ultra-processed foods bad for your health?”

Linked to worse health; cause not proven.

Confidence: low. Based on 38 on-topic papers.

Read the full answer
  • Open item for a person: Hall trial NCT03407053 appears in Hall 2019, Sciarrillo 2024 and 37276937 (secondary analyses); it is one trial, not three.
  • Open item for a person: Sciarrillo 2024 kept relevant with direction na: it tests diet order, not whether ultra-processed food harms. Consider marking off-topic.

Other papers on the same step

See all 38 studies on this question

How this page was made

Label

First read of the abstract
Claude Sonnet
Independent second read
Claude Haiku
Differences settled
The reviewer corrected 4 fields after reading the abstract. Claude Opus 5.5.
Headline
Claude Sonnet, from the checked study record. A script checked its numbers and wording.
Numbers
Checked against the abstract by a script
“How much this study counts”
Fixed rules, the same for every study
Source check by a person
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