Stop blaming yourself for your expanding waistline. It’s the food supply, expert says

(CNN) — Nutrition scientist Dr. Kevin Hall may not be a household name, but he’s famous. He’s one of the only researchers in the world to conduct not one, but two gold-standard clinical trials on the impact of ultraprocessed foods on the growing obesity crisis.

During Hall’s first clinical trial at the US National Institutes of Health, 20 healthy volunteers consumed 500 additional calories a day when they ate ultraprocessed foods compared with when they ate meals made from whole foods. In the second clinical trial, not yet published, 36 sequestered volunteers ate an additional 1,000 calories a day when on the ultraprocessed food diet, according to a midpoint analysis of the data by Hall.

“These are two of the most important experiments ever done in nutrition, not least because they