How common a problem is it to be excessively overweight in the United States?

Common enough that more than 2 in 5 adults and about 1 in 5 children and adolescents “have obesity.” Common enough that there’s no need for me to divulge the source of that information.

Those statistics, you see, have been cited so frequently they’re now considered general knowledge. That means they can be shared without attribution and quotation marks.

So why do you still see a pair of them above?

Because I’m betting you’re no different from me. That even though you’ve read those two statistics many times before, you’re still expecting the words that follow to be “are obese” and not “have obesity.”

The second phrase, though, has been around for a while. Its use is an intentional attempt by the medical world to reinforce what it now believes: that obesity’s a medical condition and can result for many reasons other than a lack of willpower.

Condition or not, I’m also betting you don’t ever want to “have obesity,” or if you do have it, you’d do just about anything to rid yourself of it.

Which means what I have to write about right now is a diet study published Nature Medicine nearly a month ago that seems to have uncovered a sort of obesity antidote. Yet the good news gets even better.

The obese individuals in the study who were given the antidote were also given instructions to eat as much of it as they want — and they still lost a life-altering amount of weight. According to the researchers, a 300-pound man willing to adhere to the diet the study participants followed for 8 weeks over the course of a full year could lose 40 pounds.

So why an almost-one-month delay before writing about such a positive finding? Because of a proverb common enough that it too needs no attribution or quotation marks.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Because I had written about the health detriments to consuming ultra-processed foods so many times before, I feared you’d pooh-pooh new information about it, and for about three weeks or so I couldn’t come up with an intro that could counteract that. That’s why you’ve been reminded of the nation’s obesity problem at this article’s start.

To lay the foundation for why this new study merits your attention whether you have a weight problem or not.

It began with researchers giving 55 British adults who averaged 43 years of age, 198 pounds, and were considered obese by their body mass index a battery of tests to ascertain their health and eating habits. From that it was determined that the 55 had been getting about 67 percent of their total daily calories from ultra-processed foods, which is about 14 percent higher than the average American aged 19 and older, according to the CDC.

The 55 were then randomly placed in one of two groups, and both groups received all their food from the researchers. They were intentionally given more than enough every day, and every bit of it adhered to the guidelines found in the UK Eatwell Guide.

Both groups were instructed to eat as much as they liked.

Only Group 1’s food options, referred to in the published study as the MPF diet, were minimally processed foods, and Group 2’s, called the UPF diet, consisted of some of those but also ultra-processed foods considered healthy enough to be included in the aforementioned guide.

After 8 weeks, the participants took a 4-week break and more tests. Then the groups switched diets for another 8-week period of study.

What both sessions revealed is that — despite being told to eat to their heart’s content — the participants consumed on average 289.9 fewer calories than they consumed prior to the initial testing when following the MPF diet. For the men in the study that led to a 2-percent weight loss that, if held for a period of one year, leads to the already mentioned 40-pound weight loss for a 300 pounder.

When participants adhered to the UPF diet, they consumed 119.5 fewer calories per day and experienced an overall 1-percent total weight loss. That should lead to a 2-pound rather than a 4.5-pound weight loss over 8 weeks.

While you could argue the lesser loss is worth the convenience and good taste of found in healthy ultra-processed foods, the fact of the matter is not all weight loss is the same.

The weight loss from the UPF diet created “no significant reductions in adiposity” when compared to the baseline testing. On the MPF diet, however, total fat mass, visceral fat, and body fat percentage were all “significantly lower” when compared similarly.

Moreover, the questionnaire used throughout the study revealed it was easier to resist food cravings on the MPF diet than the UPF diet.