The protein paradox, and a sausage on Uršlja gora

This year it’s impossible to walk into a shop without hitting the protein shelf. Bars, biscuits, puddings, crisps, coffee. A big number on every one, and the word protein.

Then you read one experiment and the whole shelf gets a bit funny.

Twenty people, four weeks, locked doors

In 2019 Kevin Hall of the US National Institutes of Health took twenty people and shut them in a hospital ward for a month. Two weeks of ultra-processed food, two weeks of unprocessed. Nobody chose anything; it was all served.

The trick is that the menus were matched - same calories, same sugar, same salt, same fibre. On paper, the same food.

On the ultra-processed one they ate about 500 calories a day more.

Nobody told them to eat more. They ate more.

Why? Because it slides

The field is still arguing, but the prime suspect isn’t the processing - it’s texture and speed. Soft, dense, salty, no resistance. You’ve eaten it before your body gets round to mentioning that it’s had enough.

And now the good part. For a bar to hold twenty grams of protein, taste sweet and not fall apart in your hand, it needs isolate, sweetener, emulsifier and binder. It’s built to be eaten in ninety seconds - that’s the point of it.

The very thing that makes food look healthier pushes it straight into the category you’re avoiding.

A sausage at 1,700 metres

At the end of July we sat down in the hut on Uršlja gora. Željac and I had soup, sausage and bread; Ines is vegetarian so she had her own. We sat there for an hour.

Sausage is meat, salt and smoke. By the strict definition - processed food. Two of them cost seven euros, which I said at the time was insane.

But it was home-made, and so good that out of that whole day - and it was a full day, with a church, viewpoints and a cross on the summit - it’s one of the things I remember best.

I’m not claiming sausage is healthy. I have no data saying so and I’m not going to invent it.

I’m claiming only this: the experiments don’t measure whether food is morally sound, they measure how easy it is to eat too much of it. And an hour at a table at seventeen hundred metres has no trouble there.

The bar I’d have eaten walking, and wouldn’t remember it.

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Sources: Hall et al., Cell Metabolism, 2019 · Science, “Ultraprocessed foods and obesity”, 2026

This is a piece about research, not advice. The sample in the experiment was small - twenty people. If you’re changing your diet because of a medical condition, ask a doctor who knows you.