Nutrition Scientist: This is why you're confused about ultra processed food | Prof. Sarah Berry

**Jonathan** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
Today's supermarkets are full of processed foods. We know beyond doubt now that they play a major part in the epidemic of poor health and obesity across the world. But while science now shows us the risks of food processing, in many cases, simply labeling all processed food as bad can be misleading or even wrong. In fact, processing can in some cases make things healthier, reducing blood sugar spikes or improving micronutrient absorption just as examples. And let's not forget, making things more affordable and longer lasting too. The truth is, there's a deeper, often unseen science behind food processing that significantly impacts our bodies. Today we welcome back Professor Sarah Berry, a world leader in large scale human nutritional studies, a professor in nutrition at King's College London and chief scientist at ZOE. Sarah has dedicated decades studying the intricate ways that food processing affects on metabolism and our overall well-being. By the end of this episode, you'll understand how processing makes some foods unhealthy, so you can make better choices for your long-term health. So Sarah, I thought we'd try and do something different for this podcast episode, because I know that you have been doing this talk about processed food to lots of different nutrition science conferences around the world. And I actually just thought it would be really amazing to let our listeners actually hear that, and hopefully we can talk a bit about it. And I will ask some questions when I don't understand it and really bring, you know, literally the cutting edge of science around processed food to anyone who's listening today.

**Sarah Berry** (2:04)
Love that. I love doing something different. And I also love doubling up on things. I've done all of this work that I've been presenting to the scientific community. And the fact that I can present it here to you is really exciting.

**Jonathan** (2:15)
So what was the talk called?

**Sarah Berry** (2:17)
So it was called Processed Food, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

**Jonathan** (2:21)
Tell me about it.

**Sarah Berry** (2:22)
It was very much bringing together all of the science that I've been involved in around looking at the health effects of how food processing impacts our health. But taking a new perspective and moving away from this kind of demonisation that we've been using around ultra processed food and actually understanding how different processes involved in processing food can impact our health differently. That not all ultra processed food is bad for us. Now, if you look in the newspapers, you see on social media, on the TV, every day there's a new headline saying ultra processed food, it's going to kill us, it's giving us Alzheimer's, it's giving us cancer, it's giving us every disease going. You see a headline every day, don't you? It's all down to ultra processed food. It's going to end mankind. And these are really scary headlines. Yes, we have a problem. Yes, our food landscape is broken. Yes, we're eating so many heavily processed foods that are so bad for us. But demonizing all ultra processed food is just wrong. And as I always tell you, Jonathan, on the podcast, it's just not as simple as that. It's a lot more complicated.

**Jonathan** (3:28)
So now I'm intrigued, tell me about it.

**Sarah Berry** (3:31)
So I actually started working in the area of how food processing impacts our health back in 1999 And it was interesting, when I was developing these talks, it actually made me stop and think about, you know, this isn't anything new, yet we're only hearing about it now. And I started back in 1999, looking at how processing fat to change the texture of fat, the mouth feel of fat, the melt profile of fat impacts our health. And so this is something, as scientists, we've been doing for many, many years. We've been looking at how processing food and therefore processed food can impact our health.

**Jonathan** (4:11)
When you say processing food, could you help to understand what that means? Because I think when I hear the word processed food, I immediately jump to like Frankenstein food that's really bad for me. But I think you're using this in some different way.

**Sarah Berry** (4:23)
When we think about processing food, even cooking rice is processing it. Even cooking your carrots is processing it in some way because you're changing it from how it came out of the ground. But I think when we think about how processing food impacts our health, we need to think about it taking a little bit of a step further, thinking about how not necessarily we process it in the home, but how we process it using industrial techniques, how we process it commercially. And there's a wide variety of techniques that the food industry use.