The science behind food that isn’t food, why you love it and why you should not fear it all | Prof Tim Spector & Prof Sarah Berry

**Jonathan Wolf** (0:02)
Welcome to ZOE Science & Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
For decades, nutrition health advice seemed relatively straightforward. Eat less sugar, less salt, less saturated fat. The advice was simple. If you were putting on weight and feeling unhealthy, the problem was your willpower, not the advice. Then it all fell apart. Over the last five years, a series of groundbreaking studies has shaken the foundations of nutrition science. Research from some of the world's leading institutions has forced scientists to rethink what makes food harmful in the first place. And at the center of that scientific revolution is a controversial new idea. Ultra-Processed Foods, the property of the food that does not show up in the macronutrients on the label. What's remarkable is that many of the leading researchers weren't always convinced that ultra-processed food was a real thing. As new evidence emerged, they had to change their minds.
But today, I'm joined by two of those researchers, telling their own story of how they've radically rethought nutrition science. Tim Spector, Professor of Epidemiology at King's College London and Scientific Co-Founder at ZOE, and Sarah Berry, Professor of Nutrition at King's College London and Chief Scientist at ZOE. Together, they explained in simple terms the four breakthrough studies that transformed how they think about ultra-processed foods, our new understanding of why it is that ultra-processed foods are making us sick, and the brand new insight that only a small portion of these foods are really harmful. We'll wrap up with brand new research that helps to identify the specific ultra-processed foods that are making us sick and those which we don't really need to worry about.
Tim, have you changed your mind about the importance of ultra-processed food?

**Tim Spector** (1:58)
Yes.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:00)
Can some food additives cause gut inflammation?

**Tim Spector** (2:04)
Yes.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:05)
Sarah, are all food additives dangerous for our health?

**Sarah Berry** (2:10)
No.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:11)
Tim, is it just the additives that make ultra-processed food bad for us?

**Tim Spector** (2:17)
No, it's not.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:19)
And Sarah, is it easy to tell how an unhealthier product is just by looking at its packaging?

**Sarah Berry** (2:25)
Absolutely not.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:27)
And finally, Tim, what's the biggest misunderstanding that people have about UPF?

**Tim Spector** (2:33)
I think it's that it's easy to tell if a food is UPF or not. And that's what the food companies hide behind. And they're very good at disguising what's in their products.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:46)
Everyone listening to this knows that eating foods that are high in sugar and fat and salt is bad for them. They might be yummy. You might decide to have it, but there's no confusion. No one talked about ultra-processed foods when we started ZOE. But in the last five years or so, there's really been an earthquake in nutrition science. And ultra-processed foods or UPFs, as they're often known, is really the center of that controversy.
And so today, I'm really excited. We're going to try and do something completely new on the podcast. I am joined by two of the world's leading nutritional scientists, my co-founder at ZOE, Professor Tim Spector, and our chief scientist, Professor Sarah Berry. And they are going to explain to us why they've changed their minds about ultra-processed food by talking us through four critical science papers that have really been the cause of this revolution in nutrition science and this revolution about ultra-processed food. And then, for the first time, we're going to talk in detail about ZOE's own research on UPF and the actionable steps all of us can take to look after our own health and the health of our family.
Before we jump into the first paper, Tim, can I confirm that when I first met you and we started ZOE, you didn't seem particularly concerned about ultra-processed foods. Is that true?

**Tim Spector** (4:08)
Yes. I mean, it's not quite as black and white as that because I knew about animal experiments, for example, where they looked at the gut microbiomes of mice being fed, you know, burgers and junk foods and seeing this effect on them.
But there were no clinical data at all to compare with that. And so I'm always wary about anything that's just in mice or in animals. I knew there was building evidence and the microbiome might well have been, you know, one of the ways we could learn more about it. But there just wasn't a way of studying it. So what changed? There was a definition of ultra-processed food, which appeared in the epidemiology literature, which took a while to get going. But about 10 years ago started to be used by researchers, which allowed us to study it in the first place, because before then we really couldn't do it outside an animal laboratory. And the other thing was there was some key studies started to be done.