Hello and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio. My name is Danny Lennon. You are very welcome to the podcast.

Today we're going to bring you a discussion about one of the most topical issues within

nutrition and health science at the moment, and that is ultra-processed foods, and taking a look at some

of the best evidence we might have to try and explain what

exactly is going on and how can we make sense of some of the narratives that are commonly

heard and do they actually match up with the best evidence we have. So recently Dr. Alan Flanagan

and I were invited along to an event titled Processing the Evidence, which took place in

Wageningen University in the Netherlands. And this was a behind closed doors workshop with the aim

of discussing the latest scientific evidence on the role of processed foods within human health.

It was an event organized by Professor Kiran Ford and Vincenzo

Folliano of Varganingen University and it ended up being a really, really a successful event,

which we took a lot from, which we'll maybe mention in a moment. It was a workshop attended by

a whole range of prominent researchers across a wide range of domains related to food processing, food

technology, nutrition science, public health and others. It had sessions that included

open discussions on the current evidence, looking at some of the knowledge gaps we might

have, some of the challenges within the UPF debate and the area of research.

And there were a number of several structured sessions that looked at different subtopics of this issue,

things that we're going to mention in this episode. So things like the interactions between

amulsifiers and the gut microbiome, or even in cases of things like

Crohn's disease and some of that emerging data, some of the impacts of processing potentially

on the food matrix and nutrient by availability, how that matches up with various claims we might

see, impacts around food liking and the hedonic reward of overeating and what that area of research tells us.

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