Ultra-processed foods don't only negatively impact nutritional status through a relative

lack of micro-nutrients like essential vitamins and minerals, but also by lacking phytonutrients,

the thousands of plant nutrients that aren't listed on the ingredients labels that may benefit our health.

For instance, polyphenols.

They aren't technically essential and that they aren't necessary for life,

but they may be necessary for a long life, so they're considered lifespan essentials.

Our primary understanding of how diet affects health is limited to the 150 key nutritional

components that are tracked and catalogued in nutritional databases.

But these represent only a tiny fraction of the more than 26,000 distinct, definable

compounds present in our food, many of which have documented effects on health, but remain unquantified

in a systemic fashion across different individual foods.

There are 8,000 kinds of polyphenols alone.

When brown rice started to be polished into white rice, people started to die in mass from

a nutrient deficiency disease.

Berryberry became one of the most common diseases in Asia

because the German brand that got removed from the rice

were where the B-vitamin was.

So Miller started fortifying the polished white rice

by adding back the thiamen that had been removed.

But what about all the other fideom nutrients that are lost?

And that's just going from brown rice to white, which is considered a moderate level of processing.

Think how much is lost when rice is turned into an ultra-processed product like brown rice syrup,

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