Hello and welcome to Zoe Recan where each week we find the best bits from one of our

podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're discussing

ultra processed food. Ultra processed foods are everywhere.

Many of us eat them over and over again without really understanding the

detrimental impact they're having on our health. But why are these foods so addictive?

Here to help us identify the ultra-processed parts of our diet,

of Professor Tim Specter, and Dr. Chris Van Telikam.

If it's wrapped in plastic and it contains at least one ingredient that you don't typically find in a domestic kitchen,

then it's ultra-processed food.

That's the shorthand way of figuring it out.

This was a definition that was developed by a group in Brazil in 2010,

and since then we've had now over a decade of really, really good,

increasingly robust research, including a very good clinical trial,

that has linked ultra-process food to early death, cancer,

weight gain, and a whole host of other problems. I think this is the NOVA classification, is that right that you're referencing?

Could maybe the two of you help step us through a little bit from stuff that I think we all feel pretty comfortable as't processed because it's like a fruit or something you know you're eating it completely off the tree.

To the other end where I think we all sort of know that if it's got 50 ingredients in it and it's bright yellow and it lives for a hundred years and you can still eat it, that's probably at the ultra-process end.

And I think we're all deeply confused about everything, which is like 95% of what we eat, right, which is somewhere in between.

Could you maybe just help us to step through?

So I think they have a few classifications, don't they, to help us understand a bit more how that works?

I would say that the boundary between ultra-processed food and just processed food, which we think is fine,

is quite a blurry one.

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