Hi, I'm Rose Rimmler filling in for Wendy Zookerman this week while she's off writing Brumbies in the Outback.

And this is Science Versus, the show that pits facts against newfangled food.

Today we're talking about processed food asking what is it

doing to us. To start, let me tell you a story about something that happened more than a century ago in Japan.

For generations, most of the rice eaten in Japan was brown rice.

But in the late 1800s, machines were invented that made it much easier to turn brown rice into white rice,

by stripping off the outer parts of the rice.

And this turned white rice from something mostly eaten by wealthy people to something that

people all over Japan were eating. And soon after, this weird disease that was once rare exploded.

It's called Berry, and it sounds awful. Your body can swell up, you can lose feeling

in your hands and feet, even become paralyzed.

In fact, it can kill you. A princess in Japan likely died from it.

And by the turn of the 20th century, it was estimated that Berry caused 8% of deaths in Japan every year.

And it wasn't for decades more that the culprit would be understood.

It was the processing of the rice that killed people. Stripping off that

outer layer also stripped off this really important B vitamin in the rice.

Berry was simply a vitamin deficiency.

These days we can eat white rice without fear because we figured out how to put that

vitamin back in. But I wanted to start off today's episode with that story

because now we do a lot more to our food than we did back then. We process the

crap out of it. We do stuff like cram it into bars, mash it into funny shapes, and pump it full of fake flavors.

So what you're really getting are chemicals, additives, things like preservatives,

...