Science Vs - Ultra-Processed Foods: A Load of Baloney?

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

We hear over and over that ultra-processed food is bad for us. But is there actually something funky going on here — or is it just junk food? We dig into what these foods are doing to our bodies. You’ll hear from Dr. Kevin Hall, Prof. Carlos Monteiro, Dr. Cathrina Edwards, and Dr. Sheela Sathyanarayana.  Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/3xYhHHZ  This episode was produced by Rose Rimler with help from Michelle Dang, Meryl Horn, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, and Rasha Aridi. Our executive producer is Wendy Zukerman. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, Marcus Bagala, and Bobby Lord. Thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Anthony Fardet, Dr. Bernard Srour, Prof. Jose Miguel Aguilera, Dr. Mathilde Touvier, Dr. Melissa Melough, Dr. Rachel Laudan, Prof. Niyati Parekh, and lots of others. Special thanks to Paul Adams.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Rose Rimler, filling in for Wendy Zuckerman this week, while she's off writing Brumbies and 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 beriberi, 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 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 beriberi 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 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, sweeteners, coloring, flavoring, trans fats,

emulsifiers. Basically, they can withstand a nuclear holocaust and they're not good for us. I always say the whiter the bread, the sooner you're dead. And we're eating a ton of this stuff. New numbers on just how much processed food Americans eat. A new study finds ultra-processed foods make up more than half of all the calories in the U.S. diet. And I know that sounds scary, and I don't even know why. Yeah, in the U.S., just under 60% of the average person's diet is ultra-processed food, which sounds scary to me too. And I also don't know why. So that's what we're going to dive into today.

We're asking, what's so bad about processed food? And we're going to look at a few different potential problems with this stuff, including 1. The additives we're pumping into this food. 2. The chemicals in the plastic packaging. Could they be sneaking into the food and messing with us? Or 3. Is the problem way simpler? plastic packaging. Could they be sneaking into the food and messing with us? Or three, is the problem way simpler? Nowadays, a lot of our processed food seems like junk food. Is the real issue the fact that it's packed with fat, sugar, and salt?

Because when it comes to processed food, there's lots of... That sounds scary, and I don't even know why. But then there's science. Science versus processed foods coming up after the break. So what's it like to buy your first cryptocurrency on Kraken? Well, let's say I'm at a food truck I've never tried before. Am I going to go all in on the loaded taco? No, sir. I'm keeping it simple, starting small. That's trading on Kraken. Pick from over 190 assets and start with the 10 bucks in your pocket. Easy. Go to Kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See Kraken.com slash legal slash CA dash PRU dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's

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so brace yourselves get ready to learn i'm jan 11 i'm steve strogettes and this is quantum magazine's podcast the joy of why new episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. Welcome back. Today on the show, processed foods. Let's dig in. So generally speaking, when nutrition nerds study this, they are actually interested in something called ultra-processed food, which is a term scientists came up with to distinguish this stuff from regular processed food. That's because most of our food is processed. Anytime we cook or blend something, we're processing it.

And ultra-processed food, it's a little hard to define. It's kind of like the way people have often tried to define pornography, right? It's hard to define, but you know it when you see it sort of thing. This is Kevin Hall. He's a researcher at the National Institutes of Health who studies food and our metabolism. He said you can basically think of ultra-processed food like this. A lot of the pre-packaged, ready-to-eat, ready-to-heat foods that are sort of in the middle of the supermarket. So rather than cheese, we're talking about Cheez Whiz instead of plain yogurt, Go-Gurt. Industrially made bread, cookies, frozen meals, that kind of stuff.

And it turns out that people who eat a lot of this food do tend to be sicker than people who eat less of it. One of the biggest studies that shows this comes from France. Scientists there recruited over 100,000 people and asked them to report what they were eating and kept an eye on their health over the years. And they found that every 10% more of this food that they ate, their risk of certain diseases went up by about 10% to 15%. This was stuff like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. And even death.

Other studies have found similar things in Italy, Spain, the UK, and the U.S. And the risk sticks around, even after researchers adjust for stuff like education and income. Kevin, our scientist, has been following this research. He thinks it's interesting, but he figured there's a simple explanation for what's going on here. He points out that these ultra-processed foods tend to be higher in fat, salt, and sugar. In other words, a lot of it is junk food. So Kevin thought it was wrong to blame the processing. It's more about the nutrients.

He suspected that if people ate fresh food with the same amount of fat and sugar, they'd see the same health problems. So he came up with a clever way to try to single out the effects of the processing itself. If there's something bad about these foods, then I should be able to design a study where I match for the salt, the sugar, the fat, the fiber. And if it's really about the nutrients, then there shouldn't really be any effect. So Kevin recruited people for a study where they would eat either ultra-processed food or food made from scratch. The key thing was that he controlled every single meal so they had the same amount of all the major nutrients.

He did this by having them move into the lab for a month. He told them, you're basically going to be staying in a hospital ward and you're going to have your own room and you're going to have your bed and your bathroom and your shower and all that sort of stuff. But every day we're going to basically give you three meals and a snack box. Everyone ate either an ultra-processed or a home-cooked diet for two weeks, and then they swapped to the other diet. All the while, Kevin's team is poking and prodding them. We're basically going to take a lot of blood from you, and we're going to measure how your body's responding

when you're exposed to these basically two very different food environments. So what did they do all day besides eat and have blood drawn? Well, it varies, right? So we actually have people who are authors and actually want some time to kind of write their manuscript. Oh, it's like a writer's retreat. Yeah. There are also a lot of college kids on their summer break.

So when they got the less processed meal, it might be something like a yogurt with fresh fruit and nuts. But an ultra-processed breakfast would be a store-bought muffin and honey nut Cheerios, for example. To you and me, these two meals seem pretty different. But to a nutrient guy like Kevin, their building blocks are the same. You add the same amount of fat and sugar in the yogurt with fruit and nuts compared to the Cheerios and muffin. He even got the fiber to match with fiber supplements. And everybody could eat as much as they wanted.

And after mealtime, Kevin's team looked at how much they ate. He also tracked their weight and a bunch of other stuff. And he figured that if processed food is bad just because it's full of fat and sugar, then he would see no difference between the two diets. But instead, there was a difference. Yeah, so I was wrong. So it turned out that people ate a little over 500 calories per day more on average during the ultra-processed diet. This is a huge effect. Yeah, so people gained about two pounds in the two weeks they were eating ultra-processed foods, and they lost two pounds when they switched to the

less processed meals. Kevin says one thing going on here was that on the ultra-processed diet, people tended to eat faster, maybe because this food is softer and goes down easier. The overall point here is that there was something different about this kind of food compared to the home-cooked stuff. To Kevin, this suggests that the problem with ultra-processed food is bigger than the fact that a lot of it is junk food. You know, I think that there's something there, and it's probably not because of the salt, the sugar, the fat, and the fiber. It's probably some other factor.

So Kevin's study found that eating ultra-processed food made people gain weight. His study can't tell us whether this would make people sick in the long term. But it's tempting to think that the weight gain is the answer, because we know that being heavy can increase the risk of illnesses like heart disease. And that might be part of it, but it's not the whole story. Remember those big studies that follow people who eat lots of ultra-processed food? Well, when the scientists adjust their results to take people's weight into account, they still find a link to these diseases. In other words, when it comes to eating ultra processed food, where you land on the scale doesn't matter that much. The risk is still there.

So what is this X factor that makes this food bad for us beyond making us gain weight? Well, the next thing we're going to dive into here is additives. A big Pew survey in 2018 found that about half of Americans think additives in their everyday food are a risk to their health. And it makes sense because with a lot of ultra-processed foods, when you flip over the package, you find some weird-sounding ingredients. Producer Meryl Horn and I went to the grocery store to see what's in this stuff. We learned a lot of new words. Mixed tocopherols. Am I even saying that right? Hexamethophosphates. We looked at frozen meals, jarred sauces, and even meats. I feel like you kind of know when you're eating a chicken nugget,

you're signing up for a gamble. Like, one actually is going into your mouth. Yeast extract, spices, guar gum, dried garlic, dried onion, cottonseed oil. There are also plenty of additives in food we may think of as healthy. For example, a lot of vegan foods are ultra-processed. In vegan yogurt, we found something called locust bean gum. I don't even know what that is. A locust bean doesn't sound like something I'd want to eat.

Yeah, it sounds like something that would crawl out of the ground every seven years. Yeah. But just because Meryl and I don't know what something is doesn't necessarily mean it's scary. So when we got back from the store, I looked up some of these additives. And you know how knowledge is power. Most of them seemed pretty innocent when I learned what they were.

For example, mixed tocopherols are vitamin E. It's an antioxidant that stops food from turning brown. And yeast extract is a flavoring that tickles our umami receptors. But there are some additives that have raised eyebrows. And one man with eyebrows raised almost to the ceiling is Carlos Monteiro. He's a professor of nutrition and public health at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. Hi, Carlos. Hello.

Carlos has been studying ultra-processed food for years. He actually coined the term in a 2009 paper. And he says new food additives are popping up faster than science can study them. In the past, I mean, we had just a few additives. Today you have thousands. And well, here in the U.S., the FDA vets a lot of the additives that end up in food. But we know some bad stuff has snuck in in the past, so we can't always count on that. And Carlos says there's one group he's particularly concerned about that's found in a lot of food. Emulsifiers. Emulsifiers are used to mix and thicken food. They're a super common type of additive,

and they're in all kinds of stuff. Bottled salad dressings, store-bought cookies, even ice cream. Ice cream. And it looks like some of these additives could be doing something weird in our gut. Carlos spoke about it with Meryl. The recent research is showing that when they arrive to our intestines, they clean the walls in the intestine. They act as detergents. Detergents. So that's like soap. Exactly, yeah.

Here's what we think might be happening. Basically, it all starts when some emulsifiers kill off some of our friendly gut bacteria, and that allows the less friendly kind to thrive. Evidence for this has been trickling in from mice and lab studies for a few years now. And just last year, we got research showing that this bacteria die-off can happen in real people who were fed an emulsifier in a controlled study. And these people, the not-so-friendly bacteria, were free to gnaw at the mucus lining of their guts, which meant the bacteria might be able to wriggle into the gut lining and cause problems like inflammation. So emulsifiers can disturb the ability of our walls in the intestine to absorb what they should absorb and what they should not absorb. Now, this was a small study, and the participants got a pretty high dose of this stuff,

more than the average person would eat in a day. But maybe if we eat lots of ultra-processed food every day, we'd be slurping up a bunch of different emulsifiers, enough to cause problems in real life, like leaky, inflamed guts. The evidence was enough for a group of gastroenterologists to publish guidelines that say people with some digestive diseases, like Crohn's and ulcerative colitis should avoid foods with certain emulsifiers in them. As for the rest of us, well, there's currently a big trial underway testing emulsifiers in people without these diseases, so hopefully we'll know more soon. People are also pointing fingers at other additives, and while I'm finding that there isn't a ton of research on most of them, I did want to just spend a little time on one other additive,

because I found the research there pretty convincing. I'm talking about this preservative called nitrates and nitrites. These are mostly used in lunch meat, sausages, and bacon. And they might actually cause cancer, because when we eat them, they react with other molecules in our body to create carcinogens. Just last year, those French scientists who have followed big groups of people who eat ultra-processed food, they put out a paper on this. It showed that people who ate more foods with added nitrates and nitrites were more likely to get certain cancers, specifically breast cancer and prostate cancer. So what to make of all this?

Well, for me, that's enough evidence to make me want to avoid processed meats. But I'm going to wait for more evidence on emulsifiers before I give up ice cream. And overall, there wasn't quite enough research on other additives to freak me out too much. But then something came up that made me think, maybe I should throw out all the ultra-processed food from my pantry. So long, ramen? That's coming up after the break. Welcome back. We just heard that ultra-processed food isn't bad for us just because it's junk food. There's other stuff going on here, including some of the sketchy additives that get tossed into the mix.

But scientists told me there's probably more to it than that. On my journey to find out why processed food is bad for us, I kept hearing this phrase over and over again from scientists all over the world. Food matrix. The food matrix. Food matrix. Food matrix.

The food matrix is the main point. So I called up Katrina Edwards. She's a nutrition researcher at the Quadram Institute. Her job is to study food on a microscopic level. She loves looking at teeny slices of food under the microscope. Her favorite food to peek at is chickpeas. The cell structure of chickpeas is and how beautiful they look under the microscope. Why do you think they are beautiful?

Well, I think it's the shape and they look very neat and organized. The plant cells are very well defined. So it's sort of like the, I'm imagining sort of like a stained glass. Yeah, yeah, it is a bit like that. Yeah, you can stain it with dyes and it looks pretty colors. And Katrina spends all this time at the microscope to better understand the food matrix, which she told me is basically the structure of our food, how it's put together. She said you can think of it this way. You might experience it as like something being crunchy or soft or hard or having a different feel to it.

How it feels in the mouth is a big clue. Yeah, big picture, when we process food, it's a very noticeable texture change. Like think of a single corn kernel when it's fresh or dry or popped. Different in your mouth. And if you were to zoom in, the tiny structures inside are also different. And scientists like Katrina are looking at what that means down the line. Like, does this change how our body breaks food down? And if it does, could that be causing our ultra-processed food problems? Katrina did a study several years back that could help us understand all this. We're going to call it the Chunky Porridge Pre-Poop Protocol.

Buckle up. Okay, so the first thing they did was whip up two types of this wheat porridge. One was more processed, it was smoother. And one was less processed, it was chunkier. And they wanted to see what happened when people ate this stuff. Did the smooth stuff break down differently than the chunky stuff? So we wanted to understand if we preserve some of that structure, how is that digested? And especially how it was digested in the upper gut, so the stomach and

the small intestine. And the difficulty here is that you can't easily access the stomach and the small intestine. Yeah, it's not super accessible because this part of your gut is kind of coiled up behind your belly button. It's not like you can reach it by poking a finger up your butt. And Katrina and her buddies really wanted to check out what was going on with the porridge here because this is where the middle part of digestion happens before food gets fully churned into poop. Because by the time it's poop, the nutrients have already been absorbed and everything kind of looks the same. So they found the perfect group of people for their study, those who'd had a procedure called an ileostomy, which can happen

when the lower gut has a disease or some other issue and needs to be removed. A surgeon has to make an alternate exit route for food waste. So they go in. And then they make like a hole in the abdominal wall. So like imagine like the front of your abdomen. And then the small intestine is basically diverted to that opening. The small intestine is rerouted so that the stuff inside comes out the side of the belly. And then they're fitted with an external ileostomy bag, which is like a pouch. So the remains of what people eat ends up in this little bag. Were you excited to be able to have kind of a window into the middle part of digestion?

Oh, it was so exciting, honestly. I think the participants couldn't quite understand why we were so excited about getting this material. But it's like gold dust, you know, to us. So it was fascinating. Studying these people meant Katrina's group could kind of freeze frame this porridge mid-digestion to see if anything was different between the more processed versus the less processed stuff

as it made its way through the gut. So every two hours after people ate the porridge, they emptied out these bags and gave the stuff inside to Katrina and her team. Was it as beautiful as the chickpeas? Oh, no, never. But very, very exciting. Very exciting, especially to see what came out the other end was very interesting. So what did come out the other end?

Actually, is it poop at that point or is it something different? It's more liquid. Lushion soup, I would say. Oh, okay. I can picture that. She took the soupy post porridge and put it under the microscope to find out if the body digested it differently depending on how processed it was. First, she looked at the stuff that came out after people ate the smooth, highly processed porridge. She was looking for those little pieces of wheat.

And she couldn't see any sign of the stuff. There were no particles. But then when she looked at what was left of the chunky porridge, it looked like what we'd put into the porridge was coming out the other end You know, we put two millimeter particles in and two millimeter particles came out And what this suggests is that if the food matrix is all broken down and mushed up It's way easier for our body to digest and we absorb the nutrients much faster And for foods like wheat, that means the sugar we get from them

can rush into our bloodstream instead of a gentle trickle. In fact, Katrina looked at this in her study. They took blood samples from the participants and they found that with the smooth, more processed porridge, their blood sugar spiked more by 12%. And that's quite a big effect.

So basically, if you eat coarse porridge, your blood sugar levels rise much less and more slowly than they would if you eat smooth porridge. In the paper, Katrina and her colleagues plotted this out in a beautiful graph, a line graph, the best kind. And you can see people's blood sugar when they eat the smooth stuff has a higher rise and a bigger fall compared to the less processed stuff. Other studies have looked at different foods and found something similar. The more processed, the faster the sugar or fat rushes into our bloodstream. And this could help explain why this stuff isn't great for us. Because the more often your blood sugar is peaking and crashing and peaking and crashing, the higher the risk of getting type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Katrina is so convinced by this research that she said

if she was borderline diabetic, she'd probably avoid ultra-processed foods. I think if I went to the doctor one day and they told me that, then I would probably freak out a little bit and then think, right, I need to get hold of my diet. So, you know, it's very individual and it's easy for me to sit here and say, like, well, you know, if I had been diagnosed with prediabetes or metabolic syndrome or something, I would be a bit more careful about what I eat. But I do think there's very convincing evidence. Okay, there's one final thing we want to look at here.

And it's not about what we're doing to the food itself, but it's about what the food is served in. This is something that's been all over the news concerning that modern day boogeyman, plastics. Plastics are messing with your hormones. This is a fact of modern life. There's BPA everywhere. Potentially dangerous chemicals found in the food. So it's the packaging that then seeps into the food.

That appears to be the case. There are freaky chemicals in plastics called endocrine disruptors. And they're often found in stuff we store food in, like plastic containers. And the big worry is that they can mess with our hormones. That's because they're really similar to natural hormones, so they can attach to our hormone receptors and cause problems. Some of them can affect things like how fetuses develop or potentially screw with our fertility, and some can interfere with another hormone, insulin. And that helps explain why exposure to some of these chemicals has been linked to increased

risk of diabetes. And these chemicals are a big problem for ultra-processed food. Basically, what we've found is that the more processed a food is, the more likely it could be to have these kinds of chemicals. This is Sheila Sathy Narayana. She's a pediatrician and researcher at the University of Washington. And Sheila says the trouble with many of the chemicals used to make plastics is that they don't stay in the plastic. Some of them are only loosely attached, so they can pop off pretty easily. And there's reason to think that people who eat a lot of ultra-processed food are taking in more of these chemicals. This we know from studies on people's urine.

That's right. We're going back to the bathroom. We talked to someone who looked at the effluent that came out in ileostomy bags. And now we're talking about pee. So this is a very like potty related subject, it seems like. Yeah, I'm very interested in the ileostomy and what they found. That's very interesting. I guess that must just be part of the course of food studies. Because like if you're interested in what people eat, you kind of have to think about it at the other end. You do. That's the only way to really know.

The reason we need pee is that's how scientists check for these chemicals in our bodies. They break down and they come out in our urine. And Sheila says some of the best evidence we have that more processed food has more of these chemicals comes from studies where scientists ask people what they've eaten in the past day or two and take urine samples from them. Sometimes these researchers ask about ultra-processed groceries, and sometimes they look at fast food, which tends to be ultra-processed. So they say, like, did you have McDonald's yesterday, or did you have Jack in the Box yesterday? They basically are asking, like, a generic question about, did you have any kind of fast food? And then they measure the chemical concentrations in their urine. And then they'll compare those concentrations to concentrations in people

who did not report eating fast food. A study that came out a few years ago found that people who ate more fast food had 20 to 40 percent more of some of these chemicals in their pee. Studies also tend to find this in people who report eating a lot of ultra-processed food generally. This could be because the food is hanging out in its packaging for a while before we eat it, but it could also be from stuff that happens in the factory. I mean, the way that I really think about it is that the more steps it takes to get the food to your plate, the higher the likelihood there is for contamination. We know that a lot of the equipment in these factories is made with

plastics that have these chemicals in them. Studies have found them in conveyor belts and storage tubs, and they've even been found in the gloves that workers wear when they touch the food. At each step along the way, there's another chance for it to sneak into the food. A good example is boxed macaroni and cheese. Sheila's like, just think about all the steps it takes to make that stuff. Let's just talk about the macaroni. You know, first you have this wheat, and it has to be harvested, and then it has to be transported, and then it has to be harvested and then it has to be transported and then it has to be broken down and created into some kind of dough to make the macaroni and at each step in that process

there's the transport then there's the mixing and I think people would be surprised at how much plastic is used in all of those different steps. One advocacy group actually had some box mac and cheese analyzed and found that the powdered cheese had at least twice as much of some of these chemicals as regular cheese. And just overall, the more steps it takes to process a food, the greater the chances for it to get contaminated by whatever plastic it touches. Every time you add a step, you're adding another order of magnitude of chaos almost. That's exactly how I think about it. So it makes sense that if you cut down on ultra-processed foods,

it would help you avoid these gross chemicals, and you'd have less of this stuff in your pee. Sheila did a really striking study that helps get at this. Here's what she did. A few years ago, she and her team recruited some families in Seattle, just regular families with a couple of kids, who ate a fair amount of canned and processed food. For the experiment, Sheila's team had caterers deliver fresh, organic, made-from-scratch meals to their homes every day for a week. These were the kind of meals and snacks that nutritionists dream of. And Sheila and her colleagues tried to make sure no plastic touched the food at any point. We asked them in the kitchen when they were preparing foods

if they would use stainless steel bowls or blunders that were glass, food processors without plastic in them. And we asked them to use all utensils that were not plastic. And they took pee samples from everyone in the family, even the little kids, before the study started, during the week of catered meals, and then after the week was up. So with most of the ultra-processed foods removed from their diets for a week and replaced with foods fit for Gwyneth Paltrow's kitchen, Sheila figured these scuzzy chemicals in their pee would plummet. In fact, a similar study done a few years before had found exactly that. But when the results came back for Sheila, something really unexpected happened. The chemicals in the family's pee didn't go down. Instead, the levels increased during the intervention. That's crazy. It is

crazy. I mean, I think as a scientist, my first thought was, how could this happen? Yeah, how could this happen? Sheila analyzed foods from the caterer's kitchen, and it turned out the chemicals were in the raw ingredients themselves, like the cream and the butter. They had really high levels of this stuff, and so did one of the spices they used. That's because these chemicals can sneak into the food supply in ways we're not always thinking about, like milk. It gets run from the cow's udder through a bunch of tubes. If that plastic tubing has these kinds of chemicals in it, there could be contamination through that route. So it's really starting from the horse's mouth, to use a bad analogy.

Right, right. Well, that's what we think. Overall, this is bigger than us. We might be able to avoid some endocrine-disrupting chemicals by skipping ultra-processed foods, but generally, we're all exposed to them. They're not just in the food system. They're used in all kinds of plastic, which are everywhere. So they're kind of just always around. Okay, so where does this all leave us? Well, the science is pretty clear that the less we eat of this ultra-processed stuff, the better. But a lot of time when I hear people talk about this, they seem to want to go backwards.

To go back to a time before the food supply was industrialized. And I don't think that's a good idea either. There's a lot to appreciate about the food system we have. Like making food at a huge scale that keeps a lot of us fed reliably. Plus, some large-scale processing makes food better. Just going back to our white rice example from the beginning of the show, processing the rice caused the problem, but it also fixed the problem. Who do you think puts those B vitamins back?

It's not elves. With all this in mind, I asked the scientists I spoke to for this episode if they had abandoned ultra-processed food altogether. Like, did it ruin Sheila's love of stuff like potato chips? That's really funny that you say that because I had some chips right before this call. Yeah, most of the scientists I spoke to said, do your best, but don't sweat it too much. Like when I asked Kevin

if he avoids ultra-processed food, here's what he said. You know, I try, but I have two small boys at home who tend to kind of like their, fingers and their French fries and all these sorts of things. And I end up eating a lot of their leftovers. How do you feel about that? You know, it is what it is. We're all doing our best to kind of make healthy choices. But the day-to-day practicalities weigh on everybody. Of course, if I could hire a personal chef

and have access to a nice little farm in my backyard and prepare unprocessed meals for my whole family, that would be great. But life just didn't provide that for me yet. That's Science Versus. Hello.

Hi, Michelle Dang, producer at Science Versus. Hi, Rose. How are you doing? Okay. How are you? I'm good. How many citations are in this week's episode? There are, let's see, 121 citations this episode. If people want to see these 121 citations, where can they go? They should pop over to our show notes, and there'll be a transcript full of all these citations

sounds good see you later michelle bye rose bye this episode was produced by me rose rimler with help from michelle dang meryl horn akedi foster keys courtney gilbert and rasha Aridi. Our executive producer is Wendy Zuckerman. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, Marcus Begala, and Bobby Lord. Thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode,

including Dr. Anthony Fardet, Dr. Bernard Strauer, Professor Jose Miguel Aguilera, Dr. Mathilde Tuvier, Dr. Melissa Malogue, Dr. Rachel Lawden, Professor Niyati Parekh, and lots of others. And special thanks to Paul Adams.