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Transcribed using A.I. May contain errors.

Amy Quinton

All right, Kat, let's go shopping.

Kat Kerlin

Let's do it.

Amy Quinton

Kat and I are visiting our local grocery store. It's the perfect place to learn about processed foods. So to me, when I think of processed foods, I think center of the grocery, the stuff that's usually in boxes and packages, and isn't like dairy and meat and fruits?

Kat Kerlin

Yeah, like we're looking at apples and bananas, and I'm thinking, this is not the aisle for us if we're looking for processed foods.

Amy Quinton

But we're gonna go shopping just see, just see what we know and what we don't know.

Kat Kerlin

Yes, I see a big wall of orange boxes that look very promising. That big ball of orange boxes was the mac and cheese.

Amy Quinton

Yep, and the mashed potatoes,

Kat Kerlin 

Four cheese mashed potatoes in a packet?

Amy Quinton 

Dried potatoes. Do people actually eat this stuff?

Kat Kerlin

I lived on that when I was in college.

Kat Kerlin

Yeah, not proud.

Amy Quinton

You're kidding.

Amy Quinton

Well the first ingredient is potatoes. So that's promising.

Kat Kerlin

You're trying to make me feel better. I appreciate it.

Amy Quinton

I don't think I've ever met anyone who's eating dried potatoes unless they're like hiking.

Kat Kerlin

You know, I mean, they were really fast to make, and they filled me up and they cost, like, $1 or something. So fast and cheap and easy kind of did it for me when I was 20.

Amy Quinton

Yeah, I mean, I was all about mac and cheese and ramen. Yeah.

Kat Kerlin

Yeah, Still am.Some days.

Amy Quinton

Comfort food.

Kat Kerlin

Totally. So yeah, chances are you eat processed foods. Most Americans do. Studies have found that between 60 and 70% of American diets are comprised of highly processed or ultra processed food. It makes sense, right? Like, if it's cheap, convenient and pretty delicious, we Americans tend to like it.

Amy Quinton

Yeah, I probably sounded a bit judgmental there, but those dried mashed potatoes had a lot of ingredients that weren't potatoes. Cheese, cultures, vegetable oil, sunflower coconut oil,

Kat Kerlin

Annato extract,

Amy Quinton

dried corn syrup, mono and diglycerides, natural flavors, whatever those are. So it's got preservatives in it, citric acid. I still don't know what mono and diglycerides are.

Kat Kerlin

I can't help you. Actually, Amy, those dried mashed potatoes probably had half the number of ingredients of some of the chips we came across. We are in the chip aisle. There's an explosion of colors.

Amy Quinton

Oh, look at those Doritos. Flaming hot, Cool Ranch.

Kat Kerlin

It's very orange. It's very, very spicy Dorito. So people love this stuff right now. Oh, my gosh. It's like a whole paragraph of ingredients. Oh, maybe I'll just cut to all of the artificial colors in it. Red 40 lake, yellow 6 lake, yellow 6, yellow 5, blue 1, red 40.

Amy Quinton

I didn't know there were that many numbers,

Kat Kerlin

I didn't either

Amy Quinton

And it also had MSG, monosodium glutamate. That's a flavor enhancer.

Kat Kerlin

Yep, makes you want more. Doritos are clearly an ultra-processed food.

Amy Quinton

And what's the difference between processed and ultra-processed, you might ask.

Kat Kerlin

And are all these foods unhealthy for you? Should they be banned?

Amy Quinton

Should they be banned in public schools? These are all really good questions.

Kat Kerlin

So in this episode of Unfold, we're going to examine processed and ultra-processed foods in our first chapter.

Amy Quinton

And in the second chapter of this episode, we'll talk to an expert about why this topic ignites such contentious debate between the public and the food industry. Coming to you from UC Davis, this is Unfold. I'm Amy Quinton

Kat Kerlin

and I'm Kat Kerlin.

Kat Kerlin

You hear people say processed foods are bad for you, right? And ultra-processed even worse. In fact, here in ������Ƶ, lawmakers are debating whether they should ban some ultra-processed foods in public schools.

Amy Quinton

Yeah, and they've already banned some food dyes in public schools. And our current U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary has criticized ultra-processed food, saying it leads to chronic diseases. And when we began to research this episode, we were both confused about which foods are processed.

Kat Kerlin

Right? Like, I kind of know it when I see it, I thought it's really just foods that you shouldn't eat too much of. The foods with the long lists of ingredients.

Amy Quinton

Yeah, but here's what confused me, canned tomatoes are processed. In fact, there's a tomato processing plant just down the road from here, and meat is processed. Isn't that why the plants are called meat processing plants?

Kat Kerlin

I always thought of those examples as like a food going through a process like canning, boiling, slicing or dicing. Not the same thing as a processed food.

Amy Quinton

But they make pizza sauce loaded with all sorts of ingredients at some tomato processing plants, and then there's the deli meat made at meat processing plants.

Kat Kerlin

Yeah, it can be confusing, and it's certainly not well defined. Nowadays practically all food is processed in some sense.

Amy Quinton

A researcher in Brazil attempted to cut through the confusion in 2009 by grouping foods based on the extent and purpose of industrial processing. The goal was not so much to categorize food but to use it as a tool to understand the health implications of different industrial processes.

Kat Kerlin

It's called the NOVA classification system. We asked Professor Alyson Mitchell in our Food Science and Technology Department about these classifications.

Amy Quinton

Alyson says category one includes unprocessed or minimally processed foods.

Alyson Mitchell

So that might be something like an apple or a dried apricot or maybe a carrot. You wash the carrot. These are foods that are minimally processed, which includes drying, washing things like that, but you haven't modified the basic food stuff, so you haven't added anything to it. It is still the same food item.

Kat Kerlin

And category two foods are processed culinary ingredients. These are things like oils, butter, sugar, salt. They're ingredients that you might add to your category one foods, but likely not eat them on their own.

Amy Quinton

I did eat a thing of butter once. I was a baby, didn't know any better.

Kat Kerlin

There's no judgment in this podcast.

Amy Quinton

So when you combine category one foods with the culinary ingredients of category two foods, you get processed foods. And Alyson gave an example of a category three food using peas.

Alyson Mitchell

So you might take those peas, you might wash them, then you might add some salt and water, and then you would can them, and you've created a product that's no longer, you know, highly perishable, like the original peas, but you've got now a canned food that can last two years. That would be a NOVA classification three a processed foods.

Kat Kerlin

Alyson says the purpose of a processed food is to preserve its shelf life. It can include foods made or preserved through baking, bottling, canning, boiling or fermenting. And then the final category under NOVA are ultra-processed foods.

Amy Quinton

Ultra-processed foods are just components of foods, formulated and industrial produced using ingredients you won't find in your kitchen.

Alyson Mitchell

You're using emulsifiers, and you're using flavoring agents,

Amy Quinton

and you're using hydrogenated oils and synthetic colors

Alyson Mitchell

and texture improvers and things like that, things that actually modify the food and make you want to eat it, you know, but it's not a food. It's a formulated food.

Kat Kerlin

Alyson says ultra-processed foods are designed not just to make you want to eat it, but designed to make you want more.

Amy Quinton

The foods often drive your appetite through magical additives like MSG. Reminds me of that commercial marketed me as a kid, the Lay's potato chip commercial.

Kat Kerlin

oh yeah, Bet you can't eat just One.

Amy Quinton

I found it.

Commercial 

Commercial

One potato two potato, three potato, four, just one Lay's potato chip, makes you want much more.

Kat Kerlin

They warned us.

Kat Kerlin

I don't remember that one. I think that's been their slogan for forever, but that's a great find. Well, Alyson says the purpose of ultra-processed foods has very little to do with shelf life.

Alyson Mitchell

The only purpose is to create a new food, or a food that mimics a food that is made from pieces of foods that are held together by industrial ingredients. And the purpose is not necessarily to improve the safety or improve the shelf life of the food. It's to sell a food product. It's to make money off of the food.

Kat Kerlin

Yeah, yeah. Kind of unappetizing. When you put it like that.

Amy Quinton

It's kind of crazy. But can we say these ultra-processed foods are actually unhealthy for you?

Kat Kerlin

Alyson says your body is getting a lot more than just extra sugar and salt.

Alyson Mitchell

A lot of the technologies that we're using are restructuring molecules and creating molecules we've never been exposed to before. What we can say is we know that as we've modified the diet in such a drastic way in such a short period of time, we are seeing increases in metabolic disorder and cardiovascular disease.

Kat Kerlin

Most studies show an association between consumption and obesity, some cancers, gastrointestinal diseases and even depression.

Amy Quinton