Dr. Amalia Scannell

They're all good ingredients, but they're in there because food itself has to perform in a way that whole foods don't.

So it has to last a long time.

It might need to be reconstituted or dehydrated.

It might need to be frozen and like for the doughs and come back out.

So they need things that if you're making fresh, they don't need.

And that's a kind of a

A conundrum, because now we have food that lasts a long time and satisfies our hunger, but a lot of people are now ending up with a lot of micronutrient deficiency as a consequence.

So we're not getting enough of our vitamins, enough of our minerals.

And more increasingly too, fibre is a big problem as well.

Well, the digestion part, your body knows how to digest food and it'll digest any of the foods.

The real problem is what's happening when you digest it.

So you're digesting it down to the brass tax components very quickly.

So your starch will digest down to sugars, your protein will digest down to amino acids.

And they'll happen high up in your gut.

So there's not a lot of things left to feed the microbiome in your hindgut that is really responsible for such a large proportion of our health, messaging to the brain, messaging to our immune systems.

So things like fiber go down there and feed those bacteria.

Those bacteria then can interact with your body in a way that with the high processed foods, it doesn't happen in that way.

And it's really tricky for people because we see a lot of people with things like anemia because all of these have very, very little iron in them because the amount of red meat and stuff that's in these processed foods

is very small because they're on profit margins.

So if you have a meat pizza, I'm using pizza just because it's a very obvious high processed food, the really good quality proteins aren't in it.