Dr Norman Swan

speaker

26,995 appearances 288 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2006 last heard 15 Sep

Dr Norman Swan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

What's That Rash? · What is ultra-processed food? · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

It's actually quite hard for people to maintain their weight.

So it's essentially the whole wholesome, as in W-H-O, wholesome nature of unprocessed foods.

And the other aspect of this that we haven't discussed is mental health.

It's been increasingly recognized that the microbiome has a lot to do with mental health as well.

And there is some research which suggests that greater exposure to ultra-processed foods at the extreme, which is what we're talking about here, highly processed, gets straight into your bloodstream, changes the microbiome, can affect your sleep and can affect depression and anxiety as well.

Yeah, and it's not just the ultra-processed foods that you're eating, but there is some evidence that you're getting an increased consumption of plastics in them as well.

We have.

Definitely.

Well, the answer is no, we're not.

And I would point to the second part of the Four Corners series on food, which is talking about regulation.

We've known for a while that there's a real problem with food regulation in Australia.

We crow and boast about how safe our food supply is.

But the reality is we've got representatives of the global food industry on our food standards organisation, Food Standards Australia and New Zealand, FASANS.

And it's interesting that they talk about standards, but not food health, Australia and New Zealand.

You would not have the tobacco industry or the alcohol industry on bodies that are controlling tobacco and alcohol.

But we've got the food industry influencing policy.

And so one of the problems now that we face in Australia is that the star system is gamed by the food industry.

Well, I think it is a bad thing to disagree.

So why it's a bad thing is they don't change the ultra-processed nature of the food that they're making.

They'll throw in a vitamin or two or they'll throw in some carbohydrates or they'll swap some sugars for different kinds of sugars just to fit with the categorization rather than zooming out and saying, what is this food?

Showing 841–860 of 26,995 · page 43 of 1350