Dr. Sarah Berry
speaker
566 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 18 Dec
Dr. Sarah Berry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
the helpfulness of the chemicals and nutrients within the food and it's really really relevant now it's really relevant now because our food landscape has changed almost unrecognizably to 50 100 200 years ago we're now eating a lot of food where the food matrix the structure of the food has changed and this is because we use multiple different processing techniques so
So in simple terms, it's that we are changing often through processing the structure of the food. Now, by processing, it could be our own processing. When we chew a food, we change the structure. Take a nut, for example, you have a whole nut, you chew it, you break up the nut, it goes into your gastrointestinal tract, it's broken down further.
We also change it using manual industrial techniques as well. So we use techniques like grinding or we might use pasteurization for dairy or, you know, extrusion for some carbohydrate-rich foods. We use all of these different techniques that also change the food matrix.
It's a double-edged sword.
And I think this is what we need to remember, that everyone's demonizing at the moment. Old processed food, you know, it's killing the nation. 60% of our energy is coming from old processed food. Yes, we are eating too much unhealthy food, much of which has been heavily processed, but processing can also be used to our benefit. And we have to think, why do we even process food in the first place?
Well, we process it to make it edible. I don't want to go and eat a rice grain that's not been cooked. We make it safe. I want to drink pasteurized milk because I know it's safer. We want to make it stable. I think how long a can can last and frozen vegetables versus fresh. So you're saving food waste. We want to make it taste good and we want to make it convenient.
So there's all of these different reasons that we use food processing. But when we think about the healthfulness of a food, We need to think about it in terms of the processing techniques that have been used, as well as the nutrient composition. We can't look at them in isolation, in my opinion. And this is what I've done a lot of research looking into.
I think processing gone bad is when you've changed the nutrient profile of a food such that It is unhealthy, so in simple terms, it's too much saturated fat, too much salt, too little fibre, too little bioactives like polyphenols, a food that is very energy dense. So you eat it really, really quickly. So you're eating too many calories.
You're eating it before your hunger signals have got to your brain to say, whoa, Stephen, you've had enough. And there's great research that has been looking at how processing can affect your eating rate, the energy density of food, the nutrient profile of a food. And that's where it can go wrong.
But where it can go right is you can improve all of those things I've said, the stability, the safety of the food. You can also increase what we call bioaccessibility, so the availability of some of the nutrients within a food as well.
So I think all of these first three foods, the crisps, the chocolate, the cookies, you know, if compared to what would be a healthy food, they've all got less fibre. They've all got, well, certainly the chocolate and the cookie has got more sugar. They won't have all of the wonderful bioactives in them. And then with the crisps, depending on the type of crisps, it's probably quite high in salt.
But the chances are with those three is that they are quite energy dense. So they have quite a lot of calories per gram, which is partly because of the processing techniques. Yet if you take a whole food like a nut, now they're actually very energy dense. So they're very high in fat. They're high in calories.
But actually, because they're in their original food matrix, how your body handles them is quite different to if, for example, they had been processed.
Yeah, so there's lots of different mechanisms that impact how full we feel, how hungry we feel related to a food. There's different hormones that are released from different areas of our gut, for example, that feedback signals to say either you're full or you're hungry. On average, I would say it takes about 10 to 20 minutes for the fullness to really properly kick in.
Now, you could easily have got through those. Well, I could easily have got through all of these in under that 20 minutes.
So there are many people who will say the food industry has specifically designed these to make them firstly what we call hyperpalatable. So to have the right mix of fat, sugar, you know, carbohydrate, etc. To make them really tasty and in this case salt as well. I don't think the food industry is out there to get us.
I think that what the food industry were doing 50 years ago versus what they're doing now is quite different. but some people will say I'm very naive. I do believe the food industry ultimately want to produce food that's safe but also healthy for us. That's probably an unpopular opinion, but based on my interactions with the food industry, I believe that.
However, I do believe that these crisps are there, have been made to be flavoursome, to be palatable to you, so that you do enjoy them. Now, whether that's that you then go and overeat them, I think is, yes, a by-product of that.
um now it's not it doesn't take 20 minutes for all of the fullness signals to kick in because as soon as you start chewing something you start to release different hormones and different sensory characteristics of the food will also trigger some sort of fullness but what we do know is that you have more of these fullness receptors saying hey you're full lower down in your
If you can get food to the lower gastrointestinal tract, that's when it says, hey, Stephen, you're full now. And these heavily processed snacks that you've got here would be typically absorbed higher up the gastrointestinal tract because kind of the hard work's been done.
Showing 81–100 of 566 · page 5 of 29
← Previous
Next →