Jessica Knurick

When I got into this field, I started really trying to understand what can we do to reduce risk of chronic disease.

That was really my goal when I first started graduate school.

And what I realized really quickly was we have actually a lot of great data on how to prevent and reduce risk of chronic disease.

What we don't have is people actually adopting those behaviors.

And so I think one of the things has to do with it's difficult to get people to adopt.

You know, it's a difficult thing to do and to adopt healthful eating and to get eight hours of sleep a night and all of the things that we would say reduce risk of disease.

But also more than that, you kind of have to look at the systems in our country because we have to look at our systems set up for more people to succeed or for more people to fail.

And a lot of times people are kind of swimming upstream trying to make these healthful decisions.

And so I think that plays into it too.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, so ultra-processed food, that definition, first of all, we don't have a regulatory definition for what that means.

So I think the FDA is trying to establish some sort of definition.

But in the science world, we do have a definition.

It comes from the NOVA classification, which is a research group out of Brazil.

And so if you ever see research studies talking about ultra-processed food, it's most likely using that definition.

And so it categorizes foods into four different foods.

So there's unprocessed, minimally processed, processed, and ultra-processed.

And the definition of ultra-process is just simply it includes an ingredient or a processing method that you don't have access to.

So you can't replicate it in your kitchen.

So that's a huge variability of food, right?