Kelly Garton

humans have been processing foods for millennia.

And, you know, usually it's taking like raw, unprocessed or minimally processed ingredients, combining it with things like salt or

sugar or, you know, using different processes to ferment or preserve or, you know, cook, extending shelf life.

And, you know, that's the kind of thing we've been doing forever.

What's more recent is the advent of ultra-processed foods.

So these are commercial formulations that

made from cheap ingredients that are extracted or derived from whole foods and combined with additives, but they mostly contain little to no whole food in the end product.

So, you know, you can identify them by seeing long lists of ingredients on packaged food and drinks, and also usually ingredients that you wouldn't see in a home kitchen.

So these are really, you know, rely on industrial processing to make.

Well, first of all, research has shown that ultra-processed foods is taking on a larger and larger share of our diets, particularly in high-income countries like New Zealand.

We don't have a recent dietary nutrition survey telling us exactly how much we're consuming, but other similar countries like Australia, Canada, UK, it's about 50% of people's energy intake.

And we know that dietary patterns that are high in ultra-processed food increase the risk of developing a wide range of serious health conditions.

And we've known for a long time, the research has been there that

Consuming a lot of ultra-processed foods is bad for us, but we still seem to be consuming a lot.

You know, consumption continues to stay high and stable, and it's increasing in many lower- and middle-income countries.

So we were really curious at looking at, like, why is this still so high and stable in our food system?

And we were really interested in sort of what the deeper, you know, patterns and feedback loops might be behind that.

Yeah, so what we did was we looked over a decade of literature that described sort of the way ultra-processed foods are designed and the way they're marketed and how those factors influenced consumption.

And there's a growing body of literature around this.

It's interesting, a lot of this is not...