Prof Sarah Berry

speaker

966 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 3d ago

Prof Sarah Berry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

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ZOE Science & Nutrition · The science behind food that isn’t food, why you love it and why you should not fear it all | Prof Tim Spector & Prof Sarah Berry · 10 Sep 2026 podcast

So yes, it shows it's safe.

But actually what we've done is gone that step further and looked at all the latest human studies to say, okay, it might be safe and not immediately causing us cancer.

But is there now some suggestion that it might increase our risk of metabolic ill health or or impact our microbiome negatively?

I think my top tip that I always give to people is does it look like

The original food that it came from.

has the texture been changed so that it's very soft, almost pre digested.

I would caution against just focusing on the number of additives and emulsifiers because you could have a food that has

one additive that we know isn't particularly good for you versus a food that might have three or four that we know are actually inert and harmless.

So that's why it is so complex.

And there's lots more to think about as well as a processing score.

We still know that actually nutrients do matter.

So for example, if you were taking lard or beef tallow, we know it's packed with saturated fat.

And although it wouldn't be classed as an ultra processed food, it's still bad for us.

And so I really want to highlight that if people are using our app, that it does also as well as include the processing food risk score, all these other features of a food, such as the amount of polyphenols, the fibre in the food, the other nutrients and so forth.

What we've done is actually validated in our own research from our own ZOE predict studies whether those foods that are in this higher risk category are actually associated with unfavourable health effects.

And we've looked at this in thousands of people and what we've found is people who are consuming more of this high risk processed food according to our classification system.

tend to have higher BMI.

They tend to have a higher weight, they tend to have higher levels of inflammation, which I think is really interesting.

And they also have a more unfavourable gut microbiome composition.

And then when we find people who are consuming more of the processed food that fits into our low risk or no risk, we see the converse.

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