Prof Tim Spector
speaker
1,755 appearances
15 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
Prof Tim Spector’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 4.
Appearances
So they started adding little bits of sugar and uh other ingredients to cigarettes to make them even more addictive.
And the early processing companies were all a lot of them were owned by the smoking industry.
So this is what they do and what this group tested
was whether foods that contained this magic combination of the salts and the fats in these exact proportions, which have been worked out by these brilliant scientists, uh actually made a difference in real life.
And they told twenty-nine participants to basically take pictures of their food
for four days, using an app a bit like Zoe's, so that it would capture the foods and then they then analyzed those foods and saw how many of them were
what we call hyper palatable by this definition.
And it turned out that those uh people
that were having hyperpalatable foods were uh overeating uh by about uh three hundred calories um per day, more than the people who were having the non hyperpalatable foods, and it didn't matter how hungry or not they were at the beginning.
So it was
Independent of hunger levels.
So these chemically produced magic mixtures, you know, that extra bit of salt and fat that they put into biscuits and things, just made people eat more than their hunger levels were really suggesting they should do.
And this was the first real-life study testing this theory that a key component of ultra-processed foods is this mixture.
Mixture of these common ingredients to produce this bliss point that just lights up our reward centres and dampens down our fullness centres.
It's the carbs, it's the fat, and it's the salt.
You put those three in the right combination, it's irresistible.
I'd like
In the UK at the moment there's no guidelines that tell you to avoid ultra processed food.
They might say avoid high fat foods like burgers and pizza, but they wouldn't tell you
Anything more broadly that there's certain types of food with lots of processing you should avoid.
Showing 241–260 of 1,755 · page 13 of 88
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