Professor Sarah Berry

But more importantly, we need to consider the food it's in.

Yeah.

So I would say that you could have foods that contain the same fatty acid composition, so an animal fat and some particular other tropical oils, for example, that contain the same fatty acid composition.

but could have different impacts on health outcomes because of the source, because of the matrix that they're in has a huge impact.

And so I do think that whilst labeling can be useful, broadly speaking, I think we need to be very, very careful to not be too caught up on labeling.

And there's an example I often use to do with almonds.

Now, this isn't related to the fatty acid composition, but it's related to how I think

being preoccupied by labeling can actually potentially even make us select more unfavorable health choices.

So if we were to consume whole almonds, almonds have a very special matrix.

They have a very rigid cell structure.

So what happens is that remains intact largely as we chew them and they pass through our digestive tract.

And we only absorb about 60% of the energy.

So about 40, 30% of the

energy and fat is excreted.

So it reaches our large intestine where it's great food for our microbiome, which is fabulous, but also it's a lot lower energy.

Now, if we were to grind those almonds up, so we break this magic matrix, we break the cell walls, we release all the fat, we're going to absorb everything.

And so that you suddenly have a food that has about a 30 to 40% higher energy content

in terms of what we're absorbing than the whole almonds.

However, if I was to go into a supermarket and look at a bag that had whole almonds intact, as we typically would consume for a snack, versus the whole almonds ground up, like we might use as an ingredient,

the back-of-pack labeling would show that they had identical energy values.