Tegan (host)

speaker

573 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Tegan (host)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

What's That Rash? · What is ultra-processed food? · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

So there's sort of a scenario that you could imagine where two people have got their shopping trolleys.

One's got instant noodles, hot dogs, ice cream, soft drinks, and the other has bread and breakfast cereal and reduced fat peanut butter and fruit-flavored yogurt.

And there's a scenario in which both of those trolleys are full of ultra-processed foods, even though one looks healthier than the other.

So you're gesturing at part of the question, which is, are they harmful?

And at least in some instances, what you're saying to me says maybe yes.

And part of Carmen's question was, should they be labelled as such?

So maybe before we get to labelling and we get to policy and all that sort of thing, let's talk about what we know about the health effects of ultra-processed foods.

And I do want to just sort of forewarn, we are absolutely going to sprinkle a very, very healthy dose of nuance over this, but let's just talk about broad brushstrokes, what we know.

Okay.

Part of the question was really about whether there's something special about ultra-processing the process or if it's just the fact that a lot of these foods tend to have high levels of fat, salt and sugar in them, which whether they were ultra-processed or not is possibly going to lead to a lot of these same health effects.

Well, yeah, exactly.

I mean, the one that springs to mind for me, it's from about five or six years ago now, where basically they had two groups of people and they kind of locked them away for four weeks, which we don't often get to do with food studies.

Often food studies are asking people what they've been eating.

People are notoriously bad at remembering and reporting that.

And so they had, it's quite a small study, but they managed to basically control every morsel that went in these people's mouths.

And for two weeks, one group was given ultra processed foods.

So things like frozen lasagnas and cereals and those sorts of things, cakes and that sort of stuff.

And you could eat as much or as little as you wanted over that time.

And the other group was given

sort of the equivalent kinds of food, but not ultra processed.

Showing 61–80 of 573 · page 4 of 29