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Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

One of the big reasons that ultra-processed foods have become so widespread is convenience.

They offer quick, easy meals for people short on time, and few groups are more time-pressed than parents trying to feed young children.

But does this convenience come at a cost?

I'm joined by Harvard professor Dr. Andrew Chan, whose research is helping us understand how early exposure to ultra-processed food can shape future health.

There's some new studies that say around 50% of the food that we cook at home is now ultra-processed.

And so that says it's not just, you know, when we're out and about, we actually need to be worried about what we're buying in the supermarket and taking home.

So I'd actually love to go down to this individual study that you published very recently on ultra-processed food that you ran at Harvard, because I think it helps us to understand one of our most common listener questions, which is like, are these ultra-processed foods making us sicker at a younger age?

And I understand that you chose a very particular group of people to study, namely kids.

Why did you choose to study kids?

Because I think children are really active, so surely they can get away with eating a lot of this sort of junky food without bad effects.

And when you say younger people, the older I get, the more I want that to include me.

What do younger people mean as you're talking about that as a doctor and a scientist?

Could you maybe summarize the study, what you did and the findings?

So this is like a 35-year study at this point.

I heard you mention that it's not just that you're eating more calories if you're eating this UPF, if I understood rightly, that sort of the quality of the food is something that, you know, you were saying actually really makes a difference.

And could you help us to understand that?

You're working on this team that's studying the rise of these early onset cancers.

You think that diet in general and potentially UPFs in particular might be part of this rise?

And Andy, you're very calm as you say that, but if I just understood what you said, you're saying consumption of UPF, like eating more UPF is associated with a higher risk of my getting tumors in my body.