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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance. Now, have you heard of this term, hidden hunger? Well, in simple terms, it's when we're eating plenty of food, but we're not getting the nutrients that our bodies need. Some experts warn that ultra-processed foods are a major culprit in this regard.
For more on this, I'm joined by Dr. Amalia Scannell, who's a microbiologist at the UCD Institute of Food and Health. You're very welcome to the show, Amalia. So we're eating a lot, but we're not getting what we need. Is that right?
Chapter 2: What does the term 'hidden hunger' mean?
Not all of us, but a large number of us in the population, that would be true. And this has been going on for quite some time. So back into the 2009, so the start of this whole century situation, a guy in Brazil called Carlos Monteiro noticed that in Brazil, hunger was going down, but diabetes was going up. And he was trying to work out what the hell was going on with that. And ultimately...
discovered that a lot of people were eating a lot of food, but not a lot of nourishment. And he grouped the foods into four different categories. So you have the unprocessed foods, so you know, your meat and two veg kind of dinners.
Chapter 3: How are ultra-processed foods contributing to nutrient deficiencies?
Then your processed ingredients, so oils and butters, the things where we have natural foods that we do something to, so it will work for us in a product or last longer. And then you have the processed foods like breads and things, And finally, the last group, which is the ultra-processed foods. And these are trickier ones because they're very tasty.
So they're full of sugar and they're full of salt. And they're very, I don't want to use the word addictive, but we all really love these things like crisps, things like pizzas, ready meals. They're full of flavor. And what they're not full of is, a lot of the time, whole ingredients. So you have extraction ingredients. So you'll have modified starches,
chemicals, emulsifiers and things like that added in. And there's nothing wrong with them. They're all good ingredients, but they're in there because food itself has to perform in a way that whole foods don't. So it has to last a long time. It might need to be reconstituted or dehydrated. It might need to be frozen and like for the doughs and come back out.
So they need things that if you're making fresh, they don't need. And that's a kind of a A conundrum, because now we have food that lasts a long time and satisfies our hunger, but a lot of people are now ending up with a lot of micronutrient deficiency as a consequence. So we're not getting enough of our vitamins, enough of our minerals. And more increasingly too, fibre is a big problem as well.
So with those foods that you described, the very processed foods, our bodies don't have to work very hard, do they, to either ingest or digest those foods? And is that a problem as well?
Well, the digestion part, your body knows how to digest food and it'll digest any of the foods. The real problem is what's happening when you digest it. So you're digesting it down to the brass tax components very quickly. So your starch will digest down to sugars, your protein will digest down to amino acids. And they'll happen high up in your gut.
So there's not a lot of things left to feed the microbiome in your hindgut that is really responsible for such a large proportion of our health, messaging to the brain, messaging to our immune systems. So things like fiber go down there and feed those bacteria. Those bacteria then can interact with your body in a way that with the high processed foods, it doesn't happen in that way.
And it's really tricky for people because we see a lot of people with things like anemia because all of these have very, very little iron in them because the amount of red meat and stuff that's in these processed foods is very small because they're on profit margins.
So if you have a meat pizza, I'm using pizza just because it's a very obvious high processed food, the really good quality proteins aren't in it. and you're getting reductions. And things like vitamin B12 and minerals, all of those tend to be very low because they're stripped out during the processing situation.
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Chapter 4: What categories of food did Carlos Monteiro identify?
We're all time poor. We're working very hard. And people need to be able to reach for something to feed them. So People are stressed and we can't really shame people for needing the convenience. So what we need to try and do is we need to say, okay, we need to make our healthy food as convenient as the ultra-high processed food that doesn't have the nutritious value of food.
So we need to be giving people their fiber, giving people their vitamins in a convenient way but in a way that is also then going to be healthy.
So what does that look like?
Well, there's a whole bunch of ways. So in UCD, we're leading a project called Healthy Oats, and its acronym is HOPE, which I like. And what we hope to do is we hope to take a local product with very low miles, so oats and Irish heritage oats, which are specific to our country.
And what we want to do is we want to grow them and grow them so that they're full of basic glucans, which are soluble fibers that are clinically proven to help your gut and antioxidants that are proven to help absorb free radicals that cause cell damage and then cancer and other issues. So what we're doing is one of our partners is optimizing that growth process
And then what we're going to do with that is we're going to get in touch with the Irish consumers, and we're doing it at the moment. We have a survey out that we're contacting them to say, okay, guys, what is it you want by way of a healthy product? What would you eat? What wouldn't you eat? What's working and what doesn't work?
And then what we're going to do is we're going to take these oats, we're going to produce products that are consumer-led, and then what we're going to do with that is we're going to make sure that those are formulated to have high quality fiber, high bioactivity, which are good flora. So it's going to be really cool.
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Chapter 5: Why are ultra-processed foods considered problematic?
And then for certain criteria of the population, certain demographics, we're going to then further supplement the product so that let's say you're a young woman who has anemia and there's a large number, about a third of young women are suffering from anemia because they're not getting enough iron.
we might target a product to those people that is healthy, convenient, and will give them the supplementation that they need.
So is that, sorry to cut across you, Molly, but is that genetically modifying food?
No, no, no, not at all.
Because I know in India, that is what they are doing, isn't it, with pearl millet, where they're increasing the iron content to try and address this so foods are convenient, available and healthy at the same time.
Yeah, well, we don't really have the genetic modification on board here in Europe, so we don't have the ability to do that. And there's nothing actually, in my opinion, wrong with doing that.
it can be very valuable but what we're actually doing is we're selecting through selecting the seeds and the varieties that grow best in Ireland for climate change already and without interrupting their own genetics because there's lots of worries about biodiversity and environmental issues that might or might not come with that but what we're actually doing is we will fortify the actual product not the grain so that the grain is what the grain is
and the fortification comes later. But what we're going to do is a lot of products are fortified with vitamins and minerals and iron and things like that. But one of the things is that, you know, it's like the labelling says, it has X amount of iron. But the bioavailability of the type that's added isn't always going to allow you to absorb that much iron.
So what we want to do is to make sure that what's on the packet is what we can prove gets absorbed.
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