Ultra-process foods are a new and emerging area of research in public health because they've been linked to a lot of adverse health outcomes in relation to human health. Basically, there's lots of evidence showing that over-consumption of ultra-process foods can make us really sick. It can change the way our brains respond to foods, change our palettes, and lots of other areas that can impact our health and wellness as whole. So in this video, I'm going to quickly show you what ultra-process foods are and what the evidence is about how they're harming our health and what we can do about that. Ultra-process foods are industrially processed using a lot of preservatives and they can often be high in salt, fat sugars. Ultra-process foods also have additional chemicals added to them usually to preserve the foods. They've also gone through a number of chemical processes and potentially have a lot of additives. A really good way to test if you are buying an ultra-process food is to have a quick look at the ingredients. If there's like a lot of ingredients, so if you've got 30 ingredients for a pizza, then you can probably look at that and think, is that quite a process food? It's a bit of an indicator that it probably is due to the sheer number of ingredients because a lot of those ingredients will be things like preservatives or things that are involved in processes when the other food is being manufactured. If you have a look at any kind of frozen food or any kind of food that has a long shelf life, you can often see that there are lots of preservatives and enumbers and other kinds of chemical-associated processes in the ingredient list. So that's the first way to detect. Another good way is how ready to eat is it. So you'll often find that foods that are ready to eat, ready to cook. Anything that's kind of readily accessible, you don't need to cook from scratch. Often has a lot of these ingredients that can make it ultra-processed. So the interesting distinction with ultra-process food is that it's not just about nutritional content. It's about the way in which the food is made and what industrial processes were applied to those food types. So it is interesting because it's a relatively new and emerging area of research and Brazil is taking quite big steps towards the population intake of ultra-processed foods and a lot of countries are starting to look at this now as a public health issue. And that's predominantly due to the high number of adverse health outcomes. Adverse health outcomes associated with ultra-process foods include things like weight gain. That's the main one. The big one that a lot of the studies are showing is that there is an increase in BMI for both adults and children who consume a lot of ultra-processed foods. Other associated factors include cancers, diabetes, depression, lethargy and a change in palate. So this isn't necessarily an adverse health outcome as such but there are some evidence to show that chronic consumption of hyper-palitable food, so food that tastes like really good and it's been designed specifically with the right amount of sugar, the right amount of crunch, the right amount of softness. So there's some really serious science goes behind making foods hyper-palitable. When you become used to consuming hyper-palitable foods your brain will reflect this and you will build new neural pathways that will always seek out whether you realise it or not other ultra-processed foods. So there's a few papers that I've been recently that have looked at this in children and what it seems to highlight is that for sea children who only like certain types of food are those children who have historically been consuming large quantities of ultra-processed foods. So when a child is exposed to chronic levels of UPS, ultra-processed foods then as they grow older their behavior seeks out these similar foods which can be more difficult because then they are nutritionally imbalanced and they're not receiving the full nutritional value that they should be getting from better prepared meals. So there are lots of adverse health outcomes associated with consuming ultra-processed foods. Other factors also include things like metabolic syndrome, damage to DNA, but also if you are already overweight then you are giving additional health concerns and health challenges to somebody who is already trying to explore ways to regulate their weight status. So what are the categories of ultra-processed foods? The first category is natural ingredients and these are called unprocessed or minimally processed foods and these are things that are in their natural and raw formats so things like nuts, fruits, vegetables, even if the food is chilled or frozen that's also clashes a group one food. Then you've got group two foods and these are things that are partially processed or processed culinary ingredients. So these are things that you need to cook a full meal with so things like oils, butters, fats, sugars, molasses, honey, maple syrup and salts. And these are ingredients that you wouldn't necessarily eat on the ones you wouldn't necessarily eat salt or oil on its own but they are important when you're making a meal from scratch. So ideally a lot of the foods that we should eat should come from group one and group two and group three and very limited from group four. Group three includes things that have been sort of processed so these are things that you might find like canned vegetables, legumes, vinegars, things that are pickled, vegetable extracts, tomato paste, meats and bacon. These are from group three and group three is classified as processed foods because these foods have gone through some kind of processing but they're very different from when we get to group four and group four is the ultra-processed foods. And ultra-processed foods are things that have been linked to these adverse health outcomes in humans. And examples of these include things like microwave meals, pre-packaged foods, ready to eat foods. So there's a lot of evidence to show that these ultra-processed foods can be have negative impact on our health. What the international communities and governments such as Brazil and Uruguay are recommending is that we limit our consumption from group four products and work on building the majority of our diet from foods that you will find in groups one, two and three. So basically cooking from scratch to improve our overall health and wellness. This is also interesting because there's also a lot of emerging research around the role of plastics and microplastics in our food. And what you'll often find is that a lot of ultra-processed food is stored in plastic containers like microeval meals. It's this degradation of the plastic under high heats that evidence is emerging to show that some of these plastics can also be harmful to our health. And also our mental health so there's obviously some emerging papers around the role of ultra-processed food in depression but we've also seen that in studies around depression people who exhibit depressive symptoms also have a diet that is not made of foods from groups one, two and three, or that it's very limited in its foods from one, two and three. So there are lots of interlinking factors relating to mental health, metabolic disease, work in consumption of plastics. So I hope you find this interesting. I'm actually just writing this section up in my thesis as I make this video. So if you are interested in any of the information or any of the references, I'll pop them in the box below so you can check the references and read some of these papers for yourself. And if you want me to make a more in-depth video around the brain science around ultra-processed foods and what's available in the evidence currently, let me know because I'm also writing that section as well. So thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one.