Neha Pathak, MD, FACP, DipABLM: Welcome to the WebMD Health Discovered Podcast. I'm Dr Neha Pathak, WebMD's Chief Physician Editor for Health and Lifestyle Medicine. Today, we're continuing our conversation with Dr Barry Smith on ultra-processed foods. In this episode, we pick up where we left off. Last time, we learned how ultra-processed food companies hijack our brains and our bodies, making us crave these unhealthy combinations of chemicals by enhancing the aroma, flavors, and experience when we eat that type of food. In this episode, he offers us tips and strategies to hijack back our brains and behaviors to shift towards healthier and more enjoyable eating patterns. He'll walk us through mindful eating, where we're encouraged to slow down, savor each bite, and be conscious of what we're consuming. He also recommends bringing back meal time with family recipes and group food prep. These strategies help bring back the joy in mealtime; rather than leaving us feeling rushed and starved for more, they can help us develop a healthier relationship with food where we focus on satisfaction and balance rather than constantly chasing heightened sensory experiences.  

Joining us again today is my guest, Dr Barry Smith. Dr Smith is the founding director of the Center for the Study of the Senses, where he works with psychologists and neuroscientists to understand how taste, smell, and touch combine with other senses to create our experiences of flavor. Building on what we just discussed about the importance of social connection for our health and how the opposite, loneliness, can be so detrimental. I can't help but reflect on my own upbringing. My parents were also very busy raising two kids and juggling life, but a big part of our cultural heritage was cooking meals together. Simple tasks like washing lentils for me and my brother, or watching my father, who's now 88, taking the time every morning to make chai. It's a 20 to 30-minute ritual. And it's just much more than a routine. There are moments of connection. Do you think reclaiming these traditional communal approaches to food prep could be a key to breaking this cycle of disconnection? How do we hijack back our food culture to reconnect with these healthier, more mindful practices?   

Barry C. Smith, PhD, MA: I like hijacking back. I think that's right. But what you're pointing out is terribly important: that food cultures prized the making and the creating of the food as well as the eating of it. We've become a very impatient society of late with busy people and not much time. It starts as food starts as fuel, but then it's pacification as well. Can I just feed myself, give myself that quick hit, and then I can feel a little bit better? Whereas the emotions of food cultures that are rich in making chai or making lentil curries and dal and spending time doing it, think of the Italian food culture, which is enormously about the preparation, the way of doing it, there's a right way to do it in this city or this village, and it was done differently in that village, as well as French food culture. These food cultures don't have so many diet-related diseases because the emotions around food are about sociality. 

They were about connection. They were about the love and meaningfulness of food because it was prepared and grown, and we know where it came from, and we liked how people made it. Whereas in a slightly more online age where a lot of people are eating alone and looking at screens, it is about pacification, and the emotion of eating is about a hit or a reward. Food companies are not unaware of the fact that the reward is part of it. Part of also what I think is worrying when we have substitute ingredients for real ingredients is that when you have savory snacks, they often have umami-tasting flavors. Umami is the fifth basic taste, along with salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. We've got that savoriness of foods, and you have it in soy sauce, and you have it in cheeses and in tomatoes and all sorts of things. But to make a savory snack delicious, they will often put versions of glutamates and, on the other side, nucleotides, which are found in foods. Glutamates and nucleotides are two different kinds of umami, but when they combine, they make our umami receptors fire to the max, and they give us that feeling that this food is delicious, and they turn out to be in lots of different familiar dishes that people love. So you get tomato and anchovies or tomato and beef in Italian dishes. You have ham and cheese, bacon and egg, pea puree, and scallops. These are well-known dishes in the West, and chefs seem to know intuitively that putting these flavors together makes something delicious. Now, in savory snacks, you'll often have. Monosodium glutamate, MSG, which is the glutamate, and then if you look at the ingredients of some of these savory snacks, you'll see disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, and those are the nucleotides. 

So, you're getting that combination of umami, which is called synergistic umami, putting those two types of umami ingredients together and making something utterly delicious. But, when we're getting those in natural foods, it's a signal to the brain that protein is coming because these are proteins from fish or meat or lentils, but they're not there when we're just adding them as flavorings. What then happens is people start eating their snacks out of the bag, out of the tube, and so on. The brain tells them, I'm going to get this big protein hit. It doesn't come. And you might go on eating because you might be trying to extract something that's not really there, but you were getting a signal it was there, and you were expecting it. I think if you relate that to obesity, the sad fact about people struggling with obesity is they're overfed and undernourished. 

So they're often eating more food but not getting the nutrients and nourishment they need. That might be because they're getting signals from the food that it's got some of those ingredients. They're not there. And it's as though we go on trying to extract them. I think that's a bad cycle to be in. Try to give people foods that give them the things they really have. Similarly, when we have food companies trying to reduce salt, fat, or sugar, that sounds good. And you say, okay, well, let's reduce the sugar. So we'll now put nonnutritive sweeteners in there, like sucralose or aspartame or any of these artificial sweeteners. 

The trouble is, our tongue detects them and says, ah, sweet. Our brain then thinks, I'm gonna have a lot of sugar. And then you start producing insulin. But of course, the sugar doesn't come, and the body feels cheated because it hasn't got the hit it was promised. So when it gets the carbohydrates or the fats in there, it holds onto them and stores them because it thinks I need this. It turns out that diet sodas are more likely to fatten you if you have them with meals than if you have them between meals. This is a terrible irony because somebody is about to have the burger and fries. Thinking, I don't want to overdo it, give me a diet soda. And that's the worst combination because that signal to the brain of "I'm getting a lot of sugar." You'd be better off having the regular thing because when you're eating, comes the point where you think, I've had enough, I'll stop, but notice that you're now bypassing that system. You're hijacking our own intake regulation mechanisms, and that's why we've actually got to stay away from that sort of food. So, there's a straightforward thing people can do. If you can't wean yourself off diet soda, have it between meals, not with meals.  

Pathak: I appreciate that advice, and I'm always looking for practical tips like these to share with my patients. I often suggest checking the number of ingredients on a package—the fewer, the better, as it's usually a sign the food is less processed. But listening to you, I realize that companies are getting smart to this, disguising multiple additives under broad terms like "natural flavorings." When we're trying to cut down on ultra-processed foods without being overly judgmental or restrictive, what should we really be looking for on ingredient labels to make better choices? 

Smith: If there are things you want to eat, try to look for recognizable ingredients without any special categories. I go along the supermarket aisle, and I think, I want potato chips. I'm not going to give up potatoes. I want potato chips. I'll find one that says they're made of corn, oil, and salt. You think, well, that's great. That's what they needed to have in there. Not 10 ingredients and not a lot of natural flavorings. We've lost both the culture of making food and the culture of eating food. We used to have nachos that were made of corn and oil and salts, but we made dips. They were just vehicles to get us to have some guacamole or some salsa, and we would make the salsa, or we'd buy it, and it's almost as if we've got to a stage of thinking, oh, let's just combine it into one product. So instead of going and getting a jar or even making the guacamole, let's just put all that spicy flavor on the taco. And then we've got that powder on its surface, which gives us that huge flavor hit, and everything happens at once. Do you remember that we used to have adverts for shampoo? Why take two shampoos into the shower? You can just combine it in one. We're obsessed with the convenience of this, but actually, people have lost the art of making guacamole, making it the way they like it, and seasoning it to their taste. So instead, they've got these intense flavorings, and they've sort of lost the natural flavorings that they might pay attention to. Also, there's something during an eating experience of dipping things into the chips, and you feel, oh, I want a bigger scoop of that, or I want to go back and have more. We've lost that because we're getting everything delivered in the same vehicle. Don't do that. Try to go for the simpler things and the additions that you add yourself, and then add as much or as little as you want. That's another top tip.  

Pathak: That's a great tip. I also wonder then when part of your advice is to make some of the things that bring you joy. Maybe you are using processed food more as a vehicle to help you get some of the foods like the dip and the salsa. My family has been in Britain for a long time. So, beans on toast were a big thing that my parents made for us growing up. Is there something different about the canned beans? Is there a healthier version that we should be looking for? Sometimes, I look at the back, and I'm not quite sure what the right version is.  

Smith: It's interesting to see places where ultra-processed ingredients turn up that you weren't expecting them. So, like in baked beans. You can have tomatoes and some sugar and some salt and other things. And, of course, the beans in there. But when they've got a number of other ingredients, they've got preservatives or stabilizers or gelling agents, you think, what's that? Why is that being added? I was cooking chili con carne, and I thought, okay, I'll go to the supermarket, and I'll get their own brand of kidney beans and water. You think that's all I want, kidney beans and water. For ages, I was using it. This was after I'd kept away from ultra-processed foods. And now it's very funny; it's as though my physiology, my organism, is attuned to detect when I've had some ultra-processed food that didn't agree with me because I was sort of feeling, Ooh, a bit of a grumbling gut and a little bit of feeling of irritation. Maybe I overdid the chili. But then I looked at the can of the kidney beans, and it had a gelling agent. And I think, why? All I wanted was kidney beans in water, but they wanted to have the gloop and the look of kidney beans. It's interesting that sometimes these things will be done, maybe because they're preservatives and stabilizers, but sometimes it's even to make them have the look and the feel of what we want. Then I had to pay a little bit more to have organic versions, which don't have any of that in there. And you think, why should I pay more for something with less ingredients? That shows you it's not a fair playing field, that the food industry is subsidizing the use of some of these ingredients. Try to find the things that you really want to eat, but try to find them with less ingredients. I'm horrified. I was traveling back on a plane from Bordeaux, where I was examining a PhD candidate, and had to rush to the airport. I missed lunch, annoyingly, and I was starving, and on the plane, they were handing out cheese and ham sandwiches. I thought, great, I'm hungry. I'll definitely eat that. As I was eating it, I thought there should be cheese, ham, and bread, maybe some butter. Then I looked at the ingredients on the back of the wrapping, and it had 30 ingredients in it. I thought, what on Earth is going on in here? There were all sorts of anti-caking agents. There were various kinds of emulsifiers and modified starches there. I just thought why can't we just give people the foods they expect from the description of them and the look of them? This is the thing that's a terrible mismatch. We often think of what we want to eat, and we have descriptions: bread, ham, cheese. That's what we're expecting. We're not expecting all that other stuff. So, we have to be on our guard a little bit and just realize we can have those things without all the extras. But maybe you just have to search or make them yourself.  

Pathak: I think that is the key and critical point. As someone who's trying to feed all these mouths, and sometimes myself, it is that you have an idea. and a lot of us are really trying, to do the right thing. thing or the healthy thing and sometimes it's that food environment where it catches up with you. 

Smith: I think that's right. For convenience reasons, we're often going to cut corners. It's probably not possible to cut ultra-processed ingredients out of all of your food, but we should certainly cut down the amount of them that we're taking in, and you will, I think, feel the benefit and the difference. There are things that you might think of as staples that you have in your cupboard or your refrigerator, and if I have to pull something together, I'll do that. Just try to choose those with a bit of care, too, where you don't always think that they have to be very industrially formatted, readily available, rip off the tin, put them in the microwave, and serve things.  

But it breaks my heart that when people are trying to eat healthily, they may be misled. For example, a lot of these protein bars or fruit and nut bars, people think, Oh, much healthier. Maybe it's the afternoon. I'm having a little dip in my energy level. I need to eat something much better than having a chocolate bar. Often not when you realize how much is going on in them, all the modified starches, all the hydrogenated fats, and everything else that's going in there. I mean, look at the ingredients label when you're picking a food item, like a fruit and nut bar or a mango smoothie or whatever you think it is. That should be the highest ingredient in there. If it's a mango smoothie, mango should be the biggest ingredient. If it turns out it's apple concentrate, that's not a great idea. You're being bluffed. And if fruit and nut are way down the list, you know, it contains only 5%, 10%, well, what's padding it out?  

Even when we're trying hard, I think it's difficult to read labels. It's difficult to know what you're doing. You end up being a little bit obsessive about looking at the back packet. Eventually, you just begin to think that our parents and a lot of the people listening, and their parent's generation were not necessarily equipped or had a tremendous amount of purchasing power; they got a lot of ingredients, and they made things themselves, and they put them in the refrigerator, and they made up a tuna salad with some, chopped up celery in there and a bit of mayonnaise and so on. That would do for sandwiches. You kind of think there was much more invention because they had to. They had to keep thinking of things to do. We want everything fast. We want everything convenient. The trouble is that the food industry has found ways, which they think of as a virtuous circle, to make food familiar, available, and affordable, that lasts a long time, and that is still profitable for them. But it turns out that, although it's affordable and available, if it's not really satisfying us, or we end up being so hungry, we eat more of it than we really know we should or should not or like eating, or if we have lack of energy and we are starting to have health problems further down the line, it's not a good place to be. 

And therefore, we have to encourage the food industry to respond as well. They're a huge part of our diets. We can't just ignore them and say, we're not going to play anymore. We have to tell them if you don't know you're doing this to us, you need to know it's time to know. If you do know, why are you doing it? It's time you changed what you're doing. So I think there's there's a big conversation about why we've increased profit and the yield and the extraction of ingredients from agriculture, but without thinking about any of the consequences of doing that. Now, we're going to have to think of how we eat sustainably for the planet and also how we eat healthily? By 2050, we'll have 10 billion people to feed on Earth. And we're going to have to think really hard about how we can feed them healthily and sustainably. So things have got to change. It's a bad sign that we, in the comfortable, West and in the global North, we're throwing away food while other parts of the world are starving. That's just not a very balanced food system, and we've got to figure out how to do better. 

Pathak: All of your points, especially at the intersection of eating sustainably and healthfully globally. How do we do that? I think that it's critical because a lot of us also are really thinking about this. We want to do it, as we said, in a healthier way. And sometimes we're willing to pay, some of us, a higher price, but we're not necessarily getting the value of it. 

Smith: And the other thing we have to realize is that we are not going to change people's behavior by telling them you should eat this. The food has to be delicious, right? So flavor first. So when people say we should eat more vegetables and plant-based eating. Yes, but people think vegetables are a bit boring and don't really like them. Okay, so we have to make them delicious. How do we do that? Well, we roast them, we pickle them, we can preserve them. We can do all sorts of things to them to give them more umami and more flavor. We need the mummification of vegetables. We've got to make them as delicious as having the burger, but without ultra-processing the vegetables. We've got to use old techniques. 

When you look at when you look at the Asian diet, Japanese people live very long, and they don't suffer as many diet-related diseases. They pickle vegetables, and they care about the crunch, the sound, the noise, and the sharpness of the pickling vinegar. They just make things taste good and crunchy and healthy. And so you're not going to tell people. Eat your greens and you're just going to eat lots of broccoli and that's it. No. It's flavor first. We have to recruit some of these brilliant chefs that we have around there to take food that's sustainable and healthy and show us how to make it really delicious. 

Pathak: And the converse, find a toddler because they will tell you if something tastes good and is easy and is giving them the joy. I'm learning becasue we've gotten a little plastic child's knife. And she comes home, and she wants that wrapper. She wants that sound. She is waiting for it. So what we've discovered recently is if we give her an apple or some raspberry, she's really gotten into something she can clean herself, something she can chop herself. I mean, she will eat that apple. She will eat the banana. She wants that experience of playing with it before she eats.  

Smith: Exactly. And I'm so glad you said that, because so many people have now realized, let children play with their food. Remember, we used to be told, Oh, you mustn't play with your food. Think of being an infant strapped in a high chair, where this implement comes towards you, a fork comes towards you, you're told to open your mouth, you've no idea what it's like, you can't anticipate its texture. We wouldn't like that. It's a horrible experience. So, if you let them play and they can feel the texture and they can smell and they can lick it and they can decide what they want to eat. They're more adventurous then. And you're right. I love the idea of letting her chop and experiment, and so on. I think it has to start early. If we're going to change the food culture, it's food literacy. It lets people experience fruits and vegetables and know they come from the trees and the fields and come in different shapes. And there's a difference between a roasted carrot and a raw carrot and a boiled carrot. Let people try them instead of just thinking it all comes ready made and we've no idea how it got there. So, I think start early. Classes and schools, food literacy, very important.  

Pathak: I just want to thank you so much for your time. This has just been a fantastic conversation, but before I let you go, I'd love to close the episode with bite sized action items, and you've given us so many to chew on, pun intended. So any other final thoughts that you'd like us to take away? 

Smith: Yes. Try just doing without ultra-processed foods for a week, or if you can, do two weeks. Just cut them out of your diet and then notice the difference in you. Experience whether you feel as hungry or if you feel as tired. I think you'll notice the difference and then go back to looking at versions of foods that are not ultra processed. Compare them with the ones that are, and just have them side by side. Try eating the non-ultra-processed version first, like a potato chip or whatever, and then saying, okay, it's got a flavor. And now you have the other one, and it will sometimes seem as though it's like a blaring trumpet. It's too much. It's too intense. And you realize you've got used to having that level of high hit, and you're missing subtler and delicious flavors that, if you slow down, pay attention to, you get a lot of pleasure from. So I encourage people to try this for themselves. 

Pathak: Thank you so much for being with us today. I really appreciated this conversation that you've had with us over two episodes. 

Smith: Huge pleasure. Thank you very much. It's lovely to talk to a clinician who's also got the lived experience and knows what it's like feeding others and trying to set things straight and reset a little bit. I wish you lots of luck with that.  

Pathak: We've talked with Dr Barry Smith about tips to hijack back our brains and our behaviors for healthier eating patterns. We've talked about cultural and social aspects of food, emphasizing traditional food preparation and communal eating that we may have grown up with, but have been too busy to continue in our own lives. And we've talked about strategies to bring those traditional practices back. Dr Smith really helped to highlight how cultural practices around food, like preparing meals from scratch and eating together foster social connection and wellbeing. And I can tell you, this is something just organically my own children have started to crave as they've gotten older. And he really helped to contrast these practices with modern convenience-focused eating habits. That so often include the types of ultra-processed foods we know can have negative health outcomes. I really appreciated Dr Smith's advice and advocacy for a return to these types of traditional food cultures where the joy and meaning of cooking and sharing meals plays a central role in our lives, offering a counterbalance to the fast-paced, individualistic approach to eating that's so prevalent today. And I can tell you play a major part of my own life.  

Dr Smith helped us understand how food companies manipulate flavors using additives like glutamates and nucleotides to enhance the taste of ultra-processed foods, creating a cycle where people overeat without being properly nourished. To combat this, Dr Smith suggests practical tips like selecting foods with recognizable ingredients and, as much as possible, minimizing the intake of ultra-processed items. I really appreciated his encouragement of mindful eating, slowing down, and engaging with food prep to discover the joy of natural flavors. Ultimately, he emphasized the need for systemic change, urging the food industry and our policymakers to prioritize our health and create a sustainable, flavor-focused food production system. 

To find out more information about Dr Smith, check out our show notes. Thank you so much for listening. Please take a moment to follow, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite listening platform. If you have tips and strategies that you use to hijack back your brain and behaviors to tilt us more towards healthier eating, please share. If you'd like to send me an email about topics you're interested in or questions for future guests, please send me a note at webmdpodcastatwebmd.net. This is Dr Neha Pathak for the WebMD Health Discovered podcast.