Mike (00:03):
What we actually start to see is the Western diet is slowly morphing everyone. It doesn't matter where you are in the world. All food supplies are tending towards the Western diet of ultra processed foods. It's a great industrial pipeline because you create palatable foods, you create safe foods, you increase the shelf life. So, there's all these great added benefits. The problem is that our bodies have been evolved to consuming them. So, it's very different, the biology in which we interact with our food, of an ultra processed food versus whole food.

Graeme (00:45):
You're listening to the Why & How podcast produced by the Ontario Agricultural College of the University of Guelph, where we look to answer big questions in agriculture, food, and the environment through casual conversations rooted in research. Well, that one was a doozy. Jordan, how's it going?

Jordan (01:04):
It's going well, Graeme. How are you doing today?

Graeme (01:06):
Pretty good, pretty good. We're just fresh off the presses with another episode, but first, Jordan, I have a question for you. What is your favorite ultra processed food?

Jordan (01:15):
Yeah. Favorite ultra processed food. Well, we actually just finished recording a very delicious episode and I say delicious because we did talk all about food. So, yeah, when I would think of ultra processed food, I like a lot of ultra processed food. My go-to is typically chocolates, a big fan of ice cream, and give me Miss Vickie's chips at any time and I will happily accept. So, to be honest, people might change their perspective on ultra processed food after listening to this episode. But those are definitely some favorites for me. What about you?

Graeme (01:50):
Yeah, I agree with all of the above, but I'm a sucker for Cheetos myself.

Jordan (01:54):
Nice. Very cool.

Graeme (01:56):
As you mentioned before, we're going to have all our questions about ultra processed food answered today, because today we have Mike Rogers, an Associate Professor with the University of Guelph's Department of Food Science on. He's also the graduate student coordinator, but while Mike himself has studied many interesting facts about food science, such as jelly food and lipid chemistry. Today we're going to talk about the evolution of food and food science more generally, and how it got to the point where we can enjoy delicious Cheetos and Miss Vickie's and ice cream.

Jordan (02:27):
Fantastic. Well, I'm excited for this episode.

Graeme (02:29):
Let's get into it. Mike how's it going?

Mike (02:33):
Well, thanks. How are you, Graeme?

Graeme (02:34):
Real good as well. So, as a person who studies food for a living, what does food mean for you?

Mike (02:40):
My understanding of food has really evolved a lot in the last decade since I've become a faculty member. One of the things I like to compare it to is consciousness. Consciousness is something that's very, very difficult to define, so is food because food is essential in not only constructing but also repairing the human body. So, in my mind, there's no delineation between food and self.

Graeme (03:09):
Could you go a bit deeper on constructing and repairing the human body? What exactly do you mean by that?

Mike (03:14):
Sure. So, everything that your body is comprised of, so your muscles, tissues, all of those molecules are obtained by your body by the foods you consume. So, anything that your body has to manufacture, it needs to repair, DNA, anything like that, the energy to do that and the resources to do that is obtained through the food supply of that individual. So, if you don't have an adequate food supply you may be missing micronutrients essential in a very minor process, but that has very large ramifications.

Graeme (03:47):
That puts a whole new meaning on that you are what you eat, right?

Mike (03:49):
Very much so.

Graeme (03:50):
So, how has food evolved throughout human's history? Originally, we were hunter-gatherers, right?

Mike (03:55):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Graeme (03:56):
Where did we go from there?

Mike (03:57):
Yeah, there's been three real important milestones in evolution with humans and food. The first one was about 1.8 million years ago when we started to master fire. That mastery of fire, including ignition and transfer of fire, allowed us to begin the advent of modern industrial thermal processing. If you think of the amount of foods that are cooked, there's a lot of added benefits. So, microbial safety, increased palatability, but there's also a lot of other changes we don't think about. The hardness of the food, foods gets softer as they cook, typically.

Mike (04:32):
So, there's changes in the physical chemistry of that food. There's also changes in the molecules that are present. So, we have chemical reactions that are happening with heat. So, that was about 1.8 million years ago. Then, in this mid-17th Century we started to see the agricultural revolution. The agricultural revolution was super important in that it increased our ability to cultivate and control the production of food. At that point though, it really didn't change drastically the foods we were consuming, just the availability and the mass production.

Mike (05:05):
Now, where the food, the last turning point in our food industry has been the onset of the industrial revolution. When we think of the industrial revolution, we think of automation, automobiles, printing press, electricity. We often forget about the implications that had in the food industry itself and the widespread mass manufacturing of these processed, and what would have become highly processed foods. So, that industrial revolution would represent a third major milestone in how our foods have changed through human history.

Graeme (05:38):
So, processed food is interesting because, obviously, the word processed food just means like something's been done to it, but what do you define as a processed food?

Mike (05:49):
That's something that's extremely difficult to define. So, recently, there's been an over classification of foods put forward. What that basically does is it subdivides foods into four main categories. So, your unprocessed foods or your whole foods, apples, carrots, things that look like they came out of the ground. Then, we have the next two classes of foods, which undergo varying levels of processing. So, a class two would be something like a frozen can of corn. Very little thermal processing happens, very little processing happens in the freezing.

Mike (06:23):
So, the food is mainly as it was before it was processed. Then, there is culinary ingredient, so these are things that are created from food. So, think about flour and butter. These are foods that are manufactured from agricultural commodities. Now, those three classes of foods have been around for a very, very long time, all three of them. Now, the new one is the fourth category and that's defined as the ultra processed food. What an ultra processed food is it takes whole foods. So, let's think about corn. We take our corn, we separate it into corn starch, corn oil, corn flour.

Mike (07:02):
We convert some to high fructose corn syrup. If we mix those ingredients back together in the same composition that that original corn had, that new product formulated from all those ingredients doesn't have the same biological response. So, even though it all came from corn, it's not like eating a whole corn. That's the new category of food called the ultra processed food. That is what's making inroads in throughout the Western diet.

Graeme (07:29):
When you say it's not like eating a whole corn, do you mean like obviously the texture is irreversibly changed, but does that also mean the nutrients inside it have been changed?

Mike (07:41):
Absolutely. So, when we talk about nutrition, our impression of nutrition has drastically morphed in the last 150 years. 150 years ago, we were discovering vitamins and what were the biological molecules needed for function. What we're starting to understand now isn't just the presence or absence of molecules that's important, but the glycemic response, for example. If you have a, let's say, a carbohydrate that is high in refined sugar, so a chocolate bar or a bag of chips, or a biscuit, that sugar is absorbed by your body much faster than if you ate the whole food that it was extracted from.

Mike (08:25):
So, if you took sugar beet versus refined sugar and you chewed on that sugar beet for a little while, your blood glucose levels aren't going to go up very high. Whereas, if you take white table sugar and start eating it, your blood sugar is going to spike, you're going to have a drastic insulin response. That movement away from homeostasis causes all kinds of detrimental changes. Really, in my lifetime and in the last 50 years, what we've seen is the advent of the completely new form of malnutrition associated with metabolic syndrome, an over consumption of unhealthy, highly refined foods or over excess calories.

Mike (09:04):
What's amazing about these diets though is they tend to also be devoid in the micronutrients. So, even though they're getting too much fat, too much sugar, they're not getting enough vitamin C, enough vitamin E because those have all been removed in the refining process.

Graeme (09:18):
So, yeah, a bunch of questions just came up there. Let's start with some of the terms that you just brought up. What is homeostasis?

Mike (09:25):
Right. So, your body likes to have a certain set of conditions that is maintained. Now, every time you consume food, that food is metabolized, broken down, and then the sugar is absorbed. Now, your body has to respond to get that blood sugar back down to that resting level. So, to do that, our body produces insulin. But the problem with our diet today is our blood sugar spikes are so high that our insulin response is over-exaggerated. So, whenever we get these peaks, that's us moving away from our homeostatic state. So, what does that mean?

Mike (10:03):
That means that our body becomes resistant to insulin. So, Type 2 diabetes develops in those types of scenarios when those spikes from homeostasis become too large. So, it has a lot of very important implications not only in health and disease, but also we're starting to understand that it plays a role in when you become hungry again. So, if you have a food that metabolizes very fast and your blood sugar spikes and it goes way down, you actually become hungry sooner than if you had eaten a meal that broke down more slowly and had a lower glycemic response, or the rate at which the sugar is taken up by your body.

Graeme (10:46):
Interesting. So, when you're eating junk food you could or you would theoretically be going back to eating junk food faster than if you were eating a proper meal, let's say, like oatmeal or some longer chained carbohydrates?

Mike (11:01):
This is a really new exciting area of food sciences, this interface between food science and nutrition. I'll give you an example. So, satiety is a very complex series of mechanisms which determines two things. One is when do you stop eating? So, when are you say satiated? So, how big of the meal did you consume? But it's also the return of hunger. How hungry do you feel again? This really has less to do with composition and more to do with the physical structure of the food. So, imagine you eat an apple, a whole bunch of dense apples and you're biting them and chewing them, swallowing. They're going to fill your gastric, your stomach compartment very quickly.

Mike (11:44):
Now, those particles got to break down before they can move into the intestinal segment. So, that slows down the rate at which food goes through your body if you compare it to something like apple juice. So, that material remains in your stomach, your stomach remains distended or full, and that triggers a neural response that says to stop eating. But what's amazing is that food structure determines the rate to which it goes into the duodenum, the ileum, but what's cool about that is there's all little taste buds along your intestinal track. They're all detecting the chemicals, the metabolites of the foods that are being produced.

Mike (12:25):
There's a mechanism called the ileal brake, which starts when the latter part of your intestine starts to detect fat molecules or fatty acids, it slows down peristalsis. So, gastric motility slows, the food slows going through you. It triggers bile secretion, it triggers all feedback and hormonal loops. So, there's all these really complicated pathways that regulate how much we eat when we stop eating and macronutrient composition plays a role. But really, what we're starting to understand is the physical structure, how hard that food is, how that material flows will dictate and determine the nutritional benefits of that food.

Graeme (13:10):
So, fat is what determines satiate, how do you say that word? Satiation, satiety, right? Satiety.

Mike (13:19):
Yeah. So, fat plays a role, but all the molecules do and to be honest, our level of understanding in this area is still very much in its infancy. 25 years ago we didn't even conceptualize the importance of food structure in health. It's really only been in the last 25 years that we've really started to consider how does a food material actually change its digestive properties?

Graeme (13:44):
I'm sure as everyone understands from nutrition, that things are always changing. You're never quite sure what to eat.

Mike (13:52):
Constantly, and the technology of food science is far outpacing the science of technology. What I mean by that is we can do really cool things to food. There's a lot of amazing science and technology that is to develop the perfect croissant, the flakiness of a croissant. There's the perfect starch to make an angel cake or a dense bread. Everything is tailored for organoleptic properties. How does it taste? Is the consumer going to want to eat it again? Is it desirable? But we need to really start to think about, can we formulate foods in a more nourishing format? So that individuals that consume these ultra processed foods have less adverse biological consequences.

Graeme (14:40):
I just want to cover some basics here. So, you spoke earlier about micronutrients and macronutrients. What exactly are those?

Mike (14:47):
Yeah. So, I think people have become very removed from agriculture. So, when we talk about micronutrients, micronutrients are things you need in very small amounts, but they're extremely important. Vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin D, vitamin K, iron, calcium. So, those are your micronutrients. Your macronutrients are your main energy source or building blocks. So, these are your sugars, carbohydrates, your fats or lipids, and your proteins. So, we require some of each of those three components. We require our diet should be around 30% protein, about 40% carbohydrate, and the remaining fat. So, macronutrients are your big three, fat, carbohydrate, protein.

Graeme (15:37):
Great. I'm sure any ketogenic members of the audience will disagree with that.

Mike (15:43):
Well, and it's really funny that you bring that up because the ketogenic diet is one of my pet peeves. So, the ketogenic diet actually became a thing to treat children with epilepsy that had difficult to control seizures. So, when you change your main energy source from carbohydrate to fat, you start to produce these things called keto bodies, and they have lots of implications neurologically. Now, if you don't have to control epileptic seizures, there is no good justification for the keto diet. As a weight loss mechanism, these are putting your bodies into extreme states.

Mike (16:22):
Ketone bodies can cause liver damage, can cause all kinds of problems for the body. So, the metabolism, when we shift away to a macronutrient composition that we're not used to eating, I.e all fat, our body has to totally change its biochemistry to utilize that energy source. In some instances, the prevention of seizures, it's justified, but to lose 10 pounds, it's a bad, bad practice to get into.

Jordan (16:49):
So, Mike, it must be frustrating for you as a researcher then that if you're coming out with new research or if there's a new breakthrough, you must think to yourself, how is media going to spin this? How are they going to interpret this? This is going to be frustrating. There must be a lot of discussions in that area as food scientists and nutritionists.

Mike (17:05):
Very much so, and there's a lot of really bad science too, to contend with, right? So, CNN doesn't necessarily pick up on the good or bad science. They don't necessarily pick up and sometimes the problem is they're really reporting on the technology and the science isn't there, we don't know the consequences of it. The perfect example of that is trans fats. So, from a processing perspective, in that chemistry perspective or food science perspective, trans fats are amazing because they behave exactly the same way as saturated fats do.

Mike (17:36):
So, when you think about a chocolate bar, well, a chocolate bar's not a good example. When you think about using fat in a cookie, that cookie will have the same organoleptic properties if it's a trans fats or if it's a saturated fat. The problem is when the technology reached the market, what we didn't realize was how devastating trans fats were for the human body. So, the science took 10 years to catch up after the technology was already being produced, manufactured, and consumed. So, the food industry and academics alike, we are always very responsive.

Mike (18:12):
In part, because of the funding mechanism of government agencies, they want three to five year research projects, they don't want 25-year blue sky research. So, we have to deliver a widget in five years. Obviously, with five years of research, I can't develop a technology, implement it into food science, and then be the one to go and study all of the nutritional consequences of it. Then, you can found that with consume foods are not consumed in isolation, they are consumed habitually and chronically.

Mike (18:45):
So, to understand the chronic effects of trans fat consumption takes a population of their consuming it to see what happens to them, unfortunately. That was the reality with trans fats in the food industry.

Graeme (18:57):
Yeah. Could you just highlight the difference between trans and unsaturated fatty acids and saturated fatty acids?

Mike (19:04):
Sure. Yeah. So, fatty acids at their most basic molecular level are an 18 carbon chain with a carboxylic acid group on the end. Now, unsaturated means it has a double bonds somewhere on that carbon chain and our body cannot add a double bond to most fats. So, if we eat palmitic acid, our body can't convert that to a unsaturated oil. There is one fat we can unsaturate, and the only one we can do that I know of is stearic acid, which is the predominant animal fat that we consume in butter, animal tissues.

Mike (19:42):
Now, when you have unsaturated, so when you have a double bond, what it does is it puts a real kink in that molecule. Changes it from a straight line to more like a hockey stick. If you imagine packing pencils versus hockey sticks together, pencils you can make nice squares out of those pencils. So, they crystallize nicely. When you pack hockey sticks, they don't. So, unsaturated fats tend to be liquids, where saturated tend to be solids. So, they give you that nice lamination between layers of flake of a croissant. That fat crystal structure is really so important in so many foods, especially ultra processed foods.

Mike (20:26):
So, unsaturated oils, although they are biologically more beneficial to us, they are much harder from a technology perspective to incorporate into a biscuit that tastes good, because you need that saturated fat to give it that mouth feel and that texture that you expect.

Graeme (20:44):
What was the great thing about trans fats? Why did food science love them so much?

Mike (20:48):
Cost. So, our predominant structuring fat in the food industry has always been animal and cocoa butter. So, milk, butter, and lard, and coco. Now, those three commodities, those commodities, very expensive. So, we wanted to move into the oil seed. So, canola oil, flaxseed oil, corn oil, those we can produce at a fraction of the cost as, let's say, a pound of lard or a pound of butter. The problem is we can't put corn oil into a solid food that's going to give it the desirable properties. So, what we had to do was turn corn oil into a solid fat. We did that through a process called hydrogenation or adding hydrogens to those double bonds.

Mike (21:34):
The downfall to that as a by-product is the trans fat. So, the difference between a trans and a cis fat, so all natural fats we consumer in the cis configuration, with a very few naturally occurring ones occurring in milk. The trans fats versus cis fats have hydrogens on opposite sides. So, if you have cis, the two hydrogens are on the same side of the double bond, and if you have trans they're on opposite sides of the double bond. That tiny configuration wreaks havoc on our cholesterol levels and all kinds of other attributes that downstream lead to all kinds of negative biological consequences.

Graeme (22:14):
So, for milk, is that a concern or not?

Mike (22:16):
No. So, actually, that's another really interesting question. Actually, the naturally occurring trans fats, there's two in milk, CLA, conjugated linolenic acid and trans-vaccenic acid. Both of those have actually been shown to have biologically beneficial actions. The ones that are detrimental are the industrially produced trans fats. [inaudible 00:22:35] acid is the big one, it's the 18:1. It's the one implemented in heart disease.

Graeme (22:42):
Interesting. I want to touch on something you mentioned further back, so in processed foods they take out the micronutrients-

Mike (22:50):
A lot of times, yeah.

Graeme (22:51):
... and I'm wondering why is that?

Mike (22:53):
Preservation. The greatest illustration for Canadians is corn. If we drive cross-country in Canada and look at the number of corn fields we produce, now, our harvest season is very short. So, across Canada, we're harvesting all of our corn within a very short window. Surprisingly, only about 5% of the corn manufactured in Canada goes to the sweet kibblet market. That's corn on the cob, frozen corn, minimally processed corn. The rest either goes to silage. So, about 45% goes to silage for animal feed.

Mike (23:28):
The other 45% is dedicated to the ultra processed food industry. That means it goes to corn oil, corn starch, corn protein, all of those. The reason we do it is if we didn't, it would rot. So, if we were to harvest all of that corn across Canada, we would only be able to consume a small portion of that fresh before it started to go moldy and go bad. So, it's impart preservation, it's impart safety, but it's also the convenience that ultra processed foods impart. So, it's extremely complicated, that interplay. Yeah.

Graeme (24:05):
So, are all ultra processed foods unhealthy generally or can you get away with a certain amount in your diet?

Mike (24:13):
Yeah. So, that's another great question. Absolutely, you can get away with a certain amount in the diet. The problem becomes when it becomes the staple food. In Western society, believe it or not, more calories are consumed from ultra processed foods than whole foods. Now, why that is scary is every country that that happens in, you see as that transition from home made meals prepared from scratch. So, depending on where we live in the world, that ethnic cuisine, that homemade ethnic cuisine is being displaced everywhere.

Mike (24:51):
As we see it get displaced, what we see is a double digit increase in obesity. We see it not only in the adult population, but now we see it in child populations. We see increased prevalence of childhood Type 2 diabetes. We forget metabolic syndrome Type 2 diabetes that is driven by food were not prevalent in the population until post-industrial revolution. So, in the last 100 years we have been able to drastically change our food to today, where malnutrition is a double-edged sword. When we talk about malnutrition we think the characteristic 25 years ago, it's people who don't have enough calories.

Mike (25:44):
Today, there's a new form of malnutrition who over-consume calories, but they over-consume poor quality foods that are not dense in micronutrients. So, we're actually starting to see micronutrient deficiencies in the obese population, which is totally counterintuitive. Because if you're eating enough calories, you should be eating enough micronutrients, if you're eating a balanced diet. The problem is we are shifting so heavily to the Western diet, that the majority of people get more calories from the Western diet than whole food.

Mike (26:22):
Once ultra processed foods go above approximately one-third of your calories, there's a high potential to start developing diet related diseases.

Graeme (26:34):
It's crazy. I know I was traveling in Thailand and we ended up getting lost and going into this remote village. The one thing they did have was plenty of pop drinks. They were having a festival and just sodas were going around everywhere.

Mike (26:50):
This is something that's very disturbing to see globally. One of the reasons it's so disturbing to see is it creates this weird monopoly of land agriculture. What I mean by that is as our need for corn oil increases, we require additional land resources. We saw this with the palm oil industry in the 90s. There was a huge surge of use of palm oil and fractionated palm oils that it ends up displacing the foods that are produced and often used as local cuisines. What we actually start to see is the Western diet is slowly morphing everyone.

Mike (27:34):
It doesn't matter where you are in the world, all food supplies are tending towards the Western diet of ultra processed foods. It's a great industrial pipeline because you create palatable foods, you create safe foods, you increase the shelf life. So, there's all these great added benefits. The problem is that our bodies haven't evolved to consuming them. So, it's very different, the biology in which we interact with our food of an ultra processed food versus a whole food.

Graeme (28:06):
To be fair, I don't think any of the people producing ultra processed foods necessarily saw it coming when they were making it, right? It's kind of you succeeded in one way and the next thing you know, you're failing in another.

Mike (28:18):
It's a very slippery slope, right? I don't think anyone's going to be up in arms when we start talking about ultra processed foods like chocolate bars and chips. But consumers, I think, are unaware a lot of times what an ultra processed food is. These meat mimics we see all over the market today. So, there's all these substitutes made from plant-based proteins to replace animal meat. Not getting into animal ethics or any of the periphery issues around that, but when you look at these formulated burgers that mimic meat, they have way higher salt contents.

Mike (28:55):
They have way higher glycemic responses, they have lower micronutrient density, they don't have the same protein profile. So, consumers thinking they're eating a hamburger that similar to a whole meat hamburger, well, it's probably similar to eating a handful of crackers in reality. Consumers are just so disconnected from what our food we evolved with means and how important it is to us. So, when you think about the [inaudible 00:29:26] of foods we eat every day, 150 years ago, think about what of those were available.

Mike (29:34):
One startling number I came across a few years ago, in 1900, we consumed on average a pound of white sugar a year in North America. That's a hundred years ago. Today, we do that two to three times a week. So, our whole food system has morphed and changed because when you go to that grocery store, that whole middle is all ultra processed foods, right? If you shop the edges is your whole minimally processed, your fruits and vegetables, your meats and dairies. Then, by the time you get into your boxes and cans and frozen section, it's like an onion.

Mike (30:14):
They've been processed once to refine them, they've been processed once to formulate them, they've been processed once more to get them ready to be shelf stable in the grocery store. Then, you take them home and you process them again. So, it's like an onion, right? Every level of processing reduces the quality a little bit and unbeknownst to the consumer, they bring home this pre-made dinner and thinking it's the same nutritional quality as consuming whole foods and it's just not.

Graeme (30:43):
So, we know that this is the way it's been going, but nowadays in North America we're seeing potentially a reversal. I don't know how the statistics are looking, but the rise of the organic movement and the whole foods movement has certainly been prevalent among media outlets. What do you think of that?

Mike (31:06):
Well, I think it's great, but the downfall to it is it takes a lot of privilege to consume that type of foods. What I mean by that is let's look a year ago at the prices of broccoli. Broccoli a year and a half ago went up to almost $7 a head. So, let's say now I'm a single father, I work minimum wage job, I rent an apartment in Toronto and I have two kids. My food allowance is $25, let's say, a day to feed my family or a week. I can bring my kid to McDonald's and buy them a happy meal for $5 and he's going to be happy or I can give him a plate of steamed broccoli.

Mike (31:43):
Reality is, those decisions are often ... they're not equitable. There are people who are forced because of their life situation to make that bad decision and access to nutritious food should not be a privilege. That's what I'm worried about. I'm worried about in my lifetime that whole foods will become so disproportionately expensive compared to ultra processed foods that the next generations of humans won't know what whole foods are. They will only consume boxed prepared foods. We've been seeing that for the last 50 years, that trend.

Mike (32:25):
There's so many things that drive it. I can keep a box of cereal on a shelf for a year. I can't keep an apple on a shelf for a week and a half without it going bad. So, it's not a simple solution. What we need to do and where we need to go is, the processing and refining we have in place to create products and to preserve products is important. We need to develop the technologies that reassemble the ultra processed ingredients into these new forms of ultra processed foods, but with an eye at structuring them in such a way that they respond more like the food that it was derived from.

Graeme (33:08):
So, things like apple chips and stuff like that or just dehydrated food, is something like that what you're talking about or even further?

Mike (33:19):
Even more simple. Yeah. Even more simple. So, in 1800, there's a really interesting story that emerged in the Dutch East Indies. It was a plague of a disease that was a neurological wasting disease. It was this uneven distribution in the population. What they found was really interesting. In the discreet populations that were getting sick from this disease they were being fed rice that was polished instead of unpolished rice. This whole populations like sailors and prisons. What they found was, coincidentally, when they remove the outer layer of the rice they also removed with it vitamin B1.

Mike (33:58):
This created widespread deficiencies across Asia, creating a massive plague of beriberi. It's sometimes as minor as just removing a layer. The problem is we don't understand the whole complexity and the interaction between food and body. So, any time we change something, a lot of the time we're throwing blindly at a dartboard in the dark. We don't know what we're targeting because we don't know how the body interacts on so many levels with the food we consume.

Graeme (34:30):
It's funny because our reward systems clearly love the ultra processed foods and stuff, right? I know I prefer white rice over brown rice and people generally prefer white flour over whole wheat flour.

Mike (34:44):
But there's a biological evolutionary reason we desire to over-consume sweet foods. So, again, if you imagine your ancestors hunting gathering in climate, and they're moving across, they're nomadic, so they're just moving where the food is and they come across this raspberry bush. If they leave that raspberry bush for long, the birds are going to get them. If they pick them and harvest them, they're going to rot. So, there is a benefit to overriding satiety mechanisms to over-consume.

Mike (35:17):
There's a biological need to do that from our evolutionary path to compensate when we were nomadic for those times when we didn't have access to food. So, we gorge on the sweet foods, our bodies had developed survival mechanisms around it.

Jordan (35:33):
Well, and I think what complicates that, and it's funny that you actually bring that up. Well, it makes sense that you brought that up. I was actually reading a book today talking about that and it's just so mind-blowing to think that that's something we're competing with, is like our instincts, right?

Mike (35:45):
Yeah.

Jordan (35:45):
That our technology is evolving so quickly and the way that we eat food and availability food, our bodies can't keep up, right? Evolutionary can't keep up. So, it is very interesting. You're very passionate about this and you know your stuff, but it makes it seem like even more of a plug for potential food scientists. How cool is it that this is the area that you're working in and that there's some big problems that we have to figure out, right? So, it seems kind of cool that you get to be a part of that and those are some of the questions you get to ask.

Mike (36:20):
It is. One of the things that I think people ... I think people have become so removed from food. I think that the technology that we see often is so in our face, like a cell phone or a video game. So, we can very easily imagine how that technology has transformed our lives. But we don't think of the technologies that has transformed our lives in the food supply, because we don't see them every day. The reality is, the technologies that go into your foods today are as advanced as any other technology, AI, whatever it is.

Mike (36:54):
Whatever that field of science is, it is as advanced in your foods, most people are just unaware that it's there. That's a very, very scary fact because it's not transparent. All these things we do, hydrogenation causing trans fats, all these little things, refining, causing the beriberi ailment, these all have massive consequences in people's lives. Being retroactive in the food industry is an unacceptable approach to take with technologies.

Mike (37:28):
We have to be aggressive at understanding the fundamentals of the technology. Just not the technology itself, we need to understand how our body interacts with that and that's very, very difficult to do.

Graeme (37:40):
So, previously, food scientists have been recruited to Coca-Cola and whatnot to make the best Dorito, the best Cheeto, the best soft drink, right? What are some ways you think that graduating food scientists and current food scientists can work for better healthier foods?

Mike (38:02):
Well, I think part of that is being informed on what the consequences of processing and health are. So, it is that truly interdisciplinary science, right? You can't teach science in silos. So, if you are a food science student you need to be versed in microbiology. You need to be versed in chemistry. You need to be versed in processing. You need to be versed in biology, nutrition. So, all of these things require a lot of understanding and require a lot of ... There's a lot of facets.

Mike (38:33):
Now, the very, very cool thing about the food industry is it's everywhere. It's not just the food industry, it's NASA, it's the military, it's government. When we talk about innovation in the food industry, where it's driving, what's driving the next generation of food innovation right now is space exploration. How can we ensure that the food leaving our atmosphere will not spoil? Because a salmonella infection on the space station could be catastrophic.

Mike (39:06):
So, the food industry has facets in so many areas and is such an advanced field that's underrepresented in the STEM disciplines. It's often looked at as a lesser science because it's applied. But it really makes it far more challenging because I can't put a box around it and wonder if the cat's dead or alive, like Schrödinger's, for a Schrödinger. So, I have to work with real messy systems that aren't stable, that are hard to study and they constantly change. So, it makes the science of food enormously difficult and enormously frustrating to study.

Mike (39:50):
Then, just to complicate it a little bit more, throw in the fact that every person isn't the same and there's that concept of personalized nutrition on top of that. The path of the food industry forward has so many opportunities. This is true across all agriculture. There is so much room for improvement and there is such a demand for highly qualified personnel to work in that area.

Graeme (40:19):
Just in our final moments here, Mike, what do you think the future of food looks like?

Mike (40:24):
I think the future of food is going to actually become even more technologically demanding. Why I say that is, right now in our food supply, we're looking to get to a zero food waste footprint, right? We don't want to throw anything away. So, what that means is we refine, refine, refine, refine, and we increase exponentially that power of refining. We can literally now refine to a molecular level. So, we can take all the lycopene or vitamin C out of the food. So, as the level of valorization and the need to waste no food comes into play, we're going to see a lot of really interesting changes in the food supply.

Mike (41:01):
We're going to see new forms of protein sources and lipid sources. We're going to see probably incorporation of things like insects, soldier fly larvae, crickets. You mass produce very low resources to produce some low carbon footprint good quality proteins. The downfall is, in North America nobody's going to consume a cricket. So, again, this all feeds into that ultra processed food industry. So, forward moving, the power of extraction is going to increase exacerbating the problem we currently have.

Mike (41:35):
So, the next Nobel laureate in the area of food and nutrition will find the link between super molecular structure and health. We will begin to formulate, structure, not only with a mind's eye placed towards palatability or the sensory appeal, but we're going to think about how does structure play a role in nutrition and health. I think that's where foods will be going in the next 100 years.

Graeme (42:09):
Well, Mike, I'd like to thank you for being here today. Are there any shout outs you would like to give before we wrap up?

Mike (42:16):
To my little boys, [Terry 00:42:18] and Logan, I guess those will be the only two. They'll be ecstatic to hear their names.

Graeme (42:23):
That's great. Thanks so much for being here. It was a really awesome episode. Where can people find you if they're looking for more information about your research?

Mike (42:30):
Yeah. I have an email address through the University of Guelph, it's rogerslab.uoguelph.ca.

Graeme (42:37):
Awesome. To everyone listening, thanks so much for tuning in again. We'll see you later. The Why & How podcast is published by the Ontario Agricultural College of the University of Guelph. It is produced by Stephanie Craig and Jordan Terpstra, recording and editing by Jakub Hyzyk and Kyle Ritchie. The host is me, Graeme Li. If you liked what you heard, be sure to leave us a review and subscribe. Thanks for listening.