The Truth About Ultra-Processed Foods

We all want to try and eat healthier, but how do we do it? The Mediterranean diet is the gold standard of healthy eating. We know that when you eat well, you feel better, your mood is better, your cognitive performance is better and it's good for long-term physical health. I've been trying really hard to think about how to make this easy to apply to our daily lives and I've come up with the new 5-a-day. Five food groups that most of us are lacking in that can really help to bolster our health. Whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, fresh fruit and foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids. Joining me is the brilliant Catherine Bruton, a recipe creator who's helping me to bring the science to life into simple, delicious recipes. Today we're going to make the green goddess risotto. Batch cookable and absolutely scrumptious. I can't wait to show you. Okay, so this is the most delicious risotto which we are going to make with pro-barley, we can also make it with spelt but today we're going to make it with pro-barley and we're creating this delicious sauce, green sauce that we're going to make for it with cavolo nero, frozen spinach, frozen peas, basil, lemon and parmesan. Yum and if you want gluten-free you can also use buckwheat but just less cooking time. Less cooking time, exactly. It takes a little bit of time, we're going to draw you in, we're going to ask you to press pause on life and just take some time. All those things that need to be done, that you feel like need to be done now, they'll still get done, you're going to take some time, it's like, it's a kind of nice thing to do to just sit back and cook something relaxing. It's really mindful to do this kind of recipe and you can batch cook, you can make loads of it and then batch cook it for later. Batch cook it, you can put it in the freezer and then just the night before you want to use it, put it in the fridge and then when it comes to cooking it, a little bit of stock or a little bit of water brings it back to life. And just warm it through right and it's good. Exactly. Amazing. When you make a risotto, you need stock to make it. We're going to use the stock for two separate things. We're going to cook our greens in there. Nice. And then we're going to use that stock to make the risotto. Double the flavour. And for our flavouring and for our stock, we're going to use bouillon. So we have 1.5 litres of stock and for that you need two tablespoons of bouillon, which just goes in here. This is almost boiling and you just give that a whisk. And you can, of course, if you make your own veg stock, you can use that, right? Absolutely. You just need that little bit of flavour that's going to go through the risotto. But actually, if you don't have any stock, you can just use water because at the end we've got all of this flavour that's going to go in. So it's not completely necessary. Our cavolo nero, it comes on stalks like this. A really little nice trick to peel it off. You don't want these tough stalks because they're going to be too hard. You just pull it off like that. Ah, because I usually do this like with a knife almost. Much quicker. Then this just needs to be finely chopped so that it cooks a little bit quicker. And you can use any seasonal greens. So if it's cabbage, cavolo nero has lovely depth of flavour and texture. I think it keeps it really well. But kale could work. Cabbage could work. You can use like collard greens. Yep. And if you can't find cavolo nero, if it's not in season, you can just increase the amount of frozen spinach and frozen peas that you use. And then you've got two store cupboard ingredients that are ready to go. Okay, so this is now all going to go into our boiling stock. We're going to put it in. It's going to stop it from boiling. We've got to bring it back up to the boil. Give it about two or three minutes to soften all the veg but not cook them too much. And then I'm going to show you how we're going to make our sauce. So while the greens are cooking, we can start getting our sauce ready. Nice. Here we have, I mean just even looking at that, you know it's going to taste good. That is my kind of portion of parmesan. It is. That is about 30 grams of parmesan and it's all going to go in. We don't need to worry about chopping it or anything like that. We're going to do the zest of half a lemon. And did you know, do you want to hear a fun fact about parmesan? A couple of fun facts. First of all, it's one of the highest calcium containing cheeses. It's also one of the cheeses with the lowest amount of lactose because it's so, so it's aged for such a long time that the lactose is broken down by the fermentation process. And it's one of the foods that has the highest level of creatine. Really? Yeah. So like 10 out of 10 for parmesan. It already had a 10 out of 10 for me. Yeah, it's just gone up. We just have even more reasons to eat it now. Yeah, it's so good. Okay, so then this is about a 60 gram block. Okay, perfect. So it's about half of a block that you get in the supermarket. We're not being shy. So you just grate that in there and this will also create this delicious creaminess to the stock. Yeah. And actually when it's all done, it has that slight kind of feeling of pesto to it. So when I made this at home and my two girls tried it, they thought, oh, that's really nice mummy because it tastes like pesto. Got loads of amazing, so this is a fermented dairy. So on the protein pyramid, it's one of the healthiest, really good source of protein that you're getting from the parmesan as well. So obviously today we've used parmesan, but if someone doesn't eat cheese or doesn't like parmesan, could we use something else? Nutritional yeast is a really good substitution for parmesan cheese. And a couple of tablespoons, maybe three, you can do it by taste, but it gives you that real umami flavour that you get from parmesan. And it also gives you that creaminess as well. And you can just substitute that for parmesan and do nothing else. And it will work. Amazing. And nutritional yeast is actually high in protein and B vitamins. I use it for quite a lot of things. It's delicious. Really good. So yeah, that's an easy swap. So we've taken this out of the water, but the water stays on. Yes. Don't throw it out. Don't throw it away. That's your stock. That's what you're going to use to make your risotto. You just bring it back up to the boil. It's just really to soften the veg, particularly the cavolo nero, because it can be a bit stringy if it's not cooked. And then this stays, you turn your heat to low. And that just stays on a very low heat. And we'll come back to this when we start to make our risotto. Perfect. And then this is our really, really delicious sauce. So we have our blender here. Depending on the size of your blender, you might need to do it in batches. You can also use a stick blender for this. Put all of this into our blender. Give it a good squish. You can press it right down. The veggies are nice and soft. And also the cheese will melt. To this, we've also added a couple of ladlefuls of the stock. And that's going to help make our sauce. Here we go. Color is so beautiful. And that's your sauce. And then to this, we're just going to add some salt and pepper. Always remember your seasoning. But remember when you're seasoning, your stock has salt in it. So your stock is just a little bit salty. So just... It only needs a little bit, you're right. Just a little bit. But lots of pepper. And then we can just set this aside. This would also make a delicious pasta sauce. Yeah, 100%. So now we're going to move on to our sofrito base. So our sauce is done. The base of a really great risotto has a sofrito, which is celery, carrots, onions, slowly cooked in olive oil. Delicious. And sofrito is the base for so many dishes in the Mediterranean diet, if not all the dishes. And did you know that there's actually science? Like there's entire papers written about the synergy of what happens when you create sofrito. I did not know that. So like all the different polyphenols that are present in the onion and the carrot and celery. Yeah. When you combine them and gently heat them with extra virgin olive oil, new polyphenols are formed. So sofrito is a completely different type of food to if you took the individual components of it. That's really amazing. I did not know that. So that's why when we talk about the Mediterranean diet, sofrito is actually an ingredient. It's an essential part of the Mediterranean diet as an ingredient because it has its own health benefits. And you can also add tomatoes to this, right? Yeah. And you can add garlic, but with garlic, it needs a lot less cooking than these ingredients. It needs to go in at the end, maybe just a few minutes of cooking. Yeah. Otherwise it burns, right? It burns. And when it burns, it gets quite bitter. Yeah. It's not a very nice flavour. And sofrito, I mean, you're an amazing chopper, but like I sometimes just buy it frozen. You can buy frozen bags of sofrito from the supermarket. It's actually really convenient to just have ready to go in the freezer. If you're back from holidays and you want to make something, just grab it. You can also chop lots of this and freeze it like this if you want to, but you can also use a blender. And how much are you using for this recipe? So we have two carrots, two celery sticks, and one onion. Onions, you always slice three or four that way. Keep the root intact. And then nice and fine down that way. The sofrito has now gone into the pan on a medium heat with some extra virgin olive oil, about four tablespoons. And then we're going to pop the lid on. And this is to sweat the vegetables, which means they're going to cook in their own juices and soften without taking on any colour. And that's for seven minutes. Okay, so our sofrito is all done. Nicely soft, ready to go. Here we have our pearl barley. We've 200 grams in here. It doesn't look like a lot, but what happens as you cook it is it doubles in size. So that goes in and you just give it maybe a minute or so to get the heat going through the barley. On this side, we have our pot of stock, which we've left on a really, really low heat. So the stock being hot just means it cooks, all cooks a little bit quicker as we're going along. So this is where the thyme kind of goes in, two at a time, two ladles at a time. In they go, you stir it to mix. That sound is lovely. It's lovely, it just starts to sizzle. This is the process you need to go through to get a really delicious, perfect risotto. So this process happens where you ladle in some stock, you stir it. Once it's sizzling, you just make sure it's all submerged in the liquid. The lid goes on and you just give it some time and it will start to absorb the liquid. And as we add more and more stock, it'll soften more and more, it will expand more and more. And this kind of part of it takes maybe 35 to 40 minutes. And so how often are you adding stock back in? Every three to four minutes. Okay. So you can, you have it, we have it on a medium to low heat. So if you can just hear that little sound of it bubbling, you just need that sound, just like bubbling away. Yeah. Doing its thing. And you need to keep an eye on it because you don't want it to burn. You need to just put everything else aside and just be here with your risotto, taking a bit of time out. So if it's buckwheat, it'll need a little bit less time. It'll need less time and less stock. If it's spelt, is that the same? It's exactly the same if you use a spelt grain. So I've made this with barley and with spelt and both are absolutely delicious. And then as we touched on earlier, if you're using parboiled spelt because you really don't have the time or that's the best way for you to get the spelt, then again, it's a bit less time, isn't it? Less time and it'll be less stock. So in this recipe, we use a lot of fresh ingredients but you may have also noticed we're using things like bouillon and I've also suggested you could buy frozen sofrito. These are processed foods. So how does that fit into a healthy diet? Well, there's been a lot of fear around ultra-processed foods and a lot of the foods that we do have available in the supermarket fall under the ultra-processed food category. This is exactly why at Zoe, we've created a new way of thinking about processed foods. Beyond just the level of processing, what we're really interested in is the health impact that this processing is likely to have when you eat these foods regularly. What does that mean? Well, instead of 70% of our foods being considered ultra-processed and therefore potentially harmful, with the Zoe's Processed Food Risk Scale, only about 25% of foods are thought to be in the highest risk category, which means that we have quite a strong reason to think they're going to be unhealthy if eaten regularly. This new scale is actually revolutionary. We finally have a tool that can better identify foods in the supermarket based on their health impact, not just level of processing. Because if you're scared, every time you go supermarket shopping and you strip all the convenience out of home cooking, it really does make it a bit unattainable. Now, this is not to say that we still shouldn't be aiming for the majority of our diet to be made with whole foods. That is exactly what this series is about. How can we cook using whole foods, making delicious meals with fresh ingredients? But we mustn't be scared of all processed foods. So next time you're in the supermarket, don't be worried about anything that could be labelled as ultra-processed. Instead, think about, is this likely to be good for me or might it have a harmful impact? And that's a much better way to think about processing. If you do have the Zoe app, you can actually see the risk scale in action when you take a snap of any food in the supermarket. Okay, right. So as you can see, all of the liquid has been absorbed. So we're going to add two more ladles. So there we go. Lid back on, a few more minutes. So we're now finished with all the ladles and you'll see the pearl barley has almost doubled in size and it's coated with this lovely starchy kind of sauce and that's when you know you're done. The pearl barley won't fully soften, it will still have a tiny little bit of chew but that's part of what makes it really delicious. Okay, so we're going to be ready for our sauce. Let's go, we're going to pour it all in. There's quite a lot of sauce but that's okay, that's part of what's going to make it really delicious. It's all in and the fire's still on but just quite low heat. We just want a really low heat because the sauce has cooled down so you just want to heat it through. This is such a good recipe because it's a really lovely way to use pearl barley which is of course a whole grain. So often people get a bit stuck on how to use whole grains but any recipe that is traditionally made with rice can just be made with whole grains. So a risotto can be absolutely made with barley or spelt and this offers so many benefits. The reason whole grains are one of the five a day is because we just don't eat enough of them and all the dietary patterns in the world that have the best health outcomes are high in whole grains. Actually here in the UK we're quite good at eating oats, they absolutely are a whole grain but let's get a bit more adventurous, let's start using spelt and barley. They're really affordable as well, you can find them in the supermarkets and they make an absolutely delicious dish. I think it's actually better tasting than rice as well. I was going to say once you try them you won't go back to rice. Also to say when you get it to this point, you cool it right down. If you want to batch cook this, this will comfortably serve four people, maybe four to six. You can double the recipe to make more and then you just cool it right down, put it in your boxes, pop it in the freezer and that's your batch cooking done. It's a brilliant, brilliant batch cooking recipe. Yeah I can tell that would work really well. And you can see that delicious sauce. The creamy texture right? Yes and then we're going to finish it off. I know we've got parmesan already in there but... Never enough. Also because it's pretty. Final little flourish of olive oil. And definitely if you're using olive oil to cook, try and use extra virgin olive oil to finish the dressing because that flavour is going to be even punchier and delicious. I think if I went to a restaurant and served that, I'd be very happy. I'd be asking to speak to the chef 10 out of 10. Look at that. There we go. Gorgeous. I'm Dr Federica Amati, medical scientist, head nutritionist at Zoe and best-selling author. I'm also one of the creators of Daily 30, Zoe's gut health supplement. I teach nutrition to healthcare professionals as well as advising policymakers on how to improve public health. I also work with a clinical medical team to help people achieve their health goals. Subscribe for easy ways to improve your health, simple, delicious recipes and evidence-based information. Follow me on Instagram and TikTok for regular updates and quick health wins. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you found this useful. I can't wait to see you next time.