Jonathan Steedman (00:02.307)

Hey food groupies, we're gonna talk about preservatives today, which is obviously a huge umbrella term for a whole host of things that you can find in food. I'm absolutely not gonna dive into each one or name any specific ones, because I just, I don't think that's helpful for almost anybody. What I am gonna talk about is how I think you should approach preservatives. Apologies in advance, if I say parasites instead of preservatives, I literally just recorded a podcast on preservatives and the P words are.

doing my head in. So we're not talking about parasites, we're talking about preservatives. I mostly said that out loud for my benefit, but I'm to talk to you about how I think you should approach including or avoiding preservatives in your diet, what you need to know. And then we'll touch as well on a few of the tools that are out there to help you, quote unquote, help you navigate preservatives and we'll unpack some of those.

I don't know if I'll name, I'll try not to name them just because I don't want to get sued, but we all know what they are. You know, they're for the foods that are like yucky foods, or if you want to, you know, change some of the foods you get from the grocery store. That was not a good one. Anyway, so I don't think you should be focusing on how many preservatives you are eating. I think if you...

that is the length through which you are making food choices. You are missing the forest for the trees. Okay. I am absolutely not telling you that you should eat as many preservatives as you can, or it doesn't matter at all, do your thing, go nuts. I just don't think it's a very helpful metric for you to make decisions around food. There are far bigger fish to fry, right? First and foremost, it reeks of something which happens all the time where we just dial in and really focus on specific ingredients in food.

which is not overly helpful most of the time because food is complex. A food that is high in one thing, you know, if someone says, this has kind of thing, this food has a preservative in it. Sure. What else has it gotten at? Right. What other nutrients does it provide? What other, you know, macronutrient, like what's the protein, carbs, fats, what's the fiber, what's the fluid, what's the, know,

Jonathan Steedman (02:23.083)

what's this food matrix as a whole? Or we see it on the flip side of like, know, don't know, oranges are good for your skin because they contain vitamin C. Yeah, oranges contain lots of vitamin C, but they also contain lots of other good things. So just honing in on the one little thing in that food is it's this overly reductionist view of how food works. So we can use it to make all of these claims around like this, oranges will make you...

and will have anti-aging properties and it turns out it's just like vitamin C and vitamin C can help a little bit with collagen production. Again, big claim. We can see it on the flip side too of like, this food has a preservative in it, it's bad. Okay. And that's again, too overly simplistic. First and foremost, it's not taking your dietary pattern into account at all. And that's what you need to be focusing more of. So what I get everyone I work with to focus on is to try and include as many whole

minimally processed foods as possible. There's definitely some exceptions to that. If you listen to my ultra processed food podcast, you'll know that when we see foods like, you know, just calling a food processed or unprocessed is too simplistic, right? So things like bread products, you know, particularly, you know, your whole grain wholemeal breads and you know, cold dairy products are specifically or more importantly, talking about, you know, like yogurts and things, we know that these are actually linked with improvements in health. So I want the majority of your diet to come from

minimally processed things or some of those specific things. Essentially, you want lots of fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, seeds, know, healthy fats, avocado, olive oil, lean proteins, whether you want to go the plant based or animal based, you know, arguments made for both. You know, if the majority of your diet comes from that, and you also have a few things that have some preservatives in them.

you're going to be so fine. Okay, please. I can't stress that enough. You don't need to go, well, that muesli bar has a preservative in it. Should I be worried about that and eat a different muesli bar? If all of your diets coming out of a packet, then I mean, yeah, maybe, but also I would still take a step back and be like, well, how can I get some more minimally processed things? How can I cook a little bit more? How can I eat more veggies, eat more fruits, eat more grains, eat more these sorts of things? So I think it's less about

Jonathan Steedman (04:45.484)

trying to reduce your preservative intake and more about trying to add more of these other things, right? You've heard me talk about it before. I'm a big fan of approach goals versus avoidance goals. That's not just because I like them. It's because literally in the behavior of psychology, psychology literature, we see that people who set approach goals are more successful than people who set avoidance goals. I'm trying to eat less preservatives is an avoidance goal. I'm trying to eat more fruits and veggies is an approach goal. Both of those goals or both of those,

statements are kind of trying to achieve the same thing of a reduction in preservative intake, for example. But you can see one's framed as I'm trying to do more of something and the other is framed as I'm trying to do less of something. And that's pretty much when someone says like, should I be worried about preservatives? My answer is no, not because they're completely inert and they have no impact on your health. But just because I don't think you should worry about preservatives, I think you should focus on increasing all that other stuff I spoke about. So

Hopefully that's helpful. The reason, that like, that does kind of, that's why I don't like these apps or these Instagram accounts that hyperfixate on preservatives because again, they're already, from my perspective, they've lost a point or they've struck out because they're really focused on things you should avoid, right? So that's it. Second thing is there's no accounting for the rest of your diet. And I don't blame the tools for that because like, how could an app know what the rest of your diet is, right?

what it can get you to do is just hyper fixate on your preservative intake instead of being like, well, you know, I have this thing once a day or maybe even less frequently than that in the context of so many other relatively unprocessed health promoting nutrient dense foods versus someone who has lots of this type of food. That's a completely different thing. Whereas the app doesn't say that.

Although the Instagram account doesn't, I almost said that name. The Instagram account doesn't say that. It just says this food good or this food green tick, green traffic light, this food bad, red cross, red traffic light, right? Based purely on the preservative content, okay? And so the other thing that these apps or these approaches don't do is they don't talk about the dose. They don't talk about how much of that preservative is in that food.

Jonathan Steedman (07:09.995)

the sheer presence of that preservative is a black mark. The second thing is they don't talk about, know, they also, sorry, the second thing they do is they just rank foods based on how many preservatives they have. So if a food has three preservatives, it's worse than a food with one preservative. Doesn't overly matter what that preservative is. Doesn't matter what dosage that is. You know, those three preservatives combined could be in a way lower dose than the one with one preservative, but they just kind of get you to feel like it's a numbers game of less preservatives equals good, which is way

I'm a fan of simple, but that's too simplistic. And then the last reason I don't like these apps or things is they don't explain how they reach these conclusions. They don't publish their process and they hide behind like, it's patented, it's intellectual property. And the business owner in gets that, but the scientist in me thinks that's pretty cheap. And so, because the reason that's important is because

If you are making these claims about this tool, you need to publish this data and you need to show your reasoning. So then you can undergo something called peer review, which is what all studies have to undergo. That doesn't mean studies are perfect either by the way, but it does. It's a good start. And these tools don't undergo peer review because they don't publish how they do it. So what that means is other food scientists, other nutritionists, other dietitians can't look through the process that they went through to, I guess,

challenge them and say, look, I don't think that reasoning was sound or based on this data, that's maybe not the right claim. So they kind of just get to, they get to say that they're sciency because they've looked at studies and they use sciency words, but they actually aren't scientific. If you actually want to follow the scientific process, they haven't done that. And so, no, I do not recommend using these apps at all. I know people like, yeah, but what harm is it? You know what it can do? It can make you afraid of food.

because it will get you to view all of that food through good food, bad food lens, and it will get you to hyperfixate in on those sorts of things. think, sure, they might get you to reduce your packet food intake, but they get you to do it through fear, which I don't think is positive in nutrition at all. So if you wanna keep using them, that's fine, but please know that I'm not going to be like, yeah, they're pretty harmless. You do what you want. I think they are harmful, and I think you should stop.

Jonathan Steedman (09:34.942)

All right, Papa John-o, that felt very, very, anyway, I'm gonna stop now. I hope that's made sense. And I hope it's helped you shift how you should view preservatives and packaged food in general. Look at it through a lens of I'm trying to eat most of my food from these sources. I'm gonna focus on including lots of these sources and I'm not gonna get too stressed about a couple of numbers or a couple of ingredients I can't pronounce is always the one. And if I feel like I'm eating lots of packet foods,

I'm gonna focus more on including more unprocessed foods rather than focus on avoiding preservatives. Amazing. Thanks, team. If you got questions, let me know. Otherwise, I will chat to you next time.