Hello, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever you're in the world it's very nice to be speaking to you. It's Mark Ashford. I'm just jumping on here to let you know about a new book that I've written that's related to diabetes, especially type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes. Ultra-processed food and diabetes is its title. It's available on Amazon in ebook, paperback and now in audiobook. Ultra-processed food is food that is somewhat removed from whole foods or natural foods. If you look in your pantry, when you look at the ingredients on the shelves that you can make your meals from, you will not find the food additives that are put into many food products that you find on supermarket market shelves. I'm thinking of acidity regulators, coloring agents, emulsifiers, flavoring agents, leavening agents, phosphates, sweeteners. These are all chemical products. Some of them are derived from animals, some are from plants, but there's also an increasing number that are produced from minerals that we mine and also even petroleum. For example, when you look at a food, tomato sauce, which we all like to enjoy with pasta and as an additive to soups and so forth, will often have an acidity regulator in it like calcium acetate. The issue here is that the taste of tomatoes may not be as palatable as some people would like. It may be too acidic, so they add calcium acetate to control the acidity of what you're eating. Coloring agents can be added to make it redder and more richer. Orange juice in glass bottles in the supermarket shelves. Check on the back to see if there is a coloring agent in there. You'll see it, you see these additives in the ingredients list. They're not going to be in the nutritional label because often they don't have any nutritional value in themselves. They're there to do something for the product. Emulsifiers are often used in ice cream. When going through the list of food additives examples in the book, you'll see that emulsifiers consistently are mentioned in ice cream because emulsifiers are needed to blend the ingredients, often which are artificial, to make the ice cream product. This is not a small issue. A recent French study showed that French adults on average are consuming about 10 kilos of additives during a year. In a BBC video which is available on YouTube entitled "UK doctors switches to 80% ultra-processed food diet for 30 days." 30 days is not long, it's one month in a 12 month cycle. But when you look at the before and after photographs, his body has definitely deteriorated, he's definitely put on weight and it's also very clear the way it's changed his body shape. More importantly they did before and after MRI scans and in just 30 days there were new neural connections in his brain. As the doctor said, the neural connections are very similar to those that you would expect to see in somebody that has an addiction, a chemical addiction. That chemical addiction is leading to overeating, overweight and obesity, and increase in the prevalence of blood pressure. Obesity is one of the biggest diseases which is on the rise. Throughout the world, the first world, Canada, US, UK countries like that are seeing it first, but it is now appearing in second and third world countries, countries that have not had any obesity in the past. I'm thinking of Brazil for example. The highly processed food diet is replacing the natural healthy food diets that existed in Brazil and this was flagged in the 1980s so it's not a new discovery. And don't think that pets exempt from this. Unless they're eating a very natural food diet, a whole food diet, they're eating kibble, they're eating canned food, and those will have their own list of food additives. Pets are cats and dogs and also some other animals which are common pets are going to be affected by the use of food additives. This book is about ultra-processed food and how it relates to the risk factors for diabetes and if you're a diabetic, how to reverse your diabetes by scaling back and cutting out foods which are highly processed or ultra-processed foods. The new term in the world is ultra-processed product. What we're consuming is more products than foods because some of the additives have no nutritional value. I'm thinking of an emulsifier, Monopropylene Glycol, and non-food use it can actually be found in windshield washer fluid to prevent it icing up during the winter. So these food additives are contributing to a change in lifestyle. We're seeking out food that is visually appealing, tastes a certain way rather than expressing the natural whole food taste. As I mentioned, acidity regulators in tomato juice, colouring agents in all types of food emulsifies the flavouring agents which give the food a different taste profile compared to what the natural food would be. So that's an interesting book and I will be following up in another book in more detail because there's been a debate on highly artificial drinks and especially sugar drinks in schools and banning them from vending machines in Canadian and US schools. But one country, Colombia, has actually started to tax drinks that have certain characteristics like high sugar, high salt, and foods that are highly fat, they have a high fat content. India is considering bringing in taxes on these type of foods to try and reduce the consumption of fast food and it affects all of us in our lives. When I'm in Starbucks and getting a coffee, I'm seeing people on the drive through ordering whole meals for the whole family and it's all food that is coming out of a sealed plastic bag which is then reheated in the store, put into a paper bag and given to them at the drive-through window. We can repeat this scenario in all types of environments that are serving food that is not cooked and prepared on the spot but is to simply reheat it and put into a bag and give it to you. It's the way of life and I totally built a build, bought into that. So have a look at the book, have a look at the the video, the BBC video on YouTube and I look forward to speaking to you more about the next book, the more detailed book on highly processed food, food additives and the food products that we're now consuming. So I hope that you found the this introduction interesting. I certainly found it enlightening as I was reading it and I'll talk to you later. Bye now.