Not what I was expecting but thoroughly enjoyable. A learning experience.

Definitely something that should be shouted about. The author and narrators passion comes across without being pushy and is backed up with fact based evidence.

A necessary lesson.

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3 people found this helpful

Another greatly researched book!

One thing I love about Kimberley’s books is her ability to bring the science and research to an understandable level. Yes there’s a small amount political info with good reason I feel as it helps to give a clear picture of what’s happened so far and the potential for the future of the UK with clear recommendations. I do hope this becomes another valued text for the professionals and decision makers. On a personal level the information is insightful, useful and easy for me to utilise in daily life.

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2 people found this helpful

Valuable listen.

Because of the information in this book I have been able to identify shortfalls in my diet and put them right.
Easy to listen to and very well read

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Outstanding delivery of critically important research.

Kimberley’s book totally resonated with me as a practicing Mental Health Social Worker and Psychotherapist of 40+ years. She skilfully sets out the economic/humane reasons for investing in a range of cost effective, preventive measures to improve individual and national mind/body health throughout the life cycle. Her ‘tales of two brains’ were illustrations of the wide range of drivers which shape our food/other choices and impact on personal and national health outcomes. A life changing read, to be widely shared. Thank you.

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1 person found this helpful

Brilliant

Interesting, well written and quite alarming. Definitely motivated me to make some changes for my family.

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1 person found this helpful

Everyone should read

This was a fabulous book that everyone should read especially those in policy making and public health. X

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Excellent book

Brilliantly researched and presented book. It is fascinating (and terrifying), i think everyone needs to read it. The narration by the author is also excellent, making it enjoyable to listen to, even when the content leaves you feeling a bit uneasy!

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Fascinating and easy to follow

Kimberly shares key nutritional information about a number of critical social topics in a clear, research based manner. Hearing some of the information which has either been poorly communicated, or not shared at all by our government is horrifying, but I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to access the information in this book. Thank you Kimberly

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Hugely informative

A thought provoking and enjoyable listen, Unprocessed lays bare the gaps in government funding and the lack of will to implement genuine change.

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Mindblowing and amazing book

- EARTHQUAKE ANNOLOGY: Kimberley Wilson begins her book ‘Unprocessed’ with an earthquake analogy. In Japan, they have buildings designed to withstand earthquakes they have no control over. They build in resilience. When it comes to physical health, we employ and consider the principle of prevention, we tell children to brush their teeth to prevent tooth decay, stop smoking because to prevent the risk of lung cancer. When it comes to physical health, we're always thinking prevention but with mental health however, we wait for something to go wrong. We wait for the disaster and then ‘see if we can drag you back to health or patch you up well enough to get back into work. Wilson argues that it should be the other way, Wilson wants people in positions of power to start thinking why we don’t do something similar with the brain. There's no reason that we don't try to build in mental health resilience prevention and that kind of strength into the brain, because the brain is a physical organ. it's built into the keystones of its strength and integrity, in the connections in it and we know what that process is, so why do we leave it to chance. We need to realise the importance of nutrition, not just for the health and growth, but the importance of ensuring your brain is fed properly.
- PRE-CONCEPTION: Before people get pregnant and during pregnancy, most know you should take folic acid. The reason that folic acid is important is that it helps to prevent neural tube defects and the neural tube is the part of the embryo that becomes the brain and the spinal cord. We know there's a clear problem, it's evident in its physical presentation. When there is a lack of folic acid in our diet, there is a neural tube defect and when you replace it in the diet in pregnancy, then you see that a beneficial outcome. But why would we assume that that there’s only one nutrient that would have that kind of effect on brain development. Also, are we taking it early enough. The evidence suggests that we're not because the brain is one of the earliest organs to start developing, which means that the nutritional status of the woman at conception is important to how that process starts building the foundations of the brain. This means that preconception nutrition is a key factor. Women who start their folic acid 3 months before conception, their children have better neurological outcomes. Yet the state of prenatal health in women in the UK is actually very poor. Hopefully people are supplementing adequately, but we have widespread population level deficiency in nutrients that are essential to brain development, irreplaceable in the brain structure, and we must start wondering what the downstream consequences of what this means for brain development, developmental neurological illnesses and conditions and mental health.
- THE FLYNN EFFECT: Society is seeing a decline in the Flynn effect. The Flynn effect is the observation that since records began, global IQ's have been increasing and that's been attributed to three factors. One is improved education; second is the reduced exposure to toxins in the environment, taking lead out of paints which impacts on neurological development. Last is improved nutrition, more access to quality food and the right nutrients. Global this has been increasing for 100 years. Then sometime around the 1990s, in Western countries like Norway, Denmark, Germany and the UK have seen a decline in these scores. In UK high schools, educational levels have been decimated in terms of IQ. So why is that the quality of our global education is falling through the floor. We haven’t started putting lead back into paint, education is accessible so. maybe there's something about the declining quality of our nutrition that is having this impact on brain development and IQ. It’s not just folic acid, is it it's also iodine and choline.
- IODINE: Iodine has been declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as the leading cause of preventable brain damage globally. There is a very clear association between iodine consumption and brain development. The old term used to be cretin or cretism for iodine deficiency. You have swollen glands, but you also have restrictions in mental and physical growth at the extreme end. People who grow up in areas of iodine deficiency can have an IQ of 15 points lower than those who grow up with sufficiency of iodine. WHO has global recommendations, yet 67% of pregnant women in the UK are iodine deficient. The message isn't getting across. people aren't aware of it that should be one of the nutrients that should be as high as folic acid.
- CHOLINE: We also need to think about choline. International research conferences where scientists say we must put choline into pregnancy supplements, because it's as crucial for brain development. It’s one of the building blocks of the brain, and you can't synthesise it, you must get it from your diet, and we have huge deficiency. However, choline which is found in liver, eggs and animal foods, because it helps to make what's called acetylcholine, which is a neurotransmitter, as well as to create your brain cell membranes. There is growing evidence, questions in the research as to whether deficiencies in choline are associated to our increases in autism and ADHD. There are questions about whether we can make definitive associations, but what's not in question is the brain is made from food, it's made from some key nutrients that we're not eating and so we fundamentally have a problem.
- When scientists have these conferences on early nutrition, they say we must put this these nutrients into the supplement and if you’re thinking about starting a family, take choline. However, you won’t find it in pregnancy supplements as choline salts are quite bulky. and it's inconvenient, so we don't do it. This is a commercial decision, being made companies who think people don’t want what they don’t know. However, this is a concern over public health because midwives, health visitors and doctors will do is to say get whatever over the counter supplement is there, and they will assume that it contains everything that you need when you're trying to build a baby's brain. Parents will assume that they are getting everything they need to build their baby's brain and they're not. Not because the information isn't out there but because the people producing the supplements are aware, they're just not, because it's not convenient to them and to their profit and it's not being legislated for. If there's no public demand for it, then why should companies change.
- THE FAT BRAIN / DHA 3: Our brains are mostly fat. in fact, if you were to take your brain and put it out on a lovely sunny day and take all the water out, 60% of what was left would be left is fat, and of that about 20% is a fat called Docosahexaenoic acid (omega 3). if you imagine your brain as a as a brick wall or a house, one in every three bricks is made of this fat. It is an essential building block to a healthy brain. And to get adequate amounts, you need to be eating one to two portions of oily fish per week. This was a recommendation made by the government back in 1994 and we're still not meeting that. We know that it is irreplaceable in the brain, because both in animal studies and human comparison trials, when you restrict the availability of DHA, you get less connectivity in the brain and a smaller overall brain volume. People who have a higher intake of omega 3 throughout their lives have up to 49% reduced risk of developing dementia. If you remember the zika virus which is still around, the massive concern about getting zika virus was the effect of the virus had created shrunken heads of babies. The way the Zika virus works is to prevent the absorption of DHA from the bloodstream into the brain, so you have a very clear demonstration of the effect of insufficiency of this single nutrient that none of us are getting enough of on brain development.
- MAGNESIUM: Magnesium is really important for a whole bunch of stuff; it makes 600 different enzyme reactions. Basically, anything that happens in your body that needs energy, requires magnesium. Hardly anybody's getting enough magnesium but it’s at the centre of the chlorophyll molecule, so the darker green the more magnesium you're going to be getting. You find folic acid in large leafy greens, and if you're not pregnant in liver. if you’re pregnant in egg yolks. It’s also found in salmon, pork, chicken, fish and seaweed.
- UPF FOODS: Regarding ultra-processed foods (UPF) makes people feel full, but in terms of nutrition, contain little nutritional benefits such as minerals. The book discusses the Nova scheme of so there's a little controversy about ultra-processed foods in the scientific literature because food is complex and some things that might fit into one category, you could argue, fit into another but also the fact that something is an ultra-process doesn't automatically make it healthy so we shouldn't necessarily use process as a sign of healthy food.
- NOVA CLASSIFICATION: the Nova classification is the name of the classification that came out of Brazilian research breaks food down into four categories. category one are basically things that you would find plucked out of the ground or very minimally processed whole grain such as rice, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, milk. Category two foods are things are culinary ingredients made from extracts from Group One foods such as sugar, oils, vinegars or salts. Category 4: is food sold ready to eat or heat, they contain an ingredient or a process that cannot be replicated domestically so if you're reading on the label that says it contains emulsifiers, additives, preservatives, then it would be considered an ultra-processed food, because you've taken a whole food, extracted it, pulled it apart, and then put it together with added salt, sugar, emulsify that help other chemicals to improve the mouth feel of it anything that contains foaming agents or firming agents or similar, that would make it a category for ultra-processed food. About 55% of the average UK's persons diet is category four foods, and up to 67% of children's diets in the UK are category four foods or UPF. The problem with that, it's not that these foods in themselves, eating a Kit Kat isn't going to kill you, the problem is that when you process something, you extract something from it and the thing you tend to extract are the essential nutrients. when you take the outer layer off rice or a whole grain, you're removing essential oils and fats when you remove the BRAN, because they oxidise, turn bad and go rancid, so you increase the shelf life. You remove the B vitamins, fibre and magnesium. Refined grains remove 80-97 percent of magnesium. At least twenty nutrients are removed in refining flour and only five are put back in when refined flours are “enriched”. You remove magnesium, 70% of the magnesium is lost in the processing from whole to process and from studies following hundreds of thousands of people, that the higher your intake of UPF the lower your intake of vitamins A, B vitamins including B12, vitamin C, vitamin D, a whole bunch of minerals including magnesium, zinc and selenium and your Omega threes and essential fibre. The more you're eating foods in this category, the hungry your brain is, but these foods are depleted in essential vitamins and minerals. Companies do enhance foods afterwards. When they have a breakfast cereal and you think, well they've added lots but its nutritionally weak. You have children who are overweight and yet malnourished. The thing is that only a select nutrients are put back into these foods, the ones that are cheapest. As we remove all of the nutrients from a whole food there might be thousands of important plant compounds in an apple that we simply haven't identified in a lab and can't then put them into an apple flavoured health bar. You're never going to get the kind of balance and complement of nutrients from an UPF as you would from a whole food.
- FREE WILL: a lot of Kimberly’s book is quite political. We think we have free will and the book talks about the politics of choice. Government thinks that we think we are agents our own destiny, but we’re basically manipulated. It not just that were manipulated, but so much of our decision making is unconscious, not just in terms of our immediate choices, but also our historical ones.
- IN UTERO: Your food preferences are learnt and start to be learnt in utero, there based on the things that your mother was eating, and you don't have a choice about them. If drinking fizzy pop, you are creating increased inflammation.
- BABY FOOD: Children are exposed to lots of those little pouches which tend to have a homogeneous texture, tend to be slightly sweeter, and it can make it more difficult to then introduce children to more homemade textures and foods and less sweet flavours and any kind of moderately palatable diet.
- Children under two shouldn't be having any free sugars at all but a rusk biscuit which is manufactured an advertiser weaning food is 30% sugar. There's a real a contradiction in what's being marketed to parents who care and are interested in their children's well-being and the recommendations in which our choices are preset. We just eat the things that are familiar. We have brains that are primed for famine, the more your advertise certain food, the more you see it presented to you, that lovely smell they pump from bakeries at the back of the supermarket before you’ve even crossed the threshold, is designed carefully to get you to spend more money. The government's own impact analysis for the buy one get one free is that controversial, they don't help you to save money, they're not economical because they encourage you to spend more and you spend up to 20% more than you intended in the first place. They cause a lot of food waste.
- THE PRISON STUDIES: There is an excellent podcast that I recommend on Crime and Nutrition by Kimberly Walsh – worth a listen. There have been at least 5 studies worldwide including UK – funded by the Home Office were a well-researched, double bind experiment so it’s a gold standard. The UK has one of the largest prison populations in Europe, only behind such author authoritarian states as Turkey and Russia in terms of per capita prison incarceration. Prison incarceration is expensive to house a prisoner and we have been cutting budgets for the last 13 or so years, which means that prisons are understaffed, the staff are less experienced, and prisons are becoming more dangerous. They're expensive, they're dangerous as morale is through the floor. There are a number of studies using a randomised control trials describing causal effects, they have been replicated and there have been at least four other studies, in America, the UK (which was funded by the Ministry of Justice), the Netherlands and in Singapore demonstrating the same magnitude of effect, where if you improve nutrition and in these studies they used nutritional supplement versus placebo, and that if you improve nutrition in prisons, you reduce objective incidents of violence so the number of people violently assaulted reduced by 30%. The UK study was done in 2002 with Home Office funding and they have done nothing about it. In UK studies, antisocial behaviour reduced by around 30% and violent acts reduced by 37%.
- The impact also on prisoners and on prison staff if you're if you go to work frightened about how your day is going to go, if your morale is through the floor you can't take care of your family, you leave and you'll go and do something else, it makes a prisoners less likely to rehabilitate and it compounds the problem. The fact that these trials were done through supplementations. Though it’s not Whole Foods, but through supplementations, it's cheap, it's accessible and there are no side effects, and yet we're just sitting on our hands. In the Netherlands they have implemented changes but in the UK we’ve done nothing.
- Politian’s, say we need tougher sentences, but for decades we have very long prison sentences compared to other countries and more prison places but it's not solving the problem. It’s doing the exact opposite.
- COOKING: We have become less skilled at cooking ourselves, partly due to the removal of cooking classes in schools and around people having to work more. Parents are cooking less at home and so children are picking up those skills less and less, but we know that big food industry and companies like McDonald's count on the fact that millennials can't cook and that's why they invest in things like’ just eat’.
- So many people are worried about vaccines and medicines regarding the neurological impact that heavy metals in vaccines like mercury and aluminium have on babies and young children, given there's an increasing amount and the rate of autism. We need to learn to cook real foods.
- Concern around consumption of oily fish and the risk of mercury isn’t borne out in the data. When they have looked at studies where they take blood from the unbiblical cord at birth what they've seen is a correlation between mercury and better neurological outcomes. The benefits of oily fish consumption outweigh any potential risk and that it's still important to consume it but in terms of other exposures – well, we need oxygen to live but give too much oxygen to a new-born baby and it can be fatal.
- We know the most rapid period of brain development is in the first thousand days to around the age of two and then obviously onwards your brain is not fully formed until the age of 25 when myelination in the prefrontal cortex at front part of your brain is completed. The most important nutrients are going to be vitamin D so everyone over the age of 1 in the UK should have a vitamin D supplement. Vitamin D is required for the dopamine system in the brain and that's why there's association between vitamin D and ADHD which affects the dopamine system. Also, polyphenols found in brightly coloured fruits and vegetables helps keep the blood vessels in the brain healthy and a Omega 3 fatty acids.
- DEMENTIA: The book finishes with some studies on dementia and how eating a healthy diet full of nuts, fish and vegetables, fruit and beans can also be good for you.
- A fascinating book.

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