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You're 160.5. Lovely. Step forward.
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Amy and Nancy are 24-year-old twins.
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So, Amy and Nancy, what we want to do is to look at how food processing impacts your health.
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They're taking part in a test with Doctor Sarah Berry and Professor Tim Specter from King's College London.
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What you're going to do is for two weeks, Nancy, you're going to be doing the unprocessed diet and Amy, you're going to be eating the ultra-processed diet.
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Then we're gonna get you back here and then we're going to do the same test again and look at how these different foods have impacted your health.
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The twins diet will be matched exactly for calories, nutrients, fat, sugar, and fiber.
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Ultra-processed food accounts for more than 50% of our energy intake and it's an even bigger problem in children.
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So it accounts for about 65% of our energy intake for children.
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This is actually increasing at an alarming rate.
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We believe ultra-processed foods are having an unfavorable effect on our health is because the actor processing foods breaks down the structure of the foods.
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Often ultra processed foods have very little fiber in them, or the fiber is removed.
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Many of these ingredients most people won't have heard of.
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But what we don't know is how all of these different chemicals might interact together in terms of our health.
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I do eat some processed foods just out of convenience, but I do love lots of fresh food and have quite a healthy diet. I think.
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So I think it is gonna be a bit of a shift.
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For breakfast this morning I had a quinoa porridge with berries on top and it's done a really good job at keeping me energized and full.
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So it's the end of the day now and I've got a bit of a headache, to be honest.
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So yeah, ending the day, still hungry, feeling a bit sort of rubbish and yeah, a bit of a headache.
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Lots of the things that you've just described are about your headache.
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All point to the fact that you're probably having what we call a glucose dip, which is a dip in blood sugar that happens about 2 to 4 hours after people consume really heavily processed refined carbohydrates.
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This is a mousse made with fruit puree and only 73 calories.
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Yeah, you'd think that would be a healthy option.
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Oh my goodness.
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Pork gelatin, glucose fructose syrup, acidity regulator, citric acid, sodium hydroxide, modified maize starch.
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There's a term we use called the health halo where, you know, you have packaging says "High in fiber or low in sugar, low in salt, plant-based,"
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sort of these kind of magic words that make people think, "Wow, these are really healthy."
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If anything ever says "low, reduced or no," I'd always be a bit suspicious because how else have they therefore made that food taste great.
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In the last decade, the evidence has been slowly growing that ultra processed food is harmful for us in ways we hadn't thought.
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The twins find there is one ingredient they keep seeing again and again on food packets.
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And then emulsifier again, we've seen that a few times, haven't we?
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Emulsifiers are essentially a glue.
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They stick components together so that they have a good mouth feel and they don't fall apart in your mouth or on the plate.
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So here we have carboxymethyl cellulose CMC, which is one of the commonest emulsifiers used in the food industry.
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And I'm just gonna demonstrate what happens when you just add water to it and it very rapidly becomes like a glue.
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The food industry uses around 60 different emulsifiers to enhance the appearance, texture and shelf life of ultra-processed foods.
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Some are naturally occurring, others are chemically produced.
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It's found in an incredible number of our foods and they are potentially harmful.
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Doctor Mathilde Touvier is leading one of the world's biggest studies into food additives, publishing regular reports based on the health and eating habits of 174,000 people.
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She's been looking emulsifiers' long-term impact on health.
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The BBC has had exclusive access to the early results.
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They are yet to be verified by peer review, but she says they're concerning.
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We observed a significant association between emulsifiers' fire intake and increased risk of cancer overall and breast cancer, not only but also with cardiovascular diseases
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In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, food safety is regulated by the Food Standards Agency, the FSA.
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It says it's about to launch a public consultation on some emulsifiers.
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A spokesperson for the Food and Drink Federation said,
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"Food manufacturers take the health of consumers and safety of the food they produce seriously and adhere to the strict regulations.
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In the UK, all additives are independently and rigorously assessed to safety by the Food Standards Agency before they can be used in food."
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The results of the twins test are now in.
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Amy, you were on the ultra-processed food diet.
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Your results were really quite different to your sisters.
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They were far worse.
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Your blood fat levels actually went up; your lipids which are markers of heart disease, they were increased; your blood sugar was noticeably worse.
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You actually gained weight nearly a kilogram and you actually lost weight.
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It's a bit scary, isn't it? After only two weeks to see those sorts of results.
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So just imagine what that would be over 20 years.
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After just two weeks of the test, the impact of Amy's ultra-processed diet will be fully reversible.
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But the results are in line with a growing body of evidence, linking chemical additives and ultra processing to serious health consequences.
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We already have the most obese children in Europe.
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That means more type two diabetes, more cancers, more heart disease, more misery, more mental illness.
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This really is a future time bomb.
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There are now dozens of scientific studies warning of the dangers of diets high in ultra-processed food.
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The twin's test showed the potential impact these foods can have on you in just two weeks.
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Esme Stallard, BBC News.
