In the excerpt, the dashes are an example of a literary device as its purpose is to achieve a particular artistic effect in the piece of writing. There are three types of dashes, and each of them has different functions: The hyphen, the En dash, and the EM dash. The one used here is the Em dash, the longest dash of them all, which takes up the spacing of a capital M in print, and can be written as double hyphens "--" or like this "—." The purpose of this dash is to introduce new ideas into a sentence, to create heightened drama, or to put emphasis on a phrase or part of a sentence, such as it is used in the excerpt.
Processed foods have been studied by several scientific and medical researchers and institutes and have found that severe health problems can come about from eating too much processed foods.
