Welcome to Zoe, Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. As we welcome the new year, I've got a really special episode for you today. Two of the world's leading scientists are here to give you straightforward, actionable advice on how to change your diet and what to eat in 2024, so you can feel better and improve your health. That's right. Dr. Sarah Berry and Professor Tim Specter are back on the show. They'll share their incredible knowledge about nutrition and healthy eating with you. Sarah is a world leader in Large-Scale Human Nutritional Studies, Associate Professor in Nutrition at King's College London, and Chief Scientist at Zoe. And Tim is one of the world's top 100 Most Cited Scientists, a professor of Epidemiology, and my scientific co founder at Zoe. Sarah and Tim, thank you for joining me today on what is New Year's Day for everybody who is listening.

Pleasure. You got me out of my bed after a late night last night just to be here, but I'm very excited regardless. I didn't have all the tequila slammers that Tim had, so I'm doing a bit better than him today.

My voice is a bit more gravely than usual.

All right. Well, we are doing a special episode today, which I'm really looking forward to, really tied into, I think, the heart of our Mission at Zoe. Our Mission at Zoe is to improve the health of millions by helping them to change how and what they eat. I wanted to have this opportunity today to have both of you as incredible scientists who dedicated your careers to understanding how the foods that we eat could make us sick or support our health, really talk to us about what is the latest science and what would the advice you would be giving to somebody who's waking up today and saying, in 2024, I want to make changes that are going to ensure that I feel better and in the long term, that I'm healthier, based on actually the real science, not something they just discovered that popped up on their social media and told them that the answer was to just eat cucumber. And so I know that you've pulled together seven essential strategies, and we're going to cover each of those. But before we run into those, can I just start at the beginning? Tim, why does what we eat actually matter?

Well, it's probably the most important personal choice we can make for our health and also the planet as a side effect. And the data clearly show that if you got everyone to improve their diet to the top 10 %, you would get rid of 60 or 70 % of all common diseases. It doesn't matter when you started. There's new data showing that if at age 40, even if you've had a really bad diet, if you shift yourself to an optimum diet of the top 10 % of people, you're going to gain an extra 10 years of life.

An extra 10 years of life.

Exactly. So this is why it's worth it for everybody, whoever's listening at whatever age, whatever state of your health or your diet to really listen up and make those good choices because it's going to make a huge impact on the rest of your life.

Jonathan, not only will it reduce your risk of diet-related disease, you also feel better. And we know this from our own research that If you follow a healthier diet, you have more energy, you have better mood, you feel less hungry. I think that's really important that we don't forget that it also enables us to feel great.

And it's not a super strict diet. We're talking about these people that punish themselves. And so that extra year is, you're counting every minute of it because you can't wait until you can get to something good to eat.

Never allowed a piece of cake for the rest of your life.

Exactly.

And look, our seven top tips are going to make you feel great and live a longer, healthier life, in my opinion.

Now, a lot of people listening to this may be saying, well, actually, I think I already am eating healthily. Are most people in the West, in fact, already eating well?

No.

While people have been thinking they're eating healthily, heart attacks, cancers, diabetes, all the mental health problems have been slowly increasing. So for the vast 20 years, we've been deluding ourselves that what we thought was a healthy diet actually isn't. And I think that's the tragedy. It's not like people weren't trying to some extent. They wanted to do the right thing, but they were given the wrong advice, they were in the wrong environment, and they ended up making the wrong choices.

I do I think, no, there are a proportion of people that are eating good diet, particularly those that have listened to our podcast over the last few years. But I think that the real challenge is in the current food landscape that we have in the UK, in the US, and many other countries, it's actually really hard to eat healthily as well.

I would totally agree with that. One of the things I've been struck on my own personal journey with Zoe off over the last seven years is I thought I was eating healthily at the beginning, and now I've changed almost everything that I eat, but also that I have this experience. As soon as I'm eating out, as soon as I'm looking to buy something, how hard it often is to eat something that is healthy and how much thought I have to put into it. And in the past, I would have thought it was trivial. What are the problems that come from this food? So you talked about living longer, but what is the negative? What's been happening to people's health as a consequence of this food you've been talking about?

Most of the common chronic diseases are in some way impacted by our bad diets and are increasing weight.

So if somebody is listening and maybe their diet isn't so good, what are the risk factors they are exposing themselves to?

Really, there's very few conditions that Sarah and I can think of that we know definitively are not related to a poor diet. So I think there's a chance for everybody listening, even if they've got some obscure illness that no one's ever heard of, that improving your diet is going to have some impact on And I think that's a really new way of thinking, certainly compared to 20 years ago when I was looking at this, when we thought it only had a trivial effect. I think we've totally underestimated the impact of diet because we didn't really know what the good advice was. So if it was just eating more muesli and orange juice, then obviously it didn't work.

And Jonathan, I think on a positive note, we also know that introducing a good diet, as well as giving us longer life years, can actually reverse some of these chronic diseases. There's fantastic research coming out now in a real-life setting of people with type 2 diabetes, going on a healthier diet, losing weight, and going into total remission. Even for people already along that path, it's not too late. So listen to our top seven tips.

Let's go and start with the first strategy. And the first one, I think, is food is more than fuel. Don't count calories or macronutrients. Tim, many people listening have been told that eating healthily is fundamentally about counting calories and making sure that they don't eat too many calories a day. Why is that wrong?

That's rubbish advice because while at one level, you can describe food in terms of calories by burning it and seeing how much energy it gives off. That's not a useful guide to what to eat because it totally ignores quality of that food. And we also know that following calorie reduction doesn't work for the vast majority of people. That's why calorie-restricted diets, although they all lead to some short term weight loss, virtually always lead to a long term failure of that plan and an overshooting.

And Tim, a lot of people are going to be completely shocked to hear this because they've been brought up, in my case, almost 50 years of advice saying, the fundamental thing you need to do is count your calories. And if you are overweight, it's your fault and you just need to reduce the number of calories you do each day. So are you sure?

Absolutely. There are multiple studies now and meta-analyses looking at these where they've done very carefully controlled trials of people on calorie-restricted diets against control groups. And yes, nearly everyone will reduce rate when you They say half the amount of calories they're eating, and they can sustain that for a while. But then that body starts to react against it. We've had millions of years of evolution to ensure that We don't lose vital amounts of muscle and fat that we still keep them. And so after that initial period of euphoria, oh, this is easy. I'm losing weight. Your body starts ramping up its defense mechanisms to stop you losing too much of your valuable tissue. It senses you're in this starvation mode, and it goes to survival mode. And that means absolutely ramping up those signals to the brain saying to eat more. So you're Appetite signals. All the time you see food, you think about food, you're obsessed about eating more. And so it's really hard to not go past that fridge and not dive in or have a snack. Then And you've also got your metabolism, which at the same time is slowed right down.

So it is conserving your energy rather than burning it up. It's trying to keep every little scrap of fat and muscle in your body. So you are absolutely fighting against nature by doing that if you are purely following a calorie approach to this. And many people doing these low calorie diets are often taking junk foods and things that get into the system very quickly. They not have the the right amount of fiber, all kinds of things they're ignoring because they're focusing just on this one measure of food.

And help us to understand because you mentioned food quality. So again, I think a lot of people are thinking food is fuel, right? If it's not calories, then maybe it's like the macronutrients, like carbs and fat. What is this quality thing?

Food isn't just an energy source for our body. It's also an energy source for our gut microbes. And I think that's another way to look at food, get an idea of how we're discovering it's much more complex. And so as well as just providing sugar, for example, for our cells to burn, it should be providing fiber for our microbes to feed off. For those of you who haven't heard about the gut microbiome, this is the community of 100 trillion microbes that live in our gut. Most of them in our body are in this lower part of our intestine. And basically, we have to nourish Push them every day with food for them to produce all the chemicals that keep our body really fit and healthy, keep our immune system, stop us from aging, stop us getting cancer, and help keep us happy, send chemicals to our brain. So we need to send complex fibers down to those guys all the time to keep them happy. And that's really one of the key factors of food quality that is totally ignored if we're only focusing on calories.

And I think, Jonathan, it's important to add that as well as counting calories not being a sustainable way to lose weight is that actually back-of-pack calorie information is highly inaccurate. And so we know that for some foods, it can over or underestimate the amount of calories by up to about 30 %. Yes. We also know that food is so much more than just the amount of energy that it gives us. It's so much more than the macronutrients that I know most people are familiar with, the amount of protein, fat, carbohydrate, for example. Food contains thousands of chemicals, and all of these chemicals have magical properties in our body and have different kinds of properties in our body. If we become over-focused on the nutrients or the calories, then we're not getting the correct diversity of these different kinds of chemicals, which is important. Also, food's there to be enjoyed. I often say, as you know, Jonathan, if a food is too healthy to be enjoyed, it's just not healthy at all. We have to remember that eating is part of our culture, it's part of how we live our lives, our social setting, our lifestyle.

We need to make sure that in a quest to eat healthy food, we still retain that pleasure that we get from food.

I agree. It's come up on a lot of podcasts, actually, isn't it? About this idea that our social lives actually have this hugely positive impact on our health. So clearly, what you want to do with your food is support that in the way we talk about Mediterranean diet. Quite often, one of the things I'm always struck by when you're in the Mediterranean is how long people sit down and eat their food together. I know that you shared some of this data.

And they're not stressed about eating. And I think this is the other thing. If people are on diets, there's some evidence to show that actually you're stressed when you sit down to your meal because you're worrying about counting things and looking at the pack and not overdoing it. And that probably offsets any potential advantage. And so we want to get people to sit down to a good meal that's based on quality, not calories, and absolutely each time really enjoy that moment.

So if people are waking up on January the first and they're listening to this, should they now be saying, I've got to restrict myself and cut out lots of foods from my diet in order to be healthy this year?

Absolutely not. I think that it's really important we focus on adding healthy foods in, increasing the diversity of our plate rather than worrying about taking specific foods out. And by adding in healthier foods, naturally, you will display some of the less healthy foods.

Hi. I love that you're listening to this. It means a lot to me and the whole team who put such a lot of hours into this podcast each week. We release this show for free without ads to help millions of people improve their health with cutting-edge science. In return, all I ask is that you help us on this mission. If you know someone who'd benefit from listening to this episode, please send them a link to this show. If you haven't already, hit follow wherever you're listening right now. Thank you, and on with the show. All right, let's move to the second strategy. This one is that fat is not your enemy. So, Sarah, many of us grew up being told that actually fat is your enemy. It's bad for us. You should be looking to restrict it as much as possible, and that if you eat lots of fat, you will get fat. Is this all true?

Absolutely not. Fat is your friend.

Fat is your friend? It is. Okay, some people who have not been listening to the podcast are going to be a bit shocked.

Tell us. So fat's your friend, firstly, because it makes food taste great and we want to enjoy our food. So fat carries the flavor in food. It also creates that beautiful creamy mouthfeel of food. I don't know if you've ever tried low fat cheese, but it tastes like crap. And the reason is, is because you haven't got the fat carrying the beautiful flavor, giving you that creamy texture. Is that right?

So the fat is really required for you to get that taste.

Chocolate. Why does chocolate taste great? Because it melts in your mouth. Cocoa butter melts at 37 degrees, body temperature is 37 degrees. You put it in your mouth and you've got It's a beautiful mouthful. It's all about the fat. So firstly, it makes our food taste great.

And it should be pointed out that Sarah has been studying fat for 25 years. So are you quite a fat fan girl?

I have been teaching on the positive effects of fat the entire past 20 years.

So why have we all grown up with this assumption that fat is bad for us? And does that mean that all fat is good for you and we should go back to eating as much steak as possible?

So first, I think the misconception is based around the energy density of fat. And so what we know is per gram of fat, there's twice as many calories as per gram of carbohydrate and protein. So there's this perception that therefore it will cause us to put weight on. The fat will cause us to be fat because of how many calories there are per gram of fat. But this is wrong.

And most doctors like me, we brought up like that and changed to low fat yogurts without knowing really what we're doing just because it seemed a nice simple story. And therefore, everybody followed it. And the industry gave people what they wanted. And suddenly, you're going to supermarket and half the products are low fat.

But it's very short-sighted. So in the '80s, there was this explosion of low fat, no fat, reduced fat products. Obviously, with the removal of fat, we have to replace it with something else, and we don't know the health effects often of what has replaced the fat. We also know, though, quite clearly that actually increasing your intake from fat actually isn't associated with weight gain.

It's just not true. If you eat more fat, you don't end up putting on more weight compared to- Within reason, Jonathan.

Obviously, if someone goes and has five slabs of butter every day.

Got it, but it's not because it's... But if you move to a high fat diet versus a low fat diet, you don't put on more weight.

If you go from a low fat diet to a high fat diet, you'll find that actually a large proportion of people might even reduce their body weight. Some people will just maintain their body weight.

But what's quite clear- A lot of people are saying that's crazy. Are you saying that I could eat a lot of fat and still could lose weight?

So fat makes us feel full for longer. It delays the rate at which our stomach empties food, which again helps us create that feeling of fullness. So it also controls our blood sugar levels as well, so that we tend to consume less calories potentially later in the day.

And what about health? Because I think what a lot of people associate is this idea that it's linked to having heart attacks. I think about my... I've talked about this on the podcast It's been said before, my father being given this advice 50 years ago that he needed to eat a very low fat diet because he had high cholesterol and therefore he was at risk. Is this true?

That's wrong. So what we know is there are some types of fat that are linked to increased risk of heart disease because it increases our blood cholesterol. There's particular kinds of saturated fat. The saturated fat that's found in many processed meats, for example, or other red meats, and often in quite processed foods, so from tropical oil sources, for example. There's other saturated fats that are found in fermented dairy that we know actually don't increase your cholesterol. And this is one of those big myths out there that people are told, You've got high cholesterol, don't eat dairy. Actually, that's wrong as well. You can eat dairy, particularly cheese, yogurt, for example.

Yeah, fermented dairy is generally healthier than plain dairy.

And you don't need to go for low fat dairy either. So we know that there's some fats, the saturated fats that are bad for us. We know that there's some saturated fats that actually aren't bad for us. But really important, we know there's some fats that are great for us.

Great for our health.

Great for our health.

What are they? If somebody is listening, they're about to go and stock up the kitchen for January.

With fat.

There's a type of fat called essential fatty acids, and these are actually essential for our health. They're really important for normal physiological function.

Meaning that you would basically die if you don't have them.

You would die without them, yes.

They sound important.

They have loads of really important functions, almost like pharmacological functions in our body. Like blood like. Yes. But there's also lots of other fats that we call our monounsaturated and other polyunsaturated fats that we know have really important functionings. Actually, they don't in that way.

How do I find this in the grocery store? Because I haven't seen the monounsaturated fat oil. Where do I get these?

We know that any unsaturated fat is good for our health, and there's loads of different sources of these. So one that's A great source is olive oil, so extra virgin olive oil, which I know, Tim, is one of your favorites to have. So not only is it full of what we call heart healthy oils, it's also packed full of polyphenols. So what you'll often find is that these healthy sources of also have lots of other fantastic nutrients in them as well.

Anything else other than extra virgin olive oil?

Nuts, avocados, oily fish, so many different plant-based sources of oils.

I think this is one of the things that personally blew my mind when I first really got involved with Zoe because I had moved to avoiding all of those things pretty much because they're bad for you. And so this idea that you could actually pour a lot more extra virgin olive oil over almost any meal and make it healthier is slightly mind It's one of the big shifts that I've made in my own diet, as is also thinking that eating nuts is really good for me versus thinking like, Oh, they're really high fat. That must be something that I need to avoid. I think those are two, in my own personal case, really easy shifts that I think have made a big difference in my diet each week.

Yeah, I would say avoid low fat, no fat, reduce fat products.

Yeah, that's a very simple rule. If it says low fat, no fat, just Leave it on the shelf.

Brilliant. Let's move to strategy number three, which is very simple. Eat more plants. So, Tim, I know this was really your top pick for improving your health in 2024. Can you explain why?

Yeah, it's a catch-all that if you do eat more plants, then you're going to get so many extra benefits. And we know that plants are an incredible We're a source of many things, including, obviously everyone knows they're a source of fiber. And we are, as in the US and the UK, massively fiber deficient. Any about 5 % of us get enough fiber. So 95 % of us are not getting enough. So you get that through plants and you get through... You want diverse fiber. You don't just want the same fiber. So getting multiple different plants into your diet is really important to feed your gut microbes, which feed the rest of your body. The other reason we've come up with eating more plants is it also gives you an enormous amount of protein. And people forget. They think they've got to eat steak or I know.

I think a lot of people will be really surprised by that. Again, I was definitely brought up with protein is a piece of meat, or if you're being really healthy, maybe a piece of fish. No, I don't think that even count. When I was growing up, I don't think even... No. Really? That was full of fat. So that's fat.

Of course, you weren't allowed that.

That's like, out. Like, literally, protein is like something that our ancestors might have hunted and everything else is not protein. That's not right?

That's absolutely not right. And this is a whole failure of our education system and why we're not teaching kids this and chefs and schools and even universities, really the key that you can get protein everywhere. And there are certain plants that have more protein than others, but there are some like the grains, for example, that quinoas that have around 10 % of it is actually protein. You've got your pastas at around eight %. Pulses?

What is a pulse?

Beans, legumes, chickpeas.

Is there a lot of protein in a bean?

There's masses of it. Yes. So again, often over 10 %, and they all vary, and you're getting different types of proteins.

So let's imagine I managed to convince my son to listen to this podcast, which is unlikely, but let's just say that I managed. He's just 16. He's starting He's going to put on a lot of muscle, and he's really focused now on making sure that he's getting enough protein. And he doesn't believe that unless he's going to be eating lots of meat, that he can possibly get enough protein to actually put on all those muscles and grow up to be a man. What would you say, Tim?

I'd say there are many other ways to get muscle through purely plant-based proteins. And there are many successful bodybuilders who are on a plant-only diet.

And so you're not saying he has to be on a plant-only diet, but you're saying he doesn't have to stress about eating meat in order to get his- No, you don't have to be on a meat-only diet or egg-only diet or only having these protein shakes and this stuff, you can do that with a healthy meal, with even only just having occasional meat, because there are so many plants and legumes and related products like mushrooms that are going to give you protein.

And so people just forget that this is very much a constituent of plants. And that's really why I want to just remind people that if they have a diversity of plants, they're going to be getting sufficient protein.

Maybe just actually just help us understand what a plant is, because again, I think back to when I first heard that. It's like, a plant is something I put in the garden. A plant is not something that I eat.

So a plant is obviously your fruits and your vegetables, but it's also a nut. It's also a seed. It can be a herb. It can be a spice. It can be actually dark chocolate, because actually that's derived from a fermented plant. It can be- I love that dark chocolate might be a plant.

I'm smirking here in the corner. Coffee is a plant.

Coffee is a plant.

And so I think it's really- I'm going on a plant-based diet for 2024, called the chocolate diet. And by that nature, yes, wine and cider are also plant-based foods.

Okay, wine and chocolate.

Most of the foods we eat are plant-based. I think that's what we seem to forget in this world where we get things out of packets and it's composite. So when we're saying we want to eat people to eat more plants, we mean the whole plant rather than just a small extract of it. So So it's the difference between having a corn on the cob or having cornflakes. The corn on the cob, you can see exactly what it is. That's in its purest form. You boil it, you see it. There might be an intermediate one where you might have had it cooked and put in a can. And then you got the ultra-processed version of it, which doesn't resemble the original one at all. There's none of the outer coating, none of the goodness, none of the fiber, none of the nutrients. So it's still recognizable as the plant. I think that's the key. There is one active exception here. Mush are not plants, and they're not meat. They're another kingdom. But mushrooms, I would definitely include in this group. So I don't want them to feel... If there are any mushroom lovers who are feeling upset.

They're allowed to as well.

Yeah, they're in my group. And I think our study so far have shown that around 30 different types of plant a week is your optimum for gut health. I think we're going to be revising that number soon, but it's a reasonable... Something to bear in mind as a target. I think a lot of people who've listened to me before on this, and Zoe, have found that a useful target to get to, to try not only eat more fiber and protein, but also get all the other polyphenols in these plants, because the more different ones, the different colors, the different flavors, the different levels of bitterness, you're getting more of these There are 50,000 chemicals in plants, and you want a diversity of chemicals in order to help your body, both directly and indirectly, via feeding your gut microbes. And the better the menu you're giving them, the more they... The happier they are and the more chemicals they respond with.

And this is why you want something that's not massively processed. So it's just down to something very simple, like a white rice or a white flour. It's because you've lost so many any of these chemicals that were in the original plant.

So I would think about the healthiness of a plant using three key tips. One is, does it reasonably resemble the original plant? Are we having enough diversity? So like Tim said, are we getting a diversity of maybe 30 different plants? And what about the quality of that plant as well? Because if it is heavily processed, has loads of added chemicals, doesn't resemble the original plant, it doesn't mean it's healthy for us.

Don't forget frozen and canned vegetables are fantastic, generally in terms of nutrients. So it's not like it has to be the super expensive high-end of plants. Many of them you can just get it from the cheap freezer.

We did a whole podcast on this about being able to eat more cheaply. And interestingly, again, one of the things that I've really shifted, actually just in the last 18 months since that, is the amount of stuff that I'm eating from tins, particularly things like beans, and also the amount of stuff that's now in the freezer, which means that suddenly you can cook with a bunch of things really fast, which I'd never thought about. So I've definitely found those two tips great and completely the opposite of what I thought, which is frozen and canned food is bad. And I think you guys have generally convinced me often it's got the best in terms of the things I've got.

Yeah, often it actually is more nutritious if it's frozen because it retains some of the vitamins that might be degraded from either air or light, like vitamin C. So often it can actually be better for you.

Let's move to strategy number 4, reduce ultra-processed foods. So can we just start with what is an ultra-processed food and why is it bad for us?

There's no uniform definition of an ultra-processed food. The simplest one is that it comes in a package and the back of the label includes ingredients you wouldn't find in your kitchen and don't resemble anything that you would cook with. So this means that it contains bits of foods that have been extracted from real food and then combined together with glues and gums and colorants and flavorings and lots of fat and sugar to stick it together, it's then pressurized, baked, and comes out in some form that looks like food-like. So I call them edible food-like substances. And I think that summarizes it pretty well. There are some grading systems which are complicated to go into, but I think take a message. It's in a packet. It's probably got all these health halo labels on it. Health halo label? Saying it's low in fat or low in calories, or it's got extra vitamins, all these nonsense claims.

Why are they not, Tim? Lots of people are saying, Oh, it's great. It says high in vitamin C or high in fiber. Why would that be What's the answer to this claims?

Because any small addition that they've made to it by reformulating it doesn't hide the fact that the underlying food is likely to be harmful for you long term. And so we call them health halo. Those because it's a bit like painting a turd. You don't actually... It's still a turd, and you wouldn't eat it, even if it's got a nice color on it. So this is essentially what the manufacturers are doing.

That's That's a poop for anybody who doesn't know what Tim is referring to.

So the reason that these are bad for us is because they tend to be higher in unhealthy nutrients. They tend to be higher in salt, higher in sugar, higher in unhealthy saturated fats. They tend to be lower in healthy nutrients, so lower in fiber, good quality fats, good quality proteins. They tend to be low in a lot of the really healthy chemicals that come from natural plants, so these polyphenols. They also tend to have lots of added ingredients like emulsifiers and additives that we don't fully know how they impact our body. Then importantly, they also have a food structure that has been destroyed. By destroying the original food structure, it changes how fast we eat the food. We know that we can eat our ultra-processed food, for example, 50% more quickly than an unprocessed.50%.

More quickly.

This can go on to make us eat up to 500 calories more over day, which is huge. It means we're over eating the foods as well. It It also changes where our body digests the food. What happens is it's digested earlier up in our gastrointestinal tract, where we have less of these receptors telling us we're full. We tend to not feel as full as quickly. Again, encouraging us to over eat these foods.

Yeah. So it's the biggest disaster, really, in Western countries, is the rise of ultra-processed food that's taken over since the 1970s from whole real foods. And as we're focused on just trying to reformulate them to reduce the total amounts of fat or dial down the amount of salt or sugar, we've ignored all the other facts that Sarah has been talking about, the structure, the way that these foods are designed to make us over eat them. And if we keep eating them regularly, that just means we will over eat more of them. And they're low fiber, so we're in a state of fire We're in a cyber deprivation continuously. But we want to eat more and more of these products. And we're now at a state where nearly 60 % on average across the US and the UK of our meals are Ultra-processed.

60 % of the food we're eating in the US and the UK is ultra-processed. Yeah, it's huge.

Correct. And it's worse in deprived areas. So that's the average. So you think what it's like for poorer families, and that explains why they're that life expectancy is 10 years less. There's a clear correlation between ultra-processed food and longevity and all these multiple disease problems we're having.

And there doesn't seem to be any discussion about ultra-processed food within the food guidelines, be that in the States or really across anywhere in Western Europe?

I think some countries have introduced these. These are countries that don't have the same political pressures on them to do nothing. And the US and the UK are heavily lobbied by these massive food companies that have $100 billion budgets they can spend on lobbying and making sure that the industry comes first, the idea that there's a manufacturing base that is important for each country. So they stop this happening, effectively like the cigarette companies did in delaying any legislation against them. The food companies are finding incredibly profitable because they have long-schelf lives. They can package them. They can last for two years. And each year, they're finding more innovative ways to automate the process, make it cheaper, doesn't require manual labor at all. And they are really brilliant scientists behind making these novel products, which are these edible food-like substances substances, whilst real food is getting more expensive. So the differential is clearer. And as many people are struggling with cost of living, they're buying more of these products, not less. And the profit margins are huge on them. So on cereals, for example, profit margins are around 30 %. So they can afford to do huge advertising to children.

And it's so easy to produce these products, unlike poor old farmers making pears or apples or whatever. They're not given the same help that automation and industry and robotics and things can do for the food industry. So that's why we're in this mess. And it costs individual taxpayers thousands of pounds or dollars a year that we're paying for all the health costs of this junk food given to our populations. And so it does affect everybody, whether you eat it or not, you're actually paying for it. I think that's the point.

I think, Jonathan, though, we can add a positive note here that, yes, we're eating far too much of these unhealthy, heavily processed foods, but actually even a small reduction can have a big impact on your health. And that's really important to remember because it's all very well saying all of these reasons why they're so unhealthy for us. But the current food landscape is what the current food landscape is. You go into a supermarket, and like I said earlier, it's very difficult to actually avoid these ultra-processed foods. What I would say to people is you don't need to totally eliminate them. You could every month try and reduce by 10%, try and swap out a few products that are heavily processed with unprocessed foods. That's It's all going to have a big impact. Don't go cold turkey. We don't want to ever set anyone up, Zoe, to fail. That's why it's really important to say, Look, even a small reduction is going to have a big impact. We need to think about the fact of what is accessible to us.

I love that message. Now, I think a lot of people will be listening to this and saying, But I don't eat any ultra-processed foods. Are they right or what might be the foods that are hiding that they don't even realize they're ultra-processed, Sarah?

There's lots of ultra-processed foods that we might not typically think are ultra-processed. A lot of the cereal bars that you get that, again, have these health halos, say high fiber, full of oats, they're actually really heavily processed. They don't resemble anything like the original food they came from.

They're all breakfast cereals, I'd say, wouldn't it?

Yeah, and breakfast cereals. Also many yogurts. So many of these fruit-flavioured, sweetened, low-fat, low-sugar yogurts are actually also quite heavily processed.

As well as most supermarket breads, biscuits, cakes, most ready meals.

Again, this is one of those things that's been a relatively new discovery for me. Going to the grocery store and looking at all the yoga or the yogurt, depending on which country you're in, and realizing that basically almost every single one on something that might go on for the entire aisle is all ultra-processed, and maybe you can find one or two things that are not, it's a bit of an eye-opener. So I find that This is one of those things where when you start to realize it, it really changes the way you think about the food that we're eating for ourselves, giving our children. Let's talk about strategy number five, reduce your blood sugar spikes. So Sarah, lots of people have heard this word blood sugar and blood sugar crashes, but what are they and why would you want to reduce repeated blood sugar spikes?

Jonathan, when you eat carbohydrates, so this is a nutrient that's found in bread, in rice, in pasta, in nearly all of the foods that we eat. You have a short term increase in blood sugar, which we actually call blood glucose, and that reaches a peak around 15 to 30 minutes after you've eaten that food. What some people have, and we see this as anywhere between 25 to 50% of people, also about 2 to 4 hours after they've had these carbohydrate rich foods, have a dip in their blood sugar. We know- It spikes up, and then for some people, it can also dip down. Yeah, I think of it a little bit like going on a roller coaster. Now, I'm scared of roller coasters, so it's not something I like. What we know is if you have these peaks going up repeatedly, excessively, time after time throughout the day, that they can predispose predispose us to certain chronic diseases, predispose us to type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, so heart disease, and also increase our risk of developing obesity as well. This is because they impact the lining of our blood vessels, they impact inflammation in our body.

What we also know, and we know this from our own research, and this is really interesting, that for those people that have a dip as well, so that's the dip in the roller coaster 2-4 hours after they've had this carbohydrate-rich meal, they actually feel a lot more hungry than those that don't have a dip. They go on to eat a lot more calories, up to 300 more calories over a day than the people that don't have a dip. They feel less alert, and they also might feel that feeling of being hungry because you've got this low blood sugar.

And they might reach for that chalky bicky at 11 o'clock. People might recognize that. It's like feeling, Oh, I've got a bit of a low here. I need some sugar to It kept me going. And I didn't ever link it to actually having a real blood sugar change.

And you changed your mind?

Yeah, totally seen these results. And these people who were blinded to their blood sugar. We did this in the predict studies, they didn't know what was going on their blood sugar, and they were reporting they were feeling low energy and hungry.

They were eating half an hour before the people that didn't have these dips, as well as eating more.

So you're saying that, and this is like this blood sugar shooting up, crashing down below and starting what was actually leading people to say, I've just got to go and eat this. Actually, it's a consequence of what they ate before. So funnily enough, the first food they ate was forcing them to eat the second food.

It's commoner in women, interesting than men. And it obviously does depend on if they had a carby breakfast, typical British breakfast of toast of marmalade or a muesli or some breakfast cereal, then get to work and then they'd have this dip. And I think many people listening will remember that. And we think it's about one in three women are in that position. And the science is now telling us it's for real. It's not just a psychological thing. I'm a bit tired at work. I need to sit down and a bicky. This is physiological. And if you add up all those events over 10 or 20 years, you can see why just because of this sugar dip, actually, you're going to be putting on a lot of weight. You have more mood problems, more energy problems, et cetera.

So does this mean that people should just stop eating carbohydrates and just eat all the healthy facts you were telling us about before?

No, absolutely not. So what's really interesting is from our predict research, we also found that Some people have a dip one day, depending on their breakfast, but actually can change the type of breakfast they're having to not have a dip. It doesn't mean that you're always going to have a dip after having your meal. It's about changing the type of carbohydrate that you have. What you want to do, again, is focus on the quality of the carbohydrate. What you want to do is slow down the rate at which your carbohydrate is entering your bloodstream so that you don't get this sudden peak and then that sudden crash. Nature has a wonderful way of doing that by actually having fiber with most carbohydrates if you eat unrefined carbohydrates. You want to avoid what we call refined carbohydrates. These are the carbohydrate that you'll get from white bread red, white rice, white pasta, for example. The more fiber that is in the carbohydrate, so from whole grain varieties, that's going to slow down the rate at which your stomach empties, and it's going to blunt that peak. Also adding other kinds of nutrients and foods to your meal will help.

If you add fat, if you add protein as well, that again slows down the rate at which your stomach empties.

What are the... Because I think often people listen to this and like, Oh, I better give up carbs. That's terrible. Could you give some more examples of what are healthy carbs that are not going to cause these blood sugar spikes? I guess it's still supporting some of the things that you were just talking about before about making sure you're eating all these plants when plants are basically carbohydrates, aren't they?

I think also you can mix up your meals as well. Again, it's not about taking away your carbohydrates. What you could do is if you like a chicken curry, for example, you could have slightly less rice, more of the chicken, more of the healthy oils, and more of the vegetables in that meal. Vegetables, pulses, have carbohydrates in, but because they have so much fiber in them as well, and for pulses, they also have the protein, you're slowing down. You're changing a fast carbohydrate to a slow carbohydrate, and that's what we want to do.

Instead of the rice, you could have quinoa or you could have lentils, which are also carbohydrates, but they have a very different profile, more fiber, more protein rather than white rice. So I think there's many swaps. I mean, I have great deal with the breads, but if it's basically a rye bread, I'm fine. So I think everyone needs to find out what suits them and experiment more and just not accept that the staple is the one they should always go for. So it's choosing different ones, adding things to it. I always add cheese cheese to most of my stuff, but it seems to do the trick as well because I love cheese, but I'm not really, not everyone will do that.

And also eating foods in their original structure. So if you take a whole apple or a whole orange versus apple juice or orange juice, that has a hugely different impact on your blood sugar level.

To help us understand, because I think a lot of people, if anyone listens, it's a Zoe member, they'll say, look, when I go and look up the score for my apple, it's really good. It says I can eat it every day for almost everybody, I think, listening. Whereas Everybody looking on their apple juice is seeing that score is really bad. So it's the same thing, right? The apples are smashed up and turned to apple juice. How can they not have the same advice for people to eat?

So you've got two things happening. First, you're changing what I would call a slow food, so a food that you can only eat at a certain pace into a fast food. If you were to have a whole apple versus a glass of apple juice, that glass of apple juice can be drunk in half a quarter of the that you're going to eat that apple. You've got this sudden flux of glucose coming into your bloodstream. Also, many of the juices that you buy don't have the fiber as well from the fruit. Again, not having the fiber means that your stomach empties really quickly So again, you have this really fast surge of glucose going into your bloodstream. So you're going super fast on that roller coaster.

There's virtually no fiber in most orange juice. There's more fiber in coffee than orange juice. So I think all the good stuff has been taken away in that transition and all the cells have been broken up, et cetera. So exactly the structure of the food is really important. That comes back to this ultra-processing of foods. The more it's ground up and crunched up, it's going to have a faster effect, bigger effect on your blood sugar. But everyone is different. When I was doing the Zoe test with my wife, she could eat a croissant and have hardly a little flicker, whereas mine was way over the top. It was really annoying. And so there will be people out there with their partners ending up with quite different blood sugar profiles, which if they have a glucose monitor, it's easy to spot. If you don't have one, you have to actually think about how your body is responding. And as Sarah is talking about these dips, just think about what's happening two or three hours afterwards. Maybe keep a logbook, these things to see if you can guess what your body is doing and then swap things around You can see by changing your breakfast, can you change that dip, which suggests you are quite sugar responsive.

I think we can listen to our body. Our bodies are such incredible machines. I know that Tim and I, about a year ago, did this experiment where I made him have a full sugar Coke, and I had a full sugar Coke. I don't typically have fizzy drinks like that, although I do eat carbohydrates. About 30 minutes after having it, I actually felt sweaty and clammy, and my heart was racing a little bit, and then I had that crash as well. Now, normally I'd be too busy rushing around with my day to notice it. But at that point of time, I was just texting Tim on my metrics of my heart rate changing. But actually, you can feel as well what's going on.

This is one of the amazing things, isn't it? When you do something like Zoe and during the testing part, as you're getting the data that then delivers the program, you start to get this insight. I know I have very bad blood sugar control. That's one of the things that really shocked me. And so the first time that you do this and you say, I've just eaten, for example, the breakfast I'd been eating for a decade that I thought was really healthy. And you see your blood sugar go up through the roof and then come down. As you say, sometimes, in my case, I was also dipping. It's like, wow, I feel really bad an hour and a half later. I was just used to that. I thought that's just part of Jonathan as a human being. I'm like, Oh, that's actually really driven by what I eat. And I guess it ties back to what you said earlier, Sarah, about how by changing your... Someone listening to this, changing their diet, could actually be feeling better in just a few months time.

Yeah. My top tip is don't try and do everything all at once, just like we said with the ultra-processed food. You don't need to go cold turkey with this. If you can make one change, which is changing your breakfast or your snacks, which actually account for a huge proportion of our energy, and particularly your breakfast so that you don't set off on that roller coaster, is a really simple change that you can make by adding in fiber, by adding in protein, by adding in healthy fats.

I'd like to share something exciting. Back in March 2022, we started this podcast to uncover how the latest research can help us live longer and healthier lives. We've spoken to leading scientists around the world doing amazing research. And across hundreds of hours of conversations, they've revealed key insights that can help you to improve your health. If you don't have hundreds of hours to spare, no need to worry. At the request of many of you, our team has created a guide that contains 10 of the most impactful impactful discoveries from the podcast that you can apply to your life, and you can get it for free. Simply go to zoe. Com/freeguide or click the link in the show notes, and do let me know what you think of it. Okay, back to the show. My one tip from this is I was drinking a lot of smoothies before this because I was understood that that was really healthy. It's got all of these fruit and vegetables and plants that I was hearing you both talk about. Actually, it turned out that basically I was just drinking a massive amount of sugar, spiking my blood and not getting the same benefits because you've destroyed a lot of those fiber that you were talking about.

So I think giving up the smoothies and just going to eating the underlying fruit, which still has just the same amount of sugar in it, completely changed what I saw happen to my blood sugar and has definitely changed the way that I feel. So I think that's quite an easy change because it's one of those many things that I think people doing that they think is good for their health and turns out not to be, which I always find the most frustrating way. I was doing that because I thought it was the right thing to do.

Yeah. I mean, there are some smoothies that can still be healthy, but the ones that are mainly fruit-based, you'll get exactly as you described. But you can put nuts and seeds and more vegetables than sugary fruits and get some benefit. But I think it's just thinking about it in a different way. And I think that that's what we're trying to get across here is a new way of thinking about food that isn't just about macronutrients, and it isn't just about calories. It's what about the quality of the food? What effect is that having on your body? And start people thinking about it. How is it affecting me? And either they get the new technology or have a notebook and start thinking about it. Brilliant.

Strategy number 6, nourish your gut microbiome with fermented foods. And this is definitely one for Tim. Him, because we know you're really passionate about this. What are fermented foods? And why should anyone listening be eating any of them?

Most people already eat lots of fermented foods. They just don't know they're called that. So these are foods that are essentially probiotic foods, where they have live microbes in them. And those live microbes normally live in that food and convey a health benefit to us humans. And the one that most people know is, say, yogurt, because you mix cow's milk with three bacteria, and you produce yogurt at a certain temperature, because those bacteria multiply when that temperature drops from a high temperature down to the temperature which they love. And then it sets in the fridge, and that's yogurt. In its simplest form, it only has two ingredients, really, milk and microbes. And there are many others. So there's fermented milk, which goes like a super yogurt called kefir, which you have usually over a dozen microbes. And that process is drawn by kefir grains, where you add to it rather than just three microbes. And that's more powerful. Then you've got things like fermented tea, kombucha, which is a colony of about 30 microbes that grows like a little blob And this blob of community of microbes and yeast eats tea and sugar and converts it into a nice drink.

Then you've got kimchis, which are basically sauerkraut Cabbage, which is another one. But this is a Korean version where they add chillies and garlic and celery and various other spices. So the 4Ks is the other way to remember this. So kefir, kombucha, kimchi, and kraut. And let's not forget cheese, because I think everyone forgets that actually cheese is perhaps one of the original fermented foods. And they matter because multiple studies have shown that people who have regular fermented foods have less heart disease and less general other disease problems. And there's been some really detailed clinical trials now in humans showing that if you're having multiple portions of these a day, you can have a really big impact on your immune system.

So what's going on? Just help us understand, because you're talking about these fermented foods.

Look, you're giving your gut microbiome a great big party like Tim had last night for New Year's Eve, but without the hangover.

Exactly. So basically, it's a party, you're inviting real party people to come down and add to the existing party that's beginning to fade a bit down in your gut. Okay, so this is you're bussing in a whole load of new microbes to the party, and they're bringing champagne with them and new gifts. And this is invigorating your existing set of gut microbes. And they probably don't last there a long time. They don't stay there necessarily. They eventually pass through. But whilst they're there, they've livened that party up and they've really stimulated the immune system. And that's what the biggest thing is and dropped levels of inflammation. So demonstrably showing big changes in your blood tests.

So this is back to this idea that the bacteria inside our gut are really important to our health, and this is a way to improve what's going on with them?

Yes. There's a belief that we evolved the need to eat these extra microbes to enhance what was already inside our gut as a way of improving the whole health of our gut microbiome so that those microbes can really fine-tune our immune system and also help things like our mood, It's going to stop us getting depressed. And there's plenty of studies now showing that these probiotics can have effect on our brains.

And you just mentioned probiotics. So a lot of people listening will have heard of probiotics as a like a pill that you could pop. Would they be better Can you take the probiotic instead of this fermented food?

A fermented food is basically a probiotic set of microbes that live in your food rather than a capsule in your chemist. And so They naturally live there. They can reproduce and that you know they're live because you can smell them. And they're in your cheese and your yogurt. And those ones are going to do good for you. They're the same species that people bottle up and sell to you in a more expensive way in in your chemist shop. And they have similar effects on the body, except generally, when you're having fermented foods, you're having many more of them. So if you have a variety of them, you're probably getting over 30 or 40 different species of these microbes every day if you mix it up. And that's what the studies are showing is that you need to have these fermented foods little and often. So multiple different ones in a day. So I like to have I like to have yogurt. I like to have kefir. I like to have some kimchi. I like to have some kombucha.

I think for many people listening, the fermented food feels quite alien. It's not food that they are used to growing up with. You've mentioned quite a lot of fermented foods that are like, kimchi, who's heard of this if you weren't a Korean. So it is a real shift, I think, for a lot of people. And I think what's interesting is this is also something, Tim, that I've heard you be much more keen now than you were five years ago. So it's clearly something I think that you're getting access to this cutting edge of science in this conversation.

I think as well, Tim, it would be nice to know some everyday products so that doesn't sound unusual. So what cheeses could we have that we would consider more everyday on the shelves in our fridge products?

Well, I think virtually all the cheeses that aren't ultra-processed, I They don't come out of a tube or they're not in a slice that lasts for five years on the shelf, not pizza cheeses. But all the other regular cheeses, normal standard cheddar, for example, you get from a supermarket. So still is going to contain at least three good species of microbe. You're going to increase that as you get to more artisan cheeses. But even the basic cheese, the normal cream cheese you get from a supermarket it has microbes in it. That's why it goes moldy. If it never goes moldy, that's a sign that actually it doesn't ever change its flavor profile or its shape. So a Cheddar, a soft French cheese, a supermarket Bre, they're all good. You go up to another level if you pay a bit more and you get those Artisan cheeses, or you get one's blue cheese because they've got extra bits of little fungy in there that increase the numbers of different microbes. And if you go to unpasteurized cheese, you get a few more. But I definitely don't want to give the idea, only have to eat unpasteurised raw milk cheeses, although I prefer them.

I Pasterised cheese are still really a good source of these probiotics and a great source of fermented food.

And we're definitely hitting time on this strategy. There is a whole podcast that we did with the father of modern fermentation, and It even inspired my wife and I to try this at home. It turns out fermenting your own sauerkraat is incredibly easy and actually lots of fun. I recommend checking that podcast out. We are now on the Final strategy, number seven, stick to an eating window. I have a window in my house, but what is an eating window? Do I have one of those?

When we talk about eating window, we talk about the period in time from when we have our first meal of the day to when we have our last meal of the day. And generally, I think we're actually having an eating window that's too long. So generally, I think lots of people are starting to eat very early in the morning, and more importantly, just keep snacking until quite late in the day.

This is like my breakfast at 8:00 in the morning, and I finish my last bit of chocolate and maybe a glass of wine at 10:00. So that's 14 hours that I've been eating.

That's a 14 hour period. And what we now know is that If you can reduce your eating window, even if it's just by a little bit, that it can actually improve your health, that it can improve your levels of cholesterol, it can improve your levels of blood sugar, it can improve your inflammation, and it can also result in weight loss as well for some people. Now, there's lots of trials that have shown that having an eating window of, let's say, 6 hours have some really quite strong favorable health effects. But we now know from our own research, where we did the big IF study, that actually even going down to just a 12 or a 10 hour eating window. That means, for example, having your breakfast at 10:00 in the morning and finishing your last eating event, so your dinner or your last snack at 8:00 in the evening, that can have significant impacts on how you feel, your mood, your energy, your hunger. It can also be associated with weight loss as well. This is against the backdrop of not telling anyone how else to change their diet. We know from clinical trials in our own work that if we say, Look, just change It's strange when you have your first or your last meal of the day, that unintentionally, they reduce their energy intake from anywhere from 200 to 300 calories.

And also, in addition to that, there's all of these other favorable health effects as well.

So what's going on? Because it sounds crazy, right? Most of us are thinking food is really fuel. That's where we started. So just saying to only eat for 12 hours and not eat for 12 hours sounds totally irrelevant.

Well, I think a way to think of it is the same way as we get sleep. All humans need sleep. We have a circadian rhythm. We all know after hard partying over the season, we're not feeling up to it. And so it's the same for our gut microbes and our gut. If we don't give it time to rest, if we're eating late night snacks, then it's always working. It hasn't got time to repair itself, hasn't got time to get things back in order before the breakfast is coming down in the morning, oh, we've got to deal with that Why doesn't Jonathan give us a break? He keeps putting stuff down here. We're trying to keep up. Why can't he be like Tim?

I am a famous late night dark chocolate snacker.

So I think we're working out that the whole body needs a circadian rhythm, needs regularity. It needs an activity time. It needs a quiet repair time. And studies have shown that if you do rest the gut microbiome by not putting food down there for 12 to 14 hours or 16 14 hours, you're going to get a much healthier set of gut microbes. The immune system is going to be better. The gut barrier, which we rely on to keep the bad bugs out and also really important for our immune system is much stronger in those cases. So that's what's going on in the gut microbes. And they're producing then healthier chemicals in response, and they're not got less inflammation. So I think the idea is rest your gut microbes just like you would. You need sleep. Don't have those late night snacks. Don't keep throwing things down that tube. You want to give them the time to recuperate so they're really ready to go in the morning and they can really help you.

And this is the same for all of the cells in our body. Every cell in our body has its own clock, and that clock isn't designed to cope with being fed 24 hours a day. And I think more and more we're eating for longer periods of time, and importantly, eating quite late into the evening. We know that that's probably particularly bad for us, that if you eat later in the evening, you actually wake up more hungry the next day. We also know from our own research, if you eat late in the evening, it's associated with lots of unfavorable effects in our body, such as inflammation, such as high blood cholesterol, such as higher weight as well.

Everyone's different. I think that was the other thing we did in this massive survey. I think we've got some notes on this we can look at. But the big IF study showed that a third of people did this really successfully. So over 100,000 people signed up, over 34,000 managed to do this really successfully. But there was a difference. About a third of those people found it more beneficial to finish eating earlier in the day, had an early breakfast. You wake up hungry in the morning, said, I've got to get breakfast. I can't do this without. And then ended up finishing eating at about six o'clock. And two-thirds of people went the other way and said, I'd rather not eat anything before 11 o'clock in the morning and go later. So I think there isn't one size fits all. It is about personalization. And this is a great way people can experiment at home by themselves.

It's really interesting. It's one of the places where I think I've seen massive personalization between people, where some people I find this almost transformational, and often using it as part of trying to really improve their health, along with shifting food, going to quite a narrow eating window, and finding that it's great and has this huge impact. I'm someone who finds it awful to have this really narrow eating window. But it has really changed my view because I think I was definitely brought up with this idea, you must have breakfast. I see this even with our children, and sometimes Justine and I are like, Oh, well, it's really terrible if they leave without breakfast. But actually, now comes to people, if they're not hungry. Actually, it's fine. I am myself now more flexible. I think we've also had some very interesting conversations about sometimes doing exercise, potentially fasted, as well as having an eating breakfast. We were told a lot of things you just have to do. And it turns out that a lot of this was not based on a lot of science.

No, all the rules are going out the window, really. I think this is the really thing. Every time we do another podcast, we throw a few other of those rules out the window that our parents had taught us. And, yeah, it's a fascinating time for self-experimentation. And as Sarah was saying, really trying to listen to your body. I think this is a perfect example of how everyone's different. There isn't one recommendation for everyone other than try it.

I think it just gives us another tool in our toolbox. That's how I like to think about it. It's not going to be for everyone. But I think to recognize you don't need to do extreme time-restricted eating. Just giving your body a 12 of our rest is good enough. We know from our own research that most people will feel better doing that, and it will improve your health as well. I think it's really important that people listen to their bodies, like Tim said, and make it work for yourself. I know that I do like my glass of wine, my bit of chocolate, late in the evening. I know that actually for me, it's better to start or have my breakfast a bit later in the day. What is important to say is for people whom it doesn't really matter when they start and stop, is the evidence does show actually finishing your last meal before eight o'clock in the evening is probably the best way to do it. But again, it will differ for everyone. Just listen to what works for you.

What about no wine after 9:00? Sarah, are you going to do that?

I don't know if I'm going to take you off on that challenge, Tim.

This is how you know that they're all telling you the truth, because even on the podcast, Sarah wasn't committed to something that she wasn't sure she could follow through on.

I'll try no wine after nine, three nights a week. How about that? There you go.

Can't say fair enough.

Tim and Sarah, thank you so much. I think that was a brilliant whistle stop tour of the latest science in 2024. I think we talked about seven strategies. The first is that food is more than fuel. So don't count calories or macronutrients. It doesn't work. Food is so much more complicated than that. Don't choose restriction, choose abundance, choose what you can add into your meal. Secondly, fat is not your enemy. And we talked about how actually there's these amazing things like extra virgin olive oil and nuts and avocados that you can add into your diet. Thirdly, eat more plants. And plants are a lot more things than maybe we had imagined, but you should be looking for 30 plants a week. You should be eating the rainbow because there are 50,000 chemicals out there and you want to get as many of them as you can for your gut microbes. Number four was reduce ultra-processed foods. This is something that many people will not even realize that they are eating. Look at the back of the pack. If this is something that doesn't exist in your kitchen, this is probably an ultra-processed food. And even a small reduction, Sarah says, can really help to improve your health.

Number five, reduce your blood sugar spikes. This can have a big impact in the long term, actually on leading to things like diabetes, but also have a big impact on how you're feeling. There's a big variation amongst people, and so you can't really understand this without doing some personalized test like Zoe. But there is very advice you can do. So basically, you're looking for whole grain foods rather than very refined, like white rice and bread. And you're also saying that an apple is much better than an apple juice, and these things will have a big impact. Number Number 6, nourish your gut microbiome with fermented foods. Tim is adding fermented food into his diet every single day. Some of them are weird sounding things like kefir and kombucha, but actually cheese and yogurt are fermented foods that we've all been familiar with and probably been eating since childhood. Then number seven, last but not least, stick to an eating window. There's this fascinating news science that suggests that at least for 12 hours, you should be resting your gut and that can have a real impact on your health. And that actually, if you're one of the people who finds it easy to further restrict it, that can have even more beneficial impact on your health and also potentially in terms of being able to manage your weight better.

Spot on.

Wonderful. Well, we will explore more of those topics throughout the podcast this year and many new things that are happening in science. I hope that you enjoyed this. I hope that you are now recovering from New Year's Eve and the festive season. We hope that you will choose to join us on this podcast throughout the year.

We will. Thank you.

Hope you invite us back.

Indeed. We hope to be invited back.

You behaved yourself, Tim. You're allowed back.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Happy New Happy 2024.

Thank you for joining me on Zoe's Science and Nutrition Today. I hope that you'll try Sarah and Tim's strategies to eat a healthier diet in 2024 so you can improve your health this year. Now, if you want to go one step further and get personalized advice and support on how you can eat the best foods for you to help you feel better now and in the years to come, then you can learn more about Zoe and get 10% off your membership. Simply go to zoe. Com/podcast. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolf. Zoe Science and Nutrition is produced by Yellow Hewings Martin, Richard Willen, and Tilly Fulford. See you next time.