Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #6 Making Fast Food Healthy with John Vincent

Episode Date: February 21, 2018

In this episode Dr Rangan Chatterjee talks to LEON co-founder - John Vincent, on his journey to provide healthy, affordable fast-food choices, how he helps employees stay happy and the challenges our society face to be healthier. Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/johnvincent Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, my name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, medical doctor, author of The Four Pillar Plan and BBC television presenter. I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space, to hopefully inspire you, as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier,

because when we feel better, we live more. My guest today is someone who's made a huge contribution in making it easier for us to make healthy fast food choices it's mr john vincent co-founder of the healthy fast food chain leon john welcome to the show today thank you so much and john i think it would be interesting to start by just sharing how i first came across Leon, which was literally in the last few years. I've been spending a lot of time in London with my media work. And, you know, I'm always on the move, I'm busy. And I really take nutrition seriously. And I always try and see what can I buy that's healthy, that's fast, that nourishes my body without breaking the bank, that also is going to help me feel good.

And actually, that's how I discovered Leon. I thought your menu, I thought the food was fantastic. And I thought it really helps people eat well and makes it easy for them. How did you come up with the concepts of Leon? Well, can I just say, first of all, thank you for getting it. So what you just described is really the reason that we started Leon, for those exact reasons. We wanted to contribute to people's well-being and make it easier for everyone to eat and live well by solving a big problem that we felt existed around fast food. So we really reframed fast food around the idea of sort of if God did fast food or fast food in heaven. So really we thought, what would that be?

And we thought, first of all all the food would absolutely taste amazing um and i think none of us want to deny ourselves flavor and none of us want to deny ourselves the the delights of eating good food but then we thought the fast food that we serve has to do us good so very much based on on the principles of the Mediterranean diet around things like lots of olive oil, nuts, seeds, very limited sugar, very limited bad fats, a lot of fruit and vegetables, lots of herbs and spices. So very much following the Mediterranean food principles. And then very much, as you say, affordable. And there's no point in doing fast food to posh people. So we had to make sure that it was affordable and kind to the planet and the reason we got there from our personal journey we were actually working to 100 hour weeks literally 100 hour weeks um not able

to do the four the things that are in your four pillar plan very easily so we were we weren't eating well uh we were eating cold sandwiches or fast food or pizzas. We were not sleeping well enough and we didn't have effectively the time to exercise. So really, Leon was the antidote for our own lifestyles as well as hoping to provide a solution for others. Wow. I mean, incredible story. I mean, one thing I find, John, when I give my patients healthy lifestyle advice in the consultation, when I give my patients healthy lifestyle advice in the consultation, some people just find it too difficult because the modern environment is set up in such a way that it can be challenging.

And I think that's where Leon is a great example of how we can actually help people to make healthy choices. I think you're absolutely right. I remember being in front of an advisor at the gym a few years ago, sitting there and him saying, you know what, if you were to exercise more and be more relaxed and eat better, you'd actually lose weight. And I kind of pretended to myself that it was just the knowledge that was getting in the way. Oh, if only I'd have known this, I wouldn't have been so unwell for so many years. in the way oh if only i'd have known this i wouldn't have been so unwell for so many years and so clearly what i love about your approach ron is you're actually helping people take that knowledge and actually turning it into something actionable and practical and for me it's often the practicality and context in which we work and live we might be parents we might be busy at school

or university we might have be grandparents you might be busy at school or university, we might be grandparents, we might be carers. And actually having the opportunity and the ease to actually put that theory into practice is what most people are missing. And for me, fast food is accessible. It's ubiquitous. We had to replace the bad fast food with good fast food to make it really easy for people to eat well we can't just do organic cafes in the middle of nowhere in posh hotels we have to be on the high street where a traditional fast food chain used to be so it's that ease and accessibility and plugging into people's lives that we felt we had to get right. Yeah, I so resonate with that because it's all very well saying that we've all got to, you know, prepare all our own food from scratch and

buy it local. But the reality is, is that frankly, some of us are going to do that some of the time, but most of us are going to find it too challenging. We're going to go and we're going to want that quick fix option. And look, about myself I'm very proactive with my health but you know what when I am in London I'm rushing around but I don't want to compromise my diet where I can so Leon is an obvious choice for me it reminds me actually of a practice I used to work at in a place called Oldham and we were right in the centre and the population were mostly on benefits and probably didn't have access to the sorts of things that many people who don't live in areas like that think are available to everyone. And it just frankly isn't true. We know that people of lower socioeconomic status have poorer health outcomes. I think there's a very good reason why that is.

And I remember in that practice, if I ever forgot to bring my lunch with me, it was incredibly challenging to buy a healthy lunch in a one-mile radius in that practice. You'd have to be incredibly motivated to walk that extra journey, get in your car, drive there and actually buy something healthy because there was a plethora of kebabs fried chicken fries and very attractive prices so for people and families who don't have that much disposable income that's where they would turn how do you see leon being able to maybe bridge the gap in some of these areas i think that's a great question um one of the things which i have been considering is um and we're making a decision at the next sort of meeting, I guess,

effective board meeting that we have internally, is for every, say, 10 or 20 restaurants that we can afford to open in the high traffic areas that we do, that at the moment places like, you know, Oxford or Birmingham, London, etc. Should we open them in the worst socioeconomic location? So where the socioeconomic standards or the income levels are the lowest. And that's something that we're certainly looking to do. And there is a London borough who has asked us to open a Leon with potentially lower prices if they can subsidise the rent in the areas where people have the lowest access to good food. So I think we have to consider that and we are considering that as part of our strategy. We also have to keep our prices as low as possible. And so the volume

that we do through Leon, through the speed of service that we achieve, that allows us to keep our prices down. The challenge that everybody's going to have, the consumers of all income levels, is that prices may well go up in the next few years. We are looking at inflation in food. We are looking at potentially all costs going up. At the moment, all retailers and food people are trying to keep a lid on prices and not push them up. But I think we're going to see some, unfortunately, some inflation in the next couple of years where people are going to find it even more difficult to eat well.

And the trouble is if you put calories in an energy drink or if you put calories in a cheap chocolate bar, unfortunately, those are cheap ways of providing fuel. And they're ultimately not the best ways of people doing what you write about in your book. Yeah. And I imagine it must be a real challenge as a business owner, because on one level, you need to start and you need to get a business that actually can deliver profit and do what it needs to do to be sustainable. And it's only if you can meet that goal that you can then start thinking about actually then how do we spread it out and i think often it's not realized that it's like well why can't you bring prices down why can't it be cheaper but i think you need to get a sustainable model that works for healthy fast

food first and it's it's hugely inspiring for me to hear that you guys are considering it and i hope at some point in the future you are able to sort of follow through on that because it would just be fantastic in those areas to see that it doesn't have to be as hard. And really that's where I see health going. It's, you know, I'm very proud of my book, but at the same time, I'm not stupid. I understand that actually giving people that information, of course, it's important.

Giving them knowledge. Yes, of course, it's important. Trying to give them practical tips. That's one step better where hopefully this is how you can actually do it in your own life. But ultimately, you know, we've got a very challenging environment we live in, whether it's food, whether it's the fact that we're so busy and we don't get time to switch off and we've got too many things to do, so we neglect our sleep. Ultimately, if the environment makes it challenging for us to be healthy, knowledge, personal responsibility only goes so far. I agree with you completely. I've got a fantastic book called The Pleasure Trap,

which it really explained why we're hardwired to do the things that we're hardwired to do around the dopamine response in the brain and wrong and you'll be much more familiar with this from a scientific and medical perspective than i am but i was struck in the book by the fact that in nature things like sugar and you know this right things in nature like sugar was scarce and we couldn't necessarily um reproduce it and i'm using the word reproducing inverted commas there and we couldn't necessarily get access to um i guess sex um the the issue of you know we're programmed to want to seek a mate we're programmed to want to seek sugar and those things are there because

We're programmed to want to seek sugar. And those things are there because ultimately, in nature, we're programmed to preserve energy. So it's fundamentally to once we've caught something to rest. We're programmed to sleep when we can. We're programmed to reproduce. We're programmed to seek energy-rich nutrients like sugar and fat, which were scarce. And the general availability of those things now and the general availability of things that substitute the dopamine response like drugs, we're all caught in this mega pleasure trap. And at the same time, we are also working too hard to try and achieve those things.

So I think we are immensely off balance, immensely off kilter as a society. And you only have to see it in the hospitals where the most ill-looking people are typically the people looking after the other ill people. So I think we have to fix it. We have to make Britain less unwell. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you're trying to do with your business is a key part of that. Have you seen that since you have set

Leon up with your co-founder, which has been how long now? It's 13 years. Unlucky for nobody. 13 years. Fantastic. Wow. So over 13 years now, Leon's been around. Have you seen other similar concepts coming up now? And in many in many ways you may have influenced those those chains to actually set up i do think that we were seen as very avant-garde strange food when we launched and now the mainstream has come to us i think it's fair to say and i'm not saying that we have created all of that i certainly know that we've created some of it. And I think we have been of inspiration to other brands that now do similar things. And we were the first to do quinoa on the high street. We were the first to do things like porridge in the morning, which is now commonplace, the first to do poached egg pots. Some of those things are now, you know,

I guess, copied and followed on by others. But we've definitely seen the mainstream in a certain segment of the market move to us. What we are yet to see is, as you have said before in this conversation, we're yet to see every area of Britain or every area of society buy into and adopt those eating habits. I think that we are seeing a divided Britain when it comes to the sort of super salad quinoa eating, you know, olive oil, mayonnaise people over here and people that either don't yet understand that or buy into it or can't get access to it over here. And I think that unfortunately, food has reinforced the potentially divided society that we already have. Yeah, I think that's such a key point. And you make me think of a recent trip I had to California, and I was staying with a friend in Santa Monica out there while I was doing some

work there. And, you know, it's an affluent area. There are lots of healthy, organic type, you know, cafes and places to eat. And even if you want some takeaway, you can go and get some really healthy takeaway. And I thought, this is a bubble. This is not how the rest of America is. It's not certainly how the rest of the UK is. And I think depending where you live does actually in many ways influence what you have

access to or what you even consider normal so actually one one interesting thing is that if you were after the second world war we know that actually it was a period in which uh through the rationing period people were less obese than now um probably people had definitely fewer allergies than they seem to now. And I think that what's interesting is that it used to be in the late 40s and even in actually the 30s that not having much money

ironically was actually a route to health. And if you look at the Mediterranean diet now, part of the reason that people in their 90s are healthy now as healthy 90 year olds in these villages in italy yes it's the inflammatory effect of things like olive oil rosemary herbs and spices but it's also the fact that when they were growing up they worked hard and they didn't actually eat a ton of food and i think what's

happened now is that if you're less well off in today's society you're still taking on a ton of sugar and a ton of potentially misformed fats that you didn't after the second world war so it's the irony is that it was a lot healthier to be less well off in the 40s than it is today yeah I think that's the challenge I know and that I think some people might find that politically incorrect but it's just a fact that we have to understand yeah the more we understand the more we can actually start you know coming up with strategies to help and you know i've read in victorian times and please correct me if i'm wrong here if you if you know more about this than me but i read in victorian times that obesity was a disease off the affluence. It was a condition of people with more money.

They could access the sugar. White bread as well and sort of, you know, all the sugary carbohydrates. And arguably they wouldn't be as physically active as maybe people out there working in the fields and doing what they need to do. So it's remarkable how it has changed. What I find so fantastic about the book

that you've written, Rangan, is we for a few years now, have been trying to form the idea of what we call a well-being multiplier, which all the ingredients that we've been trying to understand contribute to health. positivity, being in tune with the planet, resting, all of these things were just as important as the principles of eating that we have within Leon. The reason I'm so excited about the opportunity for us at Leon to tell more people about your approach and your book is because you have crystallized with scientific thinking, with your medical experience of seeing patients get better as a result of what you have practically done that is why you know we at Leon are so excited about having the opportunity to tell more people this year about your book and I think the four pillar plan is something that really can reinforce what we're doing to help our people

do well you know we we do think very explicitly about how they eat we think about their work environment we provide qigong and a very sort of um peace-based martial art called wing chun which is bruce lee's martial art all of these things we have introduced because instinctively we felt that someone like you would come along and explain in medical terms what we've because instinctively we felt that someone like you would come along and explain in medical terms what we've always instinctively felt. Yeah, thanks for that, John. I mean, it's a great pleasure for me to actually be teaming up with you and your company in some ways because the more of us that can get on board and actually sing from the same hymn sheet,

the more likelihood there is that we're actually going to really make an impact and transform people's health, which is ultimately the goal. This is why you do what you do. This is why I do what I do. It's because I believe that we can all these days probably be a little bit healthier than we currently are. But I want to get the information out. And actually, Leon is helping make it easier for people to make some of those choices.

So, you know, I think it's a great collaboration and I hope we can help a lot of people. John, one of the questions I try and end on is asking my guests which of the four pillars, food, movement, sleep and relaxation, they struggle with, if you struggle with any at all. I just struggle with the first four pillars of the four pillar plan. I think anyone that pretends that they are perfect, I think we all look at people like Gwyneth Paltrow. I'm guilty of it.

I produce cookbooks where it makes it look like I live this sort of Disney World lifestyle where I'm eating well all of the time. For me, I think that it is the hours that I work and the potential mental stress that I perhaps put myself under slash am put under. And I think that the one thing that I've literally tried to do in the last week and it's made a dramatic impact, a positive impact, is I no longer have my phone by my bedside. I used to be doing emails at half past 12. I used to, first thing I used to do was roll over at 6.30 in the morning and look at my emails or look at my WhatsApp or look at my social media. Literally this last week,

I moved my phone from my bedroom down to my study. Now the trouble is I don't have an alarm clock at the moment, so I've got to sort that out. But I think even some small action like that that people can take and sometimes have a dramatic impact. And the one thing I found literally in the last week is just having a detox from the amount of information and technology and screens and social media that we are besieged by. I think that it has to start with mental health and it has to start with

being relaxed. That's the way to break the cycle of the kind of physical mental challenge. And I think when I exercise, I know personally, when I have time to exercise, I feel amazing. It's literally chalk and cheese. So I think that for me, it's about making sure that I'm not trying to reach perfection. I'm not trying to reach nirvana. I'm just maybe exercising a little bit more. I'm putting my phone down and downstairs. I'm finding time to have three meals a day. It is unbelievable how those basic things make a huge difference. And so I know when I do it well, and I know when I do it badly. And I have to apologise to my wife

and kids for when I do it badly. Yes, so thanks for sharing that, John. I think so many people are going to resonate with that. But it really is about making those small changes, those small changes become new habits. And those new habits very quickly become our health and our happiness. John, the final question I'd like to ask you, and I think I'm going to reframe it for you. I normally ask... Is it about my tax return?

As long as you know. Is it the Columbo question the the final question i think that would be really interesting for people is not necessarily your tips for their well-being but you're an employer you very much prioritize employee well-being i think that's a big area, big untapped area. How can we help our employees be healthier and happier? And that's something you guys take very seriously. Can you just share some of those top tips for people listening who may be able to take to their employers?

Well, when we think about making it easy for everyone to eat and live well, because we're a service business and we genuinely care about the people we're in contact with every day that we work with with we start with the people who work at leon so we think that if they're well a that's a brilliant end in itself and b the customer is going to be happier because they're going to be served by by people who are well we all know that if we get in a taxi we know within 60 seconds this is a person that's going to cheer us up or is this a taxi driver that's going to depress us and so we have to have our own people well and for us it is these what we

call the sort of six or seven elements of the well-being multiplier which you very neatly and much more neatly have put into the four pillar plan i would say for us applying the four pillar plan as you do to your own life is exactly how you need to think about it with your own people so rather than there being a magic new construct that one should introduce in order to look after your people at work for me it is just applying the same four pillars that one would implement for one's own life so we think think about the stress that people are under. And that fundamentally comes from having positive relationships at work. We know, don't we, that cancer survival rates are improved when one has positive relationships and support.

And we put the positive relationship element based on kindness, based on courage and based on self-leadership. We put all of those at the forefront of how we think about at Leon. We then make sure that our team members are eating three good meals a day. We give them a deep discount on the food. We give them meals whenever they're working at Leon for free. We then have built a quoon, which is a Chinese well-being space and training hall that all of the team members can come to for free

to have massage, Wing Chun, Qigong, yoga, and lots of other practices that actually help with their physical and mental well-being. And lastly, I think it's about making sure that when people fall off the rails, and maybe people suffer from depression in any organisation, people suffer from fatigue, having the safety net there with trained support to support those people who fall off the wagon, that's really very important to us. And we've had some examples of that at Leon, where we absolutely have made sure that I hope that we are there for those people. of that at Leon where we absolutely have made sure that I hope that we are there for those people.

John, I mean, absolutely incredible to hear that. I think what you're doing for society and trying to help people make better choices is fantastic. What you're doing for your own employees is incredible. And actually, it's inspirational. And I wouldn't be surprised if your Leon website gets a lot of inquiries from people listening to this saying oh that's the kind of company i'd like to work for because it is that important and you're right there shouldn't be a separation between how we treat ourselves and how we treat our employees it's one and the same thing really or it should be in any event john look i have found that an incredibly interesting conversation i really thank you for your time if people want to find out a little bit more about yourself

and what you're doing with Leon, how can they do that? Well, given the fact that I've just come off social media, I'm trying to work that one out. But anyone that would like to contact me, my email address is john at leonrestaurants.co.uk, J-O-H-N at leonrestaurants.co.uk. Plus, come to any Leon, speak to the manager, speak to what we call the managers' mums and dads,

speak to a team member, and ask the person from the restaurants to get hold of me and introduce you to me. I really believe in being available. I really believe in being contactable. And I would be delighted to hear from anyone that's got any thoughts at all. John thank you so much for your time and I very much look forward to working together with you. Thank you. That's the end of this week's Feel Better Live More podcast. Thank

you so much for listening and I really hope you found the conversation useful but also enjoyable. If you're not already I'd highly recommend that you subscribe to this podcast so that you can be notified when the latest episode of my podcast comes out. I'd also be incredibly grateful if you consider going onto iTunes and giving this a five-star rating so that I can get this information out and reach more people. It really does make a difference. And if you have any suggestions for people you'd like to see me have conversations with on this podcast, I'd encourage you to get in touch with me on social media using the hashtag feelbetterlivemore. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram using the handle at DrChatterjee and on Twitter using the handle

at DrChatterjeeUK.