The Food Medic - S2 E7 - Public Health Campaigns with Jenny Rosborough (RN)

Episode Date: February 13, 2019

In this podcast episode, Dr Hazel sits down with Jenny Rosborough who is a freelance registered nutritionist and Head of Nutrition at the Jamie Oliver Group. Jenny has spent the last few years campaigning for a healthier food environment, previously as Campaign Manager at Action on Sugar and now with Jamie Oliver. Over the last ten years, Jenny has also worked in child nutrition, training health professionals to deliver healthy lifestyle programmes, called MEND (Mind, Exercise, Nutrition, Do it…!), with families nationally and internationally. Hazel and Jenny discuss the sugar tax, reformulation of foods, a ban on the of energy drinks to under 18s and a possibility of a meat tax. We would love your feedback on this episode and if you are enjoying the podcast please do subscribe, leave a rating and a review as it really does help. Ps. Don’t forget to keep listening to the end for a teaser to the next episode and also for this week’s challenge.Find Jenny on instagram @hellohealthyyou_ and on twitter @hellohealthyyou Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone and welcome back to the Food Medic podcast. My name is Dr. Hazel Wallace and I'm founder of the Food Medic. I'm a medical doctor, a health influencer and best-selling author of the books The Food Medic and The Food Medic for Life. I'm also a qualified personal trainer and currently studying a master's in clinical nutrition and public health. The Food Medic is aimed at bridging the gap between traditional medical advice and the latest thoughts and developments in nutrition and other areas of lifestyle. You can find more about us over on www.thefoodmedic.co.uk and on all social media at The Food Medic. Now, in this podcast, I sit down with Jenny Rosborough, who is a freelance registered nutritionist and also head of nutrition at the Jamie Oliver Group. Jenny has spent the last few years campaigning for a healthier food environment,

previously as campaign manager at Action on Sugar and now with Jamie Oliver. Over the last 10 years, Jenny has also worked in child nutrition, training health professionals to deliver healthy lifestyle programs called MEND, Mind Exercise Nut, Do It, and families nationally and internationally. Now, public health policies and campaigns always cause a split in opinion and a lot of debate. So I wanted to bring Jenny in here to discuss the campaigns that came out last year, such as the sugar tax, marketing of foods that are high in fat, salt or sugar,

and banning the sale of energy drinks to under 18s. I want you guys to listen to this podcast with an open mind and consider the pros and cons of these kinds of campaigns. But don't forget to keep listening to the end of the podcast for a teaser to the next episode and to also find out what this week's challenge might be. It may prove to you that your diet isn't actually as healthy as it could be. So Jenny, welcome to the Food Medic podcast. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you.

Recently you contributed to the Food Medic Educational Hub and for those of you guys who are unfamiliar what that is, essentially it's a dedicated space for nutrition, medicine and lifestyle over on my website, where we host contributors from students to dietitians, nutritionists, doctors and other experts. Now, Jenny, I asked you to write about the sugar tax because I feel like it's something that is quite topical at the moment. You know, people are for it. Some people are against it. I think there's a lot of confusion about it. And you did write a really good blog. But for those who have not read it, can you tell us what this tax means for, I guess, us as consumers, but also for manufacturers? So essentially, it's a mandatory reformulation programme where manufacturers are asked to reduce

the amount of sugar in their soft drinks, or they are subject a tax so it's a tiered levy if the drinks contain more than five percent sugar they have to pay a tax of 18p per litre and if they contain more than eight percent sugar they have to pay 24p per litre now it's tiered because those who can't get it necessarily under or won't get it necessarily under 5% sugar still have an incentive to reduce what is currently in there. Okay. So some of them aren't reducing it as much as they could, but they're taking a bigger tax hit essentially. Is that correct? Yeah. And it's the first of its kind, this kind of tax, because it's been done differently in other countries

where the cost has been passed on to the consumer, whereas the main aim of this is reformulation and get companies to reformulate so overall we end up with all the drinks on the shelves containing less sugar so even if people continue to buy those drinks and they end up having less sugar over time. Okay and I just want to carry on from that because there is an argument to be had that this levy is aggressive and that it hits the poorest the hardest because while the tax is designed to be on the manufacturer, some of the manufacturers may choose to pass that cost on to the consumers. Is this happening and what's your thoughts on this? So I think it's really important just to reinforce that that's not how the tax is intended, that it by our government is intended to reduce the amount of sugar in the drink and for reformulation.

If manufacturers don't reduce the sugar, then actually, if we want to ultimately get people to consume less sugar, which I think is what we want to do, then to create that price differential, as other countries countries have done whereby the sugary drink is more expensive than the less sugary drink then it's important I guess that they do pass that on rather than distribute essentially the cost across their whole range if that makes sense. So it depends how we look at it then financially you could say it's regressive but a term that I'd really liked and kind of resonated was the idea of that it's progressive for health so yeah it's not how it was designed and I think that we need to keep looking at what manufacturers are making a lot of progress and which ones need to do more and I think some of these manufacturers that haven't reduced the sugar in their popular

drinks I think that over time maybe these other will, because they might just end up too sweet. Yeah. But it's one thing bringing out this tax. It's another thing, you know, whether people will actually go for the lower sugar option. And although it's early days yet, is there evidence to say that it's led to a decreased consumption of these kind of like higher sugar beverages? Yeah, I mean, it's a good and important question. So it is definitely early days. What we know currently is that it did incentivize reformulation at an unprecedented rate. So quicker than what we've seen usually. And partly because it is much easier to reduce sugar in drinks than in food because the sugar doesn't contribute to the weight. But in terms of the impact on health and consumption, what we would need to do is look at purchasing data, we need to look at National Diet and

Nutrition Survey from Public Health England. So that will show our sugar intakes. And then probably a bit further down the line, have a look at correlations to health as well. So that will be perhaps in terms of weight gain tooth decay type 2 diabetes levels and so I think that it's really really important that we have a good evaluation on this and it was very much all the conversations that were going around the table with the HM treasury were very much about measuring to ensure there were no unintended consequences so there is lots of plans to have a full evaluation but I guess what we know in the first instance is that drinks that people were buying before now probably continuing to buy but

they do contain less sugar. Yeah I guess it's a bit of an experiment then is it? I think that there has been lots of modelling studies and research because this was a different approach to other countries yeah so there was modelling studies and research because this was a different approach to other countries. Yeah. So there was modelling studies and research that showed that this reformulation approach would have the highest impact on health and then sort of creating that price differential after that, that would have the next biggest impact. But yeah, it's important that it's evaluated. But I think all we can really ask for at this stage is that companies respond and that they reformulate because we think that you know reformulation is a

key key point of impact when it comes to public health so if that's the main aim here then that's really important and I think it's also really important to consider why this happened in the first place and why there was the need for the tax and so many conversations were had around it and it's important to remember that we are consuming two to three times more of the free sugars so the type that we need to reduce and that is recommended and especially for children and teenagers that is mainly coming through with the biggest source the biggest contributor is through soft drinks so it's important that action was taken. Can you just clarify for people what free sugars are? Yeah so free sugars are the type of sugars that we want to reduce and essentially they don't include sugars that are in whole fruits

and milk sources so those natural sugars but they do include added sugars they include all the sugars coming from syrups and honey and also those in fruit juices and smoothies as well. So essentially, those sugars that have been released through processing, so released from their cell wall. Okay, so we just talked about how reformulation is really important. But this isn't the first time that we've reformulated something. So salt reduction is another example. First of all, why did we need to kind of step in and reduce the amount of salt in food? What were the health complications of doing so? And how successful has that programme been?

Yeah, salt reduction is a really great example of how important public health is. And we know that as a population, we're consuming too much salt. And it's really important that we reduce our salt intake because salt increases our blood pressure and high blood pressure can then contribute to the risk of heart disease, stroke and that is a leading cause of death worldwide. So it's really important that action is taken. Now the problem was that a lot of us don't know that we're consuming too much salt. We also know that high blood pressure doesn't really have any symptoms so we wouldn't necessarily know unless we were getting checked that our blood pressure was high either and even when people are aware that they need to reduce salt it might be that they're

adding less salt to the food on the table or in cooking but that salt only counts for about 20% of the salt that we're consuming the majority of salt is already in the food through processing mainly and naturally in there as well so when you talk to people about okay so what steps you take to reduce your salt they might be adding less at the table but they also might be choosing foods that are less salty but they're not the biggest contributors necessarily of salt in our diet so what a lot of people don't know is that bread was the biggest contributor of salt in our diet now if you're reducing your salt intake you wouldn't think well I've got to reduce my bread and neither would we want people necessarily to be reducing their bread intake because there's lots of other nutritional benefits but because we

consume it quite a lot as a population that was kind of a key example of an area that we need to target if it's an everyday food let's reduce the salt in these products and then make sure that as a population we're consuming less overall. Yeah. And I guess that's an example of a successful reformulation programme. Yes. So first of all, it was really about being able to reduce the salt that everyone was consuming without people changing the way that they eat and what happened in 2004 the food standards agency set up this program asking companies to reduce the amount of salt in their products and every couple of years they would be reset so the goalposts shifted and over across about 10, this led to across the population, 11% reduction in salt intake, which is really successful. Yeah, really successful. And that did correlate to reductions in heart disease as well.

So you can't say it's just because of that. But the research showed that there was correlation there, which is great. Then what happened when the government changed? And this is a challenge with public health nutrition. When the government changed and the reins went over to Department of Health, they set up a responsibility deal. And although the first programme was still voluntary, it was being heavily monitored. The responsibility deal wasn't so much and so progress really stopped. So when we talk about reformulation and public health and mandatory and legislation and all those things,

I think people think that's a bit scary. There's a reason for that and it's based on previous experiences and with sugar reduction and now we're talking more about calorie reduction programs as well so reformulation in the same way where everything's reduced gradually we are talking about mandatory and we're asking for that even though it's not at the moment because manufacturers want that as well. People want this level playing field. Yeah, exactly. They still want to have their foot in the door as well when it comes to this and have a say. And in addition to reformulating foods,

there's been this drive to censor the marketing of junk foods or what's known as high-fat sugar and salt foods. First of all, what is a high-fat sugar and salt foods first of all what is a high fat sugar or salt food yeah and you think we run the risk of demonizing certain foods which still have a place in the diet um some things being like whole grain cereals or yogurts yeah i'll be keen to hear your thoughts on this yeah so hfss so high fat sugar salt it's wordy isn't it because we really try and move away from terms like junk food for the demonizing aspect that you just mentioned but essentially that is designed by the nutrient profile model and that's department of health

model and what they will do is they'll give point systems to the less healthy ingredients so the salt the saturated fat sugar will get certain points in a food and then overall whatever point it ends up with will determine whether it would be described as hfss or not and that is really to be able to determine what's advertised but it's being re-looked at because the government changed their guidelines on free sugars and also fiber in 2015 so to make sure that it's capturing those changes as well demonizing so that's interesting i have a bit of a bug bed because i feel like the term demonizing foods is thrown around quite a lot and i think first and foremost it's really important to acknowledge that how we talk about food is crucial. And when it comes to public health, we need to raise awareness of products that contain more sugar than others or salt or whatever it is, not just sugar.

Because A, people don't know. And B, that's what gains the traction in getting companies to change because you have to create a bit of public appetite for some of these policies. So you do have to talk about it. But how we talk about it, I think, is really, really important. So when it comes to, like you said, the cereals or the yogurt, that's really tricky because on the front of the pack, the company is allowed to say, you know, this is a source of fiber, even though it is high in sugar as well and that's really misleading for parents so by raising this and putting pressure on the government to take action on the manufacturers to take action we want to create products that are still a great source of fibre but lower in sugar and I would say with cereals and yoghurts they're not your occasional foods they're everyday staples so they're the ones that we do need to reduce but yeah I definitely think the campaigns are never about telling people not to

have cake anymore or you know not to enjoy a chocolate bar there's a place for everything in our diets but to do our jobs in nutrition we need to be able to raise awareness and talk about some of these less healthy products and make people aware yeah and when it comes down to advertisement um i had an interesting conversation with someone yesterday and fruit and vegetable i think they get five percent of food advertisement whereas the rest of it is is largely these highly processed foods. And while I'm an advocate of, like you said, not putting food into these categories of good and bad, I do agree, coming from a public health perspective,

that it's about giving people autonomy and giving them informed choices. And if all that we show people is advertisement for sugary cereals or chocolate bars. We lose that autonomy because we think that's what we should always have. So I think it's about, like you said, levelling the playing field and giving people back their power. And it's not about taking away. It's actually about promoting health.

Also, everyone needs to look at it through their own intuitive lens if you don't want to engage in it then don't but it's to help the people who need this help yeah definitely and I think that's so key isn't it because it can be seen as you're taking away this sugary drink or you're taking away this and always about taking away and and a key line that the food industry will always use is well we just we have this product and we have this product and it's up to people to choose. As if free choice is really a thing and it's not necessarily with eating for loads of different reasons.

First of all, I think we make over 200 food choices a day. So a lot of what we actually do, we outsource a lot of those. So what we end up doing is just going by habit or all of the behavioural insight stuff is really interesting. So when we walk into a supermarket, there's prompt after prompt. And we're not restricting choice. We're restricting the prompts that are always driving us towards those heavily processed foods that have the bigger profit margin. Ultimately, the fruit and veg companies, they don't necessarily have the budget to advertise and promote in the same way.

Because it's farmers. They don't have the money exactly so what's happened over time is we because there's been no boundaries we have drinks that have far more than your whole an adult's whole daily recommended intake of free sugars let alone a child's and we need to restore a bit more balance there because all we're saying is that actually isn't appropriate in the first place we're not taking things away from people we're just trying to make a food environment that ultimately promotes healthier eating over less healthier eating because at the moment it's definitely the other way around yeah and we've talked about a couple of campaigns and a lot of

this is part of the childhood obesity plan so most of these plans are all focused around removing things or restricting things. Do you think that we should be focusing more on positive nutrition and how can policy play a role there? Yeah definitely. I think it's really important because a big part of this and I think from our learning as well is how these are positioned in the media. So price promotions, for example, essentially the research shows that what they do is encourage us to buy more, eat more and waste more. They're not necessarily as good for our pockets as-dense foods to be financially available to everyone and to be the cheaper, more affordable option rather than the other way around. Of course, there's lots of media and newspapers in particular that are anti-anything, as they call it, nanny state.

So the headlines that they will take from that is very much like, you know, taking away your pizza, banning your pizza. And it's unfortunate because that's not in essence what the whole policy has ever looked like so I think part of it is is challenging with public health and you're always going to get pushback it's a time of change but yeah of course as much as we can we want to talk about giving healthier food choices and making them more accessible rather than taking things away. Yeah, and when you step back, a lot of this policy is driven by what people want. And we, as the people, are driving the change. I think most people are for putting restrictions on advertisement of this certain food.

And especially now we've got in London, they're going to be restricting advertisements of junk food on the tube, which is just another example. Yeah, there's lots of polls actually where there's a lot of public support and that's how the the sugar tax started was with a public poll to parliament to say that this is what people wanted and there was news out yesterday research showing the impact of having sweets and chocolate at checkouts and that's a classic one because if you kind of take that forward we know that product placement has an impact on our choices so if you take that at face value the headline then becomes

you know campaigners want to remove want to take away your sweets and chocolate and that's how it simplified actually what campaigners are saying is let's have the healthier options there to nudge people towards those rather than the chocolate that they might have not most people don't want necessarily in the first place. But now we're having it because it's a trigger and we're expected to be able to resist all this stuff all the time that we are designed to want, sweet foods and food,

back in the day we were eating to survive. But where our environments changed, what we're actually having to do is resist constantly, which isn't really fair. No, it's not. And it's difficult to have that willpower especially if you've had a long day and that dairy milk is staring you in the eye when you go to your car with petrol and they try to sell you really cheap chocolate it's hard to

say no to that for anyone the size of the bars is so big as well exactly it's crazy so jamie oliver has been campaigning to ban the sale of energy drinks to teenagers and children. So like under the age of 18. In addition to how much sugar there's actually in these drinks, the main reason for this ban is because they're full of caffeine. How much caffeine is actually in these drinks? I don't think people fully understand that. I don't think I'm fully aware of that.

And what effects do they have on young people? What do we know? Yeah, so Jamie has been campaigning and lots of other organisations as well in terms of caffeine these drinks have to be labelled not recommended for children if they contain more than 150 milligrams per litre now what we do know is research shows the consumption of these is linked to physical symptoms such as headaches and stomach aches and disrupted sleep. Obviously, one of the challenges with most things in nutrition that we come up against is the fact that it's hard to get gold standard, randomised controlled trial evidence for these, which is what some people, you know, people who don't want the sale of these to be banned.

I'm expecting. Will expect, yeah. And it's unethical to put some children in a group where they're assigned to drinking lots of energy drinks and then others not and compare them because obviously that's unethical. So we're not going to get that causal link necessarily. But we know there are lots of associations. And I think with research as well and science and policy, we have to listen to people's lived experiences and what is happening so when you've got teachers complaining that it's really impacting in the classroom and lots of children are on their way to school buying these drinks and parents are complaining because they have little control once their child is on their way to school and essentially what has happened

is the main supermarkets have voluntarily decided that they would ban the sale of these drinks. It doesn't mean that children can't have them ever. It just means they can't go and buy them on their way to school. So their parents would have to buy them. Yeah, exactly. So that's a voluntary measure. But it doesn't tackle the root cause of the news agents and the independent shops that are selling these drinks for cheaper than they're selling water i know i think waitrose banning the sale is really good precedent but

is that the biggest issue children buying energy drinks in waitrose probably not so the next step is now the government had published a consultation which everyone's fed into now as part of the chapter two of the child obesity plan and we'll see the outcome of that so we want it to be more legislation because again we need that level playing field where everyone has to do it yeah absolutely because when you span it you know like some people might think you know what's the harm in you know an energy drink here and there but it also displaces what they could be drinking like water or milk or it could displace their lunch which could be more nutrient dense and then like you said all of the other side effects that come

with it and what i'm seeing and i know this isn't going to be across the board but particularly in london you see school kids with massive starbucks coffee like the frappuccinos and things like that like where do we draw the line should we be saying you know don't sell coffee to kids do you know and that is so interesting because i think with the energy drinks part of it is the portion size as well the fact that they contain so much sugar but the same does go for the frappuccinos and those kind of drinks and i think that we need to monitor what's the impact like with energy drinks for example whilst the sale of soft drinks was going down energy drinks were still going up and part of that is to do

with the marketing of it and children believing you know they're tired they might not have slept well they've got to get through school they haven't had breakfast well this is going to give me energy I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing and why would they so I think we need to assess the impact of those kind of drinks and then make choices and campaigns based based on that information yeah and also we don't know i guess we don't know we can't tell if this will happen but we don't want to make it the forbidden fruit where you know like with alcohol because kids get their hands on alcohol like you can't deny that it's like underage drinking we don't want to make energy drinks that either

but how we do that's really tricky because if you take anything away from anyone or restrict it in some way you're going to want it yeah do you think there's any way around that or we just kind of have to wait and see yeah it's a good i think it's a really good point and we know that with nutrition and generally we don't want to overly restrict and what I think with things like the sale of energy drinks is it's just getting to a stage where it's the norm that children can't freely go and buy what says on the packet not recommended for children so it's trickier maybe in this generation but we need to think about the long haul and the impact in the longer term and just re-establishing some norms again which are in the favour of health rather than

it's normal to be having a yeah the can of drinks with 10 teaspoons of sugar like that should have never been the case and this idea that we're taken away all the time well it shouldn't be in there to start with really yeah now moving away from campaigns that are currently that we've just spoke about a few weeks ago a study came out looking at the impact of of attacks on red and processed meat and the number of deaths and economic savings that that would have as a result so what the researchers said was that a price increase of about 13 percent on red meat about 79% on processed meat in the UK would translate to about a 22% drop in deaths and nearly a 19% drop in healthcare costs linked to processed meat consumption and this was just a study and I'm not saying that it's going to be implemented yet

anyway but I want to know your thoughts on this, because I definitely have my own thoughts. But a lot of people got quite upset about this. Coming at it from a medical point of view, I'm looking at it and thinking, absolutely, we need to reduce our red and processed meat consumption from not just a health promotion point of view, but also environmental point of view but also environmental point of view and particularly when it comes to processed meat when we're discussing health because we know that there's a direct link between processed meat in particular and colorectal cancer and then the link between red meats less clear but there's definitely an argument to be had that we should be reducing our consumption of meat across the board and again that that's for many reasons but then when we're taxing, I think processed meat and red meat shouldn't be lumped into the same category. And there's so many nutritional highlights when it comes to consuming red meat. And I fear that that is one example of where things could get too restrictive. I don't know what your thoughts on this are.

With the sugar tax, it wasn't just, you know, an idea that was kind of plucked out of thin air and that to that. It was really thought out. It was managed for unintended consequences with a sugary drink for the general healthy population that doesn't offer us anything that we need nutritionally so when it comes to red meat in particular like you said yes lots of people vegetarians they don't have it as part of their diet but hopefully are aware enough to make sure that they are making up for that elsewhere and have the knowledge to do that but it does contain nutrients and important nutrients so b vitamins iron which is easier to absorb from these sources so i think that it will be very tricky to start taxing things that do add nutritional benefit to our diet so yeah i would say with this that we need to probably,

as a population, need to reduce our red meat consumption and processed meats we need to be careful of in terms of health. But yeah, I think it's just it's going to take a lot of thought, isn't it? I wouldn't say at this point that I would have enough information on that to be like, that's a great idea. I think when it comes to these kind of things as well, the whole idea of sustainability and sustainable diets is relatively new for a lot of people and we're still trying to figure out how that actually looks and what our cap on meat and

fish and animal product consumption should be but i do think that it's something that we should consider but potentially from a public health guideline like include it in the nutritional guidelines first it's just interesting to discuss yeah and you don't necessarily want the sugar tax to end up being the gateway for you know lecture let's just slap attacks on everything yeah i don't think that's what anyone really wanted no so we've kind of talked about public health from a top-down policy level approach. What do you think we can do at a grassroots level to ensure that we provide our children in particular with the healthiest starts to life? I know that's like a massive question to end on. No, that's a great question, actually, and where my passion, I think, lies as well, because I very much started more in kind of grassroots terms, delivering MEND programs,

which were healthy lifestyle programs for families and actually having that communication with families on the ground was the best thing I could have done to start my career really I think and so yeah it's a big question there's loads of things that we could do but I think a key aspect that I think of is exposing children to foods that we don't have that innate preference for, that they might be a bit fussier around, like vegetables, for example, would be really, really important and probably one of the most evidence-based things that we can do. So just to explain, we all have this innate preference for sweet foods when we're born. So now we all have this preference for sweet foods. And so we need to expose children to the more bitter foods which

might be the green vegetables in order to get them to like them now if we can build some of these processes in to get children to have these types of foods like within schools and systems like that and I think that that would be really beneficial in the longer term it's hard for parents when they're feeding their child who are refusing constantly you know all the green vegetables to keep giving them because they just see money waste food waste and all these things so I think that some of these aspects about exposing children to some of these foods would be a really good start and kind of with that in mind what we really want is in schools health to be part of Ofsted regulation and monitoring because we know

that it's always going to be hard to get health on the agenda in schools if it's not one of those top priorities and what gets measured gets done and all of that but yeah there's lots of different things but I think that's an area that I feel particularly passionate about. Yeah I think that's all we've got time for today but we did cover some pretty heavy topics but really insightful and thank you so much for coming in today before you go do you want to tell everyone where we can find more about you and more about all of this yeah yeah so um i am on social media at hello healthy you this might give me a bit of a drive actually to finally publish my website it's coming um but yeah twitter and instagram at the moment

um hello healthy you amazing so thank you so much thanks for having me wonderful okay guys so that was jenny and i hope that left you guys with a lot of food for thought so we've spoken a lot about what we should remove from the diet but let's focus on what we can include. Now we know fruit and veg is good for us and in the UK and in many countries across the world it is recommended that we eat a minimum of five portions of fruit and veg a day. Now these recommendations are based on advice from the World Health Organization as evidence shows that high fruit and vegetable consumption can reduce the risk of certain cancers and diseases such as cardiovascular disease, which includes heart disease and stroke.

Now, a recent study published last year found that 10 portions of fruit and veg was actually better at reducing the risk of all of these diseases and early death. So the question is, why not recommend 10 a day? Well, while this study backs up what we already know, i.e. more fruits and vegetables in the diet, the better. The thing is, here in the UK, where guidelines recommend that we eat at least five portions a day, only one in four adults and one in five children manage to meet the target. So increasing the target to 10 portions is probably a little bit ambitious. But the thing is, if you're meeting five, can you do better? Can you get six?

So this week, I'm challenging you to track your fruit and veg portions. And if you can, try to squeeze in one extra portion. If you do get involved, please do let me know on social by tagging me at the Food Medic and using the hashtag the Food Medic Challenge. I love to see your posts, super inspiring for me, but for everyone else that's getting involved too. So next week on the Food Medic podcast, we're going to be hearing from Lucy Erickson, who will be talking all about sustainable seafood consumption. Billions of people around the world rely on fish for protein, and fishing is the principal livelihood for millions of people around the world.

However, increasing fishing efforts over the last 50 years, as well as unsustainable fishing practices, are pushing many fish stocks to the point of collapse. So what does that mean for us, and how can we continue eating fish in a sustainable way? So on the next episode I'm going to be asking Lucy all of these hard-hitting questions. This is an episode you don't want to miss.