WHOOP Podcast - How Small Diet Changes Can Add Years to Your Life – Dr. Federica Amati

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

What simple diet changes can help improve long-term health? This week, in the second installment of our Longevity Series, WHOOP SVP, Research Algorithms and Data, Emily Capodilupo sits down with Dr. Federica Amati, Head Nutritionist at ZOE, Nutrition Topic Lead at Imperial College London Faculty of Medicine, and Head of Nutrition Science at Wellfounded Health. Dr. Amati’s primary focus within the health and nutrition space focusses on maternal and early childhood health, women’s health, and the gut microbiome as a modifier for nutrition to improve overall health. ZOE runs the world's largest study in nutrition-science and provides its members with personalized nutrition plans to live healthier. At Zoe, Dr. Amati communicates and provides up-to-date evidence-based research, using food as a tool to transform member health.In this episode, Emily and Dr. Federica Amati discuss Dr. Amati’s journey through medicine to nutrition (00:47), the percentage of health that begins and ends with nutrition (03:28), the surprising additives in today’s food (05:41), why nutrition shouldn’t be about convenience (10:15), why we need to start caring about our gut microbiome (13:57), the benefits of having plants in our diet (16:29), and Dr. Amati’s new “5-a-day” to prioritize in our diet (18:55). Dr. Amati amplifies the need to regain a positive relationship with food (20:57), reframing how we approach food (26:57), the importance of nutrition in the first 1000 days of life (28:32), and understanding food agency (29:24). Dr. Amati highlights the benefits of the Zoe Diet in helping to improve your overall health (31:56) and why it’s never too late to start taking control of your health (39:50).Follow WHOOPwww.whoop.comTrial WHOOP for FreeInstagramTikTokXFacebookLinkedInFollow Will AhmedInstagramXLinkedInResourcesDr. Federica AmatiDr. Federica Amati - ZOEZOESupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

People fear food more than they enjoy it now. And we need to completely flip that over and say, listen, food actually is there to be our ally for our health. We've evolved with this food. Our gut microbiome, you were asking about earlier, we co-evolved with the gut microbiome. We're like, it's one of the theories as to why our brains are able to develop so much is partly because of the gut microbiome and the gut brain connection. There's a reason we've evolved to eat these foods, these fibroach, these berries and these roots and these plants. we're going backwards to disassociating from the foods that got us here in the first place. Hi, everybody. I am Emily Capitaluppo, Woop SVP of Research Algorithms and Data. And today I am joined by the incredible Dr. Federica Amadi. Dr. Amati, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me. Such a pleasure to be here and to finally meet you in real life. Why don't we start off super easy. Tell us about you and how you got into studying nutrition. Great question. So I started my career wanting to do medicine at school. And so I was that kid that did the sciences and, you know, every weekend I was in hospitals, volunteering, spending time with patients. Life had other plans. So my grandmother died the day of my chemistry exam. So I turned up to the exam, but didn't do much. And at the time, I think my school thought that it would be fine because it was such exceptional circumstances. And my place was to study medicine at Imperial College. college. And they were like, it's fine. You know, we understand. Everything else was A's. And then a week before I was due to start, they sort of went, actually, we can't really set the precedent. You should really reset that paper. And I was like, oh, no, that's not my plan. I just, you know, I just wasn't planning to take her out. So instead of doing that, I thought, you know what, I'm going to go and study biomedical sciences. So very similar to the US model, because for a hot second,

I was going to apply to U.S. universities. So I thought, I'll do the undergrad bit, and then I'll do, I can do post-grad medicine, which is available as well. But when I did the biomedical degree, I actually realized that I was so interested in the science, but I wasn't sure about how the public health system worked in the UK. So I then did a master's in public health. And it was doing that master's, which I loved, that I realized so many of the diseases were trying to prevent. All the chronic diseases are diet-related. And I had this amazing lecturer

who is Professor Eddie Riboli. He runs the epic cohort. And he was basically saying, and all of these factors we can see from our research, they all lead to increased cancer rates. And I was sort of saying they're going, what? It's just me that finds this amazing. And that was it. I became so interested in understanding how to prevent disease. And nutrition quickly became the most obvious tool to do that. So I did my PhD in clinical medicine because Imperial didn't offer nutrition PhDs at the time and did my training in nutrition separately

and did another master's to get my accreditation so that I'm a registered nutritionist in the UK. Now I work clinically. I'm the head nutritionist at Zoe. I get to basically do what I've always wanted to do and try and help to improve people's lives day-to-day, but also massively reduce their risk of chronic disease and stop them mending up in hospital as much. From your research and from the work you've done at Zoe,

what would you say, and I know this is like impossible to super pinpoint, but like what percentage of health begins and ends with nutrition? Well, if you look at the data, so epidemiological, big population data, The estimate is that 80% of premature deaths are preventable. That's wild. Okay. And the four lifestyle factors that can reduce that risk of premature death by 80% are not smoking. Sure.

And when I say that, I'm like, everyone's like, yeah, sure, but people still smoke. So it should be said, right? Drink less alcohol. So I'll lump that one in with nutrition. Move your body more. but improve your diet is the strongest one by far. So it used to be that smoking led to more chronic disease deaths and premature deaths, but now we live in a world where poor diet is the leading cause of premature death in chronic disease.

That's wild. And is any of that because like one cancer due to smoking is more treatable than it used to be or just our diets have degraded so far? So there's there's earlier detection of cancer rates. There's better treatments for things like COPD, so these chronic, obstructive, pulmonary disorders. And also, thankfully, smoking rates have started to decline. So all of the public health efforts that went into stopping the tidal wave of smoking deaths actually worked, at least in the countries that adopted the public health intervention. So we've seen this decrease. And we know that young people are smoking less.

The flip side of that is that diet has worsened across the globe. literally all countries have seen a degradation in their food environment and the UK and the US really lead the way with being best and worst in class. So that's why we see the biggest increase in diet-related diseases across the lifespan. You know, we've seen a doubling of type two diabetes in children in the US in the past like 15 years. That's so scary. A large part of that people will hear what you said and kind of nod their head and go like, yeah, we eat a lot of crap. But I think one of the things that I've learned a lot from you and from Zoe that I think would be helpful to get for our members to hear, our listeners to hear, is what are the ways in which

our diet has degraded that people don't even realize? Yeah, it's interesting though, because I think a lot of people don't necessarily realize whether it's added sugar or whether there is added sodium. You know, we know that high potential, high blood pressure is like the biggest risk factor for heart disease, which is still the biggest killer. Yeah. But people think, oh, I don't yet add that much salt to my plate. But actually, there's added sodium in your soda.

There's sodium in your ketchup. There's sodium in your cereals. There's sodium everywhere that you don't even necessarily expect. And a lot of these foods do fall under the ultra-process food category. And to your point, a lot of ultra-process foods aren't obvious. because there's no labelling for them. In fact, most ultra-process foods have health marketing on them. So it's really hard to spot them.

I mean, the classic examples are things like nut-based protein bars. They're filled with crap, honestly. And I'm yet to find one that's like, oh, actually, they've done a pretty good job with this. And they're like a health food, really. If you think about the kind of people that opt to buy these, they're people who are conscious of their training or trying to eat like a diet that supports their health. and actually it's not going to be helpful, then there's other foods which can look quite innocuous

in the sense that ready meals that you might buy from the grocery store and you think, oh, like a three bean Mexican chili or something, but actually the way it's been made and the nutrients or rather the xenobiotics, so emulsifiers, artificial sweetness, things that have no real place in our diet. We never used to eat these things. They've been added in to make the food look better, taste better, have to let you better texture and last longer and all of these things have an impact on us just because artificial sweetness were thought to be okay for us because they weren't

passing through to the blood so it was like ah they're innocuous nothing happens they taste sweet and it goes through it's all good but it goes through and your gut microbiome has to deal with it and you know some really interesting research looking at the effects on the brain of foods that are artificially sweetened so their calorie density doesn't match their sweetness actually actually disrupts our metabolism. So our metabolism, instead of using that energy, goes, hang on a minute, this is much sweeter than the amount of energy we're actually getting from it. Let's not burn it all up because it doesn't match.

So when there's a mismatch between sweetness of food and actual energy available, our body senses that is this term which I love called nutrition wisdom or food wisdom. And, you know, we've kind of lost it because we're eating foods that taste sweet, but then don't have any actual sugar in them. And we're tasting foods that are really salty, but then actually it's just all over the place. And our body senses these things and goes, what's going on? I don't know what to do with it, basically.

So there's a lot of disruption across the board. The food environment is a whole, I think, when you realize just how much of it is stacked against us for health, you kind of go, oh, wow, okay. If you try to go to a store and you're trying to buy fresh produce or lentils or whole grains like, you know, a barley, for example, you have to go and look for it. You have to go to the bottom shelves and go in the middle of the grocery store. There's no fancy packaging. There's no health claims. You have to really go out of your way to buy whole foods. And then when you add to that a layer of advertising, billions of dollars

spent every year on food advertising. So we're constantly being told to eat and that we're hungry and to snack and eat some more. And are you sure you don't want to drink? And do you need a protein bar? Do you need a protein shake? You know, we're subjected. We're bombarded the messaging to eat more food, even though we don't actually need to eat more food. And then when we go and try and find food, it's mostly ultra-processed food on the shelves. So it's incredibly difficult as a food environment. It's not just our choices that have changed. Our choices have changed because of what is surrounding us. And I think that's a really important point to make, because often it can feel like it's individual agency. It's the person's fault that they're doing

this, but for some people, it's not even an option. And for those of us who do have options, you have to work extra hard to actually eat a minimally processed diet, right? I'd love to follow up on a couple of the things that you were talking about. One is, you know, you have to work really hard. You know, everything that you mentioned that people are going to, like the ready packaged meals and the nut, you know, protein bars and all that kind of stuff, it's a convenience factor. So what would you recommend for somebody who's, you know, busy and looking for convenient food? trying to eat a more minimally processed diet. Yeah.

So I'd like to push back on the convenience. We've been sold convenience as a solution. It's a problem that maybe we didn't have, right? So like I caveat that with the knowledge that there are people listening who might have two jobs, single parenting and caring responsibilities, in which case, yeah, okay, like time is really, really short. But for a lot of us, you know, we have been sold this idea. that oh my god i don't have that time i even saw an advert the other day for a ready-made food

company and the advert was basically saying did you know that the average person spends two hours a day thinking about food imagine what you could do in that time if you just had the food made for you and i was like no opposite of what we did so it's this idea that we've suddenly been sold this idea that like thinking about preparing and actually putting time into our food like it's bad we shouldn't be doing it what like okay let's take a step, a really big step back, okay, and look at evolution. Until very recently, our entire days were spent, foraging, hunting, finding food, then sitting, preparing it and eating it with our tribe. I'm literally our entire lives used to revolve around thinking about finding and

preparing and eating food. Now, I'm not saying we should go back to that, but to now be living in a society where food has been so commoditized that we're being told that we should even spend time thinking about it. We shouldn't even spend time preparing it. It's removing us from our food so much that we don't know where it comes from. We don't know how it's being made. And then we essentially consume it, not even thinking about it. And all of the science tells us that that is the opposite of what we should be doing if we want to foster good metabolic health, good eating habits, a good relationship with food, and actually harness the power that food has to bring us together. It's an essentially sociable thing to do to eat with friends,

eat with family, eat with colleagues, right? We're removing that even more by being like, don't think about it. Just buy a thing, put it in the micro. So that's my first challenge. My second is if you think that you're one of those people that really doesn't have time, take a look at your screen time. Most of us spend about two hours and 14 minutes on social media a day. Now, it's in bits, I know that, but my second challenge is priority. When we understand that food, is our best tool for health, which is not a small statement, then I think we're better inclined to say, okay, I'm going to carve out 20 minutes of my day.

You don't need more than 20 minutes to cook one meal, 20 minutes of my day, just to make sure I get one meal in, which is like prepared and it's ready for me. And some other people are better at batch cooking, so they might separate some time out on the weekend. There's ways, like the first step is to find what works for you. I'm not a batch cooker. so for me it's a 20 minutes in a day but really carve it out of your time in the same way that

we've become so much better at carving out time to go to the gym to work out to move right and it's so important that we do that we have to apply a similar thought pattern a similar thinking to food we should be spending time thinking about selecting preparing and eating our food not only is it pleasurable and delicious it's really important for our health you talked about how artificial sweeteners, you know, which became obviously very popular because all the plus of sweet without any of the minus of calories, but a really disruptive term microbiome. And I think, you know, thank God over the past couple of years, there's been increased understanding that like the gut microbiome is important.

But I think largely people think of, you know, the quality of your food in such this like hyper reductive way. It's like calories, fats, carbs, and proteins. and that's it. What do you wish more people knew about the microbiome? And then my follow-up question is, and what should they be doing more to support it? I wish people knew that our gut microbiome doesn't eat macros. Neither do we. Let's be clear. Food is complex and food has thousands of chemicals in it and we have trillions of microbes. And so when you try and map out the way the thousands of chemicals interact with each other in the food, then the way they interact when

we digest them, and then you add to that the trillions of microbes, it is a literal chemistry lab in there. And taking such a reductionist view of this much fat, this much protein and this many calories, just does nothing to serve, to serve us. And actually, also in the traditional macro profile, fibre is not even mentioned. Yeah. And fiber is like the one thing that 95% of us deficient in and it's the one thing that our gut microbiome needs to thrive like a low fiber diet is the fastest way to decimate your gut microbiome so I would love to just set macros and calories have a place I'm not saying that they're completely useless but they are just not working for us and they they aren't useful when considering how to improve your dietary pattern because our dietary

patterns are made up of foods. They're not made out of macros and calories. So think about foods and specifically think about how you can introduce more fiber into your diet. The answer to that is super simple and it's plants. And when I say plants, I don't mean plant extract in a powder or I mean eating actual plants. There's no shortcut for this, Emily, right? I think people are often like, but can I take a supplement? Right. I had my green powder drinks. So I'm good. with a green padders. They didn't even have that much fiber in them. I'm like, guys, you could have at least put the fiber in if you're going to make it, right? There's like one gram of fiber, pointless. So, no, you need to eat the plants. Now, the great thing about eating

plants is that it fills you up. You have great energy. It's cheap. It's affordable. Plants are incredibly affordable. You can get them locally. You can get them dried. You can get them frozen. You can get them how you like them. And if they're dried or frozen, all the protein and everything is equally good. Yeah. So actually, I'd go as far as saying that with frozen fruits and vegetables, often the vitamins and the phytochemicals are better preserved than through the traditional food chain. So like frozen berries are. Yeah, they're cheaper too. Yeah. So that's a great hack because I think like as the mother of a toddler who eats an insane amount of berries,

you know, the frozen organic ones are like half the price. And also if your toddler is teething, frozen raspberries are like nature's natural tea there they love that um but and so are frozen peas and frozen corn like frozen anything you can put it in and enjoy it in pretty much any dish or however you like to enjoy it like you can defrost your berries and eat them and similarly like with dried it's i'm thinking here about pulses and beans and whole grains they take a bit more time to prepare but you can literally buy them in bulk if you you'd want to get them so they're already cooked so you'd like remove a step, then tinned or canned or jarred, you know, chickpeas and beans, garbanzo beans, you guys call them. They're amazing.

And when they're already cooked for you, you don't need to worry about boiling them for like two hours. Yeah. They're there. You can just literally tip them onto a plate, warm them if you want. I eat them cold as well. Like I love them. And they're so easy to add to your diet. Now whole grains like barley like spelt like quinoa like buckwheat they cook just as quickly as rice spelt takes a bit longer but they're so much more nutritious than rice and are incredibly affordable and you can batch cook those that's the one thing I will do like I'll just cook a bunch put it in the fridge five days it will last in the fridge you can add it to your stews add it to soups add it to salads just have it as a base for something else I think once

you start adding plants to your plate, almonds, walnuts, any nuts you like. If you're allergic to nuts, don't worry, seeds are amazing. Add seeds. But if once you start having them every day, you know who you have five a day? I've caught with a new five a day. Okay. I'm ready. Which hits way more marks than just generic five a day, which often ends up in like an orange juice and apple than on a like lettuce and tomato. It's not really cut, not cutting it with that. The new five a day is nuts and seeds, legumes. So whether that's peas or beans or gabanzor, whatever you like, whole grains, fresh whole fruit, because that has been demonized to hell and back,

and people are scared of eating fresh whole fruit, and it's so protective for our health. It's important we have it in our diet. And then the fifth one is healthy fats. So that means focusing on things like omega-3 fatty acids, but also extra virgin olive oil, nuts and seeds again. They come up twice because they're so good. If we can get those every day, you're ahead of nuts. most of the world's population.

And there's so many other plants that we include, like herbs and spices. And those are even nice to haves and they make things taste great. But there's so much on offer when we talk about plant foods. And I think when we switch to this like abundance mindset of what does positive nutrition mean? It means what are you adding back to your plate? You're going to feel great. You'll be less hungry.

You'll find out that it doesn't take that long to pull these ingredients together into a meal. like it just it's 20 minutes is all you need and hopefully then you'll start to be like wow food is great and that relationship with food needs to come back what's up folks if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health performance fitness you may really enjoy getting a whoop that's right you can check out whoop at whoop.com it measures everything around sleep recovery strain and you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free. You get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member.

And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. We've lost so many generations, the U.S. and the UK again, not doing very well. Don't learn how to cook. They don't have a relationship with food. It doesn't bring them that joy. We need to bring it back, Emily. and we both have kids

and it's like big job. We do it for ourselves and for them as well. Yeah, one thing I love doing with my daughter is we have this like stepstool thing called like a learning tower so she can come up and stand at our counter and I do cook with her every day and it's like a very fun special thing

and I found just made her a lot more curious about food. But I'll just jump on this segue. You've done a lot of research around the first thousand days of life which you define as basically from conception starts as day one. So it's roughly from conception until age two-ish. Why is that such an important specific period to focus on? Yeah. So it's this period of time where all the research points to it being a fundamental period of construction.

And it makes sense when we think about what happens in this time. In the womb, all of the organs are built. The brain, every tissue, the actual. the shape, the bones. So you go from this sperm and egg, an entire organ is built to house this baby, which by the way, it's amazing, right? We literally just build an organ for the centre and it's just used for that. And then you have this time period where every week is critical, which is terrifying. In one hand, you're like, oh my goodness. Yeah, when I think about it, yeah, brains built, eyes are built. Like, it's amazing. And on the other hand,

we have to remember that the human body is super resilient and the mother's body is so well attuned to get what it needs from wherever it can. So if you're somebody who's had a really difficult pregnancy or maybe you really weren't able to eat properly, like don't worry because your body will take calcium from your teeth to build the bones and it will literally take protein from your muscles. So in some ways it's like it's about both the maternal and child health, right? We want to make sure that in the first thousand days, maternal nutrition is such that it has everything to build this baby with all the best building blocks without having to damage the mom a bit. Yeah, you know, my grandma told me that like, you know, when she was having

her babies and what she had been told by her mom was that like it was normal to lose a tooth every pregnancy because you lose so much calcium. Yeah, that like it was just sort of a given that like you know ah well there it comes. In previous generations it's like not unusual for women to find out they were pregnant because their teeth start cracking. Yeah that's awful. Okay like it's good news for the baby in the sense that right they get what they need but like so it's really critical it's this time where we can have an impact on the foundations yeah so what now later in life there's other opportunities there's growth spurts and there's specific times when there's huge brain development or specific times when metabolic flexibility is important.

But the foundations and the blueprint, they're set in that time frame. So for me, what does this mean? It's like we should be empowering women and couples and parents to know how important it is and to make all the adjustments they can to really focus and hone in on this time and make sure that not only is maternal health as good as it can be, and nutritional status, but then postnatally, making sure that the infant is exposed to the best possible environment, the best possible foods, that weaning, I mean, now we're at a point where infants are exposed to about 70% of their energy intake from ultra-processed foods.

You read that in your book? What? Terrifying. But, you know, I've worked with women who come to me for help because they think their child is a fussy eater. I will, you know, work with them and sit with them, and I realize that a lot of the foods, these children are eating are from a packet and they always have been when they're presented with the broccoli they have no idea what to do with that the food marketing on children's food products is such that parents trust those foods more than they trust food so that you know you have

these foods that say safe for toddlers or perfect for weaning or great for practicing you know self-feeding oral motor development yeah like as if you're helping your child's language development by then like knobby biscuits. What? Yeah. But this is the world we're in is like these companies are allowed to say this on pack. And parents have no education from anywhere else to support them to say actually you're better off just letting your child learn how to peel a banana or letting them smush like a sweet

potato and play with it. There is no support for parents. Now it's amazing to hear you cook with your little one. but that you know you've done that because you have the education and the access to know that's a good idea but many parents don't and so i've i've been in situations where you know a baby babies are the best because they'll try anything you can put anything in front of them and they'll give it a go and i've seen sort of babies around the age of seven eight months nine months and they're sitting at the table with their parents in restaurants and they're trying to grab for the avocado

grab for the scrambled eggs or grab for the sourdough toast and mom will be like oh no here's your pouch because it's safer and it's tidy and it's tidy yeah that's honestly a disservice to that child but it's not the parents fault it's the way that this industry has evolved to basically prey into parents fears safe you're not going to choke all these things and we've removed so now we've got a generation who quite quickly goes from you know same taste every day from formula milk to food from a pouch with no texture and no no understanding what food looks like and then we expect them to eat food it doesn't really work like that right so we need to reframe how we approach food we've built an industry of fear around food for so many reasons

including sugar including if you eat this you'll put on weight and if you do so people fear food more than they enjoy it now and we need to completely flip that over and say listen food actually is there to be our ally for our health we've evolved with this food I got microbiome you were asking out earlier, we co-evolved with the gut microbiome. We're like, our colon is way bigger, longer, and has way more surface area than other mammals. It's one of the theories as to why our brains are able to develop so much and why we're able to be so much more sentient beings with thoughts is partly because of the gut microbiome and the gut brain connection. There's a reason we've evolved to eat these foods, these fiber rich, these berries and these roots and these

plants, our gut microbes evolved with us to help us break those fibres down into useful chemicals that we use for our health, right? And now we've just complete, we're going backwards to disassociating from the foods that got us here in the first place. So yeah, I think it's tricky. The first thousand days is one of those topics which can be quite emotional and emotive. My intention is never to put the pressure on the parents, especially mothers. We have enough pressure as it is. But it's more about if you don't have the knowledge, you can't empower yourself with the information. Well, I think it's scary how we've institutionalized this fear and this disinformation. My daughter was in the NICU for four days when she was born. And so we had to do

certain things that you wouldn't otherwise have had to do, including we had to take an infant CPR class. And I was actually an EMT for seven years. So that was fine. But they talk about like, you know, your kid is going to choke on food. And so you sort of leave with like all food first and foremost is a choking hazard. And of course you don't get any education in the NICU around like you have a virgin microbiome that you can either see with crap or with food. So much of what we hear about food is it's a choking hazard. And very little of what we hear about food is like what does a toddler or, you know, a weaning infant actually need. So I think part of the problem, though, the reason for that is because most medics

don't have nutrition education. So it's very recent that medical schools have nutrition education. In London, so Imperial College School of Medicine, I teach, I'm a nutrition lead for the medical students there. And we've been going for three or four years. So none of the senior medics have been taught. And in the U.S., it's similar. I think there was a bill that was passed maybe two or two, two, three years ago.

to put nutrition education in the medical school curriculum. The medical system isn't equipped to advise us with nutrition. And I think part of the beauty of what companies like ours, like Weepen's doing, we're like helping people to take agency back and be like, okay, you can't rely on external forces because the food environment isn't great, advertising isn't great, food marketing isn't great. So you have to sort of take things into your own hands and go back to that food wisdom I was talking about.

trust your body, understand how it works, and learn how to do it yourself, invest in learning how to cook. I find it so funny how we invest money in so many things, like learning an instrument or learning a language or getting a personal trainer, taking yoga classes. But for some reason, people don't invest in learning how to cook. It's a life skill. You're not born knowing how to cook, right? So you either have a mom like you that exposes you from early age or like my mom, I used, all our conversations were in the kitchen. But if you don't get a, take a cooking class. Like, it'll revolutionize your life.

And I think taking that agency back is, for me anyway, it's such a driver for why I do what I do, why I write books like that. My book, everybody should know this. It's so funny because in it, there's quite a lot of detail about quite a lot of things that, you know, I think I went to, I spent quite a long time writing about, um, hypertension. and the renin and detentin system. And I just think it's important if you want to understand how blood pressure goes up

and how you get to a place where you have high blood pressure, understanding the mechanisms behind it is quite useful if you're that way inclined. Otherwise you can just look at like what you can do to improve it. But for me, like education and understanding mechanisms can have a real transformative impact on people embracing improving their own health and getting excited about

what they can do for themselves and what they can do for their families and maybe becoming a little bit boring at dinner parties for a while you're like, did you make your own sauerkraut? But you know, it's a real discovery and I think it's it's such an amazing way to empower people. Yeah. So I have been following the Zoe diet for the better part of a year now and I think have drank the Kool-Aid. I think you've clearly drank the Kool-Aid or very much not Kool-Aid, but you've internalized the wisdom. And I think you talked a lot earlier in this podcast about how, you know, if you try this and you eat, you know, the daily five after a couple of days or weeks, you'll realize that there's a lot of wisdom here and you'll feel better. But there's probably a lot of people

listening right now who are, you know, yeah, yeah, but maybe not for me. You're a little bit skeptical or just overwhelmed by the change. And so if you were going to give, if people said like, I'm going to give Dr. Armadi 30 minutes a day? What are just some really practical, simple things people can do, low time commitment while they ease their way into a more plant-based, whole food-based diet? Good question. And Emily, I guess you've done, Zoe, so you know that it is a gradual process. So I think what I love about what we do in our membership is that we take people by hand and we take it step by step and those food changes are gradual so that it can integrate into your life but often what I will say is if you don't know where to start start with breakfast

so about 20 to 25% of our energy intake on average comes from our breakfast and most of us have some sort of control in the morning on what we're going to eat whether that's because we're eating it at home or because we have like five, ten minutes in the morning to pull something together and take it with us. So if and doubt, start with breakfast. Whether that means eating at home, as I said, that could be, I mean, oh, again, name it. If you've got time to make it at home, it can be beans with eggs. It can be like a mushroom, a mushroom sourdough situation. It could be a lovely steel cut oats with frozen berries, but there's so many options. And if it's something you're taking with you to work, then you have loads of options again. Like, I love making

care for yogurt, seed, nut and berry little pots. And I just take them with me anywhere I go. I've always got them. They're old jam jars, basically. And I like, oh, and the frozen berries, keep it cool. So it's like revolutionary. It's a good hack. Yeah, no ice pack. But even sometimes it's just a boil a couple of eggs, a handful of almonds and an apple and take it with me. But just, you can always, even if you've only got five minutes before you have to get out the door, you can usually pull something together. And so breakfast is the simplest way to start. And then the other thing that contributes again, UK and US, we're a population of snackers. And that contributes about 25% of our energy intake. And snacking is often the worst culprit for quality of diet because we grab and go something on the way, on the fly, from a coffee shop, from a store where it's, and that's where, like, the bars creeping or the muffins. And for that, so Professor Sarah Berry, who's a chief scientist in an absolute legend in nutrition science, she actually ran a trial where she just asked participants to swap

their snacks for a handful of nuts. And in her study, in her trial, it was almonds. And within two weeks, she saw changes in markers of health just from changing to, just told everyone to bring almonds with them. And if they felt peckish, have that. Now, of course, it's not all about nuts if you're allergic or if you want to bear it. Fresh fruit is great. As I said, you can boil eggs. You can have, you can make your own pots of grains with vegetables. It doesn't matter what it works for you. But if it's a whole food based and you're avoiding that quick grab and go snack, you're already making a huge impact. Yeah, I love the recommendation around almonds, both because obviously, you know, Dr. Berry's research proved that it's efficacious, but also it can be. every bit as convenient of a grab-and-go food so not everything is you know swap out your potato chips with like something that takes an hour to go and like carefully craft like some of it really is

equally convenient so it's just about the quality of the choice so easy because if you have a big bag of almonds at home and you put them in a jar you'll actually grab a handful pop it in a little tupperware or a little bag and you can take it with you I mean I have nuts in all my bags but also I think another thing that's worth mentioning here is and this is something that I see a lot in clinic so I work clinically with a medical concierge company called well-founded we look after people from like start to finish basically and it's interesting because a lot of the time I'll speak to patients

that I'll be like digging I'm like okay you've got a really good diet you're working up something's not working for you and it's often one of two things either alcohol you can train you can eat an organic whole food diet you can do all the things but if you're drinking half a bottle of wine a night you will feel it your body will tell you off so being honest about what your relationship with alcohol is and if you if you are one of these people who drinks most nights it needs attention like that cannot continue right and the second thing is sugar, sweeten beverages or or diet beverages. But it's like, I always have, you know,

I have some patients who are like, I always have a soda at lunch. I'm like, why? We're doing all this lovely work and then why do you buy? So these two things often also creep into people's dietary patterns and they will kind of ignore them until it's not quite working out. And then it, so it's worth mentioning those. So it's breakfast, snacks and mind what you're drinking because it does have an impact. And then If you want to give Zoya a go and go full deep dive metabolic health and nutrition, you can. But in the meantime, doing those two things or four things if you include the drinks, it makes a huge difference. It's so good to call out beverages.

I read a article at some point a couple years back, but that like it wasn't appreciated that calories and beverages like counted until like the 70s because they just assume like, you know, they're sort of solid things and then like liquid should just go through you, right? like it doesn't count and so you know those were free or something and then um i guess it must have been around like when soda was really taking off that they were like oh maybe these calories count too or the sugar counts too that just does tend to be a sneaky place especially because i guess with straws and things like you just you don't even pay attention to it it goes down so and so many sugar sweetened beverages sell themselves as other things energy drinks sure um pre-workout

whatever, like, there are elite athlete exceptions where they might actually need that high sugar beverage, but for the vast, fast, vast majority of us, it's not necessary. And it's not necessary for the one-hour Barry's class who are about to take you there. I think often there's this idea that, like, if you're doing a hard workout, you need to really pay attention to rehydrating with sports drinks. And it's just, most of the time, you can just have some water and a banana. You'll be fine. Oh, yeah, you can't go to like a park run like casual 5K without being given, you know, half a liter of, you know, sugary sports drinks. It's like, I promise you didn't like burn that. You probably don't need that. So yeah, it's worth noting. I think a lot of these things are sold to us

as I call it lifestyle sports. Yeah. Where it's, you know, there's very science to support use of these things for elite athletes. But that doesn't apply to most of them. No. No. It's a very science. It's, It's been such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. As we wrap up, what's something maybe fun or unexpected that you didn't get a chance to share, but you think that our listeners would enjoy hearing? So I think I often get asked, because I talk a lot about the first thousand days and the importance of childhood, adolescence and all these things, who are, is it too late for me? Is it too late for me if it's changed?

And it's like, no, it's not. So there's some amazing trials. new age one is one of my favorite trials where they gave a Mediterranean dietary intervention to adults living in care homes and they looked at their microbiome and health markers of frailty and as you know emily frailty is this like measure that we have to see when resilience really starts to decline and for older people it can mean that they get very sick from a very minor illness and then don't recover so frailty is something we want to avoid and in the trials, after two weeks of the Mediterranean Dietary intervention, and it got better out

up to 16 weeks, older adults reduced all their frailty markers, their gut microbiomes that considerably changed, their cognitive performance and their physical ability improved. It's never too late. Now, one of my favorite studies that looked at modeling these dietary improvements actually showed that if you change a diet at the age of 40 from like our baseline not very good diet. Standard American diet. Sad. Sad for a reason.

To just improving it, to any public health guidelines. So like not aspirational, but just normal, you add like quite a lot of life years. But if you then switch up and improve to a longevity Mediterranean dietary pattern. So everything we've been talking about today, extra virgin olive oil, nuts and seeds, leafy greens, like beans, then you can look at adding up to 11 years to your life at 40, which is like awesome. And if we do the same thing at 70, you're adding up to six years to your life. That's like a lot of time. So it's never too late to start.

It's never too late to make a change. And even if that change seems minimal, even if it's just your breakfast, you will be making an impact on your dietary pattern. It's about the consistency, not perfection. And most of all, I really hope that anyone listening

can just re-embrace the joy of food. Just really make something delicious and sit down and enjoy it and realize that it's good for you. you, it's good for your microbes, it's good for your taste buds, and you're going to feel great after you eat it, and it's going to help you feel better tomorrow. Yeah, joy of food, and it's never too late to start. I love that we're going to end on that note of optimism, that this stuff's really important, but if you've been slacking for the last 40 years or so,

no worries, not too late to start. And it's not your fault that you've been slacking. The food environment is working against us, so it's up to us to turn around, take the rain back and just make it all about looking after ourselves and really loving ourselves with food because it is the ultimate act of love. I love that. At Whoop, we often say that you can't manage what you don't measure. And I think that Zoe has done such a beautiful job, and therefore manage the quality of your diet in a way that goes so far beyond the traditional just macros and calories that we're used to nutrition being reduced to. So, you know, we're very grateful to you, Dr. Romani, for sharing your discount code, which is Federica 10

for 10% off of the Zoe program for anybody who wants to go and check it out and learn more. With that, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. It's been great. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question to us answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at whoop.com. Call us 508-443-49-5-2. If you think about joining whoop, you can visit whoop.com. Sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. New members can use the code will, W-I-L-L, to get a $60 credit on Woop accessories when you enter the code at checkout.

That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.