ZOE Science & Nutrition - 10 tips to help you live healthier: Part 1

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

In this special two-part episode, we’re taking a journey back through all of our episodes to bring you 10 actionable tips that will have a big impact on your nutritional health.  Here, in part one, we’ll explore whether you actually need to spend more on organic food, why snacking can help your diet, and plenty more.  These are evidence-backed tips to help you live and eat healthier. If you want to uncover the right foods for your body, head to joinzoe.com/podcast and get 10% off your personalised nutrition program. Download our FREE guide — Top 10 Tips to Live Healthier: https://zoe.com/freeguide Follow ZOE on Instagram Timecodes: 00:00 Introduction  01:57 Snacking 8:44 Ultra-processed foods 14:58 Organic food 21:00 Fermented foods 28:47 Protein Resources from ZOE: Snacking  Ultra-processed foods Organic food  Fermented foods Protein Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here Episode transcripts are available here.

Welcome to Zoe, Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. Back in March 2022, we aired the first ever Zoe, Science and Nutrition podcast. The episode covered food intolerances and featured my friend and renowned gastroenterologist, Dr. Will Bulsiewicz. Today, 99 episodes and 20 months later, we've spoken to many of the world's leading scientists to learn how to control our blood sugar spikes, bust common exercise myths, uncover the truth about organic foods, and much more. And you joined us a mind-boggling 35 million times for this ride.

Now, these conversations are jam-packed with insights that can help you live a longer, healthier life, which to our surprise, created a problem. Many of you, especially those who have discovered Zoe more recently, have been in touch. Fiona emailed saying, Hey Jonathan and team, I'm a new listener and I love the show, but I'm wondering what I've missed and I'm not sure I'll have the time to catch up.

Any chance of a highlights episode to share some of the most impactful discoveries? Well, if you're listening, Fiona, thank you. That was a brilliant suggestion and you're in luck. Over the last few weeks, our team combed through all 99 episodes to find the top 10 most actionable tips to apply to your life today. And in today's episode, you're going to hear tips one to five. Today's podcast is a gift from us to you because without you, this show would not exist. So from everyone here at Zoe, have a wonderful holiday period and enjoy the show.

Tip number one. If you tend to eat between meals, the easiest way to improve your diet is through your snacks. Snacking. It's more controversial and confusing than you might think. We asked our community whether they thought snacking was healthy. We got thousands of responses. And surprisingly, there was an almost exact three-way split. 36% of people said, yes, snacking is healthy. 32% said it isn't. And interestingly, 31% of you said you didn't know. So we dedicated a whole episode to snacking, and we kicked things off with our usual quickfire round of questions from listeners.

Are most people eating the wrong snacks? Yes. Oh, yes. Tim, we've agreed on something. We can go home now. I snack every day. Is it bad for my health? Maybe. Maybe. And this is something my mom always told me.

Is it true that snacking spoils your appetite? Maybe. I'd say yes. Okay. What's worse, a mid-morning snack or a mid-afternoon snack? Well, I can't answer that with a yes or no, can I? So that's not very fair. I've messed up. You're allowed to answer the mid-morning or mid-afternoon, Sarah. Mid-afternoon. No idea. Okay. Pass. Can snacking lead to inflammation? Yes. Yes. And finally, and you're allowed a whole sentence on this, what's your favourite snack?

Oh, crisps in the day, chocolate at night. Cashew nuts. Since we usually snack between meals, we tend to think of snacking as no big deal. But in the US and UK, a whopping 25% of our energy comes from snacks. I'd love to talk about what happens when we snack. And Sarah, you know, you spent 30 years really understanding exactly what happens in our bodies in the, you know, the minutes and hours after we eat. Can you help us to understand, you know, I've gone and I've met Tim and I've refused to have just a coffee. Well, he's not offered you a snack, has he?

I agree. So I've gone and decided that I'm going to have, you know, a chocolate croissant to go with it. What happens at this point? So I think it's first important to say what the typical composition of a snack is. And so snacks in the UK and the US tend to be high in carbohydrates, high in refined carbohydrates and sugar, high in fat, high in unhealthy fat, saturated fat, and low in protein and low in fiber. Okay. So what's happening is when you're eating a snack, you're eating a high refined carbohydrate snack, a high saturated fat snack. And so what this does is it causes an

increase in circulating blood sugar that peaks around 30 minutes, returns to baseline around two hours and often dips as well below baseline. Then the fat that's in the snack causes an increase in circulating blood fat that kind of creeps up throughout the day if you're having multiple eating events. So you're in this kind of state of metabolic chaos is the best way to think about it if you're having lots of snacks. And that's because these snacks are basically hitting you much harder than a sort of regular, let's assume it's not a sort of ultra-processed meal, but a sort of reasonably plant-based, reasonably fiber-rich food. These snacks are just sort of hitting all of these things much more than a normal meal? So it depends obviously on the composition of the snacks. Not all snacks are the same. So I'm talking about the unhealthy snacks, the snacks that 75% of people are eating.

Like what, Sarah? Give us some examples. So light crisps, light cakes, light chocolates, light pastries. So particularly high in refined carbohydrates and particularly low in fiber and protein. Again, what will happen is you'll absorb all the nutrients really quickly into the blood stream. So you have this really quick, rapid rise in circulating blood sugar that sets off a cascade of quite unfavorable effects, including inflammation. What often happens is you also get a dip in blood sugar about two to four hours after having these refined carbohydrate snacks. And we know from our own ZoroPredict research that this causes an increase in hunger. It causes an increase in energy intake.

And it also causes you to eat more at your next meal. So we know that these highly processed snacks are not good for us. But thankfully, it is possible to make a few changes to our habits so that snacking can be healthier. Yes, snacking's okay as long as it's not late at night, it's not after your main meal, and you pick the right stuff. And if you pick unprocessed, you know, fruits,

vegetables, nuts, seeds, et cetera, and you don't go to something in a packet that is generally gonna be bad for you. Who would have thought that snacking could be such an easy way to improve your overall diet? Choose things like nuts and seeds instead of grabbing that packet of crisps or potato chips, and you're on to a winner.

You know, I'm a big fan of nuts, and I think virtually all the nuts that are on offer, nuts and seeds, are healthy. I that are on offer nuts and seeds are healthy I don't think there's really any real exceptions unless they've been chemically treated and that you do get some of these these nuts that are roasted in a bit of sugar and things there to be avoided but generally plain ones you know look out if you're if you have a sensitivity to salt you might want to reduce some of those but otherwise all those nuts and things are really healthy options and ever discussed they might actually reduce the amount you eat subsequently

and they're fantastic sources of protein and and fiber and other nutrients you agree sarah i would agree and i think something that we need to bear in mind is for people that do snack it does account for a huge proportion of their energy intake so it's actually a fantastic, simple dietary strategy to improve the quality of your diet. Most of the other meals that we have, for example, our dinner, we tend to have, or the majority of people do tend to eat this as part of either a family or a social setting where you have less control over the food. But with snacks, they tend to be eaten in isolation. They're under what we call your own personal choice. So it's a really good way to improve the quality of your diet. Hi, I'd like to take a really quick break with you.

I hope you're enjoying today's episode and maybe swapping your regular snacks for nuts and seeds. If you're not already a regular listener, I hope you might come back. Make sure to hit the follow button so you know when a new episode arrives. We release episodes each week ad-free as part of our mission to improve the health of millions. And to help us, I'd love for you to share this episode

with one person you think could benefit. Thank you. Now let's get back to the show. Tip number two, use ingredient lists to identify ultra-processed foods. Diets high in ultra-processed foods are linked with increased risks of heart disease, weight gain, and cancer. Basically, they're bad news all around. Now, we did an episode exploring how ultra-processed foods can wreak havoc on our bodies. Tim joined me for a conversation with Chris Van Tullochem, a medical doctor, broadcaster, and the author of the new book, Ultra-Processed People. Could you maybe start by just helping us to understand very simply, like,

what is ultra-processed food? So there's this long formal scientific definition because it's a category of food that was developed to do research with, to study diet and its effects on health. But it boils down to if it's wrapped in plastic and it contains at least one ingredient that you don't typically find in a domestic kitchen, then it's ultra-processed food. So that's the shorthand way of figuring it out.

This was a definition that was developed by a group in Brazil in 2010. And since then, we've had now over a decade of really, really good, increasingly robust research, including a very good clinical trial that has linked ultra processed food to early death, cancer, weight gain, and a whole host of other problems. I would say that the boundary between ultra processed food and just processed food, which we think is fine, is quite a blurry one. And particularly in the UK, we have a huge number of products where you can buy a lasagna lots of places and it's wrapped in plastic, but the ingredients, while it's a long list, there will be nothing you wouldn't have in a normal kitchen there.

Give me some examples here as useful. So cheese is a processed food, okay? So we're not talking about those as being problematic because virtually all our food is to some extent processed. But it's when you're replacing the natural ingredients with the extracts of other foods and extracts of chemicals to mimic the original foods using what we call edible, industrially produced food-like substance. And I think it's that substitution.

I was just laughing because I feel like food-like substance already. I don't really want to eat food-like substance, do I? I'd rather eat food. And it's exactly right. So you have these ingredients you wouldn't recognize in your kitchen. They're all there to make that food seem like the original as much as possible, but using the cheapest possible group of ingredients that allow you to manipulate it, give it a massively long shelf life, and make you overeat it. You might be listening to this thinking,

but I don't eat any ultra-processed foods. And you wouldn't be alone. When we surveyed our Zoe community, 84% of you said they ate little or no ultra-processed foods. But the uncomfortable truth is you probably are eating them without even knowing. I think it's very difficult to avoid ultra-processed foods if you know what all of them are.

And it may be that these people don't realize that in the morning when they drink their orange juice and they have their muesli and they have other breakfast cereals, for example, or their instant porridge, they're eating ultra-processed foods. That's amazing. So breakfast cereal is an ultra-processed food? I would say almost all commercially available breakfast cereals are ultra-processed food? I would say almost all commercially available breakfast cereals are ultra-processed. Almost all supermarket bread is ultra-processed. Almost all flavored yogurts are. And the areas they might be not noticing their consumption would be the very typical lunches that we go and have in the UK. Lunches, a packet of crunchy things, might be some popcorn,

a sandwich and a drink. And particularly if you get it from the fancy shops and we can all know the names of them, they're widely available up and down the country. That's still all ultra processed. It all contains maltodextrin, dextrose, the bread is full of emulsifiers, there are flavorings. So even the sandwich that you might think is like, it's just bread and like this plain... It might be a vegan falafel organic whole grain but the bread will contain emulsifiers and the the condiments particularly will contain thickeners or maltodefensives even if it looks brown because it's been dyed brown it makes it looks like a granary healthy seedy loaf generally it's been made to look exactly that but underneath it's full of these chemicals.

So, yes, I think many people don't realise the extent to which they're surrounded by stuff, even with healthy veneers. Anything that says it's healthy on the packet is nearly by definition unhealthy. It's a great rule of thumb, that, isn't it? If there's a health claim on the packet, it is almost certainly ultra-processed. It's a little alarming, isn't it? Ultra-processed foods are really damaging to our health, and you could be eating way more of them than you realize. But there are things you can do to cut down on these foods. And I think I love, however, a little bit of sunshine at the very end. This was a slightly depressing podcast, I think, compared to some, which is maybe think about ways you could take, well, start with breakfast. You know, think about swapping out.

If you're eating breakfast cereal, actually, you might think you're doing something really healthy and you'll look at it and you'll be like, wow. So think about swapping that for stuff that isn't ultra processed. So, you know, bread with only ingredients you would have in your kitchen, yogurt, these sorts of things, taking food to work. So again, you know that you've got food that you can eat instead of most of us living in environments where it's very difficult not to. And I think the final thing, which for me has been the most shocking, is just turn the food around and read the ingredients list

and suddenly realize that many of the things you thought you were doing really well, you were maybe actually spending money on these things because you thought they were good for you, and realizing that actually they were ultra-processed. Tip number three. If you're going to buy one organic food product, make it this one. Eating organic is a lot more than an expensive fad. Organic food has more nutrients, and the pesticides in non-organic foods can impact our health.

But there's still a lot of confusion around organic food. Is it marketing hype? Can you trust the label? And that's what we explored in our episode about organic food. So Tim, can we just start at the beginning and explain what does it mean for something to be organic? The key things about organic food are that it doesn't contain antibiotics. Antibiotics are not given in that food chain, not given to the animals. It doesn't contain any pesticides or herbicides or actual chemical additives of any kind. And also the third thing is it doesn't include any artificial

fertilizers. When you buy something organic, it doesn't guarantee that it's totally free of all these things. It just means the levels will be very much lower. Tim is one of the world's only scientists to have explored the effect of organic foods specifically on the gut microbiome. It was an observational study. We took 60, I think, four pairs of our twins, working with some environmental epidemiologists. Robin Minaj was leading the study and looked at several hundred different residues, insecticides and herbicides, and found that nearly everybody had some organophosphates type residues in their blood and urine. So just to make sure that I've got that, this is where I'm happily eating my

pears and my apples and my leeks and whatever. I'm not out in the garden spraying this on my hands. This is from the food I'm eating. And you're saying that I went into your hospital lab along with 10,000 other twins and you took my blood and you could actually find bits of this you know remnants of this pesticide in in my blood is that yes i think it was over 90 or something so almost everybody had some yeah so in your blood and urine nearly everyone's got these insecticides and about 50 of people um had detectable levels of these herbicides, the glyphosate, the Roundup. And we looked at the gut microbes to see if these chemicals were having an effect. Was there a difference between people with high exposures, high levels in their blood and urine versus low levels?

And there was a clear correlation. And so people who were eating more fruits and vegetables had higher levels of these chemicals, and they also had different changes in their gut microbes. So the gut microbes were producing different chemicals in response. That sounds a little scary, but it's important to note here that this doesn't mean you should give up eating fruits and vegetables, even if you aren't buying organic.

Because the benefits of eating fruits and vegetables, even with all these chemicals, is far better than the damage to your health of choosing ultra-processed foods, for example. And we should acknowledge, of course, that organic food is more expensive how should people think about those trade-offs and i'd love to talk about maybe are there particular foods where um you know these levels of the pesticides and everything

are really high and you should be really worried versus others what are the foods where the pesticides are likely to be worst breakfast Breakfast cereals that contain oats. Okay. That's incredibly surprising. I thought you were going to give me a fruit. Tell me about oats. So oats, because they're often raised in damp countries, they are sprayed just before they're harvested to dry them out. And so this gives them massive amounts. And because they're wet, they absorb all that glyphosate. And so their levels are five to 10 times more than many other grains. So that is something that is not particularly a health food

that I think people should go out of their way if they do love oats. And I know you used to be a big oat eater, although you're not anymore. And you can afford it. Either switch to something else or go jump. Particularly if you're trying to give your kids something which you think is healthy, I think that you could be giving them high levels of, particularly this herbicide, glyphosate. Rice is another one that came up,

interestingly, in some surveys as being quite high in pesticides. And we do know that if you get certain areas of India and Pakistan do a problem with runoff of arsenic into rice paddy fields. So, you know, if you're getting cheap rice from certain places, you may be ingesting a lot of chemicals. And in general, fruits and vegetables that contain a lot of water will tend to absorb these chemicals more than others, and where they particularly attract insects as well. So, cucumbers, pears, nectarines, these tend to have quite high concentrations. And everyone loves strawberries. I love strawberries. But in tests in the US and the UK, they commonly get tested as being above the safety levels.

So if you are in the grocery store and you are thinking about buying some organic food, go for oats, rice and fruit with a high water content. Tip number four, try fermented foods. The idea of letting food rot and then eating it makes most of us squeamish. But far from being dangerous, fermented foods like kombucha and kimchi are brilliant for our gut health. And there are a few foods that we can pretty much guarantee you're already eating without even knowing they're fermented. Joining us on this episode is author and food activist Sandor Katz, who is widely credited with reintroducing fermentation to the US and the UK with his book Wild Fermentation.

He calls himself a fermentation revivalist. The food magazine Chow calls him a provocateur, trendsetter and rabble rouser. I'm also joined by Tim Spector, one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists, and my co-founder here at Zoe, to help us understand the science of fermentation and why it might bring unique health benefits. So abandon any fears you may have, and let's dive into the fabulous world of fermentation. Fermentation has been an integral part of how people in every part of the world make effective use of whatever food resources are available to them. It's part of our cultural legacy everywhere, and yet over the past several generations, fewer and fewer

people have been practicing fermentation. And so when I talk about myself as a fermentation revivalist is really trying to, you know, revive interest in these ancient practices and basically help people feel confident to bring them into their home kitchens. Isn't fermentation quite niche? Why would we even talk about this topic? Well, I mean, every person in every part of the world eats and drinks products of fermentation almost every day. I'm not sure how you could call that a niche type of food. Think about the kind of diet that maybe people in the UK or people in the US have. Bread is fermented. Cheese is fermented. Cured meats are fermented.

The condiments that we use are fermented. Olives are fermented. Pickles are fermented. Coffee is fermented. Certain kinds of tea are fermented. Chocolate is fermented, certain kinds of tea are fermented, chocolate is fermented, vanilla is fermented, obviously beer and wine are fermented. I mean, an incredible range of foods that are really everyday foods are products of fermentation. And so I think that probably opens up our mind to the reach of fermentation.

What is it and why is it something specific that we would think about and that you've really sort of dedicated, I guess, your life to? Well, broadly speaking, fermentation is the transformative action of microorganisms. For thousands of years, long before we specifically knew of the existence of microorganisms, people have been working with the reality that these organisms inhabit our food. Fermentation is just an essential part of how people everywhere have been able to make effective use of whatever kinds of food resources are available to them. We know that fermented foods like sauerkraut, yogurt, and kefir, which is fermented milk, have tons of beneficial microbes.

In fact, even more than the probiotics you might find at the health food store. So why is it that eating this thing which is fermented is actually improving our health? And also, particularly, there's two parts to this. And I just want you to sort of unpack a bit for the audience, because the food itself is changing, isn't it? And you've got these microbes. Could you just explain a bit more like why both of those things are affecting our health? Yes. So the food itself, we know that if you're eating plants that have either a high fiber content or a high polyphenol content, which is the defense chemicals in plants that our gut microbes feed off. They are stimulating your community of gut microbes to

help your immune system, to help all aspects of your metabolism and infinite things we still don't understand. So it's really important that the plants you're eating in something like a kimchi is part of trying to get this big variety of plants in your diet. And I would say aim for your 30 plants a week. I'm sure Sandor does many more. But, you know, just by having a kimchi, you're getting probably about eight or so of them, eight or 10 different plants in one spoonful. So that's important. They're feeding the whole gut community. And then you've got on top of that, you've got these microbes that are sitting on those foods that go through your intestinal system. And a lot of them get killed off, but

enough get through the stomach acid to get to your lower gut, where they will have an interactive effect on your microbes, stimulating to produce good chemicals that are, again, really key for your immune system and your digestion, your metabolism, etc. So it's that double system of both feeding the original contents of your gut microbes, stimulating new ones to grow more of the good guys. And these probiotic microbes that don't live in humans just passing through having like a beneficial effect. What this means is you should eat fermented foods regularly in order to increase the diversity of microbes in your gut and to reduce the negative effects of inflammation. But watch out when you're shopping. The key thing is live microbes.

Keep an eye out for high sugar content too. There's been an explosion in the UK of things like kefirs and kombuchas that you can buy in stores. And there's a suspicion that many of them do not contain live microbes. They're easily using really ultra-fine filtration systems that get rid of some of these microbes, or that in order to do big quantities and ship them around the country, they have to basically pasteurize it. Or the sugar content is so high that it might inhibit the microbes. Or occasionally, you've got things like apple cider

vinegars that have such high acidification that it kills off the actual microbes in there, the mother, etc, is actually dead. So it's great to have these products, but I feel they could be exploited. And I wonder if you had any thoughts? Sure. I mean, I think that that's a really important question. Definitely, the more educated you can make yourself as a consumer, the better quality products you can find. Generally, I would advise people to sort of steer away from big national brands and support, you know, smaller regional brands, because they have less reason to sort of try to develop these workarounds. So yeah, I mean, I would say,

buy as local of a product as you can. And if you have any questions, then really try to pose those questions to the producers and see if they can answer them to your satisfaction. Experiment by adding kimchi to a stir fry or topping salads with sauerkraut. And you could swap your regular cup of tea for a glass of kombucha, although I'm not giving up my tea anytime soon. Don't be afraid to get Tip number five. When it comes to protein, go big on beans. Most of us understand what carbs and fats are,

but protein is much less understood. We're surrounded by the claim high protein. It's plastered on everything from shakes to bars to tofu. But does that mean we're consuming too little protein, too much, and what is too much anyway? It turns out a lot of what we thought we knew about protein might be wrong. In this episode, I spoke to Professor Christopher Gardner. Christopher is one of the world's leading nutrition scientists. He's also the Director of Nutrition Studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center

and a long-term member of Zoe's Scientific Advisory Board. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Many myths to be busted. Well, on the topic of myth busting, why don't we start with our usual quick fire round of questions from our listeners. And just to remind you, Christopher, the rules are quite simple. You can say yes, you can say no, or if you have to, you're allowed a one sentence answer, but no more than that. And we know that this is the hardest thing for any professor to do, but are you willing to give it a go? Yes. Do animals contain special proteins that you can't get from plants?

No. Should we all be worrying about getting enough protein? No. Are protein shakes and protein bars healthy for most people? Compared to a tablespoon of sugar, healthier, but I always say, compared to what? Compared to food? No. I told you it was hard for a professor to answer these questions. And the last question, can eating more protein help with weight loss? No. Fat and carbs are like the fuel that power us through our days. While protein creates structure, everything that we're made of comes from the

20 amino acids that all proteins are composed of. So it's sort of like the letters in the alphabet. We are the words that are created out of those letters. And we actually need far less protein than everyone thinks. On average, people in the US are eating double the amount of protein they need. And you can get all of your protein from a plant-based diet. Almost anything that says like extra high protein on it or a bar or a shake or any of these things are just really bad for you. Don't eat them.

And I think, Christopher, your message is eat beans instead. Beans, hummus, all the three bean soup, a three bean salad. So David Katz and some other colleagues and I wrote a paper called Modernizing the Definition of Protein Quality. And in it, we said, okay, so there's this one issue of the distribution of amino acids, perfect in animal foods, less than perfect in plant foods. There's actually an issue of digestion and bioavailability, and it is a little higher for meat protein than plant protein. But when people are eating meats, they're getting a lot of saturated fat, and they're sometimes getting hormones, and antibiotics were used to grow that meat, and there's no fiber in there.

If you were eating beans and tofu and tempeh and plant foods, you'd be getting much less saturated fat. You'd be getting phytochemicals, antioxidants. You'd be getting lots of fiber for your microbiome. You guys at Zoe might have heard about the microbiome. That's a pretty cool thing. And so this idea of should the protein quality definition in the U.S. is based on amino acid distribution and digestion and availability. And we propose that it should also include the nutrients that come with those foods rich in protein, which in your bar was sugar, in that meat was saturated fat and no fiber, versus those beans and grains that had antioxidants and other things like that. And if we're going to be eco-warriors these days and not

destroy the planet we live on, the legumes and grains are much easier on planetary boundaries of land use, water use, greenhouse gases, eutrophication and biodiversity. In a nutshell, beans are an ideal source of protein. They contain fiber, polyphenols, and nutrients that other protein sources lack. So there you have it. Five crucial Zoe tips to boost your nutrition. We're going to leave it there for this episode. Make sure you come back for part two,

when we'll find out what the warrior diet is, and why counting sheep will not help you sleep. If you want to dive into any of today's topics in more depth, why not listen to the episodes featured in their entirety? You'll find links to each of them in the show notes. If you want to take your health journey even further, you might want to consider joining Zoe. Your membership will help you to understand the right food to eat for your body, to help you feel better now and enjoy many more healthy years to come. You can learn more about becoming a Zoe

member by going to zoe.com slash podcast. And you can also get 10% off your membership on this link. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolfe. Zoe in Science and Nutrition is produced by Yellow Hewins Martin, Rich Willen, and Tilly Fulford. See you next time.