ZOE Science & Nutrition - Most replayed moment: Is Our Food System Making Us Sick? | Prof Brian Elbel & Prof Tim Spector

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

Today, we’re zooming out to look at the bigger picture. On this podcast, we often talk about things that you can do to improve your diet. However, you're not the only one who has an impact on your health. The truth is, our food system - from government policy to supermarket placement - has a profound influence on what we eat, how we eat, and ultimately how healthy we all are. So, what steps can we take to improve not just our own health, but the health of society as a whole?  Today, I’m joined by Professor Brian Elbel and Professor Tim Spector to explore the forces shaping our food system — and the changes that could benefit our collective well-being.

Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. On this podcast, we often talk about things that you can do to improve your diet. However, you're not the only person who has an impact on your health. The truth is that our food system, from government policy to supermarket placement, has a profound influence on what we eat, how we eat, and ultimately how healthy we all are. So what steps can we take to improve not just our own health, but the health of society as a whole? Today, I'm joined by Professor Brian Elbel and Professor Tim Specter to explore the forces shaping our food system and the changes that could benefit our collective well-being. So maybe we can just start off by explaining what is population health and how does it impact the individual?

I think population health is a couple things. I think it is really looking at the health of populations. By that we mean we're averaging over a bunch of different people, right? So while you may be looking at one or two people in certain smaller studies, we're averaging over a whole big group of people. So that means a couple different things. It means when we're looking at solutions, we may be looking for a three to five percent sort of change that could be quite meaningful at a population level.

Then maybe wouldn't be what you're looking for if you're looking at sort of individual studies. So I think that's one big kind of key distinction and difference. I think another is the type of data that we're using, right? To look at population health stuff, we need a lot of data on a lot of people. And that's something that's quite different from smaller studies where you're down there collecting in the weeds individual data. For my studies, I'm using big data that are collected for generally other reasons, right? They are data that are collected for big national

health surveys, right, that are looking at bunches of different things, or their data maybe from food companies themselves and directly and looking at some of those studies as well, without taking their money to do it. And Tim, from your perspective, what's the biggest threat to a dietary health today? It's the fact that we don't know that we're eating very unhealthy foods that are impacting our gut health and making us overeat them, that we just don't know the real properties of the food we're eating, and people are being misled into making wrongful food choices. And is there one particular class of food that you're worrying about? Yeah, I would generally call ultra-processed foods, I think, are the number one enemy for healthy

eating. And Brian, you know, in your research, how are you seeing that food in general, and I guess ultra-processed food in particular is shaping our long-term health. What do you see? So I would agree that ultra-processed foods are a huge problem in the food supply across the world right now. I think they're actually a particularly tricky one to look at at a population level. They're this huge class of foods that have come on very quickly and really taken over the food supply. So it's really hard to sort of tease out at a population level what the relative contribution these foods have had. Although I think in many of the smaller skill studies, we know they're quite problematic,

but it's actually quite hard to tease out the overall contribution they have, except to say it's probably quite meaningful. And so if you were going to look at that question, you know, so I think Tim's answer, when Heath looks at this is that it's sort of these ultra-process foods are the biggest issue, would you have had the same answer or would you have said something different? I think I would have the same answer. And I think the next level to that question would be, why are they there? What's driving folks to eat them?

I think those are some of the next level of questions that are really important to understand why they're problematic, but I think I would agree with that. And Tim Bryan was just saying, like, it's hard to recognize what a UPF is. How would I recognize a UPF? Well, the ones that we're seeing at the moment are different to the ones when they started 50 years ago. And I think that's what Brown was talking about, a lot of these nutrition studies, epidemiological ones that look over time. And so it's completely changed in that time. So you can't just go back, say, okay, what was, were people eating this 50 years ago, or 30 years ago, even 20 years ago, it's completely different. So we're now up to over 50 to 60% of all our food is this general group of ultra-processed foods in the Western world. And that is the major problem.

So what are these foods? You know, some people call them fake foods. They're created in huge factories from extracts of whole foods. So they don't use whole foods typically. they would use a product of whole food. So they'd never use milk. They'd use some sort of dried form of it. You know, they wouldn't use corn. They'd use some extracted bit of the starch of the corn. And they put it back together to resemble food. So there isn't a unifying definition of ultra-processed food other than it's things that you really couldn't make yourself

in your own kitchen that includes ingredients you wouldn't find in a common kitchen. and that they are also industrially made to make you overeat them. And this is something that is a fairly new concept, this hyper palatibility of them, so that their structure and everything about them is made so that it's the least effort to eat them in as fast a possible time. And they want you to eat more and more. They want to eat multiple bags or amounts of them, which is never the case with real natural food.

It's more to it than just saying, oh, it's got red dye three in it. These 10 companies that control 80% of the supply of these foods employ the very best food scientists working around the clock for decades to come up with ways of putting these chemicals together that make us overeat them, that make us love them, and make a percentage of us addicted to it. And so it's necessarily complicated because they've used every trick in the book to do that.

And I think we don't quite yet understand. to the time's point, what components of them are most problematic, right? Is it the overeating? Is it a particular components of it? Is it the combination of those things? But the component of the definition you gave, which I think is one of the most compelling I've heard as well, is it's really things you wouldn't cook with, things you don't recognize in your kitchen, right? I think those are the kind of the best example of some of these ultra-processed foods. And it's most of the stuff you pick up at the grocery store and turn around and look at the label for. Listening to all of this, it's just like one more step in.

my radicalization, I think, over the last really only, I would say, two years. You know, when I think back to before that, Tim, right, we hardly ever talked about ultra-processed food. So I think the shift in this focus on this part of what was going on is amazing. And every time I hear more about it, it sort of makes me a bit angry, Brian. Now, I would love to switch, though, from just sort of being frustrated to talk about actionable advice. And obviously, in general, I think, you know, we're going to have to talk about what individuals

can do. But I am interested in what they might also be able to lobby for. But maybe if I start at the individual level, Tim, what's the one thing that you would say to listeners, you know, they could do tomorrow in order to eat fewer harmful UPSs? Well, a few months ago, I'd have said, look at the back of the pack, number of ingredients, and that's the biggest red flag that this is going to make you overeat, and it's going to be ultra-processed food and bear for your gut. But now there's a more sophisticated solution, which is in the Zoe app. So for the last two years, the science team at Zoe have been working on a new way of classifying these ultra-processed foods into not just yes and no, which I think we've agreed was a bit too crude because you include some stuff that's really quite healthy and you're

labelling and lumping all together into five categories, including three ultra-processed food categories, one that's pretty neutral or only potentially low risk, no one is moderate risk and the other is extreme risk. And we're taking into account not just additives, not just those chemicals, emulsifiers, but also looking at the structure of the food, how quickly it is to eat it, how it disperses, how fast you can consume calories in per second, whether it needs chewing and whether it has those ingredients that the chemists put in to make it hyper palatable, which means you over-eat.

And that means, as studies have shown, you're going to be overeat by about 500 calories a day, about 25% of your intake. So it's all those things together that actually make up ultra-processed food. And we should think ultra-processed food really is a risk of ill health rather than the processing itself. I think it's a bit of a shift. So I think people can now use this in the app. They can scan things in the store or on their plate and start to learn more and realize there's a gradation of these problems.

Because the worst ones have all of these things. They're the perfect, you know, atomic bombs that have, you know, nuclear war in your gut and your brain. So that's really what people can do now because it is really difficult otherwise. Otherwise, you've only got the back of the label. and we don't know enough about all the ingredients to make a call just on those basis. But if you start to think how the food companies are thinking, then this is an insight, and this is using AI on our fantastic database to do it. So I think this is showing much better than the current yes, no idea that has come out of academia,

which is pretty good for population level studies, but really doesn't help the consumer. So, Brian, I'd love to talk about what our listeners could be. pushing governments about in terms of policy change. Definitely be more serious about taxes, right? And moving on from taxes just to sugar, from sugary beverages to other classes of products that we think are problematic. I would definitely want to look at sort of the availability of foods. You know, I don't think we're going to do much in the States on making food less available, but we can at least make sure that there are healthful foods available in all communities. I think I would really want to think about doing something on marketing, right? I think this is actually

really, really big one that is going to be quite tricky to think about making solutions for, particularly in a place like the States. But I think it could have really big implications, really for kids, but also more for, you know, the broader role that these foods play in our culture is quite prominent, right? You know, you don't see apples that are the, you know, host of a major sporting event. You see, you know, cookies. Yeah, or sports drinks or things like that, right? And so I think that those are all things that we could do to try to think about it. And I do think that many of these solutions brought together could be influential, right? I also don't want to give the impression that they're going to be solutions, right, by themselves.

I think we're going to have to think about a lot of these together. We're going to have to think about much more prominent solutions that are not even on our radar yet. This is like such a big problem. It's so ubiquitous. These foods are everywhere in the food supply. They're part of most people's diets. It's really hard to avoid them. We're going to need some sort of more dramatic solutions that maybe aren't even on the table yet.

What about schools? I was in California recently, and they are talking about having some restrictions on what is served in schools, areas where there is some state or federal control. And this is also true in the UK where they could really change the school environment. Because I do feel we ought to be protecting kids more. And maybe, you know, these category four or five, particularly the five ones, could just be banned outright. And that would be fairly straightforward to do once, you know, it's an accepted system. Do you think that would work? So I definitely think schools are a really important area to look up for all the reasons you describe.

I think we have made good progress in the States and some other places as well on trying to increase the healthfulness of foods offered in schools by traditional measures, by things like how much whole grain is in there, how much sugar is in there, how much protein is in there. I think we have not moved to the next level you're describing, which is like what's really happening with ultra-processed foods. So I do think that's an area that we could be focused on for sure. We already know that the average school lunch provided by the school is going to be healthier than the average lunch brought by a kid at home. So that's already there. That's true in the UK as well. The snack box is the worst thing.

That should be the easiest thing to ban as they do in Japan. That would be a big, would that be like a big impact here? But I do think we could do a lot more in schools, including things like that. And some schools do it, right? You know, in some private schools, for example, non-publicly funded schools, they just don't require you to bring a lunch and they provided to you, right? And so that is something that happens in some places. Thank you for listening to today's recap episode.

I want to take 30 seconds to talk about something that's not talked about enough. Menopause. Over half the people on the planet experience perimenopause and menopause. Yet symptoms are often misunderstood or dismissed. At Zoe, we're moving menopause research forward. We recently conducted the largest study of menopause and nutrition in the world, and our study showed that two-thirds of perimenopause and women reported experiencing over 12 symptoms, symptoms like weight gain, memory problems and fatigue.

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simply search Zoe Menopause in your favorite podcast player.