ZOE Science & Nutrition - Recap: How to break bad habits and transform your health | Rich Roll & Tim Spector

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Change is difficult. Our routines can feel locked in, our habits on autopilot, and the idea of a major lifestyle overhaul can seem impossible.  However, Rich Roll is living proof that this isn’t the case. Once struggling with addiction and poor health, he transformed his diet, rebuilt his body, and completely rewrote his future. In today’s conversation, Tim Spector and Rich Roll discuss why midlife is a crucial turning point for health, what happens to your microbiome when you change your diet, and why it’s never too late to make a dramatic shift. 🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily30+ *Naturally high in copper which contributes to normal energy yielding metabolism and the normal function of the immune system 📚 Books from our ZOE Scientists: The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE: Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks  Better Breakfast Guide Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here Listen to the full episode here

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. Change is difficult. Our routines can feel locked in, our habits on autopilot, and the idea of a major lifestyle overhaul can seem impossible. However, Rich Roll is living proof that this isn't the case. Once struggling with addiction and poor health, he transformed his diet, rebuilt his body, and completely. rewrote his future. In today's conversation, Tim Spector and Rich Roll discuss why midlife is a crucial turning point for health, what happens to your microbiome when you change your diet, and why it's never too late to make a dramatic shift. I'd like to start right at the beginning, Rich. So today you're an ultra-endurance athlete on a fully plant-based diet, but you made this big pivot, I think, around the time you were 40. Could you tell us what your life was like before that?

To answer that question, I think we have to cast the gaze backwards a little bit. So leading up to that throughout my 20s, I had a struggle with drugs and alcohol that really took me to some pretty dark places. And I was able to get sober at 31. I went to treatment for 100 days, which is a long time to be in voluntary, sort of voluntarily incarcerated in what's, you know, kind of a mental institution for the temporarily insane. but that really changed my life and provided me with a new set of tools around how to like organize my decision making and my actions. And when I emerged from that experience, building a foundation of sobriety was like my number one priority. And I went all in on my recovery. And over the next nine or so years, was very focused on that. But at the same time, I was also very, intent upon reestablishing myself as a sort of respectable human being who could show up on time

and be relied upon and the like and rebuild my career as a result. And during that period of time, I really overlooked my health and well-being because I was so focused on that one thing. And it's only in retrospect when I look back on it that I realized the extent to which my relationship with food and lifestyle habits was still very alcoholic, like I was using food to medicate my emotional state. Shortly before I turned 40, I was about 50 pounds overweight, so I wasn't like obese, but I was quite sedentary. I'd been an athlete in college. I swam for Stanford in the late 1980s at a pretty high level, but really hadn't taken care of myself in quite some time. And I had an incident walking up the staircase to my bedroom where I had to like take a

a break halfway up. Like I was literally winded by the exertion of just, you know, walking up a simple flight of stairs. And I had some tightness in my chest. And it was a scary moment. Heart disease runs in my family. My grandfather, who had also been a standout swimmer, had died young of a heart attack. And so heart disease was something that my mother was always telling me, you got to be careful with your heart. And everything kind of snapped into focus as a result of that experience. And I realized that not only did I need to make some pretty significant changes in how I was living, like, I actually wanted to. Like, I was blessed with like a level of willingness to actually take action on that.

And I think the reason that I bring up the sobriety aspect of my story is because I'd had that history, like I'd had that bottoming out moment where I made a decision, acted on it, and made a change that changed my life dramatically. And I felt the same energy. I was like, I think I'm having another one of those experiences. experiences. And what I learned about that prior experience was that you need to take action quickly because these, it's, you know, it's sort of a sliding doors moment. Like, if you don't act upon it with some level of urgency, whatever willingness you're experiencing tends to fade pretty quickly.

And I thought, I kind of need, like, detox for my lifestyle. Like, I need to kind of recreate that treatment center kind of experience, but for, like, food and lifestyle habits. And so that's set in motion, a series of experiments with food and diet and fitness that kind of catalyzed this journey that I've been on that took me from there to hear. And Rich, can you tell me a bit about, I guess, what your diet looked like before you were climbing up those stairs and then tell me, like, what did you change? Maybe over the next, I don't know whether this was a instantaneous or this was the next year. What did it look like, you know, by the end of the year? I was on what you would call the window diet. Do you know what the window diet is? Tell me about the window.

diet is when you drive up to a fine dining establishment, you roll the window down and they hand you food into your car. That was the diet that I was on. So a lot of fast food, a lot of late night takeout in the law firm in which I was working as a lawyer, Pizza Hut, Dominoes, McDonald's, Jack in the Box, cheeseburgers, fries, you name it. You try to mull. I tried them all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of greasy food. So it was a big shift to actually go fully plant-based. And I did it almost as an experiment to prove to myself that it wouldn't work so I could make peace with the fact that I just felt the way that I felt and this is the way I'm supposed to feel and was not expecting the sort of dramatic shift in how I felt. But I tried a bunch of stuff. You know, I dabbled in paleo. I tried

vegetarian. I sort of checked a bunch of boxes. And the one thing that I hadn't done because I was reluctant to do it was to go entirely plant-based because it sounded hard. It was like, who wants to do that? It just sounded difficult and I couldn't imagine how I could ever be full or sated with anything that I was eating. So I did it kind of as a challenge, again, to like prove that it wouldn't work because I really didn't want it to work. That's the truth. So I was just surprised as anyone when it actually, you know, it seemed to resuscitate me. If we're going to describe the key components of that diet, because I think it's sort of quite powerful like describing about this shift so fast. What was the, it was eating plant foods as close

to their natural state as possible. So limiting, you know, limiting exposure to processed foods, trying to reduce the oil intake and just grazing on as many varieties of plant foods as possible, home-cooked and nominally limited, you know, limited processing. It wasn't raw particularly. No, I didn't go. I never went totally raw. I ate a lot of raw foods, started doing a lot of, you know, smoothies, the base of which was always like dark leafy grains. But keeping it pretty simple, like a lot of legumes, a lot of beans, a lot of, a lot of quinoa and variety, I think, making sure that I was getting a lot of variety on the plate. When you're thinking about riches, like really dramatic change in diet, I love this from the window diet to the plant-based diet. That's definitely two quite extreme shifts. How might that have impacted his microbiome and what were the implications from that for his health and I guess what Rich was describing to us? When we see someone shifting from a really poor diet to a really good diet, there have been a number of small studies and population studies and some Zoe studies, so you do see a really rapid change in the gut microbes.

So probably you could see it imagining Rich within a week if we had tested you at the time. as you transitioned from the junk food diet to the plant-based diet. And when we get Zoe members having their personalized nutrition program, those that are adhering to it are seeing effects within a few weeks on their gut microbes. And it all fits because those same people, although it takes for us to detect it several weeks to see it, probably the changes are earlier because mood and energy in all, all our Zoe studies also improve within a week. So if you ask them, you can see differences in mood and energy, whether it's just by shifting your diet or it's having some like prebiotics. You can see

these changes. The mood and energy comes first, actually, before you see the actual changes in the gut microbes, which again goes back to this idea how important the gut and the brain are. And energy is the one thing that doctors don't ask about, but actually is perhaps the most important global feature of how you're feeling that I think needs much more medical attention. So, yeah, in summary, these things can happen really fast, particularly if you're moving from a bad place to a good place. If you are on a really good diet

and you just want to incrementally do it, it would be harder to see that. And the differences would be more subtle. But anyone who's on a poor dart really, they make that effort, they will see results very, very fast. When is it too late, Tim? So, you know, here we're talking about making a change of 40. You're describing like a really dramatic change here, right? So you're saying the microbiome changes rapidly, like in a big way.

And then you're saying the health outcome changes in a big way. When's it too late? There's no evidence that it's ever too late because what you're doing, even if you're 90 and you suddenly say, I've been lucky, maybe on the window diet, and there are these people that, you know, smoke and drink and have terrible food, and they're lucky they get to there, but, you know, they want to keep going. They can improve their gut microbe just as well as someone, age 40, by making that change, and they will also see improvements in their mood and energy, because we're talking about

instant changes in these microbes producing chemicals. And these chemicals can instantly impact your brain and your immune system. So it's not like you've got to wait for vessels to rebuild or some major changes to structure to happen. This is what's so great about the microbiome and lifestyle is it all happens in real time. And that's why it's so much nicer to talk about this than, well, I used to talk about genetics, because that really, really is slow. You know, it's like, well, several generations on, you know, they'll be reaping the benefits here, you know.

And could you explain a little bit this mood and the food? Because I think a lot of people listening to this, and I think they sort of understand that you can somehow, you know, improve your heart and this makes sense. But the mood thing seems rather magical. Like, does science understand what's going on? Well, we understand a little bit of it. but we're probably just scraping the surface of what these microbes can do, what the chemicals

they can produce. But it basically comes from the chemicals they produce. As I said, their chemical factories, they produce brain chemicals, for example, like serotonin, really important for brain and enjoyment and happiness and calm. They also produce things like GABA, which is an eloquent of a Valium tablet. And body can't produce much of this stuff. So, Most of it comes from the gut microbes. So they will be producing these chemicals, which then get passed over and picked up by receptors in the brain, which will change those moods. Similarly, the effect on the immune system, we would damp down inflammation, and then the brain

suddenly senses, oh, there's no inflammation going on here. I don't have to be in this rather depressed state thinking I'm ill, because the brain is just like a giant program, it's predicting what's going on. It's not often it's wrong. We think the brain's always right, but actually it's just another organ in the body and sometimes he gets these algorithms wrong. So that's what I think that would explain these changes and why a change, getting rid of a terrible diet has such a profound, rapid effect on people. And the brain is perhaps the first thing to pick it up because it's not getting those sickness signals from the rest of the body.

I'd love to talk about how do you find the motivation to start a change and how do you find the motivation to stick to a long-term health change? I think the first thing I would say to that is to kind of challenge the presumption here, which is that you need motivation in order to take action. Like, how do I find the motivation? You mentioned willpower earlier. You're like, how do I find the willpower to, like, do all these things that you're telling me to do? And I think that assumption that you need motivation or willpower and you're kind of sitting around waiting for it is something that keeps people paralyzed in bad habits.

And I have a mantra that I use that I think is very helpful. And, again, it's something I learned in recovery. And it's, it goes like this, mood follows action. So rather than waiting until you're struck with inspiration, what is the thing that you can do right now? And the mood, i.e. the motivation, is a product of taking the action. And this is something that's validated in neuroscience. Behavior first, thoughts, feelings, and emotions follow. So it's about kind of reversing that equation in your mind and breaking down, again,

everything into tiny, actionable items. So there's a wonderful book called Atomic Habits that you've probably heard of by James Clear, and he always says, habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. So you always default to your habits, and if you want to make a habit change, break it down into its tiniest sort of elements.

And so when you think of, oh my God, I have to like change my diet for the rest of my life, It's all very daunting and, like I said earlier, intimidating. So I'm always encouraging people to start with very easy lifts, like lower the ceiling on your expectations, broaden your timeline or forget about a timeline altogether and just take one tiny little thing. Like maybe, you know, Tim, you can get rid of the fermented dairy in your fridge and like replace it with, you know, something else that might be a little bit healthier. And like, that's all you're doing. Like just go into your pantry and like, you know what, all these chips in here, I'm just going to take them out of the house.

Maybe you didn't, that was all you did that day. But you like chalked up an easy win. So I think it's about like assembling a lot of easy wins. And when you just kind of like focus on tiny little things that you can master, that does have a compounding effect. And when you when you teach yourself that you can do that like and you make that one little change, you're like, oh, I did that. Now, that's really not an issue for me anymore. What else can I do? Like, let's move on to the next thing.

And you just kind of build on these things. I believe that that is really how you make change. So it's about the tiny little daily habits that you're almost reflexively or unconsciously, you know, kind of indulging every single day and drawing attention to those. Rather than making dramatic, wide sweeping statements, like, yes, I went, all that kind of stuff. But, like, I don't think that's how it really works for most people. And I think, you know, kind of just gradually leaning into this as a process rather than a result driven by this day, I have to weigh this much, I think you're in better stead to then adopt habits with staying power. Because this is really all about sustainability and having it all kind of work in the construct of our, you know, we all have busy lives and we're all, you know, kind of doing lots of different things.

So how can you create an environment that's conducive? to making the healthy choices and chalk up those little wins with small little habits that you can build upon. 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 perimenopausal women reported experiencing over 12 symptoms, symptoms like weight gain, memory problems and fatigue. The good news is

the results also show that changing our food habits may reduce the chance of having a particular menopause symptom by up to 37% for some women. We know how important it is for you to be able take control of your own health journey. So we've created the menoscale calculator to help you score the frequency and impact of your menopause symptoms. Go to zoe.com slash menoscale to get your score. The calculator is free

and only takes a couple of minutes. And by the way, we've spoken about perimenopause and menopause many times since starting the Zoe Science and Nutrition podcast. To find these episodes, simply search Zoe Menopause in your favorite podcast player. I don't know.