ZOE Science & Nutrition - Recap: Scrappy ways to eat healthier and save money | Carleigh Bodrug & Will Bulsiewicz

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

Today we’re talking about something we’re all guilty of: food waste. A forgotten yogurt at the back of the fridge, a stale hunk of bread, a bag of dry wilted greens.  They may seem insignificant on their own, but collectively, in every kitchen across the world they add up to a global environmental crisis. So, can we change the way we approach food and help curb this epidemic of waste? I’m joined by Carleigh Bodrug and Dr. Will Bulsiewicz to show us how a few simple changes can lead to a greener home, better health, and even a lower grocery bill. 🌱 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 by 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. Today we're talking about something we're all guilty of, food waste, a forgotten yoghurt at the back of the fridge, a stale hunk of bread, a bag of dry, wilted greens. They may seem insignificant on their own, but collectively in every kitchen across the world, they add up to a global environmental crisis. So can we change the way we approach food and help curb this epidemic of waste? I'm joined by Carly Bodrug and Dr. Wilvolsuich to show us how a few simple changes can lead to a greener home, better health, and even a lower grocery bill. A shocking 40% of the food we buy winds up in the waste. That's almost half.

So if I'm paying $60 or pounds at the supermarket, I'm actually throwing away 25 of that. So I'm not only throwing money down the drain, but I think you're also explaining, and I'm contributing to a huge amount of waste that's harming the environment, and presumably loads of nature that's been plowed into fields to make food that we don't even use. But, Carly, you wrote a book that offers ways to solve exactly this problem. It's full of a lot of fun tips and recipes and brilliant facts about food waste we ignore, which I can't wait to hear about. But I'd like to start by, like, sort of understanding the problem a bit more

that you just sort of picked up on in the quick fire. Carly, why does so much of our food wind up as waste? When I first heard that statistic that somewhere around 40% of food ends up in landfills, I really thought, okay, is that that much of an issue because it just decomposes, right? But unfortunately, what happens when food does end up in landfills and it's mixed in with things like plastic, it emits a really powerful greenhouse gas called methane, which is a not so good thing for our environment. Food waste actually emits more emissions than the entire airline industry. So this is a huge global issue. And then when we think about how many people are hungry across the Western world and beyond, and then also inflation and grocery prices, it's just nonsensical to be

throwing food in the trash. My mind also went when I heard that statistic to thinking, okay, is that from a consumer level? And if we're looking at a pie chart, consumers more than grocery stores and restaurants, consumers are actually wasting more. And I think it's just because we're so busy. We're all go, go, go, go into the grocery store, grabbing a bunch of well-intentioned vegetables and then not thinking about what to do with them. And so I might have thought that like a lot of it would not be in my house. I might have thought that a lot of the waste is, you know, from the point that it's like grown, you know, it's the point that it finally makes it to the supermarket, to the point that makes it my store.

Or maybe at restaurants where you always feel like, well, they have all those other meals, right, that they have as options. But it's not really true. It's mainly in my house that this problem is happening. There's definitely food waste happening at every level, but the largest piece of the pie is in consumer homes once we get past the farming stage. And really, if you think about it,

the reason that that's happening is because grocery stores have a bottom line. Restaurants have a bottom line that they're really paying close attention to each week, how that food is being utilized, making sure to use their scraps and the things that they would normally throw out, whereas as consumers, we're not necessarily keeping a budgetary line where we're like, oh, that well-intentioned box of spinach at the back of my fridge that I buy every week is going into the trash, right? It's just, I think there's a lack of accounting, and I don't think it's a fault of consumers necessarily, it's an education issue, and then on top of that, we're also super concerned about

expiry dates, which I'm not saying not to worry about expiry dates, but there's almost this fear around food in your own home, whereas restaurants, again, have more of an accounting process where they're making sure that the food is used up in time. I've definitely had that argument at home. My wife is generally the view that she's a doctor, so like, and I'm very focused on cleanliness will, which I think you can probably understand. You know, you're trained very hard, right, about hygiene. So I think her basic feeling, certainly when we first met was that one minute after midnight, if the food had the expiry date was like now the day before. It's like, this is like toxic in the fridge, needs to be thrown out immediately.

Is that an important part of this story? I'd love to understand a bit more, Carly, about what are the reasons behind this enormous amount of what we buy ends up being thrown away? Of course. So it's often called best before dates in North America. And if you even think about that phrase best before, that's not necessarily suggesting that after that, that best before, that stroke of midnight, that that food's no longer good anymore, right? I encourage people always to use their senses, like their smell, their sight, and even taste in some cases to just make sure that the food is edible and safe to consume. And I mean, we don't have expiry

dates on things like bananas. So we're doing this by our senses oftentimes anyways. So a big part of this is best before dates. But I would say the largest reason that people waste food is a lack of planning. And this I like to say is kind of the low-hanging fruit when we're talking about food waste is if you are going to be more careful in meal planning and thinking about where you're going to be eating for breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert for the week, how your family is going to be consuming food, then you're going to head to the grocery store with an actual plan. You're going to look at your fridge and pantry before you head out. I remember before I kind of implemented this in my own home. I'm a food blogger and I was wasting so much more food than I should have been.

And every single week, I think I would head out and buy a bag of oats because I'd get to the grocery store and be like, okay, I want to prep overnight oats this week. Oh, do I have oats at home? I don't know. So I'm going to grab another bag. And then I have like seven bags and one of them's going bad. And I think it's just this busyness that is really skyrocketing waste, especially in the Western world. In my mind, I'm doing the math on the numbers that you've shared so far. And what I'm hearing from you is that 40% of our food globally is wasted, but it's actually worse at home than it is in other places. And so I'm sort of having a family. We have four children. I'm thinking about this. And it strikes me that basically what you're telling me is that

we could save 50% on our grocery bill. That's what I'm hearing. Yeah. And I think the average Canadian family I can speak to was over $1,700 worth of food per year. And I mean, I think it's far more than that. And you even think about the $1,700. I mean, that's a lot of money. And money down the drain of food we're buying. And then beyond this, if you're going to be careful, more careful about kind of planning your meals, you're going to inevitably save money too because you're not bringing the access into the home. So you're cutting your grocery bill that way too. And then if we take it one step further and we start thinking about the whole plant and eating parts that we might not have normalized in North America, you've got a. recipe for eating healthy, eating a diversity of plants, eating low waste for the planet, and then also saving a lot of money, which we all want to do. Carly, I wanted to move on and talk about bread. So the team was actually doing some research and shared with me. Apparently, I don't have the statistics for the rest of the world. Apparently in the UK, it is the number one most wasted food in the UK, and I suspect it's not

going to look very different anywhere else. Is there anything we can do about this? Yeah, that's the same in North America. And there are so. many things we can do with the bread that has gone a little bit stale. So first of all, you don't want to bring too much bread into the home if you're not going to consume it quickly. And the problem I think why it's being wasted so much is that almost everybody is buying bread every week and then not getting to maybe the full loaf. So the first line of defense is if you are somebody, maybe you're a single person in a home and you buy a loaf of bread, freeze half of it if you think you're only going to eat half. But there's so many amazing recipes that you can utilize what they

call stale bread recipes. And I want to preface this by saying, if there's mold on your bread, it's time for it to go. But we like to get to it before that. So if you think about a baguette, oftentimes you buy that and then the next day, it's already hard. So here's a couple of things that you can do. One of my favorites is a classic panzanella salad. So you break it up with some fresh tomatoes and basil. I have a great tahini sauce as well that can go on this. and you eat it as a salad. Croutons are fabulous. So chop it up, toss in a little bit of herbs, bake it, and make croutons, breadcrumbs. So again, you can just throw it in a blender with some herbs and make delicious breadcrums. I've even made a stale bread cake before. So really the options

are limitless and there's no reason that we should be tossing bread that has kind of reached that point where you don't want to toast it. You can still utilize it for a lot of things. You know, there's a part of me that mold on a bread is actually reassuring because truly, real bread in like three days, unless it's sourdough bread, it goes bad. And that's the way real bread is supposed to be. And it's disturbing that bread can sit on the shelf for 10, 14 days and be as soft as it was the day that they baked it. And nothing changed and there's no mold. Like I find that a bit disturbing.

What's going on in that situation, well? There's preservatives in the bread, the commercial breads. There's preservatives in the commercial breads. I'm all for supporting local, you know, local stores, local bakers. But the problem is that if you want to get like a high quality bread from your local baker, you could be easily paying $9 in the United States. What would you pay in London for a nice loaf of bread? Yeah, it could be, you know, 45 pounds.

Yeah. So these are expensive things. What we started doing recently is actually, I was talking to Carly about this last night. We bought a breadmaker. And the beauty of the breadmaker is that I can get the absolutely, best flour that I could possibly buy. And for about a dollar and 50 cents, I simply put that flour with some other ingredients like yeast and things like this into the breadmaker. I push a butt and I come back in four hours. My house smells amazing and we have fresh bread. But I just

want to point out that fresh loaf of bread that we just prepared for a dollar and 50 cents, it's only good for about three days. But it's also not going to last that long because it's the point. It smells so good and you will consume the bread quickly. My kids love it. Yeah. And if I come back to Carly talking at the beginning about potentially freezing the bread, does that change its sort of nutritional breakdown? Because I feel that when you freeze and unfreeze the bread, it definitely doesn't taste the same way that it did before. Yeah, I feel like this episode, we have an amazing combination of, like, game-changing hacks here, and the freezing the bread is right at the top, because basically what happens is that bread, of course, contains starch.

and in its native form like just you know you bake a loaf of bread you eat it that starch it's a source of energy for humans but when you freeze it you develop what's called retrograde starch or i like to refer to it as resistant starch and resistant starch basically means that it actually no longer feeds humans now it feeds your gut bacteria this is conceptually very similar to prebotic fiber but in some ways perhaps even superior to prebotic fiber because it is it feeds so nicely and produces the short chain fatty acids, which are the anti-inflammatory compounds that we get from fiber and from resistant starch. So it's an interesting thing because actually you find less calories in the bread, but it's better for your gut after frozen. That's very

interesting. That's cool. I hope you found the information in this week's episode useful. If you're interested in improving your gut health, you might want to download. our free gut guide. It's packed with recipes and science-backed information to help you on your journey towards better health. Go to zoe.com slash gut guide to download it for free. Or if you're looking for another podcast to listen to, we have a lot more in our back catalog. Would you like to know how to reduce your risk of dementia or how to make the most of coffee's hidden health benefits? Search for these episodes on your favorite podcast player. Thank you.