ZOE Science & Nutrition - Recap: Why you should eat 30 different plants every week | Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall & Tim Spector 

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Today, we’re talking about plants. For years, our diets have been guided by a simple three word slogan: ‘five a day’. While it’s well established that eating fruit and vegetables is good for us, some experts believe the ‘five a day’ message puts too much emphasis on quantity, and not enough on variety. So, is time to adjust our guiding plant principle? I’m joined by Professor Tim Spector and chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who advocate for a new goal: eating 30 different plants each week. Together, we’ll explore why diversity is key for your microbiome and share some delicious ways to bring more plants onto your plate. 🌱 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 by Prof. Tim Spector Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Free resources from ZOE: Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition  Gut Guide - for a healthier microbiome in weeks 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 plants. For years, our diet's been guided by a simple three-word slogan, five-a-day. While it's well-established, they're eating fruit and vegetables is good for us. Some experts believe the five-a-day message puts too much emphasis on quantity and not enough on variety. So is it time to adjust our guiding plant principle? I'm joined by Professor Tim Specter and chef Hugh Fernley Whittinsaw, who advocate for a new goal, eating 30 different plants each week. Together we'll explore why diversity is key for your microbiome and share some delicious ways to bring more plants onto your plate. How big a role overall should plants be playing in our diet?

And where does this number 30 come from? I think the first thing to be clear on, which isn't clear on all the guidelines, particularly the UK ones, is what constitutes a plant. Most people just think of them as fruits and veg, and that's where the UK and many other countries, five a day, comes from where at least one can be orange juice, which is ridiculous to have that as a core health. outcome. And really, we're forgetting that nuts and seeds and herbs and spices are very much part of that mix. And that's where a lot of these outdated guidelines have gone very wrong, because it's much broader than people think. So when you're talking about five a day of which one is a drink, you've only got four to have which can accompany your steak, you know, a few little accoutrements around there and you think you've done it.

Whereas the whole point is to make plants the centre of the meal and actually have the fish and the meat as, either, optional side plates. So interesting that. I mean, from a chef's point of view, we traditionally have, and a lot of us still do, including myself from time to time, we get very, very excited about animal protein, about meat and fish, and we make a massive fuss of it. We obsess over how we're going to marinate it or get the skin crispy or get the crackling. And once you've obsessed over those ingredients, you haven't got a lot of time left to think about the plant or the veg, which does then become the bit on the side. So we have to recognize that there's slightly tyrannical ingredients, meat and fish. I'm still an omnivore. I enjoy them both.

But we've got to just put them on one side from time to time and then focus on making plants delicious, which turns out not to be hard at all. Not least because from the plant kingdom, you've got the greatest variety of textures and flavors. and aromas far greater than you could ever get from the world of animal protein. I mean, a pork chop is different from a chicken drumstick, but it's not nearly as different as a walnut and a peach

or a leek and a strawberry. You know, these plants are really different from each other. And from the point of view of flavour and just being excited in a kitchen, we've got to remind ourselves of that often, and that's why a great variety of plants ingredients coming into the kitchen is exciting. We shouldn't see it as just, this is what we all

should be doing now for our health. It's what we ought to want to do because it brings so much flavour and excitement into the kitchen and onto our plates. So Tim, I think you've done a brilliant job of explaining why plants have this sort of health benefit and that different plants have these different polyphenols and different fibres, so we can't just eat one. But why couldn't I still just have like a large piece of fish or meat in the center of the plate and just very little bits of, you know, 10 different plants spread rounds around the edge. Well, that would certainly be better than not having any veg around the edge. Let's be clear. It's, it isn't a binary thing. This is something we know that if you have too much meat,

particularly red meat, in very large quantities, the epidemiology suggests that starts to become bad for your health, even if it's good quality. If it's poor quality, you don't need very much at all for it to be bad all the time. Just by leaving little places on your plate for the plants, you're not really going to get enough total fibre in your diet. And we know that total fibre is very important. Magic figure is for every five grams of fibre, you're going to reduce your overall risk of mortality by about 14%.

When you say reduce your chance of mortality for like regular people listening, that's just like reduced your chance of dying by 14%. Correct, yes. So you reduce your risk of dying by around a sixth, just by five grams of fiber. And that, just to put into context, the average US person has about 15 grams of fiber. So just increasing 15 grams to 20 grams, we give you this. improvement in your lifespan. In that case, I'd love to come on to this 30 plants a week, right?

We put it in the title of the podcast. He was put it in the title of his book. It's clearly like a big deal. Where does this number 30 come from? Well, surprisingly, there aren't many studies on it because nobody thought to actually ask people in a week how many different types of plants you're at. They used to be all lumped together.

You just have your greens and how much fruit, a much vegetable, usually combined. So no one really cared because they didn't think it was important. So it was the combination of the American gut study with the British gut study that came together that I was a part of the British section where had a combination around 11,000 people and a subset of those, a few thousand of them recorded diligently everything they were eating over a week, and we compare that to their gut health profiles, and we showed that the people with the healthiest gut microbes, which we defined by diversity, sort of different types of species, we're eating the most variety of plants, and this came out at around 30.

It's an approximate number because we couldn't tell the difference between 28 or 32, whatever, but it gives you a rough idea of the importance of it. It was definitely there were gradations of it. What I found surprising this study was that vegans and vegetarians didn't come out as having any healthier gut microbes than omnivores, people who eat meat and fish, who also ate the wide variety of plants. And I think that's a really important message that we've been driven down this path

of, you know, sub-dividing of people into these groups, whereas actually we'd forgotten that the common denominator of a health is not necessarily what you're notie, what you're avoiding, but actually what you're including in your diet. And I think this to me is the real message from those studies. And that work inspired us

to do this randomized control trial, which we've called the biome study, because we're looking at the outcomes on the microbiome, of using a prebiotic blend of over 30 different plants all put together. So we're interested what happens when you give people mainly a blend of freeze-dried plants in reasonably large amounts to produce over five grams of fiber, but with this variety. And so over six weeks, that's what we gave these volunteers, around 350 volunteers, divide into these three groups, one with this pre-bartic blend. The other were taking recroutons, which were sort of ground up, to be rough,

similarly similar. And the third group was a probiotic group that were taking a well-known probiotic that has been shown to be effective in a number of diseases. So we had these three groups and over six weeks the main outcome was the change in the microbiome we were looking at. And it turned out that the pre-botic blend, even the probiotic active other arm in terms of its improvement on the gut microbiome. So we saw big changes in the good gut microbes that have been associated with good cardiac health and reductions in those microbes that have been shown to be related to poor health and poor diets.

So we also showed improvements in mood and energy and reduction in hunger and a number of other parameters. So it was really exciting to see how we sort of take this epidemiological concept, which is just based on observational data, and then do a randomized control trial that had such convincing results. And I think that really cemented the idea that we're talking, I route the right ballpark. This 30, you know, it may have been. plucked out of the ether somewhat, but as well as the public loving it, and it's being achievable, as you said, many people, we're going to discuss a bit more how to achieve that, but it's not that hard a goal. Many people are already doing it, and we now have a randomized controlled trial

to say that that diversity of plants put together have a very rapid effect on transforming many people's gut microbes. So Hugh, imagine somebody's listening to this, and there'll be a lot of people listen to this saying, okay, I'm completely sold by Tim's idea about the health benefit. I quite like the idea of not dying or dying a lot later, so apparently I add more of these plants I can get there, but I don't know where to begin. Okay, well, the first thing is don't worry that we're sending you off to buy lots of expensive obscure plant ingredients that you haven't heard of.

what to do with and might not like. The first thing is to remind yourself that there are many, many, dozens, maybe over a hundred plants that actually you already like. You're going really, yes, there really, really are. And that's why I've done a big plant list in my book. And there's over 200 plants on the list. And with a possible exception of the idea that put a couple of seaweed there, because I think it's a really interesting ingredient. But every other plant on that list, you've heard of it. I promise you you've heard of it. You've heard of the spices and the herbs and all the main vegetables, you've heard of the pulses, the nuts and the seeds. With a lot of them, you might not have put them in your cooking for quite a while just because

of the habit you're in. The first thing is to remind yourself, there's lots of plants out there that you already like. Some of them might be in your kitchen cupboard already. The thing about those store cupboard ingredients is we often think of them as standby. But actually, why not be using them every day? Why not crack open a tin of beans two or three times a week? same with the lentils, same with the spices, same with the nuts and seeds. It might not be a bad moment to open one of the tins that I've bought with me.

Hugh, you just talked me through what you've got there? This is something I travel with a lot, and there's nothing in here that's particularly weird or surprising. It's not going to bite me, is it? No, it's not going to bite you. It's just my own homemade trail mix, put together with some things that I have in my cupboard most of the time. So there's, well, what can you see there, Tim? We could count the plants. I mean, these are things that you recognize.

Nothing too obscure or lucky there. We've got walnuts. There's the obvious ones. We've got some dried fruits. Probably, I guess they're raisins or sultan. A few snipped up dried apricots as well. We've got some sunflower seeds. We've got some of the goodies.

I'm going to shake a few things out because a few of the stuff at the bottom, aren't they? And you've got some dark chocolate, which is one of my favorite plants, actually, next to coffee. What are these ones? Those are sunflower seeds. Those are pumpkin seeds. So you've got a lot of plants in there? Yeah, I mean, that is, you know, that is a really easy thing to travel with. Whenever I leave home now for a day or two, I usually pack that with me.

Try some of them. Yeah, by all means. Did you go straight for the chocolate there, Tim, or were you having a virtuous nut before you get in? into the dark chocolate. Chalk and nut as well. Very good combination. Yeah, so that's an easy thing to travel with. And of course, much cheaper putting your own little box of trail mixed together

than buying something ready made because you can buy those things in reasonable quantities and they're much cheaper than when you get that little packet of it all mixed together. So it's a bit like my diversity jar, except actually not crunched up quite as much. No, I quite like them in whole. The one thing here I have done, I've actually. soaked the almonds overnight and then let them dry off just a little bit. And they do swell up and it makes them less gritty and almost like eating a fresh nut. Sometimes I do that with the walnuts too and they really swell up.

They almost double in size. And I like that sort of fresh juiciness rather than the grittiness you get with a very, very dry nut. Enthusiasts of eating nuts, call that activating soaking nuts overnight. Of course, with some seeds, not an almond that's been taken out of. of its shelf. But it is nice to remind people that when we take whole spices off the shelf, things like cumin seeds, coriander seeds, caraway seeds, all of which I'm a big fan of. And I do like to keep them as whole rather than ground spices. A lot of those spice seeds are alive. If you put them in the soil, they would germinate and grow into a coriander plant, a cumin plant, or a

caraway thing. Then we could eat them as herbs, fresh herbs. We forget that. Even if they've been on the shelf sometimes for years. They are living things. To me, that says something about their potential to do us good. All those polyphenols and chemicals. They're in there in the spice seeds in order to make new life, in order to generate the next plant. They're mini eggs, aren't that? They're mini eggs. A seed is a plant egg. That's why when you put the sprinkling of spices in, you might say, oh, it's just a pinch. Is that going to make any difference? Well, it's a pinch of seeds or half a teaspoon of seeds that have got a lot of power in them. And surely somewhere that's what's doing us the good in our gut microbiome when we harness

that power. And of course, it adds fantastic aromatic tastes to the food that we're making. 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.