ZOE Science & Nutrition - Why the ‘big food’ industry is killing us – and how to fight back | Prof. Brian Elbel and Prof. Tim Spector

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

👀 Unwrap the truth 👉 Try the new ZOE app Why do we eat what we eat? It might feel like a personal choice, but hidden forces—industry tactics, government policies, and even cutting-edge food science—shape our decisions every day. In this episode, Professor Brian Elbel from NYU and Professor Tim Spector unravel the truth behind our ultra-processed food (UPF) obsession and its alarming impact on global health. Our food system isn't just flawed; it's deliberately engineered. From seductive marketing to strategic supermarket layouts, Brian and Tim reveal the invisible hands guiding us toward unhealthy choices. Learn to spot UPFs in disguise, understand how corporate profits trump public health, and question whether interventions like soda taxes and calorie labeling truly make a difference. But all is not lost. Tim and Brian provide actionable strategies to reclaim control of our health. Discover practical tips for decoding confusing food labels, making healthier choices, and advocating for transformative policies. Tune in to learn how individual awareness and collective action can challenge—and change—a food system that’s designed against us. 🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily 30+ *Naturally high in copper which contributes to normal energy yielding metabolism and the normal function of the immune system Follow ZOE on Instagram. Timecodes 00:00 write timecodes 📚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 Free resources from ZOE Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks  Mentioned in today's episode The corporate capture of the nutrition profession in the USA: the case of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (2022) Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake (2019) Relationship between community characteristics and impact of calorie labeling on fast-food purchases 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. We like to believe that we choose what to eat. But in reality, hidden forces push us towards cheap, unhealthy food. From supermarket shelves to the meals we grab on the go, our food system is built for profit, not health. And it's making us sick through tactics that we barely notice. Ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, now make up well over half of the average diet. Designed for long shelf life and mass production, corporations engineer the worst UPFs

to be irresistible at a high cost. New research links harmful UPFs to obesity, metabolic disease, even early death. So what's the reason they're everywhere and what would it take for us to break free? Today Dr. Brian Elbell, a professor of population health and health policy at New York University, uncovers the hidden forces shaping what's in our food. He's joined by Professor Tim Spector to reveal how UPFs have quietly taken over our food system and why they're making us sick. Tim is one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists, professor of epidemiology at King's

College London and my scientific co-founder at ZOE. By the end of this episode, you'll have a clearer view of your food and the system shaping it, so you can push back and make smarter choices. Brian, thank you for joining me today. Glad to be here. And Tim, thank you as always.

Pleasure. So Brian, we have a tradition here at Zoe where we always start with a quick fire round of questions. They come from our listeners and we have very strict rules on purpose to be difficult for professors and scientists. Okay. And the rules are you can give us a yes or a no or if you absolutely have to, a one sentence answer.

You're willing to give it a go? Let's give it a go. All right. Are we getting sicker from the food we eat? Yes. Do government policies do enough to protect our health? No. Tim, do a few giant corporations control what's on our supermarket shelves? Yes, around 10 of them. Do food companies fund nutrition research for their own gain? Yes, it's not all bad, but mostly, yes. And Brian, you have a whole sentence here.

What's the biggest misconception when it comes to unhealthy food choices? I think the biggest misconception is that they cannot be part of a healthy diet, and I think they can on occasion. Well, look, we often on this podcast talk to scientists who study like tiny cells in their labs or one or two people in great depth. But Brian, you're someone who studies the health of entire populations. So you sort of focus on the very end of the scale. And Tim and I actually co-founded Zoe eight years ago because of Tim's realization that

the food that we eat is the most important thing that affects our health. And yet we have a crisis in our food system. But this is the first time we've sat down with a leading scientist to really understand what's going on at this sort of big picture way. So maybe we can just start off by explaining what is population health and how does it impact the individual? Yeah, so it is quite a contrast to what Tim was studying there. So 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 you know, 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 3% to 5% sort of change that could be quite meaningful at a population level that maybe wouldn't be what you're looking for if you to 5 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 our 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, generally called ultra-processed foods, I think, are the number one enemy for healthy eating. And Brian, 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 scale 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 processed foods are the biggest issue. Would you have had the same answer or would you have said something different? I think I would have had 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 that when they started

50 years ago. I think that's what Bram was talking about that 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 and say, OK, were people eating this 50 years ago? Or 30 years ago, even 20 years ago? It's completely different.

So 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 foods. They never use milk. They'd use some sort of dried form of it. You know they wouldn't use corn. 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 fairly new concept this hyper palatability 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 a

time and they want you to eat more and more. They want you 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 3 in it. These 10 companies that control 80% of the supply of these foods, employ the very best food scientists working round 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. I'd like to share something exciting. Back in March 2022, we started this podcast to uncover how the latest research can help us live longer and healthier lives. We've spoken

to leading scientists around the world doing amazing research. And across hundreds of hours of conversations, they've revealed key insights that can help you to improve your health. If you don't have hundreds of hours to spare, no need to worry. At the request of many of you, our team has created a guide that contains 10 of the most impactful discoveries from the podcast that you can apply to your life. And you can get it for free. Simply go to zoe.com slash free guide or click the link in the show notes and

Do let me know what you think of it. Okay back to the show and I think we don't quite yet understand The tense point what components of them are most problematic, right? Is it the over-reading is a particular components of it is of 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. I think it's interesting that you've both said this idea that it's very different from 50 years ago, because I think most people listening will say, well, I'm surprised by that. I feel like the food that I'm eating now doesn't seem very different from, you know, the food that I might have had as a kid or that I see that my parents eat. So why are you suggesting that this is different food than we had back then?

than we had back then? On average, we know that the food supply and the diet in most countries is quite different than it was 50 years ago, right? So that's sort of statistically true. I think the other thing is that most of the foods that are ultra-processed, and that do make a majority of most diets right now, you know, we didn't really have the processing capability

50 years ago to do it, right? The technology wasn't there. The science behind it wasn't there. So there's actually quite a different set of tech that goes into them and science that goes into them, not the kind of science that we might be propagating on this end of the table, right? But things that really are quite complex that just wasn't there 50 years ago. And Brian, could you describe a bit what has changed?

I mean, 50 years ago, everyone was buying food from a big supermarket already. It's not like everybody was sort of going to their local farmer to collect milk straight out of the cow. So again, I think people, I think we'll be quite surprised to hear you say that it has changed so much. So if you think of sort of the things that are generally at the kind of outskirts

of the supermarket, I'm hoping that's universally true statement, but the produce, the meats and cheeses and milks and those sorts of things, you know, I think a lot of those are the same, although some differences, but I think a lot of those things are the same. It's really the things sort of in the middle of the supermarket that is much different to much process. And I think what we've seen is people kind of shift from the outskirts to the middle

and they're buying a lot more ready to eat foods, food that have a lot more processing before they get to them and maybe put them on their plate or as part of their cooking process. So I think that's a big part of the difference there. Yeah, 50 years ago I think people would be looking at the breakfast cereals as the very first sort of examples of this genre. Then a whole range of these other ones started to come and people realized that there was huge markups to be made, cost very little, you could charge what you like for it, you could spend huge amounts on advertising, and it had a shelf life that was like years.

And so that itself became people thinking, what else can we do in that line so that, you know, you get biscuits and cookies, you get all the cakes, you've got then it spread to ready meals and that's a relatively new idea that you just buy these pre-processed lasagnas and chilies and frozen pizzas and all these meals that are now you can buy in bulk in these supermarkets. Is it just the level of processing, sort of once food hits, the sort of big food manufacturers has changed

or has anything else changed in the food landscape? So I think what changed in the food landscape, and another word often used for that is the food environment, is much more than just processing, right? So I think that there's a lot more availability of food, right? So it used to be that food was largely available from supermarkets. Now, if we all left our midtown New York and walked just a few feet, we'd probably find five different places that were selling chips and sodas.

So I think that sort of availability is a big part. I think partly because of the processing more and more broadly, pricing is a big part of it as well. Right? We know that the price of foods have generally gone down, particularly unhealthy foods have gone down more than healthy foods. So there's sort of a bigger gap between the prices of healthy and unhealthy foods. I think that's another big one.

I think another really big one is the marketing of these foods, right? It's really, really quite prominent where you go and you see marketing for foods in a way that you didn't before. It's targeted at children oftentimes. We think this marketing really works quite well to drive particular food consumption behaviors. So I think it's kind of a combination of those things in the food environment and food landscape that are really all coming together here.

Yeah, I think in the UK only 2% of advertising is for real food, 98% is for ultra processed food. So the landscape is just so twisted that it's not surprising that they're going in these divergent directions. Brian, right back to the quickfire questions. You said we're getting sicker from the foods we eat, and you're now looking again at this population level. What do you see?

So, if you just look at broad population level data, you see that the percentage of ultra-processed foods in the diet is going up, and you see that in general, folks are getting more unhealthy. So there's sort of that kind of base level correlation here. I think that's sort of not enough to sort of directly say that there's a cause and effect there, but I think there's lots of other kind of evidence as well, particularly from these smaller scale studies. And Brian, in what way are populations

getting more unhealthy? So I think populations are getting more unhealthy in a couple of different ways, right? So we've seen very much rising rates of obesity. Most Western countries, and you're going to sort of see that quite dramatic rise in obesity rates in all populations, not just particular populations. Yeah, there's that Lancet report saying by 2050, 50% of the world's population is going to be overweight or obese.

I mean, quite frightening. And that, mainly the food environment that's doing that. Is absolutely right. And then I think the other big one that comes along And that, mainly the food environment that's doing that. Is absolutely right. And then I think the other big one that comes along with that, but it's also independently a problem, are things like diabetes, right? And other sort of metabolic diseases like that, that are really quite problematic.

And we know our huge, you know, a huge drain on individuals' health and a huge drain on the health system as well. So those are sort of two quite prominent examples, but there's more, right? You know, there's fatty liver disease. There's all kinds of things that kind of come along with this sort of unhealthy eating.

And, you know, some people say mental health issues, particularly the epidemic in the young is at least partly caused by the unhealthy eating. So obviously for any individual who, you know, ends up being sick as a result, it's terrible for them. Are there any like broader sort of, I guess, society-wide consequences of this sort of sicker and heavier population?

So I think there's multiple things that go along with that. I think we can't minimize the individual costs, so I think that's there. I think that there's also broader societal costs in terms of changes in productivity and changes in contributions to society. I think that's another kind of really big one as well that has quite big financial implications. I think the other one that has really big financial implications is just the cost for

treating these individuals is very much high and going up, and governments are children a big chunk of those dollars. And so I think that that has real implications for the broader society, not just those that are impacted by potentially the poor nutrition themselves. And isn't that a big part of the costs of health systems around the world today related to the food we're eating? It is a big part of it.

It's a growing part of it. You know, it used to be that in most Western countries, it was sort of smoking that was a number one killer and the number one kind of contribution to healthcare costs at certain periods of time. Now it's really shifted to being sort of diet and nutrition and metabolic diseases like that. And so I think that that's a big and growing problem.

I mean, as a proportion of the cost of the UK, we know that the food companies are making about 30 billion pounds, 40 billion dollars worth of profit in the UK, and it's probably costing between 90 and 140 billion pounds in healthcare costs directly, which is getting close to the total NHS budget. So these are massive, massive numbers that are potentially preventable.

And do you see that also, Brian, in your research? I ask because people talk about this, but this is what you really study. I mean, do you really see food as such a big driver of the health costs globally now? I think that's true. I mean, I think the stats you're giving from, Tim, are broadly true across the world. And they're things that we have seen progressively get worse, not better. So I think these are very real costs costs and I think those are true statements. This is pretty shocking, isn't it? Like I think we all grew up with the idea that smoking

is really bad and it causes cancer and these tobacco companies were sort of hiding this, but now we figured it out. And it sounds like we're sort of sleepwalking through a situation where now a huge part of our health costs are coming from food and yet we don't seem to be doing much about it. So one of the things about smoking is that it kills you quickly and pretty dramatically, right? When you die of lung cancer, at least previously, it was sort of a quick thing and you came and you were done and you didn't sort of like, I think for something like nutrition, a lot

of these things are slowly building over time, right? You know, weight slowly building over time, diabetes slowly building over time. And once you're at these points and have these health conditions, you know, treating them with some recent exception is actually quite difficult. And so I think part of the reason you're saying that is because it is something that, you know, presented very differently than smoking did historically, and it's something that has been a little bit sort of slow growing right now. Yeah, and I think smoking, interestingly,

in the US but in the UK, the tax paid on cigarettes more than compensates for the extra health care that is needed for smokers. I'm not saying the government gains from people dying of lung cancer, but that's sort of the way it's going, and it's the total opposite for food. In addition to the taxes for smoking, really keeping a sort of the way it's going. And it's the total opposite for food. In addition to the taxes for smoking, really keeping a lot of people from smoking as well.

Correct, yeah. It's preventive. So if I understand this rightly, we're eating more and more of these ultra processed foods and this shift in diet is like now making a lot of us sicker. I'd love to understand why they're in everything, right? Like what's going on behind that? And Tim, I'd like to pick up on some of what you said

earlier about sort of these giant corporations. What's going on there? The giant corporations are these 10 major companies, massive companies like Nestle or General Mills that control 80% of the food around the world and that's basically in our supermarkets, whichever country you go to. They own all these subsidiaries.

So they have enormous power and their budgets are the size of medium-sized countries. So you've got to start thinking of them as these, you know, as if countries like Kenya or Tanzania were lobbying to buy Kenyan coffee. It's the same idea of all their resources going into Washington or London and influencing what happens to the politics of food.

So they've kept this off the agenda successfully so that no one until now has really been asking these questions to say why aren't these companies paying for all the health care misery they're causing instead of just making massive profits that they're keeping and giving back to their shareholders. So they've got no moral rationale when they were set up. They were set up as companies to make money, and they will do that if nobody stops them. And Tim, can you paint me a picture maybe of an ultra processed food just for people trying to get their head around this, like why this ends up being much more profitable

for them than, you know, what a company might have sold before that was in the food business? Yeah, the example I like to give is a potato chip type food like Pringles. It looks like a potato. It's sort of molded, it was like identical potatoes. You've never seen a potato like that in real life, but it's sort of got that potato shape. And yet its main ingredient is not a potato. It's actually cheaper to use rice or tapioca

or some sort of corn extract. A little bit of potato tagged in as the third or fourth ingredient, stuck together, molded like a big bit of dough. Then it's pressured with pressure heaters to make it into these shapes, which are then baked at super high temperature under pressure.

And then they add these chemical seasonings to it, about 30 of them, to make it a tasty snack that looks a bit like a potato. And it's done at perhaps a quarter the price of actually just slicing up a potato and putting it in some vegetable oil and adding salt, which is how it should have been done. They've worked out this is brilliant and they'll actually people over eat it.

And that's what most of these potato, in inverted commas, snacks are like. They're made with whatever the cheapest, most usable ingredient is. They don't really care about the quality of it. And it's all about providing something that looks visually good, has a nice snap to it, and then has all these chemicals to make your tongue go delirious with the effects, as if it's doing something to your brain. And the Pringles could all be made in a factory

under controlled conditions, versing the potato chips that you really need to make real time in front of people, or right before they have them, with labor there and spaces there. And so all of those things really contribute to the overall cost. If you're the company running, it's just like much more efficient. You can keep prices down.

It can last on your shelves for years. And then you spend all of the money you make on marketing to tell everybody how great this product is and that you should buy it. And developing other science and technology that's gonna develop even more tastier, more products that people can't resist. More addictive ones, yes. That's exactly what they do. And they're very, very good at it.

I'd like to ask a controversial question now. Do they know that this food that they're making is less healthy than the food that it replaces? Absolutely. I would agree. It's hard to imagine that anyone engaged in this process wouldn't know that. It's a bit like the cigarette industry. They knew it was harmful, but they said, well, people love smoking.

They'll say people love these snacks. They love their potato chips or whatever it is. And they do. Let's give them pleasure. So they're justifying working in that field by saying, well, I'm surrounded by the best food scientists in the world, I'm well paid. And people, we're not forcing anyone to buy these snacks.

They love them. But they're creating something that, you know, it's about, I don't know, I've read estimates about one in 10 people are actually addicted to these types of ultra processed snacks and foods. So, you know, they really feel a compulsion to keep eating them.

We mentioned right at the beginning of this question about funding research. And I think it was Tim said, well, actually these food companies are funding research sort of for their own gain. And Brian, you were just mentioning, like, they know that this isn't, this food isn't healthy. What is going on?

What do we know is actually happening? So the industry does fund food research, you know, and if you sort of step back and look at the kind of research that they're funding, or rather the outcomes of the research, it's generally not things that are showing these products are unhealthy. It's very specific questions that tend to kind of look at ancillary things or cherry pick particular sorts of outcomes that might look better.

The food industry is not funding studies that are taking a global look at whether or not these are healthy foods or not, right? That's not the kinds of questions that they're most interested in. And so why do they fund these studies at all? So they can talk about how great their foods are. So they're like carefully picking studies actually to allow them to say, hey, this thing is good, even though they know that if they were to step back and like do a fairly designed study, it would say this food is really bad.

I think that's right. Examples are, so the diet cola industry would set up a study to show that these are great compared to other sodas for helping children not have dental caries, you know, so their teeth don't rot. Very specific on that, they wouldn't look at anything else and they'd be very, and in a way, it's distraction technique is what they use a lot. They have these umbrella organizations

that they use to give out the grants, like Ilsy, which has largely gone underground, but it was funded by Coca-Cola, and they gave out lots of grants to people to say that if children run around and have playgrounds and exercise time, they can lose weight, which sort of meant that it was fine to have your Coke or your Pepsi as long as you did a bit

of running in the playground. It didn't matter. And Tim, is that not true? That's not true. No, it's absolutely not true. You don't have to look around and see how many obese children there are. Even if they do run around, if you over consume all these snacks and drinks, you're going to get obese.

So this distraction technique as well as this make them look good technique is basically what they're doing, diverting attention. So for 10 years, you know, it was all about you can run, you know, any reason the US has an obesity crisis is they're not running enough. The kids are not getting playgrounds. And to be fair, physical activity is really important. It's just probably not gonna help with your obesity very much, right? Absolutely.

And so I think that that was a big part of it for a while. It was activities or advertising around moving and things like that, when obviously that was not the overall problem here. It sounds like this is a really conscious policy brand that they are pursuing. This isn't just sort of accidental. They're not opening their books to us necessarily to sort of see what they're doing, but there

have definitely been evidence of sort of concerted efforts through some of the groups that Tim's mentioning some of these trade organizations to focus on things like movement, right? Or very particular sorts of questions versus the broader fundamental question of whether or not their products are helpful or not. Could you tell me a bit more about that? Yeah, so, you know, there's been a couple sports organizations that have been funded by the food industry, right, to sort of talk about movement and physical activity.

Even if you look back at sort of during the Obama administration, which I thought was actually quite a good program, the First Lady's Let's Move initiative, like it was great, it was really important, and a lot of it was still about moving and physical activity versus just kind of looking at the kind of foods that were there as well. So I think even in sort of quite well-meaning ones, if you wanted to bring the food industry

along with you, you really did have to focus on some of these physical activity things versus focusing just on the food. But it's a distraction. It's a brilliant distraction. To get everyone thinking about exercise is the cure for everything, then they won't think about all these soda machines in schools and the food environment and the snacks and those other stuff, just not getting enough exercise. And that was really brilliant the way they did it. And I think they delayed any legislation by at least a decade by doing that.

It sounds incredibly cynical. I just want to check Brian, I think quite a careful academic. And I think I'm just struck that, you know, this is quite strong really to talk about what they're doing. This does not seem like it's within the reasonable behavior of what we would expect from companies who are providing the food that we live on? Yeah, I think it's quite reasonable behavior if you look at it from the perspective of what these companies' jobs are, right?

Their job is to return profits to their shareholders, and I think the best way they can do that is to really sort of focus on some of the foods that are not particularly healthy for us, right? Or not healthy for us at all in many cases. So, you know, I think that that's pretty true. I think it probably shouldn that are not particularly healthy for us, right, or not healthy for us at all in many cases. So I think that that's pretty true. I think it probably shouldn't be a particularly controversial statement.

What I see the kind of biggest problem here is a failure from the government to step in and say, this is something that's really not helpful for our citizens and we want to tackle it a little bit. Industries doing what they do, yes, I wish they were different. Yes, I wish that they took more of a, we're going to sacrifice some of our profit in a more dramatic way to help the health of society. But I think the bigger downfall really comes to some of the government for not stepping in in a bigger sort of way.

So could you tell us what role government policy should have around this whole new ultra-processed food that has been clearly filling up the middles of our supermarkets? Yeah. So I think there's a couple of problems that have made tackling ultra-processed foods even trickier than tackling other foods. I think some of it, as you heard from Tim, is the definition of these things are not super clear, right? If you're going to actually go after something in a regulatory environment or actually come up

with policy against it, you need to have clear definitions of what it is that you're going after. So I think that's one of the reasons that it's tricky for government to do something. That said, a couple of things that government can do. I think one of the things we can do, which you've seen in certain scenarios, is change the prices of these foods via taxes.

I think that that's one of them. You've seen the most work on this in sugary beverage taxes. I think it's the class of ultra-processed foods that we can actually clearly identify and target at some sort of liquid with some sugar in it, right? So I think it's a little easier to kind of go after that. It's also a class of products that arguably doesn't have any real nutritional value otherwise.

And so it's an easier one to kind of really make the poster child, if you will, of something that we can kind of go after with policy or taxes. So I think that's another kind of big one. You've seen some governments try to start labeling these foods in a different sort of way, particularly on the front of the package. And that's something that some countries have had more success than others. That's something we're lagging a little farther behind with in the US.

The third thing that you can do, which again, some countries have had more success than others is think about some restrictions on marketing these foods, particularly marketing to kids. And I think that's another real one where some governments, Chile being a prominent one that stands out, have actually had some success in trying to change the marketing of these foods, particularly to children in a way that other countries, particularly in the US, we haven't been able to for a number of reasons. The show you're listening to right now that's providing you the latest evidence-based health haven't been able to someone you think would benefit. And if you haven't already click follow this podcast wherever you're listening right now. Okay, let's get back to the show.

And when you look at like the science across those changes, do any of those things work? Yeah, so let's sort of take them one by one. You know, there's been most evidence from taxes in things like supermarkets, right? Does it sort of change what people purchase in supermarkets? And I think the answer to that is a pretty clear yes. People are purchasing fewer of these beverages once you start implementing these taxes. You have to do the studies in a nuanced way. For example, if you have a tax in one city and not the other, people will cross the border and buy more sodas there.

But even if you kind of take that into account, these are things that are definitely decreasing people's purchase of these beverages. So I think there's some pretty good evidence on taxes. And Brian, on that one, is the hope that you just sort of like make more money out of people who are buying these products or is the hope that the food manufacturers therefore sort of change the products that they're making in response to these taxes so that they stop saying, well, our only job is to worry about how much profit we make. We don't care that this is killing you.

It's sort of like trying to say, oh, actually I am caring now about whether I'm killing you with this. I'm going to use all my great food scientists to make this product that is still tasty, but isn't going to be bad for you. Yeah. So let's break down each of those. I think those are each different mechanisms by which this policy could be helpful.

So one thing that taxes do is just make people purchase less of those products. And if we think they're unhelpful products, then that's a good thing. And that's what happened in the UK, by the way, the sugar levy, they didn't make any money on it because nearly everybody apart from selling classic Coke and Pepsi switched their formulations.

And so they just added the artificial sweeteners and drove down the sugar. So it didn't generate any money, but it did switch behavior. And that's the second reason by sort of what we call reformulation. So changing your product where it doesn't necessarily qualify for the tax and hopefully is more helpful. So I think that's another kind of big thing that people can do. And then a third example is it didn't work necessarily this way exactly in the UK, but if there is money that comes from these policies and you can hopefully

redirect that back into things that will actually help decrease demand for these products even more or help deal with the consequences of the negative health impacts that they have. I think we're then going to move on to this question about labeling. Yeah. So there's a couple of move on to this question about labeling. Yeah. So there's a couple different ways you can think about labeling, right? One is what we have in the States

is something called menu labeling or calorie labeling in fast food restaurants or other chain restaurants. So you walk up into a fast food place, you're gonna order something, you see not only the product and how much it costs, but actually the number of calories that are in it. So this is something that's rolled out over the US over the last sort of 10 or 15 years.

We've done some of these studies and found that, you know, on average, these don't have a whopping effect, but they probably have a smallish effect on the number of calories people are purchasing at these restaurants. So that's sort of one way you can kind of go about labeling. And wears off, though, doesn't it? I thought the New York studies show that after a while,

people revert. It helps for a little bit, and then it... So we have since done better studies than that that use sort of more detailed, bigger data and found that the drop off is not quite as much as we thought it was initially. So yes, it does wear off a little bit and I also don't want to oversell the impact of these, right? So for an average of a thousand calorie meal,

we're talking 20 to 30 calories, right? Oh wow, let me just tell you, so instead of eating a thousand calorie meal, you eat a 980 calorie meal. This seems like a very small return for making every poor country put calories. And it's still rubbish food. So you're absolutely right.

This alone is not gonna do anything to change population level obesity. Glad we clarified that. But I also wanna say that now, but remember, we're talking about things at a population level here. So you're not gonna find any of these policies that are gonna be 350, 400 calorie sorts of interventions So you're not going to find any of these policies that are going to be 350, 400 calorie sorts

of interventions. You're going to have to find things that are 20, 20, 20, 20, 20 across a whole bunch of realms if you're going to try to think about a broader policy level solution to some of these problems. Well, Brian, I was just thinking as you talk about labeling and I think both of you have been talking about sort of this analogy with tobacco in the past. We sort of been on this long journey, if I think back to when I was a kid

and they were advertising tobacco everywhere with sort of manly cowboys smoking their Marlboros. This is all, you know, I mean, you're smiling because that seems so crazy. I was describing this to my son last week. And firstly, he couldn't imagine really that tobacco could be associated with a brand in that way. That'd be advertised like that.

Even before advertised. But he just couldn't even imagine somehow it could have that one-to-one relationship because to him it's so sort of impossible. And so I'm just thinking, you know, when you're talking about labeling, you're talking about like the amount of calories, but is it conceivable that you could end up having

the sort of, you know, huge warning labels on ultra processed food and indeed, you know, sort of the restrictions and with that really start to make a difference? Yeah, so I think you're absolutely pointing towards a different sort of labeling here that could be much more effective. And you've seen these play out in a couple of different countries, right? Some of the evidence, I think, for other countries, particularly Chile, is a little bit more encouraging. It's a big black hexagon that goes on. It's very visible. And it is more along the lines of what you're describing there, where it's not just sort of like a small little nuanced thing. It's a much more prominent one. And there's been talk about,

is that even enough? Do you need something skull and crossbones like? Do you need various Xs if it's high in fat or sugar or things like that. Does it work? So there is some evidence that it's effective in changing children's, or oftentimes parents, food choices for children in places like Chile. Again, this is not by itself going to be enough to change things overall. But just taking the cartoons off was one thing that did make a big difference, didn't it? That kind of gets to the third thing we talked about, which is marketing, right?

And so, and that was a big change, I think, that they did in marketing in a place like Chile, is that they actually changed and said, if you want to sell bad cereal, sugary cereal to children, you can't put a cartoon character on the front. It has to be completely unbranded package. And again, the industry is very smart about getting around these rules,

and they had to really kind of go after them in multiple different ways. But I think that's another potential solution here as well. And does that make a difference? Yeah, I think there's some evidence that makes a difference as well. Lots of evidence that that makes a difference in experimental studies, right?

You know, you show kids in a lab, one versus the other, they're definitely gonna eat more of the branded character foods, regardless of what kind of foods there are, right? So it's a bunch of evidence from that. That's really interesting. I'd never really thought about it. So the fact they have these characters on the front of-

Happy tigers or other sort of Batman or whatever it is. That's not just somehow like a general trying to differentiate my products. Like it literally, it's gonna make kids in particular sort of want this product more. So in these lab studies, you sort of randomize the product with and without the kind of character. And when you have the character,

they're gonna choose them more often and need more of them, right? And it's true sort of regardless of the type of product it is. So you mean if the character had been on the apple, I could have got the kids to eat more apples. It's like literally, and this is a big yes back to the conversation we had before that there's not a lot kids to eat more apples. It's like literally, and this is a big yes back to the conversation we had before

that there's not a lot of money in selling apples. So nobody is doing the sort of the marketing investment to make the apple seem more appealing because it's not this clever thing you've built in the lab yourself. Apple man is super power. So there's no tiger on my apple packaging. You occasionally see that

and you occasionally see these sort of efforts that prop up that are like, we are gonna use the same marketing that goes towards the unhealthy foods and put them towards healthy foods and produce. They never really have traction. They never really take hold. You know, it's hard to do it.

It's hard to maintain it. It's quite expensive. You know, it's really interesting. I have a five-year-old as well as a 17-year-old, and I'm often frustrated about the yogurt. You say yogurt, that she chooses and that she wants. And it had never occurred to me until now that actually she really likes the ones

that are sort of for kids. And now that I think about it, like the packaging is very different from the sort of adults healthier ones that I want her to eat. And that it's also true that when it's all invisible, she doesn't care as much, you know? And I always thought it was just

because they have more sugar put in them. And I'm sure that's part of it. That's certainly part of it. But it sounds like you're saying that isn't the whole story. Like, you know, she's only five, but you're saying she's already susceptible to this sort of branded marketing. Oh, that's right.

And until kids are about that age, five, six, they actually can't necessarily tell the difference between what's an advertisement and what's just a regular program that they're watching or something like that as well. Right. So that sort of makes it sort of doubly bad in that regard. But yeah, I think it's definitely the sugar as well, but the branded products absolutely make it trickier for you as a parent. And presumably somewhere like the states,

it's particularly hard to restrict things like advertising because of maybe questions around free speech that might be less of an issue in many of the other countries where people might be listening. That's exactly right. So in the states, our Supreme Court thus far has ruled that marketing is really thought of as corporate speech

and is given some of the same First Amendment protections. And so it's quite hard for even a state government if they wanted to regulate marketing in that way. So it's something that we have made much less progress on. There's been a whole bunch of voluntary sorts of things that haven't gone particularly well, but it's something quite hard to do in the states relative to some other places. 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. When I think back to before that, Tim, we hardly ever talked about ultra processed foods. 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 at Brian.

Well, I can tell you as a parent of a 13 year old, it's hard to really get too radical about this. So in your home environment, right, you can maybe control what's there. You can control even the media they consume. Once your kid starts getting older, maybe you see this with your older kid, going out into the world, it's really hard.

They're passing these stores all the times themselves. They're seeing things. They're making purchases on their own, right? So I think that it becomes even trickier to control. 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, 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 UPS? Well, a few months ago, I would have said, look at the back of the pack, number of ingredients, and that's biggest red flag that this is going to make you overeat. this is gonna make you overeat, and it's gonna be ultra-processed food and bad for your gut. But now there's a more sophisticated solution, which is in the Zoey app. So for the last two years, the science team at Zoey 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 labeling or lumping them all together, into five categories, including three ultra-processed food categories. One that's pre-neutral or only potentially low risk, and the other is moderate risk, and the other is extreme risk.

And we're taking into account not just additives, not just those chemicals, emulsifiers, sweeteners, 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 overeat.

And that means, as studies have shown, you're gonna 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 bases. But if you start to think how the food companies are thinking, 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. First, I think quite a lot of people will be excited. I'm very excited about it and started to use it all the time now. It's a huge plus because people have been asking me all the time, why don't you have something in the Zoey app

that tells us how ultra-processed it is? And we sort of thought about that, but now we've got one that's not only ultra-processed, but how does it link to your health risk? And that's the key thing here, because some of these additives might be quite trivial. They're just in there. They might be in natural plants in some way, like soy lesser thin or something that,

if that's the only ingredient, say in some dark chocolate, then the dark chocolate is good quality. That's the only thing there. I'm not gonna say that's terrible food. I'm never gonna eat it, because it's gonna be better than many other things that I'm gonna be eating.

Bread's a good example. You go into any store with a range of breads, and you look at the back of the pack, and you don't understand exactly what's going on. Some will have 20, 30 ingredients, others will have four, but within them, some of those are going to be good and bad, and some of those breads are going to be designed to be hyper palatable, because they've added sugar, they've added

salt and other stuff in there that's going to make you overeat it. So you will eat much more of that bread than you would one down at the other end of the range that either may have no ingredients or anything that we call it. So it might have a score of zero or one, or it might just have one emulsifier or something to make the bread stick together, but otherwise it's a healthy product.

And so it allows you to look at the range of foods, discard the ones right at the end, the same as for breakfast cereals, some cookies and things like this. There's always a range. And that's what we're trying to do is to say, well, we're not trying to stop people eating all these foods, demonize all breads.

We just want people to start picking the ones at the good end of the spectrum and trying to avoid the ones at the other end, which are definitely harmful. You're quite serious about your diet, we know that. Would you try and avoid all UPFs? So would you use this to avoid all of them, including those that are sort of at the one out of three

risk level that you're talking about? No, I'm interested in avoiding definitely the number fives. I sort of know what they are myself anyway now because I've been doing research in it. I would use it for the number fours, the sort of moderate risk if I can because some of those are disguised as healthy foods. So they're the ones I'm avoiding. I'm not too worried about threes because they're sort of neutral. You know, I want to about it, but I'd still be happy to eat them, because you can't suddenly be a Puritan and eat nothing out there.

I think some of these are interesting fun treats. I still want to have the occasional cookie or biscuit with my tea, but it might rather, we're not gonna have a whole packet every day, but occasionally I think they're fine. Chocolate's a great example. Some things have dark chocolate and the polyphenol I'm always going on about.

Am I gonna not eat it because it's got one emulsifier to stick it together? No, I'd rather pick something that isn't, but I wouldn't not eat it. That's my view. I don't know, do you have a feeling on, is there a minimum amount of ultra processing you would eat? I do think that there is a huge range

of healthfulness in ultra processed foods, right? And I think that absolutely true that some of them are worse than others. And I think the bread example is one that I always use as well, right? Even if you compare, you know, local bread from your bakery fresh baked with completely white flour

versus something from the supermarket that is ultra processed but has 100% whole wheat flour. Like that second one's probably gonna be more helpful for you, right? And so I do think that there's a huge range there. And I think the science is still emerging, and even more so, how we transmit that information to consumers is also quite tricky as well.

Do you know someone who wants to make smarter food choices, but may not know what's really behind the label? If so, why not share this episode with them right now? We've got two policy experts who can help them make smarter food choices. I'm sure they'll thank you. So Brian, I'd love to talk about what our listeners could be pushing governments about

in terms of policy change. If you could wave your magic wand, our listeners could be pushing governments about in terms of policy change. If you could wave your magic wand, what would you be pushing for? I think it's a lot of the things we've talked about before. It would definitely be more serious about taxes, right? And moving on from taxes just to sugary, 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 wanna think about doing something on marketing, right? I think this is actually a really, really big one that is gonna 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. Or 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 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 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 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 these category four or five, particularly the five ones, could just be banned outright. And that would be fairly straightforward to do once it's an accepted system. Do you think that would work?

So I definitely think schools are a really important area to look at 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's 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? In some private schools, for example, non-publicly funded schools, they just don't require you to bring a lunch, and they provide it to you, right? And so that is something that happens in some places.

And if we go back to sort of maybe the early part of the podcast where I think you were describing like quite a close analogy with cigarettes in terms of the impact on health and sort of misalignment really between companies just trying to make money and like the impact on people's health. It feels like the responses are all quite cautious. It seems like if you look at the tobacco example,

and is that because the reality is it's really just nothing like as bad as tobacco and after all, who wants to be in a world where you can never have cake or a cookie? And so does that mean that it's just not analogous or is it that this is all new and like everything new, it's gonna take us another five or 10 years to just realize how serious this is.

So we'll be sitting here in 10 years time saying, well, we were mad to think that we wouldn't need to like take much stricter rules on this because basically it's like putting, I don't know, something poisonous in the water, you change the regulations. So you can still have food. After all, nobody's saying you can't have cake,

but we just can't have any more of this ultra processed cake. So I think it's a combination of both of those things. People love food. I love food, right? I mean, this is something that is pretty ubiquitous. It's very culturally driven. It's a huge part of life. We all love food.

And we all need to eat, right? And so it is a harder class of products to go after than something like cigarettes, right? You could demonize cigarettes. You could demonize cigarette companies in a way that is much, much, much harder to do with food. So I think that that's a big part of it. So I think partly because of that, I think it is harder to sort of shoulder

or gather the political will to do a lot of these population level solutions. I mean, even things like taxes, we don't even have them everywhere in the states. It's only a handful of cities and counties, right, that have done these things in some states. But isn't that the lobbying of the big food companies stopping the politicians acting like they did,

you know, for decades in cigarettes? They delayed legislation. Absolutely. And they've got huge budgets to impact, you know, what goes on in D. in DC and in London. I think that's absolutely a huge part of it. And there being a different sort of popular uprising for some of these policies in a way that maybe is quite different than for cigarettes. I think that there was a kind of a clear understanding that cigarettes were bad and there was a problem

and there was a clear villain and someone to go after. I think when you combine some of that lobbying with this general sort of like, but I like those foods, it even becomes trickier to make broader policy level change there. So Brian, to sort of come to the conclusion, what would your advice be to individuals who are navigating this food system

that's clearly stacked against them? I would say pay attention to what's driving you to eat particular things, right? And if it's driving you to eat things that you don't like, try to think about why, right? What is it there? And how would you like to make the healthier choice the easier choice?

And what are some policies that you can maybe do to do that? I think that should be a real goal of policies, to make the healthier choice the easier choice. And that's something that I think we can make some movement on and we're just not quite there yet. I think that should be a real goal of policy is to make the healthier choice the easier choice. And that's something that I think we can make some movement on and we're just not quite there yet. I think that's really interesting. We talk a lot about mindful eating at Zoe and it's this sort of realization

that a lot of what we're doing with food is we're not even aware sometimes that we're even eating, right? You snack, you don't even realize. You're definitely often not aware of what you're eating and you're almost certainly not aware truly of what you're eating, like what is actually inside it and therefore what is its health impact on you. And what we've seen is that when people start

this mindful eating and they start to get into this habit, like those three things together, can have quite a profound impact because I think just, you know, anyone listening to this, I doubt that anyone is more keen to eat Pringles. I'm definitely like, totally shocked. But it's not even a potato. And so obviously affects you.

And it doesn't mean that you're not necessarily going to snack anything, but you might like, well, I could quite happily switch to, you know, a whole bunch of other things I suddenly realized are much healthier. And so I love this idea of the, like, being mindful, helping you to understand is like suddenly empowering you to make more of a decision.

So I think being mindful is absolutely part of it and part of the solutions. I would also like it to make slightly easier for you to grab something that's not a Pringle. Brian, Tim, thank you so much for taking the time. I'd like to try and do a quick summary and we covered a lot of different things. The thing that's I guess really on my mind

is this analogy with smoking. And I think Brian, you said at the beginning, like smoking used to be the number one killer and now actually it's diet and nutrition, but it's sort of been slow growing and it's not as obvious that it's the food that's killed you as it was with smoking because you don't just have this one disease

that is linked to sort of ultra processed food in the way that we had lung cancer linked to cigarettes. And so this has sort of been happening secretly around us. And it matters not just because it might affect you or your loved ones, but also it's this enormous burden on the health system, which means they can't be treating all of these other things. So it's affecting everybody who's listening.

And what's really shocking is it might be a surprise to me, but I think you're both telling me it's not at all a surprise to these massive big food corporations. Like they know about the health impact, but they are chasing their profit motive. And as a result, they're like, well, it's not our problem. It's not banned by the government. So we're going to keep doing this like genius food science to make it so tasty. But also I think some people here will be shocked. That's some very underhand behavior it sounds like in terms of intentionally funding science that confuses the issue and says, well, you know, oh, but it's really good against dental

decay so don't worry about the fact that it's going to give you diabetes. Or like funding all sorts of sports movements so that you focus on exercise and don't think about this. My other big takeaway is I'm totally shocked what's actually in a Pringle because it is designed to look like a potato chip. There's many other examples about, you know, let's not poor old Pringles, you know, if you were starting to get the varlins out for them now, but every country in the world I think you can see them these days. But it's a brilliant example, I guess, as you described it, of just like the complexity

of how it's put together. And it's rather extraordinary as I listened to it, that this is cheaper than just taking a potato. So again, explaining how somehow this ultra-processing is actually more efficient, as you were saying, Brian. The other thing I'm really struck by is how much marketing is going to kids and that there is all this science that says,

it's really effective. And so you said, you know, stick a character on a food and the kids will eat it more. And so all of these foods with these cartoon characters, again, they know that this is targeted to children and it's going to have an impact on sales. But on the other hand, I don't wanna leave with no positive news.

I think the positive news is this idea, Brian, is you're saying like pay attention to what's driving you to eat something. You might not even like it that much as you start to think about it because of the ways that Tim was describing it, making you want to eat more. And that there are things that governments could do around taxes, about restricting marketing, about food labels. And there's evidence from certain countries starting to do that, that this can have impact.

And so if anyone's listening to this and wants to do more, then the question is, well, you know, how could you lobby at your local level to start to make those changes? And I guess you didn't say this, but I think my take on this is the idea that we would ever restrict smoking sort of 40 years ago seemed mad, I think.

This was, of course, that's how it all has to be. And I think now we think it would be mad to allow cigarette companies to be advertising to our children and mad to allow you to smoke indoors and all these things that have shifted. And so I guess I'm quite optimistic that as we start to understand what's going on here, we will look at it in

the same way that we think about, you know, lead in the water and we still have water and we still have all this food. But if we start to understand this better, which is also, I'm very excited by all of Tim and the other Zoe scientists about UPF, like understanding this better could allow us to reduce the UPF and still be able to eat snacks and treats we like. Am I way too optimistic or is this possible? No, I think we've definitely reached a turning point. Everyone's talking about UPF now. They weren't talking about it before. We're starting to understand what's gone into the food and now we've got, you know, to get tools like like the Zoe app that

can empower the individual to make the right choices or steer them towards the right choices without having to you know give up everything and I think that's really important. Brian, Tim, thank you so much for coming and joining us today. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Now if you listen to the show regularly, you already believe that changing how you eat can transform your health, but you can only do so much with general advice from a weekly podcast. If you want to feel much better now and be on the path to live many more healthy years, you need something more.

And that's why more than 100,000 members trust Zoe each day to help them make the smartest food choices. Combining our world-leading science with your Zoe test results, Zoe is your daily companion to better health for life. So how does it work? Zoe membership starts with at-home testing to understand your unique body. Then Zoe's app is your health coach using weekly check-ins and daily guidance to help you shift your food choices to steadily improve your health. I rely on Zoe's advice every day, and truly it has transformed how I feel. Will you give Zoe a try?

The first step is easy. Take our free quiz to find out what Zoe membership could do for you. Simply go to zoe.com slash podcast, where whereas a podcast listener, you'll get 10% off. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolff. Zoey's Science and Nutrition is produced by Julie Pinero, Sam Durham, and Richard Willow. The Zoey's Science and Nutrition podcast is not medical advice. And if you have any medical concerns, please consult your doctor. See you next time.