Inside Tim Spector’s weekly food shop - 6 grocery rules to lower your blood pressure, cholesterol, and heart disease risk | Prof Tim Spector & Prof Sarah Berry

navigating the supermarket maze

0:00Welcome to Zoe Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. A neon sign hangs above your head, buzzing and flickering. Bathed in its harsh light, it feels as if you've been standing motionless for hours. Your eyes are wide as they flit back and forth. A bead of sweat runs down your furrowed brow

0:30as you whisper into the void, what yogurt should I buy? In our grandparents' day, the weekly shop was easy, with little to choose from, and much of it was simple whole food. Today, we're inundated with choices. There are hundreds of snack options, an endless range of breads, and a thousand different yogurts. It can be so overwhelming that we feel paralyzed by too much choice. So today, I talked to two of the world's leading nutrition scientists about how they do their weekly shop. They outlined six simple rules to help you navigate the experience.

1:05And so by the end of today's episode, you'll have the necessary know-how to transform the health of your shopping basket. I'm joined by Tim Spector, scientific co-founder of Zoe, and Sarah Berry, Zoe's chief scientist. Both are professors at King's College London, both are world-leading experts on nutrition science, and have decades of experience running nutrition studies and navigating grocery stores. With their powers combined, they'll finally remove the pain and confusion from grocery shopping. And by the end of the episode, you'll be able

1:37to confidently choose the best products to keep you healthy for years to come. Tim, is it true that some breads are healthier than others? Definitely. Are most kefirs and kombuchas in the supermarket healthy? Probably not. Sarah, do you buy many products that advertise themselves as sugar-free? No. Do you use front-of-pack nutrition labels to guide your shopping choices?

2:06Partially. Have you changed what you buy each week since joining Zoe? Yes. Absolutely, yes. And finally, Tim, what's the biggest thing that people get wrong when they're doing their weekly shop? I think it's being fooled by those labels on the front with ridiculous health claims. High protein, low fat, low sugar, low calorie. They're the things most people get wrong and they get attracted to them. When I walk into my local grocery store when I'm going to do the shop, I can sometimes feel

2:41completely overwhelmed. You know, I want to buy the best foods for my health and for my family's health, but there are so many options today. So, for instance, if I want to go and buy yogurt, which I know from YouTube can be a healthy option, there are rows and rows and rows to choose from, and I can't read the ingredient list for all of them. And today, I'm hoping we can go behind the scenes and get a sneak peek into your shopping carts and understand what world-leading

the explosion of food choice

3:08nutrition scientists actually do when they have to go and do the shop. Tim, why are there so many options in shops today? I feel like when I was young, it was like nowhere near as bad as this. Most big supermarkets have 30,000 or more items, some up to 50,000, which is just incredible. And I think it's quite important to put this into an evolutionary perspective. I think just 100 years ago, or even 70 years ago, there was virtually no choice of what you had. It was what there was in the house or what

3:43there was in the village. There wasn't this concept of waking up every day or going to the shops and say, which of these thousands of items am I going to eat today? And I think we're suddenly faced with ridiculous amounts of choice. And we will tend to go for the unhealthy, sparkly, shiny things that marketing is telling us to buy. And I think this is where the manufacturers are doing such a marvellous job on marketing and making us buy things that we wouldn't normally eat. I feel we're all convinced

4:16that having more choice must be good. So isn't it just a good thing that there's now this enormous variety of different foods in the supermarket? So I think it's actually a double-edged sword. I do think there are some benefits to it. The things that I'm now seeing on the shelves compared to when I was younger, you know, 30, 40 years ago, there's an enormous new variety that's then exposing us to all different types of fibres, polyphenols, bioactives, and different tastes. So I think that's one good side,

4:48one good aspect of it. One other benefit is that by having the variety that we have, we do also have the opportunity to offer different price points according to people's budgets. The majority of people have very little expendable income left for food. And so those choices are often based purely on budget. And we know the heavily processed ones tend to be about 55% cheaper than the minimally processed. So yes, we're offering more variety, but I do think therefore we're offering variety of foods that are often a lot less healthy than if

5:21we'd narrowed it down to the original types of food. As an example, let's go back to when I was younger, you had your full fat yogurt, you had your natural kind of low fat yogurt, you might have had a fruit sweetened yogurt. There wasn't the array that we had now. So yes, there's some healthier ones, but there's also a lot of incredibly unhealthy ones. Yeah, I think psychologists tell us that if you have sort of nearly infinite choice, you make the wrong choices. You're overwhelmed by it and you tend to go back to

5:52the same trolley. I was filming a TV series where we were going to people's supermarket trolleys and asking them why they'd bought that. And they just said, well, I always buy it. And we're all guilty of it. We've all done it. But I think it's really good to highlight that there's generally always a healthier option than the one you have in your trolley. And has this explosion of variety mean that now there's vastly more healthy choices available than in the past? I think it depends on the food category. We're seeing a real explosion in pulses, for example, so beans, lentils that we just didn't

6:29have in the past. So I think that's fantastic. But then we're seeing an explosion in other food categories, where I think you're having a lot of doctored foods that I certainly think are less healthy. I don't think proportionally it's changed. Yes, if you're going there specifically to find a healthy food, a great example is in 10 years, the whole range of fermented foods has changed dramatically. But it hasn't changed proportionally because they're more ultra-processed foods and low fat, high protein variants of other foods as well. So I'd love to come back to one of the quickfire

ignoring front of pack labels

7:04questions, Sarah, where I asked about looking at food packaging and the label that's on the food packaging. When you're going shopping and deciding what to buy, do you use those claims on the food packaging in order to judge how healthier a food is? And maybe we could run through a couple. But for example, imagine that you're in the shop and you see a whole row of products and some of those products will say in big letters like low fat and some other product next to it will say no fat and the other product next to it might say full fat. Will you

7:40always buy the one that says low fat? It would totally depend on what type of food it was because we know that not all fat is equal. So if it was yogurt, for example, I know that the type of fat that's in yogurt, even though it's saturated fat because it's fermented fat, is not unhealthy for us. Take extra virgin olive oil, take nuts, seeds. They're fun to pack traffic light. We'd have a big red when it comes to total fat. If, however, it was something that was, let's say, mincemeat, for example, I would

8:14opt for the lower fat version so that you can get like 5%, 2% mincemeat because I know that the saturated fat that's within mincemeat is not good for us. So it's very nuanced. And so that's why I do think the low fat, no fat isn't helpful. Also, I know based on the evidence out there that many people are selecting low fat, not necessarily for health reasons, i.e. low fat means less saturated fat, means less cardiovascular disease, which is what I think of as certain nutrition scientists.

8:44They're selecting it because they think it's going to help with weight loss. But the evidence from randomized control trials are really clear that if you're selecting low fat foods above full fat foods, it does not result in weight reduction. The latest US guidelines have changed their view of fats. So they're basically saying there's no advantage in low fat foods in general. And it's all about the ratios and it's about instead of what, which is where the UK and the rest of Europe

9:20should really go. And they're not. So we're terribly behind. And that's reflected in the labels. No nutrition scientist really believes that fat itself is bad for you. And yet that's all over our labels in our foods. I think we need to ignore that. And I think there are some rare exceptions, but in general, personally, I ignore something that says low fat. And there is also the issue of by taking the fat out, what are they replacing it with? Particularly if it's a processed food, it's actually the fat that carries the flavour of food.

9:53For the two of you, when you're in the supermarket, almost the only time when you would care about labels saying sort of lower fat is when you're thinking about meat like mincemeat, you know, sort of red meat. And in all the classic places that I would think about, which is cheese and dairy and all sorts of other products strand around, actually, if it said low fat or no fat, not only it wouldn't make you choose it more often, you might well actually be going in the opposite direction. Absolutely. But, you know, I believe fat has an incredibly important role to

10:28play in our diet, that if you have the right type of fat, you're actually increasing the healthfulness of your food. And often by saying a product is low fat, except for our mince example, you're often stripping out healthy fats, you know, your mono and your polyunsaturated fats that we know are so, so important for our health. And you're replacing them with starches and sugars. That's usually what they're doing, which are not great for your blood sugar levels. They just make the whole thing sweeter. So I can already throw away like half the products in the supermarket because they've

11:00got a massive label on them saying sort of low fat or no fat. Can I come on to the next really big one, which is sugar-free, which I also see all the time. Are you more likely to pick that versus the product next to it that doesn't say sugar-free? I'll never forget the moment that everything shifted for me. I was at a public talk on nutrition, listening to a speaker explain that my gut had trillions of microbes in it and that these bugs shaped every aspect of my health. That speaker was Professor Tim Spector, one of the world's top 100 scientists, who became my co-founder here at Zoe.

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12:42It depends. We have to think of sugar, I think, as two different types of sugar. We have to think of sugar in its natural context. So fruit that has sugar contained within the structure of the fruit, for example. We call that intrinsic sugar. And then we have to think of added sugar separately. Now in the US, it actually says on the label how much added sugar there is versus the intrinsic sugar. If I was in the US, I would actually look at the Becker-Pack labeling and I would look at, oh, well, how much is added sugar? But in the UK, we can't do that. We just know how much total

13:16sugar there is. If it says no added sugar, then yes, I think that is a healthier option. If it says reduced sugar, low sugar, then does it still have a lot of added sugar in it? I won't know. But for me, Sarah, I would be really suspicious that it was basically just full of artificial sweeteners that they've replaced the sugar with. Good point. Let's take full sugar Coke versus no sugar Coke. If you remove the sugar from the full sugar Coke, you're saving about 130 calories.

13:48But what's in that kind of Coke, depending on what country you're in, different sweeteners. So ACE-K, aspartame, saccharin, sucralose, it all depends where the Coke is sold. So you're replacing it with something else. And again, it's like, which is better? Yeah. I think the Coke example is, I don't think it's fooling anybody. It's pretty obvious what you're drinking. I think it's when it's in things like yogurts or desserts or sort of sports drinks when we're being fooled or other juices, because they're keeping that sweetness level up and they're

14:23adding chemicals that we know may have a detrimental effect on our gut microbes. So for me, it's a bit of a red flag. And it's a red flag for you because sugar-free probably means they've put in a whole bunch of sweeteners and other artificial things, but they're not being honest about it. Is that what you're saying? Using Sarah's caveat, it depends because there might be some fruits that do give enough natural sweetness to it. But in general, it's a sign that they've probably added other stuff to it that's really hard to find. And you have to use a magnifying glass on the back of pack to

14:55actually seal those sweeteners and additives. I do think if it says low, no, or reduced, to pick up on Tim's point, you really have to think, well, if it has had something taken out of it, what has it had put back in in order for it to maintain its texture, its structure, its taste, its functionality? And that's why we need to be a little bit cautious. Sometimes it can have the fat or it can have the sugar taken out and it could have something even healthier put in, certain

15:26fibres, et cetera. But that's really rare. Typically, it's swapped with something that I don't think is going to be healthier for you. Let's move on and talk about some of the other labels that I see all the time when I'm in the supermarket. And maybe we start with gluten-free. I think a lot of people see a gluten-free option and they say, this is healthier. Tim, how do you respond to seeing that sticker on the product? Generally, I would avoid it because it means that it's gone through extra

15:56levels of processing to make sure there's absolutely no wheat in it or anything else that's going to trigger some with celiac to have a problem. Although I have seen gluten-free water, so it is used in some countries to ridiculous levels. When gluten was at its height about five years ago, it seems to have slightly died down now, this gluten-free trend. It was mainly used as a marketing thing. Obviously,

16:261% of the population do have a real problem with gluten. Possibly another 1% are intolerant of it. But for most people, it's a marketing tool and they've created foods. They're usually highly processed foods to do exactly that. The only exceptions are things like pastas. So rather than having wheat pasta, which is a traditional Durham wheat one, you have a whole range of gluten-free ones which might be made with lentils or chickpeas or other variants which are fine for celiacs to

17:01consume. They're generally fine. So you would eat those? Yes. They're not, in most cases, highly processed. But gluten-free bread? Gluten-free bread. I've tried and it's pretty horrible. Sorry for any people with celiac disease who have to have it. But unless you really need to, I would generally avoid it. We've got to talk about protein now. I don't think I saw any stickers about protein 10 years ago in the supermarket. And I was on holiday in Portugal this summer and the supermarket there was full of

17:35stickers talking about high-protein. So if you see a high-protein sticker, is that a sign that something is healthy? Absolutely not. No. They've done the surveys and I think we've done some Zoe studies to show that if there's a protein sticker on that food, 70% or so of people will regard that as healthy, whatever else is in it. So it's like this super sign saying, buy me. People have been driven by this huge tsunami of information

18:08about telling them how protein's amazing, how it's going to give you big muscles, how it's going to make you age better, prevent all kinds of problems, reduce all diseases. And this is just hype. And 90% of people are not protein deficient. But nevertheless, manufacturers will carry on. If it sells products, people will keep putting it in there. And in general, there's nothing too much wrong with protein itself. It's just what else it's replacing on your plate and is in there. A lot

18:44of the stuff that's when they've added protein to these ultra-processed foods, often they're increasing the processing. It's generally not good. So I try and ignore those protein messages. Doesn't mean they're all bad, but some of them are. I don't know what you think, Sarah. So I have a 14-year-old son who has just joined a gym a couple of months ago and has never looked at food labels, never shown any interest in food, and now regularly comes home with these snack bars, all different types of snack bars. And he's like, mum, mum, I've got a really healthy snack bar. I was

19:18like, why? He says it's high in protein. And this is a 14-year-old child who is being brainwashed. I don't know by what. TikTok, obviously, because that's what occupies his brain, into thinking as long as it's got protein on it, it's healthy. And when he looks at the products that he picks out and says this is healthy in the supermarket, how often is he right? Oh, rarely. Often these are snack bars that you look at the backer pack, which tells you the list of ingredients. And I mean, there's just all sorts of ingredients. Lots I haven't heard of doesn't necessarily mean

19:51it's bad. But in this case, when I'm looking at the backer pack of many of his snack bars, it's just got so many synthetic ingredients. It's got very little whole food, very little healthy fats, very little healthy protein, very little fibre. Not always, but in the case of stuff he's picking. Most of these high-protein claims come in high-risk ultra-processed foods. And it's so easy for them to add it. You just add a bit of whey protein. It's a waste product from the dairy

20:23industry. It costs nothing. They pour it in there and suddenly they can double their sales. It's a scam, basically. What about when I see it on my tin of beans? Because I have for the first time noticed that in my tinned beans of all sorts that they have started to say high in protein. Should I be worried about that since it's got a claim about protein? Assuming it's just a tin of beans? Absolutely not. The protein that's in pulses and beans is

20:54an incredibly healthy protein. You're also getting fibre. You're getting other micronutrients with it. It's part of the original plant. I'm assuming these are beans that you've not got some sort of source that's all... No, they're just in a jar or a can of kidney beans, lentils or any sort of beans. I have noticed that they've started to have a sign on them saying high in protein. And I didn't see that a few years ago. I think that's fabulous that they're now doing that because lots of whole foods

21:27that are high in fibre, high in protein, wouldn't typically put that on their label. And yet that's an incredibly healthy source of protein and fibre and micronutrients. I think any manufacturer now is daft not to put protein on the label. And what we are seeing is some healthy foods that are finally getting round to it. And so people can see that, yeah, rather than eating unhealthy meats or whey protein or processed snacks, you can have a can of beans. But I do think that we're being a little bit down

21:58on labels. If you use them in the right way, you can, in most instances, make a reasonable call on the healthiest version, not necessarily the front of pack labelling that we've talked about. But if you were to look, for example, at two crisps and you were to look at something like kettle crisps or kettle chips versus monster munch, monster munch, great example, nutritionally, they would be quite similar. So if you looked at the back of pack, you'd first get their nutritional profile. So by this,

22:31we mean calories, fat, fibre, protein, salt, sugar. But if you were then to look at the ingredient list, so it's slightly different to the nutrients, for the kettle crisps, chips, so very simple chips and crisps, you would just see that they're potatoes, sunflower rapeseed oil and salt. And yet if you were to look at monster munchers, I don't know off the top of my head, but I would imagine there's all sorts of reconstituted starches you might know. Most Pringles brands have over 30 ingredients.

23:03And so in that case, the label can be useful and can be helpful for people. Do you have a friend who reads every ingredient label before putting anything in their shopping basket and still feels unsure if they've really made the right choice? Why not share this episode with them right now, where two of the world's leading nutrition scientists reveal the simple rules that they use when they're grocery shopping, so your friend can shop with confidence instead of guesswork.

checking for hidden ingredients

23:29So Sarah, I think actually you're now pulling us onto the second part of the podcast, which I'm really excited about. You've now said, hey, look, here are all these labels that you both ignore, but you've also brought, I know, six rules to help us navigate the grocery aisle. And I'd like to go through them each in turn, but I know the first one, rule one, you both agreed is check for hidden ingredients. So Sarah, could you help us to understand what that means and how you do it? So what that means is that the majority of our food is now processed. The majority of our food has

24:04added ingredients, some of which are healthy, many of which are unhealthy for us. You won't know that necessarily from the front of pack. So it's a case of taking off the aisle, turning it around and looking at the backpack label. On the backpack label, you have two different labels. You have the nutrient profiles. So it tells us like calories, sugar, fat, protein, fiber, and so forth. Slightly different in the UK and the US, but broadly speaking, similar. Then you have the ingredient

24:36list. And that lists the ingredients that have gone into the food with the biggest ingredients being at the top and the smallest ones at the bottom. So what you often find is the ingredients that are put in tiny amounts, but still quite significant in terms of our health, in terms of health effects will all be at the bottom, all the kind of, you know, the additives, the sweeteners, the colorants, et cetera. I think the most helpful thing to look at from the nutrient profile is how much fiber is in there and how much added sugar is in there. That's what I would look at. And then

25:11from the ingredient list, that's where I would have a look to see how many whole foods, healthy foods are high up. So if, for example, I was buying a peanut butter, I would expect that peanuts is the top of the list. So there's some peanut butters where it is just peanut butter, salt, pinch of sugar. There's other peanut butters where actually you'll get other oils coming higher up the list, like palm oil and other oils. And then the peanuts is second down, showing that actually peanuts

25:45isn't the main ingredient in that peanut butter. So that would lead me to doubt, well, why is that? Do you check for hidden ingredients for every single thing that you choose in the supermarket? Or are there particular products that you're careful about? Because this sounds like a lot of work. Yeah, I actually rarely look at back-of-pack labeling because I take the view that if you can see the food through the packaging, if it resembles the original food it came from. So take crisps, for example, if those crisps look similar to a potato that's just been sliced, I mean, quite often it's not in a

26:21clear pack, so it's difficult to do. But then I would assume that it's reasonably helpful. I'm making big assumptions here. If it's a crisp like what's-its, so like cheese puffs, then that's where I'd start to look at the back-of-pack label. And so, Tim, what products do you worry about as you think about checking for these hidden ingredients? Well, I found, especially when I'm abroad, finding a healthy yogurt can be difficult. In the US, for example, really hard to find a full-fat yogurt that doesn't have sweetener or vanilla in it. And you can't often tell on the front.

26:56I'm often in Spain, and what seems to be a normal yogurt, they've got a little bit of sugar in it, or they've got some sweetener. And you often have to look on the back. You can buy some tomato sauces, and they'll have added sugar in them. Whereas I just want tomatoes and oil and maybe some salt. So often, it's these additions of sugars and salts to things you wouldn't expect or sweeteners that is particularly something that worries me and then says, well, I'm not getting

27:32high-quality product if they're doing that. I just want the more natural one. I think if you looked at breakfast cereals, it is another great example. Drinks, smoothies. You go to the breakfast cereal aisle, it now dominates nearly a whole aisle, and it's a great example of where there's a huge amount of choice. But the variability in not just the cost, but the healthfulness of the breakfast cereals is enormous. When you look at the granola aisle, you can get an incredibly healthy granola. And then you have some other granolas that, I mean, just...

28:08Everything's fake in them. Could you help us understand? Because I can see this is like a real thing, Sarah. What are you worrying about when you're looking and trying to find the right granola? So if I'm trying to find the right granola, I'm looking for one that has just quite minimal whole food ingredients. So simply has chopped nuts, seeds, dried fruit, oats. You can make a really good granola just having those kinds of ingredients. In fact, I do one at home doing that. You have these other granolas that have lots and lots of ingredients. Not that that's bad, because that can increase the

28:42plant diversity, but also often have lots of additives in there that we don't know yet how they're impacting our gut microbiome in our health. There might be emulsifiers, some of which we know aren't so healthy for us. There might be other kinds of modified starches, et cetera, that are put in there for the texture, the taste. And there's often salt and artificial sweeteners, aren't there, as well? I remember being blown away a few years ago that the cereal that I had thought was super healthy, it had wonderful branding about coming from some farm and looked really pretty, had loads of added

29:16sugar in it. But I'd never even looked at the back of the pack. It just looks nice. And so in a way, it had those components in. But then I think ingredient number three is about 20% added sugar. Is that unusual in a breakfast cereal? No, absolutely not. And I think the ones that are marketed towards children are where we also have a big problem. So many of those obviously have all the lovely fun cartoon characters. You know, my kids are in their teens now, but if I took them to the supermarket and they were younger, the cereal I ended up leaving with wasn't the healthiest cereal. It was the one where I just lost

29:52the will to live and gave in and let them get the Cheerios, the Rainbows. Which are around 30% sugar, I mean, and sometimes more. 30% sugar. And what I found recently was going to supermarket, talking to other people is that, you know, middle-aged people are still eating the breakfast cereal they had as kids. So we do form these habits, these really unhealthy ones. And they've never questioned, why am I eating a breakfast cereal that is 30% sugar? They're just saying, I've always eaten it. It's just habit. So I think it's a really important

30:27pointer.

embracing healthy fats

30:28I'd love to move to rule two now. Don't fear fats. Tim, Sarah already talked a bit about how she thought about this and how low-fat products can often be less healthy than the full-fat version. What fatty products do you go for when you're, you know, doing the supermarket shop? I spent a long time in the cheese aisle and we all know that's very fatty and still a lot of misconceptions. A lot of family doctors will tell people to avoid cheese because it's bad for your

31:00heart. All the epidemiology evidence suggests that's not the case and that whether it's the fermentation in it or something else, but it's not harmful for you and possibly beneficial. So all the dairy products, generally, I go for a full fat. I obviously go for the nut aisle, the seed aisle. And of course, my staple go-to is, you know, getting olive oil, which is basically fat and about 13% saturated fat. But we know that's incredibly healthy. So all this old-fashioned

31:35advice about avoiding fat is basically wrong. And we need lots of fat in our body and just swapping out the healthy fats for the unhealthy ones which have been used in ultra-processed food for decades is the way to go. Anything you'd add, Sarah? Is there a lot of fat making their way into your basket? Yeah, absolutely. I love fat. And I actually see including healthy fats into my basket as a great way to improve the healthfulness of my food. We have to move beyond this perception that high-fat

32:10foods are fattening foods in terms of fattening for the body, that high-fat foods are bad for us in terms of our health, cardiovascular disease, cholesterol. We have to take a more nuanced approach. We know that the type of fat matters. So we know that saturated fat matters, but we know it's even more complicated than that. It's the type of foods that they're in. So saturated fat in cheese, like Tim said, we know doesn't have that negative impact. Saturated fat in butter in red meat does have that effect. But the vast majority of the foods that are packaged and on our shelves

32:43actually have quite healthy fat sources. So they're typically made with rapeseed or canola oil, as it's called in the US. In the US also, there's a high amount of soya bean oil. These are very high in mono and polyunsaturated fats. It has a very similar composition to olive oil, not as healthy as olive oil, just a caveat. But it means that often by removing that fat, you're actually removing a potentially healthy component of that food. Can I ask what specifically, Sarah, you put into your

33:14basket? You've already mentioned, for example, cooking oil. So what do you cook with at home? So I get different oils for different purposes. I buy extra virgin olive oil to drizzle on my salad or drizzle on top of food, whether it's pasta when I finished, etc. That's because it's got heart-healthy fats. But it's also got lots of polyphenols, which we know are really good for our health. Extra virgin olive oil is very different to normal olive oil. They have the same fat composition, so the same saturated monopolyunsaturated fat. But extra virgin olive oil retains all of the

33:49wonderful bioactives like the polyphenols. For cooking, I typically buy rapeseed oil. It's known as canola oil in the US or what we call kind of a bog-standard sort of vegetable oil, which is typically made up of mainly rapeseed canola and sometimes has a bit of sunflower oil in the UK or soybean oil in the US. It's very high in polyunsaturated fats, which we know are really good for our heart, really good for our cholesterol, and it has a decent amount of monounsaturated fats. It's a bit more stable for cooking as well than extra virgin olive oil, and it has quite a neutral

34:23taste. If you like the taste, absolutely go for extra virgin olive oil. Remember though that if you're heating at high temperatures, you will destroy some of those polyphenols. Extra virgin olive oil is very expensive, and so that's why I think for people that may not have the budget for extra virgin olive oil to use through all of their cooking, that's why I think a rapeseed canola oil is

rethinking snack foods

34:45a really good alternative. Let's move to rule three. Snacks are not the enemy. Sarah, I know you're an avid snacker, I'm an avid snacker, but I've always felt that snacking was unhealthy. What does the science say, and do you buy snacks when you're in the supermarket? I absolutely buy snacks, and the science shows that snacking is not unhealthy depending on what you snack. So in the UK, in the US, in many countries, about 20 to 25% of our energy comes from snacks. I believe that for people who do snack, it's

35:18one of the single simplest dietary strategies to improve your health. As a proof of principle of this, I conducted a trial at King's some years ago where we asked people to consume 20% of their calories from either nuts or UK typical, US typical snacks. We monitored them for six weeks. At the end of six weeks, the improvement in lots of intermediary cardiovascular risk measures, so things like blood cholesterol, blood vessel function, in those consuming the nuts versus those consuming US-UK

35:53typical snacks, equated to a 30% reduction in cardiovascular disease. That's huge. So I love that study that I did. It was a hard study to do, but it really shows the power that snacking can have. And so Sarah, what do you put in the basket? I don't actually get my snacks anymore from the supermarket because, and this is going to sound like a sales pitch, which it is absolutely not, but this is true to what I do now at home. I have my

36:23Zoe snack bars delivered that I purchase from Zoe. These are snack bars that we've created, Tim, myself, the incredible team at Zoe based on our knowledge of what constitutes a healthy snack. And so now I know that I'm actually using my snacking to have the healthiest possible diet that I can have. For someone listening to this who's in a country where, you know, those bars aren't available, you know, what would you have been adding to your basket a year ago before this existed?

36:54So there's so many opportunities for healthy snacks. There's obvious ones like having nuts, having seeds, having fruits, having vegetables, but there's also other ones that we might not necessarily think of. So you could even snack on leftovers of your meal. If it's a healthy meal you've had the night before, snack on those leftovers. You could have popcorn, yogurt, you could have cheese on, you know, whole grain style crackers. These are all different healthy ways of snacking. I think we have to get out of this perception that a snack is this pre-packed snack bar or chocolate

37:26bar or crisp. It is an eating event between a meal. If you are having lots of cookies with your tea every day, they're not going to be healthy for you. Changing any of those, any of the kind of things I've mentioned can have a huge impact on your diet. Let's move on to rule four. Staples matter most.

upgrading daily staples

37:46Tim, what does that mean? This means that the health consequences good or bad of what you're eating matters much more for the things you have every day than it does for something you might have once a week or twice a month. So this for most people would include things like milk or yogurt or their breads or their meat, bacon, eggs, sausages, these kinds of things. So small differences in what these make to your health

38:16have much bigger impact long-term on your long-term health. So sorting out whether you can get your staples to be healthier is really important. So the first staple I think about is bread. You know, that's something that you buy every week. It goes off. You keep replacing it. I never thought about bread before I met the two of you, honestly. And I think I used exactly the same, you know, loaf for the previous 20 years. But I think it's not true. All breads are not equal. Absolutely true. And this is a key staple across most countries. And just by changing this a little

38:54bit, we could do wonders. Now, when you go to a supermarket aisle full of breads, you see this huge range. Everything from the classical white wonder bread type that, you know, would stay the same for a month. And then on the other end, you might have, you know, paying much more for your granary sourdough artisan loaf and you're paying, you know, five times more for it. And then everything else in the middle. And you've got all these confusing labels of whole grain, whole meal, multi-seed,

39:27multi-grain, high fiber, et cetera, et cetera. And it is really difficult. And, you know, even I struggle to go in there looking at the outsides of these products to work out what I should be getting. Obviously, no, I'm not going to go down for the cheapest bread, the white loaf that is just for toasting, that is full of chemicals and additives and has very little fiber. But then I'm going to the ones that look healthy. And I don't know if they've been dyed

40:00brown to make it look as if they've got more whole grains in them, all kinds of tricky things to navigate. And so the only way I found around this is to go to the back of the pack, the ingredients list, look at the amount of carbohydrates, the amount of fiber. And it's this ratio between the carbohydrates and the fiber that is the only way I can really sort out a healthy bread from an unhealthy bread. And I'm looking for a ratio that is, you know, as close to five as I can get.

40:35On the back of the pack, you've got things like protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and they're given in grams. And essentially what you want is something that has a high amount of fiber and a relatively low amount of sugar. And Tim, is it only the low fiber that you're watching out for in terms of breads? It's not the only thing. I'm obviously looking for other additives. If it's made in the fast,

41:07rapid chemical method called the Chorley Wood process, you often have glues, emulsifiers together, you have salt in there, you've got sugar in there, you've got colorants to make it look attractive, you've got things to keep it spongy, you've got preservatives, you've got things to separate the each slice from each other so they don't stick together in your fridge. I have to say, you're making it sound more and more desirable as you do. I mean, I would love glue in my bread along with the... Well, they're designed to be super tasty. And who doesn't like, you know, a nice bit of toast

41:42and jam straight out of the toaster? They're designed to be delicious. And, you know, Sarah and I have investigated, they're designed to be hyper palatable. So they have the right amount of sugar, the right amount of fat, the right amount of salt, just that combination. But I think, Jonathan, staples are a fabulous way that we can improve the healthiness of our food by not having to totally change our shopping basket. It's the breads, it's the egg, it's the dairy, so particularly milk, and it's pasta, rice, potatoes. So these are six food categories

42:16that the majority of the people will have at least a few of them, if not all six of them, and consume one or two of them every day. And there's some really good evidence showing just switching the type of ones you have for any of these, that it can significantly improve your health. And Sarah, what have you swapped as you're thinking about it? You know, what are the ones that matter to you? So I like bread, I like potatoes, I like rice, I like pasta. I know that the white versions of these, so the non-whole-grain versions of these are not the healthiest for me. Now, sometimes I will have

42:49them. You know, if I'm hungover on a Saturday morning, I want that white bread with lashings of butter and a bit of bacon. Oh, Sarah. I know it's unhealthy for me, but I'm sorry, I got hungover, Tim, so I don't care. Not that I'm advocating anyone that listens to this to be hungover or drink. And you're hungover every day either, sorry. Oh gosh, no, no. It's just after I've done a podcast with you, Tim, I need it. Sorry. But I have tried to, where I can swap to whole grain. We know that the lack of whole grain in UK, US and internationally in people's diets is one of the biggest problems when it comes to

43:25health because whole grains have lots of fibre, lots of micronutrients, iron, zinc, that actually a lot of people are quite deficient in, and healthy proteins and so forth. They're so much healthier than the white version. And there's some fantastic new research that's just come out showing that in the UK, and it's broadly similar in the US, if we were to change our staples of white rice, white pasta, and white bread, we would change from our average intake of whole grains being around,

43:56say, 16 grams a day, we could get it up to 75 grams a day. And at that level, you reduce your risk of all-cause mortality, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease by around 10%. So this isn't telling people, go and start buying bread if you don't have it, go and start buying pasta. Based on typical consumption patterns in the UK and the US, if we were to change our bread, we would add in at least about another 20 grams of whole grain. If we were then to change the rice,

44:27so this is white rice to whole grain rice, the white pasta to whole grain pasta, we would again be adding about another 10 grams of whole grain in each time. So we'd be increasing our whole grain by whooping about 50, 60 grams. But you're still having your sandwich, you're still having your pasta, you're still having your stir fry. And then potatoes, we are a potato-loving nation, so as the US, so in many countries, keep the skin on. It makes a huge difference to the amount of fiber, the amount of micronutrients.

44:57That's amazing. So you're saying that just swapping from the sort of white version, which is what I grew up with everything, you know, pasta, bread, rice, to like the whole grain version, which generally looks brown and has the original plant there, it sort of transforms my health outcomes without having to change what I eat. Absolutely. You don't have to do it for all of them. I personally cannot stand brown pasta, but I have changed my white bread to whole grain bread. That's where the biggest size effect is anyway. And the great thing, Jonathan, as well, going from the white grains to the whole grains,

45:29there's almost no difference in price. So it's accessible and affordable for everyone. Those small changes do add up. I can't stand brown rice. And so I've changed to bulgur wheat, which is actually much higher in fiber and protein. But you could also have quinoa is even better than brown rice as well. So there's always a nice, easy swap for most of these. That's the point.

navigating fermented products

45:51I'd like to come to rule five, ferment deception. Now, Tim, I know that fermented food is having a moment around the world. You know, I think kefir was unheard of in the US and the UK just a few years ago. And now there are loads of options. What should people look out for? And why do they need to worry about sort of being deceived with their ferments? Finally, come of age that people are thinking fermented food is good. It's finally made the US dietary guidelines to say that actually we should be having regular fermented foods.

46:25And hopefully in about 10 years time, the UK will follow swiftly. What this means is that, you know, you should be trying to get multiple types of ferments in your diet. Now, the ones that are still good are things like cheese. We forget that is a good ferment. That hasn't really changed that whole scene. Possibly for the vegan cheeses, you have to be a bit careful because a lot of them are highly processed and frozen pizza cheese and other things like this and cheese slices

46:57are to be avoided. All other cheese are pretty good. So I will eat standard cheese, whether it's a gouda, cheddar, or even a cream cheese. You know, I don't have to have my artisan cheese all the time. Absolutely, they are fermented foods. As part of the study I did for my book, Ferment, we did look at 70 different products and even simple cheeses like that had multiple microbes in them. So they are alive. Even something that seems rather highly processed like Philadelphia cream cheese, we got

47:29three species of microbe out of it. It was only things like craft slices that had absolutely nothing in it. As you go more artisan craft cheese, raw milk cheeses, you will get a bigger variety of microbes, but you're still getting plenty with your standard cheddars. For my yogurts, I always go for a full fat Greek style yoghurt and check there's nothing else added to it. I don't go for the super high fat

48:00ones because I find them slightly difficult to eat. Just whatever the cow is producing is good for me. Then the kefirs, and whereas I sometimes make my own often, I'm traveling a lot, I do buy quite a lot of kefir. If I can get the artisan versions that I know are made with real kefir grains, I will do, but they're very hard to get in supermarkets. And most of the supermarket ones are a sort of cross between a yoghurt and a kefir. But the good news is we've tested them and they do

48:36have live microbes in them three or four times more than you find in yoghurt. So generally, most of the ones that don't have fruit or sugar in them are good. Anything with fruit or sugar in, I avoid because I don't know how that's affected those live microbes. So this is like a big warning for you. When you say kefir, it's like it's kefir, it's not sort of a fruit yoghurt that has a kefir label on it. That's exactly right. Because to get a kefir label, often you just have to add 12 specified microbes that are kefir cultures. So it contains kefir cultures,

49:14can be easily added to any old rubbish. And can I ask a similar question, I think, about kombucha, which I've seen explode? What is it on the back of the pack that would make you not drink that kombucha? Because I've noticed that they seem to be stuffed full of artificial sweeteners and all these sorts of things. So would you buy any kombucha? What makes you say, yes, I would take that or I wouldn't? Yeah, I do like kombucha. Generally, most kombuchas have some sugar in them,

49:45but it's a fifth of the amount you'd get in a Coca-Cola or something like that. So relatively, they're much better for you. And we do know that they have health benefits. So if the sugar levels are relatively low, they're not going to counteract the microbes. But I worry when there's lots of extra additives, food colorings, flavorings, and they've added artificial sweeteners. Because we know that the artificial sweeteners have a negative effect on our gut microbes. And one of the reasons for drinking kombucha is you're trying

50:16to improve your gut microbes. So it seems to be we have a bit of a dilemma there. And many products do have these. So look for the pure ones. Also, if you can see a sediment in it, then a kombucha, you know it's likely to be real and live and made from the actual kombucha rather than just kombucha cultures. Amazing. I'd like to move on to the sixth and final rule. And I know you

reaching for plant diversity

50:41said this was the most important rule. Buy more plants. And having spent so much time with you over the last few years, I'm totally on board with eating at least 30 plants a week. But I think there's still a lot of choices that trip me up. And maybe let's start with that target. What is this 30 plants a week, Tim? When I hit 40, I started feeling tired and sluggish. I remember thinking, great, this is it. It's all downhill from here. But I was completely wrong.

51:12It wasn't my age. It was my diet. It was literally sapping my energy. I was trying to juggle kids, work and exercise. And back then, I just grabbed whatever food was nearby. I still have that crazy schedule. But what's changed is what I put in my body. Our own research at Zoe has shown that if your digestion feels off or you're regularly feeling exhausted, it's often because your gut bugs are starving. They thrive on a huge variety of plants, at least 30 different plants a week. And the more, the better. But if you're as stretched as me, it's not always easy to achieve this. And that's exactly

51:46why our scientists developed Daily 30. It's a great tasting gut health supplement with over 30 plants in every single scoop. I take it every day without fail. And because we're Zoe, we don't just guess, we test. We put Daily 30 through a randomized control trial, the gold standard of testing. The results absolutely blew us away, proving it's good for energy, digestion and gut health. That trial helped us develop the formula that we have today. So if you're not feeling like yourself, don't settle for feeling sluggish. Head to zoe.com slash daily 30 and try it for yourself.

52:23Our science at Zoe has told us that 30 is about the right number that you want to be aiming for. We don't know there isn't an upper limit of that. So it could be higher is better. We're currently investigating that. But we do know that people who eat 30 plants a week regularly achieve much better gut health and feel better. We know that the average person in the US and the UK is having perhaps around 10 or 12 different plants a week on average. And so what we're doing is we're

52:55increasing that two or threefold. And that has the side effect of actually increasing fiber intake, as well as increasing your nutrient intake and polyphenol intake. So in a way, it's a nice, very simplistic idea that has this wide variety of other effects on the body and resonates with the public. Contrasting with most countries' official view, they should have, you know, five fruits and

53:28veg a day. And they can always be the same ones. And that's what people did generally. And they often tend to not be particularly healthy ones. It might be orange juice or just having lots of bananas or things like this. That sounds tough, trying to get 30 plants a week. So you're both going to the supermarket. How does that shape what you actually go and buy? So to get my 30 plants, I make sure there's some easy wins. The first thing is to get bags of mixed seeds. Okay, so you can buy mixed seeds,

54:04you add that to a bag of mixed nuts. So you combine those two, you've got 10 plants there. And you can put them in a jar at home. I call that my diversity jar. That's a very simple way to start. Fresh herbs are great. Everything from parsley to watercress, things you can just add on to salads. And then I make sure my spice drawer is really full because a teaspoon of spice has been shown to improve gut health. And that counts as one of your plants. So that's what I'm always trying to do, as well as

54:40trying to make sure that I'm buying things of different colors. So most people's shopping trolleys are full of iceberg lettuce. We need to change that to get something that's much more colorful, much more nutritious, and getting lots of different colors in the trolley as well is another way of getting a 30. Sarah, what do you include in your shop to get all of these plants? So I have mixed nuts and seeds for my breakfast with my yogurt. Great, that ticks the box. But the rest of the time, my choice of vegetables and fruits is quite largely determined by what I know my kids

55:11will eat. Yes, I know we should keep exposing them to all different foods. The reality of I also work full-time, two jobs, I don't have time to start disguising some chickpeas and this carrot or that carrot. And so I'll be honest, if it wasn't for the Zoe products I have, I don't get to 30. My kids don't get to 30. I try though now to add in herbs and spices. And we know that herbs and spices have a really important role to play. And this is the kind of thing that you can just add either just to

55:42your dish. Well, my kids don't kind of notice that because it's not a big chunk of a herb. You know, I add more garlic and more onions as a kind of base to ingredients. I try and add fresh tomatoes alongside the tomato pasta sauce that they like. So there's things like that I do. But I do think it's important to acknowledge it is quite hard because, you know, we are used as individuals, and you mentioned this earlier, to cooking from a small repertoire of ingredients and a small repertoire of meal choices. It's really interesting. The one thing that you guys

56:13haven't mentioned that's been transformative to me is beans. And you can now get them in a jar. You know, before they were always like in a tin and I can get in a jar. They're incredibly cheap. And then when you open one, you can put it in the fridge. You don't have all this fat of anything else. And I can have those instead of a lot of the times when I might have had like a pasta or I might have had bread and suddenly like, they're amazing because they're so high in protein. They're so high in fiber. They're incredibly filling. For me, it has transformed the sort of the number of

56:49plants I hit within the week. Another similar tip is actually getting these sachets of pre-cooked things like mixed lentils. And you can also get mixed grains as well. So a lot of the big supermarkets now do pre-cooked mixed grains. So you get different types of quinoa as well as bulgur wheat. And you get pearl barley and things already cooked. So, you know, it just takes a few minutes to make, and you've got not only high fiber, but you're also getting all those extra different plants. So it's just about thinking about it when you're doing a shop, you can make

57:22it a lot easier for yourself. Final question then. So if you were going to suggest maybe one underrated or cost-effective plant that, you know, a listener could add to their basket this week when they go shopping, what would you suggest? I would go for beetroot. It's not a trendy thing, but it's a fantastic thing for heart health. And it lowers your blood pressure considerably. And

57:56it can be cooked in lots of different ways. And you can even ferment it and make it into a kraut. So I used to hate it. I now love it. And it's always in my fridge. I would go for mixed nuts. They're great to carry around as a snack. You can also add them to so many different meals, whether it's your breakfast, you can put them on your stir fries. There's so many different ways to use them in your everyday cooking. They're packed full of healthy oils. They're packed full of micronutrients. They're packed full of fiber. To me, if I was to ever use

58:27the word superfood, it is the one food I would say absolutely could classify as that. Oh, you got close to saying it was a superfood and we know that you hate that.

summary of shopping rules

58:35I thought it was a really fascinating episode. We covered so much. I think the first thing that I take away is all those labels on the front of the pack for you are reasons not to buy. So if it says high protein, you're like, no. If it says gluten-free, it's sort of no. If it says low fat, no, it's low sugar, no. So all of those big things that the manufacturers are putting to try to sell it to you or actually make you skeptical. And then you came up with these six rules that you do use. The first is check for hidden ingredients. And interestingly,

59:08you talked about yogurts or something to really have to check. I also talked about breakfast cereal and the fact that you can have two that look almost the same on the front, but one might genuinely be healthy and the other one's stuffed full of added sugar and other additives. Then the second one is don't fear fats. There's still this huge thing about not eating fat, hence all those labels saying low fat. But actually both of you are sort of going out of your way to buy these products that are really high fat that I was told growing up were really bad. So cheese, for example, you're saying it can be a healthy food. It's got these live microbes inside it. Extra virgin olive oil,

59:44for Sarah, that's your go-to now to spread on your meal. Tim cooks everything with it. That's what I've been convinced to do now. You're actually cooking with rapeseed and canola, which also is a lower cost way to still cook with something healthy. Rule three, snacks are not the enemy. And you talked about how just changing your snacks can reduce your risk of heart attacks and heart disease by 30%. So it's pretty huge. Rule four, staples matter most because they're the things you're eating over and over again. And Sarah, I think you said this amazing thing that just like

1:00:16swapping out your sort of traditional white staples of bread and rice and pasta to whole grain, you can transform the amount of whole grain and actually like significantly reduce your risk of dying. Absolutely. Which is quite cool. Tim, you talked a lot about bread, but this is another one where a lot of what you're seeing is really not very good for you. And in particular for you, you're really looking at the fiber and saying like, is there a ratio of five between carb and fiber? So that's a lot of fiber in a bread and that most of those breads are not close to it. And most of

1:00:48them have glue and things like this, which I personally feel I don't want in my bread. Rule five, ferment deception. So it's great to see all of these new fermented foods and Tim, you're really excited about that, but you've got to watch out. Just because it says, you know, kefir or something on it doesn't guarantee it's good. But interestingly, regular cheese can be a really great ferment on kefir. Ideally, you'd get some sort of artisanal kefir, which is very hard to find in the supermarket, but a regular plain one is good.

1:01:20But as soon as you're seeing these ones, which have got fruit, you know, so it's like strawberry flavored kefir. This is no longer a health food. This is something you would avoid. Finally, rule six and the most important rule, buy more plants in order to try and hit this 30 plants a week. Sarah, I think you had this amazing honesty that, you know, you'd find it really hard to do that if you were just doing it through what you buy in the grocery. And we talked about a few tips. Try beetroot, mixed nuts, beans in jars, and that they now do these sachets of like pre-cooked

1:01:57grains and lentils, all ways to make it much easier and all healthy products that you buy and put in your supermarket. Charlie? It's a minefield out there, but yeah, you've done a great job to help. I'll leave you with one final thought. What if there was one simple habit that when repeated

1:02:33could change how you feel for the better? I'd like to tell you about something that I do daily for my own health. It's called Daily 30, the gut supplement developed by our scientists here at Zoe. Daily 30 is made of over 30 hand-picked plants, including seaweed, fungi, and different types of fiber. It's a source of plant protein, omega-3, and vital minerals. You simply add a scoop to any meal once a day to support your health and increase the plant diversity in your diet. And unlike synthetic supplements, Daily 30 actually tastes great. It's designed to be enjoyed

1:03:08because when a habit brings you joy, you're far more likely to stick with it. So next time you feel like your plate is missing extra plants, do yourself a favor. Try Daily 30. It's a delicious and healthy habit that you'll feel good about and one that your gut will definitely thank you for. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains four grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. So order yours today at zoe.com slash Daily 30. See you next time.