Mindful eating and final advice

Welcome to Zoe Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health four hundred million years ago Profound change began plants finally broke free from the sea and began colonizing the land. Over millions of years, these early explorers changed the Earth for good. They altered the climate and the atmosphere. paving the way for animals like us always existed in a world surrounded by plants Long before supermarkets, pharmacies and pubs Plants fed us, healed us, and stimulated us. But today our relationship with plants is broken. Industrial agriculture and big food corporations have transformed what grows in our fields So it is just the starting point for an industrial ecosystem that culminates in ultra processed food on our plate whole plets of God Andst instead we' food that is engineered to be impossible to resist What are the health implications? So what can we do to add the right plants back into our diets Michael Poll is one of the world's most influential science writers As a six time best selling author, he has transformed how millions think about food, plants and the hidden system shaping what we eat His new book, A World Appears, a Journey into Consciousness has just been released Professor Inspector is one of the world's top one hundred most cited scientists, a professor ofpidemiology at Kings's College London, and my scientific co founder at Surrey In today's conversation Michael and Tim help untangle this story, we discover how food corporations have tricked us into embracing meals without plants, how we end up on the dopamine roller coaster of food addiction. Plants could be the antidote we all need Michael, thank you so much for joining me today. Great to be here. And Tim, it's great to have you all say. Likewise So Michael, we have a tradition here at Zoe, where we always start with a quick fire round of questions And we have some very strict rules You can say yes Or no Well if you have to do a one sentence answer. Okay plants the secret to our health and happiness Yes. best to avoid foods that have health claims on their packs In general, yes Big food manufacturers tweaked their recipes for ultra processed foods. Could they solve the health problems with them? And Michael Do most of us use a psychoactive drug every single day? Absolutely, yes. Today I'm really excited to dive into what plants really are, the way that human beings arered to respond to them And of course, how big food companies have been designing products to take advantage of all that wiring And Michael, look, you've spent decades studying plants and food What first took you down this path I, you know, I began my writing career as a gardener. So I had that sort of daily interaction with plants and watching them closely and learning also about their importance to diet. And you know, when I deceided to write a book on consonsciousness. I didn't think it'd have anything to do with plants. It turns out I got very interested in are plants conscious or not So it's the through line, I think, of my work is this passion for understanding plants. And they're so weird and different than we are that they're sort of hard for us to understand. As Darwin said, you know, they're like upside down animals. Their brain is in their root tips, he thought, and their sexual organs are up. on top, just the opposite of us. And I just have huge respect for them. You know, they are masters of biochemistry Many of our drugs are based on molecules produced by plants They've invented molecules that radically change human consciousness They're just geniuses at biochemistry I'd really like to start with a modern food system which came up already And you've talked quite a lot about this. And if you're going to try and explain the problem as you see it today, what is it In a word, monoculture growing too much of the same thing. And in the US, it's corn or maize and soybeans And for most of the agricultural belt in the United States Those two crops take turns in the field Neither of them are food exactly. They're the raw material for processed food And they're animal feed and they're the basis for biofuels. But we grow huge amounts of corn in giant monocultures that would fail if not for lots of chemical application becausecause monocultures are just not the way nature works. And when you have too much of one thing, you also get too many pests, too many diseases, so therefore It drives you to use a lot of chemicals in your agriculture So I think many of the problems in the whole food system can be traced to that very fact grow these vast monocultures You know, as I mentioned, they're not exactly food. You can't eat the kind of corn we grow. And the soybeans are not Edamami. They're a different kind. And they're basically packets of starch and protein that can be broken down into their component parts and then reassembled as ultra processed foods turned into sugar, you, high fruit dust corn syrup, which is where a lot of it ends up. You can't take a corn cob and eat it. It's like these giant kernels that are incredibly hard. You'd break your teeth And they're just pure starch. They have none of the sweetness that a sweet corn has You see these vast fields and they cover Iowa and Indiana and Illinois, and you think, oh, all food, but no, it's not. It has to pass through a factory or several factories before it can be food. although I don't even think what you turn that stuff into should be dignified with the word food So there's a direct link between the way we're farming and the way we're eating When did that change happen? Was it just in the last twenty years or so? A little more than that. fifty years, I'd say Our agriculture was a lot more diversified before really the seventies During the Nixon administration, there was a real spike in the price of food. There had been a grain deal with the Russians that was kept secret. and when the word came out, grain prices went crazy. And food inflation became very high, much higher than it is now. And President Nixon knew that if the price of food didn't come down, he wasn't going to get reelected So he brought in a brilliant agricultural economist named Earl Butts and said your job is to drive down the price of food. And Butts knew exactly how to do it. And he basically encouraged farmers and changed the incentive structure so that they would plant one crop A fence row, to fence row is what he said. and consolidate so that if your neighbor was a weaker player than you were, you would buy your neighbor out. And the fields got bigger And the diversity declined And it worked. We have such overp productdion of corn and soy You know, our problem is not too little food, it's too much food And so what do you do with that? Well, that's why we started making biofuels to get rid of this excess of corn. You know, this is the basis of the food system. So if you have cheap corn, you're going to have cheap meat and cheap milk and cheap butter. What happens next? You're making this sort of corn that actually humans can't eat directly. Could you talk us through the next step of this master plan? Sure, there is a system for refining that corn that essentially you can break it down into its component parts And if you look at all the ingredients on a package of ultra processed food and you see malted dextrin and high fructose corn syrup and soyin. Yeah, yeah all these different manifestations of starch Most of those ingredients can be derived from corn once you've put it through this processing. And in fact, that technology figure out what you could do with that packet of starch. It was developed around the same period And high fructose corn syrup, for example, doesn't really enter the food system in a big way til the early eighties And that was, you know, a big discovery that you could make something as sweet as table sugar from corn. So you have it's called corn refineries that do all this work So when I was writing Omnivore's dilemma, where I really looked at this monoculture system I was amazed how many of the ingredients, if you took a package of twinkies or something or a sweetened breakfast cereal and you went through it And I had a list of what the corn refiners were producing from corn and the soy refiners. There it all was. And you think you're getting you know many ingredients, but in fact You're eating corn and soy and mostly corn A scientist I was working with at the time said that if you took a lock of human hair in America right now, you could determine how much of the carbon in that hair and therefore in that person's body came from corn. And I forget what the figure was, but it was like a majority. And so you know, we are the carbon life form, right? We're mostly made of carbon. So where does that carbon come from? You can actually trace it back And you can figure out how much of that person comes from corn And we are corn walking in the United States. So you're saying the average American is like more than fifty percent corn. Yeah I've got this beautiful picture now of like corn going into big factory from one end and like dozens of different chemicals coming out the other end. O it doesn't sound very appealing, but Bad Hi, I'm Professor Sarah Berry and I am completely obsessed with snacks As a nutrition scientist, I spend a lot of time analyysing large scale dietary data. and one of the most striking findings from our Zoe research is what we call the snacking blind spot. We observe that about a quarter of our daily calorie intake comes from snacks, essentially making it a hidden fourth meal Strikingly, forty percent of people who have put immense effort into preparing a high quality nutritious lunch and dinner end up falling into a gap where convenience takes over in the afternoon That specific data is why the team developed the Zoiga Health bar, a snack bar built with over ten distinct plants designed by our scientists to prioritize exceptional plant diversity From a formulation perspective, we also wanted to address that afternoon gap by creating a nutrient dense option that aligns with rather than disistrupts the nutritional quality of your main meals To do that, we intentionally preserve the natural intact structure of many of the plant's ingredients As a result, the bar is wonderfully chewy and that texture is entirely deliberate. It requires you to physically slow down your eating rate, ensuring that you savour the snack at a much more measured and natural pace. With such a range of plants inside, it has seven grams of plant protein, eight grams of fiber, and less than four grams of sugar It's still a little sweet though, thanks to the seventy percent dark chocolate and the raspberries and goji berries, depending on which flavour you choose You can find out more about the new Zoe Gut Health bar at Zoe. com forid slash snack bar It's not bad that you're carbon came from corn necessarily. I don't think it matters, but it's a reminder that we are the product of what we eat in a very literal way. I think the bigger problem is that these ingredients don don't contribute to healthy foods. for the most part There know, ways to sweeten food and bulk it up And ultra processed foods we now know are detrimental to our health and we're eating way too many of them. So it's a bit of a byproduct in a way, isn't it? So you're taking this ery crude monoculture, you're breaking it into all the bits and you say, we've got to use everything because otherwise we're losing money. What can we think of? How do we recreate it to something that the consumer's going to buy And it strikes me as quite similar to the petrochemical industry where you take gasoline or coal and you convert all these chemicals and some of them end up as artificial sweeteners others as plastics. Yeah. and it's not generally good for us All this stuff, all these byproducts, but Iustry is now so geared up to use it in some way that it's like an unstoppable force as Yeah. And it's you know, there's great ingenuity here. I mean, figuring out how to get rid of the surplus corn or extra oil and get people to buy it. and get people to buy. Yeah. But I mean, if you step back far enough, you've got an excess of calories coming off the farm and then you got to persuade people to consume those calories. And you do that by sweetening things. If you add sugar or high fructose corn syrup to anything, people will buy more of it See, cheap corn is very insidious because Products now in the market that never used to have sugar added to them. I'm thinking of tomato sauce or ketchupps, And it's very hard to find products that they haven't added some sugar to it. And you know, there are like twenty five different kinds of sugar you can add. and that's a good way of hiding its. predominance on an ingredient label So the net result is we eat more because we're hardwired to like sweetness And sweetness has become so cheap. I mean, sugar was precious for most of history. And now it's so common that it's added to just about everything we eat You know, we've been focused on this image that I think all of us can imagine of the Midwest in America where the cornfields going on forever What about the rest of the world? Most of the world said the European Union You know, Australia, Canada, they're very similar cultures are the preferred economic model It might vary slightly. so we have more wheat, for example than corn. And sugar beet has replaced Caribbean sugar plantations and they're massively subsidized by the European Union to make sugar equally cheap in Europe as it would be in places close to the Caribbean. It's a worldwide problem now that you know the US as often started it off, show. peopleeople could get rich on this, how big corporations could make even more money and how all these byproducts can be sold to consumers. And yeah, the rest of the world is hasas a sweet tooth as well has absolutely embraced it Many people say they feel like they can't stop eating. certain oldra processed foods. Tim, can these foods genuinely override our body's sort of normal control systems they can and they're specifically designed to do that because as Michael said, therere created in laboratories. brilliant scientists who have had decades of trial and error to perfect their art. blend particularly of three ingredients, sugar, salt and fat in that perfect combination that's called the bliss point lights up the brain pleasure centers that are recepted to things like dopamine. and causes something similar to what's happens in most cases of addiction. whether it's know that big buzz from a cigarette or a drug or heroin or morphine or opiates. And as well as that signal, it also seems to override the fullness signals. We're learning this from the GLP one drugs, you know, the Azempic type drugs throughout there that work mainly on that pathway And we call this hyper palatability. So that's a way of describing these foods is that they override The normal body's response, which is to feel full And that's in a way why these products are so dangerous is because we over consonsume them in ways that our evolution and our genes have not prepared us for. and it's all happened in the last fifty years or so There's certainly a proportion of the population that are just constantly craving these foods, so they're just thinking about it all the time It's like twenty four hours a day, a bit like someomeone who's into cigarettes Yeah, and they get on this roller coaster of glucose response. and I was always a little reluctant to use the word addiction. I thought it was more metaphoric when it came to food compared to drug addiction or cigarette addiction. But in fact, from the researchers I've talked to, it's a fair description and that you have the kind of dopamine release that's often associated with an addictive drug So if you accept the dopamine model of addiction, I think you have to include food I've often wondered like, okay, these food companies are trying to get us to eat their food Doesn't your mom do that too when she cooks you a beautiful meal And I realized, no, it's a different game. She wants to satisfy you. She doesn't want to fill you up necessarily or addict you to her food. And being satisfied is different than being full and the food industry is really trying to get us to eat as much as possible. That's their goal is using our bodies to dispose of this surplus. The other thing we haven't talked about is how cheap these foods are. I mean, given their complexity, it's remarkable how inexpensive they are But that goes back to your point about subsidies. This is the kind of food that gets subsidized The EU and the US government are subsidizing the least healthy calories in the diet. They're subsidizing the worst things for us The the worst things for us to eat, Whole foods, produce, they're not subsidizing. Becauseuse people often talk about, well, isn't it more expensive to eat whole food? And we've talked about that I actually on this podcast quite often, and the answer often seems to be no. But what you're saying is One of the reasons is because our governments are actually subsidizing It's artificially cheap. The price of a hamburger or french fries at McDonald's is partly being picked up by the taxpayers. It's extraordinary. And it's very hard to subsidize Who foods because whenever you subsidize something, as we learn from the monocultures of corn and soy, you get over productduction And that's fine with grain because you can store grain for at least five years if you get too much of it and wait for the market to recover. You subsidize broccoli and you've got a sloppy mess on your hand. There's nothing you can do So could we talk through for a minute what's happened over these last fifty years on the Big food manufacturing side Yeah, I mean, they have moved to a culture of ready to eat foods. They're counting on the fact that there's less cooking happening. The way to eat whole foods economically, of course, is to cook them If you buy raw ingredients and cook them is competitive with buying ready to eat foods. Many of us aren't cooking anymore. We don't have the time or so we tell ourselves, or the two partners are both working. Commute times are longer So we're looking for solutions to a problem, which is not enough time to cook a beautiful meal most nights. And the food industry stepped in. It's often been said that that was a result of feminism beginning in the sixties and seventies. But that story is a little too simple. There was definitely with the feminist Revolution There was a lot of argument in households about childcare, house cleaning and cooking And the division of labor had to change. It was under enormous pressure Um The food industry saw this as an opportunity, and they recognized that they could step in and solve the problem. There was a famous billboard that got at this KFC, Kentucky fried chicken had billboards around the country and was just a bucket of fried chicken And with this very simple headline, Women's Liberation So they associated fast food with freedom for women And this ended this conversation between men and women over who should cook or how to divide labor. And we should have completed that conversation and redivided labor in the house. But instead, we just turned to this easy out, which was more prepared foods I've been arguing in favor of cooking for many reasons. I think many things happen when you cook food at home For one thing, everybody eats the same thing. And whereas when you're using processed foods very often, and I've seen this, it's marketed this way. You know that the young boy goes for the frozen pizza and the teenage girl has a salad or the mother has a salad, and then there's a manhandler TV dinner for the dad. And they wanna divide and conquer us. So they market Vied directly to different genders and different ages. Whereas if you're cooking, everybody eats from the same platter And there's something, you know, psychologically beautiful about that. sharing food And I remember once going to a big food manufacturer, I think it was General Mills, and they hired these anthropologists to study the family meal. And if you ask people, they'll still say, Ohh, yeah, we have a family meal. but they would actually have these volunteer families and they put cameras above their dining room table to see how they actually ate meals And the way it worked was the mother had a salad and sat there for an hour. And different other members of the family came and went and would microwave their own meal and sit down with the mom for a little bit and then wander off. They weren't there at the same time. It made for an incredibly disjointed family meal, but people still said, yeah, we have family meal. I see the industry as deliberately undermining Family meeal. and I see Family meeals as one of the most important institutions of our culture. I mean think about what happens at that table. You know, it's where we learn how to share and take turns and argue without fighting the values I mean, in one of the things I wrote, I refer to the family dinner table as the nursery of Democracy. To lose this to the food industry's greed is just a tragedy I think it's sad at a cultural and political level, but it's obviously a disaster from a health point of view because we now know these foods don't give the body everything it needs Then you get into this category of children's food. which is historically a very new thing. useds to be children ate the same thing adults ate. And now you go to any restaurant and they have a menu for kids, you know, and look at that food. It's always chicken fingers and French fries and hamburgers and pizza From an English speaking world perspective, that's absolutely true. But when you do travel, you do realize that, you know the rest of the world Distinguish kids and adults Yeah. and I think that's a it's a really unhealthy development and I hope it doesn't spread. What's so powerful about plants and what have we lost? Plants are very important to human health Every cell in a plant has a wall And that wall is what we call fiber And the microbes that inhabit our gut are large intestine That's their preferred food. so that if you're not eating plants, you're not feeding your microbiome And that's critically important There's a huge loss when you take plants out of the diet and I think we're paying the price for that. So if we think about it as what we could do to get back to where we want What can plants give us Well, first of all, when you're eating plants, you're getting all this bulk. So you're getting fewer calories per bte per unit of food, which is very helpful with weight. One of the problems with ultra processed food is it's soaked Caloric, it's so dense in calories for every bite since there's so little water, so little fiber. you're getting many more calories and before you can your satiety signals can tell you you're full. Eating plants kind of slows down this whole process and adds bulk to it plants also are full of nutrients that you're not getting from ultra processed food All plants have antioxidants, a variety of them because antioxidants help them deal with the stress of photosynthesis. Antioxidants are very important to our health too. And vitamins, I mean, plants are just, you, a storehouse of necessary nutrients. People on the podcast will know polyphenols. Yeah, is how we tend to c antioxidants these days the defense chemicals in plants that They actually fuel for our gut microbes as well. You know, what's going on in the microbiome is it's like this chemical factory, pharmaceutical factory. hundreds of thousands of metabolites are produced These, it turns out, are very important to our well being and they're influencing the brain in ways we're just beginning to understand I think we have to remember that when we're eating, we're not just feeding our body. You know, we have these, you know one hundred trillion or whatever the number is, microbes that also need to be fed. And you know, we're eating not even just for two. we're eating for millions. I'd love to pick up on this point about plants affecting our minds and not just our body. And I understand that you know humans have been doing this for thousands of years. And could we maybe start with the most widely used psychoactive drug on Earth, as you mentioned, caffeine You've really looked at this in some detail and indeed, I think decided to quit caffeine at some point. Could you tell us about that, Michael Well Caffeine is probablyrobably my favorite drug And we don't think of it as a drug. We think of coffee and tea as drinks, but it is a drug and it affects the mind powerful ways I was taking this addictive drug every day. And I was interviewing an expert on drug abuse, Roland Griffith. He died a couple of years ago, but he was a very influential psychopharmacologist and did a lot of the early work on psychedelics there. But before he got interested in psilocybin as a therapeutic aid, he was an expert on caffeine I was interviewing him and he said, you know, to understand your relationship to any drug, you have to give it up. period of time because you can't think about it objectively while you're essentially. So okay, I guess I better do this And I was writing an audio book on caffeine. So I gave up caffeine for three months. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done It sounds brutal. It was. I was a daily coffee drinker, but I also drank a lot of green tea The first few days were hell. Some people have flu like symptoms. I didn't have this. I just I felt like I was jet lagged or something. And get the headaches? I got the headaches definitely and I was kind of miserable and I had no focus at all. It was really unpleasant and I was undergoing withdrawal. Even though after this ten days of withdrawal, I didn't feel myself Wh was really weird. And I realized I felt more myself on this drug than I did off it And so like what's that about? Like how it had really become that integral to how I lived and perceived the world So it got me in touch with powerful this is but it was worth it notot just for the story value, it was worth it because the first cup I had after going back on was fantastic. I mean, so much better than coffee is normally that I recommend a caffeine fast just for the pleasure of that first cup And I was like, how can I keep this going? You know, I w to enjoy this experience And I thought for a long time, well, I'm just gonna have coffee one day a week And that worked for a couple weeks, but then I had a deadline on a Thursday and I was like, you know, caffeine would really get me over the hurdle. So I started making exceptions like any addict, basically. And before long, I was down the slippery slope and back to my daily habit. But isn't that the real Michael Polland with caffeine?ave you Thank you whichich is the real one The real one is with caffeine When we talk about drugs and we talk about addiction, there's a moral connotation to it. But in fact From what I can tell, there's really no downside to a caffeine addiction up to a certain point There's been actually a lot of research showing that it may not be caffeine, but the caffeine containing plants like coffee and tea have lots of polyphenols and that actually show evidence of helping with things like Parkinson's disease with dementia and depression to a certain point. If you're above eight cups a day curve. changes and you're at greater risk of depression, anxiety and suicide The epidemiology is strongest probably for heart disease that Having up to six cups a day can reduce your risk of heart disease by twenty five to thirty percent.ow It's really interesting. And Ten, could you ever give up coffee I've tried, I haven't quite managed to shift it, but I do realize that some of the benefits of coffee you can get from having the decaffeinated on perhaps there is a a middle ground where you might be still having Three to four cups of coffee a day, but maybe half of them are decaffeinated. We do know that a lot of people are super sensitive to caffeine and can't tolerate it. They get jittery and this varies between men and women. varies at different ages. It varies if you're a smoker or a nons smoker, it varies if you're taking the contraceptive pill, all these kind of things can have a big influence And it changes as you get older. So you know, I used to be a tea drinker and I switched to being a coffee drink, interestingly And tea drinking is a softer hit. Everyone describes the fact that you get this caffeine release It's slightly more mellow So you don't get that sudden jolt that you do with Be you have that espresso in the morning So people who like that feeling perhaps like yourself you know, like a meower drug that brings them into the day slower. So I think everyone you know, finds what they like, but it is interesting even in the UK, land of tea. drinkers we're now majority coffee drinkers. Yeah. Well, the coffee here has gotten so much better. It was pretty dreadful. It was. It's very good right now I mean, I feel that in both the UK and the U.S. had just about the worst coffee, right? So we got a long way to go. has got a lot better. It's true. Yeah, tea. and green tea in particular, I think has another compound in it that kind of spreads out the effect over a longer. So it is Mellower. It's definitely Mellower You know, it probably makes sense to drink both because they have different polyphenols. Yeah. no, I think Probably the mistake we make is just by fixating on one source of caffeine. And if we did have green tea, match And, you know tea as well And if I had a decaffeinated coffee, only decaffeinated coffee, will I still get the health benefits that you're talking about As far as we know there, you know, the data isn't Pb when they have looked at people who only drink decaffeinated coffee, they still see some of the heart benefits So we think the modern processes do Most of those polyphenoles, when they decaffeinate They've got a lot better than they were twenty years ago. And so yes, I think you can get most of the benefits. It's not sure whether it's one hundred percent, but certainly majority of the benefits. from Dcaf When I'm drinking a coffee or tea, there's a lot of stuff in it whole package is really good for my health. It's fermented. Yeah, it's a fermented bean or whatever, yes And one of the things in it is the caffeine. That's the thing that's probably really making me addicted, makes me feel wired But it's not necessarily the caffeine that's actually giving me the sort of long term health benefits, even if it might be Michael, as you're saying, the thing that makes me feel great about myself in the day. But that is a benefit. And there's also the benefit of focus. I mean, like any kind of stimulant, basically, it helps you you able to block out a lot of distraction, and that's why it's so useful for work I mean, you know, the history of the coffee break think about it, you have Companies giving their employees Time off and a free drug every day, twice a day in a lot of American companies. Why are they doing that? It makes workers more productive I never thought about it like that. It suddenly sounds dystopian. We're gonna give you this drug for free. so you' can work harder. That's basically how it started I'd love now to pull this all because we've sort of almost had these two strands through this conversation, which has been fascinating between this like ultra processed food, this completely new way of growing food and making it. On the other hand, this story about plants and how we've coexisted with them and some of the remarkable things that they do And so I'd love to sort of pull this together and say, okay, we're all living now in this very unnatural. that's sort of clear So what are the sorts of diets that people should be aiming for. if they can sort of switch off all the marketing from companies just trying to make money off them And how can we sort of sidestep that and I think it can feel really hopeless and I have this conversation quite often with people, Michael what would you say to know an individual who's saying, I want to make changes, like what should I be doing a lot of emphasis on cooking If you're cooking one day a week, try to cook two days a week I think being incremental in the changes is really important and not as daunting as saying, well, you got to cook meal every night of the week. A lot of people can't do that. So If you're cooking, you're automatically eating better food, evenven if you're frying it, you know, whatever you're doing, it's going to be better than ultra processed food. And you don't have to worry about counting calories or nutrients, all those things kind of take care of themselves with home cooked food I think also we've complicated cooking in our heads. I mean we've lost the transmission of cooking from one generation to the other We've also lost, I don't know about in the UK, but in the US, we used to have what we called homeomec, homeome economics classes where And it was totally gendered and the girls learned how to cook and the boys learned how to make a Japanese lamp and it's what I remember. We need to bring that back, but you know, for both for both genders, I think, because the parents may not know how to cook anymore. That's the same in the UK. They got rid of it a few years ago and there's no cooking taught in schools. I mean, what a shame One of the things that strikes Me now looking at this in twenty twenty six is actually how mindful cooking is. And we live in this world right these devices are so addictive and you're pulled in. like I think this is worse than the caffeine. And there's something about cooking. And the reality is you can get a lot of ingredients now that make this quite quick, right? completely different. You can get your onion already sliced and arito pag ye.ight Yeah, exactly There are advantages. There's a lot of convenience offered. but it's also we why did we decide that cooking was such a chore? I mean, it can be a great pleasure also Part of it was the industry convinced us it was a chore and it was really hard. So that's one strategy I think that's really interesting. I mean, I definitely grew up in a household where cooking was you know, gendered, as you said, my mother did all the cooking. and I think that I never realize that actually it can be quite fun honestly like disconnect you from your devices for fifteen minutes Exactly. twenty minutes. It's some of the favorite time of the day. My wife and I cook together. We have an island in the middle of the kitchen and we divvy up the chores. She'll make the main or the side and you know, vice versa. And we catch up on our day and it's a great pleasure. And You know, my son doesn't think of cooking as gendered at all. I mean, he grew up in a household where both parents were cooking We required him to contribute to the meal that do something. It could just be like mince a clove of garlic or wash the salad or something, but he had to do something no matter how busy he was to contribute to the meal. And that's that's also, you know, we have to think about our kids and what habits we're teaching them around food I had a question for Michael. In your earlier books, you described ultra processed food, one of the sort of first descriptions of it as I think it was something that your grandmother wouldn'gnnize food. Now that was a while ago now. One of the advice is, you know try and avoid ultra process foods, but it's increasingly difficult for people to recognize. what they really are and what the worst ones are. I've thought about that a lot. So I wrote a series of food rules that I published as a book called Food Rules to help people identify what food they should be eating And what I was getting at with like, don't eat any foods your grandmother or great grandmother wouldn't recognize is that Traditional diets are almost all healthy They've been designed over time what they need. And whether it's, you know the Mediterranean diet or even the traditional American diet or UK diet These traditional diets are better than ultra processed foods. If your grandmother or great grandmother doesn't recognize it as food Watch out. Other rules I came up with if there are more than five ingredients. I mean, it's kind of an arbitrary number, but ultra processed food has a long list of ingredients. If there are ingredients that a normal person doesn't keep in their pantry, like, you know, multtidextrin, nobody has that. Nobody knows what it is That's to be avoided. If it has ingredients, your third grader can't pronounce that should be avoided You know, the way I define ultra processed food is foods you need a factory to make that contain ingredients no normal person has in their pantry So that's a very folk definition, but I think it's helpful And so my overall advice, after studying nutrition for many decades is so simple. And I'm often asked, what would you change? You It's simply eat food, by which I mean real food, food as we've understood it for tens of thousands of years too much and mostly plants And I think the only thing I might change in that is I think fermented foods are very important. I think we're learning that. And so among those plant foods, some should be fermented The mostly plants is what pisses off people on both sides of the vegetarian divide Vvegans and vegetarians are like, why not all plants? And carnivores are like, the nerve. he doesn't mention meat. But I think that mostly has a lot of wisdom in it You know, there's nothing evil about meat. Meat is a nutritious food. I think at least in the US., we eat way too much of it for our own good or for the good of the environment, which is a bigger concern when it comes to meat. It's just a terrible way to produce food, very inefficient. huge climate implications. And this is talking to many experts, many doctors. That's what it comes down to Tim, what are your thoughts to that I Michael really set the standard for what we should discuss as real food. And I think it's probably what you're still most known for, that mantra. But it's increasingly difficult because the food companies are obviously aware of this and are doing everything they can to disguise and make it look like something your grandmother would recognize. That's right. So when you said this twenty years ago, they weren't quite as clued up now. So the packets will now have pictures of happy farmers and wheat fields, any five ingredients. And we assume if it's plant based, it has to be good, but you know sugar's a plant. So if it says plant based, that doesn't mean that it meets your requirements to be. still read the ingredient label and see what plants they're talking about And this is back to yourre saying, Well, it could all be from that corn and so that is a plant So it's difficult. So I think the consumer has really faced with this great battle, and that's in a way why The Zoe team came up with this new way of describing ultra processed foods with the app try and categorize all these foods, which is fiftycent to sixty percent of all the foods we eat into different categories of risk because it's really hard to avoid everything. Yeah. That's. I agree. And so We've worked out through looking at hyperpalatability, which we've discussed this you know, the bliss point, through the energy density, through the fact that you can eat these incredibly fast and they've got harmful additives. you've got these different categories in there. So you can actually do this scientifically So I think we need to be using the tools, modern tools like apps to try and combat the enormous power of the food industry and their marketing Be it is difficult to rely, I think, now on the grandma rule Yeah, I was struck by that because before I met Tim, I basically fed my son on these like hot cross buns, which for people outside the UK. How would you describe that, Tim? It spit like an English muffin or something with a bit of sugar on the top and raaisins in it. And my grandmother definitely made those.t recognize them. In fact, I scanned one of these just this week, just to double check igh risk ultra pro. Y food. Because when you turn it over, it's got this extraordinary list of ingredients. but on the front, it looks just like this beautiful thing that you know my grandmother would have made. it' is hard, isn't it? It' hard. I mean, foods that look like foods, like bread, packaged sliced bread You know, you can make bread with like three ingredients, but look at what's in bread now. They don't have time to leaven it. So they put in chemicals that leaven it like this They wanted to be, you know, last and not get stale for like ten days So there are all these preservatives in it. and then they're colorings. And so you do have to be careful with traditional foods and looking at the ingredient label. And you see, is it really bread as you understood it or as your grandmother understood it? or is it some Very complicated, ultra processed food, masquerading as a traditional food Do you know someone who's looking for simple tips to improve their health and change what they eat If so, I think they might find Michael Polland's simple advice can genuinely improve their health You've talked about cooking, you've talked about sort of turning the food over and looking at the label Yeah. Any other tips for how we sort of navigate this world In my food rules, I've also talked about the preparation and the actual eating of food Many cultures have rules about when you should stop eating. Harihachbu is something they say in Japan. Eat until you're eighty percent full. That's to an American. That's such a radical idea. We've been taught to eat until you're full If you look at like the French language, what We say to our kids, arere you full? Whereas in France, they say, are you satisfied And that's such a different point in the process Science is one way of understanding food and culture is another. and there is a lot of wisdom there we're not taking advantage of. Ultra processed food, you alluded to this, we take in a lot of calories quickly and almost too quickly for the sety symptoms or method to catch up with it. If you eat really fast And so slowing down your eating, u And going back to something you said about coffee Keep in mind the first bite is the most delicious and savor that first bite. And as you eat more and more The pleasure declines So linger with that first few bites and enjoy that. And the slower you eat The more time there is for your body to catch up with what you're doing and send you that satiety signal There's so much I've learned over you the last few years, but one thing that I was really struck by was this sort of ultra processed food has a very strong taste right at the beginning, but then very little lingering flavor. So actually like eating it slowly doesn't really make sense because you're getting the benefit right away. Is that true? Yeah, I think that is true. I think it's been engineered to be like instantly appealing. And a lot of that is as you said, sugar, fat and salt and There is this immediate gratification. But of course, we don't stop. We keep eating it. And it's been engineered for what the food marketers call craveability. Cability Cvability and snackability, that's another another saying of theirs that they use internally Cvability sounds like a good thing if I'm selling it, but not such a good thing if I'm consuming it You know, cravings are desires you've lost control of, right? And so, you know, again, your parents aren't cooking for you to crave their food. They're cooking to satisfy you. And it's a whole different standard. And I think the danger is once they're in your house, Oh if he come m him what So the key is to not actually put them in your basket and take them home They're trying to manipulate you into buying their food and eating their food and coming back for more And you know, when you think about it that way, we don't like being manipulated. It was when we were told that we were being manipulated on cigarettes that you began to build a political movement to stop it Young people in particular don't like to be manipulated And so exposing those manipulations, I think is an important job for journalists. And there's been a lot of really good journalism about food. Michael Moss has done some great books on how the industry, he's gotten in the industry, and they know exactly what they're doing. You think they are intentionally manipulating us in the way that the tobacco companies did before them? Yes. First of all, there arere a lot of the same companies, right? The tobacco companies bought food companies beginning in the seventies or eighties when tobacco came under pressure. They diversified The documents are being destroyed now, whereas their mistake in cigarettes was all these documents existed and were subpoenaed. and we saw that they were lying when they said, no, cigarettes are not addictive and don't cause cancer. because internally we knew the truth from these documents. I think that's going to be a lot harder to find with food And I don't think that strategy will necessarily work. But the strategy of showing the manipulations I think can influence people. I hope it does Tim is anything you feel we've missed in terms of like the tips that you'd give for trying to get more plants into our diet We haven't mentioned the concept of diversity. I found definitely if you try and change people's opinions. say, Okaykay tryry and aim to e. thirty plants a week from the average, which isort of ten to twelve plants. and naturally everything else falls into place And you get your fiber, you get your diversity, you feeding lotots of fibers to your microbes is a different mindset. It means adding more to your plate, not restricted. It doesn't matter if you add meat or fish or whatever it is, but As long as your plate is full of those thirirty plants, all our studies show that your gut microbes are the healthiest I'd love to finish with one final question, Michael. If someone's listening to this and You could give them one piece of advice to maybe sort of rekindle their relationship with plants or take it a bit further. What would you say Eat food, not too much, mostly plants and learn to distinguish real food from All this synthetic food that's entered our food supply. And would you add cook? And cook, yes, thank you. cook and some fermented foods. Yeah. You don't need to know biochemistry to eat well. For you know, thousands of years, people ate well without it They relied on culture, right? with their parents And cultures can still guide us. So you don't have to fill your head with science. And these are really basic concepts I love it I'd like to do a little summary if that's all right and correct me if I get anything wrong. The first thing that I remember is this amazing idea that there was this big Kentucky fried chicken ad saying, here's this big tub of Kentucky fried chicken. this is women's liberation. and this sort of somehow intersection between this fantastic cultural change and then now abandon everything you've eaten for like this deep fried chicken. And then on sort of following from that, Food companies have been a big part of pushing the idea of sort of ready meals as a solution against traditional cooking versus maybe allowing cooking to happen in an easy way, given that both people are working. This has been a huge part of what has sort of mainlined ultra processed food into our lives The second thing is this brilliant idea that the coffee break that you get at work is actually companies like giving you a drug and saying, take this so you can be more productive. But we all think it's a great thing. I love this. I've never thought about it like that before. And then maybe you know into more of the heart of what we talked about, We talked a lot about ultra processed food and the way in which this started actually not with the food manufacturers, but actually in the way in which we're growing food. And that when I think about a field of corn, I think that sounds really great and natural. And now you're telling me, I can't actually eat this corn at all. It can only be used to go into this incredibly industrialized process to create tons of weird chemical offshoots rather than anything that looks like food. So I think that's fascinating that like the way it's industrialized right from the plants that they're growing, which I think is earlier than I had understood. that these food companies are building cravability. And so the question is like, do you want to be manipulated? They are making this in order to directly sort of hijack you and Tim was explaining again, sort of how that works I love this idea don't eat food that your grandmother wouldn't recognize. And recognizing that that is hard, you really need to turn the label over. And then the second thing you're saying is like know if there's a whole bunch ofingredients in there that you have no idea what they are, This is probably not very good for you And then I think in terms of prical rules I took away. One is try to cook and that doesn't mean you need to cook everything. Think about like if you could just add one day a week. So if you're not cooking at all, could you cook one day? If you're cooking two days, could you do three? because Almost whatever it is that you choose to cook is likely to be better than like an ultra processed ready meal. So I think that's really powerful Then Michael, you slightly updated your famous phrase, which I definitely heard many times. Eat food But it needs to be real food Not too much mostly plants And you said, well, could we add some fermented plants and you probably some diversity would be good there as well. And then the last thing which I hadn't heard before, which I thought were really interesting was You're saying We often grew up in the US or the UK to say, like are you full before you sit down? But you're saying in Japan, they say, well eat until you're eighty percent full. And you're saying in France, the question was, are you satisfied? And just that reframing You can see sort of makes you think a little bit less about stuffing yourself to the last moment, especially with our children 'cause they're hearing that message. Oh, you're supposed to eat ttil you're full That's where we need to practice that. Are you satisfied? Have you had enough? Are you no longer hungry? Professor Sarah Berry here all experience that familiar three PM slum, that moment where your energy dips and you find yourself aimlessly rummaging through the kitchen for a quick fix Biologically, that typically happens because highly refined soft textured processed foods can cause rapid sharp peaks and subsequent drops in circulating blood sugar Our data shows that these kind of sharp drops can actually leave you seeking out more energy, forcing you to ride a metabolic roller coaster that can drive people to consume an average of three hundred extra calories later in the day To address this challenge, the team developed the Zoegutt Health Bar. It's a snack bar built with over ten distinct plants formulated by our scientists to offer high plant diversity. When making this bar, our primary objective was to break the roller coaster cycle. We prioritized the food matrix, leaving as many of the natural plant structures as intact as possible. Because the structure isn't broken down by heavy processing, the nutrients enter your system at a much more measured, predictable pace, supporting a steady release of energy. And we topped it with real dark chocolate or raspberries and goji berries, proving that prioritizing your gut health can also hit the exact right note you're looking for in a snack