623: Jodi Moreno Shares Her Mexico City Recs and Simple Pleasures in the Kitchen

29:44I agree. Yeah, the tuna tostada is great. There's also a soft shell crab taco that comes with a flour tortilla and you can ask them for a red salsa. So that's like a secret that if anyone's listening and goes, they should do that. What is the dessert that you choose? They bring this kind of platter out with one of every dessert, which I think is a really good technique to convince people into getting something because maybe you think that you're too full and then you see the platter and you I kind of feel like you need to get something. I mean, I think that the strawberry, if I was entertaining visitors, I think the strawberry is a must.

30:17And that is one of my favorites. But there's also like a banana cream pie that is always overlooked that I love. There's a coconut flan. Everyone likes the fig tart, but that's not my favorite. I think there's some sleepers on that tray. I think. And then if you have like a bigger crowd, you just like get as many as you possibly can. Yeah. Yeah. You go there for like a weekend lunch or something. Yeah. That's nice. But there's one other mention I'll say is that one of my favorite restaurants in Mexico City is actually like it is a Chinese food restaurant called Hunan. And it's like it's a Mexico City family staple.

30:55And if you go there, you won't see any tourists. But it's such a it's just such a classic spot. Like if any of my friends that grew up in Mexico City, like they go there for their special meals. And it's such a funny scene because it's Chinese food in Mexico City. But they have like table side martini service. They have like a Peking duck. It's like my other go to special spot. And I'll take visitors there even if they're there for a short time just because it's such a beautiful restaurant and such a classic scene. I'm adding it to my map right now because I have had a lot of good Asian food in Mexico City.

31:31And I think that anything that's like a family spot, I think is like beloved for a reason. Yeah. A hundred percent. Now that you're back in New York after being away for a while, does the city feel similar in terms of the dining scene, the overall vibe? It does. It feels like I always go back to the classics, but. Yeah. Where have you been going? I have been to. Oh, my gosh. I mean I'm a big like sucker for any Keith McNally like the pestis and Balthazar just because when you've been away from New York like those are the feelings yeah um Raul's too is like a absolute favorite um do you call ahead and try to get a reservation or do you just walk in there we've tried that and then it's usually like they never have 5 30 yeah yeah and then we walk in and We usually can make it work.

32:27That's good. I think that's the thing. Like, I'm not good at making reservations. So I feel like if I can't find a way to finagle myself in, then... I think that's maybe, like, one of the less good things that's happened in New York coming out of the pandemic especially. I think that maybe because the pandemic was a difficult time for restaurants and so they relied on reservations more or maybe because of the TikTok belly landscape here. I feel like it's much harder to get a reservation at places and it feels like sometimes there are restaurants that just have so much more space for reservations than walk-ins.

33:07Yeah, exactly. And I think that's the one biggest difference I noticed. I mean, there are some places that are always notorious hard and reservations have always been a challenge here. But there's been, you know, in the past five years since I've been gone, there's a noticeable difference in that. And I think you're right. It's like it's TikTok. It's just that there's like there's so much access and everyone wants everyone wants to try it. There's only so much you can. Besides the New York classic steakhouse bistro type thing, what else are you trying to eat while you're here? I love Asian food.

33:43Obviously, I just recommended a Chinese restaurant in Mexico City. But, yeah, I mean, I love to have Chinatown, get some dumplings. My friends and I are very into both Thai and Vietnamese food. So that's probably the other thing. I've been to Bangkok Supper Club and Sape, I think, was the other one. And Ladong. those are kind of in the neighborhood where we were staying so it's they were they were all really good that's all really great i've been dying to go to mom i still haven't been but i think that's the vietnamese place that is like the top of my list right now oh i'll have to add it to my list yeah they have um they're very popular but they have a wine bar called lyri that's next door so you can put in your name at mom and then go to lyri and have some bites and like a drink and then go back over when your table is ready.

34:38Oh, I love that. I wanted to ask you, I think one of the interesting things about being a cookbook author on social media is that you have this kind of view into the recipes that people are cooking, or at least the ones that they're choosing to share and tag you in. And I'm curious if you've seen any especially popular recipes from Simple Pleasures since it's been released. Yes, I think I've been seeing people consistently make the like the pomodoro pasta the one i mentioned which makes me really happy and the funny thing is it's one of it's simple in concept but it's actually one of the more labor-intensive books because it's like you know you like cook down the tomatoes and you process them and all this stuff and so but it's been i i love the people have been making that like that's the that's the one i've seen the most so far yeah it's definitely one of the ones that i want to make the most yeah Yeah.

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36:52Visit butcherbox.com slash taste to get this limited time offer and free shipping always. That's butcherbox.com slash taste. Don't forget to use our link so they know we sent you. Okay, to close today, I want to play a rapid fire game with you. So I'm going to ask you some questions and you'll tell me the first answer that comes to mind. Okay. Okay, your favorite cookbook right now that's not one of your own? it's the uh essentials of italian cooking by marcella hasan a classic yeah favorite three things that are always in your fridge cuepi mayo um homemade bone broth and probably like five to seven versions of chili crisp it's understandable um your go-to breakfast Oh, if I'm making it for myself, I would say I usually make like a French style omelet so I can practice my egg skills.

37:49Yeah, that's a good one. Your favorite bakery in Mexico City? Oh, wow. Well, I used to live around the corner from Odette and I just love that little glorieta. It's on like that little circle. It's pretty. Yeah, there's so many, though. The bakery scene in Mexico City right now is like exploded. Yeah. Your favorite like street food to get when you're in Mexico City? Tacos. Do you have a specific taco that you go for? Does it depend on your mood? Depends on the mood. But I'm like a big fan of, I like suerero. I like to go to kind of like the outskirts. I love barbaco on the weekends, the little stands that pop up.

38:35cochinita is one of my favorites but sometimes you have to like seek it out and yeah um yeah my boyfriend's from mexico and he's like the taco expert and it's it's been really fun because i've gotten to try like so many things i would never know i love that uh your go-to late night snack ice cream straight out of the container what flavor ice cream oh i like a vanilla classic maybe sprinkle some cookies on there yeah yeah um something that you like to bring as a beach snack um sandwich is a sandwich a snack like it's a meal accounts okay depends on how much a small sandwich and some chips like i feel like i always bring a sandwich to the beach do you put the chips on the sandwich or separate yeah both okay finally a fictional food scene like from a book or movie that you wish you could magically eat in real life?

39:36So first thing that always pops in my mind is the movie It's Complicated with Reryl Streep. And I just look at, I watch that movie over and over again. And I've never been to Santa Barbara, but I want to move there and learn how to make croissants and open up an all-day cafe. And yeah, it looks like the dream life. is this like i feel like this was like a famous like not famous but i saw a lot of people get really angry about this scene in the movie because they make the croissant in like 10 minutes like they don't wait for it to prove or it's like the most unrealistic depiction of making croissants but the croissants do look beautiful yeah everything looks beautiful in that movie that's why it's like it could be so wrong but i just i want it to be it feels so right yeah yeah yeah well maybe one day we can go to cinna barbara and make croissants in 10 minutes yes i think That sounds great.

40:29Sounds ideal. It's been so fun, Jodi. Thank you for coming on the show. Thanks so much. Tim Spector, this is Taste. Thank you for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure. I'm really excited to chat with you. I have a lot of, hopefully not too silly, but burning scientific food questions for you. And also a lot to say about the book as well. That's great. You're looking forward to it. I guess before we dive into the gut health science of it all, I want to give a little bit of insight into who you are as a person and your relationship with food. And I'm wondering if you could tell me what your relationship with food was like before you began studying medicine.

41:09It was pretty basic, functional. My mother wasn't a great cook. She was the only person I know who could burn peas. and she was brought up in Australia where it was all large plates of meat and a bit of vegetables. It was not a gourmet household with people experimenting on anything exotic and, you know, I was brought up with British school food and occasionally, you know, a bit of that in Australia as well. and so my aim as a student to eat was to eat as cheaply as possible not not as healthily as possible so i had a terrible diet um trying to exist on real budget food and um getting as much free food as i could really that was the the aim of mainly of me getting getting through the year So I could spend more on vacations and alcohol.

42:18A common student experience, I think. Yeah. So it really wasn't good. But I was quite lucky and I didn't gain weight very, very quickly. So I stayed skinny despite my poor habits at that time. although you know I had had it I had a gap year where I'd gone and worked in Austria and and in other countries in in kitchens and things so that did expose me to other foods so I think our household certainly do experience foreign foods my mother was a big lover of Italian cuisine so we had before our friends did we were introduced to um exotic pasta dishes and things uh perhaps more than most uh and but yeah i it certainly wasn't a gourmet household by any means and then i went straight through to medical school which was hot and then hospital food really so So it was eating, you know, working 72-hour shifts, just eating terrible canteen food, which was eggs and French fries and sausages.

43:35Yeah, not good. All the usual suspects, I imagine. And then when did you begin to develop kind of a research or professional interest in like food and how it relates to health and those things? Well, I sort of went up a notch because I did some of my training. I spent a year in Brussels in Belgium and discovered that the hospital food there was amazing compared to the East End of London. You know, they asked you how you wanted your steak cooked, you know, medium rare. It was unbelievable, the difference. And they didn't really have any junk food there at all. It was like a superb restaurant in the hospital canteen there.

44:23So I knew that other people were getting it right. And I had a year of eating in amazing restaurants in Brussels. So that upped my level. and then I married a Belgian, French Belgian, who was a good chef. So again, the quality of food I was getting went up a notch. But I didn't really think about the health aspects much at all beyond the average doctor until about 2011 when I had my own little health crisis that triggered it all. and it's only when you're affected yourself that I think you make a big play of things and that's sort of jolted me out of this idea that most doctors have that they know everything that suddenly I realized when I was researching for myself I really didn't know very much and I hadn't been taught very much at med school and as a doctor I was mainly just bluffing it with patients, as most of my colleagues were, you know, just and treating food like fuel and just it's just about calories and amount of fat and sugar.

45:42There was nothing much more to it than that. So that was the moment that it really the penny dropped. And at the same time, in my parallel life as a scientist, a doctor scientist, I I discovered that looking at identical twins, that the only thing I'd found in about 20 years of looking at identical twins that was different were their gut microbes. So their gut health was very different. And that, to me, rang a little bell in my head that said, wow, this could be the reason that we're all different and that we're all responding to food differently. Because up to now we've just ignored this new organ in our bodies this gut microbiome and those two events this research finding and me having this mini stroke in italy up a mountain both you know coincided and so it really triggered my interest from a personal and a research point of view such that I said, this is what I want to spend the rest of my career working on.

46:54And I'd been a rheumatologist. I'd been a geneticist. I'd done epigenetics. I'd done lots of different things. And my philosophy in science had always been to try and pick the top, the hot topic of the next decade and be there. And so that's why I didn't want to just be doing me too stuff. So that's why the gut microbes and health suddenly made sense to me. And if you want to do the gut microbes, you had to then understand or relearn all about nutrition to be able to put it into its right place so that we can actually start making the right food choices if we understand why we're making them and who we're making them for.

47:40And it was miles away from what I'd been taught about calories and saturated fat and sugars and carbs and the way we've treated ourselves like just with these strange combustion engines that just burn fuel at one end and need to run around a little bit more and all be sorted out. Yeah, I think it is so interesting to hear that you thought that the gut microbiome would be the topic of the next decade because we're here over a decade later. And I think it is such a huge topic of conversation for people. And I want to dig into that, but I want to go back to the twin study a little bit just to kind of connect those dots because I'm actually a twin myself.

48:25So I'm fascinated on that level. But the fact that the twins, the identical twins had different gut microbiomes, I'm assuming that's because they had different diets. And I'm curious if they had other health outcomes that were different as well. Remember, we looked at identical twins. I don't know if you're an identical twin or not. I'm not, unfortunately. Yeah, we all wanted to be identical twins, didn't we? But they're clones of their sisters, for example, or brothers.

48:59Every gene is the same in every cell in their body. And they also spent their life together. So up to the age of 18, they'd be eating exactly the same foods, gone to the same schools, had the same parents, a lot of the same friends. But they ended up, even if you studied them at 18, they had different microbes. And that's because there is a randomness to it that we didn't know up to that point. And often the first four years, four or five years of life are when they're quite random. And just depending on who got like a cold virus first or who got given antibiotics would totally change the composition of the gut microbes.

49:46and it may have been even who even who touched them first as they came out of the uh the obstetrics ward uh that would change their their gut microbes so we know that it it's it's not very genetic at all uh it does relate to how closely you're brought up but it meant that they were really no different to either fraternal twins like you or the average you know a pair of sisters or brothers and that told us that genes aren't the crucial thing. Environment is, but there's also a big random element to this because presumably evolution has made it that way to make it rather different so that I guess we don't get all wiped out by the same infections.

50:36That's really interesting. And I think maybe a lot of people today know that the gut microbiome is something in your body and that if you eat probiotics, you'll have more good bacteria and maybe your digestion will be better. But I think it's much more comprehensive than that. And the gut microbiome affects our bodies in lots of different ways. Could you kind of speak to that a little bit more and break down like why this is something we should pay attention to? Yeah, I think the way to think about this is that you've got as many microbes in your gut as you do cells in your body. And we've evolved together with them.

51:13So it's not by chance. This is millions of years of evolution in every animal. And they provide a role that we can't ourselves do. So we've given them a home and they're giving us a bonus of thousands of chemicals that they produce that we can't do. So they're like many chemical factories in our bodies, pumping out these chemicals. And their main role appears to be on two systems in our body. The first is the immune system. They send out chemicals to the immune cells that are lining our gut. Most of our immune cells are not in our neck or bone marrow, but they're actually in our guts. And they're there for a reason, and that's to sense what's going on in our world.

52:04And our gut is the way our bodies where finding out what's happening on the outside world. And so they're interacting with each other. If they're unhappy, they'll cause inflammation, which means you've dialed up the immune cells. And if they are happy, they'll be sending out nice calming signals. And this has implications because now the immune system is crucial to things like aging, things like cancer. It's all autoimmune diseases, allergies, mental health conditions, you name it, you know, the immune system is key to it. And so that's why having a stable, flexible immune system depends on you having a really good, stable gut health and gut microbiome.

52:57And the other area is the nervous system. There's huge amounts of nerves all in the gut, and so there's a big interaction. Many of the chemicals our microbes produce are neurochemicals. I've heard of things like serotonin or GABA. These are part of common pharmaceutical drugs, and so they're naturally produced by the body, and they will get transported to the brain that can receive all these nerves and act on it. So, and it's a two-way process. The immune system can work in reverse. So if there's inflammation somewhere else in the body, your gut will get inflamed. And equally, if your nervous system is showing pain or some other problem in the brain directly, then that will also transfer to your gut.

53:47So it explains why before exams or some stressful, who knows, podcast, you might get butterflies in your gut. It's because the two are closely connected for evolutionary reasons. And I think we haven't known until recently exactly how it all worked and how crucial it is to really make sure this organ is functioning well, which is just as important as our liver or our heart. we can't live without a gut microbiome so think of it as chemical factories that are really you will produce all the good stuff if you feed them right and all the bad stuff you feed them wrong that's so interesting i never understood why you feel that kind of tingly feeling in your stomach when you're anxious but of course i think that's a feeling a lot of people have felt before and i think it is proof that everything is so connected i guess i'm wondering if i want to be supporting my gut microbiome, like do I have to take probiotics or can I just be eating a lot of probiotic foods?

54:50Well, eating probiotic foods is always going to be better than just chemical probiotics. The reasons that I talk about a bit in the cookbook, but there's a huge variety of microbes in fermented foods. The more the variety, the more chance it's going to have a benefit for you. And the studies are now suggesting that you get better benefit from having at least three portions of fermented foods a day than popping some probiotic pills, which have a more limited benefit for you. And so there was a big study in Stanford about three years ago that showed that just within about three weeks, you can get a significant drop in your blood inflammation levels just by taking fermented foods, three to five fermented foods a day.

55:51And so it is really, really important. But that's just one of the principles in the book, fermented foods. You can't live just on that. It would help. So you could have a really terrible diet supplemented by fermented foods it would help you a little bit but in the end you want more diverse microbes in that you want you want to grow the good guys and crowd out the lift the the bad guys so that's what we we with this company zoe that i i co-founded we've now got over a quarter of a million uh gut samples from people and we've done sequencing of it and we now know that gut health which used to be thought as just diversity um you know how many different species you have was a good pretty good sign of your health but even better is the ratio of the good bugs that are associated with good food and good health outcomes like low cholesterol and low sugar and uh low weight uh compared to the bad guys that have the opposite effects so it's it's It's all about, if you think of your gut as a garden, you want to increase the flowers so much that there's no space for the weeds to grow.

57:10And to do that, you need to be eating a rich variety of plants which act as fertilizers for your gut microbes. So that's why we're gone for this concept of eating 30 plants a week as a goal. may not get there but it's it's a pretty good goal and that's where we see the sweet spot of people once you get there everything else seems to fall into place you're eating enough fiber you're getting a variety and your microbes are happy um in addition you'll eat colorful plants if you can this is the polyphenols and that's the second principle is you may have heard of eat the rainbow people used to say that we didn't know why that was good but it turns out it's because these colorful often slightly bitter uh plants uh have these defense chemicals called polyphenols which are like rocket fuel for your gut microbes and they have all these benefits on the body and particularly again on the immune system um then you got so the third one is fermenting then you've got uh the idea of uh pivoting your protein so rather than having meat every day uh try and switch that for legumes and pulses things like lentils and beans which are not only a good source of protein but they've also packed with fiber and have other benefits for your gut.

58:49Then you've got giving your gut a rest is a pretty good principle. So cut out late night snacking and try, it doesn't work for everybody, but try and do a 14 hour overnight fast if you can. That has been shown to be beneficial for your gut microbes. They need to rest just like we do and sleep and have a circadian rhythm. And then the final one is to really cut out high-risk processed foods as much as you can. Obviously, 60 % of the American diet is of that category. And probably the really bad ones are only about 25 % to 30%. So if you can get rid of those, then your gut microbes will be happy.

59:38So they're the sort of six principles that I tried to stick to in advising people how to eat, but they're broad. So that's the idea, is you have to be flexible if you're going to have a sort of way of eating for the rest of your life rather than just for a few weeks. Yeah, I really enjoyed reading the six principles. And I think the one about eating 30 plants for a week is the one that jumped out to me the most, because at first I found that very daunting as a number. And then I started writing down all of the plants that I was eating over the week. And I think like it's easier sometimes with different seasons.

1:00:18Like right now it's, you know, finally summer and we have all these different vegetables that I want to throw into a salad and you can get maybe like five or six plants in that alone. Whereas in the winter, I think it's probably harder for me to do that. And I think also you say that like spices like count as some of the plants, right? Absolutely. Yes, because they're concentrated plants. You think of them, you know, we forget that, you know, spices, herbs and spices, you know, are really the tastiest bits with the most polyphenols. So they really count and your microbes love them. And they've done actual clinical trials of giving people an extra spoon of spice mix.

1:01:00And again, in two weeks, you can improve a gut microbiome. So you need to make your foods, ideally, get it more spicy. Bland doesn't really work for your gut microbes. They like a spicy life. So that's really important too. But yeah, so most people get frightened off by this 30 a week idea when they first hear it because we've forgotten what actually makes a plant. And, you know, there are some weird ones in there. You know, people just think, oh, bananas, you know. But berries, you know, different colored berries, the different types of berry, they all count. You can buy these frozen. You can get a can of mixed beans, which will have four different plants in it.

1:01:50You can buy mixed grains, these quinoas, which are different colors. You buy mixed seeds in the market, mixed nuts. There's lots of little tricks that you can get to keep your microbes happy. I wanted to ask you about protein a bit more. In the book, you're talking about encouraging people to diversify their protein sources and certainly legumes as an option for that. I think at least here in the US, there's been a lot of discourse around like protein maxing, people call it, like trying to eat like huge amounts of protein as a way of kind of supercharging their health. Do you think like most people really are protein deficient like that?

1:02:35Or is that kind of like a misconception? That's a big misconception, but driven by huge amounts of marketing. So it's not surprising people are confused. uh the data show that in the u.s 90 percent of people of the average american is getting enough protein and on average they're getting twice as much as they need according to the uh the rda's recommended dietary amounts um and it's really just this 10 percent that need to worry these are the elderly people who are not eating well they might be sick they might be on glp1 zempic type drugs they might be bodybuilders then they do need more than the recommended amounts but most of them are getting it already you know don't you don't realize you get a lot if you're eating a lot you're going to get a lot of it's very hard to avoid protein and my my worry is that you know there's only 10 percent of people who need extra protein but there's 90 percent of americans who need more fiber and if you're only going for meat and dairy as your source of protein then there's no room for plants and fiber on your plate very hard to get your to be obsessed about your 30 a day or your gut health if you just got giant slabs of steak or chicken on there or you're drinking you know lots of milk or whey protein or these powders so that's that's what i feel about i don't think there's a huge risk of overdoing it um but it's it's what you're not putting on your plate so it's all about nutrition is like it always comes down to a bit of a fight between nutrition to say well this is better than this or this is worse than this but it's we should be saying, well, instead of what?

1:04:34If you didn't have that on your plate, what would you put there? And that's where the debate should be because if people had less protein, they would have more plants generally. It's hard to see what else they would be putting on there. And so that's my beef with it. Apart from in those categories where I am in agreement and there needs to be some flexibility on the ideas. But there is some crazy talk out there about people needing to treble their protein intakes, which are not justified by any scientific studies. There's no study showing that people who double their protein intake are going to live longer or have less disease or have anything.

1:05:24but we know that for every five grams of fiber people have extra they will reduce their risk of early death by 14 so the average american has about 15 grams of fiber so just by increasing it by a quarter um you're you know you make a significant improvement in your health and there's no similar data and protein so there's nothing wrong with protein but there's no evidence it's really good for you and we know that plants and fiber are really good for you so i think we need to find a middle ground and get people eating high you know plenty of high protein legumes and plants and people don't realize quite how much protein is in many plants i think that's the other bit of education lacking.

1:06:15You've got to eat steak or eggs to get any protein, but no. And also good fermented foods have protein, so nothing wrong with it. Yogurt and if it keepers, so they're all good source of protein and good for you. So that's where my position is. The book doesn't have meat in it because we decided, well, everyone knows how to cook a bit of steak or chicken, they can add it if they want. But people do find it difficult to have a, if they're not used to it, to cook a plant-centric meal where the plants are the center of the meal rather than just the bit on the side. Yeah, I think to me that's what's so interesting about the Food for Life cookbook is that you're pairing these kinds of learnings and takeaways with recipes so that people can kind of put that into action.

1:07:09And I guess I was curious what inspired you to want to make a cookbook in the first place and how you feel like this can be a useful tool for people. Well, about six years ago, I started writing a book called Food for Life, which was a sort of A to Z of food. It didn't get a US publisher, but you can get it from the UK online. but and in that I was laying out the fine detail of each food and the pros and cons and what the scientific evidence was and going into great detail about the principles and the feedback on it the book did really well in the UK and a number of other countries and the feedback was well can you tell us more practically what what we should we do you know it's great to know the theory but can you show that theory in practice what does this mean for an average week you and people are obsessed with what do i eat so on instagram you know i've got quite a big following but and i do a lot of science i talk about you know scientific discoveries etc but my most successful video is what do i have for breakfast okay so you know nearly four million people have watched that youtube video and it's like kind of crazy that um but people want something black and white something practical particularly when they're starting say okay i get it i understand this principle but now what do i do you know because nutrition is actually complicated and so this was a hundred recipes that all have those principles behind them they all score really well using our zoe scoring system which is a sort of global one about reducing sugar spikes, keeping your fat levels low in the blood and helping your gut microbiome.

1:09:07And I think that's, so it was popular demand really. And I wasn't aware of any other book out there that had this sort of basis of science and say, okay, we're going to do each recipe based on these principles, trying to maximize things like how many plants in it. So how much fiber is in it? Normally, they just talk about calories and try to go, oh, this is a super good one. This is a low calorie food. Well, I believe and many of my colleagues now believe that calorie counting is completely worthless and a distraction from the quality of the meal and the food. And it doesn't tell you anything about how much it's going to fill you up or have other benefits.

1:09:50So it was really important to write a cookery book from a different angle where calories are not mentioned at all, but fiber are and number of plants are. And we have lots of additions, you may have noticed in the book, lots of things you can swap around so it's flexible. And you can always top it up with always some fermented food to top it up with so that you can get more fermented foods into your diet. and that's something that I also hadn't seen in other cookbooks, this mixture of sort of more classic cooking, but instead of some of those old-fashioned ingredients like creme fraiche, you'd be adding in fermented kefir or into salads you'd be having some sauerkrauts and instead of just chili, you might actually add kimchi.

1:10:47these sort of ideas which yeah were really fun and in the end yeah I loved doing it and I learned a lot because yeah nothing quite like putting theory into practice to sharpen you know your advice. Yeah I'm really curious about the recipe development process I know that you kind of worked with some nutritionists and recipe developers and some of the recipes are like you know Tim's breakfast bowl and then there are other kind of ones as well so I'm curious how that kind of process went for you and if you you know were kind of shaping a lot of what kind of food you wanted in the book or if it was like a collaborative effort in terms of like what are the actual recipes that peg into the advice going to be it's very much a team effort um no i'm not a professional chef or cook and um but i do know about the science and i know you know i had a uh you know i i do a lot of cooking myself so i so knew what i wanted recipes that would work for me so that was my sort of guide they couldn't be too complicated too fancy the ingredients shouldn't be super expensive uh and there should be a large section for people getting things from the larder so that you know you've got a store cupboard you know say you've been away been on vacation you come back there's nothing there there's always a few recipes you can cook just from having a few cans.

1:12:07That was important to me. And I had a few recipes that I wanted to replicate that were fond memories for me, but I wanted to, in a way, zoify them, you know, so make them healthier. I was a big fan of Wiener Schnitzel when I was working in Austria in the kitchens. I ate far too many of them. And I said, well, how can you get that same comfort feeling of a Wiener schnitzel, but without actually the veal or the pork? And so we did that with aubergines and a nut crumb rather than a bread crumb. You know, my mother was a big fan of making lasagnas. and so you have these childhood memories of, yeah, you really love that crusty cheese, but they're not always that healthy with the mince, so we swapped the mince out for some lentils and many other vegetables in there, and instead of the bechamel sauce, which is basically flour and water and butter, We made that into a white bean mash, which worked really well as a creamy sauce and gave you the same mouthfeel.

1:13:38So that was my contribution. So we knew generally what sort of dishes we wanted. And then luckily, we had all these people, subscribers to Zoe that does this personalized nutrition. And we've been offering recipes and people even saying what their favorites were. So a lot of them reported, well, we like this one you showed us. And so a lot of those favorite recipes that either appeared on Instagram or were shared on the website. we used those as well and then filled in the gaps you know by just playing around with a few other recipes that we'd said could work so very very much a team effort which is fun because but we had expertise from nutrition scientists clinical nutritionists recipe developers and the public so it was um yeah it was really fun i think one of my favorites that i want to make is this eggplant parmesan recipe that has lentils in it as well which is something that i had never thought to add in but i think makes so much sense and i think just shows even more about how having like legumes as something in the pantry that you can add into things really kind of goes a long way yeah that's a great example of how if you if you have this idea that more is better that you're always looking at every recipe and say, oh, what can I put in, you know, to make this either taste better or be better for me or fill me up more or whatever.

1:15:12So that's a great example that you take something simple, which, you know, would be normally just a lot of cheese and olive oil, right? And you say, okay, how can I balance that out and give you some protein and some fiber in there as well? and uh yeah it works really well so that was that was the the big principle and you know whenever we could throw some kefir on the top uh or some sauerkraut or kimchi we always did you know it was uh it was quite fun to see in which times you can swap out uh you know some double cream or um or creme fraiche for something much healthier and you can a lot of the time and we swapped out things like vegetable stocks, which are in general really quite highly processed and quite often salty.

1:16:08You know, it's hard to control the salt in it. And so we made our own bouillon, which you just make with a bit of nutritional yeast and other nuts and things, a sort of savory stock. But I also ended up using miso paste, which is a fermented food. and that's now my staple. I haven't used a commercial stock cube, I don't think, for several years now. So, you know, a lot of things have changed the way I cook as well. So it was very much a learning curve for me. Yeah, I think that's so special about that kind of collaboration also, that, you know, the nutritionist, the scientist, the recipe developer, everyone can kind of bring their expertise, and the result is a kind of like multidisciplinary book.

1:16:58No, we learned so much from each other because the recipe developer had never really sort of, you know, they'd done recipes for someone who wanted low calorie foods, but, you know, that was the only objective. They'd never done it this way around. So they found it really fun as well. Yeah, I think as someone who's, you know, I look at all kinds of cookbooks and I've certainly looked at a lot of kind of health focused cookbooks as well. I really like that at the top of every recipe, it has the grams of fiber it has the amount of plants that are in it and then you know preparation time all of those things but it doesn't have anything about calories it's really kind of highlighting all of the good things that the recipe is doing for you yeah and the ingredients which uh you know we should be celebrating those great ingredients and herbs and spices and things this has been such an interesting conversation tim thank you so much for your time it's my pleasure

1:17:53This is Taste is hosted and produced by Matt Rodbard and me, Eliza Abarbanil. The show is edited by lead producer Clayton Gumbert and supervised by Pat Stango, director of media production and development at Penguin Random House. Thanks to Shalia Harris and the production team at Penguin Random House. Theme music by Steve Rydell, logo and guest illustrations by Ellie Skrzat. Visit Taste online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated on all cool things in the world of taste. Thank you.