Meet The Man That Invented Huel - James Collier

0:00James Collier:I've never been asked that before. What concerns me is these absolutist, talking this absolutist way, black and white thinking, that's dangerous. Some of these influencers say things like, they're lying to you. You know, come on, don't be so effing lazy. You don't see anyone there going to stand there matching a carrot. But it's very macho, isn't it? You know, I used to be quite a fan of Jordan Peterson. I'm really questioning him now. I've heard them cite evidence. They say this paper shows this. How many people pull a paper after hearing it on a podcast? Probably like 0.1 % if they're not. if I'm being generous, but you read some of these papers, it's not the same thing of the sort.

0:33James Collier:They've lied, literally lied. From the outside looking in, it's quick, it's easy, I'm going to put it in the pot noodle process category. That's absolutely wrong.

0:50James, welcome to the podcast. Good to be here, guys. Thank you for joining us. We're going to kick off with a big open question. I'm ready to see where you take it.

0:59James Collier:who are you and what problem do you solve i'm james collier i'm uh what problem that's i've never been asked that before what i'm trying to do myself is i mean i've got 30 years experience in the nutrition um and more recently i've been talking about the food system so i'm trying to make people more aware of their food choices and how they have and how the food choices affect both both themselves but more broadly how they affect others and by others i mean humans and non-humans and the wider environment too okay and then the people that maybe if we call it a problem and the people that might be struggling with that that we want to kind of bring the awareness to if we think of it as maybe a doctor's surgery and the symptoms what what typical symptoms do they face on a daily basis uh there's increased risk of of chronic disease you know we've done a really good job as humanity of minimizing pathogenic diseases um and other accidents and things like that but we're not doing a very good job of non-communicable diseases like cardiovascular disease cancers um alzheimer's and diseases of inflammation etc and this is partly related to our lifestyle well It's related to our lifestyles, but partly related to our diet as well.

2:23James Collier:But I like to think more broadly than the individual. This is part of what I'm trying to talk about. I like to think we're bigger than ourselves. And our diets are also impacting the wider environment around us and other humans. The food choices you make have a wider impact than just you. However, of course, we have to prioritise our own health. And there's a phrase I use in the book. is a diet isn't sustainable if it can't sustain an individual. I'll say that again. A diet isn't sustainable if it can't sustain an individual. How can you be in a position to look after other people if you're not in good health yourself?

2:59James Collier:So the symptom, your doctor's surgery analogy, you might be presenting with, I'm concerned about other people around me that are getting ill when they shouldn't be. I'm concerned about the wider environment, the impact of greenhouse gases. and my wheelhouse is food-derived greenhouse gases, how they affect the environment, what about land use and water use, packaging maybe. But also I find some of the modern farming techniques highly questionable from an ethical perspective, both in perspective human rights and maybe animal rights as well. And then I would say to that doctor, the doctor, I understand that your interpretation of ethics might be a little bit different to mine, but broadly speaking we're probably coming from a similar place nice okay so i want to hit you with it with a big topic so um we were talking a little bit about diary of a ceo before we went on air and there was a bit of a ruckus that started a few months ago around misinformation or generalizing information with a few of the nutrition guests that came on is there any one piece of nutritional advice that is absolute as in it would work 100 of the time for 100 of the people i don't think anything's absolute in this universe well without getting too philosophical here there is one thing that's absolute and this is above my pay grade just to completion's sake people will be wondering what that is is that i know i am conscious anything else i can't be sure of i always think that's a good place to start is how we perceive anything we only know that one thing the next next thing down from that would be complexity the universe is complex and to try and thinking absolutes and black and white thinking just to know so let's bring that back to my area the food system the food system is hugely complex in fact in fact if people were to read my book well fed and they take just one thing away i mean hopefully they'll take lots of things away but the one thing they can learn from is the mere acknowledgement that the food system is complex because from there you you're open-minded you're already accepting that that there's going to be challenges and we can be open to debate and nothing is black and white but there is really strong evidence for some things and then things like um anxiety that seems to be on the rise how much of that can we attribute to diet okay let me just i'm going to answer that but i should give perspective how that links into actually what i'm trying to talk about the reason i wrote the book was uh because i changed the way i ate in 2019 then i when we got bored during the pandemic didn't we all and i started to write some essays i thought this type of eating uh needs to have a name and be written about and i call it contemplative eating or contemplative nutrition and then that formed into me wanting to write a book and i i said there's five pillars of contemplative nutrition and these are eating for our physical health and performance secondly eating for our mental health thirdly sustainable nutrition fourthly ethics and the fifth one is not what we eat but it's how we eat and who we eat with the concept of enjoying meals with other people so let's focus on two and five to answer your question with anxiety we know that anxiety is on on the increase as i understand it the statistics show that anxiety is the is the mental health condition that's causing people the most problems followed closely by depression um we know that our diets are linked to anxiety it's probably not the primary cause but then everything sort of feeds into each other.

6:25James Collier:We know that bad food choices are contributing to ill health. So let's look at that. There's obvious things like if we're craving certain foods, that can affect how we feel. Have you heard the term hangry? I have a love-hate relationship with this word. It's kind of a weird word that people throw around, I'm hangry, and they're probably not really. But on the other hand, it's quite a useful word. We're hungry and angry. and there is something in that if we genuinely haven't eaten for a long period of time we could be feeling a bit anxious a bit nervous because we've been busy maybe we've got actual worries and they're exacerbated by the fact that we haven't eaten and that indicates that there is a link you know no specific nutrient here I'm just talking about lack of energy and lack of nutrition in general and we we also sometimes when we're driven by our cravings dopamine you know Copamines knocking on the door saying it's time to go out and seek food, especially sweet cravings or fatty food cravings.

7:23James Collier:That could lead us to focus on or primarily focus on going to get food and not actually being sensible about what we're choosing. But let's look at it a bit more widely. You know, the gut microbiome, which is all the bacteria and viruses and other microbes that live in our body, that lives in our digestive system, that lives symbiotically with us. They help us and we help them. we know that there's a strong link between the microbiome and the brain so you probably heard of serotonin the hormone neurotransmitter um we generally think it helps it's about positive well-being so we think it's released in the brain which actually maybe as much as 95 of serotonin is actually released in the enteric nervous system that's the nervous system of the gut and that is influenced by the microbiome now there's everyone's talking about the microbiome at the moment we were talking about it off air just a moment ago and it's really exciting but we know so little we don't really know what a good microbiome looks like we know there's a few of the um the unfavorable ones uh i'm not gonna try and name them it's above my knowledge but we um we know uh we know a diverse one is probably a good thing uh and so we should focus on that well what did what do the microbes enjoy what how do we feed them well fiber we're in a fiber crisis um slightly outdated but 2021 statistics from the british nutrition foundation indicated that only nine percent of adults are having enough fiber in their diet similar data in america say it could be as low as just five percent of of usa uh residents that's interesting um now fiber why do we need it we all know it's useful for a healthy digestive system might help release reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease but there is a strong link between good fiber intake and mental health positive mental health and that's probably down to the link between serotonin and the gut microbiome so there's fiber but there are other things as well we all know you might have heard things like um polyphenols or flavonoids these are phytonutrients good stuff from plants um that some of the microbes uh benefit from as well so that and they they break these polyphenols and fibre down into short chain fatty acids, which then go and feed our brain.

9:40James Collier:So there's that. Then, of course, there's nutrition. And another funky word is hang-xiety. You know, hangover and anxiety from when we've had too much to drink and then the next day we're feeling a bit anxious, a little bit low in mood. We had a great night. Maybe we've got some regrets from the night before. Maybe that's what's bringing us down. So there's a link there between how we feel and how anxious we feel. But let me just go to the fifth pillar. There's been some really cool research that has shown that eating in the company of others has positive mental health implications. Now, obviously, we're more likely to make better food choices when we're preparing food for others and enjoying food with others.

10:24James Collier:We know that's being watched and we're going to make healthier choices. But even the act of eating and sharing food with other people has been shown to be beneficial Now, we know that loneliness is a predictor of poor health at a younger age. But even just the act of sharing food through a theory called behavioral synchrony. You might have heard this data before. Some people have that rowers, professional rowers, when they're in the gym training together with their teammates, they train harder than when they're training in the gym with other people who aren't their teammates. That's interesting.

11:02James Collier:well the biological process process is behind that that there's been shown to be similar ones from people who share a meal so this involves possibly serotonin and endorphins but also another hormone called oxytocin which is the same hormone that mum to baby that links mum to baby and it's associated in some circumstances with positivity and this behavioral synchrony idea that when you're eating food with family or friends you're kind of eating in unison now And this is not a case of like, you've got your food there on your marks, get set, go, and you start chewing in absolute synchrony. That would just be weird and probably not good for mental health.

11:41James Collier:But there is kind of you roughly start the meal at the same time. You roughly finish at the same time. But also you're sharing experiences. Let's say you're eating with your family and you've had a bit of a tough day and you want to just talk about it. Or you've had some good times in your day and you want to share them and make other people feel good. These are really good. So there's a lot of link there between how we feel and what we eat and how we eat. Nice. There's, as Zach said, there's so much conflicting information out there. And I'm sure that when you scroll on social media or you kind of, you read different things, there's certain things that you'll read about nutrition that you go, actually, I could probably see both sides of the coin here.

12:20And there's probably, I think the term is rage bait in the industry, stuff that gets your cortisol rising. What are the messages that people are pushing that you are categorically against? And actually, that's the stuff that you feel like, well, actually, no, this is why I'm writing the book. This is why I'm on this mission.

12:38James Collier:Look, there's healthy debate at a higher level, you know, where scientists disagree, experts disagree. And that's good. It's going to happen. Science is the continual pursuit of the truth while being content that we'll never find it. And I think that's quite good. But we can try and get closer to the truth. And these sort of what the writer Tim Urban would call high-rung debates, and I think that's a really good term, meaning that we respectfully disagree. Sometimes we'll change someone's mind, sometimes we won't, and that's okay. What concerns me is these absolutist social media ultra-craperderians, for want of a better term, who are not experts in their field, who maybe 90 % of what they're saying is actually good advice, you know, encouraging people to eat good foods and focusing on certain nutrients.

13:30James Collier:But there's enough bullshit in there that makes their whole narrative highly questionable. now a challenge to that would be well what's wrong with that you know people are broadly giving good advice and they're giving good recipes and there's testimonials from people following their advice that they're improved what's wrong with that that's a big question and you mentioned um about the rage bait uh a good term um look the algorithm seems to be set up for negativity we've only found out in recent years that humans are probably wired and there's good evolutionary explanations for this we're wired to um to be cautious but you know things that that get us going are probably things we're going to want to learn more from and this is the problem we tend to live in a blame culture now i'm going to say something and i'm going to contradict myself in a moment but bear with me when i was growing up i was taught to take some sort of personal responsibility and uh and to the decisions i make are going to influence what happens in my life to some degree obviously there's external factors now to go off topic slightly for a moment um there's people do struggle with their weight people struggle to get motivated to be active and this is a real thing and i'm not i don't want to judge anyone here and there's this concept of food noise which is where people who struggle with their weight are probably seem to be thinking about food a lot more than people who maybe don't struggle with their weight this is a real thing so for me just to come here this is the contradiction now for me to come here and say personal responsibility that's very elitist and i acknowledge the contradiction there but on some level people will find it harder to either not eat as much and this is a genuine thing and we need to support people like this or even just to be more active or even to have motivation.

15:31James Collier:Where does motivation come from? I'm just asking that as a general question. I believe in discipline over motivation more so. Okay, where does discipline come from? The why, the how. But where, how do you find the why and the how? A lot of work. But where, how do you get the motivation to do the work? That's a great question. This is what we're doing. To quote Robert Sapolsky here who wrote a book on free will called Determined, it's turtles all the way down. You can never find the answer to this. Now, the reason why I'm saying that is, you know, motivation's a funny thing, right? But one thing I am sure of, while personal responsibility is up for debate, I am absolutely sure we should not be blaming other people.

16:16James Collier:This is the problem. Then I've got to answer your question now. It's where some of these influencers say things like, they're lying to you. and they might also then say, you know, come on, don't be so effing lazy. And this is a real problem because there are genuine hardships that people have. And to say it blaming big food or the government or whatever, it means people, okay, it's not my fault. So I'm just going to carry on doing what I'm doing and just carry on in ill health and I'm going to carry on not caring about the environment. now that concerns me we need to educate people so who should we listen to in fact people if somebody is listening to this now and thinking okay why should we listen to this you know this 50 odd year old bloke if they're asking that question that's brilliant that makes me happy because they're already half the way there they should be doing that with absolutely everybody and even genuine academic experts in their field will get things wrong and that's okay but there's a few traits that people can um a few rules there's 10 of them in the book but just to give you a few examples of who's probably a quack if they talk in this absolutist way black and white thinking that you you've described if they fear among a certain foods and tell people not to eat certain foods at all that's dangerous are they transparent about their ulterior motives we all have ulterior motives a lot of them are financially linked i have an obvious one with my my role at Huell as co-founder of Huell and an investor there I can't get away from it there's nothing I can do to get away from it but I can be transparent about it if I ever talk about Huell I must mention my my motives and in my bios and all my social media it's as clear as can be and that's important there are other ones like do they talk in an evangelical way very convincing way to use complicated sounding terms without saying what they mean it's okay to use the terms but you've to describe as simple in as simple terms as possible what they mean otherwise you just it's a load of mumbo-dumbo to most people and that's okay so the one thing that i think is really useful the best thing here to spot who's likely someone you should tune in to is someone who talks into a nuanced non-black and white non-committal way they're all they're quite unsure of themselves they should be course correcting in the in the case of of a conversation they are confidently unconfident in themselves that's the one trait i think that people should look for so we mentioned huell so i think we should definitely get into it let's talk about your journey with huell because from the and i've i've used huell and i've enjoyed it that's a disclaimer there but from the outside looking in it would be very easy to say um for somebody that doesn't really know it's quick it's easy i'm going to put it in the pot noodle process category why why would they be wrong okay to give people some perspective here this term ultra processed food i'm betting guys five years ago you hadn't heard the term ultra processed food fair yeah now i'm betting you hear it five or six times a day okay where's that come from briefly for the sake of the audience back around between 2009 2011 a team at the university of sao paulo in brazil came up with what's called the nova categorization where they grouped food not on how on its nutrient value but on its on how its process degree of processing and there's four groups group one is minimally processed food so it might be cooked chopped cut sliced things like that group two are culinary ingredients like spices and salt and maybe some oils and sauces that would go with group one to make them into more edible foods maybe.

20:09James Collier:Then group three would be more traditionally processed foods maybe homemade cakes, homemade bread with maybe minimal ingredients maybe four or five ingredients max. All the processing could be done in a home. It doesn't have to be done at home but it could be at home with all ingredients that could be purchased in a home. Then there's group four the so-called ultra processed food. These are typically foods that couldn't be produced in a home environment or and would include at least one ingredient that couldn't be typically procured locally at a supermarket or something like that. But other characteristics of the ultra-processed food group are they might make a health or nutrition claim on there, like low-fat, high-fibre, healthy heart, healthy eating, something like that.

20:53James Collier:Now, the problem is that's putting everything into a bucket. and the term is actually hasn't got a proper definition and even the even many nutritionists dietitian and academics that I really really respect will agree with me on that but yet they still carry on using the term I don't like to use the term that lacks a proper definition in fact I don't dislike the term I like it in a context it's great for in academia for and research for looking at food patterns for example you might have how do does the mediterranean type diet affect risk of disease how does meat rich diets affect risk of chronic disease and plant rich diets risk of chronic disease or diets that are high in so-called ultra processed food and chronic disease that's really useful that's that form of epidemiology can be really useful for influencing how we should view things and where we should look next in research.

21:54James Collier:My problem is, is high profile academics that have done otherwise good work are going on high profile podcasts and using the term, pushing it into mainstream and people don't know what it means. It's causing confusion and it's led to this massive black and white thinking. Oh, it's ultra processed. It has to be bad. Why? In fact, what does the science say? in in 2023 november in the lancet one of the most prestigious journals they had a meta-analyses which are a type of study that looks at a load of other types of studies and they pulled together the research and of course along with all the other previous research they showed that diets that are typically high in nova 4 ultra processed foods are associated with increased risk of chronic disease but when they broke down those foods into subcategories it was not black and white certain so-called ultra processed uh whole meal or granary breads were associated with lower risk of disease as were um alternatives to meat interesting another study last year in america they took the american healthy eating guidelines and they made a diet um that was 80 ultra processed foods and fed people on this for for quite a long period and looked at key biomarkers the rest of the other 20 they could not you wouldn't get a past ethics approval if you weren't giving people some fruit and beige and things like that but they could meet the guidelines with people with um with a diet that was 80 % ultra processed food interesting there's been other research since um more recently in the last few months okay so maybe the category doesn't work we're in a fiber crisis like i've said there's only nine percent of adults getting enough fiber how are we going to get that in we've got the concept of food deserts have you heard that term oh so food desert is very much linked to um socio-economic factors where certain people in in certain parts of especially in america but in some parts of london it applies as well they don't have easy access to affordable healthy food like fruit and veg so they might live say in a in a block of flats in a lower socioeconomic area of London.

24:09James Collier:And sure, there's shop downstairs and there's takeaways downstairs and they can buy food quite cheaply, but they can't get healthy food if they have to travel too far or it's not affordable for them. So that's the concept of food desert. So let's talk about that. How can we get, how can we find convenient ways of getting fibre into people's diets? And don't forget here, I haven't even mentioned the climate change thing yet. And so, of course, high junk food overly processed food your diets are not going to be great if you're having too much of these high fat high sugar low fiber foods that's not great I'm not disputing that I'm just talking about it from a point of view of language from a point of view of definition let me give you some examples now let's take Nestle shredded wheat now even if you're the biggest Nova fan and you love this categorization thing you're not going to say that's an over four you're going to say that's a Nova 3, 100 % whole wheat.

25:04James Collier:Yet, what does it do? It makes a health claim on the healthy heart, high fibre. Okay, question mark. What about Weetabix? These, I mean, people say this wouldn't be a Nova 4. Some people say it would. Part of the problem, eh? They're a high fibre, a nutritious gem for breakfast. We should be encouraging these sort of things. They're also relatively cheap, especially if you get the supermarket-owned brands. What about baked beans? A proper British staple here. High fibre. plenty of phytonutrients okay oh nova four question mark crisps you go to one of the shops down there we buy some you've got kettle crisps and you've got walkers crisps now one of the other characteristics of uh older processed foods people say is the hyper palatability the the way we can just consume consume consume kettle crisps would be a nova three walkers would be a nova four i can bang through packet after packet of kettle crisps right so question mark um what about fish and chips another british staple here probably an over three but we all know we probably shouldn't be having that every night but this sort of misunderstanding can cause confusion because somebody who took that to the extreme might actually have kettle crisps and fish and chips every night and avoid wheat to bix and baked beans is that good i don't think so so to bring back to your point jack um you'll according to these people that come up with that definition would fall under and over four my answer to that would be so what i've been known for this very um questionable phrase bring back junk food but the junk food is in inverted commas bring back the term junk food okay again this full short and it's highly questionable a lot of a lot of my nutritionist friends don't like it because it's saying foods can be bad but i don't think it does say that there's kind of playfulness in the word junk and language is everything right language is important there's a playfulness in the term that we've we have our good food it's okay we can we can have some you know we can have some junk that's okay but it it kind of separates from the more healthful food it's an imperfect term it lacks a precise definition and these um nova aficionados will say that's the beauty of what the nova category has done they've they've attempted to define terms.

27:23James Collier:But as I've just described, there isn't a definition. So it falls short. Junk food doesn't have a definition. Ultra processed food doesn't have a definition. Unfortunately, it's too late now. The term's out there. It's being used. I just think we need to educate people that some ultra processed foods are not so great. And even then, they're okay to have occasionally. I don't want to demonise any food. And some are fine. I think the person who's come closest to getting this definition sorted is my friend Nicola London-Rain, who's a dietician, who wrote a brilliant book, How Not to Eat Ultra Processed.

27:59James Collier:In fact, it's the second most important book of last year. That being the first. But early in the book, she's categorised in a much simpler way, minimally processed foods and ultra processed foods that we should be eating less often and ultra processed foods that are fine to include. and I think she's that's the closest still imperfect that's the closest I've seen anyone come interesting so we're getting on the dangers here of of absolutes that seems to be like a theme throughout the stuff that you're talking about one of the other areas that it feels like there's a lot of absolutes but conflicting absolutes is around protein yeah and there's a lot of pressure that I think comes from protein young lads that are in the gym maybe people who are raising children you know that there's pressure all over the place around this protein argument so how do you think people should be thinking about protein that's a good one i come from the gym scene you know i used it was all about protein um you know people go down the gym and talk about how much protein you had you had your protein fixed today guys i'll tell you i was on the side before i answer your point something that never happens in the gym and probably should happen there's no gym bro goes down there and said hey you had enough fiber today bro never happens right and i've just illustrated the importance of fiber okay now there's a reason why protein is in the limelight okay there's a lot of it marketing and it's you'd have to go some in the west to be protein deficient um but there is some merit to protein it's more satiating than the other macronutrients because it's it will release some of the um more satiating hormones sooner like pyy or glp1 what everyone's heard of at the moment due to the glp1 drugs and that's interesting also protein has a lower caloric availability than the other macronutrients do you know what that term means bioavailability partly yeah so let me let me illustrate that so sugar if you were to have 100 calories worth of sugar roughly about 99 of those calories will go on to be uh absorbed and utilized uh in the body has a high bioavailability protein depending on the source the form and the amino acid profile and what else you're eating maybe only as few as 70 of those calories of 100 calories worth of protein will go on to be utilized by the body okay meaning you can have more volume of food and the calorie label you're perhaps not um having as much that's interesting so there's a lot in that it's also more thermogenic um increases core body temperature relative to the other macronutrients a little bit more so along with fiber which is also satiating they should be the two we're focusing on but not a not necessarily wholly at the expense of the other good nutrients so there's a lot of merit in having a good protein and I always think it is good to kind of semi-prioritize it but you probably don't have to pay too much attention to it because it has become a marketing buzzword and there's probably no need for that at all but look we need a good amount of carbohydrate as well not the sugary sort but the the low glycemic starchy ones that come along with a lot of fiber and then fats as well there are there are fats that we should probably be having more of like the omega-3s that you get from fish oil and algae and also from things like walnuts, flax seeds, chia seeds and the monounsaturates which comes from things like olive oil, avocado oil and even canola oil, rapeseed oil is reasonably high in monounsaturates so we should be prioritising those as well but yeah protein it's an interesting one because there's too much marketing around it but it is probably pretty good anyway.

31:31Interesting okay so So then Joe Rogan's listening to this, right? Let's say hi to Joe at home. Because he'll definitely be listening. He'll be definitely listening. But he would then say, well, I don't have any fiber. I just eat steak and eggs all the time. I'm on a pure carnivore diet. Jordan Peterson would say the same. He'd say it cures or cures all the inflammation in his body. Is there an argument for why almost no fiber is working for them?

31:57James Collier:Let me try and steel man their perspective here. They would say fiber is not an essential nutrient. because you effectively could live, as in there is no minimum requirement for... If you didn't have fiber in your diet short term, you wouldn't die, okay? With protein, with some amino acids, with some fatty acids, you would die after, you know, days at most weeks, and so with all the micronutrients. Also, fiber is a catch-all term for tens, probably hundreds of different nutrients, okay? But nutrients is the right word here. we know there is beneficial effects on on the body we know for the reason we know it helps digestion we know that certain types are linked with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease we excuse me and we know that it's good for the microbiome but what i've described to you there is mechanistic data and mechanistic data is really really cool but we all have multiple pathways so sometimes it's good to look at the epidemiology epidemiology has its limitations and that you you can listen to people say some of these people say you shouldn't listen to epidemiology that's absolutely wrong you should listen to both mechanistic data and epidemiology and things like randomized control trials you should listen to them all together so the totality of the evidence is overwhelmingly convincing as as close to truth as we can probably get that having a good amount of fiber is associated with lower risk of disease and also to get fiber you're eating a plant-rich diet and this brings me back to the other side of what I try and talk about we're bigger than ourselves we know that meat rich diets impact the environment more negatively now I'm not a vegan and I probably never will be but I do consciously and have since 2019 try to reduce my meat intake I have roughly 10 % of my calories come from animals for perspective the western average is about 28 to 30 percent so roughly about two-thirds less what does that look like i have a couple of days a week where i eat almost zero animal calories a bit of grass-fed butter creeps in but other than that nothing um and um and at meals i'll have a lot more uh plants so to use a metaphor chicken and chickpeas not literally but you might have a bit of meat and then a pulse to bulk it up with i love pulses people say they're boring well throw them in a recipe they're easy they're cheap as well for people who are struggling if they're at the financial crisis so to to bring it back to the point i've made there well we it's easy to uh to reduce the amount of meat we have we don't need as much i'm not fully convinced by the vegan argument but i'm i'm certainly not convinced by the carnivore argument sure they might feel great at the moment i i've heard jordan peterson's story comes from his daughter michaela who apparently has had some chronic inflammatory diseases of her joints who am i to question that if if mikaela and jordan feel better on that great but they are having a negative impact on climate change now i know you know i used to be quite a fan of jordan peterson i'm really questioning him now because he's gone yeah he's he's very he's questioning and misrepresenting the data on climate change in a big way here and i find that really worrying because someone who could should stick to his wheelhouse here Joe Rogan, I guess I'm still a fan, just don't really listen to him anymore.

35:25James Collier:I haven't really listened for a couple of years, used to all the time. And if he feels great, who am I to question? But if there's this sort of debate, what should we do? We should defer to the evidence. Subjectivity is great. I feel great on what I'm eating at the moment. I've had a meat-rich diet. I felt great. I've tried Total Vegan for a month. I felt great. I felt great on the lot. And I'm betting, and you know, Joe Rogan's probably a bad example here because he's probably eating well for a lot of his life, but a lot of people, they might go down the carnival route and they'll feel better.

36:04James Collier:I can't deny that. But I'm betting if they have just improved their lifestyle in other ways and made better food choices, they'd have felt better anyway. Stop eating the junk food, and I'm using the right term there, and did more exercise. um yeah it's it does seem to me and i don't want to misrepresent some people here but it's very macho in it to go on social media and stand there with your shirt off and drink raw milk and and um and stand there going look at me you don't see anyone there going stand there much in a carrot right you know i could do that i'm probably in reasonable shape um i'm just not going to do that sort of thing it just see it's just all about images you know rage bait again it's become very polarizing in fact i'm doing i'm doing a piece at the moment it's taking me take me a fair few weeks to to write and i'm calling it nutrition populism so where the political mindset of populism you know fear of power um and putting but putting all your um your faith in a limited number of people or an ideology there's there's an absolute it it maps perfectly onto the nutrition populism maps perfectly onto what's happening in the political world at the moment and i think this carnival diet is coming in there.

37:13James Collier:They're following these people. People are feeling crap. Yet they've got these people there talking in absolutes, like Paul Saladino and the other Sean, whatever his name is. And they're speaking in absolutes. They're telling people to get this out of their diet. It's convincing. It's compelling. They look good, right? I find it highly questionable. But then you've got, on the other end, you've got people like Lane Norton and Mike Isretail. Do you know these two guys? Dr. Mike. Yeah, they're outstanding. And they defer to the evidence. and they talk in this very nuanced, non-black and white way.

37:45James Collier:They're the sort of people you should be listening to. Well, I've heard Lane Norton say something last week. I disagree with you there, mate. But I know, broadly speaking, we can have an argument over the evidence. I wouldn't want to go up against him in a debate because he's, well, much more learned than me. But the point I'm making is they will say things that are incorrect sometimes and that's okay, but they're deferring to the evidence. and just on that you can i've seen paul saladino do this and he'll cite he'll pull a research paper and show it back up his evidence now two things there one is let's say it does back up his point um okay that's one that's maybe one mechanism he's shown a mechanism in the body and there are several mechanisms usually for one outcome so we're more interested in outcomes than we are in particular metabolic pathways but the other thing is i've heard them cite evidence they say this paper shows this you how many people pull pull a paper after hearing it on a podcast probably like 0.1 if that if i'm being generous but you read some of these papers don't say anything of the sort they've lied literally lied these are the same people by the way that will go they're lying to you and i'm and i've realized you've got me on my high horse here but a point i'm trying to make is is question everything don't trust anything including me don't don't trust what i say here i'm genuinely mean that i mean don't trust what i say but if you're if you're criticizing me you better have done a critical review of the evidence so it feels like it can be quite confusing and for people listening and looking at the landscape of diet and nutrition it can be quite complex so this is an activity that we we run with our clients but if people listening were a five-year-old child and they want to be a high performer when it comes to all thing nutrition in a nutshell what would you say the do's and don'ts are in your opinion it good first one is be be physically active the biggest predictor uh you know we're talking a lot about food and nutrition here a bigger predictor of living well older is is being physically active i would also say to them get plenty of rest and plenty of sleep have an early night um because real sleep is really important as well um and the other one of course is is have trying to have plenty of friends easy to tell a five-year-old that but loneliness community benefits there all of them um trump food the next one on the list would probably be don't overeat don't eat too much in fact a lot of the the reason that that some of these social media influencers demonize certain nutrients or foods they're misrepresenting them but on some respect they have a point maybe some like sugar uh causes over consumption it's very easy to eat a lot of sugar is there anything from sugar in itself that's inherently bad probably not i mean people might say otherwise it's linked to inflammation and blood glucose rises but the evidence doesn't really agree with that the problem comes because two things one is if you're having a lot of sugar you're probably not having something else that's got benefits to it or you're just eating loads you're eating too much but it's just not it's not interesting to go on social media and say don't eat so much is it but ultimately that's what it comes down to so if you're making better food choices you're more likely to feel fuller high fiber high protein you'll feel fuller sooner you're less likely to eat as much be physically active sure being active can help increase your appetite in the longer run but you know if you go for a run you might be hungry you go for a run you probably don't feel hungry as soon as you just got back from that run it's probably a good 45 minutes before you're hungry again well you've just created a gap there and you're less likely to eat eat so much in the course of a day you might be chugging a load of food down later on so it's complex so you're i would say don't eat so much to that kid because you couldn't give them you couldn't go into more depth but and just eat lots of different foods and not too much junk good good answer so then where does huell come into solving this problem because people are making otherwise unfavorable choices a lot of people aren't having the time to prepare food to eat as a meal and i realize i've just banged on about how great that is and what's one thing huell doesn't do is it probably doesn't encourage people to sit down and eat a meal together and i accept that but the reason why huell is important and there's a place for it is people are making bad food choices a lot of people are needing convenient options they're going there and maybe You grab in a meal deal, you know, with a white bread sandwich and a bag of crisps or a chocolate bar and a drink.

42:22James Collier:And that's not ideal. We know that you've got complete nutrition. It's got all the nutrients we need. It's high in fiber. Got the omega threes I've spoken about. It's got the protein. So it promotes satiety. In fact, we've done research on this and you is promoting satiety. So it's for people who don't have the time to cook, don't have the time to prepare at all their meals. I mean, if you're the sort of person that can shop properly, make good shopping choices, you can prepare food for a family and enjoy it as a family for three meals every day. Huel's not for you. I discourage you from having it.

42:56James Collier:How many people do that? Some people would have Huel just for one meal a day and maybe can have a meal with the family in the evening. Others maybe just a couple of times a week when they're on the go. I've spoke to sales reps before who have been, they're on the road a couple of days a week and they have one Huel that day. Brilliant. That works for them. So I'd like to describe Huel as the best plan B. I wondered how we could best articulate, we've mentioned a few times just in passing, sustainability and environment and just how we can maybe get food choices and sustainability and the environment, how we can kind of paint a bit of a picture of what's really happening there.

43:34What's really happening. So we know that we've got plenty more people to feed these days.

43:43James Collier:And another thing that people keep going on about is this ancestral eating, eating like our ancestors, yet they fail to define what that means. They probably contradict, you know, which bit of our ancestors, which era of ancestors from where in the world. Because we know there's been fish-rich diets, say, around what's now Canada and places like that. and we know that people that live inland in Africa probably had a very different there was a bit of game but actually maybe a lot of fruits and berries and and what about tubers and what about grains so which bit of our ancestors I don't know but putting that aside even if we were to go back to maybe 100 years ago farming methods from 100 years ago we're not even that far there's 8 billion people to feed there's people that we're doing things now that we wouldn't be able to do if other people hadn't done the food thing for us and i don't just mean the agriculture i mean the whole food production process the catering process ironically the social media influencers are filming their content on a phone that wouldn't have been invented if the foods they were demonizing you know weren't around i'm taking that a bit a bit too far maybe but you get the point i'm trying to say technology is only doing as well as it is because of convenience foods from from other sectors so to bring that back to your question there's enough calories and protein in the world at the moment to feed every human alive and this is a recent phenomenon and people don't realize this we've got more than 8 billion people on this planet that we need to feed um and in some places the food's not not reaching people correctly but we don't even need to go that far we need to just probably look down the street with we've just come out of a cost of living crisis if we even are out of it yet i don't know um as people struggling to eat healthily i've spoke about the concept of food deserts so we need to encourage people to make food choices going to benefit themselves but when it comes to sustainability that's the bigger one we know that meat-rich diets are having a greater impact on greenhouse gas emissions and this is demonstrated through very very convincing science so anybody who disputes that should i would say they haven't done a critical appraisal of the evidence there's things like land use and water use as well um so we need to be addressing these things so how can we do that well we can try and educate people and get them to eat less meat like i said i'm not telling people to eat zero meat but we can certainly eat less but what about these other new food technologies that are coming on you know people are saying go back to natural whatever that means there's some really exciting stuff coming um stuff that i've got no financial interest in at all you might have heard of the clean meat or the cultured meat or the so-called lab-grown meat i hate that term um these are identical to actual meat from an animal but without the animal and through modern technologies we can produce that then there's a finnish company called solar foods that are their tagline is food from thin air they're using carbon from the air and through um a genetically modified microorganism they're converting that carbon into food.

46:52James Collier:Now, it's not GMO food they're creating. I'm just saying they've modified the microbe that creates that. This is really interesting. Then there's these novel proteins. There's novel fats. So algae is interesting. You can get protein and omega-3s from fats. Now, talking about sustainability, if we all follow the already insufficient guidelines of eating two or three portions of oily fish a week to get omega-3s, that's not enough, by the way. But if we literally do that, there's not enough fish in the sea, quite literally. So how are we going to combat that? Or we can look at aquaculture, questionably ethics, and also pollution-wise, there's concerns, a whole conversation, and maybe I'm not the best person for that.

47:34James Collier:But why don't we cut out the middleman, or more importantly, the middle fish? And just where do the fish get their omega-3s from? The algae. Now, algae is really interesting because you can get protein from it, the omega-3s from it, but there's something else to it as well. It grows so quickly. How does it grow quickly? it pulls carbon from the atmosphere that's good so it's a very sustainable food um sure you wouldn't probably want to eat it on its own but it can be used as an ingredient um insect farming okay maybe an ethical question there i'm not here to answer that but it's interesting gmos themselves so-called frankenfoods that i'm probably going to get slated for even saying on here there we should be looking at them there are people in the world who have got food insecurity and GMOs could answer that, could solve that problem for them.

48:22James Collier:Yet in the Philippines last year, where there is a lot of food insecurity, they've been demonised because they've listened to Western privileged people demonising this technology. Now, I'm not saying we should let GMOs be run wild. There should absolutely be regulations. Otherwise, some big corporations are going to go mad there looking for profit. That wouldn't be right. But this black and white thinking of GMOs are bad and it's at the other end saying GMO should run freely. Neither are correct. It should lie somewhere in between. Let's look at the right sorts of technologies. And of course, you know, I'm co-founder of Huel and Huel is the category of complete foods, which I see could be one of the other solutions as part of the bigger solution to the environmental problem.

49:08James Collier:There's a quote I like to use when we're talking about sustainability and people who are referring to this ancestral way of living. which just is a no-go anymore. The quote comes from the environmentalist Mark Linus. And it's, if we were to revert to natural farming technologies circa 1960, we would need a plot the size of two South Americas in order to feed the planet. Now, I get that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but there's a lot of truth in that. And that might not be for the 8 billion today, but it could be for the 10 billion that are coming. It's very applicable. So when people start challenging the impact of sustainability on the environment, a lot of it's common sense.

49:53James Collier:Even if you're a climate change denier, there's still not that much land. We know that it takes a lot more land to feed animals per calorie than it does to eat the crops ourselves. So we should look at that. I wonder if we can rewind back to your time in the NHS. Sure. um so sometimes i get concerned with someone might be going through a depressive period in their life depressive season and they might go to their gp and there's a medical prescription that comes from from the doctor rather than perhaps a look at lifestyle or diet you know some of the things that we've looked at today so i just wondered how how armed do you think our gps are with the knowledge around nutrition and lifestyle bear in mind the era that i was in the nhs was 95 to 2002 so things have changed a lot i know it's hard to believe looking this young here but um it was a while ago things have changed i was a clinical dietitian there so people know what i was doing um i did do some outpatients but a lot of what i did was inpatients it was treating people already ill a lot of was tube feeds like stroke rehab or cancer rehab to make sure people were getting enough nutrition um and i also was actually the union rep for the british dietetics the british dietetic association um for north hampsonshire during that period so i got myself onto the committees with with the um the trust management at that time which was a great learning curve i probably had this big plan in my head that i didn't know i had about let's absorb as much experience as i can you never know what's going to come in handy now i know gps i know doctors um and i get to talk to them and we need to be looking more toward preventative but i think it's kind of amazing that we do have treatments for people and i of course the perfect solution would be for people not to get depressed in the first place but that's very easy for me to see as i've had history of depression by the way and i've had medicine medical treatment for it and I was having a good lifestyle at the time.

52:00James Collier:And I was having psychotherapy and other treatment, but I still at one period in my life benefited massively from an SSRI, the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor. So I was doing everything right and I still needed something. But yeah, we shouldn't be a straightforward go to the doctor and have the prescription. I do know someone at the moment who I'm very close with who's in their early 20s and she's been struggling and getting her to make lifestyle changes is just not doable. So turning to prescription medicine has been notably helpful. It's not a cure, but it's been helpful. So I don't know if I'm qualified to answer or comment any more on that, Zach.