Recap: Why you should eat 30 different plants every week | Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall & Tim Spector 

0:00Hello, and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're talking about plants. For years, our diet's been guided by a simple three-word slogan, five a day. While it's well-established that eating fruit and vegetables is good for us, some experts believe the five-a-day message puts too much emphasis on quantity and not enough on variety. So is it time to adjust our guiding plant principle? I'm joined by Professor Tim Spector and Chef Hugh Fernley-Whittenstall, who advocate for a new goal, eating 30 different plants each week.

0:39Together, we'll explore why diversity is key for your microbiome and share some delicious ways to bring more plants onto your plate.

0:51How big a role overall should plants be playing in our diet? And where does this number 30 come from? So the first thing to be clear on, which isn't clear on all the guidelines, particularly the UK ones is what constitutes a plant you know most people just think of them as fruits and veg and that's where this the UK and many other countries five a day comes from where at least one can be orange juice which is ridiculous to have that as a core health outcome. And really, we're forgetting that nuts and seeds and herbs and spices are very much part of that mix. And that's where a lot of these outdated guidelines have gone very wrong, because it's much broader than people think.

1:48So when you're talking about five a day of which one is a drink, you've only got four to have, which can accompany your steak. A few little accoutrements around there and you think you've done it. Whereas the whole point is to make plants the center of the meal and actually have the fish and the meat as optional side plates. So interesting that. I mean, from a chef's point of view, we traditionally have, and a lot of us still do, including myself from time to time, we get very, very excited about animal protein, about meat and fish, and we make a massive fuss of it. We obsess over how we're going to marinate it or get the skin crispy or get the crackling.

2:29Once you've obsessed over those ingredients, you haven't got a lot of time left to think about the plant or the veg, which does then become the bit on the side. So we have to recognize that they're slightly tyrannical ingredients, meat and fish. I'm still an omnivore. I enjoy them both. But we've got to just put them on one side from time to time and then focus on making plants delicious, which turns out not to be hard at all. Not least because from the plant kingdom, you've got the greatest variety of textures and flavors and aromas far greater than you could ever get from the world of animal protein.

3:03I mean, a pork chop is different from a chicken drumstick, but it's not nearly as different as a walnut and a peach or a leek and a strawberry. These plants are really different from each other. And from the point of view of flavor and just being excited in the kitchen, we've got to remind ourselves of that often. And that's why a great variety of plant ingredients coming into the kitchen is exciting. We shouldn't see it as just, this is what we all should be doing now for our health. It's what we ought to want to do because it brings so much flavor and excitement into the kitchen and onto our plates.

3:43So Tim, I think you've done a brilliant job of explaining why plants have this sort of health benefit and that different plants have these different polyphenols and different fibers, so we can't just eat one. But why couldn't I still just have a large piece of fish or meat in the center of the plate and just very little bits of 10 different plants spread around the edge? Well, that would certainly be better than not having any veg around the edge, let's be clear. It isn't a binary thing. This is something we know that if If you have too much meat, particularly red meat, in very large quantities, the epidemiology suggests that starts to become bad for your health, even if it's good quality.

4:26If it's poor quality, you don't need very much at all for it to be bad all the time. Just by leaving little places on your plate for the plants, you're not really going to get enough total fiber in your diet. And we know that total fiber is very important. magic figure is for every five grams of fiber, you're going to reduce your overall risk of mortality by about 14%. When you say reduce your chance of mortality for regular people listening, that's just like reduce your chance of dying by 14%. Correct. Yes. So you reduce your risk of dying by around a sixth, just by five grams of fiber. And that, just to put it into context, the average US person has about 15 grams of fiber.

5:19So just increasing from 15 grams to 20 grams will give you this improvement in your lifespan. In that case, I'd love to come on to this 30 plants a week, right? We put it in the title the podcast. He's put it in the title of his book. It's clearly like a big deal. Where does this number 30 come from? Well, surprisingly, there aren't many studies on it because nobody thought to actually ask people in a week how many different types of plants you wet. They used to be all lumped together. You just said, well, you just have your greens and how much fruit, how much vegetable, usually combined. So no one really cared because they didn't think was important.

6:01So it was the combination of the American gut study with the British gut study that came together that I was a part of the British section where we had a combination around 11 ,000 people and a subset of those, a few thousand of them recorded diligently everything they were eating over a week. And we compared that to their gut health profiles. And we showed that the people with the healthiest gut microbes, which we defined by diversity, sort of different types of species, were eating the most variety of plants. And this came out at around 30. It's an approximate number because we couldn't tell the difference seen 28 or 32 or whatever, but it gives you a rough idea of the importance of it.

6:57There were gradations of it. What I found surprising in this study was that vegans and vegetarians didn't come out as having any healthier gut microbes than omnivores, people who eat meat and fish, who also at the wide variety of plants. And I think that's a really important message that we've been driven down this path of subdividing of people into these groups, whereas actually we'd forgotten that the common denominator for health is not necessarily what you're avoiding, but actually what you're including in your diet. And I think this to me is the real message from those studies. And that work inspired us to do this randomized controlled trial, which we've called the biome study, because we're looking at the outcomes on the microbiome of using a prebiotic blend of over 30 different plants all put together.

8:02So we were interested in what happens when you give people mainly a blend of freeze-dried plants in reasonably large amounts to produce over five grams of fiber, but with this variety. And so over six weeks, that's what we gave these volunteers, around 350 volunteers, divided into these three groups. One with this pre-botic blend. The other were taking really croutons, which were sort of ground up to be roughly similar. And the third group was a probiotic group that were taking a well-known probiotic that has been shown to be effective in a number of diseases. So we had these three groups. And over six weeks, the main outcome was the change in the microbiome we were looking at.

9:00And it turned out that the prebiotic blend, even the probiotic active other arm in terms of its improvement on the gut microbiome. So we saw big changes in the good gut microbes that have been associated with good cardiometabolic health and reductions in those microbes that have been shown to be related to poor health and poor diets. So we also showed improvements in mood and energy and reduction in hunger and a number of other parameters. So it was really exciting to see how we sort of take this epidemiological concept, which is just based on observational data, and then do a randomized control trial that had such convincing results.

9:55and I think that really has cemented the idea that we're talking about the right ballpark. This 30, it may have been plucked out of the ether somewhat, but as well as the public loving it and its being achievable, as you said, many people, we're going to discuss a bit more how to achieve that, but it's not that hard a goal. Many people are already doing it. And now we now have a randomized controlled trial to say that that diversity of plants put together have a very rapid effect on transforming many people's gut microbes. So, Hugh, imagine somebody's listening to this, and there'll be a lot of people listening to this saying, okay, I'm completely sold by Tim's idea about the health benefit.

10:47I quite like the idea of not dying or dying a lot later. So apparently I add more of these plants I can get there, but I don't know where to begin. Okay. Well, the first thing is don't worry that we're sending you off to buy lots of expensive, obscure plant ingredients that you haven't heard of, don't know what to do with and might not like. the first thing is to remind yourself that there are many many dozens maybe over a hundred plants that actually you already like you're going really yes there really really are and that's why i've done a big plant list in my book and there's over 200 plants on the list and with the possible exception of i did put a couple of seaweeds there because i think it's a really interesting ingredient but every other plant on that list you've heard of it i promise you you've heard of it.

11:34You've heard of the spices and the herbs and all the main vegetables. You've heard of the pulses, the nuts and the seeds. With a lot of them, you might not have put them in your cooking for quite a while just because of the habit you're in. The first thing is to remind yourself there's lots of plants out there that you already like. Some of them might be in your kitchen cupboard already. The thing about those store cupboard ingredients is we often think of them as standby. But actually, why not be using them every day? Why not crack open a tin of beans two or three times a week. Same with the lentils, same with the spices, same with the nuts and seeds.

12:09Might not be a bad moment to open one of the tins that I've brought with me. Hugh, will you just talk me through what you've got there? This is something I travel with a lot. And there's nothing in here that's particularly weird or surprising. It's not going to jump, not going to bite me. No, it's not going to bite you. It's just my own homemade trail mix, put together with some things that I have in my cupboard most of the time. So there's, well, what can you see there, Tim? We could count the plants. I mean, these are things that you recognize. Nothing too obscure or lucky there. We've got walnuts, obvious ones.

12:46We've got some dried fruits, probably, I guess they're raisins or sultanas. Raisins and a few snipped up dried apricots as well. We've got some sunflower seeds. We've got almonds. some of the goodies i'm going to shake a few things out because a few of the stuff at the bottom yeah and you got some some dark chocolate which i is my one of my favorite plants actually next to coffee what are the what are these ones those are sunflower seeds those are pumpkin seeds pumpkin seeds so you've got a lot of uh plants in there yeah i mean that and that is you know that is a really easy thing to travel with i when whenever i leave home now for a day or two i usually pack that with try some yeah by all means go did you go straight for the chocolate there tim or are you having a virtuous nut before you get into the dark chocolate i have a choc and nut as well a very good combination um yeah so that's an easy thing to travel with and of course much cheaper putting your own uh little box of trail mix together than buying something ready made because you can buy those things in in reasonable quantities and and they're they're much cheaper than than when you get that little packet of it all mixed together so it's a bit like my diversity jar except actually not crunched up quite as much.

14:00No, I quite like them in whole. The one thing here I have done, I've actually soaked the almonds overnight and then let them dry off just a little bit. And they do swell up and that makes them less gritty and almost like eating a fresh nut. Sometimes I do that with the walnuts too, and they really swell up. They almost double in size. And I like that sort of fresh juiciness rather than the grittiness you get with a very, very dry nut. enthusiasts of eating nuts call that activating, soaking nuts overnight. Of course, with some seeds, not an almond that's been taken out of its shell, but it is nice to remind people that when we take whole spices off the shelf, things like cumin seeds, coriander seeds, caraway seeds, all of which I'm a big fan of, and I do like to keep them as whole rather than ground spices, a lot of those spice seeds are alive, if you put them in the soil, they would germinate and grow into a coriander plant, a cumin plant, or a caraway thing.

14:58Then we could eat them as herbs, fresh herbs. We forget that. Even if they've been on the shelf sometimes for years, they are living things. To me, that says something about their potential to do us good. All those polyphenols and chemicals, they're in there in the spice seeds in order to make new life, in order to generate the next plant. Well, they're mini eggs, aren't they? They're mini eggs. A seed is a plant egg. That's why when you put the sprinkling of spices in, you might say, oh, it's just a pinch. Is that going to make any difference? Well, it's a pinch of seeds or half a teaspoon of seeds that have got a lot of power in them.

15:35And surely somewhere that's what's doing us the good in our gut microbiome when we harness that power. and of course it adds fantastic aromatic tastes to the food that we're making

15:48that's it for this week's recap if you're listening to this you're already on your way to living healthier through better nutrition and at zoe we're doing everything we can to help you on your way so we've developed daily 30 a delicious dietary supplement to add to your meals because with zoe we ran a clinical trial testing daily 30 the results were staggering It's selling out in the UK, and we're working hard to bring it to the US as soon as possible. Sign up to the waitlist at zoe.com slash daily30.