The truth about expiry dates, freezing food and vegetable scraps | Carleigh Bodrug and Dr. Will Bulsiewicz

24:49Peak freshness. Does it make any difference? Like I'm listening to this and thinking that, yes, like we're in New York right now. I can imagine that in January, that raspberry has come a long way. I tend to think of this as conceptually similar to people often ask me, what's the effect of cooking on the microbiome in terms of the food? And there was actually a study done by Peter Turnbaugh, who's at the University of California, San Francisco, where he took the exact same food and he looked at the effects on the microbiome, uncooked versus cooked, raw versus cooked, and saw that they were slightly different because we are actually changing in some ways the way in which our body interprets the food.

25:25So when we freeze the food, it is slightly different, but not exactly the same and not less in a way. So raw food, the advantage that we have, there was a recent study where they showed that actually raw plant food has a microbiome and that the microbes that you find on the plants actually show up in the human microbiome. So about 3 % of the human microbiome is derived from these plant-based microbes. Amazing. Which is quite fascinating. Now, certainly you don't get that benefit from the frozen, right? But the frozen, we get all the fiber, all the polyphenols, all of the phytochemicals. So you get the exact same nutrients.

26:04You get it at peak freshness. You get it at a better price point. And sometimes it's actually advantageous in terms of being fun. So like as an example, my two-year-old, we like to give her as a snack frozen blueberries. And it's our little hack to get her to eat blueberries. And when she calls them frozens and she thinks they're really fun. I love that. So Carly, I'd love to talk about some other food scraps from your book. We were looking through it together and there's some really fun ones. And Will, maybe you could expand a bit on the nutritional value. Can we start with that coffee grounds that we had right at the beginning of the Q &A because they definitely go straight out in my house.

26:41And I've been waiting on this. I can't wait to hear the answer to this one. So I'm a huge coffee drinker and pitching those coffee grounds every day was hurting my scrappy soul. So there's so many things that you can do with them. They are edible. So what I love to do is bake with them. Coffee grounds really enhance just like coffee chocolate flavor. So I have a great recipe for something called common ground granola. Basically, you take some oats, you add a couple of tablespoons of those spent coffee grounds, a little bit of coffee, tahini, cocoa powder, toss it all up and bake it. And it's just absolutely amazing.

27:17I have seen people cook, bake cookies with coffee grounds. And another thing that you can do if you're somebody who buys baking soda, pops it in your fridge to deodorize, coffee grounds can actually do the same thing. So you can take them and put them in a bowl, put them in your fridge, and they'll deodorize for the week, which is amazing. And then we can take this one step further. I mean, I am not going to claim I have a green thumb here, but a lot of people use spent coffee grounds as fertilizer. So I've heard that it works really great for some plants and not others. I am not on the up and up because most plants go to die in my home.

27:52But yeah, it can work as a great fertilizer as well. So, so many different ways that you can use a spent coffee grounds. Yeah. So, the interesting and exciting opportunity with this is that coffee is actually, believe it or not, the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet. Wow. Because most people are not consuming enough other types of food that contain antioxidants, but the one thing they do consume is coffee. And you know that the antioxidants that you will find in a cup of coffee, and by the way, there's also soluble fiber in coffee, It's derived from the coffee bean, from those grounds.

28:25And you can only get a fraction of it because you're basically running water in, steeping it or brewing it, and then taking whatever comes through. When we consume the coffee, it has the soluble fiber. It has the antioxidant compounds. It also has insoluble fiber. So basically from my perspective, you could take what you get in your cup of coffee and make it even better by consuming your coffee grounds. Amazing. I'm going to rethink the coffee from tomorrow. Right. So Carly, how about this topic of sprouting? I am such a fan of sprouting. So this is a way to turn something that is pennies into such an abundance of vegetables in your home.

29:06And you can do this from anywhere, any kitchen. So sprouting is basically this act. And actually, I'm going to pass this over to Will because he can explain what sprouting is better and then I'll tell you how to do it. Okay, so sprouting is basically we're unlocking nature's code for germination, which is where the seed turns into a plant. And so the seed opens up, we unlock it typically with soaking, and the seed opens up and out comes this shoot, out comes this plant. and with it, you have massive dramatic growth of fiber, of protein. You actually have more vitamins. You have a microbiome of that plant.

29:46I was talking a moment ago about eating raw food has a microbiome. Sprouts have a beautiful microbiome ready to support your body and you also get special phytochemicals. So an example of this that people within the sprouting world love is broccoli sprouts are known to contain 50 to 100 times greater density of sulforaphane, which is the cancer-fighting phytochemical. So for example, if you want to get more of this sulforaphane, the absolute best way to get this is by sprouting broccoli seeds. And that's a lot less expensive if you do it yourself than it is to buy a whole bunch of broccoli stalks.

30:22So if we want to sprout, I can tell you how to, and I want to preface this by saying, I just talked about how I'm not a green thumb, but I can do this all winter even in Canada. I like to always tell people to start with lentil sprouts. So you take brown or green lentils, dry lentils, which are really affordable at the grocery store, add a cup to a jar, fill it with water, let them soak overnight. The only thing you need, which makes this easier, is like a perforated lid for a mason jar. Then the next day, you're going to rinse your lentils and turn them kind of on an angle so that they can drain.

30:59And you're just going to let those, just as we'll talk about, germinate. You're just going to rinse them a couple of times a day. And what you'll see is little sprouts start to sprout up. You'll know when they're ready, they are bright green, really tender, and you can top them on a salad. You can eat them. I eat them by the handful and they're just so delicious. Put them on soups. Because lentils, usually you have to cook lentils, but with sprouts, you don't actually have to cook them. You can eat them raw. So that's one of the advantages that we get. And it's quite striking. I love that you choose lentils because like if you start with a half of a cup, I like starting with lentils too.

31:37If you start with a half of a cup of lentils. Oh, you're going to have a full mason jar. You have a full quart mason jar in two to three days. I was about to ask how long does that process take? Three days, maybe two and a half, depending on how fast they kind of germinate in the probably humidity of your home. But yeah, just even starting with half a cup. And if you have a small mason jar, you'll have a full, like you will have grown a full salad in your kitchen. And I think one of the things that I love about this concept of sprouting is that I see it as a solution to so many of the challenges that we currently have.

32:14So number one, sprouting is completely inexpensive. I can buy organic lentils, right? And I can, which costs literally like 25 cents for me to get that half of a cup of organic lentils. And then that's going to turn into this massive amount of lentil sprouts in two to three days with very minimal effort. Number two, you don't need a lot of space. So like you could go into a little small apartment in London or in New York, but all you need is one square foot. and you can have a garden on your kitchen top. What's really good to kind of angle the mason jars, if we're going to get into the details of it, is also like a dish rack.

32:53So you can just put your mason jar kind of draining on a dish rack, and you just want the moisture or any liquid to be draining out throughout the day and then rinsing them. And the third thing is you don't need to actually have a patch of dirt. You don't need actual soil. All you need is your countertop, and you can have a garden, and it's going to deliver to you, literally, fresh from the garden, the most nutritious food that you could possibly have, again, in two days and it costs you 25 cents. And Carly, we will definitely put a link in the show notes. And I imagine, am I right in suspecting you probably have a video that talks us through how this works?

33:25I'll send that to you so you guys can link. So if anyone is interested, you will be able to see how to do it. Now I'm listening to this and saying, again, this is like my fear of food again. Is that really safe? Like I feel I was probably, I'm thinking about like a potato. You know, I was definitely brought up, once the potato starts to grow anything on it, that's it. You've got to throw it away. You can't eat that because it's suddenly become unsafe to eat. So I imagine there are some other listeners who like me are thinking about this and like, well, hang on a minute. Well, the food has sort of gone off.

33:54You're saying it started growing. Surely now it's not safe to eat anymore. You have to think about it almost like a carrot growing in the ground, Like it's the beginning of a process to grow new food. And I think once you try them, your mind will be changed about that because they have such a fresh, abundant, incredible flavor, like almost poppy, peppery flavor that is nothing you would associate with spoilage, right? Would you agree? I guess that potato sprouting is a little bit different. I know that there are some concerns about that, but. Yeah, I mean, I think that we need to have appropriate safety measures with all different types of foods, and that includes when we are preparing and making our own sprouts.

34:43But I would say for the listeners at home who I would imagine have probably heard stories about food poisoning related to bad sprouts, right? I think that's where a lot of the fear comes from. I think that's exactly right. I think that's part of this thing in my mind. Well, hang on, isn't that like something you've got to be really careful about? Right. So you have to separate that, which is like industrial farming practice and some of the issues and concerns that exist with that. And then the fact that they're putting them into a package and they're sitting in your supermarket for a period of time prior to consumption, that's a very different thing than you preparing this at home and then consuming it immediately at the peak of freshness.

35:19So the other thing that I would advise is that when people actually go to buy their sprouts, I actually would recommend that you buy specifically sprouting seeds and legumes. So like if it's lentils, you buy specific sprouting lentils. And the reason why is because not only can you get them organic, but they also are designed for higher germination rates and relevant to our conversation. They've actually been tested for pathogens. So they test them for pathogens prior to actually sending you the sprouts. That's an important part of it. Can you help me to understand why it makes the food like better for me nutritionally?

35:50Because I would have thought like you haven't added anything other than water. So how comes it's like any better than just eating the lentil, you know, I guess cooked, but how's it getting better? Yeah. I mean, I will admit there's an element to this that's almost mystical to me, right? Like it's hard to fully answer this question and feel as a scientist that I've filled in all the pieces, but imagine like Pandora's box, it's closed off and it's got everything in it. But then once you open it, it just unpacks in this beautiful way that expands and becomes so much more than what it started as. So you have the amino acids that make proteins.

36:25You have the oligosaccharides that turn into pieces of fiber. And basically what happens is that nature provided the enzymes that are necessary to deconstruct and reconstruct those building blocks into larger pieces. And so over the course of a couple of days, we know for a fact that the fiber content increases three to four folds. The protein content increases three to four fold. I don't know how we get this, but we get more minerals. We get new vitamins. Vitamins come from the microbes. I'm almost thinking it's a bit like, you know, you start with an egg and it ends up as a whole chick. And so you're sort of saying like, to start with the lentil just has like almost like the raw materials with this tiny little bit that's alive inside it.

37:05And then by sprouting it, it's starting to, I guess, as you said, it's like starting to grow into a whole tree. I just don't know how big a lentil is. Bush, I don't know. But you're saying like, it's basically going through all these amazing construction, and then we're suddenly getting all of these nutrients that weren't there before, because actually the plant, the lentil seed has sort of like grown them. It doesn't expect we're going to eat them. It thinks it wants to be a bush, but we're swooping in at day two and saying, I'm going to eat you. Yeah. So like if we zoom in and we want to get super nerdy and scientific here, we're going to be talking about amino acids and oligosaccharides and specific enzymes.

37:40but on a more simplistic level, this is a little bit like a question of where do babies come from? And daddy's answer is, it's magical. I feel we could talk about sprouting for a long time, but I should move on because you had a lot of other things you're talking about. Water in a can of chickpeas, which has a name that I didn't know and I can't pronounce. Aquafaba. Aquafaba. This is one of Carly's favorite things. You've made that up, right? That doesn't really have a name, does it? You know that that exists and I feel like it's quite popular in maybe a niche group. probably a baking crowd, but this is really something you should never throw away.

38:14So when you open up a can of chickpeas, we're talking about that liquid that the chickpeas are sitting in and it's actually magical. So it's really cool, especially if you're somebody who's plant-based because it can be used as a meringue substitute. So when you beat that up, you add about a teaspoon of cream of tartar and what will happen is it will whip up just like egg whites will whip into meringue. So you can make little meringues. You can also make chocolate mousse. The aquafaba is quite kind of gloopy. So you can also use it as an egg white substitute in baking. I love to kind of coat my tofu with it and then put it in breadcrumbs.

38:52And it just makes for like a delicious egg wash. And really, when you think about if you're opening up a cracking open a can of chickpeas, you were just going to pour that down the drain. So the potential is limitless for this ingredient that costs you nothing. The chickpeas are soaking in this water. And so anything that is what we would describe as water soluble, that basically means anything that can stick to water, will start to leak from the chickpea into this water. So what we find is we actually find that there's both fiber and starches that have come from the chickpeas. And there was a new study actually that just got published.

39:29In fact, the actual print version is not coming out until December of 2024. but this study they looked at the aquafaba and found that there were around 80 unique types of fiber and that these 80 unique types of fiber in the aquafaba were actually specifically feeding the beneficial gut bacteria and these are the beneficial gut bacteria that many people are paying a lot of money for a probiotic and basically what we're saying is the part that you could discard that people are pouring down their drain you could be consuming that making a delicious this meringue that has 80 types of fiber that feed and give you those probiotic bacteria.

40:06I love it. That's really funny. All right, I'm going to be rethinking my can of chickpeas. Carly, I wanted to move on and talk about bread. So the team was actually doing some research and shared with me, apparently, I don't have the statistics for the rest of the world. Apparently, in the UK, it is the number one most wasted food in the UK. And I suspect it's not going to look very different anywhere else. Is there anything we can do about this? Yeah, that's the same in North America. And there are so many things we can do with bread that has gone a little bit stale. So first of all, again, you don't want to bring too much bread into the home if you're not going to consume it quickly.

40:44And the problem, I think, why it's being wasted so much is that almost everybody is buying bread every week and then not getting to maybe the full loaf. So the first line of defense is if you are somebody, maybe you're a single person in a home and you buy a loaf of bread, freeze half of it if you think you're only going to eat half. But there's so many amazing recipes that you can utilize what they call stale bread recipes. And I want to preface this by saying if there's mold on your bread, it's time for it to go. But we like to get to it before that. So if you think about a baguette, oftentimes you buy that and then the next day it's already hard.

41:18So here's a couple of things that you can do. One of my favorites is a classic panzanella salad. So you break it up with some fresh tomatoes and basil. I have a great tahini sauce as well that can go on this. And you eat it as a salad. Croutons are fabulous. So chop it up, toss in a little bit of herbs, bake it and make croutons. Breadcrumbs. So again, you can just throw it in a blender with some herbs and make delicious breadcrumbs. I've even made a stale bread cake before. So really, the options are limitless and there's no reason that we should be tossing bread that has kind of reached that point where you don't want to toast it.

41:57You can still utilize it for a lot of things. You know, there's a part of me that mold on a bread is actually reassuring because truly, real bread in like three days, unless it's sourdough bread, it goes bad. And that's the way real bread is supposed to be. And it's disturbing that bread can sit on the shelf for 10, 14 days and be as soft as it was the day that they baked it. And nothing changed and there's no bolts. Like I find that a bit disturbing. What's going on in that situation, Will? There's preservatives in the bread, the commercial breads. There's preservatives in the commercial breads.

42:30I'm all for supporting local stores, local bakers. But the problem is that if you want to get like a high quality bread from your local baker, you could be easily paying$9 in the United States. What would you pay in London for a nice loaf of bread? It could be, you know, four to five pounds. Yeah. So it's, these are expensive things. What we started doing recently is actually, I was talking to Carly about this last night, we bought a bread maker. And the beauty of the bread maker is that I can get the absolute best flour that I could possibly buy. And for about$1.50, I simply put that flour with some other ingredients like yeast and things like this into the bread maker.

43:09I push a button and I come back in four hours. My house smells amazing and we have fresh bread. But I just want to point out that fresh loaf of bread that we just prepared for$1.50, it's only good for about three days. But it's also not going to last that long because it smells so good and you will consume the bread quickly. My kids love it. Yeah. And if I come back to Carly talking at the beginning about potentially freezing the bread, does that change its sort of nutritional breakdown? Because I feel like when you freeze and unfreeze the bread, it definitely doesn't taste the same way that it did before.

43:43Yeah, I feel like this episode, we have an amazing combination of game-changing hacks here, and the freezing the bread is right at the top. Because basically what happens is that bread, of course, contains starch. And in its native form, like just you bake a loaf of bread, you eat it, that starch, it's a source of energy for humans. But when you freeze it, you develop what's called retrograde starch, or I like to refer to it as resistant starch. And resistant starch basically means that it actually no longer feeds humans. Now it feeds your gut bacteria. This is conceptually very similar to prebiotic fiber, but in some ways, perhaps even superior to prebiotic fiber because it feeds so nicely and produces the short chain fatty acids, which are the anti-inflammatory compounds that we get from fiber and from resistant starch.

44:36So it's an interesting thing because actually you find less calories in the bread, but it's better for your gut after frozen. That's really interesting. That's cool. I did my test as part of being a Zoe member a long time ago, right when we were first putting them together. And I discovered I had one of the worst blood sugar responses of anybody who'd been going through like these 1 ,000 people in this clinical trial, which is a bit of a shock. And so I can tell that in general, bread scores very badly for me because I tend to get these like massive blood sugar spikes. So I'm definitely more cautious about it.

45:09And it's interesting that there are definitely variations within the bread. I do really like bread. But I tend to have like rye bread now with lots of stuff on it so that I like really push up my score. But I hadn't realized that freezing potentially might actually improve that. Like it's another sort of hack, right? To be able to get away with the taste. But I'm definitely not going to get a bread maker because if you have fresh bread in the house, you're going to eat it. So I think there's also this question about buying less of this if you don't really need it and being a bit more thoughtful about the quantities.

45:39I'd love to talk a bit more about sort of the routines that you can create, because I think I listened to a lot of this and I think it sounds really cool, but I'm way too busy. Is all of this for people who have a lot of time or is it possible to make this sort of scrappy eating that you talk about, a practice that just actually works sort of efficiently. And so I'd love to sort of take through, you know, maybe sort of wrap up this with like sort of practical tips for people to do this. And you talk a lot about sort of base meals. And I wonder if that's a place to start. Absolutely. So the greatest way to reduce food waste is to actually just eat the food that you're buying.

46:17We can go way scrappy or you can go little scrappy. And really the way to utilize the food that you're buying is cooking. And I always say that cooking is like a lost art nowadays. I feel like it is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself and your family is learning how to cook and teaching your children how to cook because it's just so nourishing. And then additionally, you're going to be saving money and reducing food waste. People often assume they look at an Instagram page like mine and I think they think, wow, she eats really healthy, but she's eating this massive variety of meals.

46:55I could never cook, like you said, this crazy stuff for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But in reality, even in my own home, we cycle through probably the same four base meals every week. But what's key about them is that each of them we can cycle in different plants. And this serves as both a food waste reduction strategy as well as a way to eat a diversity of plants, which we know from Will's work is just incredibly important. So these four meals, I have a curry every week. So my favorite curry personally is like a red curry, but you can do a yellow curry, a green curry, all different types of curries.

47:36So usually coconut milk or you can do soy milk based with red curry paste. And then you can add any vegetables you want. You can serve it over a variety of things, say quinoa, rice, noodles. So you can kind of see if you get that base recipe nailed down, how great that versatility is if you don't know what to make for dinner during the week. My other favorite one that I make at least once a week is a veggie bolognese sauce. and this was kind of one of the first things I made plant-based when I first went down that road that I was really missing. And what I do is I just throw whatever vegetables I have in my fridge.

48:14So say half a bell pepper that's starting to look a little wonky, that whole bag of spinach, and I throw it all into a food processor, onion, garlic, mushrooms. I process it up, add it to a hot pan, saute it up with a little bit of olive oil, and then add just a jar of your favorite pasta sauce and you've got a beautiful, abundant plant diverse bolognese that you've just added so much veggies to and reduce food waste. And is that very flexible? Because again, I think you're very confident as a cook. I'm not. And I imagine a lot of listeners won't be. So I think often worry, well, like if I put in this ingredient and I don't know, like, is it just going to taste disgusting because I'll put in the wrong sort of vegetable and it's just not going to work?

48:56I think when it comes to that, the cool thing about plant-based eating, so to give a little bit of background here, I didn't start really cooking until I went plant-based, which was around eight years ago. And the awesome thing about cooking with plants is the stakes are low. You're not worried about kind of making yourself sick. I always say you can save the meal. You add a little bit too much sweetness, you can add a little more salt, you add too little broth, You can add a little more. Like the meal is always savable. The stakes are so low. And I invite people to get their hands dirty and fall in love with cooking here.

49:34But this bolognese, if you add onion, garlic, bell pepper, carrots, celery, and mushrooms into a food processor, add it to a pan, take your favorite pasta sauce in the world, add that, I promise you that you're going to love it. And then take the carrot tops and snip them. Yes, and you snip those up on top and you've got a full scrappy meal. Carly, we've been using this recipe that you're describing. It's your veggie bolognese. This was from your first book. Yes. We've been using this in our house for many years, and it's a family favorite. The other thing that we do, Jonathan, is if you want to go a slightly different route with this, we just put the sauce on and we just simmer the sauce and we just throw stuff in.

50:09And when you slow cook with sauce, a whole bunch of different plants, they always come out well. They always are delicious. The third one I want to talk about is a stir fry. I mean, it's kind of like to Will's point. if you have a good sauce, it's going to be fine. So like a great stir fry sauce, I mean, we make probably peanut sauce once a week. If you're a peanut, I'm a huge fan of peanut butter. So peanut butter, soy sauce, a little bit of hoisin sauce, some water, stir that up, add it to a pan with whatever. Again, this is what's great. So great. If you master these base recipes, you can use any type of protein.

50:47So I would use a tofu or a chickpea. If you eat meat, you can totally do that as well. And then add whatever vegetables you had to that sauce. If you can master the sauce, your concerns are no longer because it's going to taste delicious. And can you do this like at the start of the week and then eat this? Totally. How does that? Because I think a huge key to eating healthy is being prepared. I mean, like anything in life, right? So I'm not necessarily in this stage of my life, a huge fan of just like prepping the same meal in those containers. So it's like you're eating the exact same dinner Monday to Friday.

51:26But I think that we can do some things to make it a lot easier to throw together these meals I'm talking about. So perhaps it's prepping a batch of rice at the beginning of the week when you get those vegetables into your home, slicing up the carrots and the bell peppers and the green beans so that when you're making your stir fry or you're making your pasta sauce, you can just throw them into the sauce rather than having to do the chop and the prep. So 100%, the preparation is 90 % of it. And quick point on the rice or other whole grains. If you prepare the whole grain and then you put it into the refrigerator, much like we talked about freezing the bread creates resistant starch.

52:02So does that. Refrigerating whole grains, including rice, will increase the resistant starch. If I freeze this, so let's say I make this and I'm trying to make a large amount and store some, am I losing the nutrients or am I actually storing them better than if I left it in the fridge. No, I think that what you're doing is you're locking in those nutrients. And so to me, that's a great option is to prepare a whole bunch of these things. Because I think you have one more, Carly. Yeah, soup. That's my favorite one. And I mean, we're heading right into soup season. I always say I'm transitioning into soup season.

52:35I just love soups. And this is just such a great way to get your plants in. We call them soup sundaes, like a big pot of minestrone soup. And I think this is like a cornerstone minestrone soup of the diets of some of the longest living populations in the world. This is very healthy. And again, any plants you have, but you foolproof is to start with some garlic, onion, celery, and carrot chopped up, and then add a little bit of tomato paste, your broth, whatever veggies you have on hand. Frozen works great here too. And then you can use a grain. You could use bulgur. You could use pasta and make a great minestrone soup.

53:15If you don't want to have something like a pasta in it, you can also blend that soup. So it's like a thick vegetable tomato soup. A great scrappy hack is I love to just have a reusable freezer bag in my freezer at all times. Whenever I'm prepping stuff, I'll have a second cutting board where I put my onion skins, my garlic skins and everything like that. Pop that into that bag. And once that bag is full, you can dump it into a stock pot with some water and create your own nutrient-dense vegetable broth. Onions and garlic are famously known to contain a specific phytochemical called quercetin. And this has been associated with longevity.

53:52And it's interesting because actually the quercetin is disproportionately concentrated in the skins. So what you're saying is that you could get us better access to the nutrient that we really desire to have. Do you know someone who wants to eat more plants without breaking the bank? Someone who throws away their banana peels and coffee grounds without knowing they're full of healthy nutrients. Why not share this episode with them right now to help them eat better and save money? I'm sure they'll thank you. One of our number one questions actually from listeners on the show was around soup and a concern that if you take your veggies and turn them into soup, then obviously you're boiling them away.

54:32And then we're saying, don't you lose all the nutritional value if you do this? Or does this continue to count towards those 30 plants? It kind of goes back to the conversation that we started a little bit earlier where we were talking about the study at the University of California, San Francisco, where basically they showed that if you cook your food, it still has a beneficial effect on the microbiome. It's just slightly different. So the same would be true for the soup. And in some cases, you actually get better access to nutrients because the water-soluble nutrients are actually brought out by the soup.

55:01So to me, I wouldn't be concerned about that this just really comes back to the idea of consuming a diverse diet that includes not only many different types of plants, but also different types of cooking techniques. So if you were only eating like soup, then you might potentially be missing out. But if you're eating these vegetables in a mix of ways, then some of them in soup, some of them not. Actually, you may be getting almost like more than you might have done if you were only eating them, you know, raw or steamed. 100%. And also the people who suffer with digestive health problems, people that have gut issues like IBS, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, these people struggle with raw foods.

55:40And it makes it very hard for them to eat the types of food that we're talking about right now. Whereas when you cook the food, particularly a slow cook like a soup, it really helps to pre-digest the fiber and make it much more gentle on the gut. And you still get tons of health benefits. But Jonathan, to your question, yes, there's a reason why we eat soup and salad together. That's amazing. And so you're actually saying, just to make sure I'd understood that, that for people who are sort of struggling with putting more plants into their diet, and we see that definitely there's a bunch of people who go through Zoe members for whom, you know, that's definitely a struggle, you know, to go from like your typical diet that you now have normally in the States or the UK, which tends to be very, very low in fiber.

56:20And that shift can, you know, can be a shock and you can get some bloating, all these sorts of things, Will, that you've talked about on other podcasts here. I just want to play about, you're saying actually sort of soup and things like this can be easier as ways to sort of increase your plants than necessarily eating those in like a raw or a less cooked way? A hundred percent. Slow cooked in a liquid foods like soups and stews and things of this variety are gonna be much more gentle on the gut because they're pre-digested. Smoothies, by the way, are also in many ways easier than the whole food.

56:53And then if you were to cook the food like a stir fry, that also does make it a little bit easier than consuming the food raw, but not to the extent that you would get with the soup. To me, the soup is like, if you have gut issues, this is a great place to start. Amazing. I would like to do a quick summary if that's right. And you guys keep me honest. And maybe I'm just going to share all these like brilliant facts I just learned today. So 40 % of the food we throw away, which is absolutely shocking. We throw away a lot of stuff because we worry about expiry dates, but you know what? There's no expiry date on a banana.

57:22We just use our senses. We should feel confident to feel the same way about a lot of the stuff that's that's in our refrigerator. We should be aiming for 30 plants a week. And we'll explain, you know, why that's so important. And it turns out there's a lot more ways you can get there. So for example, I just discovered you can eat the leaves of carrots. Who knew? But basically there's a lot more. Like generally if these plants are edible, then actually it turns out that all these things that you're cutting off them probably are edible as well. I think that's like a real, for me, like a really big change of thinking about it.

57:51I love this idea that in Canada, you peel off the peel of the potato and eat the peel. because that's clearly where all the good bits of the potato is now that I've thought about it. But I love that. Coffee grounds, who knew? You could bake a cake with coffee grounds. Frozen foods are often better than the fresh foods in the fruit and vegetable aisle, despite the fact they're much cheaper. And I think that's a really powerful way to rethink about it because, of course, they also just sit in the freezer. You don't throw them away. Sprouting is magic. I have never done this. I've heard Will talk about it repeatedly, but you know what?

58:28Carly does a much better job of making it feel accessible, Will. So I am going to go away and do that with the kids because I can see that that sounds fun. And we will definitely have a link on the show notes. The water from a can of chickpeas is magic and has a name. Aquafaba. And I'm going to be Googling that later just to check that it's not a huge trick. But I believe the two of you. Try base meals as a way to think about what you can eat. and I think the two that I took away as really accessible is this veggie bolognese. You can just like put a whole bunch of these veg that's left over in the fridge, just add it to a sauce.

59:03And that, you know, Carla, you've convinced me I'm not going to make something that's completely inedible. So I'm going to try that. And then finally, we talked about soup. And Will, you talked about the way that it makes a lot of plants really accessible to people, even if they might have some digestive issues, but also it doesn't just boil away all the value of the plants, which is what I'd sort of had a bit in my mind. It sounded delicious. I like the big pot of minestrone soup and I guess critically you need to make sure that it's because you're drinking the soup because you said like a lot of the nutrients go from the vegetables into the water and since because it's a soup you eat all of this so we should all be having more soup in our life I think so I think it's a great time for it too Brilliant Thank you both so much I have lots of ideas for what I need to do make me feel a little bit more confident in the kitchen I hope that's been the case for a few listeners as well Thank you Thank you Jonathan Thank you Carly This is fun Now, if you listen to the show regularly, you already believe that changing how you eat can transform your health, but you can only do so much with general advice from a weekly podcast.

1:00:03If you want to feel much better now and be on the path to live many more healthy years, you need something more. And that's why more than 100 ,000 members trust Zoe each day to help them make the smartest food choices. Combining our world-leading science with your Zoe test results, Zoe is your daily companion to better health for life. So how does it work? Zoe Membership starts with at-home testing to understand your unique body. Then Zoe's app is your health coach, using weekly check-ins and daily guidance to help you shift your food choices to steadily improve your health. I rely on Zoe's advice every day, and truly it has transformed how I feel.

1:00:44Will you give Zoe a try? The first step is easy. Take our free quiz to find out what Zoe membership could do for you. Simply go to zoe.com slash podcast, where as a podcast listener, you'll get 10 % off. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolfe. Zoe Science and Nutrition is produced by Julie Pinero, Sam Durham, and Richard Willem. The Zoe Science and Nutrition podcast is not medical advice. And if you have any medical concerns, please consult your doctor. See you next time.

1:01:33As you can imagine, hosting this podcast, running Zoe, juggling family life, it all keeps me pretty busy. So I try as best I can to stay energized and show up well in all those parts of my life by fueling my body with the right food, by exercising, and by adding a scoop of Daily 30 to my meals every day. If you haven't heard of Daily 30 yet, it's the gut supplement designed by our gut health scientists here at Zoe. It's made of over 30 high quality hand-picked plants, including seaweed, fungi, and different types of fiber. Better yet, it contains ingredients that support gut health, digestion, and energy, which is ideal for packed calendars and busy lives.

1:02:16Simply add one scoop a day to any meal for an extra boost of fiber and plant diversity. And because it tastes delicious on just about anything and adds a satisfying crunch, it quite quickly slots into your life, becoming a daily healthy habit you'll always have time for. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains four grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. So order yours today at zoe.com slash daily30. Thanks for listening and see you next time.