ZOE's best health tips of 2024 - Part 1

0:00Welcome to ZOE Science & Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.

0:14Thanks for tuning in to this very special episode of Zoe's Science and Nutrition, where we're taking a look back over 2024. In fact, it's a two-parter. There were just so many amazing insights this year. We're an incredible lineup of guests throughout the year who shared with us a huge range of actionable tips on improving our nutrition and our gut health. And a lot of what we learned this year surprised me. Like the beverage you're probably drinking every day that we thought was bad for us. Turns out it can actually be beneficial. Or that what counts as a plant is actually so much more than just fruit and vegetables.

0:50Not to mention the really important topic that until very recently was taboo and made our celebrity guest emotional. I know I learned a lot from that one. That's coming up at the end of the episode, so make sure you stick around. With January around the corner, a lot of us are thinking about making some positive changes. But new habits can be really hard to stick to. I know my yearly resolution of giving up the dark chocolate after dinner always falls by the wayside before Valentine's Day. That's why we took a deep dive into this very topic, how to build healthy eating habits in a meaningful and sustainable way.

1:29And I got to chat with the brilliant James Clear, author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits. We're also joined by Dr. Federica Amati, our head nutritionist here at Zoe.

1:43So it's mostly about how you structure your environment. And I think a simple question to hold in the back of your mind, just like think about one habit that you're trying to build. Maybe it's a certain type of food you're hoping to eat more of, or something you're hoping to do. Maybe you just want to cook more meals or something like that. And then walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day, at your kitchen, your living room, your bedroom. Look around those rooms and just ask yourself, what is this space designed to encourage? What behaviors are obvious here? What behaviors are easy here?

2:13And if you walk into one person's house and the chips and the cookies and snacks are on the counter and visible and easy to get to, and you walk into another person's house and those things are either tucked away, maybe some of them already have been in the house or they're on the highest shelf in the back of the pantry and they're harder to get to. And they've got a piece of fruit out on the counter. That really struck me that our environment is crucial in building new habits. Another key tip is to start out small by asking yourself what you'd be most likely to stick to on a tough day. One of the most common challenges with building new habits is that people bite off more than they can chew.

2:48They decide to try to do too much. And I have made this mistake more times than I can count. So, you know, it is something that is very natural to do. I think particularly for ambitious people, there's kind of this conversation in their head where they sit down and they start thinking about the changes they're going to make. And then the assumption in the back of their mind, even if they don't state it explicitly is, man, you know, like, what could I do if I really got going? Like, what would peak performance look like for me? You know, if I was like really on my game and like living my best days, if I really have my habits dialed in, what could I achieve?

3:21And I think when you're in that mindset, which is great. It's great to be hopeful and dream about where you could go. It's also really easy to end up doing too much. Oh, well, I'm going to change five, six, seven habits at the same time. And rather than asking yourself, what could I do on my best day? I actually think the place to start is by asking, what can I stick to even on the bad days? And that becomes your baseline. That becomes the new habit that you try to get established. And once you establish that, then you can start to feel successful and feel like you're moving forward. and you gain some progress and a feeling of momentum.

3:54And then great, now you're showing up each day and there's all kinds of things that you can do from there. And so does that mean your guidance is in general, don't try and like make this massive change all at once, but think about this more as a series of like smaller habit changes step by step. And is that in fact what the sort of the science shows is more successful? So I think there are, let me give you two examples that'll probably help clarify. So the first one, this is just a really simple tactic. I think a very actionable thing that you can use for building better habits. I call it the two minute rule.

4:26And it just says, take whatever habit you're trying to build and you scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. So read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat. One thing I was left wondering, along with many of our listeners, is how long does it actually take to form a solid new habit? So this is a very common question. How many days does it take to become a habit? And so you'll hear 21 days, 28 days, 30 days, 90 days. I don't know. There's all kinds of stuff people say. The answer is it depends. There was a study that shows that on average, it takes about 66 days to build a habit.

5:03So that's a common number you'll see floating around now. People with science says it takes 66 days. But if you actually read the study, the range is quite wide. So something pretty easy, like drinking a glass of water might only take a couple of weeks. Something more difficult, like going for a run after work every day, might take seven or eight or nine months. And even that, I don't think, tells the story very cleanly, because you can imagine one person who wants to build the habit of going for a run after work, who lives with people who nobody is working out, nobody's interested in that, and it kind of goes against the friction of that group.

5:34And then another person who lives with all athletes that are excited about working out, and they just need to join their friends to do it. Obviously, these are two different circumstances, and so it's going to depend. But I think the real answer, the honest answer to how long does it take to build a habit is forever. Because if you stop doing it, it's no longer a habit. And what I'm trying to get people to realize with that answer is that we often think about our habits as this finish line to be crossed. But they're not a finish line to be crossed. It's a lifestyle to be lived. The goal of eating 30 plants a week might sound like a big endeavor.

6:11but I wanted to tell you that it isn't actually that hard to achieve. Regular listeners to this podcast know that we often talk about eating 30 plants a week and we stand by it so much that our gut health scientists actually created Daily 30, which is a gut supplement that makes it really easy to do. With just one scoop, you can add more than 30 plants to your daily diet and benefit from ingredients that support your digestion, your gut health and energy. Plus, Daily 30 can actually help keep you feeling full. Daily 30 also features four grams of fiber, a nutrient that over 90 % of adults lack.

6:49If you follow Zoe on Instagram, you might have seen our post on a nutrition trend called fiber maxing. Fiber maxing, as you can probably guess, is when you max out your fiber intake. Now, plants are full of fiber, so eating over 30 different ones can help you do just that. Now, Zoe don't usually love nutrition trends, but what we love about the idea of fiber maxing is that it's a way to focus on abundance, not restriction, by eating a variety of plants that come in different textures and colors. If you want to try a bit of fiber maxing, simply sprinkle Daily 30 on your breakfast meals. I like it with my berries and yogurt every morning.

7:27Yes, berries are plants too, and a great source of fiber. Daily 30 also tastes great on salads, vegetable soup, avocado toast, hummus. The list runs on. And because we're Zoe, we ran a study on Daily 30. As shared in a previous podcast episode, when Zoe first developed it, we ran our own randomized controlled trial to check if a new class of supplements could actually work. The results exceeded our expectations and helped us create the formulation that we sell today. 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.

8:03Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. Ready to start improving your diet this week? All it takes is a scoop to make every day a good gut day. Just go to zoe.com slash daily30 to start adding it to your meals and try the fiber maxing trend for yourself. And right now, we're offering our listeners a free Zoe tin and magnetic scoop with every order. So order yours today at zoe.com slash daily30. For many of us who are parents, we're also thinking about how to help our kids build healthy habits. And James had some tips there too. First thing is model the behavior that you want to see.

8:41To ask somebody else to do something and then to not do it yourself. Like your kids are almost always going to imitate your behavior more than they listen to your words. And so if you want them to act a certain way, then you should try to set the standard as well. People often play to the standard that you set, not the one that you request. And so, like, how can you showcase that? Another example related to healthy eating and perhaps to kids, let's say you want to get your kids to eat more greens or eat more salads. I just talked to a woman who she wanted to get in the habit of making a salad for lunch every day.

9:14And when she started, she at first she had this idea in her mind that it had to be like pure and perfect that it wasn't if it wasn't like a perfectly healthy salad, then it wasn't worth it for her to do it. And then she shifted to this idea of like, what would it be like if it was fun? And so she tried to make each salad bowl like a party and she would put little toppings on it. And she even some days she would even like crumble up potato chips and put them on or whatever, but it made the habit enjoyable. And then once she got to the point where she was actually having a salad 90 % of the days, there are all kinds of ways to improve that and to, you know, optimize it because she's actually showing up and eating it every day.

9:51And so I think you can take a similar sort of approach, whether it's with yourself or with your kids, and whether it's an eating habit or something else. What would it look like if this was fun? Let's start there, get the habit established, and then we can optimize and improve it from there. What would it look like if this was fun? For me, that seems such a light, encouraging place to end our chat with James, and definitely makes my new resolution for 2025, which again is to try and cut down on that dark chocolate after dinner seem much more attainable.

10:24If you're also thinking about a change you might want to make in 2025, let's take a look back at one of the year's most popular episodes for some inspiration. Legendary chef Hugh Fearnley-Whitinstall and my Zoe co-founder, Professor Tim Spector, are encouraging everyone to eat more plants. More specifically, to eat 30 plants a week. It's believed that eating 30 plants a week could lower cancer risk and help you live more healthy years. To me, it sounded like a lot of plants and potentially really expensive. But our guest for this episode helped me understand. It could be neither. Hugh's first key point was that plants are not just fruits and vegetables.

11:06Absolutely, that's right. Fruit and vegetables being a fantastically important and indeed delicious and useful group of plants, but there's much more to it than that. I think it's really, one of the things I really enjoy doing in the book is exploring the store cupboard and reminding people that there's lots of really great plant ingredients, whole plant ingredients, you know, not processed, but that come from the store cupboard. So I'm thinking of nuts, seeds, spices, pulses, these kinds of things. They all count. At least Tim assures me that they all count. And this is what has been the basis of my most recent exploration of what I think is a really excellent way of eating.

11:45Encouragingly, pretty much all the plants that we consume have some benefit on health. That's firstly because they contain a lot of fiber. 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.

12:29So just increasing from 15 grams to 20 grams will give you this improvement in your lifespan. But also because plants contain polyphenols, which interact with our body and specifically our immune system, helping to regulate our brains, our behavior, and more. Tim and Hugh had some tips on choosing plants based on their polyphenol content. And Tim, can I just clarify? So you're saying if you're looking at a vegetable in a store, this is the way you figure out whether a vegetable has more polyphenols? Yeah. So I didn't know any of this before I started researching my book 10 years ago. So I don't expect most people to know.

13:05No, it's not really taught. It's the shape, the colour, and then the taste, if you can nibble a bit in the green grocers, which you may not be able to. They're all clues as to the polyphenol count. So the more bitter and strong, if the leaves are loose, interestingly, that means they've had less protections from structure, so they have to be tougher and have more chemicals in them. If we can avoid it, we shouldn't discard the outer leaves of the lettuce and the cabbage. They often have very tender white middles, which are effectively blanched. I always think of that in terms of they've been prevented from photosynthesizing in the heart of the plant, which is often why the middle of the plant is sweeter and why traditionally you actually tie up celery and endives and things like that, because you want that white, slightly sweeter heart from a flavor point of view, but from a different flavor point of view and a health point of view, those greener, more open outer leaves have probably got more going on in them in terms of polyphenols, just as they've probably got more bitter flavors, which now we might try and cultivate that taste because we know it's good for us.

14:18Therefore, let's enjoy the bitterness of those plants and sort of find a way to relish it. 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 and once 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.

14:54I'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. I 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. You know, 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.

15:36And 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 flavour and excitement into the kitchen and onto our plates. So not only are plants vital for our health, with a little imagination they can be the main attraction on our plate. But where does this number 30 come from? We showed that the people with the healthiest gut microbes, which we define by diversity, sort of different types of species, we're eating the most variety of plants.

16:14And this came out at around 30. 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 take this epidemiological concept, which is just based on observational data, and then do a randomised control trial that had such convincing results. For anyone who thinks it sounds challenging to eat 30 plants a week, like I did initially, it's less difficult than you might think.

17:03Don'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.

17:38I promise you you've heard of it. You'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. Being able to put together plants-only meals, I think, is really important for omnivores as well as people who choose a vegan or vegetarian approach. We do not need meat and fish on our plate every single day.

18:10And Hugh, is that almost like your first tip to say like, it's okay to have a dinner that doesn't have any meat in it and that suddenly opens things up? Not just okay, but important to do that pretty regularly and to feel comfortable with ingredients in your kitchen that you can make delicious meals that your family's going to enjoy without putting meat and fish in them all the time. And I think that there's a whole bunch of ingredients that are really useful for doing that. I always have lots of tins of different pulses in my store cupboard, not baked beans in tomato sauce, but different types of white bean, black bean, chickpeas, lentils.

18:49I have dried versions as well, particularly lentils because they cook so quickly. But you want things to be easy and cracking open a tin of beans and adding them to a big stew with lots of other lovely flavours, tomatoes, chilies, spices and herbs add depth of flavour to a lot of these dishes that make them really very, very enjoyable. Hugh left us with some quick, easy ways to pack more plants into your meals. Like a homemade trail mix with nuts and seeds, a delicious butter bean hummus and garlic butter on greens, especially handy for those picky younger eaters. Do make sure you go back and listen to the full episode to get all those great cooking tips.

19:30One of our most fascinating episodes this year was about dementia. It's something I know has affected so many families out there, including my own. And I really wanted to hear how we can put emerging science into action on this topic. So I spoke to dementia expert Claire Steves. She's a medical doctor, a professor of aging and health, and head of the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology at King's College London. So dementia is actually an umbrella term. So lots of different things actually fit into that term of dementia. But if we want to sort of classify it, it's a condition that involves cognitive function, so thinking and learning and memory, more than one domain of it, which is altered in somebody, that that's altered to such a degree that it then causes a problem in day-to-day living and that it's gradually progressive over time and needs to have been around for longer than a six-month period at the very least.

20:25And actually, most people who get diagnosed with dementia have probably had some symptoms going back for maybe years. For me, the million-dollar question was, can our lifestyle or even diet have any impact on our risk of getting dementia? Let's start with me. So, you know, I'm someone in my late 40s. I really want to make sure that I don't have dementia. Give me the advice. If I was walking in order to try and make sure I never had to come back to your clinic in, you know, 20 years? So actually what I realistically say to patients is, it's about getting as many different colors of fruit and vegetables into your diet as possible and making sure that you're getting good plant-based fats into the diet.

21:07Because the brain is hugely metabolically active. It needs a lot of nutrients. And we know that a wide variety of plant-based nutrients is really important for brain health. And I talk about colors because actually there's evidence that flavonoids are really key phytonutrients for brain development. It may be because you're changing the microbiome because there's such a thing as a gut-brain axis. You know, there's quite a number of studies now showing Mediterranean diet, it helps to improve cognitive health. So that there is real evidence of the Mediterranean, like changing this, this isn't just like something, because, you know, doctors always say you should eat more healthily, right?

21:42And everyone's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's real scientific studies that show that switching to this Mediterranean diet, which is high in the things you're describing and low in like the more traditional Western diet of meats and like white bread and all the rest of it, like that actually has an effect on dementia? Yeah. And then you, so you've just mentioned the other thing, which is meats and white bread. Yeah. So we know that there's a relationship between vascular health and brain health. And vascular health means? The blood vessels within your body and your heart. That's because one of the other types of dementia we haven't really talked about is a vascular dementia.

22:18And often there's a combination actually of vascular factors that then bring on those other processes like Alzheimer's. So if you're eating a diet that's good for your heart basically, then that's also going to be good for your brain. Yeah, it's going to be good for your brain and it's going to put backwards the balance of things that are going on in your brain that might relate to Alzheimer's. So if you can change your diet in a sustainable way, it really can reduce your risk of dementia. What we also learned in this episode is that exercise is key. So probably the most evidence is around resistance training exercise for overall frailty and so on.

22:55Then, you know, for cardiovascular fitness, there's aerobic exercise. I'm one of your patients. I'm not very physically active. What would you be telling me that I should do that can really make a difference? Walking. Walking. I think you need to get out and do walking 45 minutes at least three times a week. And that will really make a difference. If I'm not doing that, that will really make a difference. So that I think, again, is amazing. Claire, I think you're like, well, it seems sort of obvious. But again, I think many people listening to this grew up with the assumption there is nothing you can do about your dementia.

23:27It's just literally a consequence of getting older. And you're saying, actually, if you went for a walk three times a week, compared to just not doing that, you're going to make a really significant reduction in the risk. It is rather extraordinary. For me, one of our more intriguing episodes this year was about coffee, something you probably have at least one cup of every day and contains the world's most popular psychoactive drug, caffeine. But could coffee actually be healthy? I chatted with renowned coffee expert James Hoffman, who's the bestselling author of How to Make the Best Coffee at Home, along with our very own Tim Spector.

24:04For many years, we thought coffee was bad for us because short term, it increases your heart rate, increases your blood pressure. For decades, people said this is a rather dangerous thing to be having. Don't do too much of it. You're going to have a heart attack. Then they started doing some proper studies and have shown that you actually, based on over 25 studies, you can now see a reduction of about 25 % in your risk of a heart attack or heart disease. So then you're saying, why would that be? Something that short-term might be slightly stressing your system is actually long-term good for you.