ZOE’s best health tips of 2025 - Part 1

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

0:13Welcome to this special Zoe episode, the first of our Best of 2025 series, a collection of moments that you told us changed the way you eat, think, and feel this year. It's been an incredible year. We spoke with world-leading scientists, uncovered surprising insights, and shared practical tools that you can use to feel better every day. And in this special highlights episode, where we're bringing you the very best moments, including one surprising discovery about a bright green drink that took over the world this year. Whether you're starting fresh in the new year or building on progress you've already made, this episode is packed with simple ideas you can take into 2026.

0:54Here at Zoe, we know that change isn't always easy. So if you're looking for a little inspiration, look no further than Rich Roll, who went from an overweight, junk food-addicted workaholic to one of the world's fittest men, all after the age of 40. If you're heading into the new year feeling tired, stuck, or unsure where to begin, Rich's story is the reminder that change is possible at any age. Throughout my 20s, I had a struggle with drugs and alcohol that really took me to some pretty dark places. And I was able to get sober at 31. I went to treatment for 100 days, which is a long time to be in sort of voluntarily incarcerated in what's kind of a mental institution for the temporarily insane.

1:42But that really changed my life and provided me with a new set of tools around how to organize my decision making and my actions. And when I emerged from that experience, building a foundation of sobriety was like my number one priority. And I went all in on my recovery and over the next nine or so years was very focused on that. But at the same time, I was also very intent upon reestablishing myself as a sort of respectable human being who could show up on time and be relied upon and the like and rebuild my career as a result. And during that period of time, I really overlooked my health and well-being because I was so focused on that one thing.

2:31And it's only in retrospect, when I look back on it, that I realized the extent to which my relationship with food and lifestyle habits was still very alcoholic. Like I was using food to medicate my emotional state. Shortly before I turned 40, I was about 50 pounds overweight. So I wasn't like obese, but I was quite sedentary. I'd been an athlete in college. I swam for Stanford in the late 1980s at a pretty high level, but really hadn't taken care of myself in quite some time. And I had an incident walking up the staircase to my bedroom where I had to take a break halfway up. I was literally winded by the exertion of just walking up a simple flight of stairs.

3:14And I had some tightness in my chest. And it was a scary moment. Heart disease runs in my family. My grandfather, who had also been a standout swimmer, had died young of a heart attack. And so heart disease was something that my mother was always telling me, you got to be careful with your heart. And everything kind of snapped into focus as a result of that experience. And I realized that not only did I need to make some pretty significant changes in how I was living, like I actually wanted to, like I had, I was blessed with like a level of willingness to actually take action on that. And I think the reason that I bring up the sobriety aspect of my story is because I'd had that history.

3:54Like I'd had that bottoming out moment where I made a decision, acted on it, and made a change that changed my life dramatically. And I felt the same energy. I was like, I think I'm having another one of those experiences. And what I learned about that prior experience was that you need to take action quickly because it's sort of a sliding doors moment. Like if you don't act upon it with some level of urgency, whatever willingness you're experiencing tends to fade pretty quickly. This moment was huge for Rich. Realizing his diet wasn't just affecting his health, but limiting his energy, his happiness, and the life that he wanted to live.

4:30I was on what you would call the window diet. Do you know what the window diet is? Tell me about the window diet. The window diet is when you drive up to a fine dining establishment, you roll the window down and they hand you food into your car. That was the diet that I was on. So a lot of fast food, a lot of late night takeout in the law firm in which I was working as a lawyer, Pizza Hut, Domino's, McDonald's, Jack in the Box, cheeseburgers, fries, you name it. You tried them all. I tried them all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of greasy food. So it was a big shift to actually go fully plant-based.

5:06And I did it almost as an experiment to prove to myself that it wouldn't work so I could make peace with the fact that I just felt the way that I felt and this is the way I'm supposed to feel and was not expecting the sort of dramatic shift in how I felt. But I tried a bunch of stuff. You know, I dabbled in paleo. I tried vegetarian. Like, I sort of checked a bunch of boxes. And the one thing that I hadn't done because I was reluctant to do it was to go entirely plant-based because it sounded hard. It was like, who wants to do that? Like, it just sounded difficult and And I couldn't imagine how I could ever be full or sated with anything that I was eating.

5:41So I did it kind of as a challenge, again, to like prove that it wouldn't work because I really didn't want it to work. That's the truth. So I was as surprised as anyone when it actually, you know, seemed to resuscitate me. And this theme, small changes creating big momentum, came up again and again in the conversations we had this year. It's a powerful place to start as we think about how to eat and live in 2026. Within seven to 10 days, I did feel like this resurgence, the spike in my energy levels. But at the same time, kind of hand in hand with that, there was a hopefulness that I was starting to experience.

6:17I was used to eating a midday meal and being so tired, feeling like I had to take a nap and just kind of being checked out of my life. And so to suddenly be able to eat without that food coma that I was so acclimated around almost like gave me more hours in the day. And my sleep improved. And when your sleep improves, your stress levels go down. You're able to kind of navigate tricky, conflict-oriented situations a little more gracefully. and of course your cognition and problem solving is better. So there was really no area of my life that was untouched. And yes, of course, we are holistic animals.

6:59Like we're not separated from the environment and our mental health and what's going on in our brain obviously impacts the entire body. And my experience was pretty much 360 across the board. Like so many things improved as a result of that. And that gave me the enthusiasm to just say, oh, this doesn't need to be an experiment. How can I make this sustainable so that I can continue to learn about how to do this properly and make it work for my life? Because I want to feel this way all the time. Midlife is often seen as a point of no return for health. But Rich's story suggests it could actually be the ideal moment to make radical change.

7:36But what makes this change so powerful? And why did it give Rich such a striking energy? To answer that, we need to turn to one of our most talked about topics of 2025, inflammation. To understand this better, I sat down with Dr. Federica Amati, our head nutritionist here at Zoe, and with my Zoe co-founder, Professor Tim Spector, to explore what inflammation really is and why so many of us are dealing with a constant low level of it without realising. Our view of inflammation has actually changed in recent years. So we used to know it as our defense mechanism against damage or infection, where the body would stimulate a response of the immune system, which meant it could fight off some nasty invasive bug, or it could start to heal a wound or anything going wrong in the body.

8:27So we've all got this natural defense mechanism. And this is why when you have a virus, you get an inflammatory response to your whole body. and that actually helps get rid of the virus quicker but makes you sick in the process. So often it's not the actual infection causing the symptoms, it's the inflammation itself. It's the immune system saying, right, we're going to get more white cells in there to take away the debris. We're going to loosen up the blood vessels so they're leaky and all kinds of stuff get out there. Things swell up, they go red, they're painful. All this is for a reason. And when people think of inflammation, they think of someone with arthritis and a big swollen red joint.

9:07And as you know, I was a rheumatologist for over 20 years treating those kinds of people. And that's what I thought of as inflammation. But we now know that the whole thing is much more subtle. So these things still happen in everybody and we wouldn't be alive if we didn't have those mechanisms. But what appears to be happening now is that, whereas if you think of inflammation as a big fire that gets burnt to sort of kill off all the bugs you don't want. Now, instead of that fire being turned off, it's still being left on a little bit. So the immune system is still simmering away. It still is engaging.

9:43And we have all these immune cells in our body. They're sending out chemicals all over the body saying, you know, there's danger, there's a problem. So what's happening now in the modern world is many of us have low-level inflammation where the immune system is just in a sort of slightly on mode all the time. So we can't relax and you're using up valuable metabolic energy. You're distracting your body because it thinks it's looking around for something to attack. The immune system says, where can I go? What's going on here? And this has a number of consequences. So the fact that we have this low-level inflammation means that our blood vessels are slightly swollen, our gut is slightly leaky, our white cells are just primed to do things all the time, and it fatigues the body.

10:36It doesn't have a chance to repair. It could affect your heart, so your blood vessels and your heart are just not working perfectly, and therefore increase your risk of heart disease. It can stress your metabolism, so you're more likely to get high insulin levels and diabetes. It also actually can influence your brain and your mental health, so that your body perceives you're under some threat and is more likely to cause depression. So your mood will go down as if you're ill. And we've all been ill or had a vaccination, and the vaccination itself causes a short burst of inflammation. That makes us tired, want to go to bed, not talk to people.

11:17So that's one of the current theories of depression. Then you've also got this risk of dementia. So inflammation is now linked very clearly to increased risk of dementia in a way your body can't repair itself as well if it's got the fire on. So your immune system is now seen as absolutely crucial to repairing everything in your body. And if someone is not turning it off completely every night, you're using up a lot of that immune energy, and that's why we get to this state. So it really affects all parts of your body and your mental and your physical health. And this is a modern phenomenon. If this is going on in the background, it's no wonder we feel tired, foggy, or run down.

11:58Thankfully, Tim and Federica shared some delicious science-backed foods that help cool the flame of chronic inflammation. Let's start with a classic that even my daughter will eat broccoli. Why is it a standout for fighting inflammation? Well, it's a great example. And I think it's, you know, it's one of the brassica family, which includes all kinds of things like cabbages and leeks and onions and garlic and cauliflower. It's because it has anti-inflammatory properties that have been shown. And one of the main chemicals, and this is just an example of one of many, but there's a really cool chemical there that gets released when you eat broccoli called sulforaphane.

12:38And this has all these effects on the body, these anti-inflammatory effects on the body. And it's been shown to reduce obesity-related inflammation when you give it to adolescents. It can reduce insulin levels as well. And you get even more effects when you look at broccoli sprouts. And this is a general rule because the sprout comes out of the seed and those first shoots have really concentrated amounts of all these nutrients, particularly sulforaphanes, and that gives them even more potential. So the younger that shoot is, the more you're getting of this really cool chemical. Now, there are some problems with sulforaphane because if you just throw your broccoli into a pan, you'll actually inhibit the sulforaphane from being released because the heat does this.

13:30So there's a little chemistry that needs to be going on here. So I've got a tip to overcome this. Something called chop and stop. This is the same for broccoli and it's the same for garlic and onions. You just chop it up, which releases the sulforaphane as you break down the cell walls, all leaks out. And rather than being instantly deactivated by the heat, you leave it for 10 minutes, have a cup of coffee or a sneaky glass of wine and you can then put it in the pan and you're getting all the sulforaphane. The other tip is to maximize the sulforaphane is to actually microwave your broccoli. You get three or four times more sulforaphane when you microwave it than when you heat it.

14:13Most people think microwaving is really unhealthy, but actually in some cases it can be a real boon because it works differently. A lot of people think healthy eating has to be complicated. it. When you hear something like microwaving broccoli can actually make it healthier, it suddenly feels doable. And one of the biggest inflammation breakthroughs this year came from something simple, delicious, and surprisingly easy to add to your day. Red cabbage crowd, bit of a wild card. Talk me through it, Tim. It is a wild card, and it's really thrown in there as an example of a fermented food. And it may be one that people haven't thought about quite as much because it's a bit different.

14:52But really what I'm trying to emphasize here is that any fermented food that includes things like yogurts, kefirs, regular sauerkraut, kimchi, which is like spicy sauerkraut, misos, all of these have anti-inflammatory properties. And these have been shown in multiple studies, both in test tubes and in humans. and the most recent studies often use multiple different ferments so rather than focusing just on one i think it's really important that people learn to diversify what they're eating because each ferment will have a different set of microbes in them so yogurts will have say three microbes and some of these more complex krauts and kimchis can have up to 20 or 30 in some kombucha so this Red sauerkraut is just one of an example of things that you can add to your meal in tiny little amounts.

15:53And a real classic study from Stanford showed that when they asked volunteers to try and get five small portions a day of ferments, they could really show in two weeks a dramatic, significant reduction in inflammation levels. And I think that's the first time anyone really shown in a really good study. And it's from our colleague Christopher Gardner's group. The other study that we did at Zoe, which many listeners might know about, is the Zoe Ferment Study, where we asked 10 ,000 people to take at least three ferments a day for two weeks. And although we didn't measure inflammation levels, we did measure things that are correlated, like tiredness and mood and energy levels.

16:36And they all improve within two weeks. so the vast majority of people taking these ferments at least three times a day or in three portions a day will get changes the inflammation level that translate to improved symptoms so i think that's that's something that everyone can do that's in addition to all these other foods and tricks and i love that because the study tim's referring to in the second arm they had a high fiber diet so one arm had fermented foods and the second arm had a high fiber diet and to see the difference between the two arms is amazing. So it shows you that fermented foods have a different effect on the immune system compared to high fiber alone.

17:16The high fiber diet participants had improved immune system function. So it was more ready to go when needed. The markers were really good to show that priming. But in the fermented food arm, they showed this active attenuation of inflammatory markers that you didn't see in the high fiber arm. So that's so cool. And I love the red kraut because it's colorful, it's high in bioactive compounds, It's fermented. It does all the things in one jar that you can make yourself at home. So there you have it. Some easy, gut-friendly tips to help you feel your best. Make sure you go back and listen to the full episode to hear all the ideas we've shared.

17:50But food isn't the only lever we've learned about this year. Another thing I discovered this year is that a healthy diet isn't just about what you put on your plate. Sometimes it's about the intentional absence of food. We invited Dr. Walter Longo, director of the Longevity Institute at USC, and one of Time's 50 most influential people in healthcare to explain how fasting affects longevity. In this clip, he explains how you can trick your body into reaping the rewards of fasting. So autophagy is this process where cells begin to eat themselves, right? Eat their own components. So they shrink and they start eating themselves.

18:28So Volta, that's a good thing if your cells are eating themselves? It doesn't sound like a good thing. It is a good thing, right? And so these bacteria do it and yeast do it and all organisms do it. So it's an opportunity to get rid of a lot of normal components, but junk, real junk that accumulate in the cell. So in that sense, it's an opportunity to clean up. And so it's a good thing. or a group that we collaborate with has done a clinical trial showing that the markers of autophagy don't seem to be measurable until about day five, end of day five in the human blood. But that's one of the things that everybody, people fast for three hours and they think autophagy is on, but it probably takes about five days to get there.

19:12So just to play back, you're saying that if you got into a state where your cells are actually sort of eating themselves, they're getting rid of sort of damage, that could be good, but you'd actually have to starve yourself for five days before that would happen. Yes, of course. And I think we're going to talk about it. So we've been working for many, many years on how you don't have to starve yourself to get some of these effects. And that's where fasting, mimicking diets and all the things come in. This idea of cleaning up the body at a cellular level is fascinating. But fasting for five days straight isn't realistic for most of us.

19:45Definitely not for me. So Volta has been developing a more approachable way to get the benefits of fasting without starving yourself. So then we've done lots of trials, I think 35 trials already, looking at this periodic fasting, mimicking diet. And so this is a low calorie, low protein, low sugar, high fat, plant-based diet that lasts between four days and seven days, depending on what we're trying to treat. Then, you know, the patient gets a box and that's a medicine, right? or that's potential medicine, let's say. And so we tested it now for lots and lots of different things. I think the most advanced ones is diabetes.

20:23Now, very clearly, we're seeing regression, diabetes regression, diabetes remission. And the beauty, I think, is with that lifestyle changes, right? So we ask, and the universal laden trial with 100 patients actually looked at lifestyle and saw no difference other than a little bit increase in exercise towards the end of the 12 fasting-mimicking diet cycle. So they did monthly. So these diabetics were doing fasting-mimicking diet once a month for 12 months. By the end of it, they saw... How many days per month? Five days. Five days per month. Five days a month, and then they were allowed to go back to whatever it is that they do.

21:01But now the beauty is that they improved so much. 70 % of them reduced drug use. They improved so much, then we basically think, and we've seen this, We have clinics for my foundations. And so that we can switch them to three or four times a year. That's it, right? So year one, you do a 12, maybe not even 12, but let's say 12. And then year two, you may be able to go down to four to six cycles. And year three, we're hoping you're down maybe to three cycles. And that's it. So you do it once every four months. And so now we're formally testing that in southern Italy in a 500-patient trial, three arm, and one is a control fasting-making diet once every three months, and then fasting-making diet every three months plus what I call the longevity diet.

21:48And so we'll see. We're now a patient 400. And so we've got 100 patients left. But yeah, the idea is, yes, we can try to get people to change everything they do, but they're probably either won't change or they'll go back to whatever it is that they used to do. But maybe if the doctor was on board once every three months, you know, if you have a problem, you can consider doing these five days. And once you're done with the five days, you're done for three months. Do you believe that this sort of fasting mimicking diet, this five days, sort of every few months can improve, you know, the biological age, you know, make you younger on the inside?

22:27Yeah. So we did that in two trials. And in both trials, two and a half years of biological age reduction after three cycles. So this is using what I was Wow. Let me just play that. You're saying that you did it three times and your measured biological age improved by two and a half years. Yeah. So subjects that were asked to do the fasting making diet monthly for three months, they showed a reduction in almost identical in both trials of 2.5 years on average. Tim, what's your reaction to that? At this time of year, many of us focus on supplements, quick fixes, or food fads to stay healthy. But one of the most powerful tools we have is something much simpler, sharing food with other people.

23:09The science is really clear on this. Eating with others naturally encourages us to slow down, which supports better digestion. People also tend to choose more nutritious, balanced foods when they eat together. It's one of those simple habits that makes a real difference to our well-being, especially at this time of year. That's why we've created the Zoe Holiday Hosting Guide. Our free guide is filled with cozy recipes that are perfect for sharing, hosting tips, and go-to-dinner party dishes from our scientists and nutrition experts. Think warm, relaxed evenings with the people you love, sharing delicious, nourishing meals that makes you feel good from the inside out.

23:46To download your free guide, simply click the link in the show notes or go to zoe.com slash holiday guide. That's zoe.com slash holiday guide. it's very exciting that um you might be able to trick the body into this into this state and i think the question is whether this is sustained over time um because you might get a temporary change in your these markers of biological age but i i do think uh what i like about it is that it's accepting that people aren't going to do long fasts for long periods of time outside a laboratory. And so it has a pragmatic element to it, which I think is really exciting.

24:35So I think the test will be, you know, these long-term studies to say, well, at three or five years, you know, have things really changed permanently? Or is this a temporary, will the body reset itself, I guess, this is what we're always fighting in medicine, is the body's ability to recalibrate and realise it's being fooled. And the question is, it seems to work short term. The question is, is this going to work long term? But it's very exciting. Hearing research like this always leaves me inspired and curious. If we can influence ageing at a biological level, what else might be possible? That question becomes even more important when we talk about brain health.

25:17Dementia is one of the fastest growing health crises in the developed world, with cases expected to double in the coming decades. And that's why we invited Dr. Ayesha and Dean Shirzai onto the show. Known as the brain doctors, they spent decades working in this field and are at the forefront of research into prevention. I think it's important for our lovely audience to understand that when people are diagnosed with the scary word dementia or Alzheimer's disease. It's not something that just popped out of nowhere right then and there. Let's stick to Alzheimer's disease because there are other types of dementia as well.

25:55In Alzheimer's disease, there are multiple different things that are going on in the brain. There is deposition of these harmful toxic protein byproducts, specifically the ones that have been studied are amyloid beta protein and tau. And they essentially deposit within a cell and outside of the cell, and they start damaging the infrastructure of the brain. And the direct cause as to why that happens, we're not very clear right now. But there are some hypotheses. And one of the hypotheses is that the body has a difficult time getting rid of these toxic byproducts over many, many years. In multiple studies, both imaging studies and biomarker studies, which means they look at people's blood levels of these toxic bi-products, or they look at cerebrospinal fluid, you know, the spinal tap fluid, and they look at the proteins there.

26:50It seems that the process of deposition of these harmful proteins, it takes decades for it to come to the point where people are diagnosed with dementia. It takes nearly 20 to 30 years for this process to have been present, ever present, and cause damage in the brain. Nearly 20 to 30 years of this slowly being laid down in my brain. That is correct. And that is why now scientists and neurologists are addressing Alzheimer's disease as a disease of middle age. It's not something that manifests in our 70s, 80s, 90s, and beyond. Yes, the prevalence increases because people, you know, as they age, their risk goes higher.