How to eat in 2025: 7 science-backed tips | Prof. Tim Spector and Prof. Sarah Berry

Welcome to ZOE, Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.

Last night, as the fireworks faded and we raised our glasses to say goodbye to 2024, I couldn't help but think about what I want to achieve in 2025. And maybe you did too. What are you hoping for this year? If, like many others, is to feel better and improve your health, then you're in the right place.

Today, Zoe's own Professor Tim Spector and Professor Sarah Berry share their seven tips based on the scientific discoveries of the last year. So you can become the healthiest version of you this year.

in a world where everyone claims to be an expert on health and nutrition. You might feel confused about what's actually healthy. These tips could challenge most of what you've thought you knew. Tim Spector is one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists, a professor of epidemiology and my scientific co-founder at Surrey. Sarah Berry is a world leader in large scale human nutritional studies, a professor in nutrition at King's College London and chief scientist at Surrey.

You'll leave this episode with seven simple yet powerful changes you can make today from two world leaders in nutrition science. Sarah and Tim, thank you very much for joining me on New Year's Day. Very excited to be here, Jonathan. Happy New Year, Jonathan. Happy New Year, and I think you promised this year you'd make sure you weren't too hungover. I was very sensible last night. I got an early night. I only had about 10 tequila's. So Tim, how many did you have?

Less than you. You're such a good boy, Tim. All right, well, I'm glad to hear that there are no hangovers this morning. So look, this special episode is focused on our mission here at Zoe, which is improving the health of millions by helping everyone to be able to make smarter food choices based on the latest science. So I think it's fantastic to have both of you here. And I think a lot of people will be listening to this.

feeling really motivated to make a change. I think a really classic thing to do at the start of January. And I know that the two of you have been working away on seven science-backed tips that can really make a difference. Before we go into those, I'd love to just discuss why this is so important and why if someone's listening to this, actually they should be thinking about what they eat as the change that they might make for us or something else.

Maybe Tim, can you just describe what's the reality of the food that's out there for anyone who's listening and deciding to go to the supermarket today? The food choices we make are the most important decisions we can make for our health today. And I think that's the really key message here. So everyone has the ability to really change their health. Don't depend on anyone else. Just by making the right food choices, you can dramatically add

years to your life and your health span. And we're surrounded by an environment that's trying to do the opposite. It's trying to make us make the wrong food choices. In the US and the UK, around 60% of all the food that adults eat is ultra processed food designed to trick us and trick our brains into eating it. And it's close to 70% in our kids. And some deprived bits of

the country, it's much higher than that, and you cannot get healthy whole foods. These companies are making billions, so they can afford endless amounts of marketing, endless amount of influencing experts to give you different views on what's really happening. So these foods are slowly killing us. They've made us

into the sick nations. We are overwhelmed with obesity, diabetes, cancers, heart disease, all these things that we never used to see 40, 50 years ago, particularly in young people, which is totally new. So we have to combat this and the way to combat it is with knowledge. And this is really what the start of the year should be, a bit of a reset, say, gosh, what am I eating? What's gone wrong here? What can I do about it?

And I think Jonathan, it's a really important time to be really mindful of what we're putting on our plays. But also, I would caveat with what Tim said to say that our food landscape is pitted against us, yes. And so we do need to acknowledge it's quite hard. It's hard to change what we're eating if we're not really mindful about what we're eating. But I think what should motivate people to really try to change despite the broken food landscape around us

is the incredible benefits it's going to have to our health, to our lifespan, to our health span, how long we're going to feel healthy for. And there's some great research showing that if you go from an unhealthy, the kind of diet that many of us currently, not obviously Tim, that if we change from that diet, even at the age of 40,

will add 10 extra years to our life. Even at the age of 70, if we change from an unhealthy typical UK diet to a healthy diet, the kind of diet we're going to talk about today, you can add five or more years. And this is new research that came out just over a year ago, sharing this. It's healthy years, not just extending a sick life, but it's actually saying you can actually put off those illnesses and problems that are

And I think this should be a real motivator for the New Year to say, you know, it really is going to make an impact. It really is going to make a change to how healthy I feel here and now, because we know change your diet can make you feel different, your mood, your energy, hunger, here and now, but also in the long term. And it's never too late. And I think that's really key. And as you say that, I immediately think of my dad saying, yeah, but you're going to make me eat rabbit food for the rest of my life. And it's not worth the extra years for the misery of that. What would you say to that, Sarah?

Jonathan, I always say to people, if a food is too healthy to be enjoyed, it's just not healthy at all. It's so important that we choose food that we also enjoy. Food is there to bring us pleasure. It's part of our culture, our social interactions. It's part of how we feel.

I think this common misconception that if you reduce your meat and you move to more healthy foods, you're just going to be eating lentils all the time. Absolutely not true. You can see this full range of foods that you can get that are really appetizing, both in taste and on the eye, and look super healthy as well. People need to get into it.

get a good cookbook, start thinking about new ideas. It's not just about sticking more lentils on your plate and taking away meat. I'd like to share something exciting. Back in March 2022, we started this podcast to uncover how the latest research can help us live longer and healthier lives. We spoke into leading scientists around the world doing amazing research.

and across hundreds of hours of conversations, they've revealed key insights that can help you to improve your health. If you don't have hundreds of hours to spare, no need to worry. At the request of many of you, our team has created a guide that contains 10 of the most impactful discoveries from the podcast that you can apply to your life. And you can get it for free. Simply go to zoe.com slash free guide or click the link in the show notes

And do let me know what you think of it. Okay, back to the show. So I think a lot of people will be listening to this and saying, that all sounds too good to be true. Surely, if I really want to change my health, it can't be as simple as just the food that I eat.

So I think we need to think about health as four key pillars of health. And that's diet, that's sleep, that's stress, and that's physical activity. But they're all really, really interlinked. We know how you sleep impacts your food choices. We know your food choices impact how you sleep. We know your stress impacts how you respond to a food. So yes, that's a lot to think about, but because they're all interlinked, if we can at least start with diet, then the rest can follow.

And for most people, it's perhaps the one thing that they're more in control of. Some people find it harder to do exercise or they might have some health problems or have young kids and sleep as a problem, but the one thing that you can sort of cross all ages.

really get to grips with is to improve your diet. And that I think is a really important message. So we're not saying the others aren't important, but I think this is why we focus on this at Zoe and in our podcast, because it's so achievable for everybody of all ages.

And diets are a great starting point as well, Jonathan, because we know in a matter of weeks you can feel better, you can have more energy, you can have better mood. And I think that's what's really exciting, that changing our diet isn't just about the long-term benefits that happen in 5, 10, 15 years.

is the benefits that you see straight away that I think are really important and that's something we're starting to see more and more through our own zoe research as well. I run over 30 clinical trials, I never ask people such a guru question as how do you feel? What's your energy? What's your mood? And so it's fascinating, like Tim said, this was just the last minute add on for all of our zoe research and it's fantastic that you're seeing these huge improvements.

We're about to go and deliver your seven tips. If someone's listening and saying, so what can I expect to get if I follow all seven of these tips, Sarah?

I think it does depend on where your starting point is. So it depends on where your baseline diet is. But what I would hope is if you follow these tips, you'll start to feel better very quickly within a week or two in terms of your mood, in terms of your energy. But what I do believe based on all of the evidence around these tips is that your long-term health will improve. Your risk of many chronic diseases that are underpinned by poor diet

like cardiovascular disease, like type 2 diabetes, like living with obesity, and even some cancers, the risk of those should reduce as well. Tim, we've managed to make 10 minutes into an interview and you haven't talked about my gut bugs at all. I was going to interrupt you, but I thought I'd wait. How do they play into this? Because I know that you've explained to me a lot about how important that is now coming through in the science.

These seven tips all feed into the gut microbiome in some way, and it always ends up. The central, the universe does tend to be your gut in Indian and Chinese doctors have known this for thousands of years. We're just discovering it.

And what we've shown in our studies is within a few weeks, you can demonstrate changes to your microbiome if you're starting from a very poor point and you get rapid increases in your microbes. That means they're then changing the chemicals they're producing and those chemicals are probably the key ones going to your brain to make, give you that extra energy and that mood enhancing effects.

rather than the food itself. It's acting rather gut microbes, little chemical factories. They produce these incredible ones that go to the brain, light up the brain, change that mood, and you're getting rid of the suppressing chemical effects of the ultra-processed foods, which are dampening your mood and giving you those cravings. So we're really changing the chemistry of the brain and the immune system when we change our gut microbes.

Amazing. Well, I think it's time to get into our tips. So I would like to start with tip number one, reduce ultra process food. So I think you introduce this like shocking statistic that 60% of our diet now comes from ultra process foods in countries like the US and the UK and that that number is even higher for, you know, my kids and many other kids. Sarah, what are ultra process foods and why should we avoid them?

So, Autoprocess foods, like you said, make up a huge amount of our diet. And these are groups of foods that are now found throughout the food environment that we live in in the UK, in the US. And these are typically through packaged foods. These are foods that contain lots of additives, lots of emulsifiers. These are foods that don't retain the original structure. They don't even resemble the original food that they came from.

And so these are the kind of foods that you wouldn't be able to typically make in your own kitchen. It's quite difficult to identify what an ultra-processed food is. But as a kind of rule of thumb, you can look at the backpack labelling if it's got lots of ingredients that you don't recognise, lots of additives again that you don't recognise. But really importantly, if the food as well doesn't resemble anything of where it's come from, I think that's a really key way to be able to identify if the food is ultra-processed.

And Sarah, could you give us a few examples of what an ultra-processed food is to sort of, you know, make this sort of real in our minds? Chocolate spreads, for example, lots of cookies, biscuits, cakes, all of those kinds of foods. Most snack foods, ready meals, crisps.

frozen pizzas, ice cream, also the fast foods, of course, that you would get in and take out restaurants. So it could be an ultra-processed food when I buy it from a restaurant. It's not just something that I would be buying from a supermarket. Correct. Yes, exactly. So most fast food is defined as ultra-processed. It's made centrally in large factories and then distributed.

and either frozen and then defrosted or it's produced in a very industrial way that you couldn't do in an individual kitchen. And why do we care? So it can't be made in our kitchen, but so what?

So there's more and more evidence coming out each year and this year's another example of hundreds and hundreds of new studies analysing the data to show that these ultra-poster foods are associated with poor health, associated with increased risk of a whole host of diet related diseases, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, dementia.

poor mental health, etc. Every day we see a new analysis come out. We call these meta-analysis where people look at all sorts of data related to people's food intake and their health outcomes, showing that an increase in these kind of foods is associated with poor health. Our knowledge is just continuing to build.

I feel like my grandmother always told me you shouldn't eat too much cake, right? And that lots of these things you're describing have lots of sugar and fat and things in them. So is it just that they're treats and people eating too many treats?

I think it's important to understand what it is about these foods that are harmful for our health. And it isn't just like you say that they have unhealthy nutrients. So yes, we know that older processed foods tend to have more sugar, more saturated fat and more salt, which we know are bad for health. They also tend to have less of healthy nutrients. They tend to be very low in fiber. They tend to be low in healthy proteins and healthy fats. They also tend to have lots of things put into them that we don't really yet know how they impact our health.

So they have lots of additives, emulsifiers, sweeteners that we're starting to understand might negatively impact our health, particularly through the gut microbiome. And you know, there's new studies again coming out every week looking at the health effects of these different additives.

But another area that we know is really important in relation to these old process foods is the texture and the structure of food. So that's quite different than just what's actually in the food, but also it's about the format of the food. And so many of the processes that are used industrially, that not the kind of process we use at home, change that food matrix that I often talk about on our podcast, Jonathan.

So they're changing the structure of the food by grinding it or using processes like extrusion, et cetera. And it changes the texture from the original structure of the food and changes it to quite a soft texture. And what that does, it causes us often to overeat the food. We eat a softer food and an older processed food 50% more quickly than an unprocessed equivalent. 50% more quickly. Yeah. 50% more quickly. And what we know is the faster you eat your food,

the more you eat. So every time a 20% increase in the speed in which you eat your food results in a 15% increase in the amount of calories you eat. And that's interesting because this whole idea of speed of eating and the fact that these companies make feelings baby food essentially, that's the other way to think about these foods. And some people in the US and UK are, if they're not breastfed, they're given ultra-processed baby food all their lives.

It's just pap. And that doesn't allow the brain to have time to send the messages and the gut to work to say I'm full. So it's bypassing the normal ways of doing this. There are very few randomized controlled studies of giving people ultra-processed food versus the exact equivalent.

There was one we talked about a lot, the Kevin Hall study, which is now several years old. In September, there was a Japanese study from Tokyo, where they really stayed nine Japanese subjects really closely for a week. Game two weeks washout, then gave them another week, alternating between ultra-processed and real food. What they found was that

Their chewing times were totally different. They actually sort of videoed them, seeing how long they were actually chewing for. And it was exactly, as you said, massively different between them. So they really didn't chew, and they were overeating

calorie-wise by about 800 calories, although they were starting the same. So it was even more extreme than in the American study. And this is really nice confirmation that this is a key mechanism. The fact that the food just doesn't have any real texture, doesn't then trigger those evolutionary ideas of what real food should do to the brain and doesn't fill you up.

And again, coming back to this idea we probably touch on later about how these appetite signals and when your fullness signals are perhaps the key to a lot of our current problems.

So I think that's really interesting Tim and I think this is what we're going to see a lot about next year in the world of science and nutrition about texture and the importance of texture and the importance of manipulating texture in order to actually prevent over consumption. And one of my colleagues often uses the expression of put the crunch back into your lunch.

So having food that has a hard texture, the original texture from which the food comes from I think is a really key thing for people to think about in 2025 as well. Mastication is the word for 2025. Chewing for those who aren't scientists. Chew your food lots, but buy food that needs chewing.

And I was going to say, Tim, are there any other strategies for avoiding the worst UPS? If you've been listening to this and say, I'd really like to reduce it, but I didn't even realize that I was eating any before now.

Yeah, most things in a packet that have a health claim on it are ultra-processed foods. So that's one of the biggest warnings is if it says it's got added vitamins and it's low in fat, high in protein, chances are that that's gonna be an ultra-processed food. So don't eat it. Well, be wary of it. If you reduce your ultra-processed food intake just by half, which is still above Mediterranean levels,

then you will reduce your mortality by about 12 and a half percent. I don't think it's easy to stop it completely, but just to get it down to the levels of healthier countries in Europe should be everyone's aim. And that means cutting it four times less than we're currently eating. And just start looking at all your food. See, is this likely to be ultra processed? Look in your fridge, the real food doesn't come with a health claim or a label, interestingly.

And Jonathan, I think it's an important to say people don't need to totally eliminate this heavily processed food. It's very difficult in our current food landscape. But like Tim said, making even a small reduction is going to have a significant impact. Exactly. And you may very rapidly see a change in your mood and energy. And that would be the first thing you see once you cut down these foods. Brilliant. Well, I think it's time for tip number two. Give yourself an eating window. Sarah, what's an eating window?

Well, it's not the window that I glare out of in the morning, so I wave my kids off to school. So when we talk about an eating window, we're talking about a period in time in which we're eating food, i.e. when we have our first meal of the day to when we have our last meal of the day. So in the US, for example, the average eating window is around 16 hours.

So that means if you're having your breakfast at seven in the morning, you're having your last meal of the day or last eating events as we call it, 11 in the evening. And we know that's not great for us. And there is more and more evidence coming out every year, particularly the last year, more and more evidence to show that if you can eat within a smaller eating window, it benefits your health.

Now, up until last year, most of the evidence was showing that, you know, from tightly controlled metabolic kind of clinic studies where people were eating within a really small window of like six hours, they were showing this benefit to your health, for example, levels of inflammation, blood pressure, lowering cholesterol, improving insulin sensitivity, reducing weight, reducing your risk of chronic diseases.

But that's actually really hard to do. So I don't know about YouTube, but I certainly could not start eating at 10 and then finish eating at 4, because I'd be hungry, but more importantly, it'd be really unsociable and I'd be really miserable in the evenings. But what's really interesting is over the last year, there's more research emerging, including our own research from our big intermittent fasting study in 120,000 people.

And this research is emerging showing as you don't need to limit it down to a really tiny eating window, just reducing down to a 10 hour eating window can significantly benefit your health. It can improve your energy levels, it can improve your mood. Really interestingly, it can improve your hunger as in you feel less hungry by limiting to a 10 hour eating window.

But it can also help you reduce weight. Now, a lot of this weight reduction is because unintentionally, without even thinking about it, you reduce your calorie intake because you're not mindlessly just eating. Many of us pick on food late in the evening out of habit and boredom rather than out of need. And so the sum of the evidence shows that on average, people reduce their energy intake. If they practice time restricted eating, even if it's not extreme,

small eating windows by about 300 calories. So it's a good way to control your weight. It's a good way also to reduce your risk of many chronic diseases. Can I mention the gut microbes? It does help them as well. Yes, you can. It's Christmas after all, Tim.

Yes, so gut microbes get a real kick out of having a rest overnight and they need time to recover and repair. So when you're not eating, a different team comes out. It's like an offense defense team and a new team comes out and they're the ones that

will tidy up your gut lining. They actually nibble away at the little bits of sugar on your mucous lining of your gut. And that improves the barrier, keeping your microbes from your blood, and your immune system is in tip-top shape. So that's another really important reason that we've evolved, if you think about our ancestors, we weren't eating all the time.

We never really yet before 10 or 11 o'clock in the morning. And we stopped eating when the fire went out, you know, about nine p.m. probably. So that's really important that that part of our immune system is also dependent on it. So lots of little things depend on having a decent eating with you and stopping this particularly late night snacking, which I think you've pointed out is really the most dangerous part of this.

Yeah, because it's mainly people eating out of habit, eating out boredom, not being mindful about, am I hungry? And do I need to be eating now? And Jonathan, just like we need to sleep, our body, our metabolism, our gut, all the cells in our body that are working away at metabolising our food, they need to sleep overnight.

So not only do the cleaners need to come in like Tim said in our gut and clean up, we also need to give all of the different cells involved in the process of metabolizing our food arrest. And I think that that's really important. And that the message just to reiterate isn't that you need to do it to extreme, just reducing to a 10-hour eating window. So that's like having a breakfast, say at 9, having a last meal at 7,

Is sufficient to firstly make you feel better and we show this my own very big if study. So you've got better energy better mood better but also to improve your overall i think even even twelve hour window can help people and i think what are big zoe studies showed is that actually some people find it really easy yeah.

and some people like you two found it harder than me, right? So I think we've got to realize there is this personalization element to it. People do differ. If you can't manage 10 hours, if you're doing 12 hours, all the evidence suggests that is of some benefit as well. So don't beat yourself up if you can't be, you know, as

super on the ball or some of these influencers and whatever, trying to make us do extreme things. You need to be perfect at it. So if you manage it like five days a week, but two days a week, you're not managing your window. Does that mean you've ruined everything and you should just give it all up?

No, I think what I do is I'm not that strict. And so if there's a social occasion, it's much more important that you can have the odd laps, but you don't give up the whole plan so that you would carry on therefore this idea for life, knowing that you're entitled for a couple of days, you're on your vacation, then it, you know, different rules can apply. Because the important thing is that you keep this going for years, and it's not just a fad that you're just doing for the beginning of January.

Yeah, I think that as well, there's some really interesting new research actually, Jonathan, that's come out about the consistency of eating. And this is fascinating. This is something quite novel. And this is really relevant to intermittent fastings. There's two different types of intermittent fasting. There's the time-restricted eating type that we're talking about where you eat within a particular window.

And then there's the intermittent fasting where you might go on a diet such as the 5-2 diet where for 5 days you have a really restricted calorie intake and then for 2 days you have an unrestricted calorie intake. What we're now starting to understand is that it's really important to be consistent in how you eat.

And so that's why something like time restricted eating where you're eating consistently within a acceptable window for how you live your life is better for you than something like the other type of intermittent fasting where you're going from one extreme to the other. Our bodies are primed to be able to predict

a typical pattern for you. So if, like me, I'm a snacker, I graze throughout the day, I try and have a 12-hour window, because that's just what works for me. That's fine. Yet for Tim, who has a smaller eating window, longer fast period, and he doesn't tend to graze, he wouldn't respond very well to then flipping to my dikes. His body isn't primed to do that.

And it's similar as well to sleep, you know, so this idea of consistency in all these lifestyle habits makes sense for our bodies. And I feel like this time last year you were describing this as very contentious. And it feels as though you're sounding sort of more convinced than a year ago.

Yeah, there's been more and more studies coming out this year showing that there's benefits, even for skeptical of me, Jonathan, that I think there's enough evidence that I certainly will be looking to try and reduce my eating window to about 10 hours. Oh, that's a big, that's a big thing from you, Sarah. We had a question from a listener. There was apparently an American Heart Association article, which was suggesting that there were negative impacts of reducing your eating window. Do you have a view on that?

That was interesting because that was actually an abstract that was presented at a conference. So this is before it's even been published as a full paper. Yeah. So most people thought that was complete rubbish. It was called observation epidemiology, which is the sort of lowest grade of evidence. And the newspapers never say, well, actually, there's 20 other studies showing the opposite. They just present that one. So I think it hasn't yet appeared in any paper. So we can judge it. But most of

The epidemiologists are not worried that this is going to change this trend. So tell them not to worry. Hi, I have a small favor to ask. We want this podcast to reach as many people as possible as we continue our mission to improve the health of millions. And watching this show grow is what motivates the whole team at Zoey to keep up the really hard work of creating new episodes each week.

So right now, if you could share a link to the show with one friend who would benefit from today's information, it would mean a great deal to me. Thank you. Tip number three, calorie counting is dead, but GLP1 still requires healthy food choices. Tim.

So for those people that haven't heard it before, calorie counting has been shown to be a complete waste of time and not effective for the vast majority of people who practiced it. You might be listening to this and say, I'm mad because you know people that have gone on calorie restricted diets and lost weight. Absolutely. Most people will lose weight initially when they go on a calorie restricted diet, but the body has ways of

altering not only our metabolism, so we burn this energy, so we compensate, so you need to keep reducing even more of your intake to stay the same, but also it ramps up our appetite signals in the brain so that it gets increasingly difficult to keep losing weight, and then you get to a point where your appetite is ramped up and you get hungry and hungry and metabolism is really low, so it's hard to burn off the reduced calories you're having, and so

virtually everybody returns to where they started or goes above it. So really, this over exaggeration of what, you know, the calorie is key. And it's just all about choosing low calorie foods. And, you know, you'll lose weight and keep it off, complete nonsense. And it's changed our concept. And the thing that we haven't focused on was the brain. We'd focused on metabolism and calories. And

What's really totally changed this whole field is these new drugs, these GLP1 agonist drugs, the azempic type drugs, which are focused purely on receptors in the brain, the difference between hunger and your appetite levels. So knowing when you're full, we call these satiety centers.

And this is a tiny little bit of the brain that is very sensitive to these chemicals that are always there regulating when you feel full, normally 20 minutes after a meal, you feel full, and people vary in this. So what these studies have shown, which have revolutionized the weight loss business, so that all these companies that we're doing calorie restricted diets and special packs and

et cetera, et cetera. I've gone out of business or completely switched to just giving these drugs, which are given by injection, which basically stimulate this gut hormone, which affects the brain. And that basically makes you fuller, quicker. So it's changing that threshold and tiny amounts of this drug have massive effects on your appetite. And that's why

These drugs have revolutionized weight maintenance, weight control, diabetes, and all those other diseases with relatively small amounts of side effects. And nothing has ever come close to this apart from surgery called so-called bariatric surgery. And this has really changed our whole view of how important all these different things were on weight gain.

to focus it just on this bit about appetite, which is so crucial. And one in six Americans have now apparently tried one of these types of drugs. And we don't have data in the UK. Nobody's logging it. Very few people have got it on the NHS in the UK.

there's pretty much open access privately for it, but no one's recording it. It's really important, I think, that people understand the mechanisms because it tells us so much about food and normal food and how we specify mechanisms that make us fill us up and switch off that appetite center. These drugs are doing it for us and liberating

potentially millions of people from this slavery to having really strong appetite hunger signals all the time that's been fueled by the food industry, giving them foods that tickle their brain, tickle these appetite centers all the time making it worse. Tim, could you explain what's different today versus 50 years ago?

The difference today is between a quarter and a third of the population in the United States and the UK are living with obesity. And these rates have basically tripled.

in the last few decades. And also our children are also living with obesity. And we're just surrounded by this problem, which is causing mental health problems, cancer problems, heart disease problems, diabetes problems, and causing many people not to be able to work. So a huge financial cost

We think running even in just in the UK, estimates are over 200 billion pounds a year, more than the whole budget of the NHS. And that's Jonathan, because we have not evolved to live in the food landscape that we live in. We don't walk often to work. Most people don't walk to work like we did 50, 60 years ago. And these are foods designed by brilliant chemists.

to have this bliss point in our brain where this exact amounts of sugar, fats and salt to titillate our receptors in the brain to bypass these normal fullness signals, satiety signals. So in a way, this drug is counteracting that. So people go on the drug very rapidly, lose their drive for these ultra-processed foods.

They don't want to snack anymore and they are able for the first time in their lives to lose weight regularly. And I think the risks of taking it.

It's not without risks, but it's also a huge opportunity for many people to rethink their diets. Are you basically saying that everybody should end up taking this GLP one because you're talking about calorie counting is dead? No, because

All the evidence suggests that if you are living with obesity, so you have a BMI of over 30 or you have at least mild diabetes, then the benefit far outweighs the risks of the drug for you. And there are risks of it. One in five people have nausea and vomiting, one in a thousand will get pancreatitis.

there are some potential effects on the brain long-term because you remove some of the addictive person. You might even change your personality slightly, but you are going to double your risk of living longer. You're going to have your risk of cancer. You're getting massive reductions in things like dementia, inflammation is reduced. We're just discovering all these things that can benefit people who are overweight. But if you're just slightly overweight, it looks like the risks

at the moment outweighing the benefits. So I don't think people should be using it recreationally or playing with it just for fun because it is a strong medication, a strong pharmaceutical. But who knows in the future as these drugs progress and get safer? And Tim, the second half of your tip you said was GLP1 still requires healthy food choices? Absolutely.

At the moment, no one's giving advice to people on these drugs about what to eat. They just said, you take care of it yourself. But once you take away that amazing hunger drive, it's a huge opportunity for people to start eating better, reduce ultra processed foods to a minimum.

start having their less food but healthier food so they do get the nutrients back and the many cases of people taking these drugs getting nutritional deficiencies because they're just not interested in the food, they're having less of it so therefore they're not getting the right vitamins etc. So I think this is a perfect opportunity for people

when in a way the pressure's off is just to relearn how to eat real food, have a mainly plant-based diet, switch from unhealthy processed meats onto plant-based programs and start feeding their gut microbiome. This could help them reduce side effects. It could help them get onto lower doses and I think make them healthy in many other ways, particularly for their mental health. So I think there's a huge opportunity here that hasn't been grasped

And so rather than demonizing these medications, we should be pragmatic and say, well, they're here to stay. Let's try and make people taking them healthier and more better educated about what they can do themselves.

I think, Jonathan, it's important to think you can't out inject a bad diet and it's really important when you're reducing your food intake to make sure that the food that you're having is supplying you with adequate nutrients, adequate amounts of your multivitamins, your minerals.

your fiber, for example. And I think lots of people just assume, oh, it's all about stopping eating the bad food. No, it's that window of opportunity to make sure you're eating the right food and getting enough of the right food and enough of the right nutrients. So it's a really important time, actually, to focus on diet, even if you are taking the GLP agonist.

So if you add healthier food choices on top of these GLP ones, you could actually have many more healthy years in the way you were talking about at the beginning, Sarah. Yeah, absolutely. So what the GLP one agonist will do, they'll curb your appetite, like Tim said, so you'll reduce your energy intake, you will therefore reduce your your body weight.

But we need food and nutrients, not just for energy and calories. We all know we need the food and we need the nutrients, all of the wonderful health benefits they give us for the polyphenols, for the fiber feeding Tim's lovely bugs that he hasn't jumped in to talk about yet.

the healthy fats and healthy oils for cardiovascular health, the vitamins, the multivitamins, the minerals, et cetera, that are so important. So it's so important that we still eat a healthy diet regardless of whether we're on our GLP agonist. And that isn't being talked about enough for people who are being put on these drugs. Wonderful. Thank you, Sarah. I think that's very clear. I'd like to move to tip four, which is mindful drinking, Sarah.

So I think drinking is a fascinating area, Jonathan, and I don't think it's something we've even talked about on the ZOE podcast yet. And the reason it's fascinating is because people I don't think realise how much drinks contribute towards our calorie intake. And to be clear, we're not just talking about drinking alcohol, Sarah.

Absolutely not. We're talking about being mindful of all of the drinks that we consume. In the US, drinks account for 18% of our energy intake, 18% of our calories. 18% that's a lot. Coming just from drinks. And so what I think is good about that is that actually that is a really simple dietary strategy that we can modify to improve our health.

At the moment, we know in the US, for example, and it's quite similar in the UK, that 54% of our added sugar in our diet, which we know we're eating far too much of it, is coming from drinks. So if we can just change the drinks that we're having, we can significantly reduce the added sugar that we know is a real problem for us at the moment in terms of we're eating far too much of it.

I feel like a lot of people were saying, well, you know, I gave up, you know, full calorie Coca-Cola like a long time ago and now I've swapped and I go to Starbucks and I get this big coffee. So this doesn't really apply to me, does it?

So it depends on the type of coffee and what else is in the coffee. So a book standard coffee would be like an Americano-style coffee. So just a very simple coffee that's not got all of these extra sugars and fats and creams in it. And what the evidence again consistently shows, and again, there's more and more evidence coming out in this, is that three to four coffees a day can significantly reduce your risk of all cause mortality. So as you like to say, death.

Aboriginal, risk of cardiovascular disease, some cancers, et cetera, by around 18 to 20%. And we see similar data for teas. It's stronger for green tea, but we see for black tea as well that there's a significant improvement in many health outcomes and also in all cause mortality or death.

And what about if I am, in fact, going to Starbucks? And I mentioned them, but it could be any coffee chain. And I'm having their standard super latte, which I notice on the thing actually has like 500 calories in it. So if I have three of those a day, do I reduce my risk of death by 18%?

So I don't think there's been any studies actually looking at that versus the standard coffee without all of the added cream sugar calories. But based on my years of knowledge, research and I would say no.

And Tim, the Zoe team has done some really exciting research about coffee. What did you find? Well, we published this amazing paper showing that you can tell if someone's a coffee drink or not, just from their gut microbes. And there's this one microbe that

is so fussy it only eats coffee and it's called loss on a bacta. So you don't drink coffee but it's waiting there in tiny amounts just for you to have that one cup of coffee then it's going to go in explode. It's incredibly exciting and this is the first time anyone's really linked a single microbe to a single food type.

And Jonathan, this shows how the microbiome is one of the ways in which coffee and as well tea is so healthy for us because it's feeding our microbes. In case of coffee, this particular one loves it.

And it also tells us every single different food you eat is gonna have an effect on each of these individual microbes. So it starts to imagine this whole world in there that is just being fueled by the diversity that you feed it. And also the idea that people still think milk is a health drink and increasing the epidemiology is showing that's not the case. And it doesn't really have those benefits that have been promoted for so long. So keep it to an absolute minimum, I think is the key.

And if I swap it for oat milk, then suddenly it should, is that a health drink? All the evidence suggests that it's not a healthy swap. It may be better for the planet slightly, but in terms of sugar spikes, we're showing with our Zoe studies that oat milk will give you a sugar spike does for me compared to normal milk. So if you're sugar sensitive, then it's not a good swap.

But Jonathan, the amount of milk that most people add to a tea or coffee that they make at home is quite small. It's not going to be a problem at all. So this is when I'm in the store. This is when you're in those coffee shops that are all singing and dancing, what they add in. That it's the equivalent of eating a doughnut.

Yeah, so there's a whole range increasingly of these fermented drinks that you can get. So people know Kombucha in the US. It comes in alcoholic and non-alcoholic forms, hard and soft Kombucha's. The soft Kombucha's the ones we're talking about here.

lots of evidence. They are good for your gut microbes. Just check those and too much sugar in them. Water kefir is another new category called tibicos, some places. They're less sour than kombucha and worth a try. The other ones is called milk kefir. Tim, why are you saying any of these drinks are things people should be adding to their diet in 2025?

because they're alternatives to unhealthy drinks, so it's making intelligent mindful swap, so they're much more natural choices, and they also tend to be good for your gut microbes. There are fermented foods, and you should be trying to get at least two or three of them fermented foods into your diet every day for your gut microbes, so try them.

And this is one of the reasons that coffee and tea are so good for us is because we know they contain certain chemicals called polyphenols that we know are microbes love feeding on that give us many of these benefits. So if I could summarize back, I'm going to do a Jonathan here and summarize back.

I think what we need to be really mindful about when we're choosing our drinks is all of the hidden sugars and fats that can be in many drinks. We need to be mindful of artificial sweetness, as there's more and more evidence emerging to show that actually they have a negative impact on our health, probably mediated in part through the microbiome. And we need to see drinks as a great opportunity to actually add benefits to our diet by drinking on either water,

Obviously, coffee, tea and also some of these fermented drinks that Tim's mentioned, such as computer and caffeine. Amazing. So, Tim, tip five, eat more plants and you can still eat meat.

And Zoe, we've been promoting eating more plants for your general health, and we're trying to get people to eat 30 different plants a week. And this is diverse plants, and we're talking about fruits, vegetables, but remembering a plant is also a nut, it's a seed, it's an herb, it's a spice.

And it's not that hard when you start thinking about it. And many people think this is a choice. I've got to give up meat if I do that. And this puts people off because meat eating has been shown in epidemiological studies. If you eat too much meat, it is associated with extra heart disease and extra cancers.

if you eat processed meats, even in small amounts have been associated with cancers and heart disease. But if you eat small amounts of meat, there's no evidence of good quality meat that isn't highly processed. There's no evidence it's harmful. So there is perhaps a middle ground here for people who want to be healthier in 2025. They don't want to give up meat. They can just

reduce the amount they're having, which will have massive benefits for the planet and also their health, because it allows them to put more plants on their plate. Because in nutrition, we often get obsessed about, is this good or is this bad? The question you should be asking is instead of what?

What else can you put on your plate and this is again coming back to this mindful eating, looking at a whole plate of food and saying, how does this balance up? If they've got a huge stake, there's no room for your plate. So I would like people to reduce them out of meat and we've just

got a study, just come out with our colleagues in Trento on 23,000 people showing that dividing people into vegetarian, vegan and omnivore states, omnivore is people who eat meat and everything.

And the differences between them are quite marked. So in general, the vegans have the healthier looking gut microbes, better ratios of good to bad microbes, but they don't have the best diversity. Actually, the ones of the most diversity are meat eaters. Because if you have meat and dairy, you're getting different microbes eating those. So it's a complex picture, much more complex than we thought.

But I think the lesson here is that if you can eat a small amount of meat and lots of plants, you're going to get the best possible picture in terms of not only a good diversity of microbes across the board, but you'll get a good ratio of the good guys to the bad guys.

Do you know someone who's gold this year is to eat healthier in 2025? Do they want to feel better and improve their long-term health? If so, why not share this episode with them right now? Given the most up-to-date information from two of the world's leading nutrition scientists, I'm sure they'll thank you. And Tim, for people who've never heard this idea that you should eat 30 plants a week, what's the science behind that? Why should they be doing that?

The 30 plants a week concept came from research. We did with the British gut combined with the American gut study, which was a sort of charitable research project about seven or so years ago, where we saw asked people

how many different plants they eat every week and compared that to their gut health. And it turned out the sweet spot was around 30 plants. Now we're still working at Zoe to try and get

even better data on this. But at the moment, that seems to be the consensus from the field that this is a good target to aim for. Why do plants matter for your gut health? Plants are the main source of food for your gut microbes. And the more different sources of food, there are the more different microbes you get, the more different chemicals you produce, the healthier

your gut is your gut community is and your rest of your body. So it gives you the best possible pharmacy in your gut that can supply the rest to your body.

And plants contain the most precious of all nutrients that we think of as nutrition scientists, fiber. And there's so many different types of fiber. When we think about fiber, we normally just think, oh, it's one nutrient. But actually, fibers are really, really diverse and they feed lots of different microbes and they have lots of different health effects in our body. And so having that diversity of plants enables not just our microbes, but all the other cells in our body that need fiber.

to have a diversity of different types of fiber to really thrive. So we've changed from five a day, which was the standard across the world concept that it didn't really matter what plants you had. As long as you were getting some fiber in, it could be the same fiber every day, it didn't matter. We've really switched in the last few years to this idea of diverse fibers from diverse plants is the real healthy way to go.

So Tim and Sarah, that's a very powerful explanation for why we need to be eating a lot more plants and like these 30 plants. You said in this tip, however, you can still eat meat. So do I need to give up meat in order to get health or I have to eat meat? What's the situation?

No, I think you have the choice now. We've seen very clearly that if you're a vegan or a vegetarian, you can have a perfectly healthy diet and it has no health consequences. But at the same time, we've seen that if you

someone who's really mindful about what you're eating, you can reduce your meat considerably and still be healthy and still enjoy good cuts of meat. And this could be several times a week, having meat can still be compatible with a very healthy lifestyle and nutrition. And anyway, I still eat meat once or twice a month.

and I have healthy gut microbiome and many other people are in this situation. So the idea that we can be still omnivores, which is how a lot of people think we evolved, but just by changing the proportions we're eating, we can get the maximum health benefit from our food. But if I'm eating me three times a day,

If you're eating meat three times a day, I would say that's not good and that you're not leaving enough space on your plate for plants. So again, it's what's that meat replacing in your diet as well as are you having too much excess meat?

I think, Jonathan, there's been a real hyper focus on plant-based approaches on cutting meat out of your diet. I think that it's going back to a little bit of balance here that, yes, we need to focus on getting plenty of plants, plenty of different types of plants, plenty of different types of fibers, therefore, on our plate.

But actually a little bit of meat here and there is certainly not going to be bad for us, putting aside animal welfare and environmental considerations, and that it can be actually a very healthy part of the diet. But it's about balance and not having meat to excess. One thing that is really clear in relation to meat is the processed red meat, undoubtedly, isn't healthy for us. So by this I mean the salami is the hands, for example.

the ready meals, the mince meats in packaged foods, all these ones which are sort of unnecessary. And once you learn how to cook the alternatives, you don't even notice you've given them up. Okay. Tip six, stop worrying about getting enough protein.

Currently, there's huge marketing saying that we're deficient in protein and that we can't be healthy without extra protein, snack bars, protein added to nearly all kinds of ultra process foods and that we're a protein crisis and nothing could be further from the truth.

The average American is being told they need from all our scientific studies about 50 grams a day, if they weigh about 130 pounds, about 60 kilos, and they're eating double that.

We're similar in the UK, eating about double the recommended levels of protein already. So it's a complete myth that there's a massive gap between supply and demand and that we need to change our diets. For this, this is all driven by the big food companies, by people making money out of this, wherein in fact we're in a fiber deficiency.

where 95% of us aren't getting enough fiber and the average American is only eating enough fiber that we recommend for a four-year-old. And so this is this real imbalance in this advice that's totally been driven by the industry. So I think there are some caveats and people should be aware of where protein

There might be some deficiencies, but just put in that context that nine out of 10 people don't have to worry at all. The people that do have to worry are if you're sick and not eating, or there's some reason that you're not getting normal food in your diet and you're elderly or frail, then you need to focus, making sure you're on protein-rich foods. If you're like a semi-professional bodybuilder and you're

That's all you're doing, or professional athletes possibly, or you're someone who's perhaps a vegan on and you're trying to lose weight and you're really reducing your calories. I think the key message here is proteins not our problem, fiber is our problem, and you can get all the good proteins you need from plants. If you're mindful about how you're eating and you have a diversity of plants, they will give you the right balance.

people who are, say, cutting back on their meat and want to maintain their protein, really increase the amount of beans and legumes, which contain fantastic amounts of protein. And people can realize that normal food contains protein, things like pasta, whole grains, you know, bulga wheats, really high protein levels in many foods. So if you're generally having plenty of food, it's really hard to avoid protein.

And it's also very hard to get your protein levels really high. And I think Jonathan to add to that is I don't think for the majority of us we need to ever consider having protein shakes, protein powders, protein bars. Our final tip, tip number seven, snack smarter.

Jonathan, I love a snack. So I think snacking is an incredible opportunity for us to improve the healthfulness of the diet. And the reason for this is because the reality is 95% of our snack, 25%. So that's a quarter of our energy in the UK and the US comes from snacks. But what we know is that actually a huge amount of us are having really healthy main meals, but then having very poor quality snacks.

And so what that means is we're almost undoing all the great stuff that we're doing with our main meals by having poor quality snacks. And we've done some great research, Zoe, showing that people who snack on healthy snacks, so by this I mean nuts, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, that sort of stuff, that's associated with really favorable health outcomes. It's associated with a favorable gut microbiome composition.

It's associated with lower blood pressure, lower cardiovascular disease risk, lower blood cholesterol, better insulin sensitivity. And so it's a really simple single dietary strategy to improve our health. And one of the reasons I think as well it's really great, just like drinks, it's under our own self-control. So what we typically have for lunch or for dinner might be dictated by where we're working that day or if you've got kids, what your fuzzy kids might choose to eat for dinner.

But snacks tend to be under our own control. And I've conducted a randomized control trial where I had people either eat the UK, US typical snacks or eat nuts, which I consider to be a healthy snack. And what we found was that in a little six weeks, there was such a big improvement in health outcomes that actually equated to a predicted 30% reduction in cardiovascular disease. Wow.

And so that's a real motivator just for changing your snacks. And Sarah, I feel like I was often told when I was growing up that just snacks are bad and snacking is bad and the healthiest thing would be to eat three proper meals and nothing in between.

So I think what's key here is thinking about the timing of the snacking rather than the frequency of how often you're eating. We are a nation of snackers in the UK. We're a nation of snackers in the US. On average, in the UK and the US, we have what we call six eating events. So we have typically breakfast, lunch and dinner, which is three eating events. And then we typically have two to three snacks a day. Now, if you're not a snacker, I wouldn't suggest you go and start snacking.

But if you are a snacker, and that's how you like to eat, our research shows that the snacking itself isn't the problem. It's what you're snacking on, so changing from unhealthy snacks to healthy snacks is important. But also the timing of snacking is really important. We see that in the UK and the US, 30% of people are snacking after 9 o'clock at night.

And what we see is that if you're snacking late in the evening, even if it is healthy snacks, that is associated with unfavorable health outcomes. So the key here is to switch unhealthy snacks to healthy snacks and to stop snacking earlier in the evening. And the other thing, Jonathan, that we know is that 20% of people say they snack out of boredom or habit. So the other thing I would say is to be a little bit mindful when you're going to have a snack, are you actually hungry?

or are you just snacking because it's the habit of going to that cupboard because you've got a minute between your meetings for example. So this is back once again to sort of this mindful eating being aware about what you're eating and why because sometimes you're just doing it. I do this. You just don't even really realize you're eating because you're just like watching TV and suddenly it's all just disappeared.

Yeah, and so there's little strategies you can do. Don't have by your desk or in front of the TV. Don't have the snacks just sitting there. Make it something that is like a conscious effort for you to go to the cupboard and actually select out that snack. And it links to what we were talking about earlier about the time windows and things. So in a way, you've got a bit of a snack curfew that just makes you think twice about grabbing those extra cookies.

So to snack smartly, I would avoid snacking after eight or nine in the evening. I would stick with your typical snacking pattern. So if you don't snack, don't start snacking. If you do snack, choose healthy snack alternatives.

Brilliant. Well, Tim and Sarah, thank you for sharing those amazing expert tips as if that wasn't enough brilliant actionable advice. I think we have a bonus today for anyone who is willing to listen through to this point. We have seven healthy foods that our listeners can add to their plates this year.

I hope you've been thinking hard about this. Last night, Tim, can you share three foods you'd be adding to your plate this year? My three, which I think we're going to see an explosion of in this year, are mushrooms, which are an incredible food and have all kinds of links with

helping people fight cancer and things. I'm going for Kimchi, which is Korean sauerkraut, which you can mix in with all your foods. It's fantastic fermented food. And rye bread, which is pro the healthiest bread you can have and suits me and my particular blood sugar profiles. And so Sarah, what are your three?

So my first is not, they are a powerhouse of nutrition. They're packed full of heart healthy oils, loads of fiber, loads of polyphenols. They keep us full for long. They reduce our risk of so many different diseases. They're a great snack.

My second is extra virgin olive oil. I know this is one of Tim's favorite as well. It's a pet full of hot, healthy oils. It's a pet full of polyphenols. And there is just exploding evidence all the time about how healthy it is for us. And we are not scared of fat here as early. We love adding healthy fats to our food. The third thing is a little bit of what you enjoy.

And so that's up to the audience. And it's about the fact that there are so many healthy foods that can still be really, really pleasurable for us. So dark chocolate is a great example. If it's a good quality dark chocolate, it can actually be quite healthy for us and yummy.

Amazing. And the seventh that I would add is daily 30, which is Zoe's plant-based supplements. So I eat it every day. And my wife eats it. My mom now eats it. In fact, the whole extended family does. And the reason why I do it is firstly, like,

It tastes really nice that I know that I'm adding all of this additional plant diversity in my diet, which just gives me that confidence. I always have it with my breakfast. It's underway. But the other part is that I know that the two of you spent a really long time working on the science behind it and figuring out how to take all of the science from ourselves and others and wrap this up. And we've actually shown it works through a randomized clinical trial, which is really exciting.

Tim Serra, thank you so much for dragging yourself out of bed this morning and sharing with us how to eat in 2025. Just going to quickly summarize what we went through. So we had seven tips. The first is reduce ultra process food. And if you reduced it by 50%, you can actually reduce your risk of death by over 12%, which is amazing.

Give yourself an eating window, even 12 hours could actually improve your energy, your mood, your hunger. Calorie counting is dead, so don't set off right now and say I'm going to have this really restrictive number of calories for the rest of the month, because at the end of the month, you are going to be, as Tim described, hungry, miserable, and Jeff's starting to put all of this back on.

hangry, GLP1 still requires healthy food choices. So if that's something that you're on or that you may be going on to, like it's actually the perfect timing to make these changes in your health and actually they can really transform how you feel very rapidly and also improve how many healthy yes.

mindful drinking. So I was really shocked to hear that half of all the hidden added sugar in our diet is actually coming through our drinks and quite possibly hidden in the coffee that we were thinking is really good for us. On the other hand, three coffees a day could reduce your risk of death by up to 18%. So that's pretty amazing. Eat more plants and you can still eat meat. So 30 plants a week is the ideal target. That supports our gut microbiome.

Most of us probably should be eating less meat than we are because you need to do that in order to get the benefits of all of these plants. But you don't have to give up meat if it's something that you really like. Stop worrying about getting enough protein. Amazingly, the average American is getting double the recommended level of protein. So this idea that we're all in this massive protein shortage isn't true. It's been pushed on us by big food manufacturers to sell ultra-processed food. And that's the same, really very similar across the rest of the world.

And finally, snack smarter. And the good news, if you're a snacker like me or Sarah, you don't need to give up snacking. That's what the latest answer is. It's not that snacking is necessarily unhealthy, but you need to swap the unhealthy snack for a healthier snack.

But don't snack into the evening. And so the thing I'm most guilty of, which I think is going to have to be my new year's resolution, is to try and cut down the dark chocolate at 10pm in front of the TV, because none of you have ever managed to come up with a reason why that's good for me.

Sadly, that's true. We're working on it. What a lovely way to spend my New Year's Day with you two. Oh, well, it's a huge pleasure to spend New Year's Day with both of you as it is a huge pleasure to spend many years now working with you. And I'm incredibly excited to see where the science goes this year and what we will be sharing both on this podcast through the rest of the year. And I have no doubt that there will be, you know, this time, next year, a whole bunch of new discoveries that none of us are really aware of today.

Jonathan, I've just realised we've been working together now at Zoey, the three of us for seven years. So that is one top tip for every year we've been together. Beautiful. And you're not totally sick of me yet. I feel lucky. Go and enjoy the rest of New Year's Day. And I hope you found that useful. Thank you, Tim and Sarah. Thank you guys. 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.

If 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 so is your daily companion to better health for life. So how does it work? Zoe membership starts without 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. We 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. Whereas a podcast listener, you'll get 10% off.

As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolf. Zoey Science and Nutrition is produced by Julie Panero, Sam Durham and Richard Willow. The Zoey Science and Nutrition podcast is not medical advice, and if you have any medical concerns, please consult your doctor. See you next time.