How to reduce your heart disease, dementia, and cancer risk with 12 everyday high-fibre foods with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Prof Sarah Berry

Could 12 everyday high-fiber foods really help lower your risk of heart disease, dementia and some cancers? 

The world is obsessed with protein, but fewer than 1 in 10 people eat enough fiber. But this year, fiber is making an unexpected comeback.

In this episode, legendary chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and ZOE’s Chief Scientist Professor Sarah Berry ask whether fiber is another food trend or a powerful part of our diet that we have overlooked.

Taking inspiration from Hugh’s new book High Fibre Heroes, they explore how fiber feeds your gut microbes, helps you feel full, and slows the release of sugar into your blood.

Are you buying more protein while overlooking the foods your body may need most? The answer could already be in your cupboard, freezer or fridge.

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Jonathan: Hugh, is cooking fiber-rich meals difficult and technical?

Hugh: No.

Jonathan: Sarah, can you get all the protein you need from plants?

Sarah: Yes.

Jonathan: Hugh, in the Elizabethan era, did women sometimes wear carrots in their hats?

Hugh: Yes.

Jonathan: One of my favourite things from the book. Sarah, I don't like kale. Do I need to eat it to be healthy?

Sarah: Oh, no, I don't like it either.

Hugh: But you should try my kale porridge.

Jonathan: Okay, and finally, Hugh, what's the most common myth about fibre that you come up against?

Hugh: I think the most common myth about fibre is that it's somehow boring or difficult or both, and it's absolutely neither. And we'll knock that myth on the head in the next hour or so.

Jonathan: I do think that the word fibre immediately feels really boring to me, and it's felt like for a long time protein has been this incredibly sexy nutrient that's been in the spotlight. But I have noticed that the public's attention definitely seems to be turning towards fibre over the last year. And so I think one of the questions, is this like yet another social media craze that benefits no one, that's driven by some people trying to sell some things and then we'll move on? I'm looking forward to understanding whether this is a long-term trend or yet another internet flash in the pan. But can I just start with the beginning? Like, what is fibre, and where does it come from?

Hugh: Well, from a chef's point of view, fibre is basically a really exciting and useful thing that's in almost all plants in one form or another. Just to pick up on the boring question, if we think about fibre in a reductive way, the fibre inside the plant, maybe we extract it or as bran or some sort of chicory reduction or something, and then we start using it as an ingredient additive, or we sell it in capsules. That's pretty boring. But when we talk about fibre in our kitchen and in our recipes, we should never forget the wrappers. The wrappers are plants. They're all the best ingredients you can have in your kitchen. They're full of flavour. They're full of goodness. You can eat a lot of them raw. They blend together to make incredible flavours. They stand out on their own. So it's the vegetables and plants, nuts and seeds, and whole grains that are the fibre packages that stop fibre being boring. If all you wanted was to get the fibre out of them and eat that, that would be pretty dull. We don't need to, and we definitely shouldn't. We should be embracing the wonderful myriad diverse packages of fibre which are plants.

Jonathan: And Sarah, why is fibre important for our health?

Sarah: So fibre's important because it impacts so many different mechanisms related to health. Most importantly, it impacts our gut microbiome, but it also impacts how we metabolise food, how full we feel, how quickly we absorb food, where we digest food. It impacts, therefore, so many different chronic diseases. And we know that if you have a higher intake of fibre, it reduces your risk of cardiovascular disease, of strokes, of heart attacks, of certain cancers. And we're now starting to understand there's even evidence emerging around many other diseases such as Alzheimer's, for example, and other cancers. And this is because partly the role it plays in terms of our gut microbiome. We know that what we call soluble or fermentable fibres, so these are fibres that pass through our gut, enter our large intestine, and then provide this wonderful food for our gut bugs. We know that these then can be eaten, in simple terms, by our microbes. They use them for wonderful fuel, so they're all happy having their party, which is great. We know we love at ZOE a healthy gut microbiome. But they also produce byproducts. These byproducts are called short-chain fatty acids, and these short-chain fatty acids have lots and lots of diverse roles in our body, from impacting inflammation, so for example, reducing inflammation, to impacting our hunger signals. We know that inflammation is at the heart of many chronic diseases, and so fibre plays a really important role in feeding the gut microbiome and creating all of these amazing chemicals. But it also does other things as well. So as well as the soluble fibre that reaches our gut and provides the food for our microbes, we also have insoluble fibre. And insoluble fibre is the kind of fibre that you might actually notice more when you're eating food.

Hugh: Yeah. When you chew celery or a cabbage leaf, you actually end up with a sort of wad of fibre, which may be your problem with kale.

Jonathan: I was literally thinking, "That is my problem with kale."

Hugh: But if you cook the kale right and make it nice and tender, maybe strip out the middle stalk, which of course you can then put in a beautiful ferment, 'cause it's a brilliant ingredient in a kimchi or a sauerkraut. That's where the microbes go to work outside of your tummy and get some of the work done before they go in. So, but that's such a brilliant summary from Sarah, touching on so many important roles that fibre has. I mean, a layman's description that I like to use is that fibre becomes almost like the soil in your gut microbe garden, and like a good soil or a good compost, it's great if it's been contributed to by many diverse types of plant offering up different types of fibre. And even the soluble fibres from different plants will be different from each other and the insoluble fibres. And they have other things with them which will add to the diversity of food on offer to the microbes. So if you want your gut microbiome garden to be blooming, fibre is the magic soil and the compost all rolled into one that will make it bloom.

Sarah: And I think as well as the role that it plays in the microbiome, which is really, really important, I think it's important to recognise the other roles that fibre plays. So we've got these two kinds of fibres, the soluble and insoluble, and they act in slightly different ways. Hence, like you said, it's so important to get a diversity because you want both mechanisms of action. But then once in your stomach, both the soluble and insoluble cause a bit of a swelling of the tummy. These stretch receptors in your tummy feed back to your brain, say, "Hey, you're full. You don't need to eat any more food," which for most of us is a good thing in the food environment we live in. Then when it enters the small intestine, which is where your stomach empties the food into, the soluble fibres particularly form a gel-like substance, and so it's quite thick. So what that does is it slows down the rate that your food is passing through your gastrointestinal tract, slows down the rate it's passing through your small intestine. Why is that important? Well, it's important for a number of reasons. It means firstly, assuming you're eating that fibre with other foods, which is how you should be eating it, so you're consuming it as part of a food that will have carbohydrates in, might have sugar in, so fruit, for example. It will delay the rate at which you're absorbing the sugar, so the glucose enters your bloodstream. So you'll get a lovely kind of blunted, natural, normal peak in blood glucose, blood sugar that your body handles then very well. The other thing that happens that I think is really exciting, you also absorb it slightly lower down your gastrointestinal tract. It's passing more slowly. It's not absorbed rapidly at the top, the other bits of the food, and what that means is you have more of these fullness receptors, so like GLP receptors. Most people have heard of GLP, you know, your kind of fullness hormone. And so it's therefore activating more of these receptors because the fibre's allowing it to be digested lower down your gastrointestinal tract. So again, it's feeding back saying, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're full." And then the magic happens as well in the large intestine, in the colon, like we've just discussed. So you have all of this wonderful soluble fibre that the gut microbes feed on—

Jonathan: I asked a question at the beginning about how many people are eating enough fibre, and you said less than one in 10. So how much fibre are we supposed to be aiming for each day?

Sarah: So in the UK, our guidelines are 30 grams of fibre a day. In the US, they give a recommendation based on how many calories you consume. So they say 14 grams per 1,000 calories. So that's anywhere between, let's say, 25 grams to kind of around 38, 40. That's what the current recommendations are. But there's so much emerging evidence now of these added benefits, particularly for our gut microbiome, that suggests that actually an ideal amount would be potentially to go to 40 or even to go to 50. The problem is, is fibre, like you said, is being considered boring, unsexy. There hasn't been loads of research on these different amounts. So we believe as nutrition scientists, that to go up to 40 would be a fantastic amount to achieve.

Hugh: I think it's very hard to overdo it with the fibre if your main source of fibre is natural whole foods. I think it's important to say that if you know you're at a pretty low fibre intake at the moment, you don't wanna go from zero to hero too rapidly because there are consequences for your tummy getting used to a high-fibre diet. So take it a little bit at a time. Don't go onto a massive fibre fest straight off the blocks. But if you do it gradually, you can build things up at a... You know, within a matter of a few weeks, you can get to that 30. And if you want to, you know, smash it and go up to 40. You start to just know when you're moving in the right direction. You feel the benefits. You see plates of food that just look right once you start to read fibre. What makes everything Sarah said so important about the slowing down and the sending the little microbe love letter to the brain. Thank you so much for this glorious fibre. You can stop eating now, and we're just gonna have a marvellous time looking after the fibre, looking after you. Leave it with us. That's a great message. It's such an important message in contrast to what's gonna be happening if you're eating a lot of very low fibre, highly processed foods, where very different events are gonna be going on in your microbiome and very different messages are gonna be sent to your brain, and they're gonna be messages like Have you just eaten something? I thought I tasted something, but now I'm not so sure 'cause I don't feel full. Well, if it slipped down easily, why not have another mouthful? Oh, go on. I'm not sure I'm there yet. That's the kind of messages we're getting when we eat a lot of junk food. So we overeat, we don't feel full, and we don't look after our microbes with that lovely garden of fibre.

Jonathan: Brilliant. I've just come back from a vacation in Scotland, which was brilliant. But I had the same experience that I often have when I'm travelling, you know, driving around, going to lots of places. You really have no idea what you're gonna get to eat until you sit down at the restaurant. And there were some cases where I was able to get lots of plants, and there are others where it's almost impossible to find it on the menu. And I definitely notice how I feel now when I've had a meal that sort of hasn't had any of these plants and any of this fibre in a way that I never would've been aware of how it made me feel 10 years ago. So it's something you can sort of learn to be aware of, but I think we're not generally brought up to be attuned to this.

Hugh: But it's a very self-reinforcing thing if you make a few changes in your shopping and cooking and you're feeling the benefits within weeks, if not days. That's fantastically reinforcing, and that's what I think helps people. But also the idea that it has to be all very virtuous and sort of bland or austere, completely wrong. I mean, high-fibre meals, you know, they can be spicy, they can have... They can be saucy, they can be full of delicious things that make them exciting and fun to eat. It's not about suddenly going on this hair shirt diet of eating, you know, boiled cabbage and raw carrots.

Jonathan: Totally agree. And in fact, the best meals that I had were high in fibre and delicious and had all sorts of other things as well. Hugh, before we go on, could you put this, like, 30 grams a day into context? Like, I have no idea what a gram is. Like, what does that look like on a plate?

Hugh: Well, if you've got a plate in front of you, like a nice beany chilli, whether it's got meat in it or not. If it's got some beans, carrots, onions, and you have a reasonably generous portion, maybe with a small portion of brown rice rather than a big portion of white rice, you're probably close to a third of the way there. You're probably eight, nine, or if you had a generous helping, close to 10 grams of fibre on that plate, particularly if you've gone for the whole grain rice. Maybe the quick breakfast of whole grain toast with a little bit of nut butter on it as you fly out the door, probably again, six, seven grams of fibre. Might get something similar from a bowl of muesli or granola. So if you're making these whole natural food choices quite regularly, and some of them are built into your routine, and then whenever you cook, you've always got two or three veg and maybe some pulses going into, even if you're eating meat or fish or whatever, you're back on track. The issue is that so many of us are dependent on meals that we don't make ourselves. They're made for us by manufacturers who want cheap ingredients, want malleable ingredients, so therefore they're using refined white flours, be they from wheat or maize or rice, and spinning them into all sorts of combinations that they're very good at pushing our buttons and getting our taste buds going. Let's not pretend that the problem with ultra-processed food is any more than it needs to be with high-fibre food. It's not that it's bland and boring, it's that it's very easy to eat. It's probably got something crispy and spicy on the outside and creamy and gooey or easy to swallow in the middle, and it presses a lot of buttons. But nutritively, it is very, very lacking in the stuff that we need. Not just fibre, but serious nutrients.

Jonathan: The team said to me that an apple has about four and a half grams. Is that right, Sarah?

Sarah: Yeah, around that.

Jonathan: So does that mean that, you know, I could eat whatever it is, seven apples or something a day, I'd get my 30 grams, and I've solved my problem?

Sarah: Well, it would be great that you're getting 30 grams of fibre, but there is increasing evidence regarding the importance of having a diversity of different fibre types. So we touched briefly on the fact that you've got soluble and insoluble, and, you know, in simple terms, the soluble feed your gut microbes, the insoluble bulk out your stomach, bulk out your poo, et cetera, et cetera. But within those groups, there's so many different fibre types, and they all behave very differently. So for example, the fibre that's in apples, pectin, that's a fabulous soluble fibre. That will feed your gut microbes, but not all your gut microbes like pectin. And so what we know is that different microbes preferentially feed on different types of fibre. And we know from our own ZOE research and other published research that it's important to encourage a diversity of different microbes, particularly the good microbes. So you want a diversity of different foods. But we also know some fibres have very specific functions. So take oats, which contain beta-glucans. We know that beta-glucans have a really potent role in reducing our bad cholesterol, our LDL cholesterol. We've done a whole podcast on this, Jonathan, for anyone that wants to find out the mechanism. And so, for example, if you want to benefit from all the wonders of fibre in terms of our health, getting that diversity means that you're getting everything from the cholesterol-lowering effect to the stool-bulking effect to the cancer-reducing effect to the microbiome effect. And then even more importantly, which picks up on a really important point that Hugh said as well, is that you're actually getting all the other wonderful things that come with those foods. So you're not just getting in an apple the fibre, you're getting all the polyphenols that are in that apple that you wouldn't get just from a fibre extract, for example. And that's why diversity, in my opinion, is so important. So it's not just quantity, it's also the quality, the foods it's coming from, but also the diversity of those fibres.

Hugh: And of course, that's what makes life in the kitchen interesting. You know, different flavours, different tastes, different textures, different ingredients every day. That doesn't mean an endless shopping list. And of course, if you work through the seasons, different things become available to swap in for other things, and then you get a chance to just explore in a way that fits in with what's best and freshest. You know, so you can get a fantastically diverse high-fibre diet based very largely on homegrown British seasonal produce.

Jonathan: Well, let's talk about this fibre maxing trend which has been shooting around the internet so that even I have noticed it. I mean, firstly, Hugh, what is fibre maxing?

Hugh: I don't spend masses of time online looking at the latest food trends, but I think it's also useful to be aware of what's going on. And I did look at some fibre maxing stuff earlier in the year, and I was sort of mostly really quite happy with it, and a lot of it's quite good fun. And also fibre maxing as a trend tends to be offering up pretty whole natural foods, quite a big diversity of them, because one thing people want to be online is a little bit original, and they want to do something a bit different. So that's all good. The one thing about it that's I think is maybe it's just a tiny bit misleading is there's a huge amount of emphasis on seeds and nuts and grains that are very high in fibre, which is not wrong, but the way in which fibre maxers tend to count their fibre. Obviously, dry ingredients are gonna have higher per gram or per 100 gram scores than fresh vegetables simply because fresh vegetables are between 70 and 85% water. So no wonder 100 grams of chia seed's gonna have more fibre than 100 grams of tomato. The irony is that whenever you're eating dry fibrey things, you've got to add a load of water. You know, you can't have the chia seeds without pouring on the water, and yet they get this fantastic high-fibre per 100 gram score compared to, I don't know, cabbages or cucumbers or leeks or apples. And that's a little bit misleading because it sort of tends to put a higher value on them. It's like Top Trumps for fibre. Chia seeds beat an apple, and it kind of doesn't because the apple's got a beautiful package with all the water that helps you digest it. It's got different fibre in the skin than it has in the flesh of the apple. And having said that, nuts, seeds, whole grains, great ingredients, but don't think that they're the shortcut that means you don't need the fresh fruit and vegetables because somehow you've got these magically high-fibre ingredients here. Fresh fruit and vegetables are a brilliant package.

Sarah: When you're increasing your fibre intake, yes, like you said, you need to increase it slowly. But it's really, really important you also consume adequate amounts of water because we know the fibre absorbs the water. Otherwise, you can actually have the reverse happening to what you would think would happen, and you can actually end up with constipation as well as lots of other GI symptoms. So make sure as you're increasing your fibre, you also increase your fluid intake.

Jonathan: So Sarah, like, we're talking about fibre maxing, but the other trend that I'm really aware of is that the whole world's gone crazy about protein, and it's been added to, you know, everything. How do you think about that craze, and has that actually played into the amount of fibre that we're all eating?

Sarah: So I think the protein craze is a totally unnecessary waste of time craze.

Hugh: I'm with you on that. How many people do any of us know who are suffering from a protein deficiency? I think the protein craze is a gym bro thing. It's actually about acquiring a certain type of body, and it isn't necessarily always a healthy one. There is a literal recipe for getting ripped, which is time at the gym plus very low-carb, high-protein diet produces a particular low-fat body shape that some people think is very desirable. That does not represent gut health. It does not represent overall health. It's a body shape. And I think people have extrapolated from that so that people who actually aren't even that bothered about their body shape are grabbing high-protein bars off the shelf thinking it's doing them some kind of good. And I'm happy to hear you say that, Sarah. I've just expressed a slightly kind of, not necessarily irrational, but a fairly strong prejudice, and I'd now love you to give me the fantastic scientific backup. Am I right, Sarah?

Sarah: You are right, Hugh. It started, like, with the gym bros, and then all these claims about protein keeps you fuller for longer, so feeds into also people's, you know, fear of overeating, weight management, et cetera. My 13-year-old son joined a gym a couple of weeks ago, and he's never had any interest in nutrition, Hugh, despite what I do. But suddenly he's like, "Oh, Mummy, where can I get pure protein?" Obviously, he's started watching certain people on TikTok. There's a massive difference between fibre maxing and protein maxing. Fibre, we have a massive deficiency. Most countries internationally are not consuming enough fibre. In the US, in the UK, in many, many countries, we're now getting more protein than what is considered necessary for normal bodily function. Okay, there isn't a harm in getting more, but if it's at the cost of other good nutrients, that becomes a problem. What we've seen, recent analysis, actually, that was just published only recently, showed over the last 10 to 15 years, the intake in the UK, and I would imagine it's similar in the US, of protein has increased by 20%. Now, that's quite big. Now, what's good news is we have seen very recently a slight increase in fibre in the UK and the US, but, I mean, we're talking tiny. We're talking about half a gram to a gram. Now, there is the question of by protein maxing, are we then limiting our fibre? There isn't much data actually to show that by adding in more protein, those people tend to have less fibre in their diets. And we've analysed from our own ZOE Predict studies looking at if people who have more protein, do they tend to have less fibre? Now, if people are doing it in the way that we would advise people to do it, you can get a really good level of protein and a good level of fibre in your diet. Where it becomes a problem is more, I think, Hugh, these kind of gym bros that are really minimising their carbohydrate. And once you minimise your carbohydrate in order to increase your protein to less than about 25% of your calories, that's when it becomes really tricky to get enough fibre.

Hugh: Yeah, because you're starting to tell yourself that a carrot's got too much carb or a whole grain has got too much carb. So these things that have got loads of good things that are healthy foods are being struck off your list in favour of more protein that you don't really need.

Jonathan: So before we start switching to focus on these high-fibre heroes and what we can do, I guess I just wanna wrap up around protein and ask you, Hugh, about, you know, what are your thoughts, therefore, on eating meat and fish? You historically were rather famous for this. Have you now thrown it out the window and it's only vegetables on your plate?

Hugh: I'm still an omnivore. I mean, I've written books about fish and meat, you know, separately, quite big tomes on each of them. But overall, I've written a lot more about eating plants, some of that more recently. But I've always been a huge fan of veg, and what I've learnt about meat and fish is they are great ingredients. If you source them well, they're very healthy and they can be sustainable. But what I've learnt from a chef's point of view is they're quite tyrannical ingredients, and they hog a lot of attention. For chefs and enthusiastic home cooks, if you've got a nice piece of meat, that's what you make your fuss about, your marinade, or you put it on a barbecue to get the nice char-grilled stripes on it, or you concentrate on getting the skin of the fish perfectly crispy. And when you're obsessing with your main animal protein-based ingredient, you start to forget everything to do with the veg starts to be the bit on the side, and that's the emphasis that's really changed in the way I cook. I've sort of recalibrated. And in order to do it, I did become vegetarian for six months, not with a view to it necessarily being a permanent change, but a way to it just shifting the way I cook so that I wanted to have a repertoire of absolutely slam dunk, veg-only delicious dishes which I could go to whenever I wanted as a break. And the best way to enjoy really good plant-based food is not to have a bit of meat and fish next to it to compare it with. And the best way to make a lot of plant ingredients delicious is to give them a little bit of that attention, like maybe a little bit of oily marinade with some spices in it. Put it in the oven, make it crispy, concentrate the flavours, caramelise it, put it on the barbecue. There are very few vegetables that can't be barbecued. Get some of those charcoal stripes on the veg, not just on the meat. Build up those flavours and the sort of complexity. Combine different ingredients for contrast. And then you start finding that these plant-based meals really start punching through, delighting the palate, and they don't seem like the poor relative of the plate that's got a big piece of meat or fish on it. You know, as ever, it's so much about balance and it is fair to say that my balance has shifted and I eat less meat. Probably not much less fish 'cause I live by the sea, and I've got an opportunity to get very fresh, sustainably caught fish. But I'm just more comfortable than I've ever been about putting plants-only food on the table more than half the week. Let me put it like that. I mean, we raise chickens, goats. We've had goats and sheep at home, occasionally beef. And so I usually have a freezer full of home-reared meat, but it doesn't come out every day. It comes out once or twice a week, and then it has at least two or three outings. And if I've taken something out at the weekend, that's probably it for... That might be it for 10 days, 'cause there's lots of things to enjoy with the leftovers. If you want any behaviour change from anyone, anywhere about anything, you've got to promise that life is not gonna get worse. You know? That actually it's gonna get better. So people will believe you say it's gonna get better because you're gonna feel better. They can probably buy into that. But does that mean it has to taste worse? 'Cause if that's the route, I'm not sure I'm up for it. And the answer, it absolutely doesn't have to mean that.

Jonathan: I feel like that is the beautiful transition to start to talk about, okay, so what can I do if I'm listening to this and saying, "Well, I would like to increase my fibre intake. I've heard this brilliant story from Sarah that, you know, 30 grams a day is gonna make me live longer and be healthier. Like 40 grams even more, probably 50 grams even further away." So just like the more I can do, the better. But actually I have no idea really how to do that. And Hugh, your new book focused on 12 high fibre heroes, and I was expecting them all to be like difficult to find, you know, rare plants, they're really expensive. You thought chia seeds would be at the top of the list. I definitely thought chia seeds would be at the top of the list. But they're not at all, and I'm gonna put you on the spot here. Do you think if I asked you to list your 12 heroes, you might be able to run through them?

Hugh: I'll give it a shot. Peas, carrots, sweet corn, mushrooms, broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, beans, lentils. How many have I said so far? There's a couple more. The point being basically that they're ingredients everybody knows already. They know what they look like, you know where to get them. You've probably got some of them in your fridge or your cupboard already. They are basically the most accessible, most inexpensive vegetables. I don't mind if they're tinned or frozen. Some of them you're obviously gonna be more inclined to buy fresh. But you know what they are, but you're still probably thinking of them as the virtuous side veg. So the aim of the book is to sing about them as the heroes that they are or can be in your kitchen. And the way to do that, as we've hinted at, is to put them centre stage and make them the star of the dishes. So each vegetable has a chapter, and in that chapter it has eight or nine recipes. And I can promise you in each one you'll get a couple of salads, a couple of big hearty soups, a couple of stove top main courses, and a couple of things you can slam in the oven, so sort of tray roasts. They can really start delivering for flavour, for colour, for excitement, and not be the boring bit on the side.

Jonathan: We're not gonna have time to go through all 12 of these, but I would like actually to dip into four or five today. And actually, the very first hero in your book is The Humble Pea, which you've already started to talk about, and I'm really curious, why did you choose to start with the pea of all things?

Hugh: Partly because I think most people have got a packet of frozen peas in their freezer. Most people quite like peas, but they don't get super excited about chasing them around the plate after they've finished the lamb chop. And so my invitation is to get them into the middle of the dish and let them be the hero. I mean, I'm a huge fan of fresh vegetables, and lots of the vegetables I suggest are things you will generally buy fresh. But frozen peas, let's be clear, that's not an ultra-processed food. A tin of beans with no sauce, but just in a little bit of brine, which you can crack open and tip into any curry or soup, anything saucy, again, that's not an ultra-processed food. These are natural ingredients, minimally processed or fresh, and they do everything for you that Sarah has been talking so eloquently about. If you just take those dozen vegetables, for most people just to bring half of those in or most of those in over a couple of weeks, all accessible most of the year round, you've already upped your diversity within the realm of things that are very familiar, inexpensive, and accessible. And hopefully by delving into the recipes, you've upped the taste and flavour and excitement around them, too.

Sarah: I have, without fail, a bag of garden peas in my freezer constantly, and my kids will eat them, even boring on their own with a knob of butter and a bit of salt. But it's something I know that they'll eat, and I love the fact that, again, what you've selected here is affordable and accessible, because back to basics, I think, is the way to go.

Jonathan: You've both mentioned, actually, this idea of frozen peas. I sort of just assume that frozen peas will be a lot less healthy than, like, fresh peas?

Sarah: No, absolutely not. So firstly, they're cheaper. So if you look at frozen peas, they're 10 times cheaper per 100 grams than the equivalent fresh peas.

Hugh: Nobody likes a homegrown fresh garden pea more than I do, but if you can't get them out of the pod within a few hours, the sugars start to turn to starch. And actually, if you're buying whole fresh peas in the pod, even at your local farm shop, if they were picked yesterday and certainly the day before, they will not be as sweet as frozen peas. If you want an incredibly dependable ingredient that you can come back to that's always going to taste sweet, that's got, almost completely nutritionally intact as well compared to a fresh pea, frozen peas are a brilliant product.

Sarah: Yeah, and sometimes they can even be better. So they're normally frozen within about two to three hours of harvest, so you preserve the natural sugars in there so they taste sweeter. But also, peas are really rich in certain vitamins and minerals that we know can be degraded by either oxygen, so by air, or by light. So vitamin C is a great one. We know that the more it's exposed to air, the more that it's exposed to light, that it can start to degrade. If you're freezing it straight away, you're preserving all of that vitamin C. So in many instances, the frozen pea, unless it's the one that you're literally podding from your garden when you have it fresh, can actually be nutritionally better for you.

Hugh: If it's lost its flavour, it's probably lost some of its goodness.

Jonathan: So Hugh, the only thing I can think of doing with peas is boiling them. How would you make them delicious for me?

Hugh: Well, I think peas are a brilliant ingredient in a soup. Fry an onion, maybe a carrot, add a bit of stock, add a half a bag of peas, blitz it in a blender. If you put a pinch of curry powder in, just a pinch when you're sweating the onion, it gives a lovely warming flavour. I use a herb in the garden called lovage, which has got a curry-ish flavour. When I don't have lovage, I just put a pinch of curry powder in. Very lightly curried pea soup, super easy thing. Just peas that have been bashed up with a little butter and garlic and served as a treat on their own with a few things to scoop them up with, like a warm sort of pea hummus. So easy to do and really, really tasty.

Sarah: Some of these beans, peas, pulses are actually really good sources of protein, so they'll also keep you full for longer.

Jonathan: Now, my team asked me to ask you, Hugh, what variety of pea to use, and I was confused by that because I thought peas were just peas. So could you help me out here?

Hugh: Well, there aren't a load of demon bad peas out there, like here are the pea varieties you've got to steer well clear of. It's whatever works for you in your garden, and then when you're buying frozen peas, it's basically whatever's in the packet, guys. I do often, if I can get them, get organic frozen peas, which you can find in quite a lot of supermarkets. I just like to support the organic farming system where I can. Obviously, they're a bit more expensive. I think petit pois have got a certain charm. They're small. They're quite nice scattered on a salad. The idea that we only eat peas sort of hot on a plate. Peas are a brilliant ingredient for scattering in salads. If you've just got a very simple salad of a classic lettuce and cucumber, try sprinkling not just a few seeds on that, but a few quickly blanched peas. Drop them into cold water again and just fling them on top of your salad. It's a lovely pop of sweetness in a salad. Picks up a vinaigrette or a dressing really, really well. I've almost always got a bag or two of organic frozen peas in my freezer, and I do not know what variety they are.

Jonathan: I'd like to move on to carrots now. Carrots were a staple of my school meals where they were boiled to death. And I have to say, as an adult, I've always felt that there's nothing really much to a carrot.

Hugh: The list isn't necessarily in order of hero status, but it kind of is. Yeah, yeah. So carrots are number two, and they could have been number one, and I just couldn't emphasise what a fantastic ingredient they are too much. They are brilliant. What I think is really interesting about carrots, it... I had the same experience of carrots at school, cut into rounds and boiled in lots of water. Half the flavour's gone with the water that went down the sink. They're probably cooked until they're mushy. Any sense of pleasing resistance or bite about them, that's gone too. So it is tragic that so many of our first experiences of these amazing, wonderful vegetables were disappointing, bordering on revolting. So I think one of the things you find very quickly if you've got kids, often kids don't like cooked carrots, but they do like them raw, and that immediately gives you something to work with. Why do kids prefer raw carrots to cooked? Because they haven't been boiled and all the flavour's still in there. And they like crunch. They've got a nice crunch to them. You get the instant sweetness. The actual flavour of a carrot is intact. You've done nothing to it to spoil the carrot. So at the other end of the spectrum from ruining the flavour of a carrot by boiling is how do you make a cooked carrot even more delicious? And one answer to that is, go back to what I said, some of the heat treatment we lavish on our meat and fish, let's give it to the vegetables. Let's just roast some carrots. Let's toss them in a little bit of oil, a little bit of garlic, seasoning, maybe some spice if we like, and let's roast them in a hot oven till they're just starting to go a little bit burnt on the edges. They've shrunk quite a lot. We've done the opposite of lose the flavour into the water. We've lost the water to concentrate the flavour. That's incredibly rewarding. That's why there are so many recipes in my book where vegetables get roasted or grilled or charred in a way that you... The water's driven out, or some of the water's driven out. You get this caramelisation on the surface. You concentrate the flavours. You create a new flavour by burning the sugars a little bit. Suddenly, you've got these things popping in your mouth, like they're really delicious. But of course, you're not just gonna put a carrot in that roasting tray. You can put some brassicas in there. You can put some Brussels sprouts. You can put some spring onions or some wedges of regular onions. They'll concentrate the flavours, too. They'll get also get a little bit burned. And the brassica in there, even kale, which for the last five or eight minutes of your roast, you can put some kale leaves scattered over the top. They'll become concentrated and crispy, and they'll have a lovely contrasting flavour, the slight bittersweet flavour of a brassica leaf compared to the really intense sweetness of a carrot, and then the allium, the rounded out allium flavour of garlic or onions. Three things together like that, that's real deliciousness. But even before you put it on the plate, you've got an opportunity to chuck in, say, I don't know, a handful of chickpeas for the last five minutes. Creates texture, a little bit of creaminess, and again, a bit boring on their own, but again, the contrast and compare these different plants coming together on a plate, and if you've added a little bit of spice, too, I mean, that's a plate full of completely delicious food. Concentrating flavours is a key thing to think about. As soon as you start thinking about it, it becomes obvious when you're doing it, and you start "Oh, I see what... I'm reducing this down to this," so the flavours, you know. Same thing happens when you bubble down a tomato sauce from a couple of tins of tomatoes. You concentrate that flavour, concentrate the sweetness. You've added a little garlic. You get flavour from some olive oil. Then you've got a base sauce that just wraps around so many different ingredients in a delicious way.

Sarah: You know, carrot's a great example. Yeah, packed full of fibre, packed full of flavour, brings lots of other nutrients. Every fruit, vegetable obviously brings different types of other nutrients, micronutrients. Take beta-carotene. It's what gives the yellowy orange colour to a carrot. It's a precursor for vitamin A, so when you eat carrots, you get a load of beta-carotene. Your body can convert it, if it needs to, into vitamin A. Vitamin A has a really important role in the functioning of your body. Both beta-carotene and vitamin A are really important in terms of immune response, in terms of our vision, in terms of protecting our eye, in terms of being, particularly beta-carotene, a really powerful antioxidant. You know, and we know that if you're getting beta-carotene from whole foods, and it's important to caveat not from supplements, that actually you can reduce your risk of certain chronic diseases because of the antioxidant capacity of beta-carotene. That's just one nutrient that's in carrots.

Hugh: You started with that thing that people used to put carrots in a hat because... But a carrot, things become boring because they look so familiar and we've taken them for granted and we have got nowhere close to exploring their full potential or possibilities. As soon as you start doing that, they don't even look boring anymore. You go, "Oh, carrots, yes." They've got that amazing feathery green frond that makes perfect sense to have that flowing like a peacock feather, but slightly less cruel to the birds, flowing off the back of your hat. That amazing pointy orange root, which by the way, also comes in purple and yellow. People think these are funky modern varieties, but the purple carrot and the yellow are actually going back to some older varieties that predate the orange carrot. And you can be sure of one thing, and I'm betting my bottom dollar that Sarah's gonna back me up on this, that a different coloured version of the same vegetable is gonna have a slightly different nutrient profile and different's good. You're gonna get something from a purple carrot that you don't get from an orange one.

Sarah: Absolutely. We know that what gives different fruits, vegetables, carrots, their colour are different chemicals. Typically, these are different kinds of polyphenols, which are bioactive substances, and they all act in a different way. Jonathan, I just want to pick up on something to do with how we cook carrots, because you made the point, you know, and I did, about how if you eat carrots raw, typically kids prefer that. They prefer the crunch. But actually what happens is that we actually absorb very little of the beta carotene if you eat the carrots raw because it's trapped within the plant cell structure, the fibre structure of the carrot. If you cook it, then you release a lot of that beta carotene. Now, obviously, you don't want to overcook it for reasons that you said. Or,

Hugh: or cook it... If you cook it in a sauce where what comes out of it'll stay in the sauce or roast it to concentrate the flavour, so the only thing that comes out is water, and then you're preserving it. But I... Tell me whether you think this is right, Sarah, but I think there's a halfway house. This is a great tip for getting kids to eat carrots if they don't want to munch on a big raw carrot. Grated carrots with a dressing, and here's my tip. If your kids don't like a vinaigrette, just try squeezing half an orange onto a bowl of grated carrots, maybe a tiny pinch of salt, and stir that in, and there's suddenly a juiciness there. And the acidity of the orange will start to break down a grated carrot, and you will get a little bit of pre-digested beta carotene coming in that if you just munched a completely raw carrot with no dressing, you wouldn't get. So, okay, we haven't got fermentation starting yet, but we've got a little bit of extraction and breaking down of the texture from the acidity of the orange. And most kids love the flavour of orange. So a little squeeze of that on your carrots just to get kids interested and excited is a little hack for getting your kids into carrots.

Jonathan: And Sarah, can I confirm that you were saying that actually if I cook the carrot, suddenly I'm going to get all of these healthy nutrients out that when I didn't cook it, even though I'm eating it raw, I'm just not going to get the same thing?

Sarah: You'll still get healthy nutrients regardless of having it raw. So if any parents are listening, please still continue to give your kids raw carrots. It's just that you are able to access more of some of these healthy nutrients, particularly the beta carotene. But then there's other tricks you can do as well. We know that beta carotene is a fat-soluble vitamin, so make sure you're drizzling oil on. So if you're putting it in your air fryer or you're roasting on the barbecue, whatever—drizzle oil on as well, 'cause then you're having it with some fat and you'll absorb even more as well.

Jonathan: I think I would naturally have thought any sort of cooking or boiling, it's all going to break stuff down and lose some of the nutrients. But actually you're saying potentially I'm getting more out of it, out of this thing, which I think is not obvious at all.

Hugh: No, it's not obvious, but in a way it's like if you're going to lose the nutrients, where are you losing them to? If you're losing them into the sauce, you haven't really lost them. But I think we can probably extrapolate from what Sarah just said to almost all other vegetables. You will get different benefits from the cooked version than you will from the raw. Sometimes you'll get things from the raw, which is kind of what you're hinting at, that will be lost when you cook them. A cooked tomato and a raw tomato give you quite a different set of polyphenols, nutrients, et cetera. And the raw will give you some stuff that you don't get when it's cooked. So cooking isn't always giving access to more. Sometimes it's giving you access to more and taking away things that you would get when they're raw. So cooking, raw, mix it up, bit of everything.

Jonathan: I love that. I had originally hoped to cover many more vegetables, Hugh, but you are so excited about these carrots and peas that I, exactly. I've made very little progress. So I'm going to wrap two together. So you have a chapter on cabbage and kale. And look, I know kale is super trendy. I asked this question at the beginning about whether I was never going to be healthy because I didn't really like kale. So I wasn't surprised by kale. But I was very surprised to see cabbage. So Hugh, can you explain to me what the difference is between cabbage and kale, and why are you talking about cabbage when everyone only talks about kale these days?

Hugh: It's interesting that people obsess around kale particularly. One of the reasons for that is cabbage has been around kind of forever. Kale is pretty new. It's quite easy to deal with in the kitchen because basically when you buy it, you're buying a pile of leaves that have already been picked or whatever. Cabbage, what are you gonna do? It's a tight heart. Are you gonna cut it into quarter? How... You know, the more decisions to be made. So kale, I think first looked like a potential winner as a commercial thing because it's like easy prep cabbage, pre-prepped cabbage. I think back to what we were saying about difference between a purple carrot and an orange carrot. The nutrient profile of different leafy brassicas, the difference is subtle, but nevertheless rewarding. So therefore ring the changes between spring greens or a white-hearted cabbage or a Brussels sprout, which is obviously a baby cabbage, and different types of kale, of which I'm growing three in my garden at the moment. So they're all very close relatives of the same family, but they grow in slightly different shapes, different leaf colours, but that's why I've grouped them all in the same thing. I get that not everybody likes kale on the side of the plate, but again, I think that one of the easiest, nicest ways to eat leafy greens, all the brassicas, also things like spinach and chard, is in a sauce, in a saucy thing or a soup. So I'm often adding at the end of my curries or pasta sauces or tomato soups, a handful of shredded fresh cabbage or kale or even a couple of sort of bricks from the freezer of that frozen spinach. We often cook a tomato sauce and just put spinach and chickpeas and a bit of spice in it. Suddenly that lovely homemade tomato sauce from a couple of tins of tomatoes, a tin of chickpeas, two, three bricks of frozen spinach, little bit of curry powder or if you prefer, slightly North African spices like cumin and coriander without the other curry flavours go really, really well. And that's a lovely... You can use that as a pasta sauce or have it with a baked potato, or you can just dip good bread into it. It's a really hearty thing. As soon as you've got the pulses in there, you've got protein and you've got more fibre, but you've got a kind of creamy richness in the middle that, okay, on their own, a little bit bland, but with a sauce wrapped around them, they're so nice to eat.

Jonathan: And Sarah, is there... I know you're gonna tell me that there's fibre in the cabbage. Is there anything else that we know about that is like giving us, you know, particular value?

Sarah: Yeah, I mean, there's loads of micronutrients. Vitamin K is a perfect example of one that's in quite high amounts in cabbage. It's really important for blood clotting, bone health. But there's loads of polyphenols. These are the bioactives that I know we often talk about that are just incredible chemicals that have such wide-reaching effects. There'll be different bioactives, different polyphenols, depending on the colour. So red cabbage you mentioned as well. You know, that's a great source of a particular polyphenol called anthocyanin. That's also found in some berries. You know, it's an incredibly rich source of that. We know that that's important for blood pressure. We know it's important for blood vessel dilation. We know it's anti-inflammatory. And it's the pigmented, so the darker the leaves are, the different colours, having a mixture of different types of colours, these cabbages is—

Hugh: —important. With many cabbages, you've got that in the one plant. You've got the outer dark green leaves, which have different flavour, more intense flavour, some might say a little bit austere, and then you've got the sweeter inner leaves. And as Sarah's been saying all along, different colours, that means different nutrients from often from the very same plant.

Jonathan: And Hugh, I'm a bit intimidated by cabbage. Like, I understood with the carrot, I was with you. The peas, I'm with you. I heard this story with the cabbage where I can use, you know, like, a bit in something else. But let's say I've got a whole cabbage and I want to use that for dinner. Is there, like, an easy recipe that I can do and where I'm not gonna end up with it completely, like, over-boiled and tasteless, which is basically my fear and why I'm a bit intimidated by it?

Hugh: 100%, and it's probably not what you think it's gonna be at all. I would suggest roasting it, not whole, but in wedges. If you cut a big-hearted cabbage in half, so that all the leaves are still joined together by the stalk, and then in half again until you've got quarters. And then probably take it down to eighths or even slightly smaller wedges, all joined by that stalky bit in the middle. Brush that with a little bit of oil, salt, and pepper. Roast those till they're golden and caramelised. If you want to start getting funky, there's all sorts of ways you can spice that up and you can add a brilliant dressing at the end made with miso. And miso is lovely. Wonderful addition of flavour. Got live microbes in it if it's a true miso. The only thing is if you're gonna heat that up, you will knock those live microbes on. It's why I love using miso in a dressing. Adds a wonderful flavour. You can put a spoonful of miso, shake it up with a little bit of lemon juice, oil, and spices if you like, and then you trickle that over when it comes out and it's not piping hot, but just when it's cooled. Trickle a miso dressing over some toasted seeds on your beautifully roasted golden cabbage. Again, you've concentrated the flavours. You've caramelised the sugars. You've mellowed out that slightly intense bitter brassica and the cabbage that you feared so much has become utterly delicious and easy to eat and a total treat.

Jonathan: It does sound pretty tasty, doesn't it, Sarah?

Sarah: It does.

Hugh: It would be crazy not to talk about beans, even if only for a minute. But I would say something that's whenever you're cooking anything saucy, a soup, a stew, a pasta sauce, a curry, you've just got to ask yourself, why not put a tin of beans in that? It's such a great food, such a balance of protein and it just builds a dish up from a... Suddenly something is a main course if it's got beans or pulses in. Everyone's got a tin of beans at the back of the cupboard. You've just got to get them to the front of the cupboard and into the saucepan.

Jonathan: I would love to talk about all the other vegetables, but I would love to finish with a single piece of advice from each of you for our listeners. For someone who's listened to this and wants to start increasing their fibre intake today, what would be your one piece of advice that they could start doing today?

Hugh: Just start taking vegetables seriously because they can do you serious good. They can deliver serious flavour. They're proper serious ingredients that are worthy of your attention in the kitchen, and they're utterly transformative of your health.

Sarah: Don't worry about all this fancy stuff you see from these Instagrammers on fibre maxing. Go back to the basics that we're all familiar with. Go back to the basics that are affordable, accessible, easy for us all, and enhance them. Enhance them with wonderful other nutrients, extra virgin olive oil, spices, herbs, et cetera.

Jonathan: I love it. We covered a lot of different stuff. I'm definitely not going to try and repeat all the recipes because I think that'd be very dangerous as Hugh's done. But I mean, I think my biggest takeaway actually is maybe sort of what Sarah touched on at the end, which is you don't need to be eating really fancy foods in order to get all of these amazing like health benefits and amazing tastes out of food that is also giving you this fibre. And that actually these very traditional affordable ingredients across the globe can be delicious. There's this enormous talk about protein and the idea that we all need to eat far more protein, but actually we're in general meeting our protein targets across the Western world. But on fibre, we're told like thirty grams is the level you need to be at. Only one in ten people are even at thirty grams. And the latest science is suggesting that actually if you got to forty grams, you get even more health benefits. And probably if you keep going to fifty and beyond, and those benefits are like living longer and pushing out all of these terrible diseases, including cancer and Alzheimer's. So there's this weird disconnect between the science and the amazing benefits from eating, you know, more of the plants with this fibre in and then the conversation around protein. I also took away that if you are one of the ninety-five percent of people who are, you know, not eating a lot of fibre, don't suddenly double your fibre intake overnight. You can increase it quite fast. I think Hugh, you were saying like in a few weeks you can already increase a lot, but sort of step by step so that you don't have like really bad bloating. And Sarah, that it's really important you take a lot of additional fluid intakes, a lot more water because actually the fibre is going to sort of suck this in and you could end up being constipated, which is funny because one of the benefits of fibre is you suddenly stop being constipated. So you can get there. It's a bit like going to the gym, I guess. You definitely can't just jump, so you've got to build up to it. Fibre is complicated. So I think Sarah did this brilliant explanation that there's all of these different types of fibre, that a lot of the benefit is that it feeds your microbiome, but actually there's all these other benefits from this insoluble fibre that you can hear is linked to how we feel full and how it triggers our GLP receptors and everything. And then I think we talked about, okay, practically what can you do? And I think one of my biggest takeaways is that if you're cooking a meal which has meat or fish in it, it's this tyrannical ingredient. It sort of becomes the centre of everything. And so all the veg sort of just gets squeezed to the edge. And so, you know, Hugh talked about going from, you know, maybe a traditional way of eating where there's a meat or fish, you know, at the centre of the plate for every dinner, even just moving it so that that's only half the meals and for your other half of the meals you're putting, we're saying, "I'm gonna put veg at the centre," suddenly unlocks all of this opportunity. And Hugh has a dozen different vegetables to talk about, but today we just talked about a few of them, and I loved how practical they were. So peas, you know, who knew that frozen peas could be better than fresh peas? Who knew that suddenly like a curried pea soup could sound so great and be high in protein? I am being forced to reassess carrots. I accept that maybe I have been a bit harsh on them in my early childhood experience. But I love this idea that actually if you roast these vegetables, you sort of condense, you take the water out, so the flavour gets stronger. You don't lose all the nutrients that are inside them, and it's actually really easy. Again, it's like some oil and spices, and you put it in the oven, and suddenly you get all of this flavour. But even the carrot that to me seems so boring, Sarah suddenly waxes lyrical about the beta carotene. You know, it's an antioxidant. It can-- It's even been proven to reduce risk of diseases. And interestingly, you know, cooking some of these vegetables can actually make the nutrients more accessible, so we shouldn't feel like, well, if it's not raw, it's not gonna give you the benefit. Actually, you know, weirdly, cooking it might give you more. Then we talked about cabbage and kale. I discovered I don't have to like kale, but it's probably because I'm preparing it wrong and that, you know, one of the simplest ways to use it is just like add a handful to a pasta sauce. And you said, you know, throw it in, add some chickpeas, and suddenly you're getting all of this additional fibre and protein. But you did give me a whole cabbage recipe that even I can do. Roast it, cut in wedges, brush with some oil, salt, and pepper, roast to golden, and then for bonus, miso dressing. My co-founder Tim will be very happy I add some fermented food at the top. And I think it's just an example where you suddenly move this thing from what I always have thought about as a side to my meat to suddenly like it is a main course. And I think the book is fantastic. I'm definitely gonna be cooking a bunch of recipes from it. But I hope, you know, for everybody listening, it does make you rethink these vegetables as something that can be really central to a meal and really delicious. You don't have to chase after this incredibly exotic ingredient. Thank you both.

Hugh: Thanks so much, Jonathan.