How to eat 30 plants this week, with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Thirty plants this week, think you could do it? It might sound a lot, but it’s easier than you think. Fruit, veg, nuts, seeds, even coffee all count as plants. Today, we learn how why plants are so powerful. 

Alongside Hugh is Tim Spector - a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London and ZOE’s scientific co-founder. Tim explains why our gut loves plants, highlighting the importance of polyphenols, healthy fats and fiber. You’ll finish this episode inspired, empowered and hungry.

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Books

Hugh’s book How To Eat 30 Plants a Week

Tim’s book Food For Life

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Episode transcripts are available here.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Jonathan Wolf: Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.

Eat more plants. That's the message echoed by our two guests today. Legendary chef, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and leading scientist, Professor Tim Spector. To be more specific, the message that Hugh and Tim are shouting from the rooftops is eat 30 plants a week. Now a diversity of plants every week can boost the diversity and health of your gut microbiome.

Plants contain prebiotics, which fuel your good gut bacteria, and they're jam-packed with substances called polyphenols, which can have anti-inflammatory properties. Many scientists believe that 30 plants a week could lower cancer risk and help you stay healthier as you age. But this sounds like a lot of plants.

Surely it's hard to achieve. And why 30? What's the science behind this number? Today you'll learn how, armed with the right strategies, you can eat 30 plants per week. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a chef who champions seasonal local ingredients. In the U.K., he's a household name, known for his TV show, River Cottage, and recently his best-selling book, How to Eat 30 Plants a Week.

Tim is one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists, a professor at King's College London, and my scientific co-founder here at ZOE. He was part of the team responsible for the large-scale scientific study that led to the 30 plants recommendation. Today's episode will inspire you to pack more plants onto your plate and give you tools that could help you live a longer, healthier, and tastier life.

[00:01:57] Hugh and Tim, thank you for joining me today. 

[00:01:59] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Great to be here. 

[00:02:00] Professor Tim Spector: Likewise. 

[00:02:01] Jonathan Wolf: So Hugh, we have a tradition here at ZOE where we always start with a quick-fire round of questions that come from our listeners. We have very strict rules. You can say yes or no, or if you absolutely have to give us a sentence. Are you up for it?

[00:02:16] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Of course I'm up for it. 

[00:02:18] Jonathan Wolf: All right, starting with Hugh. Do you have easy ways to hit the goal of 30 plants a week? 

[00:02:24] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Yes, I do. 

[00:02:26] Jonathan Wolf: Are there plants that we should eat that are not fruits and vegetables? 

[00:02:30] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Oh, yes. 

[00:02:31] Jonathan Wolf: Okay, Tim, could the right variety of plants transform your gut? 

[00:02:37] Professor Tim Spector: Absolutely. 

[00:02:39] Jonathan Wolf: Does the gut influence molecules in our brain?

[00:02:43] Professor Tim Spector: Yes. 

[00:02:45] Jonathan Wolf: Could 30 plants per week help you live more healthy years? 

[00:02:49] Professor Tim Spector: It can. 

[00:02:51] Jonathan Wolf: Hugh, what do you think is the biggest misconception about eating 30 plants a week? 

[00:02:57] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: That it's going to be difficult and expensive, doesn't have to be either. 

[00:03:02] Jonathan Wolf: I'm really thrilled to have you. I think it's a brilliant topic, but I'm also thrilled because you're a bit of a legend when it comes to healthy cooking and for some of our listeners in the U.S. and elsewhere, who may be new to you, back in the 1990s, your TV show River Cottage really led a U.K. movement to reconnect us with seasonal local ingredients. 

And in a food environment, where I think most of us were completely disconnected from where the food that was in our grocery stores actually came from.

And if I was thinking about this over the weekend, I think your show was the first time I'd ever actually thought about where my food comes from. And it's also the first time I'd ever, I think, even heard of organic food. Last year, I was lucky enough to visit your stunning river cottage. And you don't just grow an amazing variety of food there. You also build stunning meals from them.

 So I think all of our listeners are going to leave feeling really inspired to eat more plants and this is more achievable. I'm also very excited because you have brought some surprises with you and there are two shiny metal tins in front of me and I have not been allowed to know what's inside them.

I'm desperate. I can hear a little rattle. So I think these are going to get opened up during the show. 

[00:04:13] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: I very much hope so. Be a shame not to. 

[00:04:14] Jonathan Wolf: All right. And then Tim, thank you for coming. I know that you're going to explain really the latest science about why it's important to eat 30 plants a week.

[00:04:25] And I think maybe let's just get specific now about what we even mean by plants. And Hugh, you said in the question that plants aren't just fruits and vegetables. 

[00:04:36] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Absolutely. That's right. Fruit and vegetables being a fantastically important and indeed delicious and useful group of plants, but there's much more to it than that.

I think it's really one of the things I've really enjoyed doing in the book, is exploring the store cupboard and reminding people that there's lots of really great plant ingredients, whole plant ingredients, you know not processed but that come from the store cupboard.

So I'm thinking of nuts seeds spices pulses these kind of things. They all count at least Tim assures me that they all count and this is what has been the basis of my most recent exploration of what I think is a really excellent way of eating 

[00:05:13] Jonathan Wolf: Amazing.

So Tim, I'd love to get a bit into the science to start with, and then we're going to start to talk about how can we really get these plants onto our plates and, you know, into us. Can we maybe just start with a single plant, Tim? What happens when we digest this and why do we care? 

[00:05:31] Professor Tim Spector: Okay, so plants are generally a mixture of different types of carbohydrate.

They've all got a little bit of protein in them and the rest is usually different types of carbohydrate, which can be the starchy bits in it, which turn to sugar. It can be the sugar itself and the fiber, which is harder to digest. So, plants have this in different amounts. And so, when you eat a plant, your digestive juices start breaking it down as soon as it's in your mouth, the saliva, et cetera.

And depending on its structure, how much sugar is released early on in the gut as it goes down, some of that sugar will be released. So you take rice, for example, a lot of the sugar is released quite early on, and that's why rice gives you sugar peaks. And other plants where, you know, the starch is much more tightly bound, it's harder to come out of it, is actually protected, and so doesn't come out.

So, the precise structure of each plant is very different, gives it different properties. The key health benefits, we think, are from the fibrous bits that are harder to digest. And they are broken down mainly in the lower part of the gut, the colon, where most of our gut microbes are. 

At the same time, most of the plants we're talking about have large amounts of these chemicals, polyphenols, which, as the fiber's been broken down, they are released into the gut and taken up by the gut microbes.

And these polyphenol chemicals are the other big part of that picture, as well as the fiber. In the past, we used to think it was just purely the amount of fiber, just like a weight of slough that went down. 

This is how it was described to me at medical school. It was, you know, you just clean out the system like your drains being trained by just having enormous amounts of fiber that just took away all the toxins.

And that was all it was. So it was like a pipe-cleaning exercise. And, you know, there was nothing else really in the food to do it. That's why, in a way, we went for these very artificial foods, you know, breakfast cereals like All-bran or whatever, or just refined bran rather than the original plant to cure our ills.

And it's only recently we've worked out the subtleties of it that it's not just the pure volume that's doing it. It's actually these really chemical interactions as the food is going down, and it's being slowly broken apart by our digestive juices and the key microbes into these chemicals. And they interact with our body and particularly our immune system. 

It's increasingly obvious that our immune system is linked to inflammation and that's regulating virtually everything in our body, from our brains, our behavior, to allergies, our responses to foods, and all kinds of autoimmune disorders and cancers and aging.

[00:08:43] Jonathan Wolf: Tim, I think you've drawn a beautiful picture of what's happening as you eat a plant and pointing out this is what you end up being made of. Are all plants the same in that flow you're describing and in terms of how they sort of support our health? 

[00:09:00] Professor Tim Spector: No, they're very different. The structure of the plant is quite crucial to how the body deals with it.

As I said, some have very light structure so that the starchy sugars get released very early and there's very little fiber that continues down right to our guts. And a great example of that is my least favorite plant, which everyone knows by now, the iceberg lettuce. Because it's basically water, there's very little structure there that's useful for us. Hardly any polyphenol chemicals at all. 

And of course, lettuces with color, obviously have many more of these polyphenols than ones just in a single color. So Rossololo or the more bitter ones, the endive type variety. 

So the big difference is even within a sort of family in what the structure of that plant is, what the chemicals it contains and how they interact with our body. 

But there's very few examples like the iceberg lettuce that are really useless. So I don't want to give the impression to anyone listening out there that, you know, there's half of them that you can throw away, they're pointless. You know, it's quite hard to find examples. So virtually all the plants that we consume have some benefit on health.

There are some right at the top superstars, but as I said, virtually all of them are good. And I think a lot of the attention now is to saying, firstly, the amount of fiber that is available. Then the different types of fiber that are available, i.e. is it just a single form? And there are hundreds of different types of fiber.

We're only just understanding that. Hardly anyone studies it in the world. Some are soluble, some are insoluble, some are partly between the two, that means when you add them to water, they dissolve. And we thought that was really important, but it's turning out to be less clear-cut. So we shouldn't worry too much about that.

They're all good. And then they vary in how many polyphenols they have, which is what Hugh was talking about. You know, the difference between the good lettuces and the bad lettuces is often the polyphenol count, these defense chemicals, which you get by stronger tastes, more bitterness, more color in the leaf.

[00:11:18] Jonathan Wolf: And Tim, can I just clarify, so you're saying if you're looking at a vegetable, like in a store, this is the way you figure out whether a vegetable has more polyphenols? 

[00:11:28] Professor Tim Spector: Yes. So I didn't know any of this before I started researching my book 10 years ago. So I don't expect most people to know it, it's not really taught. 

It's the shape, the color. And then the taste, if you can nibble a bit in the greengrocers, which you may not be able to. They're all clues as to the polyphenol count. So the more bitter and strong, if the leaves are loose, interestingly, that means they've had less protection structurally, so they have to be tougher and have more chemicals in them. 

[00:12:01] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: If we can avoid it, we shouldn't discard the outer leaves of the lettuce and the cabbage. They often have very tender white middles, which are effectively blanched. 

I always think of that in terms of they've been prevented from photosynthesizing in the heart of the plant, which is often why the middle of the plant is sweeter and why traditionally you actually tie up celery and endives and things like that because you want that white, slightly sweeter heart from a flavor point of view. 

But from a different flavor point of view and health point of view, those greener, more open outer leaves have probably got more going on in them in terms of polyphenols, just as they probably got more bitter flavors, which now we might try and cultivate that taste.

Because we know it's good for us. Therefore, let's enjoy the bitterness of those plants and sort of find a way to relish it. 

Whereas traditionally we might've been working in the garden to actually soften those bitter tastes and sweeten the plant through processes like blanching. 

[00:13:00] Jonathan Wolf: And Hugh, when you say bitter, I think I was brought up to believe that bitter is bad.

So when you said it's bitter, well, obviously nobody wants to eat that. Are you saying like, we have to just start to suffer because Tim's telling us that it's really great for our health. 

[00:13:14] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: I think it's a really interesting question. I mean, we don't love bitter flavors immediately. From an evolutionary point of view, we really like sweet things because that's telling us that there's sugar and energy there.

 Many generations past when we didn't grow food, we went and hunted it and gathered it. To be able to find something with a lot of calories in it and a lot of sweetness was something you just couldn't ignore, the energy benefit of that. 

So, you know, you would risk climbing up a tree and getting stung by a lot of bees to come back with a load of honey, or you'd wait until fruit was incredibly ripe and then you'd gorge yourself on it. 

Nowadays, we just have access to energy through sweetness all the time. That's what the confectionery aisle at the exit of the supermarket till is doing. And it isn't very good for us. So our relationship with food has changed quite a lot. 

As to whether we should relish the bitter flavors, I mean, we can learn to love things that don't immediately taste appealing.

Beer being quite a good example, I would say. If you don't like it, you don't like it and you can't force yourself to like it. But we've come to enjoy things like watercress, which has got a hot and bitter taste. You probably can't eat platefuls and platefuls of that kind of stuff, but they deliver a kick.

And often from a chef's point of view, it's the contrast between that bitter or hot kick and something else on the plate that's a little blander or sweeter. 

[00:14:40] Professor Tim Spector: Other cultures do, you know, make it more of a thing to get that wider range of tastes in. And I think we've in the U.K. and the U.S. really lost that.

[00:14:49] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Yeah, I think we're rediscovering it a bit and chefs are helping us to do that. Much in the same way as we've been a bit wary about really hot foods, where chilies are coming from, whereas other cultures have been just saying, bring it on, give us as much of that as you've got. 

And I think it's great because actually a lot of these plants grow beautifully in this country. So it's great that we are diversifying our taste a little bit. And, you know, part of that is fashion. You think, Oh, I ought to like that. So you make an effort. But actually it ends up like the beer, you do actually enjoy it. 

So why not? you know, open up your mind and your taste buds and learn to relish the more unusual flavors.

[00:15:26] Professor Tim Spector: And while you're on spices and chilies, the other thing to look for going down the grocery aisle is, so we talked about color. We talked about shape. We've talked about if you can, you know, it's going to be bitter, but often the small growing tips, the tips of the leaves or the roots of the plant have the most concentrated flavors, which is also telling you how the most concentrated chemicals, and that's where they make the herbs and the spices from.

[00:15:56] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: That's because the tips of the plants are trying to ward off against nibbling flying insects and the roots of the plants are trying to ward off against nibbling grubs and things that live in the earth. 

[00:16:07] Jonathan Wolf: There's something very extraordinary. The plants are making all of this stuff to protect themselves from things that are eating them.

And funnily enough, we eat them and they turn out to be good for us. So there's something sort of rather magical about that. 

[00:16:20] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: I'd love Tim to explore that with us a tiny bit because I feel the same. I mean, if essentially these plants are making poisons to probably not to kill, but to at least to ward off the flies and the bugs and the grubs in the roots, how do they end up being so good for us if the natural reaction from the predators is yuk.

[00:16:41] Professor Tim Spector: Well, there's a number of theories, one is this whole idea of hormesis, which is a little bit of poison does you good.

So, you know, it's a bit like Jonathan, if I told you to go jogging for sort of half an hour a day, that would be poison for you. But you know, a little bit of it might do you good, well, you'd probably kill me first though. But, so that's one idea. 

The other is, I think we're changing our views because it's actually not us that eat the polyphenols. It's not the human that digests it. We've got these trillions of microbes that are actually ingesting the polyphenols and converting them into other, safer chemicals for us. So I think it's, that is a really interesting… they're the middlemen. 

[00:17:25] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: There were things I just couldn't eat as a kid, partly because of texture, but also flavor.

But I thought tomatoes were sour and uninteresting and the mushrooms were slimy and tasted weird. Now they are two of my favorite foods. That's partly because I saw that cool chefs who I admired were doing good things with them. So I better get with the program and start liking them. But you can actually change your tastes, literally, and start enjoying things that you didn't use to enjoy.

[00:17:52] Professor Tim Spector: I couldn't eat beetroot for 40 years. It was really interesting. And I now love it. Absolutely. You know, so it's absolutely right. And sometimes, yeah, I think school meals have got a lot to do with it. You know, those early years can be really quite crucial and push you down the wrong route if you're not careful.

[00:18:07] Jonathan Wolf: I'd love to move on because I think we've had brilliant exposition from both of you about why plants are so good for us. But I think there's a misunderstanding, you know, for a lot of people, like how much should we be eating? And there's this famous saying that I remember as a kid, an apple a day keeps the doctor away.

And our team did some research for the show. And apparently only 10% of American adults meet the U.S. daily recommendation for fruits and vegetables in their diet. 

The U.K. is a little better. but still only one in three meet the U.K. guideline, which suggests you should be eating five fruits and vegetables a day.

So there's this huge mismatch between even the current guidelines. Never mind, I think what Tim you might be talking about. Could you help us to understand, you talked about like an individual plant can have this benefit, like how big a role overall should plants be playing in our diets. And where does this number 30 come from?

[00:19:04] Professor Tim Spector: So the first thing to be clear on, which isn't clear on all the guidelines, particularly the U.K. ones is what constitutes a plant. You know, most people just think of them as fruits and veg, and that's where the U.K. and many other countries, five a day comes from. Where at least one can be orange juice, which is ridiculous to have that as a core health outcome.

And really, we're forgetting that nuts and seeds and herbs and spices are very much part of that mix. And that's where a lot of these outdated guidelines have gone very wrong because it's much broader than people think. 

So when you're talking about five a day of which one is a drink, you've only got four to have, which can accompany your steak.

You know, a few little accoutrements around there and you think you've done it. Whereas the whole point is to make plants the center of the meal and actually have the fish and the meat as, you know, optional side plates. 

[00:20:16] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: So interesting that. I mean, from a chef's point of view, we traditionally have, and a lot of us still do, including myself from time to time, we get very, very excited about animal protein, about meat and fish, and we make a massive fuss of it.

We obsess over how we're going to marinate it or get the skin crispy or get the crackling. And once you've obsessed over those ingredients, you haven't got a lot of time left to think about the plant or the veg, which does then become the bit on the side. So we have to recognize that they're slightly tyrannical ingredients, meat and fish.

I'm still an omnivore. I enjoy them both, but we've got to just put them on one side from time to time and then focus on making plants delicious, which turns out not to be hard at all. 

Not least because from the plant kingdom, you've got the greatest variety of textures and flavors and aromas far greater than you could ever get from the world of animal protein.

I mean, a pork chop is different from a chicken drumstick, but it's not nearly as different as a walnut and a peach, or a leek and a strawberry. You know, these plants are really different from each other. And from the point of view of flavor and just being excited in the kitchen, we've got to remind ourselves of that often.

And that's why a great variety of plant ingredients coming into the kitchen is exciting. We shouldn't see it as just, this is what we all should be doing now for our health. It's what we ought to want to do because it brings so much flavor and excitement into the kitchen and onto our plates.

[00:21:49] Jonathan Wolf: So Tim, I think you've done a brilliant job of explaining why plants have this health benefit and that different plants have these different polyphenols and different fibers, so we can't just eat one. 

But why couldn't I still just have a large piece of fish or meat in the center of the plate and just very little bits of 10 different plants spread around the edge.

[00:22:13] Professor Tim Spector: Well, that would certainly be better than not having any veg around the edge. Let's be clear. It isn't a binary thing. This is something we know that if you have too much meat, particularly red meat in very large quantities, the epidemiology suggests that starts to become bad for your health, even if it's good quality.

If it's poor quality, you don't need very much at all for it to be bad all the time. Just by leaving little places that are on your plate for the plants, you're not really going to get enough total fiber in your diet. 

And we know that total fiber is very important. The magic figure is for every five grams of fiber, you're going to reduce your overall risk of mortality by about 14%.

[00:23:02] Jonathan Wolf: When you say reduce your chance of mortality for regular people listening, that's just reduce your chance of dying by 14%. 

[00:23:09] Professor Tim Spector: Correct. Yes. So you reduce your risk of dying by around a sixth, just by five grams of fiber. 

And that just to put into context, the average U.S. person has about 15 grams of fiber. So just increasing with 15 grams to 20 grams will give you this improvement in your lifespan. 

[00:23:32] Jonathan Wolf: In that case, I'd love to come on to this 30 plants a week, right? We've put it in the title of the podcast. Hugh put it in the title of his book. It's clearly a big deal. Where does this number 30 come from?

[00:23:45] Professor Tim Spector: Well, surprisingly, there aren't many studies on it because nobody thought to actually ask people in a week, how many different types of plants you eat. 

They used to be all lumped together. You just said, well, you just have your greens and how much fruit, how much vegetable, usually combined. So no one really cared because they didn't think it was important.

So it was the combination of the American gut study with the British gut study that came together. I was a part of the British section, a combination around 11,000 people and a subset of those, a few thousand of them, recorded diligently everything they were eating over a week. And we compared that to their gut health profiles.

And we showed that the people with the healthiest gut microbes, which we defined by diversity, different types of species, were eating the most variety of plants. And this came out at around 30. It's an approximate number because we couldn't tell the difference between 28 or 32, whatever, but it gives you a rough idea of the importance of it.

It was definitely… there were gradations of it. What I found surprising in this study was that vegans and vegetarians didn't come out as having any healthier gut microbes than omnivores, people who eat meat and fish, who also ate a wide variety of plants. I think that's a really important message that we've been driven down this path of, you know, subdividing of people into these groups.

Whereas, actually, we'd forgotten that the common denominator for health is not necessarily what not you're not eating, what you're avoiding, but actually what you're including in your diet. And I think this, this to me is the real message from those studies. 

And that work inspired us to do this randomized control trial, which we've called the Biome study because we're looking at the outcomes on the microbiome of using a prebiotic blend of over 30 different plants all put together. 

So we're interested in what happens when you give people mainly a blend of freeze-dried plants in reasonably large amounts to produce over five grams of fiber but with this variety.

And so over six weeks, that's what we gave these volunteers, around 350 volunteers divided into these three groups. One with this pre-biotic blend, the other were taking really croutons, which were sort of ground up to be roughly similar. And the third group was a probiotic group that were taking a well-known probiotic that has been shown to be effective in a number of diseases.

So we had these three groups and over six weeks, the main outcome was the change in the microbiome we were looking at. And it turned out that the prebiotic blend, even the probiotic active other arm, in terms of its improvement on the gut microbiome. 

So we saw big changes in the good gut microbes that have been associated with good cardiometabolic health and reductions in those microbes that have been shown to be related to poor health and poor diets.

So we also showed improvements in mood and energy and reduction in hunger and a number of other parameters. So it was really exciting to see how we sort of take this epidemiological concept, which is just based on observational data and then do a randomized control trial that had such convincing results.

And I think that really cemented the idea that we're talking about the right ballpark. This 30, you know, it may have been plucked out of the ether somewhat, but as well as the public loving it and it's being achievable, as Hugh said, for many people. We're going to discuss a bit more how to achieve that, but it's not that hard a goal.

Many people are already doing it. And now we now have a randomized controlled trial to say that diversity of plants put together have a very rapid effect on transforming many people's gut microbes. 

[00:28:44] Jonathan Wolf: And Hugh, how does it feel eating 30 plants a week? Because I think of you as someone who really was this driver of getting back more to the natural environment, but someone who I think of as being a bit like me, I grew up in an environment where, as you said, a piece of protein, like meat or a piece of fish is the center of the plate, and these other things go around it. 

[00:29:09] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: There's definitely been an evolution. I mean, I grew up in a household that put meat in the middle of the plate in a fairly traditional way. But also actually one where my mom and dad, both still with us, I'm delighted to say, but they moved out of London in the early seventies and rented a farmhouse in the country.

And they inherited a veg garden that they didn't really know much about what to do with it. But the day we arrived it was middle of the summer and there were peas on the vines and there were carrots in the ground. 

The people who'd rented the farmhouse before us were enthusiastic growers. They'd I don't know, found their dream house and moved out, but we inherited a veg patch. And we learned so much from that. And it changed the way we ate as a family. 

The thing that really changed for me was when about 10 years ago, I became vegetarian for a short period, not because I was thinking of giving up meat and fish forever, but with a specific goal of taking these, as discussed, slightly tyrannical ingredients out of the way, so I could become just a better cook of vegetable and plant ingredients.

And that was quite transformative, and very quickly we start to draw from other cultures that have enjoyed cooking with plants in a sort of freer and more focused way than perhaps we have historically. 

And River Cottage has taken a similar direction. You know, at the Cookery School now, we still do courses on how to make salamis and cheeses, but one of our most popular courses is called Much More Veg Course.

And another one is our Fermentation Days which are almost all about fermenting fruit and vegetables. And this is a direction of travel that's really good for everybody. And it's not just about doing what's good for you. It's about what's exciting in the kitchen because there are so many flavors to draw down on once you really get enthusiastic about it.

[00:30:59] Professor Tim Spector: I had a similar experience when I got into plants,  you know, after my sort of medical incident. But I gave up meat in order to change. And I just wonder whether you think even if you did it for a short time, for most people, it's a fairly crucial thing that, you know, it's hard to do that while you're still eating, have meat as your, as your sort of concept of a meal.

[00:31:26] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: I don't think you need to give up meat and fish. I mean, it was series seven or eight of River Cottage so we needed a big idea. So I was like, what if Hugh goes veggie for a bit. But you know, I did it. So maybe you could say I did it so that you don't have to.

What you do have to do is give up having them every single day, because being able to put together plants-only meals, I think is really important for omnivores as well as people who choose a vegan or vegetarian approach. We do not need meat and fish on our plates every single day. 

[00:31:57] Jonathan Wolf: And Hugh, is that almost your first tip to say it's okay to have a dinner that doesn't have any meat in it. And that suddenly opens things up. 

[00:32:06] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Yeah, not just okay, but important to do that pretty regularly and to feel comfortable with ingredients in your kitchen. That you can make delicious meals that your family is going to enjoy without putting meat and fish in them all the time. 

And I think that there's a whole bunch of ingredients that are really useful for doing that. I always have lots of tins of different pulses in my store cupboard, not baked beans in tomato sauce, but different types of white bean, black bean, chickpeas, lentils.

I have dried versions as well, particularly lentils because they cook so quickly. But you want things to be easy, and cracking open a tin of beans and adding them to a big stew with lots of other lovely flavors, tomatoes, chilies,  spices and herbs, add a depth of flavor to a lot of these dishes that make them really very, very enjoyable.

So yeah, feeling comfortable that you can put together a meal fast, that's going to be tasty, that your family are going to enjoy and not panicking because you haven't put meat and fish on the table. That's really important. 

[00:33:07] Jonathan Wolf: So Hugh, imagine somebody's listening to this and there'll be a lot of people listening to this saying, okay, I'm completely sold by Tim's idea about the health benefit.

I quite like the idea of not dying or dying a lot later. So apparently if I add more of these plants I can get there, but I don't know where to begin. 

[00:33:27] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Well, the first thing is don't worry that we're sending you off to buy lots of expensive obscure plant ingredients that you haven't heard of, don't know what to do with, and might not like.

The first thing is to remind yourself that there are many, many, dozens, maybe over a hundred, plants that actually you already like. You're going, really? Yes, there really, really are. 

And that's why I've done a big plant list in my book. And there's over 200 plants on the list. And with the possible exception of, I did put a couple of seaweeds there because I think it's a really interesting ingredient, but every other plant on that list, you've heard of it, I promise you, you've heard of it. 

You've heard of the spices and the herbs and all the main vegetables. You've heard of the pulses, the nuts, and the seeds. With a lot of them, you might not have put them in your cooking for quite a while, just because of the habit you're in. The first thing is to remind yourself there's lots of plants out there that you already like.

Some of them might be in your kitchen cupboard already. The thing about those store cupboard ingredients is we often think of them as standby. But actually, why not be using them every day. Why not crack open a tin of beans two or three times a week? Same with the lentils, same with the spices, same with the nuts and seeds.

Might not be a bad moment to open one of the tins that I've brought with me. 

[00:34:44] Jonathan Wolf: Hugh, will you just talk me through what you've got there?

[00:34:45] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: This is something I travel with a lot and there's nothing in here that's particularly weird or surprising.

[00:34:53] Professor Tim Spector: It's not going to jump, not going to bite me is it?

[00:34:55] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: No, it’s not going to bite you. It's just my own homemade trail mix put together with some things that I have in my cupboard most of the time.

So there's, well, what can you see there, Tim? We could count the plants. I mean, these are things that you recognize. Nothing too obscure. 

[00:35:13] Professor Tim Spector: We've got walnuts, obvious ones. We've got some dried fruits, probably, I guess they're raisins or sultanas.

[00:35:22] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Raisins and a few snipped up dried apricots as well.

[00:35:24] Professor Tim Spector: We've got some sunflower seeds. We've got…

[00:35:31] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: I'll tell you what, I’m going to shake a few things out because a few of the stuff at the bottom aren't there.

[00:35:32] Professor Tim Spector: And you got some dark chocolate, which is my, one of my favorite plants actually next to coffee. What are these ones?

[00:35:44] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Those are sunflower seeds. Those are pumpkin seeds. 

[00:35:45] Jonathan Wolf: So you've got a lot of plants in there. 

[00:35:50] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Yeah. I mean and that is a really easy thing to travel with whenever I leave home now for a day or two, I usually pack that.

[00:35:58] Professor Tim Spector: Can I try some?

[00:35:59] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Yeah, by all means. Did you go straight for the chocolate or are you having a virtuous nut before you get into the dark chocolate?  

[00:36:06] Professor Tim Spector: I have a choc and nut as well.  

[00:36:07] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Very good combination. Yeah, so that's an easy thing to travel with. And of course, much cheaper putting your own little box of trail mix together than buying something ready-made. 

Because you can buy those things in, in reasonable quantities and the, and the, the, the much cheaper than, than when you get that little packet of it all mixed together.

[00:36:24] Professor Tim Spector: So it's a bit like my diversity jar, except actually not crunched up quite as much. 

[00:36:29] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: No, I like, I quite like them in whole. The one thing here I have done, is I've actually soaked the almonds overnight and then let them dry off just a little bit. And they do swell up and that makes them less gritty and almost like eating a fresh nut.

Sometimes I do that with the walnuts too, and they really swell up. They almost double in size. And I like that sort of fresh juiciness rather than the grittiness you get with a very, very dry nut. 

Enthusiasts of eating nuts call that activating, soaking nuts overnight. Of course with some seeds, not an almond that's been taken out of its shell, but it is nice to remind people that when we take whole spices off the shelf, things like cumin seeds, coriander seeds, caraway seeds, all of which I'm a big fan of.

And I do like to keep them as whole, rather than ground spices. A lot of those spice seeds are alive. If you put them in the soil, they would germinate and grow into a coriander plant, a cumin plant, or a caraway thing. Then we could eat them as herbs, fresh herbs. 

We forget that even if they've been on the shelf sometimes for years, they are living things. To me that says something about their potential to do us good. All those polyphenols and chemicals, they're in there, in the spice seeds in order to make new life, in order to generate the next plant. 

[00:37:49] Professor Tim Spector: Well, they're mini eggs, aren't they? 

[00:37:50] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: They're mini eggs. A seed is a plant egg. That's why when you put a sprinkling of spices in, you might say, Oh, it's just a pinch, is that going to make any difference? 

Well, it's a pinch of seeds or half a teaspoon of seeds that have got a lot of power in them. And surely somewhere that's what's doing us the good in our gut microbiome when we harness that power. And of course, it adds fantastic aromatic tastes to the food that we're making.

[00:38:15] Jonathan Wolf: And so Hugh, someone's listening to this, they're feeling very motivated, but they're still like, okay, I can make the trail mix, I can believe that, but it's not actually dinner. How could they begin? 

[00:38:27] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: I've written How To Eat 30 Plants a Week. It's a cookbook, right? So, this enterprise is going to be much easier if we're ready to get into the kitchen and do a bit of cooking.

That doesn't mean the recipes are going to be long, or complicated, or difficult. But one thing I think we can all agree on, it’s much harder to get 30 plants a week into your diet and to eat healthily. Generally, if you're not cooking at all, if you're totally dependent on food made by the food industry for you, you're going to struggle.

That's not to say you can't get some decent food in, but it's probably going to cost you more. If you can get into your kitchen and put some simple recipes together, it's going to be easier. What I invite people to do is to just do some of the things that you probably think about doing to meat and fish.

So roast them, you know, get a big tray of different veg into the oven and roast it. That will caramelize the edges, it will concentrate the flavors. If you put a little bit of spice in that roasting tray too, you're going to get lots of lovely aromatics going. So I've got quite a few recipes in the book for roasted vegetables.

Also even for barbecued veg. I mean, it's still summer. Let's get some things like courgettes, green onions, maybe even small beetroots, onto the barbecue. Those lovely baby gem lettuces. Who'd have thought you could barbecue a lettuce? But because it's got such a tightly packed heart, something like a baby gem lettuce or a head of chicory, cut it in half or quarters and put those on the barbecue.

If it's raining outside, do it inside with a ridged griddle pan or even just a heavy-based frying pan. You don't even need any oil in the pan or on the veg. Just that seared high heat to char the vegetables makes them really, really delicious to eat. 

[00:40:13] Professor Tim Spector: I love garlic as well. When you roast garlic and you squidge it out at the end.

[00:40:15] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: That's absolutely right. Whole bulbs or maybe half bulbs of garlic with a little bit of olive oil, roasted. You could roast all the alliums. You could roast all the brassicas from whole brussel sprouts to wedges of cabbage or whole florets of broccoli or cauliflower. They roast brilliantly, or you can pan-fry them very quickly to char them and get some crispy edges.

So these are the fun things you can do. We like something a bit saucy with the food that we eat. So the way to sauce your veg, whether you've grilled it, charred it, barbecued it, roasted or whatever, is with something like a nice creamy hummus. 

And rather than just putting chickpeas in tahini and olive oil, I often put two pulses, so I put chickpeas and butter beans and two types of oil as well as tahini, a spoonful of peanut butter. So you've already got six plants in your hummus where you might have only had two or three before. Or to dress them with something like a pesto. 

The two things I almost never put in a pesto, are pine nuts and basil. I might put a bit of basil in if I've got some in the garden, but many other leaves and many other nuts and seeds.

So parsley is a good one. Nasturtium flowers and leaves chopped up can go in a pesto, pea shoots are great in a pesto and even carrot tops. Carrot tops are brilliant. There are lots of things. And from a nut or seed point of view, rather than quite expensive pine nuts, I'm more likely to use cheaper pumpkin seeds or nuts like walnuts, cashew. And again, two or three of them. 

Just picking the herbs from my garden recently. The seven-plant pesto I have in the book was suddenly a 15-plant pesto. And my head chef said it was the best pesto he'd ever tasted. So there you go. 

[00:42:03] Jonathan Wolf: I think that conversation tees up actually a bunch of practical questions we had from our listeners about hitting the weekly 30 and maybe we could try and run through them, you know, quite fast.

[00:42:15] So, Tim, the first one is how much is a portion, because some of those things that Hugh was talking about did sound like quite small amounts, right? As you're describing your 15-plant pesto.

[00:42:26] Professor Tim Spector: Well, there isn't a standard rule because it slightly depends on the density of the plant you're putting in.

In general, a portion will be a cup full for the average sort of fruit and veg. But then once you get to herbs, if it's parsley, you might just, it'd be a pinch or sort of dollop of it. And then when you get down to spices, we're talking about a heaped teaspoon. 

[00:42:53] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: And that could be a cumulative over the week.

We want our food to continue tasting great. So what I've been saying generally about quantities and portions, Tim, and you know, put me right if you think I've got this wrong, but continue to cook in the proportions that make sense for the best flavors you're going to eat in. But err on the side of generosity with all the big leafy veg.

 And be maybe a bit more generous than you're used to with the herbs, because I think we've been a bit tentative just putting a pinch of herbs in, if you could put a handful of herbs in. That's why I think it's great to put things like fresh parsley in a salad where you're actually eating the leaf rather than just a dusting of finely chopped parsley on some other veg.

Be generous with herbs, especially if you grow them yourself, you've got them there, crazy not to use them. Be generous with spices, but not to the point where they're an overpowering addition, but making it taste weirdly just of one spice. 

But I think one of the things about cooking with spices, we tend to only reach for the spices if we're making a curry or cooking a recipe from a book, which says add this spice. I would say, bring your spices where you can see them and season with them much more freely. 

A really generous sprinkling of caraway seeds is actually a delicious way just to finish off some steamed buttered cabbage and you're adding an extra really great plant ingredient, but creating a fabulous taste as well.

[00:44:11] Jonathan Wolf: My personal story on this is I have a five-year-old. She's not the most adventurous about food. It is a constant battle with her parents. But interestingly, she's very happy to have sumac on her avocado toast because red, it's cool. It's not a very strong taste. But interestingly, like mommy and daddy have it and she's convinced that she's lucky to get it and she loves it.

[00:44:36] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Funnily enough, strong flavors, actually not all of them, but some of them really get kids excited. And garlic is another really good example. 

And kids who are reluctant to eat their greens, one of my tips has always been, make a little bit of garlic butter, just bash a clove of garlic, sizzle it gently in a bit of butter, just so the butter's flavored with garlic, and then toss the steamed carrots or the peas or the green beans with that, and that suddenly creates a little flavor edge.

It isn't going to work for every kid, but for some of them, it's catnip. It really works. 

[00:45:07] Jonathan Wolf: Brilliant. I'd like to ask another question from our listeners. Does a different color mean that it counts as a different plant? And a particular example was, if I have a purple carrot and an orange carrot, does that mean it's two plants?

[00:45:22] Professor Tim Spector: In my book, yes. I mean, there are no hard rules on this. And until someone actually does the physical, randomized trial of different carrots, we won't know for sure. 

[00:45:32] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: There's got to be something different in a purple carrot that you haven't got in an orange one, right? 

[00:45:36] Professor Tim Spector: Well, we do know that there are 10 times more polyphenols in a purple carrot, compared to an orange one.

So, the chemical composition is different. There's many more of them. There are probably some things in the orange carrot that aren't in the purple one, and therefore you're getting the benefit of some extra chemicals that will feed off a different group of microbes. 

[00:46:00] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: I'd add to that that, you know, Obviously, if you eat the leaves of your beetroot, that is definitely a different plant from the roots of your beetroot.

Maybe even because my son at the moment is just chewing up all the pea pods after we've eaten the peas. He picks up the pods because they're so sweet. They're a bit fibrous, so he doesn't swallow it. Then he chews and chews and chews until he's got this wad of fiber, which probably would do him some good if he swallowed it, but he doesn't.

At that point he spits it out. But I'm guessing just in chewing and enjoying the juices of that pea pod, he's probably swallowed down a few polyphenols that he wouldn't have got just with the peas on their own. 

[00:46:35] Professor Tim Spector: Yeah. So go for it. you know, I think being adventurous is the key here. We're not trying to put people off new colors and tastes and shapes. Absolutely go for it. 

[00:46:45] Jonathan Wolf: And I have a number more questions, and I know we're taking so long, so I'm going to try and keep you tight on these now. Are frozen or dried plants as nutritious as fresh plants? 

[00:46:54] Professor Tim Spector: In general, yes. A few exceptions, but the vast majority are, and sometimes for things like frozen peas can actually be more nutritious than the fresh equivalent.

[00:47:07] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Makes perfect sense from a cook's point of view. I mean, I do say to people, unless you're actually growing peas yourself and you can pod them and eat them within an hour or two of picking them, you should really get frozen because the sweetness, the natural sugar reverts to starch pretty quickly. They don't taste so great. So you probably won't eat as many. 

I mean, the freezer and the store cupboard are brilliant sources of inexpensive ingredients that can really help us do this. It's not about going crazy on elaborate, expensive, unusual, fresh produce. 

[00:47:40] Professor Tim Spector: When we say fresh, it's often been hanging around for days or weeks, whereas you generally know if it's canned or it's frozen, it's much faster.

[00:47:51] Jonathan Wolf: Do cooking methods matter? 

[00:47:53] Professor Tim Spector: Yes. They do. You can boil up all the goodness out of food and that's been a problem in American and British cuisine. Boiling up things like cabbage so there's nothing really left at the end of it unless you're having it as soup and you're drinking all the water.

[00:48:11] Jonathan Wolf: So there's a brilliant follow-up; do soups count was a popular question. 

[00:48:17] Professor Tim Spector: Absolutely. 

[00:48:18] Jonathan Wolf: You were just describing before boiling it all away. 

[00:48:21] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: What's the good stuff is still in the soup, isn't it? There's a whole chapter on soups in, in my book, how to eat 30 plants a week, because they are such a good receptacle for so many different vegetables and for bouncing off different textures and flavors. 

One of my soups is called the Super 6 Standby Supper Soup because I'm betting that everyone's got the ingredients to make a version of that soup in their kitchens right now. Handful of frozen peas or sweet corn, an onion if you've got one lying around, a tin of beans, and any other leftover veg, greens, salad, or whatever you might have, chop it up and add it to the soup.

[00:48:56] Professor Tim Spector: That's what I do when I'm just about going on holiday and my fridge is still half full of veg. Just cut it, chop it all up, fry it up or stick it in the oven and then blend it up and I've got a soup. So I think you can really make vegetable soup from any vegetables really, once you get the knack of knowing what the end one, one tastes like and they're super nutritious.

So soup is generally, really fantastically healthy. 

[00:49:21] Jonathan Wolf: What's special about mushrooms? 

[00:49:24] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: You want a short answer on that one? Good luck. 

[00:49:28] Jonathan Wolf: Well, we did do a whole podcast on mushrooms.  

[00:49:31] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Well, there you go. I mean, I heard it and it was absolutely brilliant. So I refer you to my previous answers, is what I  expect Tim to say on that.

[00:49:35] Professor Tim Spector: We did do a big. podcast on this, if anyone wants to go dive deep. The key is that mushrooms have a completely different structure to other plants. 

They're closer to animals than they are actually plants. They have this chitin layer, which is very hard structure, and they are full of nutrients and fiber that you don't get in other traditional plants. 

So they come in a whole range of different flavors, sizes and shapes, each of them very different to each other. And we're finding out more and more, they have great health-enhancing properties. So we need to be all eating many more mushrooms and really there's nothing I can say against them.

We just need to have more of them. I absolutely love them. And I think we're going to be using them in medicine very soon. 

[00:50:27] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Super interesting to me that you say that mushrooms are a bit more like meat because from a chef's point of view, they're a really good way of developing the umami flavors, those nice savory notes that we get from meat. But they're sometimes a little harder to get into plant-based dishes 

So frying up a bunch of mushrooms, particularly with alliums like garlic and onions as well. You get this incredible combination where things do end up tasting quite meaty. 

So there's a vegan gravy in my book that's really based largely around mushrooms and alliums to get that depth of flavor. 

[00:50:58] Jonathan Wolf: Do you know someone who keeps saying they want to improve their diet or someone who could benefit from eating more plants but doesn't know where to begin?

Why not share this episode with them right now and empower them to feel inspired by the food they eat? I'm sure they'll thank you.

Does organic matter? 

[00:51:18] Professor Tim Spector: That's another podcast we could talk about. But the quick answer is yes, it does, but it depends. I think it's more important if you're, trying to eat on a budget to eat more fruit and veg than eat less because you only want to eat organic.

So I think that's the key message. If you've got the means to buy all your fruit and veg organic, go for it because of the pesticides and herbicides that you don't want.

But in general, I don't want to put people off eating fruit and veg. Health wise you get much more benefit from eating fruit and veg than avoiding pesticides is my view. 

[00:52:03] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Yeah, I wouldn't argue with that. I mean, I'm a real champion of the organic movement and we're lucky to have an organic farm at River Cottage and I grow fruit and vegetables organically at home, but you've got to get some veg and fruit inside you. 

[00:52:17] Jonathan Wolf: I have a couple of final questions that the listeners definitely won't let us finish without.

[00:52:23] I'd like to ask about breakfast. And actually the number one question was, so what do both of you eat for breakfast? 

[00:52:33] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: I think breakfast is a really great opportunity to eat a bunch of plants. We have to be a little bit careful because the plants we tend to gravitate towards for breakfast traditionally are cereals, often in a very processed form, which isn't great.

But even in unprocessed form, they can be quite carby in things like oats and porridge. It's not a bad way to start the day if you're looking for a bit of energy. 

I've always enjoyed eating fruit for breakfast, especially the apples and things that I grow at home. And at the moment, strawberries and raspberries and berries are such a wonderful treat.

But what I have learned, not least from Tim, is that actually it's great to combine them with things like nuts and seeds which have some natural fats and oils And some extra fiber literally sometimes in the same mouthful.

So I'll often pop a walnut and a chunk of apple in, a lovely flavor combination in the mouth and then that, and perhaps Tim can tell me whether I've got this right, it's going to be something I digest a little bit more slowly and draw the beneficial nutrients from a bit better if I eat the two together than if I ate the apple completely on its own.

So fruit and nuts is a great way to start the day, I think. Or, you know, toast and a nut butter. then you might get once in a while on something a bit more proteinaceous. And I like poached eggs on a little bit of toast, maybe with some of that seven-plant pesto, or kimchi is really good with the poached egg because you get the creaminess of the egg and the spiciness of the kimchi or a spicy kraut.

[00:54:01] Jonathan Wolf: It's starting to sound quite yummy. Tim, can you out-compete Hugh the chef's breakfast? 

[00:54:07] Professor Tim Spector: No, no way of possibly doing that. 

[00:54:11] Jonathan Wolf: You haven't got a 15-variety pesto you knock up just before you have your breakfast each morning? 

[00:54:15] Professor Tim Spector: Most people know my breakfast, my go to breakfast. I do have some berries and nuts in there, but I like to mix it with a sort of silky, dairy mix of full-fat yogurt and kefir, which just seems to always do the trick and really fills me up, so I'm not at all hungry till lunchtime.

And I have my mix, my diversity jar where I'm putting in about 10 nuts and seeds on top of that. So I've got about 12 plants already ticked off by the time I've finished breakfast. 

I found increasingly, I'm trying to diversify my breakfast because I think, even if it’s healthy, you can get into a rut. And so rice, sourdough with mashed peas, and then sprinkling my sort of diverse things on top of that. 

And at weekends, I really love a shakshuka, where I've often got leftover tomatoes and peppers in the fridge and you grill them all up and stick an egg on top of it. And it's a great way to get, you know, plants in early on. And it's absolutely delicious with lots of spice. 

[00:55:30] Jonathan Wolf: That also sounds delicious. And Hugh, I think it tees us up for the last question, is there a recipe that you'd like to share with all of us? 

[00:55:40] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: I've mentioned the seven-plant pesto and I've mentioned charred vegetables with something like a gribiche or the pesto.

There's a lovely recipe that is a wonderful catch-all for lots of delicious things, some from the store cupboard, some fresh from the garden. And that's a caponata, which is a lovely Italian dish, sweet and sour. 

It's usually got aubergines and tomatoes in. I would always add courgettes, zucchinis, and as well as the eggplant and zucchini/aubergine/courgette, you can add lots of lovely store cupboard things like capers and olives, classic and instead of using a bit of sugar, which traditionally might have gone in to get that sweet sour thing going because there's going to be vinegar in there, I would use a natural sweetness like dried apricots chopped up going straight into the caponata. 

And then I would probably cheat in something that isn't necessarily traditional, but I would definitely whack in a tin of big fat butter beans or chickpeas just to make it more substantial and feasty. So you've got a dozen plants there once you've spiced it up and seasoned it.

And easy to add some of those things we talked about, a handful of frozen peas from the freezer or any nice greens from the garden that you've got going, just fold them in at the end and they'll only make it more delicious and better for you. 

[00:57:00] Jonathan Wolf: Sounds delicious. I think that probably everybody listening to this has come away feeling rather inspired by the possibility.

Before we wrap up, you have still got a second secret tin that I think I would love to know what's in it before we wrap up the episode. 

[00:57:16] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: I have Jonathan, and you know, I jumped on the train with some goodies from my store cupboard, but at this time of year when I travel, I often raid the garden as well. Or the fridge, but this time there's so much going on in the garden. 

So I'm just unscrewing the top of my tin and I'll just put these out on the table. These are the fruits of the garden just now. It's a slightly random combination. The thing I thought you'd enjoy the most, because they were only picked a few hours ago. And I think we'll get a little sound effect here. These are some pods of peas. I think you'll get that.

[00:57:51] Jonathan Wolf: That is a fantastic noise. 

[00:57:52] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: That is the sound that turned me onto fresh vegetables. It's the sound I mentioned earlier that day when we moved out of London and arrived in the country and there was a vegetable garden miraculously already in the house we were renting. 

And we went and picked these, I didn't even know that peas grew in pods probably until that day.

[00:58:08] Professor Tim Spector: They’re so sweet.

[00:58:09] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Aren't they incredible?  

[00:58:10] Jonathan Wolf: And Hugh, can I just say, because there is a spectacular smell when I've just popped it as well. That is not at all like the smell you get when you take your frozen peas out of the freezer, as well as this wonderful noise.

My daughter would be completely shocked that peas don't just come out of the freezer. Tim, what do you think? 

[00:58:27] Professor Tim Spector: Delicious. 

[00:58:28] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Pretty special. And I have to say, however many peas I grow, and I've got four or five rows in the garden at the moment, more or less at the peak of the harvest, half of them don't make it to the kitchen.

[00:58:41] They get eaten by the kids in the garden. And even if they do make it to the kitchen, they don't get cooked very often. And this thing of a raw pea straight from the pod, you cannot buy that because if you buy them and they've been in the shops for a couple of days, they just don't taste the same.

[00:58:56] Jonathan Wolf: I would have to say, they're incredibly sweet. So, really surprising. They're halfway to fruit, aren't they, in terms of the experience? 

[00:59:05] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: And this is a whole way to a fruit. These are literally my first two ripe tomatoes of the season, and I've got one for each of you. My wife's had one. I haven't had one myself yet.

[00:59:17] Jonathan Wolf: I feel bad now, Hugh. Would you like to share? It's quite a small tomato. 

[00:59:22] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: No, I want you to have it because when I get home this evening, there'll probably be another ripe one. 

[00:59:25] Jonathan Wolf: That's fair enough. 

[00:59:28] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: I'll have a gooseberry instead. 

[00:59:30] Jonathan Wolf: It's so good. 

[00:59:32] Professor Tim Spector: Again, when you think of them as a fruit, it does make more sense. Tomatoes, which is what they are. 

[00:59:38] Jonathan Wolf: And again, you eat that and it's really fresh. There's just a complexity of flavor and taste, which is so much more than you get from the…

[00:59:48] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: From a steak. 

[00:59:49] Jonathan Wolf: From a steak, or even from a tomato that you get normally that's been sitting in the…

[00:59:32] Professor Tim Spector: A supermarket tomato that's been made under tunnels.

[00:59:55] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: When I eat foods like this raw, that's when you have the most extraordinary sensation. And because of the conversations I've had with Tim, I get something extra when I taste these now. I get all the excitement of the flavor. 

But as I feel like even the little pip of the gooseberry or the skin of the tomato or whatever it is, I just know, at some almost unconscious level, I'm thinking about the goodness of it as well as the flavor of it, and that in that thing, there are so many amazing things that I don't really know how to describe them; polyphenols, micronutrients or whatever. 

But as well as that explosion of flavors, I'm getting an explosion of good things that are going to keep me well and look after my gut microbiome. That's why I'm eating 30 plants a week. 

[01:00:40] Jonathan Wolf: Hugh it was incredibly motivating to hear you talk.  I'd like to just quickly wrap up on what we've, we've covered today. 

So I think we started by saying plants are not just fruit and vegetables. They are nuts and seeds and herbs and spices, everything that comes from a plant. So it's more achievable to get 30 in a week than you might think. 

They matter because they have this profound impact on your health. Tim, I think you said that for every five grams of fiber that you add, you can reduce your risk of dying by 14%. And that, that's huge. I know from all these different podcasts that we've, we've done over the last few years.

The other reason why plants really matter in addition to the fibers is polyphenols. And you described, how can I figure out if a plant has polyphenols where you said color is a giveaway shape. 

So these loose outer leaves have more polyphenols and Hugh was talking about trying to eat more of the outside. Whereas historically we tended to throw all of that away and focus on sort of the white inner. 

The tips and the roots have the most polyphenols because they're sort of protection for the plant. And so herbs and spices are really, really heavy. And we've done a podcast on that in the past. 

And bitter is another way to tell about the polyphenols and that can be a kick. And Hugh was teaching me not to be as scared of this as maybe I have been. 

Why 30? Well, there is some really interesting science and Tim talked about a brand new study he is one of the investigators with,  about you know, proving that sort of 30 plants rather than just one plant is more effective.

But the key reason that you're explaining is we have all these different microbes inside us. And so different microbes like different plants. So it's much better to have 30 with all of that complexity and variety. It's a bit like being in the zoo, all the different animals need different food.

You've got this zoo inside you. This is how I explain it to my daughter always. So, which she really likes and gets. It's like, oh, I need to eat these different plants for them. 

And then we talked about how can you really do this? And I think the big message, I think here was you don't need to be a vegan or a vegetarian. But you do need to embrace the idea that I'm going to have a dinner that doesn't have meat or fish in it so that I can really go for something which has got many more plants in it. 

And there's lots of ways that you can do this. And I won't go through all of this, but you talked about tins of beans, all these sorts of things in your cupboard, trying to roast or barbecue your vegetables.

We talked about for kids, you know, what about adding garlic and butter onto the veg? It just makes the whole thing taste so much nicer. So they're willing to go for it. 

And then we wrapped up talking about what you actually have for breakfast. And Hugh, you said your normal go-to is actually just something very simple, your own apples and walnuts, but with a bit more time, you give us this beautiful picture of the poached eggs on toast with kimchi or your own pesto.

And Tim, you shared your famous regular breakfast, berries and nuts, you know, dairy, full-fat yogurt and kefir with this sort of assortment of nuts and seeds on top to really drive as many parts as possible. All of which I think sounds very achievable. 

[01:03:44] Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: For sure. I would just add to that, don't worry that it's going to be difficult or a stretch.

[01:03:49] And think first about all the lovely plants that you already like, maybe quite a lot of which you just haven't bought for a while. So get out there, remind yourself what's tasty and get cooking more plants. 

[01:04:00] Jonathan Wolf: Hugh and Tim, thank you very much. 

[01:04:03] Professor Tim Spector: Pleasure. 

[01:04:04] Jonathan Wolf: I really enjoyed having Hugh and Tim on the podcast today, and I hope you learned something new.

Now, my biggest takeaway is that eating 30 plants a week isn't just essential to our health. With the right inspiration, it can also be fun, simple and creative. Now, if you listen to the show regularly, you probably 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 hopefully 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 smarter food choices. Combining our world-leading science with your ZOE test results, ZOE is your daily companion to better health for life.

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Will you give ZOE a try? The first step is easy. Take our free quiz to find out what ZOE membership could do for you. Simply go to zoe.com/podcast to find out more. Where as a podcast listener, you'll get 10% off. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolf. ZOE Science and Nutrition is produced by Julie Pinero, Sam Durham, and Richard Willan.

The ZOE Science and Nutrition podcast is not medical advice. And if you have any medical concerns, please consult your doctor. See you next time.