8 ways to eat better in 2026 with Prof. Tim Spector and Prof. Sarah Berry

What if small changes to how you eat could help you feel more energetic, less hungry, and more in control of your health?

You’ll hear simple tips you can try at home, like how to build a balanced breakfast, add more plants to your meals, and choose small habits that are easier to stick to over time.

What is one easy change you could try this week to feel a little better?

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Transcript

Jonathan: Many of us plan to improve our health this year, and this almost always means a focus on how to eat better. Today I’m joined by two of ZOE’s top scientists to help us find clarity. And by the end of this episode, you’ll have eight science-backed principles to guide you towards your healthiest diet in 2026.

Sarah: People want to cut their calories ’cause they want that rapid weight loss. And many people will embark on New Year’s diets and yes, they will see weight loss, but you are just likely to put that weight back on. We know that you can just focus on the quality of the food, not calorie count at all, and you can still lose weight.

Jonathan: Sarah Berry is a world leader in large-scale human nutritional studies and Chief Scientist at ZOE.

Sarah: A lot of people are focusing on meat sources of protein, but we know that processed red meat is associated with significant increases in many chronic diseases. You can get all of the protein that you need as long as you are having a diversity of plant-based proteins,

Tim: And we now know that the most important part of gut health is the diversity of plants, seeds, nuts, and spices that you are getting in your diet.

Jonathan: Tim Spector is one of the world’s top 100 most cited scientists, a world expert on gut health, and ZOE scientific co-founder.

Tim: We know that fermented foods are a healthy force. We asked 9,000 people to take them for a couple of weeks. Within a few days, they noticed improvements in their mood, their energy, because it reduces inflammation levels.

Jonathan: If you were gonna describe the top fermented foods, what would they be?

Jonathan: Sarah, thank you for joining me today.

Sarah: Pleasure. Great to be here so soon after Christmas as well.

Jonathan: And Tim, thank you for being here as well.

Tim: Likewise.

Jonathan: So first I have a really important question. Tim and Sarah, did Father Christmas bring you anything nice yesterday? Or have you just been too naughty this year?

Sarah: Jonathan, I’m always a good girl. Do you know what? I had about three hours of my kids not arguing.

Tim: I was far too naughty, Jonathan, as usual.

Jonathan: I got a new TV, which I was very excited about, but I lost the negotiation at home about the TV being bigger than the old TV. Who has the remote control? That’s—

Tim: The most—

Jonathan: —important.

Sarah: You are truly lucky to have us as well on Boxing Day, Jonathan,

Jonathan: I appreciate it and I think today is gonna be fun. Let’s start with our Q and A. Tim, can you live 10 more healthy years if you eat a gut healthy diet?

Tim: Absolutely.

Jonathan: Sarah, can consuming too much protein ever be bad for you?

Sarah: Yes,

Jonathan: Tim, is mindful eating just another wellness fad?

Sarah: No.

Jonathan: Sarah, is nutrition more important than exercise if you want to lose weight?

Sarah: Yes.

Jonathan: Tim, is calorie counting a great way to lose weight?

Tim: No, it’s a terrible way.

Sarah: I knew he’d say more than yes or no for that one.

Jonathan: Alright, and so finally for both of you, what’s been your favourite health myth of 2025?

Sarah: Gosh, I’ve got so many.

Sarah: I’m gonna go with seed oils are toxic. That’s my favourite myth. Seed oils are not toxic to us. They can be part of a healthy, balanced diet. And we have a whole podcast on it as well.

Tim: Intravenous vitamin infusions seems to be completely daft.

Jonathan: Well, thank you for that. I know that our listeners are keen to get clear, practical advice on how they can improve their health for good, particularly, you know, if we’re just coming to this end of this holiday season.

Jonathan: So I’m very excited to have two of the world’s leading nutrition scientists here, and I know you’ve been spending a lot of this year finalising these eight ZOE principles for how to eat in 2026. So, Sarah, look, changing habits is hard. How much difference can a change in diet really make to long-term health?

Sarah: So diet can make a huge difference. I think it’s the most powerful tool that we have to improve our health and research quite clearly shows that if you change your diet at any point in your life, you can add lots of healthy years. So we know that if you are 40, for example, and you change from the typical UK US style diet to an optimal style diet, the kind of diet that we very much support at ZOE, you can add 10 years of healthy life at 70.

Sarah: You can add six years.

Jonathan: Six years even when you’re 70.

Sarah: Absolutely. This is what the research shows quite clearly now.

Jonathan: So based on your own clinical trials, like how quickly can people expect to feel different if they make changes to their diet?

Sarah: So you can feel differently in hours just by selecting the right breakfast.

Sarah: So we know, for example, if you have a highly refined carbohydrate breakfast, so let’s say white toast or pastries, you can feel pretty rubbish sometimes in a few hours after that, you can feel quite sluggish. You have these blood sugar dips that make you feel quite, unenergetic, less alert. We know just by making sure you have a balanced breakfast, the kind of breakfast Tim has every day.

Sarah: So let’s say kind of Greek yoghurt with nuts and seeds and berries, that you can have a very balanced blood sugar response. You can stay alert, you can have more energy just in those few hours. So you’re not going on this rollercoaster throughout the day. We also know from our own research that you can start within days to generally feel more energy, better mood.

Sarah: More alert, less hungry, just by changing the kinds of foods you’re having. And then we know from the clinical trials that I’ve been running over the last 25 years, that you can start to also see improvements in clinical markers. So just changing your diet within two weeks. You can see reductions in blood cholesterol, for example, or glucose responses.

Sarah: You can see improvements in blood pressure in as little as four to six weeks. You can see improvements in your overall insulin sensitivity in as little as six weeks as well. And I think this should be really encouraging that in the here and now. You’ll feel it in this matter of, you know, just a few hours.

Sarah: But then within a few weeks you see clinical markers starting to change.

Tim: And I think up to now people haven’t listened to their body. So I think the key is understanding what’s going on and how food can affect you. And once you realise there’s this relationship to how you feel, then you can start to notice the difference.

Sarah: Yeah, and it’s blown my mind from the trials we’ve run at ZOE, our PREDICT trials, where we see people saying, I feel better just in a few days. And ultimately that’s really, really important. That’s what matters. People are feeling better, they’re more likely to continue with any dietary or lifestyle change that they’re undertaking.

Sarah: Yeah.

Tim: Much more important than just waiting for your cholesterol to change after six months, which up to now people have done, which is not as motivating at all.

Jonathan: One of the things I’ve learned running a data-driven health company is this: small actions create compounding impact. You’re hitting subscribe is one of those small actions.

Jonathan: It tells the algorithm that this show matters. It helps us reach more people, and it lets us bring you more science-backed advice. So if this episode gave you value, subscribing is how you can give a little bit back. We’ll keep showing up every week to return the favour. Okay, back to the show. Well, I’m feeling really motivated.

Jonathan: So let’s dive into the eight principles and principle one is mindful eating. And I have to admit, when I first heard of this, I thought it was just like another Californian wellness fad, but it turns out it’s actually a big deal. So Tim, now ZOE’s definition of mindful eating is different from some other people’s.

Jonathan: Can you tell us what we mean by it and why it’s important?

Tim: Mindful eating, which is sort of mindfulness about our nutrition, is getting people to think before they eat. So you’re stopping before you eat, trying to understand what you’re eating. Then you’re discovering how what you eat affects your health.

Tim: And I think I first came across this concept before even knowing what it was called when I started to change my diet in 2011. Didn’t know what to do. So I said, okay, well I’ll try being vegan for a while and see how it goes, and had to assess everything I was eating to say, well, what’s in this pastry?

Tim: What’s in that hors d’oeuvre? I must admit I didn’t stick with being a vegan for more than six weeks. I missed my cheese far too much. But it was a really instructive way to just stop routinely eating the stuff that the food companies want us to eat. You realise how quickly you finish things when you’re not concentrating on what you’re eating.

Tim: You’re not really aware of it. And this is what food companies who are making these highly processed foods are really designing it for.

Tim: So that you eat it without thinking, it dissolves in your mouth and before you know it, you finish the packet, you’re onto another one and it’s mindless eating. So in a way, mindful eating is the antidote to what the food industry with all their bliss points and all their careful chemistry is, is, is trying to do.

Sarah: I think as well, the habit side of things is really important, that so much of what we eat and how we eat is out of habit. So for example, the majority of people who snack, they say they snack because, well, it’s just what I do. It’s out of habit. Rather than they need that snack or rather than that they even know what the quality of that snack is.

Sarah: And so also getting people to stop and think can sometimes be a great way of changing a habit.

Jonathan: It’s been really interesting, I think, talking to all these behavioural scientists over the last year and realising how much there’s science behind habits and also how hard it is to create a habit. Sarah.

Sarah: Absolutely. It’s hard to break a habit and it’s hard to create a new habit as well. And so whatever tools we can give to people to make it simpler, but also to motivate people that this is a habit that’s worth changing, which is why I think we need to continually reiterate to people that diet really is the most powerful tool that you have for your health.

Jonathan: There are a lot of members listening who will know that we’ve made mindful eating central to the new ZOE app. There’s a big change and we had a lot of questions about it, including some people who’ve been really unhappy about it. So could you briefly explain how it works and why you felt it’s so important from a scientific perspective, and therefore why we’ve done it?

Tim: What the ZOE app does is it gives you the tools to make this link between what the food you’re eating, what’s in it, and what it’s doing to your body. And it’s pretty effortless. All you do is you snap a picture of your food. AI looks at that, breaks it down into its constituents, tells you things like how many plants are in it.

Tim: How much fat and protein are in it, how much fibre’s there. And this then is linked back to your own health profile to say, well, are you likely to get a sugar peak or too much fat hanging around? Is that good or bad for you? And it also tells you the processing risk as well. So in a millisecond, you are getting an incredible amount of data that you couldn’t possibly get.

Tim: Even if you had, you know, Sarah on your elbow whispering in your ear, you know, even she wouldn’t be able to do it at that speed. This makes a huge difference just by taking a snap. After a while, you get to know what it’s gonna tell you, and so you can start steering towards healthier foods. And it just gives you the tools to make this change in your life so that this idea of just mentally snapping your food, whether it’s with the app or not, becomes a habit so you know actually what you’re eating and what it’s doing to your body.

Tim: And then if you’re feeling good or bad, three hours later, as Sarah was saying, you bring, you’re gonna start realising why. And so this builds really good habits.

Sarah: I think as well, a really good differentiation between what we’re trying to do in terms of how we’re trying to educate people and make them mindful about the food they’re eating versus what is traditionally out there is we’re moving away from just giving information about calories or amount of fat and amount of protein.

Sarah: It’s all geared towards giving information that’s about the quality of the different nutrients. So it’s about the quality of the protein, the quality of the fat. And so building on all the research that we’ve been doing over the last eight years and ZOE building on the data, we have now more than 300,000 people.

Sarah: We can also give back predictions to people on how we think these foods are also going to impact health outcomes like their microbiome, for example, or their blood sugar and other health parameters as well.

Jonathan: Definitely made me realise how often I’m snacking, which I had not even realised before.

Jonathan: It is really interesting. Alright, onto principle two: 30 plants. So we talked about like how we should approach eating. Now I think we’re starting to get into like what we should be putting on our plate. And so Tim, look, we all know we’re supposed to eat fruit and vegetables. Like I was always told that growing up as a kid.

Jonathan: So why are you instead talking about—

Tim: Plants? Plants encompass many things that people don’t think about. So it’s not just fruits, it’s vegetables, but it’s seeds, it’s nuts, it’s herbs, it’s spices. It’s pretty much everything that is not meat, doesn’t come from animals. And there’s actually a much richer variety than many people believe.

Tim: And so up to now we’ve been told, you know, you’ve gotta eat your five a day. And people have just stuck with that eating the same five a day. And most people don’t even manage that. They, you know, manage about two or three a day. And so they’re having very little variety of plants. But we now know that the most important part of gut health is the diversity of plants that you are getting in your diet, the diversity of all these things I’m mentioning.

Tim: So it’s not just having large amounts of one of them, it’s this rich variety of them.

Jonathan: And Tim, can you explain why?

Tim: The reason that this diversity of plants is so correlated with gut health is that this gives a greater variety of food for your gut microbes. So it’s essentially thinking like you’re putting huge amounts of different fertiliser for all the different animals that might be living in your gut.

Tim: And so you’re not gonna give them all the same food. You give them a rich variety of foods so that all these different animals can grow in, you know, to their maximum potential. That means that these bugs in your gut can then produce all the really healthy chemicals that your body needs.

Tim: So this is a really big insight that has only come about in the last few years about how our health is so dependent on richness of the different gut microbes. The more you’ve got, the better. And so the way to get that is to give them the biggest diversity of foods to eat. So they’ve got incredible choice.

Tim: And the more choice they have, the more different species can flourish and they can produce all their own fantastically healthy chemicals for our body, our immune system, our mind, our metabolism, et cetera.

Jonathan: And how important are these microbes for like my health?

Tim: They are vital for our health. We can’t live without them.

Tim: Essentially, your brain wouldn’t develop properly. You have no immune system and, you know, our metabolism would fall apart. So we’ve evolved to be totally dependent on these microbes, and we’ve only recently realised just how important they are for our bodies. An example is they’re absolutely crucial for our immune system.

Tim: Most of our immune cells are in our gut, and they’ve specially designed these immune cells to interact with the microbes. And the more the microbes are well fed, the better the signals they’re giving our immune system, which means we can fight infections, we can fight ageing. All these things that are so crucial for our health span.

Sarah: And I think, Jonathan, where it gets really interesting is that we now are starting to understand that different bugs like different types of fibres or different chemicals. So when Tim talks about the importance of the diversity over the amount, so instead of just thinking about, well, as long as I’ve got my five portions of fruit and veg, it doesn’t really matter what else I’m doing. Actually, no. You need to have that diversity to give lots of different types of chemicals like polyphenols.

Sarah: Polyphenols are a really broad group that we know different bugs like different polyphenols. Same with fibre. Fibre we think of, yes, it’s just, oh, this simple single nutrient. There’s lots of different fibres and we need a diversity of different fibres as well.

Jonathan: And so this is why you say like even if I’m having a hamburger and chips, if I add a bunch of like plants onto that, I am in fact making this better.

Tim: Yes, you are counteracting anything bad in your burger with something good.

Tim: It’s not about taking stuff out. It’s all about adding more to it. How can you improve every meal by just adding more plants that will keep those, some of these microbes going that would otherwise die out if you didn’t.

Sarah: And there’s some interesting trials that feed people quite high, unhealthy fat meals.

Sarah: And then on another occasion we’ll feed the same meal but add some kind of polyphenol-rich food to that meal. And what you see is by adding that polyphenol-rich food to what would otherwise be an unhealthy meal, you prevent lots of the short-term negative effects. So you prevent the normal impairment you might see in blood vessel function or the normal inflammation that you might see postprandially.

Sarah: So immediately after consuming that unhealthy meal. Now it’s not to say you can eat your burger, put a side of veg on, and then it’s all fine, but it’s showing the importance of adding in and not just thinking about taking away.

Jonathan: I love that. Why is it 30 different plants?

Tim: 30 seems to be the approximate sweet spot that we’ve found for optimal gut health.

Tim: And we’re gonna refine this as the science changes, but at the moment, 30 is what we think is producing the right results. And certainly that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few years and my gut health has, has, has improved in that way.

Jonathan: Well, Tim, we know that you have fantastic gut health, so if 30 plants is what you’re targeting, I think it’s good enough for a lot of us.

Jonathan: What about if I go above 30 plants, do I get any more benefit or it’s like, just don’t even bother.

Tim: The reality is we don’t really know yet because we haven’t been able to track this. But now we are looking forward in the next year to be able to track people who are regularly getting above 30, as I’m trying to do now.

Tim: And many others, I know many ZOE members can. So we’ll be looking at that with great interest to see, well, if you can get towards 50, you know, do you get much improvement? But the key is, I think there’s a big difference between 20 and 30 or, you know, we think the average in the UK is about 12 or something like this, probably less so in the US as well. We don’t know if there’s an upper limit yet, but I can’t wait for the science to tell us.

Sarah: And we also have to be practical. I think if you are used to getting the average or around 10 or 12, it’s actually really difficult to increase to 30. It’s easy for someone like Tim and, you know, having that kind of diet for many years, but it’s quite difficult to make those changes.

Sarah: And this is what’s great with the advice that we are giving. There’s lots of small changes you can make. Just adding herbs and spices can add plant variety, different polyphenols, different chemicals as well that are beneficial to your diet.

Jonathan: Well, keeping above 30 plants a week is probably my number one focus this year, but are there any foods we should limit?

Jonathan: I think that takes us to your third principle, reduce high-risk processed foods. Now this topic around ultra-processed foods, sometimes called UPF, has been getting more press than ever this year. And Sarah, you’ve been leading the science at ZOE throughout this year working on this topic. For anyone who’s still a bit confused, what is this processed food?

Sarah: So processed food is anything that has undergone some sort of processing by the food industry, whether it’s adding in some additives, whether it’s changing the structure of the food, so grinding the food down. And we now know that in the UK, in the US, many countries, we’re consuming far too much processed food.

Sarah: So about 60 to 70% of our energy is coming from food that has been processed.

Tim: But it’s not all bad, is it? So I mean. That’s the thing we’ve discovered is that not all processed food is labelled the same way. So there are good, there’s bad and there’s ugly ones.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. And this is really important to be mindful of that. Just ‘cause it’s processed doesn’t mean it’s bad for us. There are some foods that are processed in such a way that we know are really unhealthy for us. There’s other foods that are processed in such a way that actually might even be beneficial for us and this is why we need to think about it in a slightly more nuanced way.

Sarah: But it’s really challenging ’cause the way that processing impacts the food is really, really complicated.

Jonathan: We’ve always known that food that’s high in sugars and saturated fat is bad for us. So is this just a way of saying that like some of this processed food has lots of fat and sugar in it, or is it something different.

Sarah: It’s very different now. A hundred years ago, the kind of foods that we were eating were very, very different to the kind of foods that we’re eating now. So the kind of foods then that were high in sugar, high in saturated fat, yes, we should limit, but the foods that we’re eating now are processed in such a way that it’s not just about the nutrients.

Sarah: It’s not just the fact that many processed foods tend to be lower in fibre, tend to be higher in sugar, tend to be higher in saturated fat. That’s only, I think, a small part, is one piece of the puzzle.

Sarah: What we know is that there’s lots of unfavourable chemicals that are put in, some additives, some emulsifiers.

Sarah: But importantly we also know that the structure and the texture of the food has changed. And this is really important because we know that when the food is processed in such a way to change the texture or the structure of the food, it changes how quickly we eat the food. It changes how we metabolise the food.

Sarah: It changes how many calories we absorb from the food. It changes where we metabolise the food from, so it interacts and disrupts our natural fullness signals and so much more.

Sarah: So much of the food that we consume that’s been processed is also processed in such a way that has a certain mixture of nutrients that you wouldn’t typically find in nature.

Sarah: And so by this I mean, for example, let’s say crisps or potato chips versus potatoes. Potatoes are very high in carbohydrate. Add in the salt. When you make the crisps and the oil, they then have this kind of magic mix of taste that bypass your natural kind of fullness signals in your brain, activate some of the dopamine that leaves you wanting more, means that you overconsume those kind of foods as well.

Tim: Yeah. I think the way to, other way to look at it is to say, how do we reverse or understand the tricks they’ve been doing to the food with the most brilliant food chemists to try and fool our bodies and how do we react against it?

Tim: And I think this is what, you know, the score that we’ve come up with is a way of reversing that because it talks about, yes, it talks about those additives that are bad for your gut. It talks about the hyper-palatability that you can’t stop eating. It talks about how quickly it dissolves in your mouth to fool your defences.

Tim: And I think these are the things that we need to think about when we are looking at food, you know, in this mindful way.

Jonathan: So is there any evidence that if I eat like more of this processed food, I’m gonna be unhealthier than if I eat less?

Tim: The data so far has been using this very broad categorisation of ultra-processed foods, which includes some good ones. And even that, when you take these very broad classifications, shows that in every level so far looked at, whether it’s mental health, metabolic health, cardiac health, cancer, you’re getting increased risk of all these diseases, and that is very consistent across all the epidemiology studies.

Tim: It also shows that you overeat by about 25%.

Jonathan: You’re saying if I eat like two meals, one of which is like highly processed food and the other one is sort of normal food, I eat 25% more.

Tim: Yes. Even when it’s exactly the same food, just one made from scratch, one made in a factory.

Jonathan: That’s crazy, isn’t it?

Tim: It is crazy, but not if you are the manufacturer, it’s brilliant because you know you’re gonna sell 25% more of this food and it doesn’t matter to you.

Tim: If that person, you know, gets illness or becomes obese, you are gonna sell more of that product. So it makes absolute commercial sense.

Jonathan: And Tim, you told me that Diet Coke is not actually healthy, which I remember at the time I was really shocked by it. ‘Cause it like has no sugar and you used to like to drink it, didn’t you?

Tim: I did.

Jonathan: Can you explain just simply why it’s not healthy?

Tim: Yeah. Diet Coke’s a good example. It doesn’t have sugar, so it was labelled as a health drink when it first came out and still is ‘cause it’s got diet there, that you know it, and there’s no evidence that it makes people lose weight. So it’s a totally false claim on that label for a start.

Tim: The sweetness using artificial sweeteners has an effect both on the brain to make you want more sweet things, and it also has an effect on your gut to disrupt your gut microbes so that most artificial sweeteners tested so far have a negative effect on your gut microbes, causing them to produce chemicals that might make you more likely to have diabetes or metabolic problems.

Tim: It’s one of the many mechanisms by having these additives and chemicals that your body’s not used to, that don’t occur in nature.

Tim: A lot of these sweeteners come from the petrol industry. They’re byproducts of petroleum, so that your poor old gut microbes have not evolved to deal with them, and so they get very confused and cause all kinds of metabolic problems.

Jonathan: So Sarah, I know you and your team have spent the last year working on a scientific way to understand if a particular processed food is high risk. Can you tell us about this?

Sarah: Yeah, so we’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of hours at ZOE working on thinking about what it is about processing that impacts the healthfulness of the food.

Sarah: ‘Cause we really wanted to be able to offer people advice that prevented them from having to avoid all processed foods because we know it’s so nuanced.

Sarah: We spent a lot of time considering what the features were and how we could actually apply it to the food that’s out there. It’s all very well theoretically understanding how this additive impacts our health or how this particular process of grinding or fermentation impacts our health.

Sarah: If we can’t apply it to the food and apply it at the brand level of the food, then we are never going to be able to deliver good advice.

Sarah: And so we have created a new scale that considers three real important features.

Sarah: Firstly, it considers what additives and emulsifiers are in that food in a graded way because we know some additives, yes, are bad for us.

Sarah: We know that some actually might be good for us.

Sarah: We’ve also considered the hyper-palatability of the food. So that’s kind of how tasty it is using this metric of these different mixtures of nutrients that bypass our natural fullness signals.

Sarah: And then we’ve considered the energy intake rate. The energy intake rate basically tells you how fast you’re going to eat those calories.

Sarah: And this is really, really important because we know processing has a big impact on the structure and texture of the food that changes how quickly you consume those calories.

Sarah: So we use that as a kind of surrogate measure for how processing has destroyed that very special food matrix that we know is so important in whole foods.

Sarah: And so we consider all of those three features in one single scale. And most importantly, we consider it at the brand level.

Sarah: And this is important because, for example, you could have three peanut butters. We might think of them just as peanut butter, but one peanut butter versus another peanut butter can be processed in such a way that they’re like entirely different foods.

Sarah: So you could have a very healthy peanut butter that’s been processed just in the way that the peanuts have been ground, maybe a pinch of salt. Or you could have something like Reese’s peanut butter that’s processed in such a way that makes it high risk according to our scale and according to all of the science out there.

Jonathan: And so you’ve been able to use our research, I understand, as a big part of what allows us to go to the next level because of all of the participants.

Sarah: Absolutely. So with any new score or scale that you create in science, you need to validate it. You need to check actually, does it work? Does it actually play out in the real world?

Sarah: And what we’re really fortunate at ZOE is we have this incredible data set, this data on 300,000 people where we’ve collected data on what they’re eating, right down to the brand level, right down to what brand of peanut butter or bread they’re consuming, as well as data on their gut microbiome and lots of other health outcomes.

Sarah: So we’ve used all of this data to validate the score and we see that there’s a really strong association between those foods that we class as high risk and different health outcomes in the microbiome.

Sarah: But I think what’s really interesting, Jonathan, is that it’s actually only about 25% of foods, or the energy that we’re getting from foods that we class as high risk, because I think it’s really empowering when you see all these scary headlines saying 60% of our calories are coming from these bad processed foods.

Sarah: Actually, it’s 25% that we need to really worry about.

Jonathan: So how can a listener find out whether a processed food they’re about to eat is safe or high risk?

Sarah: If you have our app, you can take a picture, it will return a risk score. It says whether it’s high, medium, low risk in terms of how the food’s being processed and how it’ll impact your health. If you don’t have the app.

Sarah: The simplest way is to look at the food, look at the number of ingredients, but also to look at whether that food actually resembles the whole food it originally came from.

Jonathan: And Tim, are there any simple swaps that people could put into practice straight away that might reduce their processed food intake?

Tim: Things like fruit yoghurts, that have lots of artificial ingredients and flavourings, particularly children’s yoghurts, swap those for just plain yoghurt.

Tim: So I think they’re one of the first things that would, in my view, go.

Tim: And also including anything that really says low fat or low calorie on it and swapping that for the more natural full fat version, the original version before it got tampered with.

Tim: ‘Cause these are things that people have regularly tried to wean yourself off milk chocolate and go towards dark chocolate and, you know, the best chocolate should have three or less ingredients, try and cut out most breakfast cereals. I’d say 90% are high-risk processed foods.

Tim: What else, Sarah, would you go for?

Sarah: I think bread. Given that it’s a staple can have a huge impact just changing the type of bread you have. So there’s a very simple swap that you can do, which is just change from white bread to wholegrain bread

Tim: And pick one with a low ingredient list. Because some of them, even wholegrain ones, some of them are certainly medium risk, aren’t they?

Tim: So again, it’s just cutting that down. But yeah, a perfect example of something you have every day. They’re the ones to really focus on.

Jonathan: I love those swaps. They’re like simple but powerful. I think it’s time to move on to principle four, which I guess sort of follows from what we’ve been talking about because principle four is focus on quality, not calories.

Jonathan: What does this mean, Sarah?

Sarah: So we now know that you could count all the calories in the world. But it’ll have very little impact on your health. It’s the quality of those calories.

Sarah: So you could consume 1000 calories of very poor quality, or you could consume exactly the same amount of calories from a very high quality diet, very nutrient-dense diet, rich in fibre, polyphenols, healthy fats, healthy protein, for example, you’ve got two entirely different diets.

Sarah: We need to move beyond calorie counting. We need to move beyond thinking about food in terms of calories for multiple reasons. It doesn’t work when it comes to weight maintenance. It doesn’t work when it comes to improving the healthfulness of our diet.

Tim: Study after study have shown that even when you are completely supervised, you know, with the nutrition team behind you and you’re counting calories, it’s impossible to maintain any weight loss.

Tim: Virtually everybody goes back to where they were and beyond because your body just adapts.

Sarah: I think it’s important to acknowledge that calorie counting will work in the short term, but like Tim said, it’s the maintenance that’s the problem. So yes, you can calorie count, yes, you can lose weight in a couple of months, three months.

Sarah: But using calorie counting will not enable most people to maintain that weight loss. And that’s because our body is so clever and our body has evolved to be able to handle times of famine. So as soon as you start losing weight, the appetite areas of your brain become really heightened. So basically they make you more hungry all the time.

Sarah: Your metabolism slows down. So you are fighting against a really, a tidal wave, that you just can’t keep fighting against long term.

Sarah: And I think there’s some really great simple examples that, from experiments actually we’ve done at ZOE that also show how this plays out in the reality.

Sarah: So one of the experiments that we’ve done at ZOE is we’ve asked participants to have just a white bagel on its own with low fat spread.

Sarah: So that’s actually very low calorie.

Sarah: Then we’ve asked them on the other day to have exactly the same, but add some cheese in or some nut butter. So you are adding a protein source in.

Sarah: Now obviously by adding that cheese or that nut butter, you are adding extra calories to that breakfast. But what we find from our data is those people that add that protein in, add that cheese in, for example, they go on to have greater energy levels.

Sarah: They go on to feel more alert, but most importantly, they feel a lot less hungry for the whole day. And actually they end up consuming over the day a lot less than if they’d had that low calorie breakfast.

Tim: Yeah. ‘Cause the low calorie breakfast can actually make you hungrier. And I think that’s the thing that people don’t realise.

Tim: So there’s, you know, and I think we’re understanding now with the Ozempic-like drugs, how important this appetite signal is. It’s sort of overriding the calorie side of the equation.

Jonathan: So, is it possible to lose weight by focusing on quality and genuinely not focusing on calories?

Sarah: Absolutely. We know that you can just focus on the quality of the food, not calorie count at all, and you can still lose weight. We know this from our own trial. For example, a randomised control trial that we ran called METHOD, where we randomly allocated people to either follow the ZOE programme or allocated people to follow the typical US-style population-based advice.

Sarah: The advice that we give at ZOE there is zero calorie counting. It’s all about the quality of the food, and people following the ZOE programme lost a significant amount of weight. They also reduced their waist circumference, which we know is really, really important in terms of metabolic health and long-term health, and they were not given any advice in terms of calories.

Jonathan: Amazing. How can I tell if a food is high quality?

Sarah: That’s a really, really tough one. And the reason it’s tough is because the broken food landscape that we live in, the mis-marketing that’s out there, the health halos that are on food that say high fibre, high protein, you know, high energy foods, and it makes it, I think, really challenging for people to work out, well, is this food healthy for me?

Sarah: A really simple and obvious one, I know, very obvious, is that if it’s a whole food, it’s more likely to be healthy for you.

Sarah: But even within whole foods there’s a huge variety as well.

Jonathan: So is for example a potato and avocado the same quality? ‘Cause they’re both whole foods?

Sarah: No, the potato is quite high in carbohydrate. Yes, it has a few micronutrients like potassium and vitamin C, but when you take something like avocado, you have what I think is quite a complete food.

Sarah: It’s got healthy oils, good for your heart. It’s packed full of fibre. It’s packed full of lots of other nutrients as well. But I think, Jonathan, it’s really important not to just think about food in isolation, and this is something kind of we really advocate for at ZOE. We need to think of the meal in its entirety as well.

Sarah: So potato on its own, I would not say is a particularly healthy food at all. But if you’re having some potato as part of an overall healthy meal where you have lots of other constituents that have healthy proteins, healthy fibre, healthy fats, then it can be part of a healthy meal.

Sarah: So I think a really simple single trick people can do is make sure when they’re having a meal, yes, it’s minimally processed if possible. So it resembles the whole food it comes from, but also that it has a mix of nutrients.

Sarah: So whilst I don’t want to overfocus on nutrients, making sure it’s not just rich in carbohydrates, making sure there is some protein, fibre and fat in it, that will keep you feeling fuller for longer and it will enable you to have a more balanced quality of a meal.

Jonathan: We asked Professor Sarah Berry, our Chief Scientist here at ZOE, and Professor Tim Spector, my Scientific Co-founder, a simple question: how would you eat to support your health in 2026?

Jonathan: Luckily for us, they didn’t just provide one piece of advice. They spent the last year coming up with eight guiding principles, which you can get for free in our How To Eat In 2026 guide.

Jonathan: You’ll find science-backed advice and tips on everything from mindful eating and timed eating windows to plant polyphenols and protein sources. The guide lets you step inside the minds of our scientists to discover smarter, more sustainable ways to eat and transform your health.

Jonathan: Forget the fad diets. Start your year strong with the help of ZOE Science. Download your free guide right now. Go to zoe.com/2026 or click the link in the show notes. zoe.com/2026.

Jonathan: So we’re being mindful about what we’re eating. We’re thinking about quality, not quantity, and we’re eating more plants. So that’s a lot about what we’re eating.

Jonathan: But principle five is completely different because it’s about when we eat, and principle five says, have an eating window. Sarah, what is an eating window?

Sarah: So an eating window is a period of time in which you are eating your food. So for example, you could have a 10-hour eating window, meaning that you have your first meal of the day at eight o’clock, and you finish your last meal of the day at six o’clock.

Sarah: Typically in the UK, in the US and many countries, our eating windows are 12 hours or more, meaning that we might have our first meal of the day at eight, but still be eating at maybe even nine o’clock in the evening.

Jonathan: So time-restricted eating, is that different?

Sarah: So time-restricted eating is about eating within a specific eating window, and there’s lots of research now emerging that if you can reduce your eating window, so reduce it down from, from, you know, a 13, 12-hour eating window, you can improve your health.

Sarah: And this is for a number of reasons. What we know is if you reduce your eating window subconsciously, you reduce your energy intake. It’s estimated you reduce your energy intake by about 300 to 500 calories. That’s why many people practising time-restricted eating go on to lose weight again without counting calories.

Sarah: We also know that it can improve your metabolic health so it can improve parameters like circulating inflammatory measures. It can improve your blood pressure, it can improve your blood cholesterol. And so forth.

Sarah: But I think where it gets really interesting, Jonathan, is that you don’t need to restrict to really restrictive eating windows.

Sarah: A lot of the studies out there, and a lot of the protocols out there that we hear that people are following are making them eat within like a six-hour window. So that might be having your breakfast at 10 and having your last meal at four in the afternoon.

Sarah: I think that’s really restrictive. I certainly would not want to eat like that.

Sarah: I mean, I wouldn’t want to be around you if you were like that,

Tim: I’d be so miserable.

Tim: Some of the people listening might have taken part in the ZOE Big IF study, intermittent fasting study. About 140,000 people did this. The people that did do it for the two weeks really noticed improvements in all kinds of things, like their mood, their energy.

Tim: They had less bloating, they had less indigestion problems. And so I really think it’s worth everyone giving it a go. It may not suit everybody, but if you can restrict this time, it’s gonna be really good for your gut microbes and your metabolism.

Tim: And I think it really does suit some people. And I think it’s just changing your habits a little bit.

Jonathan: Do you mean just to only eat for six hours a day?

Tim: No, I mean, restricting it so that you have an overnight fast of at least 12 hours, 12 to 14, so that your eating window is 10 to 12. Aim for 10 if you can do that. And that’s what they did for this two-week trial. But then see what actually suits you.

Tim: It doesn’t have to be every day either. So, you know, if you can do it for at least five days outta seven, then you’ll still get a good result.

Tim: So I think everyone should try that, you know, and see how they get on because it’s such an easy thing to do.

Jonathan: And is there real scientific evidence that if I cut my time of eating to this sort of 10 to 12 hours a day, there’s any benefits?

Tim: There’s lots of evidence that your gut health improves, your metabolism improves, your blood sugar levels and other things certainly improve in all these studies, you generally feel much better.

Sarah: I think what’s really exciting about the study that we did at ZOE is we asked people just to restrict 10 hours, which is manageable by most people.

Sarah: And even though we only asked them to restrict 10 hours, we saw, like Tim said, these significant improvements in mood, energy, hunger. We also saw a significant weight loss in those doing it as well.

Sarah: It’s very difficult to live a normal life if you’re stopping your last meal at four in the afternoon that you don’t need to do that.

Sarah: There’s more evidence emerging showing just eating within a 10-hour window, so having a 14-hour fast period still significantly improves your health

Tim: And you’re more likely to be able to do that long term rather than these short term. So again, it’s this idea of a habit that you can last for years and decades rather than just a quick fix.

Sarah: And there’s some really interesting data coming out about consistency as well. There is this evidence now to show that a consistency in the timing of your meals, in the frequency of your meals is actually really important in terms of your long-term health. It’s quite new emerging evidence, but I think it’s quite exciting.

Jonathan: And so for example, this means like if I’m gonna have breakfast, then I need to like have my dinner relatively early and not snack in front of the TV. Or alternatively, I’ve got a life where I’m eating my breakfast at 11 or even midday, in which case I, you know, I could have quite a late dinner. But these two are sort of, I’m sort of aligning these to get within the 10 to 12 hours.

Sarah: Yeah. I think there is good enough evidence now to suggest that early time-restricted eating is better than late time-restricted eating. So that means having your eating window slightly earlier in the day. So, for example, maybe having your breakfast at eight, having your last meal at six versus having your breakfast at 11 and your last meal at nine at night.

Tim: But interestingly, in the study, that big ZOE study, we found that most people preferred doing the later one, found it easier, fitted in their schedule. And I think that’s more important than this small difference metabolically between early and late eating.

Tim: So again, it comes back to this, what are the habits that are long lasting that you can keep and maintain is much more important than some subtle theoretical difference.

Tim: And so it really comes down to people’s choices and lifestyles.

Jonathan: Let’s go on to principle six. So this is a phrase that many of us will probably have heard, eat the rainbow. So my 6-year-old daughter claims this is why she needs to have four different ice cream flavours at the same time. But Tim, I’m pretty sure that’s not actually what the principle’s meant to mean.

Tim: No, the principle is not about eating different ice creams. The original idea, this has been around for a while, was to eat a rich variety of particularly fruits and vegetables, and it’s only recently we’ve discovered why that’s actually a good idea and why this rainbow concept comes in when we think about what the science is behind these colours.

Tim: What makes fruits and vegetables coloured and why we should eat coloured ones rather than just everything being beige or white. And it turns out that the intense colours of fruits and vegetables are due to polyphenols.

Tim: And these are these natural defence chemicals in plants that protect the plant against environment, sun, pests, and other infections.

Tim: When we eat them, we ingest these chemicals and they end up as being fuel for our gut microbes. We used to call them antioxidants, which was a very vague term, and now we know that these thousands of these different polyphenol compounds that we are ingesting every time we have really highly coloured plants that give us the maximum.

Tim: There’s tenfold differences between, for example, a purple carrot and a white carrot, give a tenfold difference in the amount of polyphenols in there.

Tim: Similarly with lettuces that have purple in them rather than green.

Tim: So that’s why we should be picking things that are brightly coloured. That’s one thing we know is high in polyphenols.

Tim: The other is bitterness. These bitter flavoured ones that we’ve always known are healthy for us. You know, the sort of slight broccoli taste, those crucifer vegetables, the bitterness that comes from olive oil, from black coffee, from red wine, these are high polyphenol foods.

Tim: And again, it’s telling you that that has really healthy defence chemicals in it that are really good for us.

Tim: So it’s bitterness and colour is what you want to be having in diversity.

Jonathan: I think it’s a really, a beautiful picture. I wanna ask you actually linking to this about something that you were both incredibly excited about earlier this month, which was this brand new ZOE Science paper that was published in Nature.

Jonathan: Can you explain like why you were excited about that and how that links back to this eating the rainbow and these different foods?

Tim: Yes. So when we did this big analysis, which was on 30,000 ZOE members who had given us detailed food diaries and health outcomes and their gut microbiome, we found that the number one factor in their gut health was this variety of foods they were eating.

Tim: The so-called plant diversity index that we were seeing. And this was the starting point.

Tim: And we also found that we could start to identify individual foods that were linked to particular microbes that were also linked to health.

Tim: And so this was giving us a new picture because the previous picture we had was based on a thousand people, so this is 30 times bigger.

Tim: And also we start to distinguish a hundred microbes that everybody had that we could compare different groups with, so 50 of them were really good and 50 of them were really bad.

Tim: And so it is this ratio of the good and the bad bugs that we now are able to use as a really good marker of gut health for the first time.

Tim: And this was really amazing when we first saw these results because we started to see how we can really test everybody’s gut microbes, whether you live any part of the world, of any age, we could start to compare people with this magic ratio of the good and the bad bugs.

Tim: So it was one of the most important papers, you know, I’ve been participating in in my whole career.

Tim: I think I’m really proud of this one because I think it’s a total game changer in the way we’re gonna be looking at the gut microbiome.

Sarah: I think also some really interesting analysis that we did was looking at how particular gut species changed with dietary changes.

Sarah: So a lot of the research out there related to diet and the gut microbiome is looking cross-sectionally, which is at one point in time looking at how is that food at that point in time associated with that particular gut species.

Sarah: And as part of this paper, we did some sub-analysis where we looked at people, what we call longitudinally. We looked at them at baseline and we looked at their diet and we looked at their microbiome and then we followed them over a period of time and then we retested their microbiome and re-looked at their diet.

Sarah: And what we saw was that specific species that had been associated with specific foods changed if you increase that food.

Sarah: So it showed more convincingly than that cross-sectional point-in-time data just how strong an influence a single food can have on a single species. Yeah.

Tim: So it now means that we can look at your gut microbiome and say, okay, you are low in these bugs, but if you eat these foods, you’re likely to be increasing these ones so you can improve your ratio with this very specific targeted advice.

Tim: And this is the first time really we’ve been able to do that with this level of confidence.

Jonathan: So really for the first time with this amazing scale, right, which no one has ever had before of like more than 30,000, of like the DNA of your microbiome, you’ve been able to understand sort of how individual foods are actually linked to individual good bugs and bad bugs.

Jonathan: And so therefore, you know, coming back to this eating the rainbow, that there are these particular different foods that are high in fibre and high in polyphenols. You can actually see them linked to different bugs. And now you’re actually starting to understand why we can’t just eat this one food, but we want to eat this whole rainbow.

Tim: That’s right. We’re really realising how fussy these microbes are, that you’ve got these highly specialised animals in there that are waiting for these rich variety of foods.

Tim: It’s a combination of eating the rainbow that’s giving you not only these different polyphenol compounds, which give them energy, but also different fibres.

Tim: That’s why this idea of the richness of the food that we want to eat is so important.

Tim: And that’s in a way why we came up with our whole food supplement Daily 30. It’s the same concept that we want to enrich everything that we’re eating in as many ways as we can.

Jonathan: And a lot of the listeners to this podcast are also ZOE members.

Jonathan: So I feel this is opportunity for us to say thank you ’cause that science is only possible, right? Because of all those members who have done these gut microbiome tests, have logged their data.

Jonathan: And I think it is amazing, right, for that to be published in something like Nature as a result—

Sarah: Of the data we have is just, it’s mind blowing.

Sarah: The dataset we have from 300,000 people and the data that’s gone into this paper. And it is thanks to everyone that has become a ZOE member. Yeah.

Tim: And I think we have a very unique relationship with everyone who takes part and we are making incredible science possible by this link between us and our members.

Tim: So thank you everybody.

Jonathan: Amazing. Let’s move on to the seventh principle, which covers a topic that I know many of our listeners are interested in, which is protein. Because there are so many food labels now that say they’re high in protein, a lot of people are worried that they’re not getting enough. But Sarah, this principle says focus on protein quality.

Jonathan: What does that mean and why is there sort of so much confusion about how much protein we need and from what sources?

Sarah: This is something we spent a lot of time looking at at ZOE, recognising that people are really interested in protein.

Sarah: And two things we’ve been really focusing on is looking at protein quantity. So developing guidance for how much protein people should have according to their activity levels, according to their stage in their life.

Sarah: And you can go to the show notes that will give you specifics on how much protein you should have according to your age, sex, activity levels, and so much more.

Sarah: But we’ve also been looking at protein quality because again, we know that not all protein is created equally, but also not all food sources of protein are created equally.

Sarah: And this is really important because with this focus on protein, a lot of people are focusing on meat sources of protein, particularly red meat sources of protein.

Sarah: But we know that with red meat comes lots of other problems. We know that particularly processed red meat is associated with significant increases in many chronic diseases, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and so forth.

Sarah: So we want to encourage people to get their protein from the best quality food.

Sarah: And so we have developed a lot of guidance on how people can get the right amount of protein, but from the best possible food as well.

Jonathan: And can you help me to understand a bit more what protein quality is?

Sarah: So in a very traditional sense, we think of protein quality as getting the right balance of amino acids. Amino acids are the building blocks of protein. There are 20 amino acids, and nine of these are essential, meaning nine of these we cannot create in our body.

Sarah: So nine of these we have to get from our diet. So the traditional sense of thinking of protein quality was thinking about whether the food had all of those nine essential amino acids in the right amount.

Sarah: When we think about protein quality, we are taking it that step further, thinking about the types of amino acids, but more importantly the food source that these amino acids are coming from.

Sarah: So thinking about unprocessed, whole food source of protein. So getting a balance, for example, of whole grains, pulses, seeds, and nuts give you a fantastic mixture of those nine essential amino acids, but also delivering the protein in a wonderful package that also has fibre, heart-healthy oils, and so much more.

Jonathan: So I think a lot of people listening will be surprised that you’ve gone and mentioned stuff that isn’t meat.

Sarah: Yeah.

Jonathan: When you’ve talked about protein, do plants have protein?

Sarah: Plants have protein. Something that is important to mention when we talk about protein related to plants is that they do have slightly different mixtures of amino acids compared to animal-based products.

Sarah: So animal-based products are what we call a complete protein, meaning they have all nine amino acids in what’s considered the correct amount.

Sarah: Plant-based proteins have different levels of those nine amino acids dependent on the plant that they’re coming from.

Sarah: You can get all of the protein that you need, all of those nine amino acids, in sufficient amounts as long as you are having a diversity of plant-based proteins.

Sarah: So again, it feeds into our principle about plant diversity.

Sarah: So as long as you are mixing whole grains, nuts, seeds, and pulses, you can get the same quality of protein as you would get from an animal. But with all the added wonderful extras of the fibre, of polyphenols, of oils, et cetera.

Jonathan: Can you give me some examples maybe of foods that are containing high quality protein?

Sarah: So one food that I think is the king of high quality protein is kefir or Greek yoghurt.

Sarah: So this is also a complete protein, so it has all of those nine essential amino acids. It’s also a fermented food, so it has all of those wonderful bacteria in there that’s going to give you lots of other health benefits.

Sarah: There’s also other animal sources of protein that I would consider to be a healthy source. Eggs. We’ve done a whole podcast dispelling the myth that eggs are bad for us.

Sarah: Yes, you don’t want to consume 10 eggs a day, but one or two eggs a day should be fine for your health, and they’re a great source of protein.

Sarah: Then you’ve got other rich sources of protein. Again, these come from these plant-based sources that I’ve mentioned, the whole grains, the nuts, the seeds, the pulses.

Jonathan: You’ve mentioned the word pulses three times. What on earth is a pulse.

Sarah: Tim loves his pulses.

Tim: Legume is what Americans would call them.

Sarah: Beans, peas, lentils.

Tim: Yeah. These are the powerhouses of protein because not only do you get protein, but you also get fibre. Mm-hmm. And you’re getting all these benefits in one package.

Tim: So a can, which costs virtually nothing, of mixed beans is gonna give you such a rich variety of proteins and fibre that this is really a great example of protein quality.

Tim: And a very different protein source than just whether you have white rice, brown rice, quinoa, buckwheat, pasta, huge differences in the amount of protein you are getting out of those foods, and people don’t think about those grains as providing any protein.

Tim: So I think this is something that we can all learn just by being, you know, better educated on food.

Jonathan: What about meat and fish? Is it all the same quality of protein?

Sarah: So in terms of the quality of the food that it’s coming from, it’s very different. So protein that’s in fish, we would consider a very high quality protein. Again, because we know that meat and red meat is linked to so many unfavourable health effects.

Sarah: Oily fish is a great source as well of high quality protein because as well as getting a good complete protein, you are also getting lots of those heart healthy oils.

Sarah: The omega-3 that comes in a fish, as well as lots of the other minerals that are also found in oily fish.

Jonathan: So protein powder. Lots of people are adding this in as sort of part of a way to get more protein into their diet. How do you feel about that?

Sarah: I don’t think it’s necessary if you’re having a balanced diet.

Sarah: I think what I’d be more cautious of than protein powder is all of these high-protein processed foods that are out there that have high protein on the label. So have this kind of health halo that makes people think, wow, I’m getting a great source of protein. This must be a healthy snack bar when typically it’s packed full of absolute crap.

Tim: It’s relative, and people adding a bit of whey protein to a smoothie in the morning, I’m not as worried about that as I am about eating highly processed foods that have a sort of added protein component to it, or in those snack bars and things.

Tim: I think that’s much more of a problem for us. But I, you know, I think people shouldn’t be distracted by protein powder into thinking they don’t have to worry about the other components of their meal, and they should be sticking with really good, high quality ingredients.

Jonathan: Well, the good news is we’ve reached our final principle, and this one is very close to your heart, Tim, eat fermented foods. So what are they, why do you love them so much that you’ve just written a bestselling book about them?

Tim: Fermented foods are foods that have been transformed by microbes into something better.

Tim: And I mean better. I mean that it preserves it longer, it tastes better, and actually it has health benefits for you.

Tim: So this is like transforming milk into yoghurt or kefir, which is much more interesting than milk itself just by adding some microbes to it.

Tim: It’s transforming a cabbage by adding microbes to it into a sauerkraut.

Tim: And we know that fermented foods are a healthy force. And there was a breakthrough study at Stanford that showed that it reduces inflammation levels really very fast. So your immune system is really tickled by these ferments. That was the background to why I wrote the book on it.

Tim: And we also did a ZOE study on this, the ferment study.

Tim: We asked 9,000 people who hadn’t taken fermented foods before to take them for a couple of, take three different portions a day for two weeks.

Tim: And we found that the five and a half thousand or so that saw it right through the end, they had incredible results.

Tim: So within a few days, they noticed improvements in their mood, their energy. They had less bloating. They felt really good, and we didn’t measure their inflammation levels, but we’d assume that they were all behaving like in these other trials. Their immune system was really being helped by it.

Tim: So that’s why I think everybody should be trying to achieve this three ferments a day.

Tim: And that’s what I try and do every day. Many countries do this routinely. It’s just an English-speaking world, we haven’t had this culture, it’s only recently we’ve realised just how powerful they are.

Jonathan: And does it matter what type of fermented foods I have, and could I just have three portions of blue cheese a day?

Jonathan: I quite like blue cheese.

Tim: We are not sure, but we think that the benefits come from a variety of microbes.

Tim: So if you’re just having the same yoghurt every day, you might just be getting the same three microbes.

Tim: Whereas if you have a kefir, you’re getting an extra 10. If you’re having an unpasteurised cheese, you might get 15.

Tim: Kombuchas have 30, some kimchi’s gonna have 30 or 40.

Tim: So variety is probably good. So try and expand your universe of fermented foods that you’re having and concentrate on the ones that you are likely to be live as well. Not ones that have a two-year expiry date.

Jonathan: There’ll probably be lots of people listening who’ve never consciously eaten a ferment.

Jonathan: And you’ve mentioned a bunch of names that I definitely never heard of until a couple of years ago. If you were gonna describe the top half a dozen fermented foods, what would they be?

Tim: Think of everything beginning with a K, right? So kefir, which is fermented milk, so that’s like super yoghurt, kombucha, which is fermented tea, kraut.

Tim: Which is generally fermented cabbage or fermented beetroot, or actually any vegetable can be a fermented kraut.

Tim: Then you’ve got kimchi, which I think is the sort of supreme spicy ferment, the staple diet in Korea, which is an acquired taste. But once you’ve got it, you get really hooked on it, which is ‘cause it’s got garlic, it’s got chillies in it, all these good things that have plenty of polyphenols as well as the ferments.

Tim: So if you think of those and you add to that cheese and yoghurt, you’re pretty much covered.

Tim: If you try and get those into your diet regularly—

Sarah: Can you recommend a couple of cheeses that might be more everyday cheeses?

Tim: If it looks like a normal cheese, it probably is real.

Tim: The only ones that don’t have microbes on it are the ones I’ve tested are like American-styled cheeses, like Kraft slices.

Tim: I was unable to get any microbes out of that.

Tim: And I’ve got one on my kitchen shelf that’s been there for five years that is still bright yellow and shiny. And no microbe will go near it. It instantly dies.

Tim: If a cheese comes out of a sterile plastic pack in a slice, or it comes out of a tube or it comes on a cheap frozen pizza.

Tim: It’s fake cheese, but all the other ones are probably real.

Tim: And we even tested cream cheese, Philadelphia cream cheese, one of the biggest makers, and that had microbes in it. We had at least three species of microbes.

Tim: So most cheeses, if they’re, you know, anywhere reasonable will be a source of ferments. So it’s, it’s, there is a surprising amount of good ferments out there that are cheap and easy to get at.

Jonathan: So thank you both for managing to squeeze decades of scientific research into eight principles and one podcast. And we’ve intentionally gone a bit longer this time because it felt like it deserved this.

Jonathan: Now, I know that 2025 was an action-packed year for ZOE, but that you’re not slowing down in 2026. So, to round things off, I’d love to hear what’s on the horizon.

Jonathan: Tim, can you start us off? What’s in the pipeline for you?

Tim: Well, I’m really interested from our studies that have been showing these effects on mood and energy, suggesting that food really impacts the brain.

Tim: And so my next personal project is to really research this in much greater detail and look at how food affects mental illnesses and how we can come up with great advice for people.

Tim: And so this is the subject of my, I’m gonna be writing some books on this subject and really getting some great ZOE Science behind it as well.

Tim: So I’m really interested in food and the brain.

Jonathan: Sarah, what are you and your team of scientists working on?

Sarah: So we are collaborating with an international team looking at early onset colorectal cancer, and we’re doing this in collaboration also with ZOE, because we have this phenomenal microbiome diet data and we know that diet and microbiome are really important in terms of risk of early onset colorectal cancer.

Sarah: What I’m also really excited by is work that we are continuing to do with the science team at ZOE, developing our diet scores.

Sarah: And then another area I’m really excited, if we’ve got time to research, is how we eat. And so how fast you eat your food, more work on the time of day that you are eating our food, and so much more related to that.

Jonathan: So final thing to mention to our listeners, our team has actually taken the eight principles that we’ve been talking about and turned that into a free guide that covers each of the eight principles and explains them.

Jonathan: And you can download that. There is a link in the show notes.

Jonathan: You can go to zoe.com/2026, and I do think this has been the output of an enormous amount of work this year to really try and condense the research of the last eight years. So I think that is really useful.

Jonathan: Alright, well look, just to conclude, I’m gonna run through basically the principles. I do think that there’s a very clear link between all of them.

Jonathan: So we started by saying, eating mindfully. This is a big shift, I think, in terms of what we’re talking at ZOE, and recognising that you gotta start by understanding what it is that you’re actually doing and what you’re eating to start to understand the changes that you need to make.

Jonathan: And I think this comes out of how much we understand that big food is making things look completely different than they really are.

Jonathan: And if we just take everything with trust, then we’ll be eating protein-added ice cream and we’re all in trouble.

Jonathan: The second one is 30 plants. There’s all the science that explains that this diversity of these different plants is essential for our microbiome and that our gut health is just the most important thing we can do for our health.

Jonathan: And so if you think about that, diversity starts to just really change everything that you eat.

Jonathan: The third, reduce high-risk processed foods, and there is probably more of this food in our diet than we realised.

Jonathan: You talked about, you know, a fruit yoghurt. I don’t think most people would ever think about that as being a high-risk processed food.

Jonathan: Number four, focus on quality, not calories.

Jonathan: And amazingly you can actually feel better and lose weight without counting your calories, just by focusing on the quality of the food.

Jonathan: Number five is not what you eat, but when you eat.

Jonathan: And if you can create this eating window where you’re eating for 10 to 12 hours a day, there’s all this science about how it improves your mood and your energy.

Jonathan: And there are a lot of people who also say it’s been really great for losing weight.

Jonathan: Number six is eat the rainbow. And that’s because these plants have all of these different chemicals, these polyphenols, which are their protection, which are sort of superfood for our microbiome.

Jonathan: And again, we have this new science that is showing literally individual links between foods and microbes.

Jonathan: So you can’t just eat kale, which is a relief ’cause I hate kale.

Jonathan: You need to eat all of these different things in order to feed your different microbes.

Jonathan: Number seven is protein quality. Again, in the show notes we’ll have a link to an article that allows you to calculate your own amount of protein that you should be eating each day.

Jonathan: But the key message here is there’s been so much focus on protein quantity, but actually the bigger issue for most people is the protein quality.

Jonathan: And then finally, last but definitely not least, Tim’s favourite one, eat fermented foods.

Jonathan: Try and eat three fermented foods a day, and all the best ones begin with a K, like a kimchi.

Jonathan: Thank you so much, both of you. I think as scientists you should be incredibly proud that you managed to summarise like all of nutritional advice in just eight things. Thank you. You can have a rest. That was hard work after Christmas, wasn’t it?

Tim: Phew, yes.

Jonathan: If you enjoyed this episode with Sarah and Tim, I’m sure you’ll love watching this conversation with ZOE’s Head Nutritionist Federica Amati, where we learn about the emulsifiers in ultra-processed foods and how they impact your health.