Best of 2025: The ideas that transformed our health - Part 1

This special episode brings together the moments from 2025 that listeners told us had the biggest impact on how they eat, think, and feel. It’s been a year full of surprising insights, practical shifts, and ideas that made healthy eating feel a little more doable.

Whether you’re pausing to take stock of the year or simply looking for small ideas to weave into everyday life, this episode offers some science-backed inspiration you can carry forward in your own way.

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Transcript

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

Welcome to this special ZOE episode, the first of our best of 2025 series. A collection of moments that you told us changed the way you eat, think, and feel this year. 

It's been an incredible year. We spoke with world-leading scientists, uncovered surprising insights, and shared practical tools that you can use to feel better every day.

And in this special highlights episode, we're bringing you the very best moments, including one surprising discovery about a bright green drink that took over the world this year. Whether you're starting fresh in the new year or building on progress you've already made, this episode is packed with simple ideas you can take into 2026.

Here at ZOE, we know that change isn't always easy, so if you are looking for a little inspiration, look no further than Rich Roll. Who went from an overweight junk food addicted workaholic to one of the world's fittest men, all after the age of 40. 

If you are heading into the new year, feeling tired, stuck, or unsure where to begin. Rich's story is the reminder that change is possible at any age.

Rich Roll: Throughout my twenties, I had a struggle with drugs and alcohol that really took me to some pretty dark places and I was able to get sober at 31. I went to treatment for a hundred days, which is a long time to be sort of voluntarily incarcerated in what's, you know, kind of a mental institution for the temporarily insane. 

But that really changed my life and provided me with a new set of tools around how to organize my decision making and my actions. And when I emerged from that experience, building a foundation of sobriety was my number one priority. And I went all in on my recovery and over the next nine or so years, was very focused on that.

But at the same time I was also very intent upon reestablishing myself as a sort of respectable human being who could show up on time and be relied upon and the like, and rebuild my career as a result. 

And during that period of time, I really overlooked my health and wellbeing because I was so focused on that one thing. And it's only in retrospect when I look back on it that I realized the extent to which my relationship with food and lifestyle habits was still very alcoholic. Like I was using food to medicate my emotional state.

Shortly before I turned 40, I was about 50 pounds overweight, so I wasn't obese, but I was quite sedentary. I'd been an athlete in college. I swam for Stanford in the late 1980s at a pretty high level, but really hadn't taken care of myself in quite some time. 

I had an incident walking up the staircase to my bedroom where I had to take a break halfway up. I was literally winded by the exertion of just, you know, walking up a simple flight of stairs and I had some tightness in my chest and it was a scary moment.

Heart disease runs in my family. My grandfather, who had also been a standout swimmer, had died young of a heart attack, and so heart disease was something that my mother was always telling me, you got to be careful with your heart. And everything kind of snapped into focus as a result of that experience.

I realized that not only did I need to make some pretty significant changes in how I was living, like I actually wanted to. I was blessed with a level of willingness to actually take action on that. And I think the reason I bring up the sobriety aspect of my story is because I had had that history. I had had that bottoming out moment where I made a decision, acted on it and made a change. That changed my life dramatically, and I felt the same energy.

I was like, I think I'm having another one of those experiences and what I learned about that prior experience was that you need to take action quickly because it's sort of a sliding doors moment. If you don't act upon it with some level of urgency, whatever willingness you're experiencing tends to fade pretty quickly.

Jonathan: This moment was huge for Rich, realizing his diet wasn't just affecting his health, but limiting his energy, his happiness, and the life that he wanted to live.

Rich Roll: I was on what you would call the window diet. Do you know what the window diet is? 

Jonathan: Tell me about the window diet. 

Rich Roll: The window diet is when you drive up to a fine dining establishment. You roll the window down and they hand you food into your car. That was the diet that I was on. 

So a lot of fast food, a lot of late-night takeout in the law firm in which I was working as a lawyer. Pizza Hut, Domino's, McDonald's, Jack in the box, cheeseburgers, fries, you name it, I tried them all. A lot of greasy food.

So it was a big shift to actually go fully plant-based. And I did it almost as an experiment to prove to myself that it wouldn't work. So I could make peace with the fact that I just felt the way that I felt, and this is the way I'm supposed to feel, and was not expecting this sort of dramatic shift in how I felt.

But I tried a bunch of stuff. I dabbled in paleo, I tried vegetarian, I sort of checked a bunch of boxes. And the one thing that I hadn't done, because I was reluctant to do it, was to go entirely plant-based because it sounded hard. 

It was like, who wants to do that? It just sounded difficult and I couldn't imagine how I could ever be full or sated with anything that I was eating. So I did it kind of as a challenge again to prove that it wouldn't work. Because I really didn't want it to work. That's the truth. So I was as surprised as anyone when it actually, you know, seemed to resuscitate me.

Jonathan: And this theme, small changes, creating big momentum came up again and again in the conversations we had this year. It's a powerful place to start as we think about how to eat and live in 2026.

Rich Roll: Within seven to 10 days, I did feel like this resurgence, the spike in my energy levels. But at the same time, kind of hand in hand with that, there was a hopefulness that I was starting to experience. 

I was used to, you know, eating a midday meal and being so tired, feeling like I had to take a nap and just kind of being checked out of my life. And so to suddenly be able to eat without that food coma that I was so acclimated round gave me more hours in the day and my sleep improved. And when your sleep improves, your stress levels go down, you're able to kind of navigate tricky conflict-oriented situations a little more gracefully. And of course your cognition and problem solving is better. 

So there was really no area of my life that was untouched. And yes, of course we are holistic animals. We're not separated from the environment and our mental health and what's going on in our brain obviously impacts the entire body. And my experience was pretty much 360 across the board: so many things improved as a result of that. 

And that gave me the enthusiasm to just say, Oh, this doesn't need to be an experiment, how can I make this sustainable so that I can continue to learn about how to do this properly and make it work for my life? Because I want to feel this way all the time.

Jonathan: Midlife is often seen as a point of no return for health, but Rich's story suggests it could actually be the ideal moment to make radical change for what makes this change so powerful. And why did it give Rich such a striking energy? To answer that, we need to turn to one of our most talked about topics of 2025: inflammation.

To understand this better, I sat down with Dr. Federa Amati, our head nutritionist here at ZOE, and with my ZOE co-founder, professor Tim Spector, to explore what inflammation really is, and why so many of us are dealing with a constant low level of it without realizing.

Tim: Our view of inflammation has actually changed in recent years. So we used to know it as our defense mechanism against damage or infection, where the body would stimulate a response of the immune system, which meant it could fight off some nasty, invasive bug. Or it could start to heal a wound, or anything going wrong in the body. 

So we've all got this natural defense mechanism, and this is why when you have a virus, you get an inflammatory response to your whole body, and that actually helps get rid of the virus quicker, but makes you sick in the process. 

So, often it's not the actual infection causing the symptoms, it's the inflammation itself. It's the immune system saying, Right, we are going to get more white cells in there to take away the debris. We are going to loosen up the blood vessels so they're leaky and all kinds of stuff get out there, things swell up, they go red, they're painful. 

All this is for a reason. And when people think of inflammation, they think of someone with arthritis and a big swollen red joint. And as you know, I was a rheumatologist for over 20 years treating those kinds of people, and that's what I thought of as inflammation. But we now know that the whole thing is much more subtle.

So these things still happen in everybody, and we wouldn't be alive if we didn't have those mechanisms. But what appears to be happening now is that, if you think of inflammation as a big fire that gets burnt. To sort of kill off all the bugs you don't want, now, instead of that far being turned off, it's still being left on a little bit. 

So the immune system is still simmering away, it still is engaging. We have all these immune cells in our body. They're sending out chemicals all over the body saying, you know, there's danger, there's a problem. 

What's happening now in the modern world, is many of us have low level inflammation where the immune system is just in a sort of slightly on mode all the time. So we can't relax and you're using up valuable metabolic energy. You are distracting your body because it thinks it's looking around for something to attack. The immune system says, Where can I go? What's going on here? And this has a number of consequences. 

So the fact that we have this low level information means that our blood vessels are slightly swollen, our gut is slightly leaky. White cells are just primed to do things all the time, and it fatigues the body. It doesn't have a chance to repair. 

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It could affect your heart, so your blood vessels and your heart are just not working perfectly and therefore, increase your risk of heart disease. It can stress your metabolism so you're more likely to get high insulin levels and diabetes. 

It also actually can influence your brain and your mental health, so that your body perceives you are under some threat and is more likely to cause depression. So your mood will go down as if you are ill.

We've all, you know, been ill or had a vaccination. The vaccination itself causes a short burst of inflammation that makes us tired, want to go to bed, not talk to people. So that's one of the current theories of depression. 

Then you've also got this risk of dementia. So, inflammation is now linked very clearly to increased risk of dementia. In a way, your body can't repair itself as well, if it's got the fire on. 

So your immune system is now seen as absolutely crucial to repairing everything in your body. And if someone is not turning it off completely every night, you are using up a lot of that immune energy. And that's why we get to this state. 

So it really affects all parts of your body and your mental and your physical health. And this is a modern phenomenon.

Jonathan: If this is going on in the background, it's no wonder we feel tired, foggy, or rundown. Thankfully, Tim and Federica shared some delicious science-backed foods that help cool the flame of chronic inflammation. 

Let's start with a classic that even my daughter will eat: broccoli. Why is it a standout for fighting inflammation?

Tim: Well, it's a great example and I think it's one of the Brassica family, which includes all kinds of things like cabbages, and leeks, and onions, and garlic and cauliflower. It's because it has anti-inflammatory properties that have been shown. 

And one of the main chemicals, and this is just an example of one of many, but there's a really cool chemical there that gets released when you eat broccoli called sulforaphane. And this has all these effects on the body, these anti-inflammatory effects on the body, and it's been shown to reduce obesity-related inflammation. 

When you give it to adolescents, it can reduce insulin levels as well, and you get even more effects when you look at broccoli sprouts. And this is a general rule, because the sprout comes out of the seed and those first shoots have really concentrated amounts of all these nutrients, particularly sulforaphanes. And that gives them even more potential. So the younger that shoot is, the more you're getting of this really cool chemical.

Now there are some problems with sulforaphane. because if you just throw your broccoli into a pan, you'll actually inhibit the sulforaphane from being released because the heat does this. So there's a little chemistry that needs to be going on here. 

So I've got a tip to overcome this: something called chop and stop. This is the same for broccoli and it's the same for garlic and onions. You just chop it up, which releases the sulforaphane. As you break down the cell walls all leaks out and rather than being instantly deactivated by the heat, you leave it for 10 minutes, have a cup of coffee or a sneaky glass of wine and you can then put it in the pan and you're getting all the sulforaphane.

The other tip to maximize the sulforaphane is to actually microwave your broccoli. You get three or four times more sulforaphane when you microwave it than when you heat it. Most people think microwaving is really unhealthy, but actually in some cases it can be a real boon because it works differently.

Jonathan: A lot of people think healthy eating has to be complicated. When you hear something like microwaving broccoli can actually make it healthier, it suddenly feels doable. And one of the biggest inflammation breakthroughs this year came from something simple, delicious, and surprisingly easy to add to your day: Red cabbage kraut. Bit of a wild card. Talk me through it Tim.

Tim: It is a wild card and it's really thrown in there as an example of a fermented food. And it may be one that people haven't thought about quite as much because it's a bit different. 

But really what I'm trying to emphasize here is that any fermented food that includes things like yogurts, kefirs, regular sauerkraut, kimchis, which is like, you know, spicy sauerkraut, misos. All of these have anti-inflammatory properties, and these have been shown in multiple studies, both in test tubes and in humans. 

The most recent studies often use multiple different ferments. So rather than focusing just on one, I think it's really important that people learn to diversify what they're eating, because each ferment will have a different set of microbes in them. 

So yogurts will have, say, three microbes and, some of these more complex krauts and kimchis can have up to 20 or 30 in some kombucha. So this red sauerkraut is just one of an example of things that you can add to your meal in tiny little amounts. 

And a real classic study from Stanford showed that when they asked volunteers to try and get five small portions a day of ferments, they could really show in two weeks a dramatic, significant reduction in inflammation levels. 

I think that's the first time anyone has really shown in a really good study, and it's from our colleague Christopher Gardner's group. The other study that we did at ZOE which many listeners might know about is the ZOE Ferment study, where we asked 10,000 people to take at least three ferments a day for two weeks. 

And although we didn't measure inflammation levels, we did measure things that are correlated like tiredness and mood and energy levels, and they all improve within two weeks. 

So the vast majority of people taking these ferments at least three times a day, or in three portions a day will get changed to the inflammation level that translate to improved symptoms. So I think that's something that everyone can do, and that's in addition to all these other foods and tricks.

Federica: And I love that because the study Tim's referring to in the second arm, they had a high fiber diet. So one arm had fermented foods and the second arm had a high fiber diet. And to see the difference between the two arms is amazing. 

So it shows you that fermented foods have a different effect on the immune system compared to high fiber alone. The high fiber diet participants had improved immune system function, so it was more ready to go when needed. The markers were really good to show that priming.

But in the fermented food arm, they showed this active attenuation of inflammatory markers that you didn't see in the high fiber arm, so that's so cool. And I love the red kraut because it's colorful, it's high in bioactive compounds. It's fermented. It does all the things in one jar that you can make yourself at home.

Jonathan: So there you have it. Some easy gut-friendly tips to help you feel your best. Make sure you go back and listen to the full episode to hear all the ideas we've shared. 

But food isn't the only lever we'd learned about this year. Another thing I discovered this year is that a healthy diet isn't just about what you put on your plate. Sometimes it's about the intentional absence of food. 

We invited Dr. Valter Longo, director of the Longevity Institute at USC and one of Times's 50 most influential people in healthcare, to explain how fasting affects longevity in this clip. He explains how you can trick your body into reaping the rewards of fasting.

Valter: So autophagy is this process where cells begin to eat themselves, right? Eat their own components, so they shrink and they start eating themselves.

Jonathan: So Valter, that's a good thing if your cells are eating themselves? It doesn't sound like a good thing.

Valter: It is a good thing, right? So, bacteria do it and yeast to it, and all organisms do it. So it's an opportunity to get rid of a lot of normal components, but junk, real junk that accumulated in the cell. 

So in that sense, it's an opportunity to clean up and so it's a good thing. A group that we collaborate with has done a clinical trial showing the markers of autophagy don't seem to be measurable until about day five, end of day five in the human blood. 

But yeah, but that's one of the things that people fast for three hours and they think autophagy's on, but it probably takes about five days to get there.

Jonathan: So just to play back: you're saying that if you got into a state where your cells are actually sort of eating themselves, they're getting rid of damage, that could be good, but you actually have to starve yourself for five days before that would happen.

Valter: Yeah. So of course, and I think we're going to talk about it. So we've been working for many, many years and how you don't have to start yourself to get some of these effects and this is where fasting mimicking diets and other things come in.

Jonathan: This idea of cleaning up the body at a cellular level is fascinating, but fasting for five days straight isn't realistic for most of us. Definitely not for me. 

So Valter has been developing a more approachable way to get the benefits of fasting without starving yourself.

Valter: So then we've done lots of trials and I think 35 trials already, looking at this periodic fasting-mimicking diet. And so this is a low calorie, low protein, low sugar, high fat. A plant-based diet that lasts between four days and seven days, depending on what we're trying to treat. Then, the patient gets a box and that's a medicine, right? Or that's potential medicine, let's say. 

And so we tested it now, for lots and lots of different things. I think the most advanced one is diabetes now. Very clearly we're seeing regression: diabetes regression, diabetes remission. And the beauty I think is with that lifestyle changes, right? 

The Universal Laden trial with a hundred patients actually looked at lifestyle and saw no difference other than a little bit of increase in exercise towards the end of the 12 fasting mimicking diet cycle. 

So these diabetics doing fast-mimicking diet once a month for 12 months. By the end of it, they saw… 

Tim: How many days per month? 

Valter: Five days. 

Tim: Five days per month. 

Valter: Yeah. Five days a month. And then they were allowed to go back to whatever it is that they do. 

But now the beauty is that they improve so much. 70% of them reduce drug use. They improve so much. 

Then we basically think, and we've seen this, we have clinics for my foundations, and so that we can switch them to three or four times a year. That's it, right? 

So year one you do twelve, maybe not even twelve but let's say twelve. And then year two you may be able to go down to four to six cycles. And year three, we're hoping you're down maybe two, three cycles and that's it. So you do it once every four months. 

And so now we're formally testing that in southern Italy in a 500 patient trial, three arms. And one is a control fasting-mimicking diet once every three months, and then fasting-mimicking diet every three months, plus what I call the longevity diet. So we'll see. We're now at patient 400 and so we've got 100 patients left. 

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But yeah, the idea is, we can try to get people to change everything they do, but they probably either won't change or they'll go back to whatever it is that they used to do. But maybe if the doctor was on board, once every three months, if you have a problem, you can consider doing this for five days. And once you’re done with the five days, you’re done for three months.

Jonathan: Do you believe that this fasting-mimicking diet, these 5 days every few months can improve the biological age and make you younger on the inside? 

Valter: Yes, so we did that in two trials and in both trials, 2.5 years of biological age reduction after three cycles.

Jonathan: You're saying that you did it three times and your measured biological age improved by two and a half years.

Valter: Yeah. So subjects that were asked to do the fasting-mimicking diet monthly for three months, showed a reduction, almost identical in both trials of 2.5 years, on average. 

Jonathan: Tim, what's your reaction to that?

Tim: It's very exciting that you might be able to trick the body into this state, and I think the question is whether this is sustained over time. Because you might get a temporary change in  these markers of biological age. 

But what I like about it is, it's accepting that people aren't going to do long fasts for long periods of time outside of the laboratory. And so it has a pragmatic element to it, which I think is really exciting. 

So I think the test will be, you know, these long term studies to say, well, at three or five years, have things really changed permanently, or is this temporary… Will the body reset itself? This is what we're always fighting in medicine in the body’s ability to recalibrate and realise it’s being fooled. It seems to work short term. The question is, is this gonna work long term?

Jonathan: And that's why we invited Dr. Ayesha and Dean Sherzai onto the show known as the Brain Doctors. They spent decades working in this field and are at the forefront of research into prevention.

Ayesha: I think it's important for our lovely audience to understand that when people are diagnosed with the scary word dementia or Alzheimer's disease, it's not something that just popped out of nowhere right then and there. 

Let's stick to Alzheimer's disease because there are other types of dementia as well in Alzheimer's disease. There are multiple different things that are going on in the brain. 

There is deposition of these harmful toxic protein byproducts. Specifically the ones that have been studied are amyloid, beta, protein, and tau. And they essentially deposit within a cell and outside of the cell, and they start damaging the infrastructure of the brain.

And the direct cause as to why that happens, we're not very clear right now, but there's some hypotheses and one of the hypotheses is that the body has a difficult time getting rid of these toxic byproducts over many, many years.

And multiple studies, both imaging studies and biomarker studies, which means they look at people's blood levels of these toxic byproducts, or they look at cerebral spinal fluid, the spinal tap fluid, and they look at the proteins there. It seems that the process of deposition of these harmful proteins takes decades for it to come to the point where people are diagnosed with dementia.

It takes nearly 20 to 30 years for this process to have been present, ever present, and cause damage in the brain. 

Jonathan: Nearly 20 to 30 years of this slowly being laid down in my brain. 

Ayesha: That is correct. And that is why now, scientists and neurologists are addressing Alzheimer's disease as a disease of middle age. It's not something that manifests in our seventies, eighties, nineties, and beyond. 

Yes, the prevalence increases because people, as they age, their risk goes higher, but the disease process actually starts in your forties, maybe even thirties. 

Jonathan: It's a reminder that it is never too early to start taking steps to protect your brain. Lifestyle makes an enormous difference. 

Ayesha and Dean shared some practical science-backed strategies, 

Ayesha: Nutrition, exercise, unwind or stress management, restorative sleep, and optimizing cognitive activity. And these are based on evidence-based lifestyle intervention and lifestyle factors that improve brain health and prevent cognitive decline on Alzheimer's disease.

Nutrition: very important, and I think you know this more than anybody else, and you do such a fantastic job in this podcast, empowering people about nutrition. 

So in the realm of neurology and neuroscience, we have a tremendous body of evidence showing that the types of food that people choose directly impacts their brain health, and it can prevent devastating diseases like stroke and Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia. Particular to vascular dementia. 

And when you look at the different dietary patterns, it's essentially a variation of the same theme: diets that are high in plant-based foods, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds and sources of polyunsaturated fatty acids. They tend to do very well, and the numbers are incredible.

For example, there was a study that was conducted in Rush University in Chicago, here in the United States. Dr. Martha Morris, she was the lead researcher, the lead Dr. Martha Morris, and she looked at adherence to the MIND diets. 

The mind diet is a hybrid diet. It stands for Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay. Thank goodness for the acronym MIND, the Mediterranean Combination. 

And when you look at the diet, it's not a cultural diet per se. It's essentially a scoring system when people adhere to the MIND diet, they get a high score for consuming green leafy vegetables, cruciferous vegetables, other vegetables, and fruits. Specifically, strawberries and blueberries that are high in polyphenols and flavanols. 

When they consume whole grains, when they have less refined carbohydrates such as white bread or added sugar to foods when they consume nuts, seeds, which are great sources of polyunsaturated fatty acids and omega fats.

When they consume extra virgin olive oil, which could potentially have high polyphenols and mono and polyunsaturated fatty acids, they get a high score. And sources of Omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in fatty fish or flax seeds, chia seed, hemp seeds.

And they get a low score when they consume a lot of red meat, a lot of high fat dairy products, which may be higher in saturated fats and if they consume too much alcohol. 

So that is essentially the concept that you find in all of these dietary patterns and in this population, when they adhere to the MIND diet, they reduce their risk of developing Alzheimer's disease by 53%.

And even moderate adherence reduced the risk by 37%. And in my study in the California Teacher study, same thing. We looked at the Mediterranean diet and we looked at the scoring system. And the beautiful thing was, it was not an all or none phenomenon. Every small incremental change towards that positive outcome.

Say for example, adding a cup of green leafy vegetables or switching a donut for some fruits, it actually made a huge difference, and I think that's pretty empowering for people to know that you don't have to jump into it wholeheartedly. 

You can start by simply changing a few things moving forward. 

Jonathan: So cognitive decline isn't inevitable.

Lifestyle choices play a far greater role in brain health than genetics alone. I asked Dean to dive deeper into the key dietary elements that are essential for maintaining brain health.

Dean: The three elements that are important for brain: B12, make sure that your B12 levels are normal or on the higher side. Vitamin D. Omega-3.

We just did two reviews, two comprehensive reviews, one on omega-3 and the developing brain and omega-3 on the aging brain. And in both of them there seems to be trends towards needing omega-3, being extra aware of omega-3, because omega-3 has that much effect. It's the only fat that the body doesn't make.

Well, omega-6 as well. In the Western diet, you don't have to worry about omega-6. In fact, we have an excess of omega-6. So, omega-3 is very, very important. 

DHA for the brain in particular makes up more than 50% of the brain's volume. So it's critically important and we don't make it so we have to kind of be aware of it.

So that's basically, whether you get it from fish or in our cases, in other people's cases, they can get it from chia, flaxseed or supplements. And that's basically it. 

The acronym is SMASH: salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, and herring, the fatty fish. But it's not the fish. The fish gets it from the algae. 

So it's the omega-3 in particular. There's no uniqueness beyond that. That's important to kind of know where are you going to get your Omega-3 and be aware of it and get it. 

And we just did a  conversation with a world renowned lipidologist and omega-3 expert who said that even people who are just taking it from chia and flaxseed, if they're extra aware of it, they should be fine.

Jonathan: I don’t know about you, but I love how empowering this is. You don't have to overhaul your entire life. Small swaps and daily habits genuinely add up. 

And one of those daily habits for many of us is a hot drink, which leads us to one of the biggest trends of the year. Matcha exploded in popularity in 2025, and this year I learned something I genuinely didn't expect.

Matcha doesn't just give you a gentler caffeine buzz, it actually behaves differently inside your body. We invited Chef Koj, an expert in Japanese cuisine to take us inside the science, the history, and the unique preparation behind this vibrant green drink. 

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Koj: Okay, so first of all, it's a type of green tea and all green teas are made from the same plant that any other teas that we might be familiar with, black teas that we drink typically with milk.

It's a special type of green tea because rather than taking the leaves and infusing those into water, you pick the leaves specially when you first grow them.

And when I say pick, you mean you pick the youngest ones as well and not just physically pick. And then you ground those into a very fine powder. It takes a long, long time, the whole preparation, which is why it's quite expensive. And you suspend those particles in water rather than infusing other nutrients out of the tea leaves.

And you drink that or eat it. 

Jonathan: So you just drink the whole leaf rather than dipping it in and taking it out again. 

Koj: Exactly. Imagine when I make a coffee plunger, you drink that and you get the bits at the end and it's a bit unpleasant in your mouth. Okay? That's because the particles are not very fine. But, if you imagine that they're really, really fine, you would just drink that and not notice. That's what drinking matcha is.

Jonathan: Amazing. And so tell me, is there some magic process by which you decide which tea leaves, or I could wander up to a tea plant, pick a few leaves, cut it into little pieces and hey, presto, I have matcha.

Koj: No, because it's taken at least 900 years to work out where to grow the leaves, how to pick them, when to pick them, what to do to them before you pick them. 

And so one of the main things that matcha has over other types of green tea is that it's grown in shade. And they realized this by accident initially because it was naturally in the shade of other trees, but they noticed that the leaves had more chlorophyll, so they were greener. So they look and they taste different. 

Jonathan: So it's very particular sorts of tea leaves that are picked. And are tea leaves normally not grown in the shade?

Koj: No. Most tea would be grown in full sunlight. And you know, tea has moved from China to Japan, to Sri Lanka, to India, to Kenya now as well. And they all share similar characteristics of where they're grown, typically higher up on hills, full sunshine.

But what the Japanese did when they realized the tea leaves that were growing in the shade of other trees naturally were fighting for more sunlight. And so they push more chlorophyll into the leaves and that's what makes them greener. 

So now what they do is they actually shade them. So traditionally they would shade them with, you know, bamboo.

Jonathan: How is that different from the preparation of a green tea or a black tea? People who know me know that I'm a bit addicted to my black tea. What is different here? 

Koj: Okay, so I'll start with black tea for a start. The difference with black tea is that you would collect the tea, you wouldn't be quite so picky on which leaves you choose and you'd let them ferment and oxidize. 

As you know, from watching leaves, if you just let them die, they'll go brown. And that's why black tea, it's actually black tea, but Chinese people call it red tea because often when you infuse it, it's more red, ready brown. So that's the main difference.

The green tea, you're trying to make sure it doesn't oxidize. Make sure it doesn't ferment. And that's the big difference between green and black tea. 

And then I think the first thing you asked was what's the difference between green tea and matcha? Well, matcha you are making sure that you get the particles. And with green tea you'd infuse it as you would do with any other normal, normal tea, what I call normal tea, or tea that we're more used to. 

Jonathan: So a green tea, I dip it in the hot water. I let it sit there for a few minutes. I take it out. Yes. So then all I've got is just the water with some stuff that's sort of come outta the green tea. Whereas a matcha I've literally got the entire leaf smashed in very small pieces. 

Koj: Yes. And I think. For me, that means that when it goes into your body, if you, if you just put it into water, you're kind of relying on what's water soluble to then put into your body. But by putting the whole thing in, you are opening up more options in terms of what your body can ingest, process, and extract nutrients from.

Jonathan: Understanding what makes matcha different from green tea or coffee helps explain why so many people are turning to it for focus and calm, but how does it actually compare nutritionally?

Tim: You've got the green teas which have low levels of caffeine in them, so 20 to 50 milligrams. Then you've got the matcha, which is the concentrated form, which has about double that, 60 to 90 milligrams on average. And then coffee goes to a hundred to 130 milligrams. 

So it's a sort of gradient. So you, you're getting relatively less in there. And black tea would be, you know, somewhere between matcha and green tea. So you've got a range of these caffeines. 

We've been hearing about this other chemical, this L-theanine, which does seem to counteract some of the over-stimulatory effects of the caffeine on the mind, and that's why it doesn't seem to affect your sleep as much as coffee.

Jonathan: So there's another drug here that has a different effect. 

Tim: Correct. Yes. I mean, obviously in teas and coffees and, you know, there are hundreds of different chemicals that we're only just discovering, but these are a few that have been isolated that we think definitely have these brain effects. 

And so you've got these two competing effects with matcha that are really, really quite fascinating to study and that you can still get some of the benefits of caffeine without it keeping you up at night and making you too wired. And maybe that's why matcha seems to be taking off.

Jonathan: I'd actually love to get into that now because I always thought it was the only thing coffee was, was caffeine. And I know Tim, that you co-wrote a big paper with ZOE on this groundbreaking new research on how much coffee can actually transform our gut. 

I know that you've also been reading up on the latest research on matcha, so I'd love to sort of almost measure them up against each other a little bit, because I think for many of our listeners, they're like, Okay, how does this compare with this coffee that I'm so used to? Could you tell me.

Tim: If we start with fiber, coffee's actually a decent source of fiber, 1.5 grams per cup. So if you're having three cups a day getting, you know, four or five grams of fiber, about a third of the average intake in the US.

Matcha probably has more fiber in it than coffee. It all depends on the amounts you're using, but over 50% of the matcha powder is actually fiber. So if you're putting a tablespoon in, you're going to be getting, you know, over 10 grams of fiber. So fiber is as good, if not better than coffee. 

There's less caffeine, relatively, but probably still enough to get you up in the morning. It has fats in it that coffee doesn't have, so it's actually a source of omega threes and these linoleic acids. And these are all healthy fats, interestingly, that come out. We know that these healthy fats, you know, are good for the brain, etc. 

17% of it is protein. Everyone's on about protein these days, you know, these relatively small amounts, but it's all good quality, you know, giving you a few grams of protein in there as well. 

If you take this all together, then actually nutritionally, there's quite a lot of good stuff going on with this matcha in this concentration that seems to be pretty equivalent to coffee given what we know. 

And I think there's lots of things we don't know about. Well, there's other chemicals are in there, but interesting that the things that it has that coffee doesn't is it has this L theanine, which is this other chemical in there that seems to, in studies, maintain sleep quality.

So people who are taking, I think it's, they take generally about three grams of matcha before going to bed doesn't seem to stop them sleeping as coffee would. The studies show a bit of variability between people, but that's a really encouraging sign. 

What I really like about matcha is that it's got similar polyphenol levels to coffee. These defense chemicals that you get from the bean or the leaf or the plant itself. And so, whereas it's more diluted in green tea, you're getting a really concentrated hit of them. And many of them, we still don't understand exactly what they do. But you know, these are great antioxidants.

Jonathan: Hearing Tim break this down was one of my favorite moments of the year, especially the part about fiber and the calming effect of L-theanine. If you've ever wondered how to try matcha for the first time, this next clip is for you. 

Let's say I was like, you know what? I'd really want to try it as a drink because I see it advertised in all these different coffee shops. Would you have any guide?

I have already heard, both of you told me not to have the Starbucks venti… whatever, but is there a way that might maximize my chances of having something that you would, you would approve of both, I guess in terms of the quality of the matcha and also the experience.

As maybe a very easy entry point? 

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Koj: Yeah, just some more milk. Because it's a powder, add the milk in very slowly at the beginning, even like maybe a bit of cold milk to make it into a paste so you don't have any of the clumps of powder left. And then top it up with warm milk. 

And again, you'll get the soothingness, the umami of the milk. And actually, you know, when you taste good milk, it is sweet. You don't need the extra sugar. 

Tim: Yeah. So I think it's reasonable to start with, but I think there's some evidence that having milk in your teas does interact with the good polyphenols, so they may not be absorbed as well.

So use that as a starting point. Then try and wean yourself off the milk and go hardcore like we've done today, which I actually prefer, neat rather than with milk but the most important thing is to enjoy it. 

Jonathan: And that wraps up some of my favorite moments from 2025. I hope they leave you as inspired as they left me and full of ideas to take into 2026.

Don't forget to catch part two of our 2025 highlights, but for now, please excuse me, I'm off to find a warm cup of matcha.