Best of 2025: The ideas that transformed our health - Part 2

Welcome to part two of our Best of 2025 series - the moments that changed how our listeners think about their health and what they do on a day-to-day basis.

In this episode, we delve into simple questions with profound impact. Is it safe to experiment with your own health? Does cheese really cause bad dreams? Why do some breakfasts leave you tired and hungry, while others don’t?

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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 back to part two of our 2025 highlights, the moments that changed how we think about our health, and gave us practical tools to feel better every day. Today, you’ll hear what happened when I put my own breakfast under the microscope, how arthritis symptoms were reversed in a groundbreaking trial.

And we finally get a scientific answer to the question: Does cheese really cause nightmares? But first, the person who has arguably pushed the boundaries more than anyone, Bryan Johnson. Bryan has dedicated his life and his body to testing cutting-edge health interventions to slow down ageing. His meticulous approach to sleep, diet and exercise has sparked global debate and raises a question that matters for all of us.

How much should we experiment with our own health? I began by asking him how he developed his unique way of living.

Bryan: We wanted to approach this question scientifically. And so I hired 30 medical professionals, and we went through this process where we evaluated all the scientific literature on healthspan, lifespan.

We tried to grade the evidence that we could identify, do we think, for example, a given therapy, let’s say it slows down the speed of ageing, or reverses ageing damage to a certain degree, do we believe the evidence? And then we stack ranked all the evidence and said, okay, we have our list, and let’s just start with number one and let’s do that therapy or that measurement.

And so we had a firm principle that we would do everything based upon measurement and scientific evidence. And so I became the most measured person in human history. There’s more data on my body than anyone before me. That’s amazing. And we’ve just gone through this process of measurement, application of the science, again and again, and I think it’s possible that I have the best comprehensive health markers of anybody in the world.

You know, I take 50 different markers from my sleep quality to my inflammation levels, to uric acid, to muscle, to fat, take any marker. We’re going to share this actually in the next coming days, but it’s really a contemplation of what does health look like, comprehensively, from how you sleep to what your microbiome looks like to your biological age, your methylation patterns.

So we really have tried to just do this by the data and numbers and with as little storytelling as possible.

Jonathan: Bryan, when you say the best possible markers, do you mean the best possible markers for someone of your age, or are you saying that they’re better than my 16 year old son?

Bryan: Biological age marker, there’s typically an ideal age. So, for example, in grip strength, as you grow older, you increase in grip strength capacity, then you hit a certain age, you decline in grip strength capacity. And that is true for a lot of things. That’s your cardiovascular fitness. It peaks at age 18 and then declines from there.

And so we’ve tried to identify the peak health level of every category of every marker. And we try to peg that. So we say, what is peak cardiovascular fitness for an 18-year-old, and then how do I achieve that? So, for example, my cardiovascular fitness is equal to the top 1.5% of 18-year-olds as measured by VO₂ max.

We completed a test today looking at oxygenation of muscles, and so that’s also a marker of age. So my oxygenation of my muscle is in the top 5% of 18-year-olds, elite swimmers. And so we try to find peak levels and then peg my markers to that as best we can.

Jonathan: If I understand right, you are saying that yes, you are better than my 16-year-old son.

Bryan: Basically, on all of these markers.

I mean, if you basically said a conventional wisdom would say a 47-year-old could never be as healthy as a 16-year-old. Now, in certain regards, that’s probably true, right? They have the anatomy of a 16-year-old. I have the anatomy of a 47-year-old, and there’s just some things our technologies can’t do today.

However, if you compare the 16-year-old and me on these markers, inflammation, sleep quality, cardiovascular ability, bone marrow density, down the line, it’s possible my health markers are in fact better than these 16-year-olds.

Jonathan: That’s amazing. Listening to Bryan, I was struck by the contrast between his extreme routine and the much smaller health experiments most of us might want to try. My ZOE co-founder, Professor Tim Spector. Bryan and I shared a really honest, useful exchange about what’s safe, what isn’t, and where to start.

One question I think a lot of listeners will have listening to this is, is it safe to experiment on my health? So, how should people, if you were going to advise anyone listening to this, thinking about experimenting with their health but wanting to do it safely, what would you be saying?

Tim: I think it’s reasonable to explore, particularly with sleep, exercise, and food. If you do it for short periods of time and you’re not going to overdo it, it’s probably reasonably safe if you don’t have any other medical conditions and you are fairly young and healthy.

Everything I believe in now is about self-experimentation because everyone is different and learning what sleep is good for you, how much exercise is good for you, what the right diets are that are personalised to you, whether you should be on a high-fat or a high-carb diet. These all require some self-experimentation.

If you don’t have access to things like the ZOE programme, I think I would do it for short periods of time. The danger is if you overdo it, and in areas we don’t fully understand. I think the gut microbiome was one, certainly, when we did this ten years ago, we didn’t understand quite how harmful some of these practices could be.

But I think everyone should be encouraged to some extent to do self-experimentation.

Do you agree with that?

Bryan: Yeah. I mean, life is an experiment. So whether someone is actively opting into an experiment, they are experimenting every second of every day. So when you decide to go to bed, you’re doing an experiment. When you choose something from the menu, you’re experimenting. Every decision you make is an experiment.

So the question is whether you have data just to inform you of the results of your experiment.

Tim: But what I think is really cool is that we’ve learned that just with food, if you record how you feel a few hours after eating it, in a notebook or something, you can get a pretty good idea of whether that food does agree with you or not.

These are things we never thought of before because we always assumed we’re all the same. We’ll respond to exercise, food, and sleep the same way. But the experiments Bryan’s doing are very methodical, very technical, but I think everyone can just make a mental note to think about how they feel. How does it make them feel?

Jonathan: That idea of simply paying attention, noticing how you feel after you eat, move, or change your routine has really stayed with me. It’s such a low-effort habit, and yet it can tell us more about our health than we realise.

It doesn’t just apply to food. Bryan told us that sleep was one of the biggest levers he’s found for improving his overall well-being.

So with that in mind, I turned to someone who knows this better than almost anyone. World-leading sleep scientist Sophie Bostock. In this next clip, she explains why good sleep doesn’t just help. It sets the foundation for everything else.

Sophie: We tend to increase our perception of threat when we’re sleep deprived, and I think this is an incredibly important theme that will probably run through this conversation because that sense of threat is not just psychological; that is very much physiological. So if your brain and your body are feeling on edge, then what happens? You amp up that sensitivity of the stress response. This physiological cascade which has evolved to help us to fight or flee or freeze in the face of danger.

And for most of us, that means increasing adrenaline, increasing cortisol, increasing blood pressure, increasing the blood flow to the muscles, perhaps making us sweat a little bit more, mobilising blood sugar, blood glucose, so that we’re fired up for action.

That is an evolutionary response to being in an environment where we couldn’t sleep well. So if you think about our hunter-gatherer ancestors, if they were camped out next to a den of sabre-toothed tigers, there was an evolutionary advantage in being in this increased state of fight or flight.

They were much less likely to get eaten. And over hundreds of thousands of years, our brains have learned to associate sleep loss with potential danger. And so we are more on edge.

That helps to explain those emotional responses. Also, the physiological responses, that over time our immune system becomes dysregulated, more exhausted, almost, because we are constantly ramping up our immune response, ready to fight infection.

We also see that we’re at increased risk of hypertension, of inflammation. These diseases help to increase risk of heart disease, of diabetes, disrupted blood sugar. I could go on.

But I think the other aspect is cognitive function. So we know that the brain does a huge amount of mental processing overnight. We are consolidating memories. We are pruning back information so that we can focus on what is most important.

So sleep is really helping us to learn and innovate. So when we’re sleep deprived, that brain fog, that slowness to respond, slower reaction time, can also have knock-on effects and increased risk of accidents and things like that.

So we’ve got very acute effects and also more chronic long-term effects on health.

Jonathan: If we want to make real progress with our health in 2026, we can’t ignore sleep. It isn’t just a nice-to-have. It shapes our stress levels, our immune system, our blood sugar, and even our ability to think clearly.

The good news is you don’t need to start a complicated routine. In the next part of our conversation, Sophie shared some simple science-backed steps you can try to build a more solid sleep foundation.

Sophie: Let’s keep it simple. Start first thing in the morning. Wake up at the same time as often as you can.

So set your alarm for the same time each day. When you start to do that for a week or two, you’ll find that you don’t need the alarm anymore. But try and aim for a consistent wake-up time.

Aim to get some natural light, ideally within the first hour after waking. That’s going to kickstart your circadian rhythm for the day. Tell the clock that it’s wake-up time.

The advantage of doing that is that if you get this bright light in the morning, it’s going to ban the melatonin, so you’re going to feel more alert, but automatically, fifteen or sixteen hours later, you are going to start to feel sleepy.

Move your body during the day, whichever way makes you feel happy, but get physical, be active.

There was some recent research actually suggesting that yoga was one of the best forms of exercise for sleep. So it doesn’t need to be super intensive, it just needs to feel good for you.

Take some time out to relax during the day, particularly if you’re a busy person that goes from A to B at three hundred miles an hour. Just take fifteen minutes for yourself, a moment to be and not do.

And then, as we come towards bedtime, try and have a consistent wind-down time. I’m not bothered about whether you get into bed at exactly the right time, but try and have a consistent time where you start to switch off.

In that hour of wind down, get done what needs to be done for tomorrow. Some form of relaxation, something to look forward to, whether it’s a warm bath, or reading a book, or doing some breath work, listening to music, some intimacy with your partner, with your family.

Social connection is often neglected in terms of its role in improving sleep.

And then during sleep, you want darkness. Use an eye mask or blackout blinds. Try and banish light from your sleep environment and just let it come. Don’t try too hard to sleep.

Jonathan: That sounds brilliant. The one thing I haven’t heard you mention, I’m curious about, is use of the smartphone, because you said right at the beginning that that’s the number one thing.

Sophie: Yeah. That’s really changed everything. Yeah. So, and made this work, what’s in my book, that wind down time, that’s when I’d be switching off the phone. Ideally, the phone does not come with you into the bedroom.

Buy a cheap alarm clock that has no smart functions. And this is something that can be really good for families.

So parents will often say, How do I separate my teenager from their phone. Well, if it’s something that everybody does, it’s just the norm. The phones don’t go into the bedroom. That’s not where they live. That just is a rule that you can make for yourselves.

Jonathan: If I do all of these things, if I’m not an insomniac, but I’m in that fifty to sixty per cent of people who are not getting their best sleep, can it really transform my sleeping?

Sophie: All of those things might help a bit. I don’t want to overdo the sleep hygiene piece because I also know there are some great sleepers out there who have pretty poor sleep habits.

They’re all part of this picture of positive sleep health. If there was anything to add to that, it’s that I would love people to believe that sleep is important, but also to believe that they are good sleepers.

A lot of what I do is help people build confidence. If you do those habits, what happens is that you build confidence that you are going to sleep well. That helps to ease the anxiety if you’re someone who has been anxious about sleep in the past.

The danger of this advice is that it’s too rigid, and that if you haven’t had fifteen minutes of daylight within an hour of waking up, you start to get anxious. If your phone’s accidentally gone into the bedroom, then you might have a terrible night’s sleep.

So these are guidelines. They are recommendations. They are not strict rules.

Jonathan: There’s one sleep rule many of us grew up with. Never eat cheese before bed. Supposedly, it guarantees bad dreams.

I asked Sophie whether there’s any real science behind this idea, or if it’s just another sleep myth we can finally let go of.

As you’ll hear, the evidence is pretty thin and mainly linked to people whose bodies don’t tolerate dairy well. So for most of us, there’s no strong reason to fear a bit of evening cheese. It’s nice to be able to finally put that particular sleep story to rest.

Sophie: So there was a paper that was published, I think just a month or two ago on this, and it was actually a survey.

So this was a Canadian study, and over a thousand students who got credit for taking part in the survey. And they asked them about the foods they ate and whether the people thought they influenced their sleep and their dreams.

And out of a thousand people, I think only one per cent suggested that dairy influenced their dreams.

The study suggested that the population were more likely to be lactose intolerant. So, of course, if you are eating something that really doesn’t agree with you, it may well disrupt your sleep.

Jonathan: So now you’ve had a good night’s sleep. You wake up feeling more rested, and then comes a very familiar question. What should I have for breakfast?

For many of you, that answer is a bowl of oats. But in 2025, oats became surprisingly controversial.

Some people praise them as a heart-healthy hero. Others worried they might send blood sugar through the roof. Dr Sarah Berry and I unpacked the evidence.

First, we looked at the big picture. What do long-term studies actually show about oats and heart health?

Sarah: There’s some fantastic data that’s come from what we call the epidemiological studies, which are studies in large populations where they’ve followed people for a long period of time and looked at, depending on whether people are oat eaters or not oat eaters, whether that affects their risk of disease.

In one such study where they followed more than five hundred thousand individuals over many years, they found that people who were oat eaters versus those who didn’t eat any oats actually had lower rates of type two diabetes by about fifteen per cent and lower all-cause mortality, which basically means risk of dying, and that was by about twenty per cent.

Now, obviously, there’s lots of other things that might explain some of this. People who eat oats tend to smoke less, et cetera. But you can actually adjust for that in the analysis. Fully disentangle it.

So it’s not the strongest evidence to pull on, but that gives us an idea that there’s something going on there. That there’s something about eating oats that might be beneficial for our health.

And so the next thing we need to look at is clinical trials. And also, is there a mechanism? Is there some kind of rationale at why we might be seeing this?

And what we know is that oats contain a very special fibre called beta-glucan. And this fibre is well known to reduce circulating cholesterol levels.

So to reduce total cholesterol, but also reduce LDL, which is our bad cholesterol that we know is linked to heart disease.

And there’s been lots of clinical trials that have been published showing that if you add oats to a meal, or the beta-glucan to a meal, that you can significantly reduce people’s cholesterol levels.

It needs to be about a certain dose. So we know that you need to be having about three grams of the beta-glucan a day in order to lower your cholesterol.

And so the FDA in the US and the European Food Standards Agency in the UK actually have an approved health claim that beta-glucan, this fibre that’s in oats, at three grams a day can reduce your cholesterol and hence is associated with improved heart health.

And I think the evidence is quite consistent for that.

Jonathan: So oats came out looking pretty good from a heart health perspective, especially because of that special fibre beta-glucan, which can help lower cholesterol when you eat enough of it regularly.

But what about the other concern? Blood sugar spikes.

To test this properly, Sarah and I turned ourselves into guinea pigs.

We both ate a bowl of instant oats, the kind you might pop in the microwave in the morning, and we tracked what happened to our blood sugar in real time.

Jonathan: I’m going to scan mine and show you what I’ve got, Sarah. Here we go. Wow. Can you see that?

Sarah: So Jonathan has just gone up to ten point seven.

Jonathan: I can’t believe that.

Sarah: Well, I can believe that, but I’m quite surprised. Mine’s gone up to eight point four.

Jonathan: So, Sarah, I just had ten point seven, and my number, when we scanned it twenty minutes ago, was around six. What does any of that mean? What’s going on?

Sarah: So what’s happening is the carbohydrate from the oats is being processed and broken down into glucose molecules.

And the glucose molecules are now passing through your bloodstream. And this is what we’re detecting from the glucose monitor that you’re wearing on your arm.

So you’re seeing this increase in circulating glucose from the carbohydrates that are in those oats.

And this increases within five to ten minutes after eating any carbohydrate-rich meals. Typically, it peaks around thirty minutes.

So it’ll be interesting to see what it looks like in about ten or fifteen minutes.

Jonathan: And it seems to me that that number has shot through the roof in the last twenty minutes when I ate this instant oats.

In fact, I have worn these before. I don’t think I’ve managed to get above ten with anything I eat in the last three or four years.

I definitely did used to go above ten before I started at ZOE. So that’s a pretty impressive spike I’ve achieved, isn’t it?

Sarah: Yeah. That’s quite a big increase in blood sugar levels.

An increase in blood sugar after a carbohydrate-rich meal is a normal physiological response. But once it starts to get really high, quite often it can impact how you’re feeling in the moment.

So it might be that you have a slight headache, or you might feel that your heart is racing a little bit.

Also, about two to four hours after having quite a big peak like that, you might get a dip in blood glucose.

And we’ve found from our own ZOE research that that dip can drive increased hunger, increased food intake.

It can give you poor energy, poor alertness.

What we also know is if you are eating every day all of your meals to cause that kind of peak, over a sustained period of time, that’s linked to some unfavourable long term health effects.

Like an increased risk of obesity, type two diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

So I would not recommend, based on that, you having instant porridge on its own with water for every meal of the day.

Jonathan: Or even every breakfast, right.

Sarah: No. Because you are likely as well to just not feel great for the rest of the day.

Because it sets you up on that kind of rollercoaster where you are having the big peak, you’re having this dip, it’s driving you then to go and have a quick fix to get your blood sugar back up.

You are then eating more at your next meal. And you’ll probably feel less energetic, less alert.

So yeah, I wouldn’t advise that.

Jonathan: Now, Sarah, you didn’t eat exactly the same thing as me, did you? You added all those other ingredients onto these instant oats.

Why is your number not the same as my number, Sarah?

Sarah: So I added nuts, seeds, dried berries, and some nut butter.

And they contain extra fibre, extra protein, and extra fat.

And we know that fibre, fat, and protein impact the rate at which our stomach empties.

They also impact the rate at which blood glucose is absorbed from the bloodstream and some hormones like insulin, which also impact how we metabolise the blood sugar.

So by adding and layering on this extra fat, protein, and fibre, it modulates how quickly we absorb the glucose.

So it modulates this rise in blood sugar.

Jonathan: Sarah, I know what we have with our meal is one part, but also it’s true that we don’t all respond the same as we eat these meals.

And you already showed that my baseline blood sugar was higher than yours.

So even with your pairing, Sarah, and the fact that your blood sugar control is better than mine, isn’t it?

I think when we’ve done these ZOE tests, it turns out that my blood sugar control is really quite poor. My memory is that yours is fairly good.

Sarah: Yeah, mine is a little bit better than yours.

And it’s surprising, actually, even though I paired it with the fibre and the protein, that it’s still gone up that high.

Jonathan: And I remember the first time that I ever did this test with ZOE with my blood sugar sensor, this was the thing that blew my mind.

Because I thought these oats they’re really healthy for you.

And yet I was having this response, which was as fast as when I just drank a sugary drink.

And it seems to me that what you’re seeing there, Sarah, is even when you’ve mixed in those other things, that this instant oats is, it feels like it’s almost like you’re having sugar with your yoghurt.

What’s going on there?

Sarah: Yeah. And it’s all to do with the magic of the food matrix that we often talk about here at ZOE, which basically is the structure of the food.

So, for example, there was a clinical trial where they asked people to eat, one day, steel-cut oats, another day rolled oats, another day instant oats, and another day really heavily processed oats that are often used in breakfast cereals.

And what they found, similar to what we’ve observed today, is that the less processed the oats, the lower the blood sugar response.

So the steel-cut oats caused the lowest increase in blood sugar after eating.

The rolled oats caused only a moderate increase.

But as it became more processed, up to the level of the oats that we had today, you got a bigger increase.

And it’s because of changing the structure, changing the rate at which the stomach empties, the rate at which they’re absorbed, that you see these differences.

Jonathan: One of my biggest lessons from that experiment is that not all oats are created equal. The more processed they are, the bigger the blood sugar spikes. A simple habit I’m taking into 2026 is to choose less processed oats like steel cut or plain rolled oats with no added ingredients, and to dress them up with plants, fibre, healthy fats, and protein to help smooth out those spikes.

Repeated blood sugar spikes can contribute to chronic low-grade inflammation in the body, and inflammation is at the heart of many conditions, including arthritis.

So next, I turned to Dr Tamiko Katsumoto, clinical associate professor at Stanford University, to help us understand the different types of arthritis and why joint pain is becoming so common.

Tamiko: So osteoarthritis is unfortunately one of the most common types of arthritis.

We used to call it wear and tear degenerative arthritis, less inflammatory. These are the types of arthritis that can occur in joints that have previously had, for example, an injury.

A lot of athletes that have messed up their knees or their hips, that can happen.

However, I think we’re learning osteoarthritis actually might have a more inflammatory component than we previously realised.

It’s more common in people that are overweight. It’s possibly related in some ways to the fact that they’re bearing more weight on those joints, so there may be a mechanical component.

But there are other components for osteoarthritis we don’t fully understand.

For example, the hands can be affected in osteoarthritis, and clearly, we’re not bearing weight in our hands.

Osteoarthritis is one of the classic most common types, which is not considered to be truly inflammatory.

Rheumatoid arthritis is the most common inflammatory arthritis.

Again, I think we’re starting to understand that there are genetic contributions, but more and more as we move forward, we’re learning the environmental components are substantial.

Jonathan: What do you experience as a patient living with osteoarthritis or rheumatoid arthritis?

Tamiko: Osteoarthritis, I’ll call it OA, tends to be less inflammatory. People tend to get more and more pain with motion, with using their joints. In contrast, rheumatoid arthritis is considered inflammatory, meaning that people tend to wake up feeling incredibly stiff. It takes a while for them to get up and going. They often feel like they need to get their joints moving. A hot shower might really help get them moving. They experience what’s called jelling, where you sit down for a prolonged period of time and your joints kind of gel. And then as you start to move them, that starts to get them feeling better.

But rheumatoid arthritis can be profoundly disabling. The amount of pain, the amount of dysfunction, a lot of patients aren’t, for example, if it’s affecting your hands, you’re not able to open jars or grasp things or use your joints the way you normally would like to. It can be very painful if it affects your foot joints. It can feel like you’re walking on marbles or glass in some cases.

Jonathan: Arthritis is affecting more and more people worldwide. For many, the pain and stiffness can completely change daily life. But there was some genuine hope from Dr Katsumoto.

She walked us through a major trial that tested whether a comprehensive lifestyle programme, including diet, movement, sleep, and stress management, could meaningfully improve symptoms for people living with arthritis.

Tamiko: This was a very exciting trial. I’m a huge fan of randomised controlled trials. This was a group of our Dutch colleagues. They actually did two studies in parallel. They did one in rheumatoid arthritis, and they did one in osteoarthritis. To clarify, it was metabolic-associated osteoarthritis. So patients that tended to have metabolic syndrome, were maybe overweight, those patients with OA.

Jonathan: And so randomised controlled trials are basically the gold standard of scientific testing.

Tamiko: Yes.

They’re helpful in that they minimise confounding bias in terms of the fact that people are put into two different groups. There’s an equal chance of whatever intervention working or not. And comparing to a placebo provides a robust comparator. Basically, what they did was put them through a lifestyle intervention. This is absolutely thrilling to me because I’m a huge fan of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. Just to quickly provide their six pillars of lifestyle medicine, diet is number one. In addition, exercise, stress reduction, social connections, sleep, and finally, avoidance of risky substances.

Those are the six pillars of lifestyle medicine.

And essentially what this randomised controlled trial did was put these patients through either the active arm, they called it the plants for joints arm, that underwent these six lifestyle interventions, versus the placebo, which was essentially standard of care. They ran them through this programme for sixteen weeks.

What they found at the end of the study, and even at eight weeks at the midpoint, they saw dramatic improvements in the patients’ joint disease. So for the rheumatoid arthritis patients, the endpoint they looked at is called DAS 28.

This is a disease activity score based on twenty-eight different joints.

So you measure swollen and tender joints, you measure the CRP inflammatory marker, and you measure how the patient is feeling.

And based on that endpoint, which is a very robust endpoint, there was a very statistically highly significant difference in terms of the rheumatoid arthritis patients that underwent this lifestyle programme. They looked more deeply to see what was the most likely thing driving this difference.

And it was most likely diet.

Of course, you can’t separate out; it was a full, holistic intervention of multiple different domains.

But bottom line, I think diet played a huge role.

What they did was educate these patients on a whole food plant based diet. So, minimising processed foods, minimising, really mostly eliminating animal products, increasing fibre intake, and really trying to encompass a very healthy whole food diet.

Same thing was done for osteoarthritis.

And the reason I got so excited to see the results for osteoarthritis is we don’t have great treatments for OA.

It’s one of the most common conditions. A lot of us get it. And yet we often don’t have good answers.

And so the fact that this intervention, this lifestyle intervention, showed such a promising result, I think it was really exciting for the field.

Jonathan: There was a big impact for both these groups with these different types of arthritis.

Because I know sometimes scientists can get really excited about something that’s statistically significant, but it’s like a two per cent chance.

And so the scientists get really excited about it, but a normal person or patient is like, well, that doesn’t really change my life.

Does this actually make any difference to the symptoms and how they were going to feel after this?

Tamiko: Yes. This was definitely beyond the minimally important clinical difference. So there was clearly impact on patients’ lives, quality of lives.

What was most exciting, they did a one-year follow-up of these cohorts. They showed that a lot of these patients were able to get off of their medications.

Jonathan: They were able to actually give up their medications. Because you were talking about how serious this is. So that seems rather amazing.

Tamiko: Incredible.

A lot of them ended up gradually deprescribing a lot of their meds. Many of them lost weight. Many of them improved their blood pressure, cardiovascular markers, lipid profiles. But I was most struck by the fact that some of them were able to wean off these medications.

Jonathan: The results of that study were remarkable. Many participants didn’t just feel a bit better. Some improved enough to reduce or even stop certain medications under medical supervision. So what does an arthritis friendly way of eating actually look like in practice?

I asked Tamiko to break it down into something simple you could picture on your plate at home.

Tamiko: This is the approach where you take a plate, and you divide it up. Half of it is fruits and vegetables. The whole concept of eating the rainbow is really apropos. These are foods that are high in phytochemicals. A lot of the antioxidants that are super important for calming down our immune system.

Cruciferous vegetables. These are things like broccoli and kale, and cauliflower. These deep leafy greens that I’ve come to love and embrace. They’re so important. I really think food is medicine.

These are incredibly important in terms of helping our liver detoxify. We’re living in a very polluted world. These are super helpful foods that can help us clear our body of toxins, endocrine disruptors.

So half the plate focusing on high-quality vegetables and some fruits. Then a quarter of the plate being proteins, preferably plant proteins or lean proteins. Things like beans and lentils. I’m a big fan of tofu.

And then whole grains. The thing to keep in mind is that with ultra-processed foods, we tend to eat a lot of refined grains. White rice, white pasta, white bread. These things have had a lot of the nutrients stripped out. So whole grains is where we want to go. Things like quinoa. Some ancient grains like farro and bulgur, and millet.

If you imagine the plate method. The pyramid method is a little more complicated to think through. Those are the key staples that I try to encourage my patients to aim for.

Again, animal products in moderation. Limiting them. If you look at the Blue Zones, the majority ended up eating meat less than five times a month. So maybe once a week, meat should be considered a treat.

One thing that was commonly shared across all five Blue Zones is they all ate a half to one cup of beans a day. Beans and lentils. These legumes are so good for us. Packed with protein, packed with fibre.

Another food type that I love are chia seeds and flax seeds. Chia seeds are the perfect food. They’re high in fibre, high in omega three, high in protein. They’ve got so many great components. I add them to my smoothies. I try to incorporate them wherever I can.

Jonathan: Finding better ways to look after our joints is hugely important.

Pain doesn’t just hurt in the moment. It can stop us from moving, from doing the exercise and strength work that keeps us healthier for longer.

This year, I also learned that building muscle isn’t only about getting stronger or changing how we look.

Muscle plays a crucial role in how our bodies handle blood sugar and inflammation.

My conversation with bestselling author and double board-certified orthopaedic surgeon Dr Vonda Wright opened my eyes to how vital muscle tissue is for long-term health and independence, especially as we age.

Vonda: Muscle is a critical vehicle for pulling glucose out of the blood, turning it into the energy our body needs, often to contract the very muscle where it’s made.

So you can think of it as a glucose sink, an energy sink for our body. The more muscle you have, the more efficient you are at doing that.

Jonathan: And why is that important, Vonda? Why does it matter that I’ve got these muscles to pull blood sugar out of my blood?

Vonda: At a very simple level, it’s like we’re barbecuing our body from the inside out.

High blood sugar causes chronic inflammation in our body, which is the cause of many chronic diseases. Sugar causes an internal process that produces substances called AGEs. I think of it as an internal barbecue. It’s crystallising inside our body.

Jonathan: Doesn’t sound good.

Vonda: It doesn’t feel good.

High inflammation is one of the reasons people get joint pain, frozen shoulder. It’s one of the reasons we have the highly inflamed process of unchecked diabetes. All these things work together. Muscle is critical for helping control that glucose balance. When there’s too much circulating glucose, it’s stored in fat. There’s only so much our liver can store, about two thousand calories worth. The rest has to be stored somewhere. I find fat stored in joints where we shouldn’t have it.

I see fat in shoulder joints, hip joints. It’s like putting fat into closets because there’s nowhere else to put it.

Jonathan: And so having more muscle helps pull this glucose out of the bloodstream.

Vonda: That’s right. In a more efficient way, instead of storing it in unhealthy fat globules.

Jonathan: Having more muscle doesn’t just help you lift things.

It helps your body clear excess blood sugar more efficiently and may reduce some of the knock-on problems linked to chronic inflammation.

That’s why Vonda encourages people not to obsess over the number on the scale, but to think about body composition.

How much of your weight is muscle versus fat, and how does that balance support your health over time?

Vonda: When we just calorie restrict, we lose, depending on who you read, twenty, forty, fifty per cent of the total weight on the scale in muscle. We will lose fat, but a large portion of what we lose will be muscle.

Our body has a hierarchy of needs. It perceives tissues like bone and muscle as storehouses.

Jonathan: That’s pretty shocking. I would think you’d lose fat.

Vonda: You will lose fat.

But when people are sick in hospital for a week, you can lose nine per cent of your muscle mass from lying still.

Jonathan: Nine percent in a week.

Vonda: Yes.

If I put a cast on your leg for one week and you’re not contracting that muscle, your body views it as non-vital and starts using it. You get atrophy.

When we’re calorie restricted, the brain still needs energy. The body takes it from somewhere.

If we want to minimise muscle loss, we need enough protein, and we need to lift weights. You can eat a lot of protein on a fifteen hundred calorie meal plan.

Jonathan: So what does a realistic muscle-protecting workout look like?

Vonda: Your cardio should be eighty-twenty.

Eighty per cent base training, twenty per cent high-intensity sprinting. That’s about two days a week.

You need to lift weights. My goal is strength and power. Strength is what I can lift once. Power is what I can lift over time.

To lift for strength and power, you lift heavier. The ranges are three to six reps. Four sets. If you’re starting from zero, it takes time. You need to learn technique before lifting heavy.

This is a great time to hire a trainer.

Jonathan: What exercises do I need?

Vonda: I base lifting on power lifting. Upper body push pull, like bench press and rows. Lower body push pull, squats and deadlifts. Those are the four core lifts. They’re compound. They take multiple joints and muscle groups.

Then we add supplemental lifts. Eight to ten reps. Not to failure.

Jonathan: And that brings us to the end of our 2025 highlights.

A huge thank you to every guest who shared their expertise, and to you, our listeners, for your questions, your curiosity, and your time.

I hope these conversations are giving you a few ideas that you can take into 2026.

Sleeping a little better.

Experimenting more thoughtfully.

Moving your body in ways that build strength.

Making food choices that support your long-term health.

From all of us at ZOE, thank you for listening, and here’s to a healthier, happier 2026.