The science of cravings, food addiction and 5 ways to regain control with Michael Pollan & Prof Tim Spector

If you feel like you can’t stop eating, constantly crave junk food, or struggle with overeating, this episode will change how you see food. 

Michael Pollan, one of the most influential science writers of our time, joins Professor Tim Spector to explain how ultra-processed food may drive food addiction, override fullness signals, and keep us craving more. Together, they explore why foods high in sugar, salt, and fat can feel so hard to resist, and what we can do to fight back.

Michael and Tim unpack how the modern food system changed over the last 50 years, and why many ultra-processed foods are designed around “craveability.” They explain how these foods may stimulate the brain’s reward systems, why fibre and plants help us feel fuller, and why cooking more meals at home may help reduce overeating without calorie counting.

If your cravings feel impossible to control, is it really a lack of willpower, or is modern food engineered to keep us coming back for more?

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Jonathan: Michael, are plants the secret to our health and happiness?

Michael: Yes.

Jonathan: Is it best to avoid foods that have health claims on their pack?

Michael: In general, yes.

Jonathan: Tim, if big food manufacturers tweaked their recipes for ultra-processed foods, could they solve the health problems with them? No. And Michael, do most of us use a psychoactive drug every single day?

Michael: Absolutely, yes.

Jonathan: Today, I'm really excited to dive into what plants really are, the way that human beings are wired to respond to them, and of course, how big food companies have been designing products to take advantage of all that wiring. And Michael, look, you've spent decades studying plants and food. What first took you down this path?

Michael: Well, I, you know, I began my writing career as a gardener, so I had that sort of daily interaction with plants and watching them closely and learning also about their importance to diet. And, you know, when I decided to write a book on consciousness, I didn't think it'd have anything to do with plants. It turns out I got very interested in are plants conscious or not? So it's the through line I think of my work is this passion for understanding plants, and they're so weird and different than we are that they're sort of hard for us to understand. As Darwin said, you know, they're like upside-down animals. Their brain is in their root tips, he thought, and their sexual organs are up on top, just the opposite of us, and I just have huge respect for them. You know, they are masters of biochemistry. Many of our drugs are based on molecules produced by plants. They've invented molecules that radically change human consciousness. They're just geniuses at biochemistry.

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Jonathan: I'd really like to start with the modern food system, which came up already, and you've talked quite a lot about this. If you were gonna try and explain the problem as you see it today, what is it?

Michael: In a word, monoculture. Growing too much of the same thing. And in the US it's corn or maize and soybeans, and for most of the agricultural belt in the United States, those two crops take turns in the field. Neither of them are food exactly. They're the raw material for processed food, and they're animal feed, and they're the basis for biofuels. But we grow huge amounts of corn in giant monocultures that would fail if not for lots of chemical application, because monocultures are just not the way nature works, and when you have too much of one thing, you also get too many pests, too many diseases, so therefore it drives you to use a lot of chemicals in your agriculture. So I think many of the problems in the whole food system can be traced to that very fact that we grow these vast monocultures. You know, as I mentioned, they're not exactly food. You can't eat the kind of corn we grow, and the soybeans are not edamame. They're a different kind, and they're basically Big packets of starch and protein that can be broken down into their component parts and then reassembled as ultra-processed foods or turned into sugars, you know, high fructose corn syrup, which is where a lot of it ends up. You can't take a corn cob and eat it. It's like these giant kernels that are incredibly hard. They ... You'd break your teeth, and they're just pure starch. They have none of the sweetness that sweet corn has. You see these vast fields, and they cover Iowa and Indiana and Illinois, and you think, "Oh, all food." But no, it's not. It has to pass through a factory or several factories before it can be food, although I don't even think what you turn that stuff into should be dignified with the word food. So there's a direct link between the way we're farming and the way we're eating.

Tim: When did that change happen? Was it just in the last 20 years or so?

Michael: A little more than that, 50 years I'd say. Our agriculture was a lot more diversified before really the '70s. During the Nixon administration, there was a real spike in the price of food. There had been a grain deal with the Russians that was kept secret, and when the word came out, grain prices went crazy, and food inflation became very high, much higher than it is now. And President Nixon knew that if the price of food didn't come down, he wasn't gonna get reelected. So he brought in a brilliant agricultural economist named Earl Butz and said, "Your job is to drive down the price of food." And Butz knew exactly how to do it, and he basically encouraged farmers and changed the incentive structure so that they would plant one crop, fencerow to fencerow is what he said, and consolidate so that if your neighbor was a weaker player than you were, you would buy your neighbor out. And the fields got bigger and the diversity declined, and it worked. We have such overproduction of corn and soy. You know, our problem is not too little food, it's too much food. And so what do you do with that? Well, that's why we started making biofuels to get rid of this excess of corn. And, you know, this is the basis of the food system. So if you have cheap corn, you're gonna have cheap meat and cheap milk and cheap butter.

Jonathan: What happens next? You're making this sort of corn that actually humans can't- Yeah ... eat directly. Could you talk us through the next step of this master plan?

Michael: Sure. There is a system for refining that corn, that essentially you can break it down into its component parts. And if you look at all the ingredients on a package of ultra-processed food and you see maltodextrin and high-fructose corn syrup and soy lecithin- Maize starch ... yeah, yeah, all these different manifestations of starch. Most of those ingredients can be derived from corn once you've put it through this processing. And in fact that technology to figure out what you could do with that packet of starch, was, it was developed around the same period. And high-fructose corn syrup, for example, doesn't really enter the food system in a big way till the early '80s. And that was a, you know, a big discovery that you could make something as sweet as table sugar from corn. So you have... It's called corn refineries that do all this work. So when I was writing Omnivore's Dilemma, where I really looked at this monoculture system, I was amazed how many of the ingredients, if you took a package of Twinkies or something like that, or a sweetened breakfast cereal and you went through it, and I had a list of what the corn refiners were producing from corn and the soy refiners, there it all was. And you think you're getting, you know, many ingredients, but in fact, you're eating corn and soy, and mostly corn. A scientist I was working with at the time said that if you took a lock of human hair in America right now, you could determine how much of the carbon in that hair, and therefore in that person's body, came from corn. And I forget what the figure was, but it was like a majority. And so, you know, we are the carbon life form, right? We're mostly made of carbon. So where does that carbon come from? You can actually trace it back and you can figure out how much of that person comes from corn, and we are corn walking in the United States.

Jonathan: So you're saying the average American is like more than 50% corn?

Michael: Yeah.

Jonathan: I've got this beautiful picture now of like corn going into a big factory one end and like dozens of different chemicals coming out the other end. Obviously doesn't sound very appealing, but Is it bad?

Michael: It's not bad that your carbon came from corn necessarily. I don't think it matters. But it's a reminder that we are the product of what we eat in a very literal way. I think the bigger problem is that these ingredients don't contribute to healthy foods. For the most part, they're, you know, ways to sweeten food, bulk it up, and ultra-processed foods we now know are detrimental to our health, and we're eating way too many of them.

Tim: So it's a bit of a by-product in a way, isn't it? So you're taking this very crude monoculture, and you're breaking it into all the bits, and you say, "We've gotta use everything-

Michael: Right ... '

Tim: cause otherwise we're losing money. What can we think of? How do we recreate it to something that the consumer's gonna buy?" And it strikes me as quite similar to the petrochemical industry, where you take gasoline or coal and you convert all these chemicals, and some of them end up as artificial sweeteners, others as plastics. Yeah. And it's not generally good for us, all this stuff, all these by-products. But industry is now so geared up to use it in some way that-

Michael: Yeah

Tim: it's like an unstoppable force, isn't it?

Michael: Yeah. And it's, you know, there's great ingenuity here. I mean, figuring out how to get rid of the surplus corn or extra oil.

Tim: And get people to buy it.

Michael: And get people to buy it, yeah. But, I mean, if you step back far enough, you've got an excess of calories coming off the farm, and then you've gotta persuade people to consume those calories. And you do that by sweetening things. If you add sugar or high-fructose corn syrup to anything, people will buy more of it. See, cheap corn is very insidious because there are products now in the market that never used to have sugar added to them. I'm thinking of tomato sauce or ketchup. And it's very hard to find products that they haven't added some sugar to it, some form. And, you know, there are, like, 25 different kinds of sugar you can add, and that's a good way of hiding its predominance on an ingredient label. So the net result is we eat more because we're hardwired to like sweetness, and sweetness has become so cheap. I mean, sugar was precious for most of history, and now it's so common that it's added to just about everything we eat.

Jonathan: Tim, you know, we've been focused on this image that I think all of us can imagine of the Midwest in America with the corn fields going on forever. What about the rest of the world?

Tim: Most of the world, so the European Union, you know, Australia, Canada, they're very similar. Monocultures are the preferred economic model. It might vary slightly, so we have more wheat, for example, than corn. Right. And sugar beet has replaced Caribbean sugar plantations, and they're massively subsidized by the European Union to make sugar equally cheap in Europe as it would be in places close to the Caribbean. It's a worldwide problem now that, you know, the US has often started it off- Trendsetter showed how people could get rich on this, how big corporations could make even more money, and how all these byproducts could be sold to consumers. And yeah, the rest of the world has a sweet tooth as well, has absolutely embraced it

Jonathan: Many people say they feel like they can't stop eating certain ultra-processed foods. Tim, can these foods genuinely override our body's sort of normal control systems?

Tim: They can, and they're specifically designed to do that. Because, as Michael said, they're created in laboratories by brilliant scientists who have decades of trial and error to perfect their art to get this blend particularly of three ingredients: sugar, salt, and fat, in that perfect combination that's called the bliss point, that lights up the brain, the pleasure centers, that are receptive to things like dopamine, and causes something similar to what happens in most cases of addiction, whether it's, you know, that big buzz from a cigarette or a drug or heroin or morphine or opiates. And as well as that signal, it also seems to override the fullness signals. We're learning this from the GLP-1 drugs, you know, the Ozempic-type drugs, that are out there that work mainly on that pathway. And we call this hyperpalatability. So that's a way of describing these foods, is that they override the normal body's response, which is to feel full. And that's, in a way, why these products are so dangerous, is because we overconsume them in ways that our evolution and our genes have not prepared us for. And it's all happened in the last 50 years or so. There's certainly a proportion of the population that are just constantly craving these foods. So they're just thinking about it all the time. It's like 24 hours a day, a bit like someone who's into cigarettes.

Michael: Yeah, and they get on this rollercoaster of glucose response and... I was always a little reluctant to use the word addiction. I thought it was more metaphoric when it came to food compared to drug addiction or cigarette addiction. But in fact, from the researchers I've talked to, it's a fair description in that you have the kind of dopamine release that's often associated with an addictive drug. So if you accept the dopamine model of addiction I think you have to include food. I've often wondered, like, okay, these food companies are trying to get us to eat their food. Doesn't your mom do that too when she cooks you a beautiful meal? And I realize, no, it's a different game. She wants to satisfy you. She doesn't want to fill you up necessarily or addict you to her food. And being satisfied is different than being full, and the food industry is really trying to get us to eat as much as possible. That's their goal, is using our bodies to dispose of the surplus. And the other thing we haven't talked about is how cheap these foods are. I mean, given their complexity, it's remarkable how inexpensive they are. But that goes back to your point about subsidies. This is the kind of food that gets subsidized. The EU and the US government are subsidizing the least healthy calories in the diet.

Jonathan: They're subsidizing the worst things for us

Michael: to eat. Yes, the worst things for us to eat. Whole Foods, produce, they're not subsidizing.

Jonathan: Because people often talk about, well, isn't it more expensive to eat whole food? And we've talked about that actually on this podcast quite often, and the answers often seem to be no. But what you're saying is one of the reasons is because our governments are actually subsidizing-

Michael: It's artificially cheap. The price of a hamburger or french fries at McDonald's is partly being picked up by the taxpayers.

Jonathan: It's extraordinary.

Michael: And it's very hard to subsidize whole foods because whenever you subsidize something, as we learn from the monocultures of corn and soy, you get overproduction. And that's fine with grain because you can store grain for at least five years, if you get too much of it, and wait for the market to recover. You subsidize broccoli, and you've got a sloppy mess on your hands. There's nothing you can do

Jonathan: So could we talk through for a minute what's happened over these last 50 years on the, like the big food manufacturing side?

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Michael: Yeah. I mean, they have moved to a culture of ready-to-eat foods. They're counting on the fact that there's less cooking happening. And the way to eat whole foods economically, of course, is to cook them. If you buy raw ingredients and cook them, that is competitive with buying ready-to-eat foods. But many of us aren't cooking anymore. We don't have the time, or so we tell ourselves, or the two partners are both working. Commute times are longer. So we're looking for solutions to a problem, which is not enough time to cook a beautiful meal most nights. And the food industry stepped in. It's often been said that that was a result of feminism beginning in the '60s and '70s, but that story is a little too simple. There was definitely, with the feminist revolution, there was a lot of argument in households about childcare, house cleaning, and cooking. And the division of labor had to change. It was under enormous pressure. But the food industry saw this as an opportunity, and they recognized that they could step in and solve the problem. There was a famous billboard that got at this. KFC, Kentucky Fried Chicken, had billboards around the country, and it was just a bucket of fried chicken and with a very simple headline, "Women's Liberation." So they associated fast food with freedom for women, and this ended this conversation between men and women over who should cook or how to divide labor. And we should have completed that conversation and redivided labor in the house. But instead, we just turned to this easy out, which was more prepared foods. I've been arguing in favour of cooking for many reasons. I think many things happen when you cook food at home. For one thing, everybody eats the same thing, and whereas when you're using processed foods very often, and I've seen this, it's marketed this way, you know that the young boy goes for the frozen pizza, and the teenage girl has a salad, or the mother has a salad, and then there's a Hungry-Man TV dinner for the dad, and they wanna divide and conquer us. So they market very directly to different genders and different ages. Whereas if you're cooking, everybody eats from the same platter. And there's something, you know, psychologically beautiful about that, sharing food. And I remember once going to a big food manufacturer, I think it was General Mills, and they hired these anthropologists to study the family meal. And if you ask people, they'll still say, "Oh yeah, we have a family meal." But they would actually have these volunteer families, and they'd put cameras above their dining room table to see how they actually ate meals. And the way it worked was the mother had a salad and sat there for an hour, and different other members of the family came and went and would microwave their own meal and sit down with the mom for a little bit and then wander off. They weren't there at the same time. It made for an incredibly disjointed family meal. But people still said, "Yeah, we have family meal." I see the industry as deliberately undermining family meal, and I see family meals as one of the most important institutions of our culture. It's-- If you think about what happens at that table, you know, it's where we learn how to share and take turns and argue without fighting the values. I mean, I, and one of the things I wrote, I refer to the family dinner table as the nursery of democracy. And to lose this to the food industry's greed is just a tragedy. I think it's sad at a cultural and political level, but it's obviously a disaster from a health point of view because we now know these foods don't give the body everything it needs. Then you get into this category of children's food, which is historically a very new thing. It used to be children ate the same thing adults ate. And now you go to any restaurant, and they have a menu for kids, you know, and look at that food. It's always chicken fingers and french fries and hamburgers and pizza.

Tim: From an English-speaking world perspective, that's absolutely true. But when you do travel, you do realize that, you know, the rest of the world don't distinguish diets for kids and adults.

Michael: Yeah. And I think that's a, it's a really unhealthy development, and I hope it doesn't spread.

Jonathan: What's so powerful about plants and what have we lost?

Michael: Well, plants are very important to human health. Every cell in a plant has a wall, and that wall is what we call fibre. And the microbes that inhabit our gut, our large intestine, that's their preferred food, so that if you're not eating plants, you're not feeding your microbiome, and that's critically important. There's a huge loss when you take plants out of the diet, and I think we're paying the price for that.

Jonathan: So if we think about it as what we could do to get back to where we want, what can plants give us?

Michael: First of all, when you're eating plants, you're getting all this bulk, so you're getting fewer calories per bite, per unit of food, which is very helpful with weight. One of the problems with ultra-processed food is it's so caloric, it's so dense in calories, that for every bite, since there's so little water, so little fibre, you're getting many more calories, and before your satiety signals can tell you you're full. Eating plants kind of slows down this whole process and adds bulk to it. Plants also are full of nutrients that you're not getting from ultra-processed food. All plants have antioxidants, a variety of them, because antioxidants help them deal with the stress of photosynthesis. Antioxidants are very important to our health too. And vitamins, I mean, plants are just, you know, a storehouse of necessary nutrients.

Tim: People on the podcast will know polyphenols-

Michael: Yeah ...

Tim: is how we tend to call antioxidants these days. Yeah. The defense chemicals in plants that they actually fuel for our gut microbes as well.

Michael: You know, what's going on in the microbiome is it's like this chemical factory, pharmaceutical factory, hundreds of thousands of metabolites are produced. But these, it turns out, are very important to our well-being, and they're influencing the brain in ways we're just beginning to understand. I think we have to remember that when we're eating, we're not just feeding our body. You know, we have these, you know, hundred trillion or whatever the number is, microbes that also need to be fed. And, you know, we're eating not even just for two, we're eating for millions.

Jonathan: I'd love to pick up on this point about plants affecting our minds and not just our body, and I understand that, you know, humans have been doing this for thousands of years. Can we maybe start with the most widely used psychoactive drug on earth, as you mentioned? Caffeine You've really looked at this in some detail, and indeed, I think decided to quit caffeine at some point. Could you tell us about that, Michael? Yeah.

Michael: Well, caffeine is probably my favourite drug, and we don't think of it as a drug. We think of coffee and tea as drinks, but it is a drug, and it affects the mind in powerful ways. I was taking this addictive drug every day, and I was interviewing an expert on drug abuse, Roland Griffiths. He died a couple years ago, but he was a very influential psychopharmacologist and did a lot of the early work on psychedelics there. But before he got interested in psilocybin as a therapeutic aid, he was an expert on caffeine. I was interviewing him and he said, "You know, to understand your relationship to any drug, you have to give it up for a period of time because you can't think about it objectively while you're hooked, essentially." So, okay, I guess I better do this. And I was writing an audiobook on caffeine, so I gave up caffeine for three months. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done.

Jonathan: Sounds brutal.

Michael: It was. I was a daily coffee drinker, but I also drank a lot of green tea, and the first few days were hell. Some people have flu-like symptoms. I didn't have this. I just... I felt like I was jet lagged or something. And-

Tim: Did you get the headaches?

Michael: I got the headaches, definitely. And I was kind of miserable, and I had no focus at all. It was really unpleasant, and I was undergoing withdrawal. Even though after this 10 days of withdrawal, I didn't feel myself, which was really weird, and I realized I felt more myself on this drug than I did off it. And so, like, what's that about? Like, how... It had really become that integral to how I lived and perceived the world. So it got me in touch with how powerful this is. But it was worth it, not just for the story value. It was worth it because the first cup I had after going back on Was fantastic. I mean, so much better than coffee is normally that I recommend a caffeine fast just for the pleasure of that first cup. And I was like, "How can I keep this going?" You know? I wanna enjoy this experience. And I thought for a long time, "Well, I'm just gonna have coffee one day a week." And that worked for a couple weeks, but then I had a deadline on a Thursday- ... and I was like, "You know, caffeine would really get me over the hurdle." So I started making exceptions, like any addict, basically. And before long, I was down the slippery slope and back to my daily habit.

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Tim: Which is not the real Michael Pollan with caffeine. I mean,

Michael: like you-

Tim: Thank you. ... which, you know, which is the real one?

Michael: The real one is with caffeine. When we talk about drugs and we talk about addiction, there's a moral connotation to it. But in fact, from what I can tell, there's really no downside to a caffeine addiction up to a certain point. There's been actually a lot of research showing that it may not be caffeine, but the caffeine-containing plants, like coffee and tea, have lots of polyphenols, and that actually show evidence of helping with things like Parkinson's disease, with dementia, and depression up to a certain point. If you're above eight cups a day, the curve changes, and you're at greater risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide.

Tim: The epidemiology is strongest probably for heart disease, that having up to six cups a day can reduce your risk of heart disease by 25 to 30%.

Michael: Wow. It's really interesting.

Jonathan: And Tim, could you ever give up coffee?

Tim: I've tried. I haven't quite managed to shift it, but I do realize that some of the benefits of coffee you can get from having the decaffeinated one. So perhaps there is a middle ground where you might be still having three to four cups of coffee a day, but maybe half of them are decaffeinated. We do know that a lot of people are super sensitive to caffeine and can't tolerate it. They get jittery, and this varies between men and women. It varies at different ages. It varies if you're a smoker or a non-smoker. It varies if you're taking the contraceptive pill. All these kind of things can have a big influence. And it changes as you get older. So, you know, I used to be a tea drinker, and I switched to being a coffee drinker, interestingly. And tea drinking is a softer hit Everyone describes the fact that you get this caffeine release that's slightly mellower. So you don't get that sudden jolt that you do with- Yeah ... as you have that espresso in the morning. So people who like that feeling, perhaps like yourself, you know, like a mellower drug that brings them into the day slower. So I think everyone, you know, finds what they like. But it is interesting, even in the UK, land of tea drinkers, we're now majority coffee drinkers.

Michael: Yeah. Well, the coffee here has gotten so much better.

Tim: It was pretty dreadful.

Michael: It was. It's very good right now.

Jonathan: I mean, I feel that both the UK and the US had just about the worst coffee, right? Yeah. So we have a long way to go, but it has got a lot better.

Michael: It's true. Yeah, tea, and green tea in particular I think has another compound in it that kind of spreads out the effect over a longer... So it is mellower. It's definitely mellower. You know, it probably makes sense to drink both because they have different polyphenols.

Tim: Yeah, no, I think that's probably the mistake we make is just by fixating on one source of caffeine, and if we did have green tea, matcha, and, you know, perhaps black tea as well.

Jonathan: And if I had a decaffeinated coffee, only decaffeinated coffee, will I still get the health benefits that you're talking about?

Tim: As far as we know, they're, you know, the data isn't superb, but when they have looked at people who only drink decaffeinated coffee, they still see some of the heart benefits. So we think the modern processes do keep most of those polyphenols when they decaffeinate. They've got a lot better than they were 20 years ago. And so, yes, I think you can get most of the benefits. Not sure whether it's 100%, but certainly majority of the benefits from decaf.

Jonathan: When I'm drinking a coffee or tea, there's a lot of stuff in it. Like, that whole package is really good for my health. It's,

Tim: it's fermented. Yeah, it's a fermented bean or whatever, yes.

Jonathan: And one of the things in it is the caffeine. That's the thing that's probably really making me addicted, makes me feel wired, but it's not necessarily the caffeine that's actually giving me the sort of long-term health benefits, even if it might be, Michael, as you were saying, the thing that makes me feel great about myself in the day.

Michael: But that is a benefit. And there's also the benefit of focus. I mean, like any kind of stimulant, basically, it helps you, you know, able to block out a lot of distraction, and that's why it's so useful for work. I mean, you know, the history of the coffee break, think about it. You have companies giving their employees time off and a free drug every day, twice a day in a lot of American companies. Why are they doing that? It makes workers more productive.

Jonathan: I'd never thought about it like that. It suddenly sounds really dystopian. We're gonna give you this drug for free so you can work harder.

Michael: That's basically how it started.

Jonathan: I'd love now to pull this all together, 'cause we sort of almost have these two strands through this conversation, which has been fascinating, between this, like, ultra-processed food, this completely new way of growing food and making it, on the other hand, this story about plants and how we've coexisted with them and some of the remarkable things that they do. And so I'd love to sort of pull this together and say, okay, we're all living now in this very unnatural food environment. That's sort of clear. So what are the sorts of diets that people should be aiming for if they can sort of switch off all the marketing from companies just trying to make money off them, and how can we sort of sidestep that? And I think it can feel really hopeless, and I have this conversation quite often with people. Michael, what would you say to, you know, an individual who's saying, "I want to make changes, like, what should I be doing?"

Michael: I put a lot of emphasis on cooking. If you're cooking one day a week, try to cook two days a week. I think being incremental in the changes is really important and not as daunting as saying, "Well, you gotta cook a meal every night of the week." A lot of people can't do that. So if you're cooking, you're automatically eating better food, even if you're frying it, you know, whatever you're doing, it's gonna be better than ultra-processed food. And you don't have to worry about counting calories or nutrients. All those things kind of take care of themselves with home-cooked food. I think also we've complicated cooking in our heads. I mean, we've lost the transmission of cooking from one generation to the other. We've also lost, I don't know about in the UK, but in the US we used to have what we called home ec, home economics classes, where... And it was totally gendered, and the girls learned how to cook and the boys learned how to make a Japanese lamp. And that's what I remember. We need to bring that back, but, you know, for both genders, I think, because the parents may not know how to cook anymore.

Tim: That's the same in the UK. They got rid of it a few years ago, and there's no cooking taught in schools now. Yeah.

Jonathan: I mean, what a shame. One of the things that strikes me now looking at this in 2026 is actually how mindful cooking is. Yeah. And we live in this world where these devices are so addictive and you're pulled in. Like, I think this is worse than the caffeine. And there's something about cooking, and the reality is you can get a lot of ingredients now that make this quite quick, right? Yes. Completely different

Michael: from- Yeah, you can get your onion already sliced. And there's nothing wrong with that. And a sofrito pack. Right. Yeah, exactly. So there are advantages. There's a lot of convenience offered. But it's also we've... Why did we decide that cooking was such a chore? I mean, it can be a great pleasure also. Part of it was the industry convinced us it was a chore and it was really hard. So that's one strategy.

Jonathan: I think that's really interesting. I mean, I definitely grew up in a household where cooking was, you know, gendered. As you said, my mother did all the cooking. And I think that I never realized that actually it can be quite fun. Honestly, like disconnects you from your devices for 15- Exactly ... 20 minutes.

Michael: It's some of the favourite time of the day. My wife and I cook together. We have an island in the middle of the kitchen, and we divvy up the chores. She'll make the main or the side and, you know, vice versa. And we catch up on our day, and it's a great pleasure. And, you know, my son doesn't think of cooking as gendered at all. I mean, he grew up in a household where both parents were cooking, and we required him to contribute to the meal, to do something. It could just be like mince a clove of garlic or wash the salad or something. But he had to do something, no matter how busy he was, to contribute to the meal. And that's also, you know, we have to think about our kids and what habits we're teaching them around food.

Tim: I had a question for Michael. In your earlier books, you described ultra-processed food, one of the sort of first descriptions of it as, I think it was something that your

Michael: grandmother

Tim: wouldn't recognize as food. Wouldn't recognize as food. Now, that was a while ago now. One of the advices, you know, try and avoid ultra-processed foods, but it's increasingly difficult for people to recognize- That's

Michael: right ...

Tim: what they really are and what the worst ones are.

Michael: I've thought about that a lot. So I wrote a series of food rules that I published as a book called Food Rules to help people identify what food they should be eating. And what I was getting at with like, don't eat any foods your grandmother or great-grandmother wouldn't recognize, is that traditional diets are almost all healthy. They've been designed over time to give people what they need. And whether it's, you know, the Mediterranean diet or even the traditional American diet or UK diet, these traditional diets are better than ultra-processed foods. So if your grandmother or great-grandmother doesn't recognize it as food, watch out. But other rules I came up with, if there are more than five ingredients, I mean, it's kind of an arbitrary number, but ultra-processed food has a long list of ingredients. If there are ingredients that a normal person doesn't keep in their pantry, like, you know, maltodextrin, nobody has that. Nobody knows what it is. That's to be avoided. If it has ingredients your third-grader can't pronounce, that should be avoided. You know, the way I define ultra-processed food is foods you need a factory to make that contain ingredients no normal person has in their pantry. So that's a very folk definition, but I think it's helpful. And so my overall advice after studying nutrition for many decades is so simple, and I'm often asked, "What would you change?" You know, it's simply eat food, by which I mean real food, food as we've understood it for tens of thousands of years, not too much, and mostly plants. And I think the only thing I might change in that is I think fermented foods are very important. I think we're learning that. And so among those plant foods, some should be fermented. The mostly plants is what pisses off people on both sides of the vegetarian divide. Vegans and vegetarians are like, "Why not all plants?" And carnivores are like, "The nerve. He doesn't mention meat." But I think that mostly has a lot of wisdom in it. I don't... You know, there's nothing evil about meat. Meat is a nutritious food. I think, at least in the US, we eat way too much of it for our own good or for the good of the environment, which is a bigger concern when it comes to meat. It's just a terrible way to produce food, very inefficient, and huge climate implications. And this is talking to many experts, many doctors. That's what it comes down to.

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Jonathan: Tim, what are your thoughts to that?

Tim: I mean, Michael really set the standard for what we should discuss as real food, and I think that's probably what you're still most known for, that mantra. But it's increasingly difficult 'cause the food companies are obviously aware of this and are doing everything they can to disguise this and make it look like something your grandmother would recognize.

Michael: That's right.

Tim: So when you said this 20 years ago, that they weren't quite as clued up now. So the packets will now have pictures of happy farmers and wheat fields. Only five ingredients.

Michael: And we assume if it's plant-based it has to be good, but, you know, sugar's a plant.

Jonathan: So if it says plant-based, that doesn't mean that it meets your requirement to be

Michael: healthy? I would still read the ingredient label and see what plants they're talking about.

Jonathan: And this is back to you saying, well, it could all be from that corn. Yeah. And so-

Michael: Yeah, that is a plant ...

Tim: so it's difficult. So I think the consumer's really faced with this great battle, and that's, in a way, why the ZOE team came up with this new way of describing ultra-processed foods with the app to try and categorize all these foods, which is 50 to 60% of all the foods we eat, into different categories of risk, 'cause it's really hard to avoid everything.

Michael: Yeah.

Tim: That's right. I think we agree. And so we worked out through looking at hyperpalatability, which we've discussed, this, you know, the bliss point, through the energy density, through the fact that you can eat these incredibly fast, and they've got harmful additives. You've got these different categories in there. So you can actually do this scientifically. So I think we need to be using the tools, modern tools like apps To try and combat the enormous power of the food industry and their marketing. Because it is difficult to rely, I think now, on the grandma rule.

Jonathan: Yeah, I was struck by that because before I met Tim, I basically fed my son on these, like, hot cross buns, which for people outside the UK... How would you describe that, Tim?

Tim: Must be like an English muffin or something with a bit of sugar on the top- Right ... and

Jonathan: raisins in it. And my grandmother definitely made those. Yeah. I recognise them. In fact, I scanned one of these just this week just to double check. High risk ultra-processed food. Yeah. Because when you turn it over, it's got this extraordinary list of ingredients, but on the front it looks just like this beautiful thing that- Yeah ... you know, my grandmother would've made. And,

Michael: you know-

Jonathan: Well, it is hard, isn't it,

Michael: Michael? It is hard. I mean, foods that look like foods, like bread, packaged sliced bread. You know, you can make bread with, like, three ingredients, but look at what's in bread now. They don't have time to leaven it, so they put in chemicals that leaven it like this. They want it to be, you know, last and not get stale for, like, 10 days So there are all these preservatives in it, and then there are colourings. And so you do have to be careful with traditional foods and looking at the ingredient label, and you see is it really bread as you understood it or as your grandmother understood it, or is it some very complicated ultra-processed food masquerading as a traditional food?

Jonathan: You talked about cooking. You've talked about sort of turning the food over and looking at the label.

Michael: Yeah.

Jonathan: Any other tips for how we sort of navigate this world?

Michael: In my food rules, I've also talked about the preparation and the actual eating of food. Many cultures have rules about when you should stop eating. Hara hachi bu is something they say in Japan: eat until you're 80% full. That's, to an American, that's such a radical idea. We've been taught to eat until you're full. But if you look at, like, the French language, what we say to our kids, "Are you full?" Whereas in France, they say, "Are you satisfied?" And that's such a different point in the process. Science is one way of understanding food, and culture is another. And there is a lot of wisdom there we're not taking advantage of. Ultra-processed food, you alluded to this, we take in a lot of calories quickly and almost too quickly for the satiety symptoms or method to catch up with it if you eat really fast. And so slowing down your eating, and going back to something you said about coffee, keep in mind the first bite is the most delicious, and savour that first bite. And as you eat more and more, the pleasure declines. So linger with that first few bites and enjoy that. And the slower you eat, the more time there is for your body to catch up with what you're doing and send you that satiety signal.

Jonathan: There's so much I've learned over, you know, the last few years, but one thing that I was really struck by was this sort of ultra-processed food has a very strong taste right at the beginning- Yeah but then very little lingering flavour. So actually, like, eating it slowly doesn't really make sense because you're getting the-

Michael: Yeah ...

Jonathan: benefit right away. Is that

Michael: true? Yeah, I think that is true. I think it's been engineered to be, like, instantly appealing, and a lot of that is, as you said, sugar, fat, and salt. And there is this immediate gratification. But of course, we don't stop. We keep eating it, and it's been engineered for what the food marketers call craveability.

Jonathan: Craveability?

Michael: Craveability and snackability. That's another saying of theirs that they use internally.

Jonathan: Cravability sounds like a good thing if I'm selling it, but not such a good thing-

Michael: Yeah

Jonathan: if I'm consuming it.

Michael: You know, cravings are desires you've lost control of, right? And so, you know, again, your parents aren't cooking for you to crave their food, they're cooking to satisfy you, and it's a whole different standard.

Tim: I think the danger is once they're in your house-

Michael: Oh, yeah. They're

Tim: going in you've only got to eat at least one. Yeah. So the key is to not actually put them in your basket and take them home.

Michael: They're trying to manipulate you into buying their food, and eating their food, and coming back for more. And, you know, when you think about it that way, we don't like being manipulated. It was when we were told that we were being manipulated on cigarettes that you began to build a political movement to stop it. Young people in particular don't like to be manipulated. And so exposing those manipulations I think is an important job for journalists. And there's been a lot of really good journalism about food. Michael Moss has done some great books on how the industry... He's gotten in the industry, and they know exactly what they're doing.

Jonathan: You think they are intentionally manipulating us in the way that the tobacco- Yeah ... companies did before them?

Michael: Yes. First of all, they're a lot of the same companies, right? The tobacco companies bought food companies beginning in the '70s or '80s. When tobacco came under pressure, they diversified. The documents are being destroyed now, whereas their mistake in cigarettes was all these documents existed and were subpoenaed. And we saw that they were lying when they said, "No, cigarettes are not addictive and don't cause cancer." Because internally we knew the truth from these documents. I think that's gonna be a lot harder to find with food, and I don't think that strategy will necessarily work. But the strategy of showing the manipulations I think can influence people. I hope it does.

Jonathan: Tim, is there anything you feel we've missed in terms of, like, the key tips that you'd give for trying to get more plants into our diet?

Tim: We haven't mentioned the concept of diversity. I found definitely if you try and change people's opinion, you say, "Okay, try and aim to eat, you know, 30 plants a week from the average, which is sort of 10 to 12 plants, and naturally everything else falls into place. And you get your fibre, you get your diversity, you're feeding lots of fibres to your microbes. And that is a different mindset. It means adding more to your plate. It's not restricted. It doesn't matter if you add meat or fish or whatever it is, but as long as your plate is full of those 30 plants, all our studies show that your gut microbes are the healthiest.

Jonathan: I'd love to finish with one final question, Michael. If someone's listening to this and you could give them one piece of advice to maybe sort of rekindle their relationship with plants or take it a bit further, what would you say?

Michael: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. And learn to distinguish real food from all this synthetic food that's entered our food supply. And would you add cook? And cook, yes, thank you. Cook, and some fermented foods, yeah. You don't need to know biochemistry to eat well. For, you know, thousands of years, people ate well without it. They relied on culture, right? They ate what their parents ate. And cultures can still guide us. So you don't have to fill your head with science. And these are really basic concepts.

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Jonathan: I love it. I'd like to do a little summary if that's all right, and correct me if I get anything wrong. The first thing that I remember is this amazing idea that there was this big Kentucky Fried Chicken ad saying, "Here's this big tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken. This is women's liberation." And the sort of somehow intersection between this fantastic cultural change and then now abandon everything you've eaten for, like, this deep-fried chicken. And then on-- sort of following from that, that big food companies have been a big part of pushing the idea of sort of ready meals as a solution against traditional cooking versus maybe allowing cooking to happen in an easy way given that both people are working. And this has been a huge part of what has sort of mainlined ultra-processed food into our lives. The second thing is this brilliant idea that the coffee break that you get at work is actually companies, like, giving you a drug and saying, "Take this so you can be more productive," but we all think it's a great thing. I love this. I'd never thought about it like that before. And then maybe, you know, into more of the heart of what we talked about, we talked a lot about ultra-processed food and the way in which this started actually not with the food manufacturers but actually the way in which we're growing food. And that when I think about a field of corn, I think that sounds really great and natural. And now you're telling me I can't actually eat this corn at all. It can only be used to go into this incredibly industrialized process to create tons of, like, weird chemical offshoots rather than anything that looks like food. So I think that's fascinating that, like, the way it's industrialized right from the plants that they're growing, which I think is earlier than I had understood. That these food companies are building craveability, and so the question is like, do you want to be manipulated? They are making this in order to directly sort of hijack you, and Tim was explaining again sort of how that works. I love this idea, don't eat food that your grandmother wouldn't recognize. And recognizing that that is hard, you really need to turn the label over. And then the second thing you're saying is like, you know, if there's a whole bunch of ingredients in there that you have no idea what they are, like, this is probably not very good for you. And then I think in terms of practical rules, I took away one is try to cook. And that doesn't mean you need to cook everything. Think about, like, if you could just add one day a week. So if you're not cooking at all, could you cook one day? If you're cooking two days, could you do three? Because almost whatever it is that you choose to cook is likely to be better than, like, an ultra-processed ready meal. So I thought that's really powerful. Then Michael, you slightly updated your famous phrase, which I definitely heard many times, "Eat food, but it needs to be real food, not too much, mostly plants." And you said, "Well, could we add some fermented plants and, you know, probably some diversity would be good there as well." And then the last thing, which I hadn't heard before, which I thought were really interesting, was you're saying we often grow up in the US or the UK to say, like, "Are you full?" Before you sit down. But you're saying in Japan, they say, "Well, eat until you're 80% full." And you're saying in France, the question was, "Are you satisfied?" And just that reframing, you can see, sort of makes you think a little bit less about stuffing yourself to the last moment.

Michael: Especially with our children, 'cause they're hearing that message. Oh, you're supposed to eat till you're full? That's where we need to practice that. Are you satisfied? Have you had enough? Are you no longer hungry?