Why unhealthy carbs are making you sick, and what to do about it | Prof. Walter Willett

for something like diabetes we know you can drop your risk in 2 days by a better lifestyle that's pretty good two days I'll take for cancer it's a little different it's not just an accumulation of damage but events that may damage our DNA back when we were adolescent most populations are getting roughly half of their calories from carbohydrate but about 80% of that carbohydrate is unhealthy which is a pretty big deal exactly one of the things that's changing is aggressive ad advertising and subtle advertising the food industry does massive amounts of research on how to penetrate our vulnerabilities yes sugar is a real problem but actually a bigger problem is welcome to Zoe science and nutrition where World leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health I'm your host Jonathan wolf founder and CEO of Zoe today we learn about how the food we eat has has a powerful impact on our risk of serious diseases like type 2 diabetes heart disease and cancer by the time we reach 65 a staggering 80% of us will have at least one chronic health condition and 68% of us will have two or more today's guest has been researching The Links between Food and Health in a study of hundreds of thousands of people for over 40 years in this episode he explains which foods are responsible for the huge rise in those chronic diseases that prevent us from enjoying a long and healthy life and also which are the foods that could extend our life joining us today is Professor Walter Willet from the Harvard th Chan School of Public Health Walter is the world's most cited nutritional scientist with over 2,000 Publications and several books to his name it's an absolute pleasure to have Walter on the show today to help us understand how to eat to protect our health Walter thank you for joining me today very good to be with you janathan brilliant so we have a tradition here which is always really hard for professors which is that we start with a quick fire round of questions from our listeners and we have some very simple rules you can say yes or no or if you absolutely have to you can give us a one sentence answer are you willing to give it a go that is a challenge for Professor I reckon nice will you will you try than game brilliant okay is our average diet making us sick yes see that wasn't so bad despite all the public health campaigns is the average Dart in Western countries still getting worse probably about the same but some people are getting much better some people are doing much worse if the average American improved their diet quality could they potentially add as much as 10 extra quality years to their life probably not by diet alone but with some other health behaviors I can see that you just don't want to give me a yes there okay I'll accept that is it impossible is it ever too late to change my diet and reduce my risk of ill health no does the food that our children eat impact their health for the rest of their lives yes Are there specific foods that might decrease my risk of cancer and heart disease yes and finally and you don't need to just restrict this to yes or no what's the biggest myth about nutrition that you still hear today it has been that fat is the cause of all problems we're starting to get over that now but that's Del angry Walter it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today you know this but not all of our listeners necessarily know you're the number one most cited nutrition science researcher in the world which is a pretty big deal because there are an awful lot of those researchers now um and I think really instrumental in discovering how important the food we eat is on our long-term health and starting to actually be able to understand it not in just some very generic way but really starting to try and understand specifically what it is about our diet I also remember that we met in Boston with Tim very early in my journey with Zoe and I remember how friendly you were with me despite the fact that at the time I knew abs absolutely nothing about nutrition so I'm very appreciative about that I would like to start right at the very beginning Maybe by saying like could you describe a picture of what the average diet in the west is like today sort of based on your research what is it that people are actually eating yeah I think at this point in time uh most countries most populations are getting roughly half of their calories from carbohydrate but about 80% of that carbohydrate is unhealthy refined starch sugar and potatoes and I think now that we've cleaned up the fat and our food systems quite a bit that problem of unhealthy carbohydrates is really a major issue and of course we're not getting enough of the health promoting factors such as fruits vegetables and nuts that's slightly terrifying that 80% of the carbohydrates we're eating is unhealthy and I I definitely want to sort of dig into that more but before you start to help us to understand it better I'd actually love to like actually understand a bit the research that you're doing so you run these huge studies with hundreds of thousands of people and I think as regular listeners to this show know you know that's very rare most of nutrition research is done on maybe 20 you know maybe 50 people over short periods of time could you explain how you and your colleagues are actually studying the relationship between um diet and health and how therefore it's allowing you to start to make statements like you know 80% of carbohydrates that people are eating are unhealthy hi I have a favor to ask I hope you're enjoying today's episode with Walter and rethinking your relationship with potatoes now making this show takes a lot of time we think it's well worth it in the name of improving your health all we ask in return is that you hit the Subscribe button and then turn notifications on all right back to the episode yes uh by the way that number comes from our national food survey not from our own research uh but the way we study nutrition is to gather collect information from large numbers of people as you say several 100,000 people uh where we started collecting data in 1980 using standardized questionnaires and yes uh we've done many studies comparing responses to very detailed weighing and measuring of diet and levels of nutrients in Blood and in urine and nothing's perfect but this captures most of the information for most of the questions that we want to answer and so we also collect data on smoking physical activity uh other risk factors for diseases heart disease and cancer that could be what we call confounders that could related to diet but if we don't control for them could be distorting the results so meaning you might think that somebody's diet is causing their real Health but actually it's because they're smoking or not doing any exercise or or things like this exactly L and so we can statistically control for that uh but what's really unique about our study is that we didn't just collect data at Baseline at the at the first time they participated in our study uh but every four years we update diet now and after you know 20 30 40 years that's really important because most people I think actually do change their diet along the way uh and not just their personal preferences uh the food system is changing things are uh different foods are available and even invisibly the production of a lot of foods has changed in very important ways so we did an analysis recently uh looking at what we see when we update the diet as people go along and we see some very strong relationships with the type of fat in the diet but if we only use the Baseline information from 30 or 40 years ago we would miss virtually everything that we've seen and is that part of why it's so hard to really answer these questions about links from food to health because I think almost everyone listening will feel like they're used to this idea that every few years it feels like there's like a new big thing in like all the newspapers and TV about some particular Foods being good or bad and then a few years later you feel like there's something like else why does it seem so hard to just get a really straight answer and why haven't we had a straight answer 30 years ago on this right uh part of that there are multiple reasons that uh some studies just have weak designs not enough people uh just one measure of diet they can miss a lot but this is also related to the nature of disease basically that uh for example heart attacks cor what we call coronary heart disease you need to be on a bad diet for decades uh before you actually get a heart attack and that's the reason why we don't see people dropping dead in fast fast food places we don't see adolescence dropping dead there we know that plaques are starting to form in their arteries from autopsies but uh the heart attack doesn't occur till again usually 40 50 years and onwards and uh for cancer it's a little different it's not just necessarily an accumulation of damage but events that may damage our DNA back when we were adolesence so we know for example that breast tissue is particularly sensitive during that period of life and factors that damage our DNA or that protect us from damage of DNA while we were growing up can actually be related to breast cancer and other cancers decades later uh but some things act fairly quickly also so we need this uh studies that really go on for decades before we can get the the full picture and then of course diets extraordinarily complicated that it's not just one variable like a environmental pollutant for example literally hundreds or thousands of different chemicals in the foods that we eat that uh act together or interacting U that ultimately relate to higher or lower risks of disease so we're studying things very complicated but what's usually missed in most studies is the issue of time because these things take a long time and also because you're saying that people's diets themselves change so what I'm eating when I'm 30 maybe quite different to when I'm 45 and again may change at 60 and so somehow you have to adjust for all of this in your analysis exactly so what have you found you know we're sitting here in in uh towards the end of 2023 what's our latest understanding about the links between what we eat and our risk of diseases yeah we've learned a lot uh that uh when we started back in 1980 the general belief was that fat in the diet is the villain and it's responsible for most of heart disease and cancer in Western populations and as the data emerged that's not what we saw that fat per se didn't seem to be related very much to any major disease for that matter the per in other words the percentage of calories from fat in the diet wasn't important but what did emerge was that the type of fat was very important uh and it turned out the worst type of fat was trans fat and most people did not even heard of it and nutritionist weren't paying attention at all to that in the in the diet uh but we saw fairly quickly that high trans fat intake was related to higher risk of heart disease and uh as time emerged diabetes infertility other conditions as well and I would uh like to point out that I conclusions in general because of the complexity should not be made just on the basis of one study or even necessarily one type of study because at the same time we were seeing this picture of trans fat and heart disease emerge other colleagues were doing some of the short-term studies that you described where you take a few dozen people and you randomize them to say high trans fat or low transf fat in their diet and they were seeing highly unusual unique adverse changes with trans fat and and that kind of short-term study now neither study on itself would be definitive uh but when you put that kind of evidence together you have in short term randomized studies so there's presumably very little confounding in those kinds of studies and you see adverse effects on risk factors like uh LDL cholesterol the bad form of cholesterol and bad effects on the good form of cholesterol and triglycerides in our blood going up and then you look that makes you pretty worrisome and it would predict probably that trans fat would increase heart disease risk you're sort of seeing this combination between you're able to see over the long picture across somebody's life actually these people are having heart attacks and strokes and dying but you're only observing you're not changing their diet you're just observing what they do and then you're seeing these like small scale nutritional studies where people are really intervening like with a drug test and saying oh actually you know what you give these people the transfer and you see this like short-term impact that looks very very negative yes so that combination of evidence really can take us to a quite High level of certainty about uh that trans fats are not good for us and um it took and of course it's important to reproduce studies not just one study but other investigators look at this and uh see similar results there's confirmatory evidence and when you put all that together it can lead us again to a high level of certainty in situations where we'll probably never do the theoretically ideal study where we take tens of thousands of people and put them on high trans fat diets or and randomly other people to low trans fat diets and we follow them for decades those kinds of studies are just not going to happen because it's just impossibly expensive and it's incredibly difficult to get people to comply I assume and stay on a diet like that for years and so we actually did a podcast on trans fats um with my colleague Dr Sarah Barry a little while ago and my understanding was out of research like this basically um trans fats have been removed from the food that we eat in sort of all Western countries so this is was a really big issue but is no longer an issue is that right Walter yeah that that's that's correct and that's an area where we made some great progress and the nice thing about this was we didn't have to educate everybody uh we could actually fix the problem at the source I wish all problems could be solved that way I was going to say so that's solved but the last time I checked things like you know type 2 diabetes and rates of obesity and all these cancers are still going through the roof so I'm guessing that trans fat alone is not the issue no unfortunately there's some other very bad trends that have been happening just as you described uh that looks like can counterbalance a lot of the benefits of eliminating transfer so what has been going on and what is this link between food and what's been going on with what we eat that we're seeing this like ever Rising burden of these um these diseases yeah well I it's mul factors and what we do see is a huge amount of again unhealthy carbohydrates refined starch and sugar in our diet and at the same time well the fat is actually for the most part pretty healthy fats in our diet now so that's leads me to the conclusion that at this point in time there huge amount of unhealthy carbohydrates is a serious problem and the particularly a problem when uh the carbohydrate is sugar in the form of beverages sugar sweetened beverages basically uh that includes the sodas that we drink but if you go to stores grocery stores in our country you see huge shells uh loaded with these so-called fruit drinks that are really 90 95% sugar water maybe with a little touch of actual fruit juice in there and these have the same amount of sugar mostly as a Coke would have something that like an orange juw juice or strawberry juice or whatever they might put whatever they put on the front is that what you're saying right yes and it's usually a a little few tablespoons of orange juice and a and a cup full of sugar that uh would be in those products and refined starch and sugar in so many different forms but one of the things that's changing is not just the food uh but also aggressive advertising and subtle advertising the food industry does massive amounts of research on how to penetrate our vulnerabilities and you know Cokes are advertised as something that uh there's friends all around that athletes drink this uh and nothing could be farther from the truth and this is undermining the health they're basically using uh Advanced uh psychological methods to basically exploit our vulnerabilities and especially worrisome is that a lot of this is directed at children who are vulnerable who can't be expected to make informed decisions about the long-term consequences of what they're drinking or or eating so you've got this imbalance in your opinion like the industrialization of the food and then the advertising against these is an important part of the the story of what you're seen in your data exactly that this uh production vast production of uh unhealthy Foods uh which are extremely cheap to produce because sugar and starch are very very cheap and so putting those together in thousands of different combinations of colorings flavorings marketing is a huge problem I think a lot of people listening to this will be like really clear about sugar and sugar and drinks because that's sort of quite easy to understand it looks like something you you know we all understand at home how you can take a spoonful of sugar and you get terrified by how many spoonfuls of sugar they put in but you've talked about unhealthy carbs and starch could you unpack that a little bit what are the sorts of foods that people might sort of see on their grocery shelves um that you're saying actually these are really unhealthy and the things it's interesting that are at the top of your list as you're you're saying this is how I'm what I'm seeing right the sugar sweet and beverages are clearly the the single if you have to look at one problem that's the single most important in part because many people have three or more servings per day but uh we've just published a paper a couple of weeks ago looking at different forms of carbohydrate and weight change and uh what we see is that yes is a real problem but actually a bigger problem is the amount of refined starch that we consume and this would be uh basically uh white bread think other things made with white uh flour uh white rice uh potatoes small amounts are okay but that's a form of carbohydrate that's very rapidly turned into blood sugar and I think that's really interesting because I think I was brought up uh and I think a lot of people listening to well the same thing that like well rice is really healthy you know white rice is this really healthy food and I was also I think about my grandmother she'd be absolutely shocked at the idea that you shouldn't eat a limitless number of potatoes and that would be good for you know growing up in uh you know she grew up in Scotland that's like part of you know that that's healthy obviously the sugar drinks they'd understand so can you help people who listening to this to understand I guess why you're as worried about these sort of what you call refined starches these things from white flour and white rice and and and potatoes as you were about you know Coca-Cola where everybody like no one thinks that giving Coca-Cola to their children is a good idea but I think lots of people will be thinking oh well if I get them to eat rice I'm I'm doing great yes and in fact it again when we started our work back in 1980 the American Heart Association and Oran Health promoting organizations were pushing people to consume more white rice and pasta and uh things like that because uh they didn't contain much fat uh but basically in the processing of say rice or wheat uh the first step the refining removes the brand from the outside that's where most of the fiber is that's where most of the minerals are that's where most of the vitamins are and so this is when I think about it as being actually like a little grain this is like the outside bit you see that looks makes it look more like a sort of like it's all the bits that make it look like a seed rather than the sort of the white bit Stuck in the Middle right yes exactly and that's again that's where the nutrients are hanging out is that it's not just fiber there it's it's the fiber plus all these minerals and vitamins and that and then the germ is also removed and The Germ is a little part of the seed where the embryonic plant resides and it's amazing that that can that embryonic plant can be there for years and then you provide the right moisture and temperature and it sprouts it's alive during that time and the reason that it's alive is that and it can resistance it's packed in fat uh uh and uh because that fat can be damaged with uh time and bad conditions it's got lots of antioxidants there so it's a little sealed off package uh that uh seals out oxygen and then has lots of antioxidants in there U and so the food industry rips off the brand rips out the uh germ and that takes away roughly 2third of most of the minerals and vitamins uh that are originally there in that that that grain that intact grain now what does it do with those that brand and that germ uh the food industry knows that that's very valuable in terms of nutrients so we feed that to animals and they go big and strong so hang on I just want to make sure I've got this they they take the grain that they're growing they strip out all the really good bits including your things that you say that give us all the nutrients they give us sort of the leftovers and they feed the good bits to the animals exactly yeah sounds like it's a great idea it is not a great idea but that's that uh big chunk of that 80% of carbohydrates that are unhealthy much more than sugar but then it gets worse uh then it takes that what's left uh what we call the endosperm that's and it's uh mostly almost all starch uh with that's depleted in minerals and vitamins and then it grinds that into fine particles if you're making flour and those fine particles uh create much more surface area so uh when we uh eat that say bread or something made dozens and dozens of other products made out of white flour that starch uh hits our stomach and our digestive enzymes uh uh can veryy readily break that starch into glucose what is starch it's basically a chain of glucose molecules and glucose is the form of sugar that we absorb and that's blood sugar that we measure so you get this very rapid increase in blood sugar after consuming white bread and potatoes cooked potatoes if you ate raw potatoes just fine but they're disgusting actually if you want to try but but just to make sure I've got this basically they take this thing that's a bit more like a seed the whole grain they rip out like almost all the bits that have all of the goodness and then they end up with this thing that you're you're calling is is mainly this this starch and the way to understand that then they smash it up into pieces so that when we eat a starch basically our body turns that into blood sugar almost immediately exactly and that's not good for us uh because we get a big spike in blood glucose that demands a big surge of insulin uh uh that our pancreas pumps out and that insulin does drop the blood sugar down uh quickly but then in fact it overshoots much of the time and so we're often hungry after an hour or two after that uh in contrast if we eat the whole grain uh it takes a while it's like a little time release capsule of starch uh that brand protects the uh starch from immediate digestion and we digest it which D digestions essentially means breaking that starch down into glucose and we get a much slower increase and lower increase in blood glucose levels and we uh we don't get hungry right away it's satisfying for a longer period of time and uh it's not surprising in the paper we just published there was quite a substantial difference in weight gain over time uh between people who ate the refined starches that people atate them as whole grains it's really interesting talking about this and it um you know Zoe sort of looking at your own blood sugar responses is one of the things that is sort of quite eye openening um so I definitely remember the first time that I ever saw what happened when uh I ate white rice and just as you're describing it sort of amazing it was actually having a bigger Spike than when I tested having Coca-Cola which was not at all I think what I was expecting and you know I grew up um uh as always you sort of grow up with your parents' generation of nutritional advice and my father had um had high cholesterol when he was who was young and the doctors at that time were giving the best advice which was basically you know eat as low of fat diet as possible and therefore you should eat all this healthy stuff like lots of white rice um and and I guess my question is if we had been having this conversation um you know even maybe 15 years ago would you have led as strongly talking about unhealthy carbs is the sort of number one thing that you're concerned about or is this something that has been sort of Shifting over the last 15 or so years uh I I think by 15 years ago we had seen this picture emerging so we were seeing that but uh when we started our study in 1980 uh no I was as a physician I was advising like you were describing that uh following American Heart Association guidelines that uh reduce all types of fat Flo up on these carbohydrates in fact it was pretty hard to find very many whole grain carbohydrates back then there and uh that's one of the not everything has been bad uh over time that we we've eliminated trans fat and uh there are many more car whole grain carbohydrate whole grain foods available than there were back in 1980 it was actually pretty hard to find much of anything so it's like easier to eat more healthily if you want is that we're saying in One Direction and yet like the sort of the standardized you know I see this a lot with my son who's um who's nearly 16 that it's really easy to also eat a truly terrible diet if you just go with whatever is sort of being offered to you standard and you're not choosing um to make sort of these these healthier choices you actively yes and that's basically what we see happening in the US at least and I think it's probably happening in other countries we are as you know we're not one country uh some people have sort of defined our country into seven different groups but even more crudely into two groups so uh that uh one group has uh more education uh more resources and they're taking advantage of this new knowledge and like the participants in our study who are all health professionals we've seen a huge increase in whole grain consumption over time and that part of our population is getting much healthier uh but there's another huge part of our population that uh has either less education or uh the lack of resources to act upon a good new knowledge and they're going in a very bad Direction so there's what we see is uh the average means almost nothing anymore it's uh the average can say the same but you've got two groups going in opposite directions which is obviously incredibly depressing because we don't if we think about other public health things it's not like we say here's healthy water and like deadly water and you just have to be educated enough to understand what to drink right we make sure that the water we get you know hopefully the air we breathe all these things are are safe and in a sense you know I I always listen to this and I feel like um it's one thing when we don't understand but if the science has reached the point that it's it's really clear something's going wrong isn't it when we are just um delivering food that we just know isn't really um safe at least without being really clear it doesn't mean that nobody can have something that's a treat by any means but that as a standard diet that you're just G to be like you are just going to eat all of this it feels like it's it's really a public health issue as you say the ideal Public Health uh advances are where we we don't have to educate in fact it's invisible uh and people only learn about it when something goes wrong uh that uh that clean water clean air uh the fact that uh bacterial control of bacterial contamination of food is pretty good not perfect but uh enormously better than it was 50 or 100 years ago uh people can assume for the most part that you're usually not going to get sick and Walter you were just talking about like that you've changed your view very dramatically since since the 1980s I'm curious is there anything where your view has changed more recently if you were going to look back over say a decade ago is there anything that you're now thinking a bit differently than you were then mostly the more recent data has reinforced what we've uh what we saw a decade ago we're we're fine-tuning this information uh with uh more quantitatively uh reliable data uh like looking at red meat consumption for example which uh is an area that uh is high consumption of red meat is characteristic of most of the northern European North American diets and uh the benefits of replacing red meat not with refined starch but replacing it with nuts actually nuts have really emerged to sort of the if don't want to look at a single food one of the healthiest uh Foods uh replacing red meat with nuts with legumes uh some soy products and and I guess the the U maybe one thing where we have refined our information somewhat is around the soy products we did have concerns that high amounts of the phytoestrogens the plant estrogens that are contained in soy might be adverse for breast cancer and some other hormon related cancers but it was also possible that they could be blocking high levels of natural estrogens and it turns out the the latter is actually what what's emerging mostly from studies in Asia actually where soy consumption has been high that does look like a higher soy consumption especially during adolescence and young adult life is related to lower risk of breast cancers so so just to make sure I understood that a decade ago you were like maybe soy is actually negative bad has um like cancer RIS and and now you sort of reversed that view and you're actually thinking that it is definitely not not harmful but actually POS probably positively positive benefits yes although a decade ago well I would say it was ambiguous we just didn't have adequate data but there were reasons to be concerned interestingly uh there still is a lingering concern about very high soy consumption and cognitive function uh that several studies from Asia and populations consuming really high soy consumption and within those populations the one having the ones having highest soy consumption which be a lot uh there some studies suggest adverse effects on cognitive function now I'm guessing that having having had this conversation one of the case the amount of soy that you're talking about that people might be consuming in a stag is off the charts versus anyone who's listening to this in the states or you know the UK or something is that right so in general they could probably be feeling they should be eating more rather than less if I'm making this practical is that right yes it you know there's a general principle in in nutrition that is sort of extremely simple but I think uh still valuable to consider is a where we especially where we don't have all the data we would really like to have which is usually the case and that's uh variety uh so that I think as part of our alternatives to red meat uh not just only replacing that with soy or only replacing it with walnuts uh is not the best thing but to have a variety of Alternatives some soy products some walnuts some other peanuts uh some beans uh uh variety is good because you're unlikely to get too much of something really bad and you're also less likely to have a gap to be in your diet to be missing something that's important I just want to talk a bit more about the red meat before you switch to the Alternatives because I think this is still a live debate for some people and um I think you hear you're saying you you haven't really changed your view from 10 years ago well could you help our listen on S like how how much should they be concerned about eating red meat there would be plenty of people eating this who were brought up feeling you should be eating you know some red meat every day and it has all this great protein and after all didn't our ancestors hunt meat so how can it possibly be bad for us yeah uh not just what every day every meal that's how I grew up in the midwest there have been concerns about red meat for quite a while because of the high amount of saturated fat and cholesterol in red meat and that so it's it's been suspect for a long time um I think one of the things we've come to appreciate it's not just a high amount of saturated fat but also the fact that there's almost no polyunsaturated fats in red meat and those really have they're essential and they have positive health benefits Beyond just being essential they do polyon saturates lower LDL cholesterol now we also see they improve insulin sensitivity as well which would help reduce diabetes risk so uh it's that that proportion so polyunsaturates to saturates in uh beef in particular especially that uh contribute to being adverse so we published a paper just last week in fact an update in our cohort studies now after more than 30 years of followup about uh 20 2,000 participants have developed type 2 diabetes that's an enormous number of people isn't it to to be studying sadly I mean to think of the health burden of it you know all individual cases and people who have a health burden and then collectively 22,000 participants uh developing type two diabetes just during the time we've been watching the studies are really only possible because of the incredible contribution of the participants of the studies it would not be possible without that and their willingness to share their experiences that together we learn a lot but when we have so many participants uh we can see even uh consumption of red meat about twice a week we could see a statistically significant increase in risk of type two diabetes and again part of the confusion comes because uh most Studies have only compared red meat to the rest of the diet sometimes you see not much increase in risk or weak increase in Risk but if the rest of the diet's not very healthy you're basically saying red meat is about as bad as the rest of the diet and so uh the comparison in nutrition is always an issue uh that we have we physiologically unconsciously control our total caloric intake pretty tightly over a day over a month over a year within about 1% uh of uh intake versus what we burn off by physical activity basically the whole plate is the same size so if we remove something we're going to replace it with something else and that replacement of course makes a huge difference so if we replace that red meat with refined starches that would not be a good replacement but if we replace it with some mix of plant protein sources like uh nuts legumes uh soy products that turns out to be a good replacement is this important I guess Walter is a question because you could say like it's better but it makes no difference in fact to your likelihood of getting type two diabetes or having heart disease or any of these other sorts of things like how bad is the red meat and how much better is it if you suddenly because you know you're you're I think talking about reducing it to you know below twice a week and you were said you got brought up eating it three times a day this is a pretty dramatic change so how bad is the meat how bad is the red meat yeah it's not like smoking and lung cancer where there's sort of one thing that is overwhelmingly dominant CA and that uh that's true of most things we look at there's no one factor that describes it and the increase in Risk is in I would say sort of in the moderate category but when you put a whole lot of moderate risk together then you get a big risk and we can see if we put the diet and lifestyle factors together we could prevent over 90% of type two diabetes so if you changed all of the diet and lifestyle factors from sort of like the worst to the best you could reduce the amount of type 2 diabetes by 10 fold to just 10% of yeah instead of 22,000 cases we could have 2,000 cases that is absolutely extraordin it doesn't obviously mean that people are responsible for this right because this is the environment they're living in and people don't always have either the understanding or the ability to do all this I think when're you're not being judgmental about that we just sort of talking about the difference between maybe the food that we're eating now and and the environment we're in compared to what we might have had a you know a few hundred years ago yeah you're absolutely right I'm not blaming her pointing a finger at the people who developed it because many of them that unfortunate thing is many of them have been doing what they were told to do by the uh by the Health Community I mean this is one of the most frustrating things isn't it is that people are feel like they're constantly trying to do what they're told and then we go back and say well actually maybe what we told you was worse so just to wrap up on the red me because I I'm I'm going to make my son listen to this bit afterwards um despite all the stories that like you know actually it's really important again I think of my grandmother who's like it's make sure you eat your meat you know you're going to never grow up to be big and strong unless you eat this this is more like a treat because you like it if if you like it then it is like an essential healthy thing that you should be an important part of your diet yeah yes exactly say one serving a week is very some people would consider this radical if I had said this when I was growing up uh it would a bit but uh it's actually very consistent with a traditional Mediterranean diet and the diets that many people around the world consume and if you really like a big uh uh half kilogram steak or even a kilogram steak uh you can have that once a month in many cultures uh they do have red meat you could have red meat almost every day but it would be uh just uh a small amount maybe 25 gram but uh a little bit of a mixed for example so there's many different ways of putting together this quite modest amount of red meat but it's not essential at all last question on that one Walter because there'll be a lot of people saying well we know that you know the red meat that you would eat in the states that the sort of things that those animals are allowed to be fed are like a long way away from what maybe a wild animal would eat or even maybe what might be the case if you were in France or something it was more restricted is this just a statement about antibiotics and weird food that's going into the cows or is this actually broader than this and you see it outside it's not just a a a product of the particular sort of red meat that maybe somebody might be uh uh getting in a in a grocery store in the states hi I want to take a quick break from this incredible conversation with Walter now back in March last year we created this podcast to uncover how the latest science can help us all live longer and healthier lives and over hundreds of hours of conversations with World leading scientists light Walter we've uncovered key insights that have the potential to help you improve your health now if you don't have hundreds of hours to spare not to worry at the request of many of you our team has created an amazing guide summarizing the top 10 most impactful discoveries that you could apply to your life and you can get it for free simply go to zoe.com sfree guu or click the link in the show notes and please let me know what you think of it okay back to the show we actually can't study that very well in our population because 95% of the beef is not uh grass-fed for the life of the animal but this is mostly something that's more related to Red to beef no matter where it's produced or how it's produced there's been a lot said oh the grass-fed beef has uh much more omega-3 fatty acid in it a healthy unsaturated polyunsaturated fat uh but it is higher in grass-fed beef but in grain-fed beef it's it's very very little so even doubling very very little is still very little that just for example uh a walnut the same amount of Walnut uh has about a 100 times more omega-3 fatty acid in it than does grass-fed beef Okay so hugely difference and I have to say I've yet to meet a nutritional scientist from anywhere around the world who's argued about the the positive benefits of the red meat from where they're come so I I uh um I wasn't expecting you to say anything different Walter one thing you haven't touched on is dairy and that also seems to be one of those things where there has been a lot of change in view over um the last 10 or or 20 years where where are you on that today right uh well Dair is I think perhaps the most uh complicated and interesting part of the uh plate because uh there are definitely nutritional value in dairy uh and it milk is of course incredibly interesting because uh an infant can live on human milk for six months and grow and develop with nothing else but milk uh so it's actually designed to be fully supportive of young mammals but is that necessarily something we should be consuming all our life and also uh milk from cattle is very different than milk than human milk there's uh about four times the amount of calcium about four times the amount of protein in cow milk compared to human milk so that if we think of human milk as the ideal but so again not necessarily ideal for a lifetime uh C milk is is really quite different and uh it does have a good amount of calcium and sort of uniquely high amount of calcium and and milk that's often what's pointed to as being really valuable uh and necessary for growing children uh but it does come with a lot of saturated fat again and almost no polyunsaturated fat so that ratio is really very a very bad ratio and uh we do see very clearly that uh uh dairy fat does increase the bad cholesterol in our blood and when we look in our large populations High Dairy consumption is related to higher risk of cardiovascular disease and overall mortality and especially if you compare it to plant Source plant types of fat and again like I was talking earlier with trans fat there have been good randomized control feeding studies shortterm and uh looking at what part one of the questions was whether Dairy is cheese or is uh fresh milk uh is whether cheese is better slight difference but the the study also included then fat from olive oil or other plant sources of fat and those plant sources of fat had dramatically better effects on blood cholesterol levels so you you put our long-term studies together with our short-term studies which are very consistent and it would uh say favoring the unsaturated plant oils is better and this is really going back to studies of 50 or 60 years ago comparing I say Finland with the Mediterranean countries where there was a huge difference about an eight or tenfold difference in heart attack rates U and the the difference was not in the type of the amount of total fat it was in the a type of fat that's not the only difference of course uh differences in fruit and vegetable consumption but virtually for sure that the type of fat was uh was a major contributor uh to those huge differences you touched on this early so I'd really like to come back to it which was to what extent I should be worrying about what my children eat and I think you said that there's some really new evidence linking what a better understanding of what maybe we might be eating as children to our risk later on so how much do I need to worry and what you know what does the latest science tell us I think we do need to be cons more concerned than we have been what about what we're feeding our children U and we've actually known for a long time that the process of atherogenesis of building up a Plax in the arteries that ultimately results in a heart attack that's been going that goes on starting from probably year one and uh we know from autopsies of soldiers killed in wars that the you can see the plaques developing at early stage plaques developing even at 18 or 19 and that means like starting the very first part of our our blood vessels getting blocked even when you're already 18 from from the food we're eatting from the food exactly yeah that's not new we've known that for decades and so uh basically the best thing to do is to not begin that process when you're a child and uh more recently we've been looking at cancer and just starting to get data know on what people were consuming as adolescence and cancer risk later and we've seen it high soda High consumption of soda uh during adolescence is related to higher risk of coloral cancer l in life and for breast cancer we had lots of indications that that's a critical period adolescence and early adult life that mainly comes from the American Atomic bombing of Nagasaki and hoshima in World War II that uh uh women who are exposed to radiation while they were children or young adults had few decades later had a substantial increase in breast cancer but if they were exposed after age 40 uh there was not much increase in of breast cancer so there's a critical window there and we're seeing that uh low intake of fruits and vegetables low intake of whole grains for example uh during that adolescent period is related to breast cancer risk later in life as well Walter can I just check I understood because I'm really shocked by it slightly depressing unfortunately but I just want to make sure understand you're saying that now there is this dated looking at um what women who in fact at the time were still add lence we're eating and sort of how healthy that that was is having a real impact on the risk of breast cancer I guess sort of 30 years later and it's not just because they're on a you know maybe on a better diet throughout this period is better you're saying that there something about like you know the diet we're eating as we're actually going through puberty is actually shaping this this risk of breast cancer many decades later yes right and uh that exactly what we're seeing and when we look at midlife we do see some hint of those relationships but it's not as what we're seeing at midlife it's not as strong as what we're seeing during adolescence in terms of the importance of healthy diets and is that only true for breast cancer or is this true for other things as well you know my should I should be just as worried about my son right now who is you know growing inches every week as far as I could see and and similarly potential is there similar evidence that actually the diet now is really important for his long-term Health uh some yes uh I mentioned we have the example of sugar sweetened Beverages and colar rectal cancer we have more data for breast cancer than we do for other outcomes so this is an area of research that I think is really important but there's um unfortunately not very many studies uh We've with colleagues in uh Denmark set up a lifetime study there uh where we collected data from the largest population so far but that group is only about 30 years old now so they're just starting to enter the era when cancers are will be emerging so I I think you will have just made everybody who's a parent or grandparent more paranoid about their children because we also know that this is an environment where like levels of ultra processed food are much higher for children in fact than they are for adults and where I feel I take my daughter to you know a birthday party every week and it's nothing but like highly highly refined white flour and sugar which is fine as a Tre treat but if it's like all the time it becomes quite hard I think to convince her to eat anything else because after all you know this is designed to be so nice I think what you're saying is that we do have to worry about it we do yes this there's a lot of the problem is brewing uh during that period of life that's pretty clear so could we swap to something more positive because almost everybody listening to this is not a child so like what was going to happen to them during their childhood is done clearly true for you and me is it ever too late to change what we eat in a way that can really improve our health before I go to that i g to go back to Childhood so interesting that even the fracture risk has been uh really interesting the data there that there's been this Paradox for decades that uh the main justification for consuming a lot of milk has been the calcium and while you're growing up you really need to drink a lot of milk uh to build up the bones that'll be with you for the rest of your life and it does relate to the later in life too the issues there uh but we've seen for a long time that the countries that consume a lot of milk the northern European countries actually have the highest fracture rates by quite a bit and this is when later in life you fall over and you break your hip or break a leg or fall normally would have been a bruise is a hip fracture instead one of the things that milk does it promotes growth and it does make people taller and have longer bone B and that uh we published a study uh some years ago showing that height is actually a strong risk factor for hip fractures and it's probably because we fall from a higher distance but also just a long stick is easier to break than a short stick and there's a greater torque with a a long stick and uh so we looked at at the childhood consumption of milk and actually we saw that there wasn't a benefit of high milk for fracture risk later in life in fact it was in the opposite direction especially in boys at quite a higher risk of hip fracture decades later uh among the boys who consumed the most milk is uh during childhood and they were uh taller too uh part and it looks like at least that greater uh bone length does explain part of the risk there and there is no benefit for women which is where I think we've heard all this thing about going through menopause that you need to make sure that you're you know you should be drinking milk because you should be getting calcium in order to avoid these fractures later this is the data says this isn't true we just don't see that especially during childhood now we do calcium is essential and we have to have enough but what is enough uh interesting the country in our looking across countries among the countries have good data on fracture risk the lowest fracture risk was in Indonesia and they uh don't consume any milk uh basically after weaning and uh the calcium intake was 250 milligrams a day in their National survey uh so I think some of my colleagues for years have said actually we don't really need that much calcium as has been recommended I think that's turning out to be true uh it doesn't mean we shouldn't drink any dairy uh but this three or five I was told we had to have four glasses of milk growing up in in the midwest uh now we don't need that much milk uh some of it it's fine to have you know I think about one serving a day is not a bad uh Target to to think about and some indication that it would be maybe best to have it as yogurt or some fermented product but anyway it's it's a really I think important example of this connection across the lifespan and getting into your question about is it ever too late it's clearly better to start on a healthy diet as soon as we can but uh for something like diabetes uh we know you can drop your risk in two days by a better lifestyle that two days physical two days yes that's pretty good two days I'll take okay yeah as long as you as long you do what you need to do not not like we're doing sitting here diabetes is not just an issue of too much glucose and refined starch and sugar in our diet a large part of it is insulin resistance the resistance to the action of insulin and uh in our dietary studies actually it looks like factors that contribute to insulin resistance are actually more important or just as important as the uh too much rapidly absorbed starch or glucose there's studies going back a couple of decades that by just being Physically Active you using your muscles which are most of the insulin resistance is coming from muscles and if you just exercise within about two hours you drop your insulin resistance quite a bit and uh that persists for about about two days uh and if you exercise your muscles every two days you'll stay at a low level of insulin resistance so if someone was listening to this who's in their 60s or their 70s and they're saying wow you know a lot of your guidance is really different to the guidance that I was told by my doctors and the government and all the rest of it um 30 years ago are you saying to them it makes sense to change your diet today or are they saying well you know what I'm 70 right like it's obviously too late and I'm just going to keep uh it doesn't matter what I eat anymore definitely what you eat uh today and tomorrow will make an important difference uh and uh if especially you know I'd like to maybe make the analogy of uh sort of walking toward a cliff uh that we're going along and eating an unhealthy diet and we're getting very close to going over that Cliff if you just stop two steps before the cliff you won't fall off and uh that's sort of the way we are or another analogy may be with u our coronary arteries which some ways are very simplistically like a pipe if we're accumulating uh atherosclerosis over time and they're getting close to the point of blocking that artery and we stop that progression then we prevent the heart attack and your analogy here is if you were to change to a much healthier diet you're effectively stopping walking towards that Cliff so it's not too late it's not like you're just going to fall off the cliff there's nothing you can do actually you can change your diet even at that very late stage when you're very close to the cliff and and you'll no longer fall off it right exactly and what it means is the time relationship is quite asymmetrical it takes years to get to that point of a precarious artery or falling off the cliff uh but then if you stop getting worse then you can stop that progression stop Crossing that line or stop a heart attack I think that's incredibly positive and um I think it matches actually a lot to what we we see with um members who who take part in in Zoe actually then in a sense as you're as as you've probably gone you're describing how we start to take this damage even as uh as children so by the time you're in your 50s your 60s or 70s that's a lot and interestingly I think often we see particularly strong and rapid changes in how people feel um and I guess the point is at that point there is this dramatic change now Walter we've talked a lot about changes in guidelines and thoughts I I'd love to ask you one final question around that um I'm I'm curious about how you feel about current sort of American guidelines to the public on what to eat so let's say sort of USDA and my plate here in 2023 and we know that these things there's always a sort of lag between what the guidelines might be and where the latest science is um and that's and you know for people listening outside of the US you know this is very similar to the guidance that that is being given in in the UK for example by the NHS are there any areas where you where you feel that isn't fully aligned with your views today yes uh there's some serious Divergence and the guidelines over time have gotten better they don't I think there's a lag between where the science is and the guidelines but uh they were uh totally directed to Fat avoidance if we go back a few decades and they're they've shifted quite a bit to emphasize not reducing fat intake but more focused on type of fat they uh didn't mention trans fat for a long time uh they they finally did and then we got rid of it and they've more emphasized the type of the carbohydrates so those are important differences but uh you can't touch animal sources of protein basically meat and dairy and the guidelines and in a sense the guidelines are corrupted by powerful economic interests uh and that's partly mediated through Congress which it's this is baked into our Constitution that every state gets two senators and the Electoral College or presidency is also uh very biased towards states with low populations and uh Congress even passed a law in 2015 that the guidelines could not even me mention the effect of diet on environmental factors climate change for example which is an existential crisis that the whole globe is facing and so even our secretary of agriculture said uh about a year or two ago that he's not even going to suggest that people reduce red meat despite all the evidence and despite the clear fact that red meat per serving has about 160 times more greenhouse gas emissions compared to a serving of beans or or soy products to say that you think the guidelines are are corrupted and that you can't touch discussions around meat and dairy for example it sounds like pretty strong disagreement with um w w with what is being delivered as public health advice yeah sadly it's so and even outside of um meat and dairy I feel like what you've been describing around carbohydrates is a lot stronger than the standard advice that um is given in um in the guidelines uh yes they talk about added sugar it wasn't till you got to page 64 in a footnote that added sugar meant sugar sweetened beverages it's OB fiscated in grams of added sugar and OB fiscated is a very scientist word but does this make you angry Walter it does yes it and because it's it's causing premature death and suffering you could say that the the big soda companies have blood on their hands they are making children sick and die sooner it is a serious issue I think that's really powerful and I also think your point about the way in which a lot of this is hidden so I think for a lot of parents um and honestly I was the same way six years ago I think about the difference as I think about my my young daughter versus my son I was like well okay Coca-Cola is bad but you know orange juice or one of these other like apple juice that's like a really good healthy thing and now I understand it's very close it's basically water with lots and lots of sugar in it so I feel also quite angry that we're asking people to understand things at a level that we would never ask elsewhere from some other nobody asked us to understand how our you know power you know how do how our car can be safe right we rely on the government to make sure the car is really safe when we get in and we drive and they are incredibly safe now I do understand that I feel that the more I've understood it the more um Angry I am because this isn't just about choice right it's about making sure that people are well in informed and particularly I think if you think about things like like children where you actually youve slightly terrified me with the extent to which my children might eat could be affecting their health in in 30 or 40 years yes it's it's worrisome and I think that not just that we haven't provided the information but we allow them to be exploited by aggressive advertising and uh just to make money on the part of the big soda industry and junk food industry Walter I'd love to go from like the the big picture of what's going on in government advice on the rest to sort of actionable advice for for our listeners and I think a lot of people will be listening to this saying like this is really fascinating and also you know this isn't just the same advice maybe as I'd I'd understood historically so if someone was listening to this and they want to change their diet to make it healthier would you be able to maybe suggest like three tips like your top three things that you might suggest to them that might be changes that they could do that could really have an impact on their long-term Health right of course you're asking me is something I try to avoid because it really is not just so simple as three things it's U it it's putting the whole package together but uh realizing that every it's not everybody's ready to do that all at once once but I think the biggest single sort of offender is sugar sweetened Beverages and uh really keeping those very low uh occasional treat and uh second at this point in time the the massive amounts of refine starch and sugar uh in our diet in general and then of course uh I think where there' be uniform agreement uh that uh more fruits and vegetables uh is part of our daily diets would would be good the industry likes to say that we should emphasize the positive but that's of course offis scating that there's a lot of bad things in our diet too but anyway those would be three areas where just even those would make a huge difference and it sounds like one of the ways you're saying you're doing this is like it's the things you're swapping out so it's like reducing the red meat instead of replacing that with more potatoes which you're saying is one of the things that's actually really bad it's moving that towards these things that are more whole grain that you described where like not all the good stuff has been removed exactly we had a lot of questions about Vitamins because this is an enormous um industry and a lot of people were saying asking us well you know do people if they are eating well do they need to take vitamins um in addition what's your perspective on that that's a good point if you're uh really eating a sort of optimal diet uh you we may not need extra vitamin supplements one in particular we won't get is vitamin D that uh even from a very healthy diet the vitamin D would be quite low uh because mostly we get that from sun exposure and in Northern climates we get much less sun exposure than uh we would in tropical climates uh and if we try to get too much sun exposure we'll likely get skin cancer uh which is serious also so I think the best uh way to make sure we get enough vitamin D is by taking a vitamin D supplement and I do note in UK that's actually recommended now there's also the reality that it's it's hard to have an ideal diet for most people that uh I I try to do that but I'm traveling and not always uh where I can have an an ideal meal and also an important recent study showing that uh taking a stand lowcost RDA level uh vitamin mineral supplement costs less than 10 cents a day that actually uh reduced uh the rate of cognitive decline which is pretty important issue for though I think for anybody over 40 we do prefer not to end up demented in our later years so I think you can take you can get your vitamin D that way if you have a supplement that's 800 or thousand international units of vitamin D pluses a low cost RDA level vitamin supplement does make sense for most people after age 45 some people don't absorb vitamin B12 as well and uh end up low that so it again this a sort of a nutritional safety net not to be a mega vitamin superpower kind of a thing but just making sure that we don't have some some holes in our diet which it's most people do actually so it's it's a sort of safety net if you aren't eating this sort of like really great uh loads of whole food and fresh vegetables all the rest of it then it's a way to make sure and you're saying is like you just need to recommended uh daily intake this is like 10 cents a day so this is just your standard one one pill a day and water do you do you do this yourself yeah I do and it's not it definitely it's not instead of a healthy diet because there's lots of things we get in a healthy diet that are not going to be part of that uh viamin supplement brilliant I have one final question Walter and then I'd love to do a quick summing summing up which is what's the area of research that you're most excited about that you might be talking to us about in in a few years time where you feel we don't have the the answer right now well I think at the answer the life Spectrum are the most interesting because most of our data comes from sort of middle life and uh sort of uh that during childhood and Adolescence and how that does relate to later life risk uh that is an area that we're just recently starting to have enough data to look at and then at the older ages to neurodegenerative conditions including dementia Alzheimer's disease Parkinson's disease those are areas that uh where we're just building up a substantial body of evidence in those areas that would be fascinating to understand I know a lot of listeners obviously these are the the things that we're all scared of and we'd like to understand better what we can do ourselves um to try and reduce those risks actually in the last 10 years we have learned quite a bit about that but it's clearly an area where more data more evidence will be valuable could say we've just after 2,000 years rediscovered the Mediterranean diet I was going to say could you wrap up by explaining when you say the Mediterranean diet that there like the core diet that would help uh you know prevent those diseases what are those components well I should usually try to insert the adjective traditional Mediterranean diet because it's not what people are eating today it's what people were eating back in the 1960s and it really was a primarily plant-based diet but not a vegan diet it had a a small amount of meat in it uh more emphasizing in most places fish but uh emphasizing uh large amounts of fruits and vegetables whole grains and the type of fat being that tradition olive oil but we're seeing other uh non hydrogenated plant oil soy and canola oil are also pretty healthy and maybe fit with other dietary patterns as well so it's it's basically healthy sources of fats healthy sources of carbohydrate healthy protein sources lots of fruits and vegetables and uh put that together and it uh you can put it together in thousands of different ways that will have very important health benefits both by uh not getting too much of some uh less healthy parts of the diet but getting an abundance of health-promoting parts of the diet I love that um and it is interesting how how much of nutrition seems to be about getting back to the advice that maybe my you know my grandpar my grandparents were brought up with about what one was supposed to eat and we seem to have gone on this very long detour to start to be heading back and saying that maybe they knew more than we thought they did it depends where your grandparents Liv yes I sure that I'm sure that is maybe go a little bit further back Walter I would love to try and summarize today and we were very wide ranging so I'm going to do my best to pull that together and do please correct me anywhere i' I've got wrong if that's okay we started by saying you know what do we think now when you look at all your data you've got this amazing data spanning hundreds of thousands of people since 1980 and that through this period What You Now understand is really unhealthy has actually shifted quite a lot so in the 1980s you thought that fat was really the villain and it turns out that hasn't really been true and interestingly the number one thing you talked about is the fact that probably 80% of the carbo hydrates that we're now eating are unhealthy you talk very much about not just sugars but interestingly these starchy foods and so you were talking about potatoes and white rice and white flour which is then turning up in anything from white bread to you know almost anything these beverages so thear drinks are a are a big problem but interestingly that's shifted from being really obvious things like you know everybody listens know that Coca-Cola is bad to saying actually we just shifted to these other sugary drinks you know the orange juices and the apple juice and all the rest of it and actually they're a huge problem you also said really explicitly that advertising is a big issue and not a lot of people on the show are maybe as uh forthright and I think that's wonderful to hear that you know there is a lot of advertising a lot of it you know being Direct directed at children as well as adults taking advantage of pushing these foods which are very cheap for them and which you say are really a really a problem um that we understand basically the whole grain is good for us and what's happening is that 2third of these grains are been removed and we're just being left with this starch which almost immediately turns into sugar when it goes into our body and that is like what's starting off this race towards type 2 diabetes and other diseases um then we shifted a bit we talked about red meat um and you said you you know looking through all the data it's really clear this is not good for us we don't need to be eating it all the time you know and if you do want to eat it you should be thinking about it as As a treat rather than I think you described growing up and having it three time three times a day we talked a bit about I think some really interesting new research where where you're saying we we now see I think really for the first time that what we eat as children an adolescence has a profound impact on our health later and for example this I think really scary idea that the food that you know a young girl might be eating is going to affect their breast cancer risk later and therefore we do need to think hard about what our children and and grandchildren are um eating and that's also true for heart disease where you can see already at 18 that the food we're eating is starting to affect our arteries but on the other hand you said very positively um you could be listening to this right now in 70 5 and you have this analogy of like walking towards the edge of the Cliff of the thing that's going to make you really sick you could change your diet right now and you could stop walking towards the cliff and therefore even though you might only be you know a foot away a few centimeters away from from The Edge you can make that change which I I find incredibly positive we talked about the way that there are real issues with government guidelines you were really strong um you know I think you actually said corrupted when you describe it and that therefore there is a real Gap particularly around things like meat and dairy where you think they're nothing like as strong as the scientific evidence but also even around sort of whole grains and things like this they're just not as strong as the as the science really discusses which I think is a fascinating topic I'd like to do a whole whole podcast on and then finally you said okay what about some really actionable advice and I think we picked up lots of different things during the talk but when you came down to like your three tips you know your number one I think is if you're drinking any sugar sweetened beverages then stop your second one is reduce refined starch and sugar in your diet and this might be things like white rice and potatoes that you might not really been aware as being quite negative it's not only thinking about like sugar in your diet it's not only white white bread and replace that with a lot more your third thing a lot more fruits and and vegetables we talked about a couple of other interesting things like that you do take a a vitamin supplement uh daily so you figured that that makes sense you taught that you'd reverse your view on soy so I definitely take away that I should be making sure that there's soy in my diet which I think for most of us in the west tends to be very small and then I think you summed it up by all saying actually we just need to eat the way that our ancestors did 2,000 years ago with this traditional Mediterranean diet it's mainly plant-based you know there might be a small amount of meat it's often fish in fact lots of fruit and vegetable lots of whole grains lots of olive oil and if you could switch to that you could actually profoundly reduce your risk of you know dementia and heart disease and all these things that we we feel will rob us of the you know the end of life that we want to have you're getting n of my class thank you well um I thought that was a master class I would love to follow up maybe we can do something next time I'm in um in Boston because I think there's so many areas it would be fascinating to dig into more detail thank you so much for taking your time to really explain what is coming out of the research as you know as you continue to learn more thank you jisan and I look forward to seeing you in Boston thank you Walter for joining me on Zoe science and nutrition today it's been incredible to have Walter on the show today sharing his knowledge about how what we eat is linked with our long-term health and our risk of disease now if after listening to this conversation you'd like more science back tips from our podcast you can actually download our free guide with our top 10 most impactful podcast insights by simply going to zoe.com podcast here you can also find out more about how a Zoe membership can help you improve your diet and get 10% off as always I'm your host Jonathan wolf Zoe science and nutrition is produced by yellow huin Martin Richard Willen and Tilly fulford see you next [Music] time w

Channel: ZOE

Views: 221,377

Keywords: zoe, zoe podcast, gut health, ultra processed foods, tim spector, jessie inchauspe, gut health diet, ultra processed foods documentary, ultra processed food, walter willett, carbs, unhealthy carbs, refined carbs, sugary drinks, low carb, low carb diet, carbohydrate (nutrient), carbohydrate grams, healthy living tips, zoe science, are carbs healthy, low carb meal prep, health podcast, carb podcast, keto, ketogenic, science podcast, gut health podcast

Id: nI3ewFbAu3o

Length: 78min 57sec (4737 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 14 2023