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- [00:01]
Jonathan
Welcome to Zoe Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research.
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Can improve your health.
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What comes to mind when you hear the word fermented food? For many of us, it might be a strong sour taste or perhaps even a slight fear. Is it dangerous to leave food out on the counter? Is that jar in the back of my fridge supposed to look like that? For most of human history, fermentation was.
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The primary way that we preserved food.
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Yet today, especially in the UK and the us, we've become disconnected from this ancient process. But what if this lost art of fermentation could be one of the most powerful tools we have for our health? New science is revealing a stunning connection between fermented foods, our gut microbiome and a reduction in inflammation, a key driver.
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Of many chronic diseases.
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Today, I'm joined by my co founder, Professor Tim Spector, who has literally written.
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The book on this.
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For the past six years, Tim has been exploring the science behind fermented foods and health. His book Ferment explores the latest scientific evidence and provides a wide range of delicious recipes you can try at home. In this episode, he explains the profound benefits of fermented foods on our health. By the end, you'll have developed a whole new appreciation for these foods and we'll have some simple ways to start incorporating them in your diets today.
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Tim, what a pleasure. Thank you for joining me today.
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Professor Tim Spector
Great to be here.
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Jonathan
So you know the rules. We're going to start with a rapid fire Q and A from our listeners. Are you ready to go? Hit me.
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Can fermented food support better mental health?
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Professor Tim Spector
Absolutely.
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Jonathan
Is fermenting food at home dangerous?
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Professor Tim Spector
No, but depends on your spouse.
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Jonathan
You throw me off track already.
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Does fermented food always have a really strong flavour?
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Professor Tim Spector
No, it doesn't.
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Jonathan
Can dead microbes benefit your health?
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Professor Tim Spector
They can.
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Jonathan
Is your wife perpetually annoyed by the state of your fridge?
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Professor Tim Spector
Yes. Despite all the things I do, I.
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Jonathan
Know her and you, so I think she might say something similar. What's the biggest misconception about fermented foods?
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Professor Tim Spector
Probably that they're always smelly and dangerous and it's highly risky to eat them.
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Jonathan
And that's not true.
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Professor Tim Spector
It's not true.
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Jonathan
So, Tim, I think that's a brilliant sort of introduction and I know you've got a lot to say about the process of fermenting and the wonders of fermented food. After all, you literally just wrote the book on it. So let's just start at the beginning. What is fermenting?
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Professor Tim Spector
Fermenting is the process by which Microbes transform food into something better. And by better, I mean something that preserves it longer before it goes mouldy. It also transforms it into something that tastes better and more complex. And it also transforms into something that is healthier for you than the original. If you look at milk, it's not particularly good for you as an adult, but if you ferment has all these extra properties that are good for you. If you take grapes and you ferment them, you get wine, which has incredible complexities of taste and, and many other properties and smells. And so generally, you're just increasing the amount of chemicals and benefits of those foods by the power of the microbes.
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Jonathan
And could you maybe help us understand a bit more what's going on? So you gave that example of milk and it turns into something else, like cheese or something?
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Professor Tim Spector
Yeah, and I think people do get confused about the difference between fermenting and going moldy because there are similar processes involving bugs, microbes, and by those, we're mainly talking about bacteria and we're talking about yeast. So if you leave some milk out for a couple of weeks, you go on holiday, it comes back, it'll be mouldy, it'll be off, because randomly, microbes are coming from the air around it or in the container, and they're starting to eat away at the milk, using it to reproduce. And then they produce funny chemicals and smells, and it's rather random which microbes land on it. So you're not in control of that process. So you'll get a molds eventually growing on it as the acidity and everything changes in that product, so it becomes completely inedible.
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Jonathan
Okay, so that's not the same as fermentation.
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Professor Tim Spector
As fermentation. So fermentation is where you are tightly controlling the conditions around that milk, and you're making sure that only the microbes that you want to grow in the milk are growing in the milk. So that's what happens. For example, when you make yogurt. You are heating the milk up, then you're bringing it down to a certain temperature in a very close range where only certain microbes that you want to favor will grow and others are killed off. And so if you get the microbes that you want really propagating in that food, they elbow all the other ones out the way. So by changing the temperature, that allows certain microbes to grow. And in the case of yogurt, they then produce acid, lactic acid and acetic acid that will lower the ph, that increases the acidity, and that again, stops Other microbes creeping in and taking over. So you're selecting a really small percentage of all the microbes that could be in that food into this narrow range. It's like farming or precision gardening. You just want just these microbes that live in these particular conditions to flourish. And when they do that, they make sure nothing else can get in there. So once you've got the acidity, the pH is below 4.5, nothing nasty can grow. Okay, so that's really important, which doesn't happen if you just leave food out. That's essentially what the difference is. One is a highly tuned cultivation and the other is a random collection of microbes.
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Jonathan
And so now help us to understand what actually happens to the food. So, you know, you were talking about milk as an example. Why do we want microbes to eat the milk rather than us eat it directly? What happens as a result of this?
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Professor Tim Spector
So it's the same process that happens inside your body when you eat any food. Microbes will digest it and break it down into chemicals and break it down into all the nutrients and recycle them and use them and produce many other byproduct chemicals in exchange. So that's where most of our body gets its chemicals from, is from our microbes working overtime on the food. And what happens outside is you're getting a little snapshot of what's happening in your body when you do your own fermentation, say. And the microbes will be breaking down the milk. They produce substances like acids, which further change the properties of that milk. And they can turn it into yogurt, or they can turn it into cheese. And the extra chemicals they produce also provide differences in flavors. So chemicals are essentially complex flavors. So some of them will float in the air and you'll be able to smell them. Others you pick them up on your tongue and making something boring into something incredibly interesting because you're getting all these extra chemicals. The complexity of breaking down the original product, just milk, just this sugar, lactose, is broken into all these different things so that something like cheese becomes this really complex food product from something really basic, just from microbes working hard at it, to produce lots of different substances, which then is this more complicated approach. And again, the same thing. Think grapes and wine. You know, why does wine taste so much better, more interesting, than just sweet or sour grapes? It's all these extra chemicals that are providing us with that. And in those chemicals are nutrients, there's vitamins, things that we can't necessarily pick up our cells that make it healthier.
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Jonathan
I'M thinking about analogy as you're describing this. So I was actually discussing with my little girl this morning as we're going to school, talking about plants and how they're producing the oxygen that she needs and that all they need is basically like water and sunlight and then they make all of these complex fruits and leaves and all the rest of it. And is that an analogy here? Which is almost like in this case you're saying the milk is a very simple sugar and then these bacteria in this fermented process is suddenly making this incredibly complex arrangement of different molecules. A bit like the plant taking just the sunlight and the carbon dioxide and suddenly managing to make a raspberry bush.
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Professor Tim Spector
Exactly. They're little sort of chemical factories. So you just gotta feed them some of the key essentials. And they're all specialized in different ways. They will produce different byproduct chemicals that by working as a team, they can create something far more complicated, something far more interesting than the starting product. And that's why they are so helpful to us. And that's why it's a great analogy and why everyone really needs to know about fermenting. Because it's sort of what's happening inside your own body. Every time you're eating food, your microbes have the chance to make that food much more nutritious and useful for your body. If you've got the right microbes, if you've got the right team working there, they can create all the chemicals and vitamins and things that you need for the rest of your body. Essentially, when we're having fermented foods, it's double fermented, so it's fermented outside. We've evolved to actually like fermented foods because of some of these benefits. And then when we have cheese again, for example, it's then broken down again for a second time in our bodies and we still get the benefits from it, from that second wave of microbes attacking it.
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Jonathan
And Tim, you've talked about the way that fermentation is changing the taste and making it more complicated and taste great. Which is your example of like cheese or wine versus just milk or a grape. But you've touched also on this sort of thing about it being healthier. So it's not only about tasting better. You're saying this can actually have health benefits. Could you help us to understand why and how?
- [10:47]
Have you tried our dark cacao chia pudding yet? You should. It's filling, delicious and packed with anti inflammatory ingredients. You can find it in our new free, better Breakfast Guide which features seven science backed breakfast recipes, five simple food swaps and advice from our world leading team of scientists and nutrition experts. To make this chia pudding, all you need is two to three teaspoons of chia seeds, one teaspoon of raw cacao powder, a half to three quarters cup of your favourite milk or kefir, and berries or honey if you like. Add chia seeds to the bottom of a glass jar but don't fill it too full as the seeds expand. Then add the raw cacao powder, pour in the milk or kefir and add the honey or berries. Lastly, put it in the fridge and let it rest overnight. It's ready for you to enjoy tomorrow morning. We're big fans of Chia seeds at Zoe because they're high in omega 3 fatty acids which your gut microbiome loves. I add a scoop of Zoe Daily 30 to bring over 30 plants to my morning. To get more recipes like this, download your free Better Breakfast Guide right now@zoe.combreakfastguide or click the link in the show notes. That's zoe.combreakfastguide or click the link in the Show Notes. To get more recipes like this, download your free Better Breakfast Guide right now@zoe.com breakfast or click the link in the show notes, that's zoe.combreakfast or click the link in the Show Notes.
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Professor Tim Spector
We don't know exactly, but in virtually all the cases that I've looked at and researched my book, the fermented product is nearly always healthier than the original product. And it's probably because it contains more healthy chemicals and compounds. So you take cheese for example. There's no evidence that milk is really a great benefit to adults because it's quite two dimensional. It's got sugar, it's got protein. But when you get cheese, all the evidence suggests that regular cheese eaters have lower mortality, less heart disease risk, et cetera, which is rather strange because the initial product is the same. So it's probably the microbes themselves changing the chemicals in that food so they're producing chemicals that are actually helpful for our bodies and those chemicals either acting directly on us or they're affecting the other microbes in our ecosystem to then produce healthy chemicals. So I think complexity is generally better for us. That seems to be the general rule. And the same is true eating just cabbage. It doesn't seem to be as good as having fermented cabbage, which we call sauerkraut. Many other examples where the basic plant, just having that plant is fine for you, but we seem to get extra benefit from perhaps the way the microbes have created all these extra chemicals and tastes and aroma. So the more interesting the taste and flavor, the healthier it tends to be for us. And I think that's something really interesting from evolutionary point of view about why do we seek out these slightly sour tastes rather than the bland taste? And it could well be that evolution has primed us. These things are actually beneficial for us.
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Jonathan
You're saying that if I took, like milk under a microscope and could measure the different molecules inside it, it's quite simple. There's sugar and there's some protein, but there's not lots of different ones. I think when you were saying it's two dimensional, that's sort of what you're saying. And then you're saying after these microbes, these bacteria and funguses have been chomping away at it, they then produce hundreds of molecules, thousands of molecules, millions of.
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Professor Tim Spector
Molecules, Thousands of molecules. Yes.
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Jonathan
And so that's vastly more complicated after the fermentation than beforehand.
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Professor Tim Spector
And that's the whole basis of fermentation. When you think about grapes into wine or hops into beer, you're getting this incredible complexity of flavors. And whenever you get complexity of flavors, you know that underlying that there's lots more chemicals. You're just tasting a percentage of them. But the complexity of the product has really gone up hundredfold.
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Jonathan
Now many of our listeners will be saying, like, why is that a good thing? I feel like I'm spending my life trying to avoid adding more chemicals into my diet. You know, and you've been using this word, chemicals, right? Which I think we're all trained, like that sounds terrible. Why would I want more chemicals by going from milk to cheese or yogurt?
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Professor Tim Spector
Well, Jonathan, there's nothing terrible about chemicals, okay? We exist in a chemical world. Food is made up of perhaps 50 to 100,000 different individual chemicals, just like our bodies are made up of chemicals. So we are, you know, living in a chemical universe. And what we're saying is that the greater variety of chemicals there are, particularly if it's produced naturally as part of our evolution, these should be helping us survive longer and having a natural protective effect for our bodies if we're producing them. It's not the same as if you're eating foods created by the petrochemical industry as artificial sweeteners or something is a good example. But the ones that come from foods that we've been having for thousands of years, then I think we should be embracing that complexity. Because when you get often that are Made industrially, they go it down to the simplest components that are cheap. You lose that complexity, and that's why they're full of sugar and salt. To disguise the fact they have no depth or complexity to them. We should be embracing anything that has interesting flavors and what I call this depth to it. Just like a good wine, a good cheese, a really good craft beer, a coffee. That's got more to it than just bitterness. It isn't just these simple five tastes. There's much more to it. So this is what ferm supplementation really brings to the table, and it opens our senses up more. There's some people believe that we have always been drawn to these foods because they provided microbes that we couldn't get otherwise into our diet. So there's a recent cool paper in Nature which actually measured the overlap between microbes in food and in our guts, and it's only about 4%. So when we're having these fermented foods, most of them are not ones that are already in our gut. They're foreign to it. They prefer living in the milk or the cabbage or whatever it is.
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Jonathan
And just to clarify, you're saying that when I eat the fermented food, there are still live microbes in the fermented food? Tim?
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Professor Tim Spector
Yes. So most fermented foods we're talking about are live ferments, and they contain probiotic microbes, by which we mean microbes that have been shown to have some health benefit in humans. You can have fermented foods that have dead microbes, and you have most fermented foods, which are a mixture of live and dead microbes.
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Jonathan
So could you just help us to understand, I guess, like, what are the classic fermented foods that we're used to eating, and when do they have live microbes in them? When not.
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Professor Tim Spector
Okay, well, the classic ones would be your yogurt, which has live microbes in it, cheese, fermented milks, which are called kefirs or kefirs in the US Then you've got the krauts, which was fermented cabbage or beetroot sauerkrauts. You've got fermented tea, which is called kombucha. You've got fermented soybeans, which are called the miso products, and soy sauce and miso paste, natto and tempeh. And you've got a whole range of other ones, particularly all kinds of fermented vegetables and vinegars. They're live. Then you've got dead ones, such as beer, wine, and sourdough. Bread, classically. You also got some other strange ones, you know, that people don't realize are fermented, things like Marmite and Tabasco. So a lot of the condiments that we all eat now were certainly originally fermented. Like tomato sauce was originally an Indonesian ferment that Heinz took and made into a staple by adding 30% sugar.
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Jonathan
I'm taking it that that's not a fermented food I should be adding to my diet today.
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Professor Tim Spector
No, but in my book, there's a really good recipe for making your own tomato ketchup, which is lovely.
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Jonathan
So just to play that, there's a set of these fermented foods that still have live bacteria in. And then the ones, I guess are most famous as I, you know, know, think about it like a beer or a wine or bread, there's fermentation in terms of making those products, but then the bacteria ends up being dead. Could you just explain for a minute why they end up being dead?
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Professor Tim Spector
They're usually deliberately killed because you don't necessarily want your beer to keep brewing after you've sold it because it produces more gas and will explode. So this is the problem of fermentation, is it has to stop at some point and everyone who's ever fermented will occasionally have something explode. And, you know, I've had a few occasions where bottles have come off rather unexpectedly and again upset my wife. But this is why when you scale up fermentation, manufacturers of things like kombucha have the same problem as the beer makers. They want to stop fermentation so you can put it in cans or bottles. So it's no longer continuing to produce gas. So anything above 65 degrees will just about kill all these microbes. So you've got a lot of these products that started live, ended up dead. We haven't talked about coffee and chocolate, but similar process. Just before roasting, they ferment the beans. And that's very much part of that complexity of why coffee and chocolate, when it's done properly, have such great, rich, interesting taste and certain teas as well.
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Jonathan
So they're a bit like you were describing with the bread. Like the fermentation is a really important part of making the coffee or the chocolate. But the bacteria ends up being killed.
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Professor Tim Spector
Exactly, yes. So that provides the taste. And up till recently, we thought that didn't provide any health benefit. Dead microbes, completely useless. That's what I thought. Three years ago for the book, I started really researching this in more detail and started seeing more and more studies suggesting that even pasteurizing some of these foods could have some effect. And the first they didn't believe it. They just thought they'd got the experiment wrong. There's now, I guess, about 15 randomized controlled trials showing that a dead micro fermented food works more than placebo in terms of health benefit in humans, whether it's in adults or children. So we know that these things now do work. And in a few cases, they work better than in the live version, which is really weird. Weird. There's a probiotic called Akkermansia, which I think we've discussed on other podcasts, that crops up a lot. The people who studied this actually worked out that it had a beneficial effect above and beyond the live version, which is very hard to work out. But they didn't believe it until they started doing placebo studies and then showed it works. So we know that live microbes now work.
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Jonathan
You're sorting, putting these in two categories. I think Tim and I would say you got this first category where there's fermentation to make something that we eat, but basically the microbe ends up being dead. And that is basically what I grew up with. Right. So you mentioned beer, wine, bread, coffee, chocolate. These are all things that, like, are completely normal in the Western world. And then you gave me a list of other foods and like the yogurt and the cheese. Absolutely. I grew up with. But then you're like, oh, and kefir and Kraus and kombucha and miso. I didn't have any of these things growing up. Why is it that those have not really been that common in like the UK and the US and I would say a lot of English speaking countries. But then you're talking about these foods which I guess have been common in other cultures.
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Professor Tim Spector
Absolutely, yes. So if you look at the world map of fermented foods, the English speaking colonies are really the odd ones out. You only have to look in Europe and you see that Scandinavia, they've been having fermented milks and fermented fish. You go to Mediterranean, they've have a strong tradition of making their own cheeses and yogurts and other ferments. Central and Eastern Europe, fermenting vegetables like there's no tomorrow. You know, every home is packed with this stuff, as well as the kefirs in Poland, et cetera. And then most of Africa actually has fermented porridge and beers and oats and grains and breads. And then you've got, of course, the Asian, you know, the kimchis the misos. You know, the Japanese worship a certain fungus called koji. So it's like we're the odd ones out. So how did this happen? And I think it's part of this Anglo Saxon idea of sterility is important industrialization. We were the first to get fridges and when we did we sort of threw out all those old habits that used to preserve our food before the fridge. And we went into the industrial revolution first and it was just this idea that modern sterile is the way to go. And of course the US has probably led the way with getting rid of anything old fashioned. And if you can stick a chemical in it and make it last forever rather than live ferments, we do it.
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Jonathan
I think that's fascinating. You're saying that in a way we were the odd ones out. And it's really, you know, the United Kingdom and English speaking countries that really have the sort of the are the exception and everywhere else is really used to these live fermented foods.
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Professor Tim Spector
They never gave them up. Essentially even when they got refrigerators they still kept going with it. Yeah, exactly. And they didn't switch everything to using vinegars rather than salt brine, which is the essential difference between pickling and fermenting, which is people often get confused about pickling really should refer to when you just add vinegar to it. And usually we're talking about commercial vinegar which is just acetic acid rather than the vinegar you can make with microbes. It's really strange how we lost out, but it sort of makes sense. By the Second World War we'd closed all the little dairies doing their own fermented cheeses because we wanted for the war effort to make one cheese, cheddar. And that translated to the U.S. and this idea that, you know, we wouldn't have these little micro communities doing their own fermenting. But now the last 10 years have seen a massive reversal of that and we now have more cheeses than in France. Local cheeses if you count them up the little strains of cheese in the uk we can see in our supermarkets how things have changed. Ten years ago when I wrote Diet Myth and you about two people in a crowd coming to one of my talks had heard of kimchi or kefir. Now every supermarket you go to has a range of those products. Just in five years the landscape has changed mass massively. So I think the good thing about the English speaking countries is that although we have the worst food in the world, we have the ability to change it faster than any other culture because we're not locked into it. So I'm seeing all these exciting changes of people getting back into it and it's suddenly becoming back into our normal behavior and culture.
- [26:22]
Jonathan
And I understand a bit later in this episode, you're going to show us that these live ferments aren't only something we can buy from the supermarket, but it is actually possible to do this at home.
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Professor Tim Spector
Exactly. You can do both. Yeah. Try it in the supermarket and then give it a go at home and save yourself a lot of money and have a bit of fun.
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Jonathan
So before we get to like the practical questions about how you add ferments to your diet and what you could do, I'd love to follow up on what you're talking about. About, like, why is this healthy? You know, when I first met you, you know, getting on for nine years ago and we started, Zoe, you didn't really talk a lot about fermented food. You talked about a lot of different things to do with nutrition. You talked a lot about the importance of the gut microbiome. But this is something that's really new, really in the last few years. So what's changed your mind and why do you now feel that there are health benefits?
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Professor Tim Spector
Well, 10 years ago there were lots of little studies around the world, you know, 10 or 20 people where they'd give them some fermented food and they'd see how they got on. But they didn't stack up for me as a scientist of being really credible. And it's only about three years ago that for me it really switched. And there were a couple of studies that really convinced me this was more than just, oh, yeah, this sounds a good thing to have, but I'm not sure how good it is. One was this study from Stanford. Our colleagues, Christopher Gardner, you know well, and Justin Sonneberg did a study where they had relatively small number of people, about 28 people, and they put them into two groups, one having a high fiber diet, the other one having five portions of fermented food a day for around three or four weeks. And they basically taking nearly daily blood samples. So small study but very intensive and this hadn't been done before. And in the blood samples they were looking at all the immune proteins, So a whole batch of immunological studies at great detail and expense. And what they showed was that even after a couple of weeks you saw a really significant drop in inflammation markers in the fermented food group. So not only did their microbiome change more than the high fiber group, but they had this Dramatic decrease in inflammation markers. So it really helped the immune system. It changed 17 out of 19 proteins they measured. So across the board, these were having a real effect on the immune system. And that's probably the mechanism by which they are having this health effect. So the Stanford study for the first time showed in great detail that fermented foods can have a dramatic impact on the immune system as well as the gut microbiome. So to me, that was an eye opener. And then put all the other studies into context. Those other studies had been the epidemiological ones, very population, big level, showing that people that had regular yogurts, had regular cheese, other fermented foods had lower rates of death, heart disease, better metabolic profiles. And some of these we'd done in our own studies at King's, using twins, which I was working on for 25 years. So matching the big studies with these detailed ones, and then all the little studies around the world with meta analyses that had studied like 10 or 20 people with a few inflammatory markers all showed the same thing. So you're putting all this together, makes absolutely clear that these foods, if you have them regularly, small amounts regularly, will have a significant impact on your immune system and your gut microbiome. We should be learning from our ancestors, we should be learning from the latest science. We should all be having at least three portions a day. And that led me to do with the Zoe members, this citizen science project we call Pragmatic Science. So it's not a, there's no control group, but we got 9,000 volunteers and if anyone's listening, thank you very much for volunteering. Couldn't have done it without you who signed up, who weren't taking regular fermented foods and said, we want you guys to volunteer to take three a day and do that for two weeks. After a one week run in on the Zoe app, we asked them to record their mood, their energy, their hunger levels and any problems like bloating or constipation. They did that every day. A thousand dropped out. Understandable, we weren't paying them like they do in these other studies and they didn't get credits for their university. But these are normal people, these are unlike the studies, they're females, males, people aged over 40, the regular people who take these foods. And of the 5,500 who diligently did this right to the end, 100% completion rate, around 50% showed improvements in mood, energy, hunger, bloating and constipation. So to be clear, Jonathan, of the people that completed the study, that means that for the two week trial period they had at least three ferments a day and they didn't miss a day. And they recorded how they felt. On average, around 50% of them noticed significant improvements in a number of key symptoms. The first was mood and energy. They were the first things people noticed. Then they had an actual reduction in hunger, although they were eating more. And they also had a reduction in bloating and also in improvement in constipation.
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Jonathan
So that's pretty remarkable, right?
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Professor Tim Spector
So you're saying just in two weeks when I saw those data, that was a real wow factor and it just showed you that if we can get just the people listening to this podcast spread the word that this is a normal thing to do, eating three ferments a day, we can all not only improve our inflammation levels at the sort of local level, but actually this can affect our brain, brain, our mental health. In the majority of people taking it in just a few weeks, this can have an incredible public health effect. And I just don't think we've realized up to now the huge potential of these fermented foods.
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Jonathan
You started by saying that you thought it was really good for our inflammation and reducing it. And now you're talking about this study that you did with thousands of people through Zoe and there you're talking about things like mood and energy and hunger and constipation, which seems completely different.
- [33:15]
Professor Tim Spector
Yes. The Stanford study, going back to that one showed clearly you get an improvement in immune health and you also got a shift in your gut microbiome towards a healthier looking microbiome. The two things are linked and we know that inflammation is key to many features in the body and your gut health as well as. So if you reduce inflammation, your gut health will also improve. So that would probably explain improving constipation. The mental effects of this, the improvement in mood and energy and hunger are probably through the effects of these microbes on the immune system. We think that they directly interacting with the immune system, whether they're dead or alive, through most of our immune cells which are actually lining our gut and they're sending those signals. We don't know exactly how they do it, but they're sending clear signals to the immune system. So all is well. That gets transferred to the brain through the vagus nerve and other mechanisms calming the brain down, reducing so called neuroinflammation, that helps our mood, that helps our concentration, that helps reduce fatigue. So this immune system linked with the gut microbiome is the key to really how we feel Most of the time. And a lot of our problems with modern illness is due to the fact that our levels of inflammation are much too high.
- [34:44]
Jonathan
So that's amazing. So you're saying that on the one hand, you had this sort of like super detailed study at Stanford where you can measure all of these inflammatory markers, and on the other hand, you had this study study that you led with, you know, 9,000 people. And you could see this impact on symptoms that are in the brain, like energy and mood and hunger, but also things like constipation and bloating. And a few of those are directly linked. Because you would expect like the gut health improvements and the inflammation improvements to lead to those benefits.
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Professor Tim Spector
Absolutely, yes.
- [35:17]
Jonathan
So just to like, maybe wrap back to the original part of the story where you're describing all of these amazing things in the food after it's fermented, do scientists understand how this fermented food, you know, like, I'm eating this yogurt or this kefir or whatever, actually leads to the benefits you're describing after I, you know, put it in my mouth and swallow?
- [35:41]
Professor Tim Spector
Not precisely, no. But the current thinking is that it's a combination of the microbes and their chemicals themselves that are having this, this effect. And it is so complicated, you can imagine how difficult it is to sort out in humans. But we think that the, the likely place that this occurs, when you say swallow a yogurt and you've got some microbes in, gets through the stomach, wrapped around in the food. So you still got billions getting into your, your gut. When they get to the small intestine, which is the bit above the large intestine, it's not very small, it's actually very large. But there's less of our host microbes to fight it off. So we think it probably has an impact there on the immune cells. And something about the lining of the microbes sends signals to the immune cells, because we now know that dead or alive, even dead ones, have this ability to tickle the immune cells a bit like a vaccine. And so we think a lot of this is due to having different types of microbe going through your body. Having, like a vaccine effect on us will tickle the immune system and that will then drive down inflammation and do the other good things that we think. But there's probably likely to be multiple mechanisms that we still don't understand. So it's a very new science in trying to work it out, because really we've only just narrowed down what the areas to look at are.
- [37:16]
Jonathan
And I Think I remember our colleague, Professor Sarah Barry, explaining to me that the food itself is transformed by these microbes. And she was explaining to me that you start with the fat in the milk, it's not very good for you. And then when you look at the cheese, like, the structure is completely different if you look at it sort of under the microscope, as I'd understood, and therefore, like, almost like a different food for the microbes in our gut and for ourselves. Did I understand that right?
- [37:43]
Professor Tim Spector
Yes. There are lots of examples where that is true, that the microbes will break it down into these other more healthy, nutritious benefits for us. In a way, what's happening with the fermented food is it's double fermented, so it's already been transformed before you're eating it. So the difference between just drinking milk and having some kefir or yogurt is that by the time it reaches you, it's already in a better state than it was before. So Sarah's quite correct. The structure is healthier as well.
- [38:12]
Jonathan
So in simple terms, does that mean that I'm getting almost like a double benefit, that I'm getting both live bacteria that are going to be doing something healthy for me, and I'm also getting this much healthier food that is feeding me and my gut microbes?
- [38:26]
Professor Tim Spector
Yes, in the sense that that that food is going to be easily digested. It's already broken down by the microbes beforehand into smaller pieces, and those nutrients are going to be much more easily extracted from the food and released into your body and used in multiple ways. So, absolutely, yes. That's part of the thinking about why the more fermentation goes on, the more you're breaking the food down. People use the analogy with bread, normal bread, you've got lots of gluten, but if it's fermented sourdough bread, the gluten is in smaller chunks and pieces, so people have less problem being gluten intolerant. And it's easier for you to then absorb that gluten. So that's the work of the microbes doing that even before it gets into your body.
- [39:16]
Jonathan
If, like me, you've been blown away.
- [39:18]
By the power of fermented foods for.
- [39:20]
Your health, why not share your excitement and pass this episode on to a friend or a family member? I know they'll thank you for it.
- [39:28]
Now, one of the biggest questions that we had prior to this episode was around eating fermented foods versus probiotics. So, you know, the pills that we buy that say they have all of these live bacteria in which, you know, I definitely took in the past but don't anymore. How do you compare these like live fermented foods versus probiotics?
- [39:51]
Professor Tim Spector
Interesting. There's hardly any studies I could find directly comparing them. In a trial we compared a standard probiotic to our zoe prebiotic, the daily 30, which is 30 freeze dried plants and fiber. And the probiotic was a Lactobacillus reuteri which has been shown to work in 20 diseases. So we did a direct head to head comparison and our prebiotic won easily had 10 times the effect on the gut microbiome compared to this probiotic. But we didn't test it against a fermented food. Be interesting to see how they match up. But in general fermented foods have more species of microbe in them. So in the book I detail how we looked at 70 different commercial fermented foods and the range goes from having one species like in a actimal children's yogurt, all children's yogurts are terrible to the top one which had about 80 different microbes in it which was a kimchi and a water kefir.
- [40:53]
Jonathan
And more is better.
- [40:55]
Professor Tim Spector
More is better. So the more microbes you've got, the more diversity of chemicals they can produce, the more they can help you. And our community is all very different, are unique. So if you and I just have one micro probiotic, it may work on you but not on me. But if we're having 80, the chances are that it will pro work equally well on you and I. So the one reason to have fermented foods are on the probiotics is that the other is you actually get more quantity of them. I would expect if there was a direct study done, fermented foods would win.
- [41:27]
Jonathan
It's interesting how understudied this is as.
- [41:30]
Professor Tim Spector
You talk about it. Yeah, well obviously the companies don't want to do it, particularly because they're worried and there's a lot of money in probiotics. They don't want to show that just having a cheaper food version is going to do much better.
- [41:45]
Jonathan
And you mentioned earlier this concept of ghost biotics which I know you've got really excited about because we've actually ended up adding it, haven't we to the latest version of Daily 30. How on earth can a dead microbe be doing me any good?
- [42:02]
Professor Tim Spector
Three years ago I was said to be there was no point in talking about dead microbes. You should forget pasteurized fermented foods, forget all those heat treated kombuchas the stuff in supermarkets, et cetera. But now I've totally changed my mind. Studies are true, they work. And the question is, how do they work? And the best theory we have is this idea of specific proteins on the cell wall of dead microbes are interacting with our immune system, and they have special receptors there that are picking it up. So they seem to be working in that way, again using the immune system. And it makes sense when you start thinking about vaccines, when you have most vaccines, they're either live or they call them attenuated, but that just means dead. A lot of vaccines you're getting are the dead version of the live one. And it's the same. It's the cell wall, whether it's the virus or the bacteria, that is tickling our immune system. So this makes us think that eating fermented foods is a bit like being constantly immunized against our environment and protecting us. And it sort of starts to make sense. So all the foods that are out there that are being dismissed in the past, I think we have to have another look at. And that's exactly why, as soon as I made my mind about this, we put some dead kombucha into our daily 30 product for that reason, because it may not be quite as good as the live version, but all the evidence suggests it's beneficial.
- [43:40]
Jonathan
So I think a lot of people like me will be surprised because they'd assumed that the reason why you would have a probiotic pill or eat these live fermented microbes is so that then these microbes would, like, live for in my gut and hopefully increase the number of good microbes in my gut. Because they've all listened to you and other experts explaining that, you know, we need to have more of these good microbes.
- [44:03]
Professor Tim Spector
That was a myth.
- [44:04]
Jonathan
That's a myth. Is it?
- [44:05]
Professor Tim Spector
Yeah. What is happening, you know, scientifically, until recently, that's what we believed and a lot of reasons. Oh, fermented foods can't work because we don't find them staying for very long in our guts. And that was. A lot of people were dismissed their biological rationale that way. And we have to realize that they don't stay in your gut, they don't colonize your gut. As I said, 96% of the microbes in food are not the same ones as you find in your gut. Normally.
- [44:34]
Jonathan
Just to confirm that I'm getting this clearly, Tim, you're saying if I eat one of these super fermented foods with 80 microbes and I eat it and then I Stop eating it. Then a week later, none of those microbes will still be living inside my gut.
- [44:49]
Professor Tim Spector
Yeah, generally they don't last. This is what the new science is telling us, that it's really this immune reaction as it's passing through, tickling our immune system, not trying to colonize and take over the rest of our gut. And that's a real big sea change in how we're seeing these fermented foods. That's why I've changed my mind on it. That's why the whole direction this field is going in is very different. That's why I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of these fermented foods killed or pasteurized back in our normal other products because it's a much safer way to use them and we start thinking of them as helping our immune systems rather than colonizing our guts.
- [45:35]
Jonathan
So I'd love to turn to actionable advice now because I'm sure you've convinced a lot of listeners that they need to eat the three portions a day that you've been talking about. So maybe let's start for people who are new to this and then as far as they're aware, they're not eating any fermented foods a day. Where would you start?
- [45:55]
Professor Tim Spector
I'd start with breakfast. Always a good place to start because you're at home, you're near your fridge. Start with my classic breakfast. Get some full fat yogurt. When you're starting off, mix it with some milk kefir. Because some people find when you start milk kefir, it's a bit too sour. But if you mix it with yogurt, that should be fine. You can sweeten it by adding fruits to it, berries, etc. That way you've got two ferments easily done.
- [46:22]
Jonathan
And that's because the yogurt's one and the kefir is a second.
- [46:25]
Professor Tim Spector
Yeah. And they're separate. They have different microbes.
- [46:27]
Jonathan
They both count, do they?
- [46:28]
Professor Tim Spector
They both count.
- [46:29]
Jonathan
So it's a win. You can get two before you leave the house.
- [46:32]
Professor Tim Spector
Before you left the house, you've got two. Exactly. Then it's very easy. In your lunch, you can either have some cheese, which, as long as you get anything that isn't completely plastic, avoid things like children's cheeses or pizza cheeses, but even Philadelphia cream cheese, I did a study. We looked at that. That's got three microbes in it. So you can. Cream cheeses are actually quite good. Any other cheddar or basic one or, you know, raw Milk, cheese, even better. That would be your third one. But add to it some pickle, some basic beetroot, kraut or some sauerkraut on it. If you're having an evening meal, any form of soup, instead of adding cream to it at the end, you just pour in some more kefir or yogurt. That's an easy win. Into your salads, you can put again these krauts and pickles. I would ask everyone to swap their stock cube for some miso paste. You can buy miso paste, it lasts a long time, which is this fermented soybean paste that gives an umami flavor. That's fantastic. I never use stock cubes anymore and I've just replaced that with a teaspoon of this miso paste, which if you're using in cooking, it would be dead. But it's still. It gives you. Let's give it half a point for that one, Jonathan. And then just think that when you're having a salad, can you put in some fermented vegetables into there and start experimenting? You know, I don't expect you to eat kimchi straight away because it's quite spicy, but start experimenting with small amounts. And if you want to start thinking about kimchi, get some toast, put some cream cheese on it and then mix in the kimchi with the cream cheese. So actually you're giving a mellower flavor to it and you're getting used to it. I managed to convince Davina McCall to start eating kimchi this way and now she's an absolute addict. So usually people won't like it the first time. It's a bit like toddlers with some new food. You've got to keep going at it, introducing it, doing it in a mild way and then start thinking about other drinks you can have. So kombucha, the first ones might be a bit sour, but there's some nice fruit ones to start on and you can wean yourself off the sweetness or the artificial sweeteners. Just get used to the those flavors. Water kefir is another one. Tibicos, you don't. It's not as common as kombucha, but it has just as many microbes in it and is an easier fruiter flavor for the novice starting off. They're just some of the things that you can do. Zoe Cookbook has got plenty of ways you can incorporate it into recipes as well.
- [49:28]
Jonathan
Tim, you've been pitching this to me for a while and I think I'm like everything you pitched me like a Slightly slowly start to try and introduce it. And I definitely didn't grow up with eating any of these sorts of fermented foods, apart from yogurt and cheese. It's now really easy to buy them and these things, honestly, I just don't think they were available at all 10 years ago.
- [49:48]
Professor Tim Spector
Even people who don't like dairy. So I often get asked this in my talks. I don't have dairy, so I can't have these. No. There's plenty of vegan kefirs and yogurts. The coconut ones are really good. It's a slow journey and I think people will pick the foods and tastes that they like. And people have a different spice threshold, certainly, and a different sourness threshold. Some people immediately love it, some people. It can take more time. But I can tell you, if you go to Japan or Korea, you don't find people who don't have either miso or kimchi. So in a way, everyone can train their palate.
- [50:23]
Jonathan
Now, I'd love to wrap up with the idea of fermenting yourself at home, because I know that you've really got into this, haven't you, Tim?
- [50:31]
Professor Tim Spector
I have, yeah. Well, I had to. I'd write a book on it, so I've got to be an expert.
- [50:35]
Jonathan
And I think you have brought some examples of what is literally in your fridge today that you've cycled over with.
- [50:43]
Professor Tim Spector
It's a sample of what's in my fridge. Yeah.
- [50:45]
Jonathan
Oh, how many have you got in your fridge?
- [50:46]
Professor Tim Spector
Oh, far too many. At least 20 pots, I'd imagine.
- [50:50]
Jonathan
So now we understand why your wife is very upset about your fridge. So could you maybe take the first one out, explain what it is, and maybe start with what you think would be a good place to start?
- [51:01]
Professor Tim Spector
Well, let's go with the simplest ferment everybody can do because. Oh, I can't do this. Well, even you could do this one, Jonathan. This is raw, unpasteurized honey, a clear jar, and you put about 10 or 12 cloves of garlic in it exactly like this. And amazingly, after a few days, the microbes in the garlic transform the honey. They start eating the honey, and that produces the perfect environment for these microbes. They soften the garlic, they take away the hard taste of it, and it's a delicious either hors d' oeuvre or you can blend it up and it's perfect for a salad dressing.
- [51:45]
Jonathan
Can I have a smell?
- [51:46]
Professor Tim Spector
Well, you've got to try one. Oh, just try one, Jonathan. Don't be scared.
- [51:49]
Jonathan
I am a little scared. It looks like something that has been. Oh, they're quite hard, aren't they?
- [51:55]
Professor Tim Spector
Garlic cloves. Just go for it.
- [51:56]
Jonathan
I'm gonna go for it. All right. I'm not sure that I'm gonna be invited back in the house later tonight. That's pretty good. Nothing like as strong as the garlic is. If I'd eaten that raw.
- [52:10]
Professor Tim Spector
Well, that's how microbes transform foods into something completely different.
- [52:15]
Jonathan
And the honey tastes different as well.
- [52:16]
Professor Tim Spector
Yes, they're both different. I didn't add anything to that.
- [52:20]
Jonathan
You literally just threw garlic in honey.
- [52:22]
Professor Tim Spector
That's it.
- [52:23]
Jonathan
That's the recipe even I could do.
- [52:25]
Professor Tim Spector
Exactly. So everyone can ferment if they really want to at home.
- [52:29]
Jonathan
That's really surprising. So this is where you're saying these microbes do these amazingly complicated things. You just put it in the jar and you left it.
- [52:37]
Professor Tim Spector
It's mix, you know, the microbes and the garlic sitting there bored, doing nothing, but you wake them up with surrounding them with honey and they go crazy and they come out and they transform the honey and that in turn transforms the garlic into something a completely different dish. And I tell you, you blend that up and you have that in your salad dressing. It's an amazing flavour.
- [53:00]
Jonathan
What's next?
- [53:02]
Professor Tim Spector
What's next? We've got some sauerkraut. This basically is nothing more than cabbage chopped up and weighed. And you add 2% salt and then you put it in a jar and you leave it for a week. That 2% salt changes the environment so much that you then get exactly the right microbes leaking out of the cabbage. They eat the sugar that's been leaking out because the salt has released it from the cabbage. And the flavors are amazing and you get all the acidity and it's perfectly safe because they've made. It's so acid, nothing, no bugs that you don't want in there will live.
- [53:45]
Jonathan
All right, I'm going to try Tim's sauerkraut. Smells like sauerkraut.
- [53:52]
Professor Tim Spector
And there's two types of sauerkraut, obviously, the one with vinegar, which is the common cheap one, which doesn't have anything like the flavour and complexity.
- [54:00]
Jonathan
Oh, it's delicious.
- [54:02]
Professor Tim Spector
Yeah, There you go.
- [54:03]
Jonathan
So I've now had two ferments, but anyone can make.
- [54:06]
Professor Tim Spector
I mean, that's the key. So they're the two ones that are so easy. Chop a cabbage and you've got to be able to weigh it. That's about the two skills you need. This one is slightly more advanced. This is my blob.
- [54:22]
Jonathan
And if you're not watching this on YouTube, it looks disgusting. And Tim is now reaching into what looks a bit like I won't get you to eat tea water and pulling out which. Something that looks a bit like a bit of a squid or an octopus or something.
- [54:37]
Professor Tim Spector
It is.
- [54:38]
Jonathan
What is that?
- [54:39]
Professor Tim Spector
It is called a jellyfish in some countries, Russian jellyfish or Japanese jellyfish. This is a scoby, which is a kombucha mother. Okay, so this is made by the microbes. It's like a shell they produce themselves. So there's about 50 different microbes in.
- [55:02]
Jonathan
Here living inside that sort of jellyfish thing.
- [55:05]
Professor Tim Spector
Yeah, they live inside there and they. They produce it for themselves. It's like a little protective shell that they live in. So this allows them to live for years. I've had this for about 10 years, this one. It has babies and I give it to special friends.
- [55:19]
Jonathan
I'd note that I've never been a special enough friend to get given your baby scoby. But on the other hand, it's. It looks disgusting.
- [55:28]
Professor Tim Spector
It looks disgusting. But when you add it to sugary tea, so you make a big pot of sugary tea, you just add that to it, leave it for a week, you will get kombucha and a completely different flavour. And again, once you've got this sorted out, it is actually much easier than it looks.
- [55:47]
Jonathan
And that goes from sugary tea. And we know anything that's just like full of sugar is not healthy for.
- [55:51]
Professor Tim Spector
You to kombucha, which is a sour complex. Some say it's, you know, the closest you can get to beer. And it's good for me and it's very good for you. Yes, it's. Lots of studies show it reduces blood pressure, helps your blood sugar level, all kinds of benefits. So again, you know, having this in the house, the drinks of kombucha. But buy it in the stores first to see if you know what. What it should taste like. But you can. This is incredibly cheap and easy to make.
- [56:22]
Jonathan
And so that, I guess, is a brilliant example of like the magic of these bacteria moving something really terrible like water and sugar on one hand into something that suddenly is actually healthy for.
- [56:33]
Professor Tim Spector
Me and actually produces a bit of alcohol as well, usually below 1%, so you can't feel it, but it just give you an idea of what's. What these microbes are doing. The. There's yeast in there and they make CO2 and alcohol.
- [56:46]
Jonathan
So it's very complicated.
- [56:47]
Professor Tim Spector
And finally, your advanced lesson, Jonathan. So this is miso.
- [56:55]
Jonathan
I was gonna Say something looks even more disgusting than a kombucha. All right. So I'm looking at it, and it's a sort of brown paste. If anyone has had a small child who maybe ate their food and then regurgitated it, I'd say it looks a bit like that. Tim. It's not the most appetizing thing. What have I got in front of me?
- [57:16]
Professor Tim Spector
What you've got is fermented soybeans mixed with koji fungus. Okay. And salt.
- [57:23]
Jonathan
So I've got fungus, fermented soybeans, and salt.
- [57:26]
Professor Tim Spector
So basically, I boiled up a whole bag of soybeans for four hours, and then I got some koji fungus, which is coated on white rice from the Internet, mixed them together, added a whole load of salt, and put it in a jar, pressed down, left it for three months. So this is more professional than. It's definitely different to the garlic and the honey. It took me a while to pluck up the courage to do this, but I was so into my miso, I was spending a fair bit at the store on miso. I thought, I can do this myself. And actually, it's really easy to do if you just know the essentials and you've done a bit of fermenting first. So the incredible taste of that compared to just a boiled soybean is amazing. So I want you to just dip your little finger in there.
- [58:19]
Jonathan
All right. And this is a jar full of fungus. But professor and Dr. Tim Spector says it's safe and I can try it.
- [58:25]
Professor Tim Spector
Yes, you can.
- [58:25]
Jonathan
All right.
- [58:26]
Professor Tim Spector
And this is what you should be using instead of your stock cube.
- [58:29]
Jonathan
Smells good. Actually tastes pretty great.
- [58:35]
Professor Tim Spector
It does. And it just shows you. And if you just had boiled soybeans, they are virtually inedible. And so this just shows you how the microbes and the salt and the fungus, in the right conditions, just given time, will convert this into an absolutely delicious dish.
- [58:52]
Jonathan
And it's definitely like a layer that tastes a bit like soy sauce within this.
- [58:55]
Professor Tim Spector
Yeah, it's. Well, it's the same basic principle. So there you have it. That's from the easiest to perhaps, you know, one of the more complex ones that you need three or six months to make, but you've now got all the tools you need. Jonathan.
- [59:09]
Jonathan
So, Tim, thank you for sort of the tour de force tour around fermenting. I suspect there are a lot of people listening to this who are now convinced that they should be trying to get their three ferments a day. I'm gonna try and do, like, a little summary as always. And my biggest takeaway is we should all be having more microbes and fungus in our food, which is basically complete the opposite of everything that I was brought up, which is there should be no microbes and fungus in my food. And that's because we now know that these really help our immune system. And you talked about the study that you carried out yourself at Zoe with like five and a half thousand people who completed this two week study and that sort of, in just two weeks, half them had these improvements in mood and energy and hunger and bloating and constipation, which is pretty extraordinary. And that your understanding of the sciences, this is really the way that it's both improving the microbiome, our gut health, that's then improving our inflammation and therefore having all these effects on our brain. The other thing that I really take away is that everyone is eating live fermented food except Anglo Saxons. And we're the ones who got told that all our food should be sterile. We've had fridges for much longer than a lot of other cultures and therefore we just got rid of all of our fermented food. And like many other things, with our modern food culture, it's turned out to really be bad for our health. And if we can reverse that and start to reintroduce all of these fermented foods, we're going to be a much, much better place. And if you're been thinking, well, I'm popping a probiotic every day, so I don't need this, then you're saying, actually that's wrong. These fermented foods are much more powerful than probiotics, and that's because they have many more live bacteria in them, but also because the food itself is also carrying these healthful properties. And this is why for many foods, when we ferment them, they actually become healthier. And so you were giving this example about things like milk, which you're saying if you're an adult, it's not particularly healthy, and then you can turn it into something like cheese or yogurt and suddenly it is. And part of this is because we make it so much more complicated. And you said I shouldn't be scared of the idea that food has all of these chemicals in it. I think you said like 50 or 100,000 chemicals. Actually, if these are natural, the things that are just out there in the foods that we're used to eating, they're sort of what my body and my microbes need. If they're being introduced in ultra processed food, then I'M not so interested. And then I think you wrapped up with talking about, like, how could we actually achieve this? And you said, I can get two thirds of the way at breakfast. So if I was to have a breakfast that combined like a full fat yogurt, I actually tend to have a Greek yogurt because it's really high in protein. And with kefir mixed, you've already got two of these three. If you were to add like cheese or sauerkraut or something at lunch, you've already got to three. And then think about how you could introduce the miso paste, for example, that you just shared with me, which is delicious. Think about drinks like kombucha or water kefir. These are all commercially available now, so this is easy to do. There are many of these things which are not really bitter or really hard or really spicy to get into. And if you do this, before you know it, your husband and wife will be cross with you too, because you've got 20 fermenting jars in your fridge and you're experimenting with things that take three months.
- [62:41]
Professor Tim Spector
You got it.
- [62:42]
Jonathan
Tim, thank you so much. Thank you for continuing to always explore the frontiers of food and science and for coming back and telling us all about it. And I would say that if you really want to get deep into this subject, Tim has written a whole new book about it and you can understand everything you would possibly want to know about fermented food there.
- [63:01]
Professor Tim Spector
Thank you, Jonathan.
- [63:02]
Jonathan
Thank you, Tim. At Zoe, we never stop being curious about how people respond to food. Recently, we asked thousands of people about breakfast, what they eat, and how they feel about it. Their answers may surprise you. Over 70% told us that their breakfast is balanced, yet only 6% get enough fiber. If you've been listening to this podcast, you know that's not enough to be balanced. So it's no wonder that only 16% felt energetic after eating. And more than half of these thousands of people were hungry again within three hours. Clearly, breakfast is broken. But what if you could get a breakfast that actually supports your energy and keeps you feeling full? Daily 30 Our 30 plant gut supplement is a simple addition to your regular breakfast. It's one small fix that doesn't require you to overhaul your current morning routine. Daily 30 is designed by Zoe Gut Health scientists and features ingredients that support energy, gut health, digestion, daily nutrition, immunity, and skin and hair. Deliciously crunchy. You can sprinkle it on eggs, yogurt and berries, avocado, toast, and even pancakes. It tastes great on lunches and other meals, too. As Professor Tim Spector discussed on this podcast recently, the wrong breakfast can lead to grabbing sugary snacks throughout the day, so it's crucial to start building good habits at the start. Get your breakfast fix and try the new formula@zoe.com Daily30 Our scientists recently released the latest version of Daily30, which now includes even more plants, including raspberries, goji berries, fermented green tea, kombucha cake, kale, and marine algae. Go to Zoe.comDaily30 to get started, try it for a week and see how you feel.