Most replayed moment: Is Our Food System Making Us Sick? | Prof Brian Elbel & Prof Tim Spector

Summary

Podcast Summary: Is Our Food System Making Us Sick? (Most Replayed Moment)

Podcast: ZOE Science & Nutrition
Host: Jonathan Wolf
Guests: Prof. Brian Elbel, Prof. Tim Spector
Date: May 12, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the powerful, often invisible influence of the modern food system on our health, particularly through the proliferation of ultra-processed foods (UPFs). Jonathan Wolf, Prof. Brian Elbel, and Prof. Tim Spector dig into pressing questions: What is population health? How do UPFs harm us? What concrete actions can individuals—and policymakers—take to shift the food system toward better public health? The conversation is practical, urgent, and geared toward helping listeners make informed choices at the individual and societal level.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Population Health vs. Individual Health

• Definition & Importance
  • Prof. Elbel explains that population health studies look at entire populations, seeking small yet significant changes (e.g., 3–5%) that can have large-scale impact, even if the effects on an individual level appear modest. Population health research uses large datasets, often from national surveys or food companies, rather than tightly controlled small studies.
  • Quote:
    • “For my studies, I’m using big data that are collected for generally other reasons… looking at bunches of different things, or they’re data maybe from food companies themselves and directly and looking at some of those studies as well without taking their money to do it.” (Brian Elbel, 01:25)

2. The Biggest Threat: Ultra-Processed Foods

• Prof. Spector is unequivocal: UPFs are the primary threat to dietary health today, particularly because they’re engineered for hyper-palatability and overconsumption—often in ways that consumers don’t understand.

  • Quote:
    • “It’s the fact that we don’t know that we’re eating very unhealthy foods that are impacting our gut health and making us overeat them, that we just don’t know the real properties of the food we’re eating and people are being misled into making wrongful food choices.” (Tim Spector, 01:54)

• What Are UPFs?

  • Prof. Spector details that UPFs are foods created from extracts of whole foods (not whole ingredients), with additives and processing steps one couldn’t replicate in a home kitchen. Almost all contain ingredients never found in home pantries, specifically designed to encourage overeating.
    • “They are also industrially made to make you overeat them… their structure and everything about them is made so that it’s the least effort to eat them in as fast as possible a time. And they want you to eat more and more.” (Tim Spector, 04:45)
  • Over 50–60% of all food in the Western world is now UPF (03:52).

3. Why Are UPFs So Pervasive?

• Prof. Elbel: The rise of UPFs is a “huge class of foods that have come on very quickly and really taken over the food supply.” It’s hard at the population level to separate out their effects because they are so widespread, but evidence shows their impact is substantial. (02:35–03:08)

• Quote:

  • “We don’t quite yet understand… what components of them are most problematic. Is it the overeating? Is it particular components of them? Is it the combination of those things?” (Brian Elbel, 05:53)

4. Recognition and Classification of UPFs

• There’s no single, easy definition for UPFs; however, practical advice is to look for foods with ingredients you wouldn’t find in your kitchen or couldn’t make at home.
  • Memorable Moment:
    • “It’s most of the stuff you pick up at the grocery store and turn around and look at the label.” (Brian Elbel, 06:17)

5. Individual Action: What Can You Do?

• Prof. Spector recommends using ingredient lists as a starting point (“look at the back of the pack, number of ingredients… biggest red flag that this is gonna make you overeat”), but highlights Zoe’s new app feature that classifies foods into five risk categories for UPFs, three of which are ultra-processed (07:07). The app considers additives, food structure, eating speed, and hyper-palatability.
  • Quote:
    • “Now there’s a more sophisticated solution… not just yes and no… but categorizing into five categories, including three ultra processed food categories… This is using AI and our fantastic database to do it.” (Tim Spector, 07:31)
  • The worst UPFs are likened to “atomic bombs” for gut and brain health (08:41).

6. Policy Action: What Should We Push Governments To Do?

• Prof. Elbel calls for broader, bolder policy interventions:
  • Expanding taxes on unhealthy food beyond sugary beverages to include other problematic classes (09:48)
  • Ensuring healthful foods are available in all communities
  • Restricting marketing of UPFs, especially to children (10:28)
  • Recognizing that no single solution will work: “We’re going to need some sort of more dramatic solutions that maybe aren’t even on the table yet.” (Brian Elbel, 11:06)

7. Schools as a Battleground

• Both agree schools are vital institutions for change (11:10–12:41).
  • Prof. Spector advocates outright bans on the highest-risk UPFs in school food environments.
    • “I do feel we ought to be protecting kids more. And maybe, you know, these category four or five, particularly the five ones, could just be banned outright and that would be fairly straightforward once it’s an accepted system.” (Tim Spector, 11:20)
  • Prof. Elbel notes US school lunches are already healthier than many home-packed ones, but more can be done, such as banning unhealthy snack boxes, as is done in Japan and some private UK schools.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Ultra processed foods are the number one enemy for healthy eating.”
  — Tim Spector (02:16)
• “The foods you couldn’t make yourself in your own kitchen.”
  — Tim Spector (04:18)
• “We’re going to need some sort of more dramatic solutions that maybe aren’t even on the table yet.”
  — Brian Elbel (11:06)
• “The worst ones have all of these things. They’re the perfect atomic bombs… nuclear war in your gut and your brain.”
  — Tim Spector (08:41)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:00–02:00 – What is population health?
• 02:11–03:32 – UPFs as the biggest dietary threat and their definition
• 03:32–06:20 – How to recognize ultra-processed foods and why they matter
• 07:07–09:41 – Individual actions: label reading, Zoe app, nuances of UPF classification
• 09:41–11:10 – Policy interventions: taxes, access, marketing, need for bold changes
• 11:10–12:41 – The role of schools and children’s health; practical bans and lunchbox policies

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Tone & Final Reflections

The episode is frank, occasionally urgent, and always practical; the hosts’ frustration is palpable ("one more step in my radicalization" – Jonathan Wolf, 06:20), matched with a drive to translate science into actionable advice. The discussion balances hope—tools for personal choice and new science-based solutions—with a realism about the systemic nature of the problem.

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In Summary

The episode lays bare the overwhelming presence and health risks of ultra-processed foods, emphasizing that both individual choices and collective action are needed to overhaul the food system. Listeners are encouraged to look beyond labels, use new tools (like Zoe’s app), demand bolder public policies, and pay special attention to the vulnerable food environments of children and schools.

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Transcript

[A]

Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. On this podcast, we often talk about things that you can do to improve your diet. However, you're not the only person who has an impact on your health. The truth is that our food system, from government policy to supermarket placement, has a profound influence on what we eat, how we eat, and ultimately how healthy we all are. So what steps can we take to improve not just our own health, but the health of society as a whole? Today I'm joined by Professor Brian Elbl and Professor Tim Spector to explore the forces shaping our food system and the changes that could benefit our collective well being. So maybe just start off by explaining, like what is population health and how does it impact the individual?

[B]

I think population health is a couple things. I think it is really looking at the health of populations. By that we mean we're averaging over a bunch of different people, right? So while you may be looking at one or two people in certain smaller studies, we're averaging over a whole big group of people. So that means a couple different things. It means when we're looking at solutions, we may be looking for a 3 to 5% sort of change that could be quite meaningful at a population level. That maybe wouldn't be what you're looking for if you're looking at sort of individual studies. So I think that's one big kind of key distinction and difference. I think another is the type of data that we're using, right? To look at population health stuff, we need a lot of data on a lot of people. And that's something that's quite different from smaller studies where you're down there in the weeds. Individual data. For my studies, I'm using big data that are collected for generally other reasons, right? They are data that are collected for big national health surveys, right, that are looking at bunches of different things, or they're data maybe from food companies themselves and directly and looking at some of those studies as well without taking their money to do it.

[A]

And Tim, from your perspective, what's the biggest threat to our dietary health today?

[C]

It's the fact that we don't know that we're eating very unhealthy foods that are impacting our gut health and making us overeat them, that we just don't know the real properties of the food we're eating and people are being misled into making wrongful food choices.

[A]

And is there one particular class of food that you're Worrying about.

[C]

Yeah, generally called ultra processed foods, I think are the number one enemy for healthy eating.

[A]

And Brian, in your research, how are you seeing that food in general, and I guess ultra processed food in particular is shaping our long term health? What do you see?

[B]

So I would agree that ultra processed foods are a huge problem in the food supply across the world right now. I think they're actually a particularly tricky one to look at at a population level. They're this huge class of foods that have come on very quickly and really taken over the food supply. So it's really hard to sort of tease out at a population level what the relative contribution these foods have had. Although I think in many of the smaller scale studies we know they're quite problematic, but it's actually quite hard to tease out the overall contribution they have, except to say it's probably quite meaningful.

[A]

And so if you were going to look at that question, so I think Tim's answer when he looks at this is that it's sort of these ultra processed foods are the biggest issue. Would you have had the same answer or would you have said something different?

[B]

I think I would have had the same answer and I think the next level to that question would be why are they there? What's driving folks to eat them? I think those are some of the next level of questions that are really important to understand why they're problematic. But I think I would agree with that.

[A]

And Tim Bryan was just saying like it's hard to recognize what a UPF is. How would I recognize a upfront?

[C]

Well, the ones we're seeing at the moment are different to the ones when they started 50 years ago. And I think that's what Bram is talking about that a lot of these nutrition studies, epidemiological ones that look over time and so it's completely changed in that time. So you can't just go back say, okay, what was. Were people eating this 50 years ago? And you know, or 30 years ago, even 20 years ago, it's completely different. So now up to over 50 to 60% of, of all our food is this general group of ultra processed foods in the western world. And that is the major problem. So what are these foods? You know, some people call them fake foods. They're created in huge factories from extracts of whole foods. So they don't use whole foods. Typically they would use a product of whole foods. So they'd never use milk. They'd use some sort of dried form of it. You know, they wouldn't use corn, they'd use some extracted Bit of the starch of the corn, and they put it back together to resemble food. So there isn't a unifying definition of ultra processed food, other than it's things that you really couldn't make yourself in your own kitchen. That includes ingredients you wouldn't find in a common kitchen, and that they are also industrially made to make you overeat them. And this is something that is fairly new concept, this hyper palatability of them so that their structure and everything about them is made so that it's the least effort to eat them in as fast as possible a time. And they want you to eat more and more. They want to eat multiple bags or amounts of them, which is never the case with real natural food. It's more to it than just saying, oh, it's got red dye 3 in it. These 10 companies that control 80% of the supply of these foods employ the very best food scientists working round the clock for decades to come up with ways of putting these chemicals together that make us overeat them, that make us love them and make a percentage of us addicted to it. And so it's necessarily complicated because they've used every trick in the book to do that.

[B]

And I think we don't quite yet understand, to Tim's point, what components of them are most problematic. Is it the overeating? Is it particular components of them? Is it the combination of those things? But the component of the definition you gave, which I think is one of the most compelling I've heard as well, is it's really things you wouldn't cook with, things you don't recognize in your kitchen. Right. I think those are the kind of the best example of some of these ultra processed foods. And it's most of the stuff you pick up at the grocery store and turn around and look at the label

[A]

for listening to all of this. It's just like one more step in my radicalization. I think, over the last, really only, I would say two years. When I think back to before that. Tim, right. We hardly ever talked about ultra processed food. So I think the shift in this focus on this part of what was going on is amazing. And every time I hear more about it, it sort of makes me a bit angrier. Brian Now, I would love to switch though, from just sort of being frustrated to talk about actionable advice. And obviously, in general, I think we're gonna have to talk about what individuals can do. But I am interested in what they might also be able before. But maybe if I start at the individual level. Tim what's the one thing that you would say to listeners they could do tomorrow in order to eat fewer harmful UPFs?

[C]

Well, a few months ago I would have said look at the back of the pack, number of ingredients and that's biggest red flag that this is gonna make you overeat and it's gonna be ultra processed food and bad for your gut. But now there's a more sophisticated solution which is in the Zoe app. So for the last two years, the science team at Zoe have been working on a new way of classifying these ultra processed foods into not just yes and no, which I think we've agreed was a bit too crude because you include some stuff that's really quite healthy and you're labeling, lumping them all together into five categories, including three ultra processed food categories. One that's pre neutral or only potentially low risk, another one is moderate risk and the other is extreme risk. And we're taking into account not just additives, not just those chemicals, emulsifiers, sweeteners, but also looking at the structure of the food, how quickly it is to eat it, how it disperses, how fast you can consume calories in per second, whether it needs chewing and whether it has those ingredients that the chemists put in to make it hyper palatable, which means you overeat. And that means, as studies have shown, you're gonna overeat by about 500 calories a day, about 25% of your intake. So it's all those things together that actually make up ultra processed food. And we should think ultra processed food really is a risk of ill health rather than the processing itself. I think it's a bit of a shift. So I think people can now use this in the app. They can scan things in the store or on their plate and start to learn more and realize there's a gradation of these problems because the worst ones have all of these things. They're the perfect atomic bombs that have nuclear war in your gut and your brain. So that's really what people can do now because it is really difficult otherwise. Otherwise you've only got the back of the label and we don't know enough about all the ingredients to make a call just on those basis. But if you start to think how the food companies are thinking, then this is an insight and this is using AI and our fantastic database to do it. So I think this is showing much better than the current yes, no idea that has come out of academia, which is probably good for population level studies, but really doesn't help the Consumer.

[A]

So, Brian, I'd love to talk about what our listeners could be pushing governments about in terms of policy change.

[B]

Definitely be more serious about taxes. Right. And moving on from taxes just to sugary, from sugary beverages to other classes of products that we think are problematic, I would definitely want to look at sort of the availability of foods. You know, I don't think we're going to do much in the states on making food less available, but we can at least make sure that there are healthful foods available in all communities. I think I would really want to think about doing something on marketing. Right. I think this is actually a really, really big one that is going to be quite tricky to think about making solutions for, particularly in a place like the states. But I think it could have really big implications, really for kids, but also more for the broader role that these foods play in our culture is quite prominent. You don't see apples that are the host of a major sporting event. You see Oreo cookies. Yeah. Or sports drinks or things like that. And so I think that those are all things that we could do to try to think about it. And I do think that many of these solutions brought together could be influential. I also don't want to give the impression that they're going to be solutions by themselves. I think we're going to have to think about a lot of these together. We're going to have to think about much more prominent solutions that are not even on our radar yet. This is like such a big problem. It's so ubiquitous. These foods are everywhere in the food supply. They're part of most people's diets. It's really hard to avoid them. We're going to need some sort of more dramatic solutions that maybe aren't even on the table yet.

[C]

What about schools? I was in California recently and they are talking about having some restrictions on what is served in schools. Areas where there is some state or federal. And this is also true in the UK where they could really change the school environment. I do feel we ought to be protecting kids more. And maybe, you know, these category four or five, particularly the five ones, could just be banned outright and that would be fairly straightforward to do once, you know, it's an accepted system. Do you think that would work?

[B]

So I definitely think schools are a really important area to look at for all the reasons you describe. I think we have made good progress in the states and some other places as well on trying to increase the healthfulness of foods offered in schools by. By traditional measures, by things like how much Whole grain is in there, how much sugar is in there, how much protein is in there? I think we have not moved to the next level you're describing, which is like what's really happening with ultra processed foods. So I do think that's an area that we could be focused on for sure. We already know that the average school lunch provided by the school is gonna be healthier than the average lunch brought by a kid at home. So that's already there.

[C]

That's true in the UK as well. The snack box is the worst thing. That's the easiest thing to ban, as they do in Japan. Would that make a big impact?

[B]

But I do think there, I do think we could do a lot more in schools, including things like that. And some schools do it right. You know, in some private schools, for example, non publicly funded schools, they just don't require you to bring a lunch and they provide it to you. Right. And so that is something that happens in some places.

[A]

As you can imagine, hosting this podcast, running Zoe, juggling family life, it all keeps me pretty busy. So I try as best I can to stay energized and show up well in all those parts of my life by fueling my body with the right food, by exercising, and by adding a scoop of daily 30 to my meals every day. If you haven't heard of Daily 30 yet, it's the gut supplement designed by our gut health scientists here at Zoe. It's made of over 30 high quality hand picked plants, including seaweed, fungi and different types of fiber. Better yet, it contains ingredients that support gut health, digestion and energy, which is ideal for packed calendars and busy lives. Simply add one scoop a day to any meal for an extra boost of fiber and plant diversity. And because it tastes delicious on just about anything and adds a satisfying crunch, it quite quickly slots into your life, becoming a daily healthy habit you'll always have time for. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains 4 grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants, so order yours today at zoe.com daily30. Thanks for listening and see you next time.