Recap: Scrappy ways to eat healthier and save money | Carleigh Bodrug & Will Bulsiewicz

Summary

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ZOE Science & Nutrition — Episode Recap: Scrappy Ways to Eat Healthier and Save Money

Guests: Carleigh Bodrug & Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
Host: Jonathan Wolf
Date: November 25, 2025

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Main Theme

This episode focuses on the staggering scale of food waste, why it matters both environmentally and economically, and practical, “scrappy” strategies anyone can use to reduce waste, eat healthier, and save money. Special guests Carleigh Bodrug and Dr. Will Bulsiewicz share insights and actionable advice, especially around common culprits like bread.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Understanding the Food Waste Problem

• The Global Scale of Food Waste
  • Nearly 40% of food purchased ends up as waste, representing not only wasted money but also a significant environmental problem ([00:01]).
  • “If I’m paying $60... at the supermarket, I’m actually throwing away 25 of that.” — Host Jonathan Wolf ([00:01])
• Environmental Impact
  • Food waste in landfills generates methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than CO₂. It emits more emissions than the entire airline industry ([01:30]).
  • “Food waste actually emits more emissions than the entire airline industry. So this is a huge global issue.” — Carleigh Bodrug ([01:34])
• Who's Responsible?
  • Most food waste occurs at the consumer level, not at farms or restaurants.
  • Consumers, often due to lack of planning and busy lifestyles, are the primary drivers ([03:01]).

2. Causes at the Household Level

• Expiry Date Confusion and Fear
  • Over-attention to expiry dates leads to premature disposal of still-edible food ([04:02]).
  • "'Best before'... is not necessarily suggesting that after that stroke of midnight, that food’s no longer good anymore. Right. I encourage people always to use their senses...” — Carleigh Bodrug ([04:36])
• Lack of Meal Planning / Overbuying
  • Without meal planning, people purchase duplicates or unnecessary items, leading to overstock and eventual waste ([04:36]).
  • “I think it’s just this busyness that is really skyrocketing waste, especially in the Western world.” — Carleigh Bodrug ([05:35])

3. Economic Consequences

• Household Cost of Waste
  • The average Canadian family wastes over $1,700 worth of food per year — and possibly more elsewhere ([06:32]).
  • “That’s a lot of money and money down the drain of food we’re buying.” — Carleigh Bodrug ([06:32])
• Link to Health and Plant Diversity
  • By reducing waste and eating a wider variety (including parts often discarded), families can eat healthier and more affordably ([06:32]).

4. Bread: The Most Wasted Food

• Bread Waste: Universal Issue
  • Bread is the top wasted food in the UK and North America ([07:20]).
  • “Almost everybody is buying bread every week and then not getting to maybe the full loaf.” — Carleigh Bodrug ([07:38])
• Solutions for Stale Bread
  • Freeze half: Especially useful for smaller households to prevent spoilage.
  • Repurpose recipes: Ideas include panzanella salad, croutons, breadcrumbs, and even using stale bread in cakes ([07:38]-[09:09]).
  • “There’s no reason that we should be tossing bread that has reached that point… You can still utilize it for a lot of things.” — Carleigh Bodrug ([08:39])
• Bread & Preservatives
  • Authentic, preservative-free bread spoils quickly, unlike commercial bread that can last for weeks ([09:09]).

5. Homemade Bread: Healthier & More Economical

• Making Bread at Home
  • Using a bread maker, with high-quality flour, yields fresh, preservative-free bread for about $1.50 per loaf ([09:55]).
  • It only lasts a few days, but is usually consumed quickly and enjoyed by families ([10:28]).
  • “My house smells amazing and we have fresh bread... But I just want to point out that fresh loaf of bread is only good for about three days.” — Will Bulsiewicz ([09:55])

6. Freezing Bread: Nutritional Impact

• Benefits of Freezing
  • Freezing bread changes its starch, forming “resistant starch,” which feeds gut bacteria rather than humans and has gut health benefits ([10:52]).
  • “When you freeze it, you develop what's called retrograde starch, or resistant starch... It feeds your gut bacteria... and produces short chain fatty acids, which are anti-inflammatory.” — Will Bulsiewicz ([10:52])
• Taste and Texture
  • Frozen and thawed bread may taste different, but the health tradeoff may be worthwhile ([10:36]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the scale and absurdity of waste:
  “When we think about how many people are hungry across the Western world and beyond, and then also inflation and grocery prices, it’s just nonsensical to be throwing food in the trash.” — Carleigh Bodrug ([01:55])

• On trusting your senses over expiry dates:
  “We don’t have expiry dates on things like bananas. So we’re doing this by our senses oftentimes anyways.” — Carleigh Bodrug ([04:50])

• On the opportunity for change:
  “If you are going to be more careful in meal planning... you’re going to head to the grocery store with an actual plan. You’re going to look at your fridge and pantry before you head out.” — Carleigh Bodrug ([05:06])

• Homemade bread as a family solution:
  “The beauty of the bread maker is that I can get the absolute best flour... for about $1.50, [make] fresh bread. But that fresh loaf... is only good for about three days.” — Will Bulsiewicz ([09:55])

• Nutritional twist on freezing bread:
  “It’s an interesting thing because actually you find less calories in the bread, but it’s better for your gut after frozen.” — Will Bulsiewicz ([11:49])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro & Scope of Problem: 00:01
• Environmental Consequences: 01:30
• Household Sources of Waste: 03:01
• Expiry Dates vs. Senses: 04:36
• Meal Planning = Less Waste: 05:35
• Economic Impact at Home: 06:32
• Bread Waste & Solutions: 07:20-09:09
• Homemade Bread Tips: 09:55-10:28
• Freezing Bread & Gut Health: 10:52

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Summary Takeaways

• Food waste is a massive, largely overlooked problem—both for the planet and your wallet.
• Most waste happens at home due to lack of planning and confusion over expiry dates.
• Repurposing, freezing, and smarter shopping—especially for common waste culprits like bread—can slash waste, save money, and boost nutrition.
• Freezing bread not only prevents spoilage but can increase its gut-health benefits.
• Simple changes add up: mindful meal planning and using leftovers make a real difference.

The episode combines scientific insight with heartfelt, practical advice in an accessible, encouraging tone.

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. Today, we're talking about something we're all guilty of. Food waste. A forgotten yogurt at the back of the fridge, a stale hunk of bread, a bag of dry, wilted greens. They may seem insignificant on their own, but collectively, in every kitchen across the world, they add up to a global environmental crisis. So can we change the way we approach food and help curb this epidemic of waste? I'm joined by Carly Bowdrug and Dr. Will Bolsewicz to show us how a few simple changes can lead to a greener home, better health, and even a lower grocery bill. A shocking 40% of the food we buy winds up in the waste. That's almost half. So if I'm paying $60 or pounds at the supermarket, I'm actually throwing away 25 of that. So I'm not only throwing money down the drain, but I think you're also explaining I'm contributing to a huge amount of waste that's harming the environment and presumably, like loads of nature that's been plowed into fields to make food that we don't even use. But, Carly, you wrote a book that offers ways to solve exactly this problem. It's full of a lot of fun tips and recipes and brilliant facts about food waste we ignore, which I can't wait to hear about. But I'd like to start by, like, sort of understanding the problem a bit more that you just sort of picked up on in the Quick fire. Carly, why does so much of our food wind up as waste?

[B]

When I first heard that statistic that somewhere around 40% of food ends up in landfills, I really thought, okay, is that that much of an issue? Because it just decomposes, right? But unfortunately, what happens when food does end up in landfills and it's mixed in with things like plastic? It emits a really powerful greenhous gas called methane, which is a not so good thing for our environment. Food waste actually emits more emissions than the entire airline industry. So this is a huge global issue. And then when we think about how many people are hungry across the Western world and beyond, and then also inflation and grocery prices, it's just nonsensical to be throwing food in the trash. My mind also went when I heard that statistic to thinking, okay, is that from a consumer level? And if we're looking at a pie chart, consumers, more than grocery stores and restaurants, consumers are actually wasting more And I think it's just because we're so busy, we're all go, go, go, going to the grocery store, grabbing a bunch of well intentioned vegetables and then not thinking about what to do with them.

[A]

And so I might have thought that like a lot of it would not be in my house. I might have thought that a lot of the waste is, you know, from the point that it's like grown, you know, through to the point that it finally makes it to supermarket, to the point that makes my store or maybe at restaurants where you always feel like, well, they have all those other meals, right, that they have as options, but it's not really true. It's mainly in my house that this problem is happening.

[B]

There's definitely food waste happening at every level, but the largest piece of the pie is in consumer homes once we get past the farming stage. And really, if you think about it, the reason that that's happening is because grocery stores have a bottom line. Restaurants have a bottom line that they're really paying close attention to each week, how that food is being utilized, making sure to use their and the things that they would normally throw out. Whereas as consumers, we're not necessarily keeping a budgetary line where we're like, ooh, that well intentioned box of spinach at the back of my fridge that I buy every week is going into the trash. Right. It's just, I think there's a lack of accounting and I don't think it's a fault of consumers necessarily. It's an education issue. And then on top of that, we're also super concerned about expiry dates, which I'm not saying not to worry about expiry dates, but there's almost this fear around food in your own home. Whereas restaurants, again, have a more of an accounting process where they're making sure that the food is used up in time.

[A]

I've definitely had that argument at home. My wife is generally of the view that she's a doctor. So like I'm very focused on cleanliness, Will, which I think you can probably understand. You know, you're trained very hard, right, about hygiene. So I think her basic feeling certainly when we first met was that one minute after midnight, if the food had the expiry date was like now, the day before, it's like, this is like toxic in the fridge, needs to be thrown out immediately. Is that an important part of this story? I'd love to understand a bit more, Carly, about what are the reasons behind this enormous amount of what we buy ends up being Thrown away, of course.

[B]

So it's often called best before dates in North America. And if you even think about that phrase best before, that's not necessarily suggesting that after that best before that stroke of midnight, that that food's no longer good anymore. Right. I encourage people always to use their senses, like their smell, their sight, and even taste in some cases to just make sure that the food is edible and safe to consume. And I mean, we don't have expiry dates on things like bananas. So we're doing this by our senses oftentimes anyways. So a big part of this is best before dates. But I would say the largest reason that people waste food is a lack of planning. And this I like to say is kind of the low hanging fruit when we're talking about food waste is if you are going to be more careful in meal planning and thinking about what you're going to be eating for breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert for the week, how your family's going to be consuming food, then you're going to head to the grocery store with an actual plan. You're going to look at your fridge and pantry before you head out. I remember before I kind of implemented this in my own home, I'm a food blogger and I was wasting so much more food than I should have been. And every single week I think I would head out and buy a bag of oats because I'd get to the grocery store and be like, okay, I wanna prep overnight oats this week. Oh, do I have oats at home? I don't know. So I'm gonna grab another bag and then I have like seven bags and the one of them's going bad. And I think it's just this busyness that is really skyrocketing waste, especially in the western world.

[C]

In my mind, I'm doing the math on the numbers that you've shared so far. And what I'm hearing from you is that 40% of our food globally is wasted, but it's actually worse at home than it is in other places. And so I'm sort of having a family, we have four children. I'm thinking about this and it strikes me that basically what you're telling me is that we could save 50% on our grocery bill. That's what I'm hearing.

[B]

Yeah. And I think the average Canadian family I can speak to wastes over $1,700 worth of food per year. And I mean, I think it's far more than that. And you even think about the $1700. I mean, that's a lot of money and money down the drain of food we're buying. And then beyond this, if you're going to be careful, more careful about kind of planning your meals, you're going to inevitably save money, too, because you're not bringing the excess into the home. So you're cutting your grocery bill that way, too. Then if we take it one step further and we start thinking about the whole plant and eating parts that we might not have normalized in North America, you've got a recipe for eating healthy, eating a diversity of plants, eating low waste for the planet, and then also saving a lot of money, which we all want to do.

[A]

Carly, I wanted to move on and talk about bread, so the team was actually doing some research and shared with me. Apparently, I don't have the statistics for the rest of the world. Apparently in the UK it is the number one most wasted food in the uk, And I suspect it's not going to look very different anywhere else. Is there anything we can do about this?

[B]

Yeah, that's the same in North America. And there are so many things we can do with the bread that has gone a little bit stale. So first of all, you don't want to bring too much bread into the home if you're not going to consume it quickly. And the problem, I think, why it's being wasted so much is that almost everybody is buying bread every week and then not getting to maybe the full loaf. So the first line of defense is if you are somebody, maybe you're a single person in a home, and you buy a loaf of bread, freeze half of it if you think you're only going to eat half. But there's so many amazing recipes that you can utilize what they call stale bread recipes. And I want to preface this by saying if there's mold on your bread, it's time for it to go, but we like to get to it before that. So if you think about a baguette, oftentimes you buy that and then the next day it's already hard. So here's a couple of things that you can do. One of my favorites is a classic panzanella salad. So you break it up with some fresh tomatoes and basil. I have a great tahini sauce as well that can go on this. And you eat it as a salad. Croutons are fabulous. So chop it up, toss in a little bit of herbs, bake it and make croutons breadcrumbs. So again, you can just throw it in a blender with some herbs and make delicious Breadcrumbs. I've even made a stale bread cake before. So the really, the options are limitless. And there's no reason that we should be tossing bread that has kind of reached that point where you don't want to toast it. You can still utilize it for a lot of things.

[C]

You know, there's a part of me that mold on a bread is actually reassuring because truly real bread in like three days, unless it's sourdough bread, it goes bad. And that's the way real bread is supposed to be. And it's disturbing. That bread can sit on the shelf, it's true. For 10, 14 days and be as soft as it was the day that they baked it. And nothing changed. And there's no mold. Like, I find that a bit disturbing.

[A]

What's going on in that situation?

[C]

Will, there's preservatives in the bread. The commercial breads. There's preservatives in the commercial breads. I'm all for supporting local, you know, local stores, local bakers, but the problem is that if you want to get like a high quality bread from your local baker, you could be easily paying $9 in the United States. What would you pay in London for a nice loaf of bread that could.

[A]

Be, you know, four to five pounds?

[C]

Yeah. So it's. These are expensive things. What we started doing recently is actually I was talking to Carly about this last night. We bought a bread maker. And the beauty of the bread maker is that I can get the absolute best flour that I could possibly buy. And for about $1.50, I simply put that flour with some other ingredients like yeast and things like this into the bread maker. I push a button. I come back in four hours. My house smells amazing and we have fresh bread. But I just want to point out that fresh loaf of bread that we just prepared for $1.50. It's only good for about three days.

[B]

But it's also not gonna last that long because it smells so good. And you will consume the bread quickly.

[C]

My kids love it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And if I come back to Carly talking at the beginning about potentially freezing the bread, does that change its sort of nutritional breakdown? Because I feel that way. When you freeze and unfreeze the bread, it definitely doesn't taste the same way that it did before.

[C]

Yeah. I feel like this episode, we have an amazing combination of like, game changing hacks here and the freezing the bread is right at the top. Because basically what happens is that bread, of course, contains starch. And in its native form, like just, you know, you bake a loaf of bread, you eat it, that starch, it's a source of energy for humans, but when you freeze it, you develop what's called retrograde starch, or I like to refer to it as resistant starch. And resistant starch basically means that it actually no longer feeds humans. Now it feeds your gut bacteria. This is conceptually very similar to prebiotic fiber, but in some ways perhaps even superior to prebiotic fiber because it feeds so nicely and produces the short chain fatty acids which are the anti inflammatory compounds that we get from fiber and from resistant starch. So it's an interesting thing because actually you find less calories in the bread, but it's better for your gut after frozen.

[A]

That's very interesting.

[B]

That's cool.

[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 [e-mail] daily30. Thanks for listening and see you next time.