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The truth about organic food - according to science by Professor Tim Spector

Posted on July 31 2023

 

Summary

  • Organic food doesn't contain antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, or artificial fertilisers.
  • Pesticides from non-organic food can affect gut microbes, causing concerns about health implications.
  • Organic food may have more nutrients, minerals and polyphenols compared to non-organic food.
  • The risk of cancer from pesticides is relatively small, especially if consumed occasionally, but long-term exposure may be a concern.
  • Foods with high pesticide levels include oats, rice, cucumbers, pears, nectarines and strawberries.
  • Avocados and onions are among the safer foods due to their protective layers.
  • Washing and peeling can reduce pesticide levels, but not to organic levels.
  • Organic frozen and canned foods can be good alternatives and may have lower costs.
  • Pregnant women and those feeding young children should be particularly cautious about pesticide exposure.
  • Organic food options can vary between countries, with the US having higher pesticide levels compared to some European countries.
  • It is recommended to prioritise organic for foods regularly consumed and over the long term.

What does "organic" food mean? And how do you know if something's organic?

Of course, foods tell you if they're organic in massive letters on the packaging. And they cost way more. But what makes food organic? Is eating organic better for your health? And are the benefits worth the expense?

Luckily, Professor Tim Spector is here with answers: 

https://youtu.be/E4nJ07_02NQ

Tim is one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists, a scientific co-founder of ZOE, and the author of the bestselling book Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well.

Timecodes:

00:00 - Intro
00:21- Quickfire round
01:21 - What is organic food?
01:52 - Pesticides vs insecticides
06:56 - Diseases
09:15 - Herbicide risks
14:51 - Nutrient comparison 
18:06 - Natural chemical defenses
19:05 - Does Tim Eat Organic Food?
20:44 - Foods high in chemicals
24:08 - Organic and cost 
24:47 - Washing food
29:14 - Summary and Outro

Studies mentioned:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti... Organic food consumption and the incidence of cancer in a large prospective study of women in the United Kingdom from the British Journal of Cancer

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama... Association of frequency of organic food consumption with cancer risk from JAMA Internal Medicine

https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/a... Impacts of dietary exposure to pesticides on faecal microbiome metabolism in adult twins from Environmental Health Journal

Full transcript

"Now, this is pretty shocking! No one had ever looked at the gut microbiomes of humans and organic food properly, and in pesticides in their urine. Nearly every twin we looked at had detectable levels of insecticides, and this affected their gut microbes that were producing Quickfire round abnormal chemicals. Welcome to Zoe science and nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. Thank you for joining me today. Fantastic once again, and I think this is gonna be fun because we have never talked about organic food before, and I'm actually not sure that you've really talked very much about it publicly at all. First time for me as well, so I'm excited, and I'd like to start, as always, with our quickfire round of questions. Are you ready, Tim? Go for it, and we're going to be really strict today - yes, no, or maybe. All right, are there more nutrients in organic food? Yes. Can pesticides in non-organic food affect our health? Yes. Okay, not sounding too good for the non-organic food so far. Is there one food that you would definitely buy organic? Yes. If you're on a budget, is it crucial you eat organic food? No. And then I'm gonna let you have a whole sentence, Tim. What is the one myth about organic food you'd love to dispel? That you can't trust it at all. I think is the common one, but you can't trust the labels, therefore don't bother. So, Tim, can we just start at the beginning and explain what does it mean for something to be organic? The key things about organic food are that it doesn't contain antibiotics - antibiotics are not given in pesticides vs. insecticides - in that food chain, not given to the animals; it doesn't contain any pesticides or herbicides or actual chemical additives of any kind or and also the third thing is it doesn't include any artificial fertilizers. So, and Tim, what's the difference between a pesticide and a herbicide? A pesticide is also known as an insecticide, so it will kill actually the living bugs, mites, and other things that are eating the plants, and a herbicide, like Roundup, is something you put on your spray in your garden that kills weeds. Got it, so it's actually killing other sorts of plants rather than the first one killing insects, sort of plants, and it's also used in organic food production to actually dry out the crops just before you harvest them as a sort of extra way of making the harvest easier. So generally, we don't refer to herbicides much; we group them together with pesticides. So often, if I, you know, people are talking about, they're including herbicides and this chemical, which many people have in their garden called Roundup. They're the general rules. So when you buy something organic, it doesn't guarantee that it's totally free of all these things; it just means the levels will be very much lower. And so just to make sure that I've sort of got that, this organic sort of has these two elements. One is about the way in which the food is being grown, and I sort of think about this as somehow just full of being less destructive to nature in that environment, right, like not killing all the bees and everything else. And there's almost a second part, which is how is it healthier for me to consume it because it's got fewer pesticides and these sorts of things that are on the food. And so is that right, Tim? It's sort of like the combination of both of these as we think about organic? Yes, there's an environmental impact of these products, and we know that, for example, extensive use of fertilizers in fields runs off into our rivers and is actually causing major problems for the environment and fish and other hazards that we're seeing. Certainly, in the UK and many other countries, overuse of fertilizers. The other chemicals also leach into, killing other animals, and some countries use many more aggressive insecticides, for example, pesticides, than others. So there's a whole group called organophosphates, which include the family of nerve agents and things like this that, like novichok, okay, that some countries like Sweden have completely banned but are very common in the US and used so low levels in the EU but still allowed. And obviously, around the world, there are very different rules if you're getting food from Asia or India or you don't really know what's been used in those countries. So I'm listening to this and thinking I probably don't want nerve agents in my salad, but tell me, Tim, how worried should I be about pesticides in the foods that I eat? Most of these pesticides are checked to be safe in humans by studying mice and rats and seeing if it gives them cancer or what happens to their liver or other organs. So, they generally pass those tests, but they've never looked at other aspects, more subtle aspects of what happens to them. So these studies where rats are given organophosphates, and you can see changes in their gut microbes, means that they produce chemicals, and we've talked before about the gut microbiome, there's little chemical factories, and depending on how they're triggered, they'll produce different chemicals and vitamins in response to that. So these produce kind of weird chemicals when they're given organophosphates to eat; they respond differently, cause abnormalities, and can switch in the rat, at least some of the sex hormones, the phytoestrogens that occur naturally. So there's cause for concern based on Rat and Mouse studies, but I've never believed them on their own, you know that it's only in mice, only rats. You can actually produce any result if you really want to just by doing 20 experiments and picking the one that worked. No one generally publishes the other 19. But so big human studies are the ones to go for. And then you've got, as usual, this whole range of epidemiology. So from the observational study that we just take a group of people that you follow for like 10 years and ask them Diseases based on their starting diets, did you ever eat organic? Yes or no. And often because we weren't thinking about it 10, 20 years ago, the data is quite crude. So there's one study from Belgian that followed 58,000 Belgians and found that people who ate non-organic food ended up putting on more weight than people who had organic food. Now that could be totally a health bias, right? I was gonna say this is one of the things we talk about all the time, right, which is that people don't, they're not like rats, you can't make them do what you want them to do. So people have this whole bundle of their behaviors, so presumably people who eat organic food tend to also be like they smoke less, and they are more careful about what else they eat, and they probably are healthier, and so this stuff is very hard to untangle, right? In the studies you're describing where they're just observational, you're not—they observe it but they do try and adjust in their models for the fact these healthy effects that you're describing. So they would adjust for smoking and adjust for exercise, adjust for education level, etc., etc., and they still fight but it was a one-off, and no other studies really shown differences in weight. Then there was another study in the UK for 680,000 people, um, again a rather crude study because there are very large numbers and they have so yes, no, do organic foods or not, but they did have good data on cancers, and they didn't find any big effect of, uh, on cancers in that study, but they did show um an increase in one cancer called Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is a cancer of the blood, not that common, but they had increased rates."

"Then there was the Nutri Sante study, which is in France, which has actually much more detailed information because it's really been designed for studying nutrition, and they've done similar studies on ultra-processed foods, and they've followed about 58,000 people, I think it is, for a period, I think it's about nine years, and they found that there was a herbicide risks increased risk of cancer of most cancers by about 25 percent, including Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in the people that weren't taking organic food, and the organic food group were protected by about 25 percent, so that was so that's a huge difference, right? 25 lower risk of cancer. How do you so some of that, uh, it could still be this about you haven't adjusted for these healthy behaviors, but it's big enough to think there might still be uh something real in there. And again, this other, this other, uh, interesting, finally, this Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma comes up again, and, uh, also there were interesting things in breast cancer. Went up after the menopause, and so, certainly again, increasing just ratcheting up our, our, our slight worry about this. And if we looked at obviously that's just organic versus non-organic, and, in, um, if you took the people taking glyphosate, this is exposed to glyphosate, Roundup, which is what I'm saying, what the Roundup is, this, uh, herbicide that is in most weed killers, and you looked at people with high exposures, uh, because they're doing parks or sports fields or spraying crops, for example, the epidemiology studies have again suggested that, um, they're not all in agreement, but they overall suggest there is a slight increase in cancers and again particularly Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. So there is some evidence that cancers are increased through long-term exposure to these chemicals. It's far from proven, and but there is this strongly with Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which seems to be more consistent than the other data, so cause for concern that way."

"There's also, um, there was a meta-analysis of about 20 small studies looking at, um, infertility and problems during pregnancy, again suggesting a slight effect, but the studies were not well performed, and so low quality, so our sort of clarity on, on saying yes, it definitely does that is not quite there, and there were also several studies looking at, um, attention deficit in younger children, showing there was a relationship there again poor quality studies but enough to be concerned that we should be sorting this out in a way that we, you know, no one is really addressing, and the final study actually comes from, um, our own twins where we were the only ones to look at the effect of organic food on the gut microbiome. It was an observational study. We took 60, um, I think four pairs of our twins working with some environmental epidemiologists. Robin Minaj was leading the study and looked at, uh, several hundred different residues, insecticides, and herbicides, and found that nearly everybody had some organophosphates residue type residues in their blood and urine. So just to make sure that I've got there, this is where I'm happily eating my pears and my apples and my leeks and whatever, um, you know, I'm not—I'm not out in the garden spraying this on my hands. This is from the food I'm eating. And you're saying that I went into your, uh, hospital lab, along with, you know, 10,000 other twins, and you took my blood and you could actually find bits of this, you know, remnants of this pesticide in my blood. Is that yes? I think it was over 90 or something, so almost everybody had some, yeah, so in your blood and urine, nearly everyone's got these insecticides, and about 50 percent of people, um, had detectable levels of these herbicides, the glyphosate, the Roundup, and we looked at the gut microbes to see if these chemicals were having an effect. Was there a difference between people with high exposures, high levels in their blood and urine versus low levels? And there was a clear correlation, and so people who are eating more fruits and vegetables were had higher levels of these chemicals, and they also had different changes in their gut microbes. So the gut microbes were producing different chemicals in response. So people listen to this could be like, "Oh, so that's great. I'm going to give up my fruit and vegetables, and I'm going to go back to my meat and, um, you know, saturated fat diet, and I'm gonna avoid all these horrible risks, Tim, that you were talking about that I might get more cancer like. Is that the right um takeaway from this?"

"No, okay, the well if you go back, you know, obviously people who eat lots of fruits and vegetables, uh, compared to people who don't or are, you know, on ultra-processed food diets of minimal fiber. Nutrient comparison are likely to live 10 years longer and have half the risk of heart disease, diabetes, dementia, all the common chronic diseases, and they're gonna weigh less. So that's, we've known that that the fiber is really important, the plants are really important, the polyphenols, the defense chemicals and plants are really important for all bits of our body. Now what we're talking about here is, I think, you know, we're talking about a possible ten percent increase in cancer risk, which, you know, in terms of a lifetime risk is a fairly small one for vast major people, and not every cancer. We're only talking about a few specific ones where there's, there's evidence, and something like Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is a rare cancer most people haven't heard of, so you know, I don't know the exact rates, but it's going to be less than one in a few hundred people get it. You know, I haven't given up eating fruits and vegetables when I can't find organic. Okay, to me, the large is far outweigh any risk, so we're talking about a subtle difference here that probably only makes a difference if we're having them regularly and you know, for decades, but we'd still rather not have all of these people, particularly, particularly at certain times in life where you know, I don't think we talk much enough about it, but there's critical times of pregnancy or feeding young children when you know, there's so much happening to the body, the brain, and really don't want unwanted chemicals washing around that have all these effects we still don't really understand, you know, unless there's no way around it."

"Now we've talked a lot about sort of the negative things that might come from pesticides, and therefore organic food is almost just sort of saying, 'Oh well, at least it's got less of those bad things.' Um, but one of the things I've heard is, well, the organic food is supposed to have more nutrients in there, and that's part of why the idea that the soil is alive with its own microbiome all these things is better. Is there any truth in this, Tim, or is that just good marketing?"

"There is some truth in this, and there was a meta-analysis about eight years ago about 300 tiny little studies that put them all together and it showed that on average the organic produce had more minerals in it. It had less cadmium, which is like a toxic mineral, and importantly, for particularly for me, it had around 30 to 40 percent more polyphenols. 30 to 40 percent, okay, so that's enormous, so that's like, you know, increasing your polyphenol intake by 30 or 40 percent, and that really is important. So just to remind people that's the defense chemical that you find in plants that occurs naturally and is in the often the tips of leaves or the bitter part or Natural chemical defenses, it's in the berries or these things naturally so these are the things that naturally protect the plant against insects and the environment that it turns out the organic ones who are raised in our sort of traditional ways have more of and I think that's really fascinating because uh people, there's no one's exactly sure why, but I think the hypothesis I like is the fact that if you give the if you surround these plants with uh insecticides and spray use of taken away their um you don't need that defense and you're given the masses of uh fertilizer so they just grow so all they really want to is grow they're just like these giant Sumo babies that are growing big and fat as fast as possible the environment is like super easy for them and they have no defenses and so you know just like uh you know if you grow too fast um you're likely to get have a really Does Tim Eat Organic Food? bad immune system because all the focus is on growth not so it's a bit like so they are like the plant equivalent of um Homo sapiens living here in the 21st century in the developed world are they where you know we can sit on the sofa all day we don't need to do anything and we now know that you really need to go to the gym it's really important for your health and you're saying it's a bit similar that these plants the environment is not stressed enough they are really couch potatoes they're uh you know they're they're sitting there in the sun everything's done for them they don't have to bother don't produce these defense chemicals like they used to because they're no longer fighting off the um these insects and also I guess they always get the right water and they get the right fertilizer um and that means I guess thinking back to some of the things you've taught about the microbiome that they end up being different from the sort of foods we might have eaten until uh you know 100 years ago so they have a lot less of these chemicals that you know our bodies would have just assumed they would get naturally with with the food because you know way back in in the past like no plants were being treated like this so everything presumably had all of these defense cannibal calls because they were all in this fight for survival yeah exactly and that's it's the same thing you know if you look at how chickens have evolved um how we've grown these massive uh chickens in just a few weeks they don't have anything like the nutrients and things of the old scrawny chickens that uh we used to eat and I think this is all our food has been primed for growth Foods high in chemicals and size and to look good but it uh when you when you look into the detail you're getting actually less of the things that you need so if you do buy the organic equivalent you're going to be getting you know around 40 more polyphenols you less less toxins and uh um you'll be getting uh slightly more minerals on average and uh you know you you are going to be getting a slightly better product so the idea that it was a con which was what I believe 10 years ago uh is is not really true so I'm going to ask the question that our listeners have really wanted to ask from the beginning it was like our number one question um uh that we we got from all the listeners beforehand which is Tim do you eat organic food? I do, Jonathan, yes. Um, I know you might be surprised because when I'm out traveling, and you know we go out, we've been traveling around the US and places, I don't insist on organic food. That's right, you generally seem quite relaxed, uh, about it, and much more focused on whether you're eating plants. Yeah, exactly, getting a diversity of plants is my number one priority. And I know it's hard to get diversity of plants and organic, and so that bar is just really too high, especially when you're traveling, and you're sort of, you don't have those options you do at home. But at home, I would say, etc., is organic. And are you eating this organic food because you're worrying about cancer, or are you eating this organic food because you're thinking you're getting more of those good polyphenols you were talking about? I got really into this as I was, you know, six years ago, I started writing my book "Food for Life," which has a big section on this. If anyone's interested, it wasn't just about cancer, there were polyphenols, the microbiome aspect of it. I didn't really want lots of extra chemicals for decades going into my microbiome that, on the one hand, I was trying to build up in a good way. So this was just seemed to be detrimental. And you know, I can now afford it, so that's what I've now done. So I've changed my views on organic produce, but I think people shouldn't worry too much about things that they only do occasionally. I think what we're seeing here is this is something that you worry about for things that are in your diet regularly and you're going to be having them regularly for years.

So can we talk about that for a minute? Because I think, you know, you're in the nice position where your children have grown up and you're affluent enough to be able to do this with a lot of pressure. Organic food is really expensive. How should people think about those trade-offs? And I'd love to talk about maybe are there particular foods where these levels of pesticides and everything are really high and you should be really worried versus others?

One of the foods where the pesticides are likely to be worst is breakfast cereals that contain oats. That's incredibly surprising. I thought you were going to give me a fruit. Tell me it's about oats because they're often organic and raised in damp countries. They are sprayed just before they're harvested to dry them out. Okay, and so this gives them massive amounts. And because they're wet, they absorb all that glyphosate, and so their levels are five to ten times more than many other grains. So that is something that is not a health food that I think people should go out of their way if they do love oats, and I know you used to be a big eater, although you're not anymore. You know, and you can afford it either switch something else or go jump. Particularly if you're trying to give your kids something which you think is healthy, I think that you could be giving them high levels of particularly this herbicide glyphosate. Rice is another one that came up interestingly in some surveys as being quite high in pesticides, and we do know that if you get certain areas of India and Pakistan, do a problem with runoff of arsenic into rice paddy fields. So you know, if you're getting cheap rice from certain places, you know, you may be ingesting a lot of chemicals. And in general, fruits and vegetables that contain a lot of water will tend to absorb these chemicals more than others and where they're particularly attracting insects as well. So cucumbers, pears, nectarines, these tend to have quite high concentrations. And everyone loves strawberries. I love strawberries, but in tests in the US and the UK, they commonly get tested as being above the safety level. So we have these standard safeties again for these herbicides you're talking about. This is pesticides and herbicides, so these are the insecticides and the posts are the organophosphates and all the glyphosates, really high levels. That's the sort of thing you should be wary of. That if you have strawberries just once a year, it's probably not worth worrying about it. But if this is like part of your regular thing, just see if you can get organic strawberries, or presumably swap to a different fruit that has lower levels. And other barriers, I mean, you know, I now, I didn't use to, but I now try and get organic blueberries if I can. You can often get them frozen, interestingly, and they're not very expensive if you buy the frozen organic berries and you stick them in the freezer.

I was just thinking about this this morning. I get a lot of organic tinned food and a lot of organic frozen food because after podcasts that we've done in the past where I've discovered that actually like frozen vegetables and tin vegetables are good, we now cook a lot of that at home. And what's interesting is that, you know, the price of still like organic tinned beans is still incredibly cheap. So is that one of the areas that, again, you know, you picked up on three really good tips for people is yeah, organic frozen food is really good. They don't have the same costs because it probably costs more to transport organic food because it does go off quicker. So you've got to be much faster. You can't just leave it around in warehouses for as long as possible. We don't tend to store them in those chemical bags and things. So that's a good tip about frozen foods. Canned foods, I think beans do come up in some surveys as being high in pesticides. So buying 10p extra or whatever for an organic bean can is good value compared to the fresh one. It's all a bit scary, you're talking about these pesticides and herbicides. What can I do if I've got this, can I, you know, can I wash this? You know, I was always brought up by my mother, interestingly, like I should wash the fruit. Washing helps but it doesn't get it down anywhere near to organic levels. So you remove a little bit of it but often it and you can peel them that will remove some more and some particularly these, you know, that's probably one reason to peel cucumbers, which I never used to do, by the way, I'm not, you know, too lazy. But if you can't get an organic one, you know, probably peeling it gets rid of perhaps half, but you still, a lot of it might go beyond the skin. So another little trick is if you're washing stuff, add some sodium bicarbonate, baking soda. That is very good at removing it, much better than just water. So that's a little tip that doesn't cost anything. But there are certain fruits and vegetables that are actually pretty safe. Zoe's favorite fruit, the avocado, is, which we know is pretty generally healthy, seems to absorb the herbicides and insecticides on the skin. So you don't eat the skin, so you're eating the flesh and that's pretty free of any nasty problems. Similarly, an onion, you peel away. You don't eat the onion skin, so that's really well protected. Um, and there are other examples like that, that are more the drier fruits and vegetables that don't absorb the water, that have got a skin. Mangoes, another one, they're actually pretty good because, again, you're not eating the skin. So there's a list of ones you don't have to worry about, and there are lists in the U.S. There's a list of these, each year that they do produce a list of the 15 best and the 15 worst offenders that people can look at, although each country is going to vary and eat locally. You know, the amount of spraying and things will vary a lot. We know that certain parts of the UK, just like if you live in Norfolk, the spraying is enormous. So it's very hard to avoid some of that on most of the produce, whereas other bits of the country, the produce has much less. And I definitely have this vision that this is particularly bad in the states. Is this true? Rules are much laxer in the states. They allow more organophosphate use, more chemicals that are banned in Europe, and I think there's generally much less checking of these levels. So the levels are generally higher in the US. And we've talked about antibiotic levels. They're also much higher still and the general chemicals used in agriculture. It's still a bit the wild west. So your differential to move into organic is going to be even higher there than it is. Yes, and there are big differences between countries as well and the pricing as well. It's interesting. There are many countries in Europe where perhaps 25 percent of the produce is organic, a place like Sweden, Austria, etc. In this country, we're probably below three percent. In the UK, I think it's similarly low levels in the US. But luckily, it is really growing fast. So it is some doubling every 10 years. So I think it's a movement that's not going to go away, and I think, you know, it's something everyone needs to know about.

Well, Tim, you're definitely convincing me that I should be buying more organic food next week than I was last week. Um, we asked this question right at the beginning, and I just want to get the clear answer to it. We said, you know, if there was one food that you were going to buy organically, what would it be? And I'd love to get the answer.

It would probably be tomatoes, actually, because I eat tomatoes nearly every day. And so I think, to me, that's more important. I was going to say strawberries because I love strawberries, but I only have them every day, so I'm less concerned about it. So I think it would be that would be my main answer because it's you've got to think of that long-term exposure of foods and getting high-quality tomatoes. I've tasted Italian and Spanish ones, and only they taste better. But, you know, if you can get the organic versions of those, they are pretty incredible. But again, you can get a can of organic tomatoes for not much more than the non-organic version. So it's about people thinking for themselves but what they would change, what do they have regularly, what could they improve that would make a much bigger difference to their long-term health? Brilliant, Tim. Thank you so much. What I'd love to do is a little summary to try and cover all the different areas that we've gone through today. First, we talked about what's organic food and the key thing actually is what's not in it. So what I said is you don't apply pesticides, you don't apply fertilizers, you don't have antibiotics if it's in an animal. Then we talked about does it really matter for our health? And I think my takeaway was it's not totally clear. There's a bunch of studies. The biggest question seems to be about cancer risk. And I think that what's clear is it's not a massive difference or it would be really clear. But that I think you think that there is some area of risk and particularly maybe for one or two particular cancers. The net result of this, I think, is that you were saying you should be particularly cautious if you're pregnant or if you're feeding sort of small children because you're at that point where everything's been being grown. And at the same time, in comparison to the benefits of eating fruits and vegetables, this risk is really small. And so you would definitely say, you know, eat a plant, eat a fruit even if it's not organic versus something else that's so much better. But if you have the ability to sort of afford these choices, then organic is good. And the actually a big part of that is because of the extra stuff you get. So you're saying it has maybe 30 or 40 percent more of these polyphenols that you talk a lot about as being like the food for our microbes. And, um, and therefore, this organic food, even if I can't taste the difference, you know, my microbes can. So try and feed them that way. If you can, we talked a bit about what you do, and you said that you're probably eating, I think, 70 organic, Tim. Is that right? Yep. Um, and so that's a big change from 10 years ago when you were very suspicious. And actually, you've come to the view that it is better. And then I think we talked about some specific things that you should worry about. And I was amazed to hear oats and, interestingly, strawberries also as one of the highest. But on the other hand, things like avocados, you mentioned, actually really low. And my overall takeaway was, you know, there isn't a sort of you must do this completely. It's more like think about how you might be able to introduce this. If you can't afford it, don't stress too much. If you what you might be able to do though is to look at some of the things, particularly sort of tinned and frozen, for example, where you might actually be able to shift quite a bit and it might still in fact be cheaper than the things that you're buying fresh. So there is a range here. And I guess, as always, you would love there to be much more research so that these answers were clearer than I guess you're able to give today, Tim.

Yeah, we should be definitely pushing for more research, especially on the microbiome, long-term effects, but also we should be pushing for transparency on labels. You know, how does this food rank in terms of its insecticide and pesticide levels, just so the customer knows exactly what they're buying and they're not having to go and read my book every time they're in a supermarket? In everything we're talking about, it's about transparency and food so people can make their own choices given the right information and it's not hidden. Brilliant, Tim. Thank you so much for coming in. As always, I've learned a lot and I'm sure our listeners have as well. Pleasure.

Thank you, Tim, for joining me on Zoe's science and nutrition today. If you want to understand how to support your body with the best foods for your health, then you may want to try Zoe's personalized nutrition program. You can get 10% off by going to joinzoe.com/podcast. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolfe. Zoe Science and Nutrition is produced by Yella Hewings, Martin Richard Willen, and Alex Jones. See you next time. Thank you.

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