Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall On How To Eat 30 Plants A Week
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5 by 15. Hi, good evening and welcome here to 5 by 15. And I'm absolutely thrilled to be joined tonight by Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall, who is the author of so many books, made so many TV programmes. But tonight is here to challenge us, as I think you saw in the intro slide, about how we're going to eat 30 plants in a week, which when you think about it,

and first see it. Sounds like an absolutely monumental challenge. Hugh has also made a lot of films about waste, and he also made recent, well, 2018, a film about the obesity crisis in Britain. And I know that before we come over to questions from you, and do think of them, put them in the chat when you have them, I'm sure that Hugh and I are going to touch on this subject. But please first welcome Hugh. Can you turn yourself on? Because I can't see you.

Hi. Hi, good evening. Welcome from a glorious evening in Devon and thank you very much for being with us. So 30 plants, that's a lot. How many have you had today?

Guess what? I tend to think that question might come up. So when I'm doing an event, I just make sure that I knock a few off earlier in the day. Not that it's hard at the moment because the veg garden is quite abundant, but actually I think I've had getting on for 40 plants today. Now, that sounds like a silly amount, but they stack up quite quickly. I mean, as it happens, I've got quite a few plants

sauerkraut in the fridge at the moment. And I made a big pesto the other day. In fact, there's a recipe in the book called seven plant pesto. And I just made that a couple of days ago, just before the weekend. And because I've got such an abundance of herbs and,

It's actually about a 15 plant pesto. And I had a little bit of that on toast with a poached egg for breakfast. So and I've got some seedy crackers that have got about seven different seeds in. And obviously, you know, I've been knocking out recipes from the book pretty much weekly, daily, weekly since the book's been out and about and since I've been putting it together. So I am racking them up and I'm not I don't want anyone else to feel that that it's going to be too much of a slog.

Can I just say thank you so much to everyone who's tuned in. It's a glorious day out there. And if you've chosen to stay in and listen to me when it's,

But it's like that outside. Then I hugely appreciate it. And also, thanks if you've decided to forgo the Monday evening pleasure, which is the centre of my broadcasting week, which is I'm sorry I haven't a clue, which is on right now. I'm looking forward to catching up on that later. But if you've sacrificed all that to be with us this evening, it's hugely appreciated. Yeah.

Yes, and from us. And actually, Hugh, you do have a lot of clues. But can I start with something that comes up immediately from your question? You say you had a seven vegetable pesto. I mean, how much do you have to have in order to qualify for one of these 30? And again, you mentioned a spice. How much?

Yeah, no, it's a really good question. I mean, the first thing to remind everyone is these 30 plants are plants. They're not fresh fruits and vegetables. I'm not expecting you to eat 30 different fresh local seasonal fruits and vegetables in a week.

It's just plants and whole plant-based ingredients. Whole being an important word here because once you process these ingredients in various ways, they lose a lot of their goodness. But the store cupboard is a fantastic source of plant ingredients like...

You mentioned spices. I'm particularly a big fan of whole seed spices. They last longer, you know, and you don't need like dozens of them. And I'm absolutely not asking people to go out shopping for a bunch of

unfamiliar plant ingredients that they've that are expensive or obscure and you don't know what to do with. The first thing is to remind yourself of the things that you know and like already, but have maybe fallen slightly off your shopping list or or even just found their way right to the back of the cupboard. Sit spices being a classic example of that.

I actually raided, I did a bit of a rationalization on my mum and dad's cupboards the other day and sort of put my hands to the back and pulled a few things out. And there were some items, mainly spices, from the previous century, you know, from 19... I think there was some ground mace from 1998, right?

The extraordinary thing is it was scrunched up into the little plastic thing and shoved into the bottom of the little cardboard box.

The whole thing's kind of covered in dust. And I shook off the dust. It still smelled amazing. And that just reminded me of the extraordinary quality of spice and that it endures. I mean, I'm sure it would be even more aromatic if it was fresh. But that actually speaks also to the nutritional story here because we...

The foundation of all of this is to do with looking after our gut microbiome. And our gut microbiome thrives essentially on a diversity of mainly plant-based ingredients. And it adheres directly to the question, even small amounts of plants...

can make a contribution. So there's no point in starting to completely change the way you cook to use unrealistic amounts of spice that is very aromatic so that everything you eat suddenly tastes unbearably cumin-y or coriander-ish. So we're going to continue to use these ingredients in the proportions that are sensible for the way we like to eat.

Having said that, when it comes to herbs, especially if you can grow a few of your own, I don't think we're ever generous enough. We put a little sprinkling of parsley in and we don't taste it. It's a garnish. So I'd say be as generous as you can with herbs, unless they're super pungent, like maybe rosemary or lovage or something can be a bit overpowering. But spices, just use them in those sensible amounts.

But the whole seed spices is what I like to keep. So whole cumin seeds, whole coriander seeds. Carraway is a wonderful spice. I don't have 30 different spices in my cupboard. I've got nine or 10 and I use half a dozen of them a lot.

And the other thing to remember about these whole seed spices is they are aromatic seeds of certain plants. So most of them are still alive. And that also is part of what they have to contribute. If you put those coriander seeds in your garden or in your window box, they will grow into coriander plants. I mean, you might not get 100% germination and my...

Parents' 1997 caraway seeds might not have a very high germination rate, but I wouldn't be surprised if a few of those seeds sprouted. And that's the extraordinary thing about these plant-based ingredients. It's just an indication of the power that they're packing. A lot of them are literally still alive. So let's come to the other half of the title, which is why do we need 30?

It's pretty precise. I mean, obviously 40 would probably be a bit better, but... Yeah. No, it's a number that's both random and precise, if that isn't a complete contraband. No, no. I'll explain, because...

So this great variety of plants in ways that are complex, and I'm not the scientist, so luckily Tim Spector has written the most brilliant, proper sort of five, six-page introduction to this book with a really good summary of the science and the contribution that diverse plants make to our gut microbiome. But to sum it up,

The, this, this idea of 30 plus, it's not mine. Probably some of you have heard it's been knocking around certainly for a couple of years. Maybe first time I heard people mention 30 plants a week was nearly three years ago. And I've had quite a few conversations with Tim about it and, and,

And eventually I said, look, Tim, this is a thing, right? It's not going away. And he said, yeah, no, it's definitely a thing. I said, oh, right. Then if I do the cookbook, will you write the intro? But the telling bit of science, the study that got us to 30 plants, really interesting. Tim and a number of his colleagues in the UK and the US set about doing a study of the kind that, Rosie, you and I, the work we've done, the background work we've done on the

society's health and the connection with diet and, and all of that, their experiment was in that kind of space. And they wanted to know if you, people who choose identify a certain way of eating primarily vegan, vegetarian, or omnivore plus two or three of the mainstream diets like paleo. And I think low carb, um,

11,000 people divided up into those different dietary choices. And Tim and his colleagues wanted to know, does any of these dietary choices have a better outcome than any other? I might vegans over the long term be healthier than omnivores or might someone doing paleo, et cetera, et cetera. And when they drilled into the results, particularly they were measuring gut biodiversity in the short term and then

over a longer period, other health outcomes like heart health, type 2 diabetes, etc. There was nothing in the results that made any significant distinction between any of these major identifying dietary groups. Nothing said vegans were going to be healthier than omnivores or vegetarians healthier than people doing low carb. In fact, the only meaningful indicator across the study was

which broke outside the categories, was how many plants people are eating every week. And regardless of what diet people were on, if you were eating more plants, you had almost invariably a more diverse gut microbiome and better health outcomes. And the number 30 comes because quite a lot of people in the study who were obviously enthusiastic cooks who liked their plants already were getting to 30, a few quite far beyond it.

but not more than about 10 or 15% overall, but at least the, the, the experimenters recognize that it's achievable for quite a few people and might be achievable for others if they decided to pursue it. And then, uh,

So the benefit graph, it goes up like this, and it keeps going up after 30, but it plateaus a bit. So, you know, 30 is way better than 20, but 40 is only a bit better than 30, and 40 is probably quite hard and not realistic for a lot of people. Therefore, they said 30 plants, and it stuck. They could have said 29. They could have said 32. Right.

They went for 30 for, you know, who doesn't like, who doesn't love a round number? Everybody loves a round number. I mean, why I'm reading Tim's introduction. You get, there's a lot about what vitamins you get from different plants. And there's all sorts of reasons why different plants give you different things. Why can't we just take vitamins?

I mean, eat big amounts and take vitamins. Absolutely. Well, we can, and we might get some benefits, but further studies show that the intake of vitamins

isolated vitamins in supplements that have been always highly processed, the take-up of those vitamins is much less effective and indeed the benefits to the gut microbiome much less than if they are in plants.

and there's a synchronicity and an interconnectedness at again a level that's sort of very very hard to understand but what we need to realise is that plants have not

a few micronutrients or phytochemicals, individual plants have hundreds. Sometimes one plant might have thousands of different natural plant chemicals in them. So we are never going to understand how they interact or indeed how a plant that's rich in vitamin D might be better at giving up that vitamin D

because of other things in that plant that are not vitamin D, but that interact with it. And actually, mushrooms being one of the few, sometimes we're not even allowed to call mushrooms a plant, but they definitely count, by the way, as one of the 30, and they're very good for vitamin D. But other plant nutrients are given up

more readily because of the way in which they combine with other phytochemicals in that plant. And also, by the way, sometimes how we cook them. So eating a veg raw will yield a different nutritional benefit. And by the way, not always a better one. I mean, some nutrients will be suppressed or kind of wiped out by the cooking process.

Others will not. And therefore, the ones that aren't will be more readily taken up when you do cook a food. So tomatoes, for example, have quite a different nutritional profile when cooked and a good one to when they are raw.

Oh, so that's interesting. So could I count a raw tomato and a cooked tomato as two different vegetables over the course of a week? I would allow that, yes. You would. Okay, so how do you... But you can't just do 15 plants a week and have each of them raw and cooked. No, well, I wasn't pushing it that much, but...

Obviously, from what you say. I mean, clearly, I would count the leaves of a beetroot as a separate vegetable to the roots of a beetroot. It's a very different part of the plant, obviously, and it's going to have a very different set of nutrients in the sweet, purple, fibrous, crunchy root and the spinach-like leaves, obviously two different things.

So it's a daunting amount, or it looks like it on the surface. How do you set about making it really easy for people? I mean, you've said what you had for breakfast, but probably not all of us have got that pesto in the fridge that we can stick on a bit of toast. But we could make it, I know. Breakfast is quite a good place to start. I think that the place...

Perhaps a little bit unexpectedly, the place where most of us have got most room for improvement is probably not, particularly if we...

If we are cooks and, you know, this is a cookbook, it's not it's not a manifesto. We're going to talk about social policy later. But this is written for people who who cook at home and enjoy it or try to enjoy it most of the time and to make it easier for them and to help them enjoy it. But I think that the area where most of us have got most room for improvement is the store cupboard.

So it is, and one thing especially, which is pulses, which are fantastically good for us and full of fiber and other terrific nutrients and also quite inexpensive. So the, so, you know, and I've got absolutely no problem with tinned pulses, you know, but especially if it's, they're not sort of slathered in some sticky sauce where, which has got other things in it, but you know, tins have,

Beans, lentils, and butter. I'm personally borderline obsessed with butter beans. Some people like kidney beans. I like all beans and all pulses, but I particularly go crazy for butter beans and have done for a few years now. I think it's because they're so big and creamy and they break up a little bit. And so they take on nice sauces and they're quite substantial.

But so and so once you start, so no great surprise, there are quite a lot of Palsy recipes in. I had to almost be restrained because when I'm creating a set of recipes, particularly nice, hot, comforting, family friendly suppers, at some point I'm going to be asking myself, should I stick a tin of beans in here? And probably.

very often the answer is, well, it certainly wouldn't hurt. We're not going to make this dish any less delicious. And so quite a few times I have done that, and occasionally I've been a little bit restrained and said, no, we'll lay off the beans or people will just think this is bean propaganda. But it almost is pulse propaganda, this book, because it is saying, look, here's a set of amazing ingredients that are – which people think of sometimes as being, like, a bit boring –

I would say that, well, they're absolutely not boring, but what they are is very versatile and sometimes you could say a bit neutral. So they're looking for a really fun sauce or an addition of kind of more punchy, spiky, spicy, acidic, aromatic, zesty ingredients to bring them to life.

But that's not to say that they're just there for virtue, because their kind of creamy, semi-blandness is a quality in itself. This is actually something that...

that in in japan is hugely appreciated there are various different words for bland in in in japanese as i understand it i speak very little but somebody told me this and i chose to believe them there are various different words for bland that they used to describe things like tofu and beans and and and refer sometimes a little bit to the texture um and they're enormously complementary you know they when you describe it you're you're really talking about when you say this

in Japanese, maybe some people out there here right now speak Japanese, which I don't, and they're saying to themselves, Hugh's talking a lot of nonsense right now. But let me run with it, because I believe it to be the case that you say, when you say, this is really bland, you mean it as a tremendous compliment. This is a particularly bland bean. What you mean is it's

It's creamy. It's waiting there to just be made delicious by the other ingredients. And we respect that as a great contribution. And I think we could do with a little bit of that mentality in our cooking here in the UK. We are, I mean, other cultures around the world, the South Americans have absolutely nailed the bean. Asian cooking recognizes pulses, chickpeas, lettuce,

Indian subcontinent, obviously all over those kind of things. And they are wonderful ingredients. So perhaps I've said enough about beans. They're high on the list. And then the other thing I think store cupboard wise that we've got a lot more room for is nuts and seeds, which can definitely be more expensive. So they're going to be used probably a little bit more judiciously. And they are very rich. You know, they're high in fats, which is,

we now know is really not something to be scared of. Um, uh, nuts and seeds are highly calorific, uh, with seeds. That's not going to be a massive issue because we tend not to eat them in huge quantities, but if we really pile into the nuts, we're probably consuming quite a lot of fat. Now those are in fact, probably some of the healthiest fats you can eat. And they're wrapped up with some fantastic fiber as well. So nuts are super healthy ingredients. Um,

And so we have to get out of this mindset of just because oils and fats and if they're natural and cold pressed oils or whole nuts in relatively generous, but not like

sort of super over the top they are super foods they're really really great for us so what's the whole book obviously doesn't have meat dairy no no it does it's not a vegan book it's an omnivorous book there's a chapter on meat and a chapter on fish but you don't talk about sorry I meant rather that you talk about eating the plants so where does meat, fish and dairy particularly kind of fit into this world

Well, so I'm still an omnivore at the moment. I mean, I do. I worry about the meat that I, I mean, I worry in the sense that I, I'm careful about the choices I make. I do worry about the amount of meat that the world is eating. And I am, I worry about the amount of fish we're taking, taking out of the sea.

So I feel my carnivorous habit is sort of under review. That's not necessarily to say I'm going to become vegan tomorrow, but I get that the selections I'm able to make by...

going to the fishmonger and talking to him or buying fish directly off fishermen. Luckily, we've got small boats coming in just down the road at Axmouth and stuff like that. And indeed, the organic meat that I choose and most of the meat I raise here at home, that is a very privileged position to be in. But I try and be aware of that and I eat much less meat and a bit less fish than I used to.

And when I do eat it, I eat it with lots and lots of plants. So there is a bit of meat and fish in the book. I'm leaning, trying to steer people towards, you know, eating higher quality meat and a little bit less of it. And then, you know, but outside of the meat and fish chapter, it's almost all plants. And I think that one thing we need to become comfortable with is

And especially, I was going to say even us omnivores, but especially us omnivores, it's a given if we're vegan or vegetarian, we're going to eat a lot of plants-only meals. Omnivores need to eat plants-only meals too and need to be very comfortable with that. That's what we should be eating most of the time. And the only way you can do that is by showing the same, as a chef, as a cook, is by showing the same respect for

to plants as chefs because chefs are reverential about meat and fish we you know we we worship it we put all our little attention on it we marinate it we crisp it up we get the crackling going we we get those char stripes on our steak we get so excited we offer it up as this incredible uh offering with often the the vegetables the bits on the side that we haven't made a fuss over so

The way I see it, fish and meat, they can be very tyrannical ingredients. They muscle, they hog our attention, and the plants, which are actually the most important things we're going to eat, get left behind. So even as an omnivore, you've got to put the meat and fish away, out of sight, regularly. But lots of people's diets, and if you go back to fairly...

primitive times in a sense, long time ago, people depended on meat. And so obviously meat does do you and your microbiome some good. Yeah, but I mean... But you're sort of saying not an essential good. Well, I think that there are some essential nutrients that you get from meat and fish that

that you have to be a bit more thoughtful if you're going to get from a plants-only diet. But you can, absolutely. And this is where the nuts and the seeds become really vital, actually. If you're not eating meat and fish at all, and you're not eating many nuts and seeds, then you're probably going to have some issues. But even carnivores, not omnivores like us, but even carnivores...

eat the stomach contents of the animals that they kill. So basically the grass inside the gazelle is like a sauerkraut to have on the side of the steak if you're a lion. They get some of this plant nutrient from the stomach contents of the animals that they eat. Maybe not in a soup, but it's part of the process of eating that animal, and it makes a significant contribution to their gut microbiome.

That's really interesting. So, yes. And of course, you're right that for certain hunter-gatherers, I mean, it's worth remembering that modern food, however you want to

Describe it. Modern agriculture, the ultra-processed food industry or the food industry at all, or industrial agriculture, has only been around for 100 years. And in fact, non-industrial agriculture has only been around for a few thousand years. And going back for that for hundreds of thousands of years, if you were human, you were a hunter-gatherer.

I actually think that's still very relevant to us now. It's not, I mean, it's relevant to the way our microbiome has evolved to be appreciative of many diverse plant foods. But actually, most of that hunting and gathering was of fruits, nuts, berries, and fruits. And the opportunity to feast on meat was great when you could get it, but it definitely wasn't something that was available all the time. Yeah.

But I think there's something else about that, those hundreds of thousand years, that's important in a different context and slightly drifting away from the core subject of the book. But I think it's worth touching on anyway. The fact that for hundreds of thousands of years we were –

And we were hunter gatherers and basically we woke up in the morning and we spent the whole day looking for food. And if we were successful, that was a triumph. And often it was really tough, but it was a completely focused activity. It's almost the only thing we did.

Except when we did have a successful hunt or gather and we sat around with our family or our extended family, our tribe, and we feasted on the fruits of our hunting and gathering. And we felt good because, by the way, we weren't stumbling around like idiots. We knew what we were doing. We had incredibly specialized knowledge so that we knew when it was the right time to walk 10 miles to

the middle of the jungle where then we we could maybe even smell the right figs like probably uh chimpanzees and bonobos can't i smell figs we're going into the forest today or when you would go down to the coast on a super low high to find the fattest muscles or that we had that knowledge specialized depending on what the environment we were living is so when we sat down for the feast and we acknowledged that it had been good what else did we do

We told stories, you know, at the end of the meal, we told stories. And what were we going to tell stories about other than what we'd done all day, which was gather the food? So storytelling, storytelling is essentially talking about food and how you got it. That's the origin of storytelling. And I think we have an incredible, hardwired, inbuilt appetite for good stories about food.

And we are much more, it improves our appetite, it improves the way that food tastes if we know it's got a good story.

One of the best stories about food is I grew it myself or I caught the fish myself or, you know, I got it. I went, I picked the nettles or the blackberries. I foraged it. I grew it and I brought it home. We went out as a family and we all came back. That is the original hunter gatherer thumbs up on the story about food.

And I think we crave that. I think it's hardwired into us that food should come with a good story. And a lot of the food we eat nowadays doesn't have a great story or doesn't have the story isn't there. We don't even know. We don't we know nothing about the ingredients or we can make a few assumptions. They were grown in a huge field, slathered in pesticides and got mowed up by a big machine. I mean, that's not a great story.

But this is where something you and I have talked about a lot. This is where the genius of advertising comes in to sell us bad food from industrial processes that isn't very good for us by reinventing the story, by acknowledging that we need, that we have a hunger for a good story. So branding gives us a new story. Advertising reinvents the story. And if you've

developed an irresistible nacho cheesy crunchy crispy corn bite and you want to advertise it on tv so that millions of people buy it you tell a story about i don't know a bunch of mates

No, not even that necessarily. Yeah, you could invent a stupid, dishonest story about a farmer who grew this lovely corn and actually it wasn't. It was grown by a robot in a field. Or you'll be told a story about a bunch of mates who sit down to watch the footy together on a comfy sofa and they've got their beers and they've got their nachos. And when the nachos get popped out and they all share them, the team scores a goal and they all jump up on the sofa and the nachos all go flying in the air.

then we're being sold a completely different story to attract us to that food, which, by the way, has also been designed to be highly irresistible when we start eating it because people are smart. They're not going to give us this industrially processed food and make it taste of nothing. They're going to put

zappy little sprinkly things on it to press all our buttons and make it snappy and crispy because they worked out that's what we like. That was a little depression. That is super interesting about the story and I want to pursue that for a minute but I just want to say to everybody that we will come to questions. It's actually already seven o'clock. We'll come to questions in about 10, 15 minutes. Time is whizzing by but one of the original in my life stories was of course Popeye.

and that was done to encourage kids to say superhero and I've been very upset about the fact that in the rugby internationals now you have a cartoon of a little boy in black and white mowing the rugby pitch and he's going really really really slowly and then suddenly he gets a can of Red Bull and he becomes Technicolor and he goes super fast so it's sort of Popeye but instead of

a nice helping of spinach, which you want kids to eat, he's getting Red Bull. And we are in a summer of sport and you see this insidious association. You know, the story, the story is that Coke and McDonald's are the two people that could, that sponsor the Olympics.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And it's a really good follow on from what we were saying. And yes, we are being perniciously sold some quite attractive, appealing stories. We've got a vulnerability, if you like, to the taste and texture sensation of certain foods and certain combinations of

One of which actually is very unusual in nature, which is the combination of fat and

and sugar in the same thing. So in nature, it doesn't happen very often. I mean, examples of it occurring naturally would be nuts, which have got a little bit of sweetness and they're quite rich, and that's why they are so moorish. And if you add salt, which is the third thing, then they really become explosive. Peanuts. Pressing our buttons. But...

But from an evolutionary point of view, you're tasting fat and sugar combined. These are two of the things that give me a lot of energy from the sugar and a lot of

nutrient goodness from the fat and I'm tasting them both at the same time. This must be an incredible food. Give me more. And so that occurs a little bit with nuts in nature. And the other thing it occurs with is breast milk. So one of the very few foods that's naturally sweet and naturally rich and fatty is the milk, the very first thing that touches our lips. Some of the... So, you know, what is a Snickers bar? I don't know.

You know, it's concentrated breast milk with nuts in it. That's an amazing analogy. I love that. I don't love it, but it's very visual. That's what coffee is. If you get, you know that thing that if you get, if you boil milk down, it becomes fudge. There's enough natural sugar in it.

Speaking as someone who's got a really sweet tooth, I used to be the pastry chef at the River Cafe many years ago, and I would make chocolate cakes and tarts and things all day long, ice creams and all that. I've got a very sweet tooth, but I've actually learned...

not even through, not in a disciplined way, but I've just learned that actually my very sweet tooth gets all the sweetness it needs from recipes with much less sugar than have been handed down traditionally, even in cooking and indeed much less than you'll find in those kind of, in the recipe bars of, you know, layered with chocolate and toffee and nuts and crispy rice and all those things that, you know, go pop and make us excited. So, and my, for a,

decade or so now in my cookbooks I dial down the sugar in the baking and the treats and stuff like that and at River Cottage we serve Victoria sponge it's got half the amount of sugar as a classic I can tell you no one's ever complained that it's not sweet enough never

So in the little time that we've got left together before we bring in, and I can see there's lots of questions coming in, let's just talk about what we're in the middle of an election season.

From what I can see, none of the parties have done brilliantly on food policy. I mean, if we say that Labour and the Tories, Labour, you know, realistically what's going to happen, what would you like to see? What frustrates you the most about the system, which means that we don't eat 30 plants a week. We do shop in supermarkets. And you made a film about obesity in 2018, about

I've worked on this for ages, and I know that while there is a huge amount of people out there like you, and I suspect everyone who's listening to us who eats properly, we are also up against a rising tide of ill health caused so much by food. Well, the first thing I'd like to see is a government or a party saying, we take this seriously.

uh, you know, we, we need, we admitting that we, that it is even appropriate to have food policy. And we've had a big problem over the last 15 years or so. Uh, ideologically, it's not been in the ballpark of the government to say, to say, we, we do get that. It's, it's, it's part of our job to help people to eat more healthily. In fact, uh,

Some of them have quite explicitly said at times, it's not part of our job to help people to eat more healthily. And of course, we are not a nanny state. We are not going to tell you how to spend your hard-earned money. We're not going to tell hard-working families how to spend their hard-earned money. They want some treats at the end of the day. It's not for us to say. Well, if you think that your policy around health is completely non-interventionist,

and that preventative medicine is not something to take any interest in at all, then at least you could say, well, at least you're consistent. But when COVID came along,

The very government for a decade been telling us, we're not the nanny state. We don't tell people how to live their lives. Said, by the way, everyone, you're not allowed out of your houses. You're not going to work. You're not allowed on public transport. You can't do... Which I'm not saying that was necessarily the wrong thing to do. But if you're going to make a massive intervention like that for what turned out to be obviously devastating, but short-term...

health epidemic well obesity is the single biggest health epidemic on the planet it's global it's been raging for decades it gets worse we've just had only a few weeks ago new terrifying statistics that the number of under 40s with type 2 diabetes has gone up 19 in a decade

So, you know, Rosie, whatever you and I have been trying to tell people to do, they're not doing it. It's not happening. So first of all, a government that says we get that it's a problem and we are prepared to take steps. We're prepared to have a policy or a raft of policies to address that. Now, what those policies should be, you and I have talked about this for a long time. But also we know there's...

dozens of amazing agencies out there, people like the Food Foundation, Jamie Oliver, Bite Back Team, really the whole Obesity Alliance, Action on Sugar. There's a lot of hard science. There's a lot of policy research. There's a whole raft of policies that we know are waiting to leave us that government could be pulling. And so far, they barely pull a single one. Now, I think Labour has said that they will continue

ban energy drinks. You just mentioned the Red Bull, they'll ban caffeinated energy drinks to selling to under 16s, which I think is a really good idea. And they've said they will have some sort of a breakfast club, which is not the same as universal free school meals, but might be a start. Then we think, well, what's going to be in the breakfast if it's just like a

a bagel or or or you know or a bun or it's just basically you know bankrupt wheat-based calories it's not going to do i mean it might not do nothing because a full stomach is probably better than an empty stomach but they've got to do better than that but they've said that you know they've acknowledged the problem in their manifesto they've got some sort of outline and it's going to be uh

down to how seriously they take it when the time comes. And the same goes for the Lib Dems. And I think the Green Party personally, I support the Green Party. I think we're pretty robust on this, but we're not going to be shaping policy enormously. I hope we'll be influencing it because I hope we'll have a bunch of, a clutch of MPs who will have a voice in Parliament that will start to make a difference.

But yeah, the first thing is we get it. The first thing I want to hear is we get it. We can intervene. We should intervene. We should make it easier for people to make healthy choices because we recognize. And also, this is not doing it for... I mean, you can say you're going to do it because you care about the people who...

you know your your constituents or your the population um but that's not the only reason for doing it it's going to save a ton of money it's going to put huge amounts of money back into the nhs to fight illnesses that are not caused by ill health but at the moment practically half the budget of the nhs one way or another is taken is related to dietary uh illness i mean uh

That's probably a slight exaggeration, but not much of one. But 100 billion is spent on treating type 2 diabetes. I mean, it's certainly the single biggest cause of need for spending in the NHS. But of course, these things unfold over time. And one of the great tragedies of the political era

is the short-termism. And, you know, who's going to get the credit for this when the obesity figures have been... I mean, to me, that seems odd. If I was a prime minister, you know, I'd make sure that 10 years down the line people remembered, you know, oh, he was the one... Now we see these stats coming in, that must have been...

old Hugh or Rosie who did that thing back in 2024 when they got serious about, and now finally the obesity figures are coming down, the bill to the NHS is, oh, who's in their party now? They're also saying sensible things about food. Let's vote for them. I mean, does it really have to be so short-termist that people can't see, have the vision to see that these things are worth doing?

Well, I couldn't agree with you more. And I think, you know, occasionally you come across people who are doing like the Guy's and Tommy's scheme, which is a 10-year plan. And so it makes you think quite differently on what you would do in year one rather than thinking I've got to sort of do it today. And we've had 687 different obesity policies, you know, from taking things off shelves and whatever that have not made sense.

any difference yet. So we have to... Or get consulted on and then don't get actioned or get acknowledged briefly or talked about for a little bit because there's a certain amount of pressure to look like you're thinking about it. But then, as you say, nothing happens. Nothing happens. And we still have incredible inroads made by the food industry into the government scientific lobby.

into the government, you know, people are in the pay of... Anyway, I'm now going to start taking some of the questions that we've got and starting. So someone called Mini Can, she says, I make kefir at home and I have a kefir smoothie for breakfast. I pulled a beetroot and blended that in. If I do it every day, would it be too much beetroot?

What is too much beetroot?

I think it might be too much beetroot in the sense that you might get bored of beetroot. But I mean, if you're putting some of the leaves in as well, I mean, I, I, the other thing that is, let's not make these things purely out of a sense of virtue. Let's make sure they're delicious. So if you're going to make a kefir smoothie, first of all, use the whole vegetable, the whole plant or the whole fruit. And the other thing is don't over blitz it because one of the things we know about smoothies and fruit juices and things is the

If we over-process them, even if they're made from whole natural ingredients, we can make them so smooth, as it were, that they don't slow down through our digestion. And there's a phrase which is free sugars. The natural sugars in our fruits become free sugars. That's why fruit juice, although it's got some good vitamins in, is not something to glug down for your health in vast quantities.

But I think I certainly don't think you're going to turn purple or suffer any ill effects from a surfeit of beetroot. If you as long as you're enjoying those smoothies.

crack on and you know but find other ways to enjoy your I love roasted beetroot then tossed with leaves and walnut oil and cheese and some parsley rocket that kind of thing and I love it roasted or even just steamed and then cut into cubes served cold in a salad I quite I love it in a sauerkraut as well grated and mixed in with cabbage and pickled and fermented

Makes me hungry just to listen. Thank you to Francis Rubin for saying a word to recognize and thank Michael Mosley for his huge contribution to our health and our diet. And I've really been always very influenced by his thing about not just one apple, eat two. I don't do it many days, but I have read the whole thing of just one thing about why two is much better than one where apples are concerned.

And an apple is much better than apple juice. I mean, I didn't know Michael well. I had the privilege of meeting him for the very first time just three weeks ago at the Hay Festival. Yes, I saw him at Hay too. We stopped and had a chat. He was on cracking form. He recorded an episode of the next series of, I think, is of Just One Thing or maybe yet another one of his amazing shows. But he's done a phenomenal amount to help people understand

healthier lives. Thank you for bringing that up. It's great to remember him and acknowledge the incredible work he's done. I think he'd probably approve of Duncan's question. Wine is a plant-based drink. Does it count? Why don't you say that? Wine

Wine is a plant-based drink. A lot of wine has a lot of additives. It's one of the kind of slight scandals of the wine industry that it's one of the last... Booze is one of the last things left. I mean, there are a lot of problems with the food industry, but most foods, you are obliged to say what's in them on the packet. You don't always know what it means when it says E-103. But there is...

in theory, at least some level of transparency. The drinks industry, I'm afraid, is still rather untransparent. And you can put things in wine which you don't have to say what's in them. That's why I prefer organic, biodynamic and natural wines. I don't encourage people to count them as a plant, but Tim would be, and probably Michael too, would be among those to say,

a glass or two now and then there's definitely some good things in it if you choose wines with less additives i doesn't always mean buying organic but maybe avoid the really big big brand wines some of them use the same additives as haribo's just to make the wine taste the same year in year out so i've been told don't sue me but because you don't have to say what's in them

That's a funny, squeaky bit of the law, isn't it? It really is. And winemakers have been assiduously lobbying to keep this thing where they don't have to disclose. Tim said to me,

The first time I met him, I asked him the same question, but I asked him about cider. I said, so what about cider? That's just apples. You know, organic cider, that's just apples. He said, yes, and it's definitely got some great polyphenols. And he said, as far as I'm concerned, as long as you don't drink too much, cider is pretty much a health drink.

So cider, natural wine, little bit, not too much. Absolutely enjoy it. But I think you can try a bit harder to get your 30 plants without ticking the wine box. Okay. The next question also from Duncan, which I had been meaning to ask you about, because we haven't actually talked about fruit at all, at all, at all. And

really is it vegetable nuts and pulses are they much better for you than fruit how much fruit can you eat i can eat a phenomenal amount of fruit well look fruit fruit fruits are fantastic ingredient dried fruits are a wonderful way to add sweetness the the the issue about nuts is that

They're quite high in fats. But fats are really good for us. That's not a worry unless we get to a point where we're eating much more than we need. Fruits are slightly different. They're quite high in sugars. And so that's also a concern. And if we...

that's why the best way to eat fruit is whole fruits, not fruit juice. Dried fruits, whole, but with the water taken out, that's great, but it concentrates the sugar a lot. So there's plenty of fruits in my recipes. One way I think is good to eat fruits is a little bit of fruit in a salad. I mean, I like fruits in a context of other savoury ingredients where you might add one chopped apple to a salad or a grated...

pear to some grated carrot, grated beetroot and mix it all together. So fruits are definitely wonderful ingredients. They've got tons and tons of good things in them. There's quite a lot of sugar there, but if you eat it with all the fibre and the whole fruit as well, and you don't go crazy. I mean, my strawberries are just getting ripe at the moment, and I probably will eat slightly too many strawberries over the next few weeks.

then they'll be gone and we'll move on to something else. I think the seasonality of fruit is quite a good way to moderate your intake of it on the whole. Just, you know, a couple of apples. I eat one or two apples every day, probably from September to March. And then the rhubarb comes, then there's that slightly lean period while you're waiting for the berries and here they come. So that's what I'm looking forward to now. That's great. Ursula, I haven't,

Aaron's asked, will the 30-a-week message not confuse the five-a-day message? And actually, seven times five is 35, so it's a slightly different

The thing is, they're the same, aren't they, the Fiver Days? It's not about difference. I mean, I'm not massively worried about that because I think 30 plants a week for my money supersedes Fiver Day. Fiver Day has always been about fresh fruit and veg. And as we were emphasising right at the beginning of this conversation, 30 plants a week is opening it right up to include pulses, nuts, seeds and spices.

I do, in a way, they don't contradict because it's not a bad idea. It was definitely a good idea to eat

five reasonably generous portions of fresh vegetables and a bit of fruit every day or more. But to ring the changes, you could eat the same five fruit and vegetables. If we ate carrots, peas, broccoli, an apple and a banana every day for a week, we'd get a bit bored and we wouldn't get a massive diversity. And of course, but the flip side of that is,

I'm not saying we need to go out there and start shopping unseasonally. In chasing your 30 plants a week, you don't have to start eating vegetables or fruits that have been flown in from halfway across the world. We still have an abundance of fantastic seasonal vegetables and many fruits too that are coming through grown here in the UK. And that should be at the heart of our fresh production

plant kitchen supplemented by things from the store cupboard, spices, nuts and seeds, as we've talked about. Yeah. Shahira Kamali Kassam says that she's anemic and she struggles with accessing iron from chickpeas or lentils and chocolate compared with the steak once a week. She says she notices the difference. Should she take supplements?

Can you just eat more? I'm not a nutritionist and I'm a little wary of trying to answer questions like that specifically. If you are, I mean, it depends.

it is probably worth talking to a nutritionist. I would be very confident that there will be things you can do using real food. That means you probably don't need to take iron, but I do know that there comes a point where, um, if you've got a serious iron deficiency, that is definitely one of the things where you might need supplements. I'm not the person to tell you whether you are in that place right now. Um, uh,

But if you are an omnivore and you are still eating a little bit of meat, steak, many delicious ways to eat meat without just eating steak, but then if you're doing that a couple of times a week but having plant-based meals most of the rest of the time, you may have that covered. But if you've got persistent iron deficiency, it's one of the few-ish things where you may need to take supplements.

On the subject of sugar, is maple syrup or honey a better swap in cakes? And what about coconut sugar? I always find I puzzle about that one too, that it sort of has to be better, but then people like you say it's not. In health terms, not really. I mean, I like maple syrup for the flavour, but I've got a flapjack recipe in the book which has maple syrup, and it's relatively...

it's a relatively, uh, the processing of maple syrup is basically a reduction of the sap from the maple tree. Just, it's just boiled down. It's pretty natural. It's not chemically altered. You're not taking anything out of it that you are with white sugar and stuff like that. So I like the fact that it's natural, but it's a free sugar. It's going to go, it's going to go where sugar goes. It's not, there's no fiber in it or anything that makes it more virtuous in that sense. Coconut sugar, um,

is expensive it's it's a wholer ingredient in one sense it's less refined there's probably uh some uh energy uh savings in the in the process if you're looking at it from an environmental point of view but from a health point of view switching these to agave syrup honey whatever it is uh and

And continuing to use them in the same quantities as regular sugar is not going to make much difference to your health. Reducing sugar of any kind is definitely going to be helpful. As we've discussed, you can get the sweetness you need. I mean, I used to have three sugars in my tea going back to my student days. I reduced it to...

two and then one and then half. And I thought I'd never be able to get rid of that half a teaspoon of sugar. And I, I'd go for a week and I'd get bored. And I, somebody said to me, a week isn't long enough. Just, it's going to take two weeks. I said, Oh, I'll give it two weeks. They were absolutely right. But,

But I still have milk in my tea, and that milk gives me that little bit of sugar, the little bit of sweetness in my tea that I would miss if I had no milk. But that's, you know, our taste buds are responsive to very small amounts of sugar. And the crazy quantities, not just in the food industry, but that have been passed down in recipes for cakes and biscuits worldwide.

traditionally down the years, are way off the scale. It's almost like we're tolerating sugar rather than enjoying it. And we can enjoy it at much lower quantities. So rather than worry about switching to some expensive, supposedly natural sugar substitute, dial it down, dial it down, just to the level where you're still tasting it and enjoying it. And you'll find it's probably a fraction of what's in a lot of the recipes you're using.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And of course, you see it in the kind of way they market stuff to kids and the way chocolate is marketed. And when you go into a hospital, all you can get is sweets and stuff like that to feed to kids, which gives them high sugar points.

Yeah, and it's also what the great sort of distraction of the low-fat movement was. Fat was demonized, and to keep people eating the things that had less fat, more sugar went in, and it's much more problematic to have more sugar than more fat. Tony Edwards asks about organic food, and how much difference does it make to eat, to the vegetables and to what you get, does eating organic make?

Lots of controversy around this. There are some studies that have shown

I mean, obviously, most organic vegetables will have less chemical residues on them. There's a discussion about whether the levels of chemical residues are a real matter of concern. I would say yes. I mean, I'm not comfortable with eating lots and lots of... I mean, I want to eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, and therefore I don't want to eat stuff that's been slathered in chemicals. Of course, some of them wash off, some of them don't, etc., etc.,

So you're avoiding that issue if you choose organic. There are a few studies that suggest that some organic ingredients, carrots, for example, and apples among them, do have better nutrient values than their conventionally grown alternative. Generally speaking, I think it's important to eat more plants, whether or not they're organic.

And not to feel you can only eat organic. Obviously, it's a little bit more expensive. And in the end, it's a personal choice. I'm lucky enough to grow quite a lot of my fruit and veg, and we garden and grow organically here and at River Cottage. So that's the choice that I've made.

I wouldn't give up eating fruit and veg because you can't get or can't afford organic. Okay, so one question, this is actually now going to have to be the last question looking at my watch, but something that always, I did see some study about it and someone called Alex has asked, after three days, how much nutritional content is still available in

cut and cut plants like lettuce and cabbage but somewhere that I read that the longer the older the vegetable the more the nutrient quantity goes down is that right or is that I mean because you eat potatoes forever

Well, it's worth remembering that some plants stay alive. I mean, an onion, for example, is still alive. You know, if you don't eat that onion, it's going to turn... It will sprout. It will sprout. Potatoes will sprout. A salad leaf, once you've cut it, is going to lose its crispness. It's going to get a bit floppy. And obviously part of that is losing moisture. Yeah.

I don't have an expert answer to that question. I think, you know, generally speaking, the fresher the better. But I don't think you're kind of seeing the nutrients plummet out of those things. I think it's a modest reduction in nutrients. And of course, if you cook them, that takes some of the nutrients we discussed earlier. Some nutrients will be depleted by cooking, others will be preserved, and you'll be able to access them in a way that you wouldn't when they were out-competed by other nutrients when they were raw. I would

stress too much about we have you know we haven't got much choice either we can't all stride out into the veg patch and pick fresh vegetables every single day uh so if you've got a few vegetables in the fridge you know don't think they're not going to do you any good just because they've been there a few days oh that's very good um i know if i show my copy of the book it's going to

Hovind on Hugh's face, which is a very nice face and it's a very nice photo. It's a terrific book, everybody. And in fact, it's nothing like as daunting as the title implies. And you'll find that you've raced through the 30. Someone asked how much black pepper counts as pepper. And I, what, two...

the right amount for the recipe. Cumulus. That's a very, very easy answer. Hugh, thank you so much for actually giving up your glorious evening down in Devon. It has been about the first we've had. So it's very, very nice of you and everybody coming. Thank you so much. And yeah. And as ever, see you soon on five by 15 and thanks for joining us and see you again. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. Bye bye.