The truth about expiry dates, freezing food and vegetable scraps | Carleigh Bodrug and Dr. Will Bulsiewicz
01:02:06 Share

Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. Almost half of the food we buy, we throw away. Shocking really. And not just for the planet, also for your bank balance. Think about it. You pay for broccoli by its weight, but you only cook the florets on top before throwing the rest away. But that bottom stem is edible too.

And in fact, it's uniquely nutritious. It's loaded with fiber, vitamins and other nutrients that, frankly, you've already paid too much for. And broccoli is just the tip of the iceberg. From coffee grounds to carrot tops, we create mountains of food scraps filled with nutritional gold. Today's guest is Carly Boutrach. Carly's published a best-selling cookbook with over 140 recipes made from food scraps that you might otherwise throw away.

Her mission is simple: eat more plants. Her online community, PlantU, has more than 10 million followers. She's joined by Dr. Will Bolcewicz. Will is a board-certified gastroenterologist and Zoe's US medical director. He reveals the hidden nutritional value of these food scraps and how scrappy cooking can get you eating that all-important 30 plants a week. You'll walk away from today's episode saving your money and the planet, all while eating more plants.

Carly and Will, thank you for joining me today. We're so pumped to be here.

So Carly, we have a tradition here at Zoe where we always start with a quick fire round of questions from our listeners. Will is really used to this, but I know it's probably new for you. Are you up for it? I'm so up for it. All right. So we have these really strict rules that we designed so that scientists can't like give us really confusing answers. So you can say yes or no or one sentence answer if you absolutely have to. Okay.

Do we waste almost half of the food that we buy? Yes. Should I throw away my coffee grounds after I use them? Absolutely not. Can I transform my fruit peels into a snack? Oh, yeah. And Will, do we often throw away the healthiest parts of a plant when we're cooking? We do. Can saving food scraps help us to eat 30 plants a week? Absolutely.

All right. And then back to Carly, and you get a whole sentence this time. What's the most surprising thing about food scraps that you found in your writing? Food waste actually emits more emissions than the entire airline industry. And when I heard this, I was just absolutely shocked because I think all we hear about is transportation when it comes to emissions. But food waste is a huge part that nobody's talking about. That's amazing. More than all of the flights and everything that we're told that we should be doing fewer of. Yeah.

Exactly. So if we don't throw away our food, we can feel good about the summer vacation. Is that the conclusion? I think so. And we'll be saving money too. Brilliant. So one of the things I'm really struck by is that the price of groceries has grown enormously over the last few years with sort of inflation. And that's been true around the world. And then our team came back and shared, actually, I think having looked at your research and other things that 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 sort of understanding the problem a bit more that you just sort of picked up on in the quickfire. Carly, why does so much of our food wind up as waste? When I first heard that statistic that somewhere around 40% of food ends up in landfills, I really thought, okay,

But OK, 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 greenhouse gas called methane, which is a not so good thing for our environment, as we talked about in the quickfire.

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, I'm

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, go into the grocery store, grabbing a bunch of well-intentioned vegetables and then not thinking about what to do with them. And there's another piece here, which is scraps, which we're going to be talking about today.

Hey, I'm Dr. Will Bulsiewicz, Zoe's U.S. Medical Director. If you're a regular listener, you've probably heard us talk about how the foods you eat can transform your health. Zoe membership helps you make smarter food choices. According to Julie, one of our Zoe members, being a Zoe member can change your life tenfold. Before Zoe, she said she'd eat ultra-processed food for breakfast every weekend. Today, she no longer eats UPFs and no longer craves them.

Not only that, she's lost over 28 pounds and says she feels a lot healthier. As she puts it, Zoe completely changed my life. Clinical trials prove that Zoe membership works. You can feel healthier in weeks and improve your gut health in months.

If you want to try Zoe for yourself and start improving your health with every meal, the first step is to take our free quiz. We're offending listeners 10% off Zoe membership when you use the code podcast at Zoe.com. Now, back to the show.

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 the supermarket, to the point that makes it to 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. There is 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.

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 scraps and the things that they would normally throw out. Whereas as consumers, we're not necessarily keeping a budgetary line where we're like, oh,

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 more of an accounting process where they're making sure that the food is used up in time.

I've definitely had that argument at home. My wife is generally of the view that she's a doctor. So like, and 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. 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 is 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 time.

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 want to prep overnight oats this week. Oh, do I have oats at home? I don't know. So I'm going to grab another bag. And then I have like seven bags and one of them's going bad. And I think it's just this busyness that is really skyrocketing waste, especially in the Western world.

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. 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 $1,700. 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. You're cutting your grocery bill.

that way too. And 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. I mean, I feel like part of the issue though is that we're busy. We fly by the seat of our pants, right? So we don't necessarily have a plan for the week.

I don't have time to spend an hour cooking. I'm not a French trained chef, right? And I want it to taste good. We hear a lot about eating more plants, right? We talk about that a lot of guests on this podcast. Why is that important? So as you know, I'm a huge fan of eating plants, Jonathan. And really what this boils down to, the argument that I would make is that plants do the most amazing job of any major food group in terms of nourishing not only humans, but also nourishing their microbes.

And so plants contain the things that we would describe as prebiotic. Prebiotic means food for the microbiome. Examples of this, the classics, are fiber and resistant starch and polyphenols. Polyphenols are the antioxidant compounds that you find in many different plants that give them their colors. So like when we see, you know, they say eat the rainbow, really what you're saying is eat a whole bunch of different polyphenols.

So this is what we get. This is what the proposition is from eating plants. And we've proven this, Jonathan, because it sort of started with, in Zoe, we've seen the experience with our members where our members actually, we were noticing, oh my gosh, like their gut microbiome scores are improving dramatically after four or five months when they do their gut retest. The people who are more compliant with Zoe, because they are more compliant, their scores are even higher.

right? But then we actually went forward and did our randomized control trial. And Will, can you just remind people what this randomized control trial of what? Yeah. So the randomized control trial, this is Zoe's method study. And basically what we did is we put the Zoe program head to head up against US government recommendations in terms of food. And if you were to sit down and take a look at the US government recommendations, they're quite sensible.

And to me, they define with clarity what a healthy diet is. And the interesting thing about this is as a part of the ZOE program, we focus on eating at diversity plants. That's not part of the government guidelines. So we say eat a wide variety of different plants and we help people to improve the quality of their diet through personalized food recommendations.

And when you say ZOE member, you mean someone following a ZOE personalized program? Yeah. So the ZOE membership incorporates both the ZOE testing, which is what's done upfront, but then the personalized plan that gets delivered through the program that you will follow over the series of weeks afterwards. And that's what was studied in the randomized control trial. And what we saw at the end of four months is that there were a number of benefits to following the ZOE program.

The people that were generally in the Zoe group, they had lower cholesterol, they lost more weight, they had a thinner waistline. By the way, my favorite statistic with our study was that not only did they lose more weight, they actually felt more full. So they were losing weight despite feeling more full. The other part that I think is like highly compelling is that

the people who were following the program the closest were the ones who got the most benefit. And so this to me is the signal that we need to show us that everything that we've heard about eating plants is true and that eating a variety of different plants of many different sources and different parts of the plants, Carly, this is the opportunity that we have. So maybe tying back to what you were just saying about how much we're throwing away, one of the things you just mentioned is that

We're actually throwing away quite a lot of the food that is actually edible. Can you talk a bit about that? My favorite topic, scraps. So yes, a lot of us in North America especially, it's normalized to discard so much more of the plant that is actually edible. And when we're talking about this, we're going to get more into this in the show, is coffee grounds.

Radish tops, beet tops, broccoli stalks. There are so many amazing things that we could be integrating into our diet that are nutrient dense, delicious, affordable because you're buying them anyways, that we could be consuming that we're all discarding. So as I've gotten more into my culinary journey, it's just been so fun to explore the potential of a whole plant and

that you can use every single part of almost all plants. There's some I haven't conquered, but a lot of them you can.

How much of this has been thrown away? Are you talking about like there's 5% of this plant that you could go and eat in some really weird niche way, you know, if you're vegan or are you talking about this is like a significant part of that? It's a significant part. You go to the grocery store, you put your broccoli in your cart. And I mean, a lot of us pay for that by weight. And if you pay for that by weight and you're throwing away the stock, which is just as delicious, if not more than the florets, you're throwing away half the plant.

And again, money down the drain. Beets are a perfect example too. Beet greens, so delicious, so nutrient dense. And you're chopping them off. Most of us are just composting them, I hope, or throwing them in the garbage. And we're just using the beetroot. Meanwhile, the greens are just as great

great in a salad or for beet green chips as something like kale. So there's really like a lot of waste that is happening here that is completely unnecessary. Yeah. And you know, one of the things is that when we talk about eating a diversity of plants, the reason why this concept works is because every single plant has unique mix of nutrients that helps to nourish your body and your gut microbes.

And so when we talk about, for example, beets, you cut off the greens, you throw them in the trash. The nutrients that are in the greens, in the leaves, are different than the nutrients that are actually in the beet itself. So more plant points. So in a way, this is how we can amplify, whether we assign extra plant points or not to this. This is an opportunity to enhance our nutrition and to improve our gut health. I think a lot of people feel like

a lack of confidence and a worry about whether or not this stuff is really, you know, either, you know, safe to eat, nevermind going to be good for me. And I think about, you know, you're talking about the leaves, for example. I think most of us

grow up in an environment where, as far as we're concerned, you know, food comes from the supermarket. We don't, we're completely disconnected, right, from the idea of farming it. So, you know, if I see a beetroot, a beet with leaves on it or like a carrot, I'm like, well, obviously I've got to get rid of all of that because I only know this is the bit that I can eat.

But I think you're saying that there is a lot more, this is all more edible than we realize? Yes. For the most part. I mean, you want to also use some discernment and I think research. I mean, I've done a lot of that for us with my book and the work that I do. But a lot of what we're discarding

you would be surprised. And it's just like what you said, some of it is quite obvious, like carrot tops. They taste almost identical to parsley. They're fabulous in anything that you would put parsley in. So when you see kind of the vibrancy of the food...

like a carrot top, a bright green, and it's sitting right next to maybe like a big bouquet of kale, you can eat that too. So I can eat the leaves of a carrot? Of course. Well, you make it sound so obvious, but I'm like, I think if it doesn't tell me like in the store exactly that it's like for eating, I'm like, well, I've just got to take all of that off. Yeah. So am I unusual to feel like all of, again, that's back to like feeling quite nervous around it. Not want to poison my family, like...

And, you know, I grew up in like you scrape the carrot clean, right? You take all the thing off. It might be dirty or, you know, like unclean. And you're basically telling me that I've got this sort of fear about this food that doesn't reflect the reality. Yeah, exactly. And it's actually really funny because your fear reminds me of whenever I post a potato recipe in Canada, potatoes are huge crop.

And we all eat the peels. And whenever I post a recipe using the peels of the potatoes, whether it's like a separate recipe or just in a recipe, people are up in arms. How can you eat the peels? Well, the peels have so much fiber and roughage and nutrients. So oftentimes you're missing out if you are discarding the

the scraps. So I always caution people, you definitely want to do a quick Google search if you're ever unsure. I don't want people to be consuming something that they shouldn't be. But for the most part, your peels, your greens, your stocks are consumable. I mean, this sounds a bit to me like bad cultural habits in a way. Yes. Where basically what we've done is through generations, we have

created recipe after recipe after recipe that only uses the actual carrot itself and it completely ignores the top of the carrot. What I'm hearing from you is that next time I have like an Italian dish with pasta sauce, I should go grab the carrots out of the fridge and not worry about picking up parsley at the store. Exactly. I mean, you don't have to buy parsley then. If you already bought your carrots with the tops. Snip, snip. Snip, snip. The unfortunate thing I sometimes see in the grocery stores now is like

They're selling the broccoli without the stock, right? And where are the stocks going? I don't know. I'm assuming discarded. Now I seek out.

the scraps. I want the carrots with the tops. I want the broccolis with the stalks. I want the radish with the greens. And I have to think also, and maybe you can kind of confirm this, but when the food is coming without kind of those greens chopped off, it has to be more nutrient-dense or fresher or stay fresher for longer. That's another thing that we haven't talked about actually is food storage.

Food storage is a huge issue here where people don't know how to store their food. And that creates a lot of waste. So things like spinach, there's some really simple hacks. I hear from everybody that their spinach goes kind of like

you know when spinach has gone off. So if you get a box of spinach, you can put a paper towel in it and it will make sure to absorb some of the moisture. Dry paper towel? Dry paper towel or a clean cloth. If you don't have a paper towel in your home, a clean cloth will work just fine. The same can go for kale. You can kind of chop it up

put it in a glass container with a clean cloth and it will last so long. The other thing, root vegetables, think about your green onions, your cilantro, your parsley, you can actually store it like a bouquet in water, change it every couple of days. But what that's doing is just giving longer life because those vegetables are really seeking moisture as opposed to the spinach where you have to kind of contain the moisture. Potatoes in a cool, dark place.

So there's really these kind of storage shortcuts that can bring longer life and allow you to utilize these fresh vegetables for longer. But really the key here is you don't want to be buying so much that you can't get through them, you know?

The other hack that I always tell people is to invest, and it's not too much of an investment because it's actually probably more affordable, in frozen fruits and vegetables. So frozen vegetables in particular are often more nutrient-dense than the fresh, especially if you have your food shipped in because...

They're harvested and then frozen right away. So they haven't been shipped on a truck and losing kind of that nutrient density. So in many cases, if you're buying the frozen veg, it's just as good as your stuff that you're buying fresh. And then you can store it for way longer, months. And Carly, I think lots of people are like, but how can that? It can't really be true, can it? Because like stuff in the frozen aisle feels like it's somehow not...

not fresh, whereas you go to the nice fresh aisle and it's all there. I mean, is this really true? Is it actually generally more nutritious frozen than in the fresh aisle at the supermarket? Yeah. And frozen berries as well. I don't know about you, but I buy fresh raspberries often. And I mean, it takes a couple of days for those to start browning. So 100% that

Oftentimes, the frozen fruits and vegetables are more nutrient dense than the fresh, especially UK, Canada. A lot of that food in the wintertime is being shipped in, right? So it's sitting in trucks. You have to think it's harvested, then sitting in trucks and transportation and then sitting in the grocery store. It's probably been harvested for weeks by the time it hits your plate, whereas that frozen stuff was frozen immediately. Peak freshness.

Does it make any difference? Like I'm listening to this and thinking that, yes, like we're in New York right now. I can imagine that in January, that raspberry has come a long way. I tend to think of this as conceptually similar to people often ask me, what's the effect of cooking on the microbiome in terms of the food?

And there was actually a study done by Peter Turnbaugh, who's at the University of California, San Francisco, where he took the exact same food and he looked at the effects on the microbiome, uncooked versus cooked, raw versus cooked, and saw that they were slightly different because we are actually changing in some ways the way in which our body interprets the food. So when we freeze the food, it is slightly different.

but not exactly the same and not less in a way so raw food the advantage that we have there was a recent study where they showed that actually raw plant food has a microbiome

And that the microbes that you find on the plants actually show up in the human microbiome. So about 3% of the human microbiome is derived from these plant-based microbes. Amazing. Which is quite fascinating. Now, certainly you don't get that benefit from the frozen, right? But the frozen, we get all the fiber, all the polyphenols, all of the phytochemicals. So you get the exact same nutrients. You get it at peak freshness. You get it at a better price point.

And sometimes it's actually advantageous in terms of being fun. So like as an example, my two year old, we like to give her as a snack frozen blueberries and it's our little hack to get her to eat blueberries and when she calls them frozens and she thinks they're really fun. I love that. So Carly, I'd love to talk about some other food scraps from your book. We were looking through it together and there's some really fun ones and Will maybe you could expand a bit on the nutritional value.

Can we start with that coffee grounds that we had right at the beginning of the Q&A? Because they definitely go straight out in my house. And I've been waiting on this. I can't wait to hear the answer to this one. So I'm a huge coffee drinker and pitching those coffee grounds every day was hurting my scrappy soul. So there's so many things that you can do with them.

They are edible. So what I love to do is bake with them. Coffee grounds really enhance just like coffee chocolate flavor. So I have a great recipe for something called common ground granola. Basically, you take some oats, you add a couple of tablespoons of those spent coffee grounds.

A little bit of coffee, tahini, cocoa powder, toss it all up and bake it. And it's just absolutely amazing. I have seen people cook, bake cookies with coffee grounds. And another thing that you can do if you're somebody who buys baking soda, pops it in your fridge to deodorize.

coffee grounds can actually do the same thing. So you can take them and put them in a bowl, put them in your fridge, and they'll deodorize for the week, which is amazing. And then we can take this one step further. I mean, I am not going to claim I have a green thumb here, but a lot of people use spent coffee grounds as fertilizer. So I've heard that it works really great for some plants and not others. I am not on the up and up because most plants go to die in my home. But yeah, it can work as a great fertilizer.

fertilizer as well. So, so many different ways that you can use a spent coffee grounds. Yeah. So the interesting and exciting opportunity with this is that coffee is actually, believe it or not, the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet.

Because most people are not consuming enough other types of food that contain antioxidants, but the one thing they do consume is coffee. And you know that the antioxidants that you will find in a cup of coffee, and by the way, there's also soluble fiber in coffee, it's derived from the coffee bean, from those grounds. And you can only get a fraction of it because you're basically running water in, steeping it or brewing it, and then taking whatever comes through.

When we consume the coffee, it has the soluble fiber. It has the antioxidant compounds. It also has insoluble fiber. So basically, from my perspective, you could take what you get in your cup of coffee and make it even better by consuming your coffee grounds. The show you're listening to right now that's providing you the latest evidence-based health and nutrition information from the world's top scientists while making it takes a lot of time. We think it's well worth it. All in the name of improving your health.

All we ask in return is this. Send a link to this podcast to someone you think would benefit. And if you haven't already, click follow this podcast wherever you're listening right now. Okay, let's get back to the show. Amazing. I'm going to rethink the coffee from tomorrow. So Carly, how about this topic of sprouting? I am such a fan of sprouting. So this is a way to turn...

that is pennies into such an abundance of vegetables in your home. And you can do this from anywhere, any kitchen. So sprouting is basically this act and everything

Actually, I'm going to pass this over to Will because he can explain what sprouting is better and then I'll tell you how to do it. Okay, so sprouting is basically we're unlocking nature's code for germination, which is where the seed turns into a plant. And so the seed opens up, we unlock it typically with soaking and the seed opens up and out comes this shoot, out comes this plant.

And with it, you have massive dramatic growth of fiber, of protein. You actually have more vitamins. You have a microbiome of that plant. I was talking a moment ago about eating raw food has a microbiome. Sprouts have a beautiful microbiome ready to support your body. And you also get special phytochemicals. So an example of this that people within the sprouting world love is

is broccoli sprouts are known to contain 50 to 100 times greater density of sulforaphane, which is the cancer-fighting phytochemical. So for example, if you want to get more of this sulforaphane, the absolute best way to get this is by sprouting broccoli seeds. And that's a lot less expensive if you do it yourself than it is to buy a whole bunch of broccoli stalks.

So, if we want a sprout, I can tell you how to, and I want to preface this by saying I just talked about how I'm not a green thumb, but I can do this all winter even in Canada. I like to always tell people to start with lentil sprouts. So you take brown or green lentils, dry lentils, which are really affordable at the grocery store, add a cup to a jar, fill it with water, let them soak overnight. The only thing you need, which makes this easier, is like a perforated lid for a mason jar.

Then the next day, you're going to rinse your lentils and turn them kind of on an angle so that they can drain. And you're just going to let those, just as we'll talk about, germinate. You're just going to rinse them a couple of times a day. And what you'll see is little sprouts start to sprout up. You'll know when they're ready. They are bright green, really tender, and you can top them on a salad.

You can eat them. I eat them by the handful and they're just so delicious. Put them on soups. Because lentils, usually you have to cook lentils, but with sprouts, you don't actually have to cook them. You can eat them raw. So that's one of the advantages that we get. And it's quite striking. I love that you choose lentils because like if you start with a half of a cup, I like starting with lentils too. If you start with a half of a cup of lentils. Oh, you're going to have a full mason jar. You have a full quart mason jar in two to three days. Yeah.

I was about to ask, how long does that process take? Three days, maybe two and a half, depending on how fast they kind of germinate in the probably humidity of your home. But yeah, just even starting with half a cup. And if you have a small mason jar, you'll have it.

a full, like you will have grown a full salad in your kitchen. And I think one of the things that I love about this concept of sprouting is that I see it as a solution to so many of the challenges that we currently have. So number one, sprouting is completely inexpensive. I can buy organic lentils

right? And I can, which costs literally like 25 cents for me to get that half of a cup of organic lentils. And then that's going to turn into this massive amount of lentil sprouts in two to three days with very minimal effort. Number two, you don't need a lot of space. So like you could go into a little small apartment in London or in New York, but all you need is one square foot

And you can have a garden on your kitchen top. What's really good to kind of angle the mason jars, if we're going to get into the details of it, is also like a dish rack. So you can just put your mason jar kind of draining on a dish rack and you just want the moisture or any liquid to be draining out throughout the day and then rinsing them. And the third thing is you don't need to actually have a patch of dirt. You don't need actual soil. All you need is your countertop and you can have a garden.

and it's going to deliver to you literally fresh from the garden, the most nutritious food that you could possibly have again in two days and it costs you 25 cents.

And Carly, we will definitely put a link in the show notes. And I imagine, am I right in suspecting you probably have a video that talks us through how this works? Oh yeah, I'll send that to you so you guys can link. So if anyone is interested, you will be able to see how to do it. Now I'm listening to this and saying, again, this is like my fear of food again. Like, is that really safe? Like, I feel I was probably like, I'm thinking about like a potato. You know, I was definitely brought up, well, once the potato starts, you know, grow anything on it, that's it. You've got to like throw it away. You can't eat that because it's suddenly become unsafe to eat.

So I imagine there are some other listeners who like me are thinking about this is like, well, hang on a minute. Well, the food has sort of gone off. You're saying it started growing. Surely now it's not safe to eat anymore. You have to think about it almost like a carrot growing in the ground, like it's the beginning of a process to grow new food. And I think once you try them, your mind will be changed about that because they have such a fresh,

abundant, incredible flavor, like almost poppy, peppery flavor that is nothing you would associate with spoilage, right? Would you agree? I guess that potato sprouting is a little bit different. I know that there are some concerns about that, but...

Yeah. I mean, I think that we need to have appropriate safety measures with all different types of foods, and that includes when we are preparing and making our own sprouts. But I would say for the listeners at home who I would imagine have probably heard stories about food poisoning related to bad sprouts, right?

I think that's where a lot of the fear comes from. I think that's exactly right. I think that's part of this thing in my mind. Well, hang on, isn't that like something you've got to be really careful about? Right. So you have to separate that, which is like industrial farming practice and some of the issues and concerns that exist with that. And then the fact that they're putting them into a package and they're sitting in your supermarket for a period of time prior to consumption, that's a very different thing than you preparing this at home and then consuming it immediately at the peak of freshness.

So the other thing that I would advise is that when people actually go to buy their sprouts, I actually would recommend that you buy specifically sprouting seeds and legumes. So like if it's lentils, you buy specific sprouting lentils. And the reason why is because not only can you get them organic, but they also are designed for higher germination rates and relevant to our conversation, they've actually been tested for pathogens. So they test them for pathogens prior to actually sending you the sprouts. That's an important part of it. Can you help me to understand why it makes the food

like better for me nutritionally? Because I would have thought like you haven't added anything other than water. So how comes it's like any better than just eating the lentil, you know, I guess cooked, but how's it getting better?

Yeah, I mean, I will admit there's an element to this that's almost mystical to me, right? Like it's hard to fully answer this question and feel as a scientist that I've filled in all the pieces. But imagine like Pandora's box, it's closed off and it's got everything in it. But then once you open it, it just unpacks in this beautiful way that expands and becomes so much more than what it started as.

So you have the amino acids that make proteins. You have the oligosaccharides that turn into pieces of fiber. And basically what happens is that nature provided the enzymes.

that are necessary to deconstruct and reconstruct those building blocks into larger pieces. And so over the course of a couple of days, we know for a fact that the fiber content increases three to fourfold, the protein content increases three to fourfold. I don't know how we get this, but we get more minerals, we get new vitamins. Vitamins come from the microbes.

I'm almost thinking it's a bit like, you know, you start with an egg and it ends up as a whole chick. And so you're sort of saying like to start with the lentil just has like almost like the raw materials with this tiny little bit that's alive inside it. And then by sprouting it, it's starting to, I guess, as you said, it's like starting to grow into a whole tree. I just don't know how big a lentil is. Bush, I don't know. But you're saying like it's basically going through all these amazing construction. Yeah. And then we're suddenly getting all of these nutrients that weren't there before because actually the plant, the lentil seed has sort of like grown them. Yeah.

It doesn't expect we're going to eat them. It thinks it wants to be a bush, but we're swooping in at day two and saying, "Hmm, I'm going to eat you." Yeah. So if we zoom in and we want to get super nerdy and scientific here, we're going to be talking about amino acids and oligosaccharides and specific enzymes. But on a more simplistic level, this is a little bit like a question of where do babies come from? And daddy's answer is, "It's magical."

I feel we can talk about sprouting for a long time, but I should move on because you had a lot of other things you're talking about. Water in a can of chickpeas, which has a name that I didn't know and I can't pronounce. Aquafaba. Aqua.

Aqua-farber. This is one of Carly's favorite things. You've made that up, right? That doesn't really have a name, does it? That exists. And I feel like it's quite popular in maybe a niche group, probably a baking crowd. But this is really something you should never throw away. So when you open up a can of chickpeas, we're talking about that liquid that the chickpeas are sitting in. And it's actually magical. So it's really cool, especially if you're somebody who is plant-based, because it can be used as a meringue substitute.

So when you beat that up, you add about a teaspoon of cream of tartar. And what will happen is it will whip up just like egg whites will whip into meringue. So you can make little meringues. You can also make chocolate mousse. The aquafaba is quite kind of gloopy, so you can also use it as an egg white substitute in baking. I love to kind of coat my tofu with it and then put it in breadcrumbs. And it just makes for like a delicious egg wash.

And really, when you think about if you're opening up a cracking open a can of chickpeas, you were just going to pour that down the drain. So the potential is limitless for this ingredient that costs you nothing. The chickpeas are soaking in this water. And so anything that is what we would describe as water soluble, that basically means anything that can stick to water is

will start to leak from the chickpea into this water. So what we find is we actually find that there's both fiber and starches that have come from the chickpeas. And there was a new study actually that just got published. In fact, the actual print version is not coming out until December of 2024. But this study they looked at, the aquafaba, and found that there were around 80 unique types of fiber

And that these 80 unique types of fiber in the aquafaba were actually specifically feeding the beneficial gut bacteria. And these are the beneficial gut bacteria that many people are paying a lot of money for a probiotic. And basically what we're saying is the part that you could discard that people are pouring down their drain, you could be consuming that, making a delicious meringue that has 80 types of fiber that feed and give you those probiotic bacteria. I love it. That's really funny. All right, I'm going to be rethinking my can of chickpeas.

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? 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, again, 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 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. 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 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. I find that a bit disturbing. What's going on in that situation, Will? There's preservatives in the bread, the commercial breads. There's preservatives in the commercial breads. I'm all for supporting local stores, local bakers. But the problem is that if you want to get 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 be, you know, four to five pounds. Yeah. So 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 a dollar and fifty cents 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. But it's also not going to last that long because it smells so good and you will consume the bread quickly. My kids love it. Yeah. 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 like when you freeze and unfreeze the bread, it definitely doesn't taste the same way that it did before. Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like this episode, we have an amazing combination of 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, 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.

That's really interesting. That's cool. I did my test as part of being a Zoe member a long time ago, right when we were first putting them together. And I discovered I had one of the worst blood sugar responses of anybody who'd been going through like there's a thousand people in this clinical trial, which is a bit of a shock. And so I can tell that in general, bread scores very badly for me because I tend to get these like massive blood sugar spikes. So I'm definitely more cautious about it. And it's interesting that there are definitely variations within the bread.

I do really like bread, but I tend to have rye bread now with lots of stuff on it so that I really push up my score. But I hadn't realized that freezing potentially might actually improve that. It's another sort of hack to be able to get away with the taste. But I'm definitely not going to get a bread maker because if you have fresh bread in the house, you're going to eat it. So I think there's also this question about buying less of this if you don't really need it and being a bit more thoughtful about the quantities. Yeah.

I'd love to talk a bit more about sort of the routines that you can create. Because I think I listened to a lot of this and I think it sounds really cool, but I'm way too busy. Is all of this for people who have

a lot of time? Or is it possible to make this sort of scrappy eating that you talk about a practice that just actually works sort of efficiently? And so I'd love to sort of take through, you know, maybe sort of wrap up this with like sort of practical tips for people to do this. And you talk a lot about sort of base meals, and I wonder if that's a place to start. Absolutely. So

The greatest way to reduce food waste is to actually just eat the food that you're buying. We can go way scrappy or you can go little scrappy. And really, the way to utilize the food that you're buying is cooking. And I always say that cooking is like a lost art nowadays. I feel like it is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself and your family is learning how to cook and

And teaching your children how to cook because it's just so nourishing. And then additionally, you're going to be saving money and reducing food waste. People often assume they look at an Instagram page like mine and I think they think, wow, she eats really healthy, but she's eating this massive variety of meals I could never cook.

Like you said, this crazy stuff for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But in reality, even in my own home, we cycle through probably the same four base meals every week. But what's key about them is that each of them we can cycle in different plants. And this serves as both a food waste reduction strategy as well as a way to eat a diversity of plants, which we know from Will's work is just incredibly important.

So these four meals, I have a curry every week. So my favorite curry personally is like a red curry, but you can do a yellow curry, a green curry, all different types of curries. So usually coconut milk or you can do soy milk based with red curry paste and then you can add any vegetables you want. You can serve it over a variety of things, say quinoa, rice, noodles.

noodles. So you can kind of see if you get that base recipe nailed down, how great that versatility is if you don't know what to make for dinner during the week. My other favorite one that I make at least once a week is a veggie bolognese sauce. And

This was kind of one of the first things I made plant-based when I first went down that road that I was really missing. And what I do is I just throw whatever vegetables I have in my fridge. So say half a bell pepper that's starting to look a little wonky, that whole bag of spinach, and I throw it all into a food processor, onion, garlic, mushrooms. I process it up.

add it to a hot pan, saute it up with a little bit of olive oil, and then add just a jar of your favorite pasta sauce. And you've got a beautiful, abundant, plant-diverse bolognese that you've just added so much veggies to and reduced food waste. And is that very flexible? Because again, I think you're very confident as a cook. I'm not, and I imagine a lot of listeners won't be. So I think often worry, well, I

Like if I put in this ingredient and I don't know, like, is it just going to taste disgusting because I'll put in the wrong sort of vegetable and it's just not going to work? I think when it comes to that, the cool thing about plant-based eating, so to give a little bit of background here, I didn't start really cooking until I went plant-based, which was around eight years ago. And the awesome thing about cooking with plants is the stakes are low. You're not worried about kind of making yourself sick.

I always say you can save the meal. You add a little bit too much sweetness. You can add a little more salt. You add too little broth. You can add a little more. Like the meal is always savable. The stakes are so low. And I invite people to get their hands dirty and fall in love with cooking here. But this bolognese, if you add onion, garlic, bell pepper, carrot, celery, and mushrooms into a food processor, add it to a pan, take your favorite pasta sauce in the world, add that.

I promise you that you're going to love it. And then take the carrot tops and snip snip. Yes, and you snip those up on top and you've got a full scrappy meal. Carly, we've been using this recipe that you're describing. It's your veggie bolognese. This was from your first book. Yes. We've been using this in our house for many years and it's a family favorite. The other thing that we do, Jonathan, is if you want to go a slightly different route with this, we just put the sauce on and we just simmer the sauce and we just throw stuff in.

And when you slow cook with sauce of a whole bunch of different plants, they always come out well. They always are delicious.

The third one I want to talk about is a stir fry. I mean, it's kind of like to Will's point, if you have a good sauce, it's going to be fine. So like a great stir fry sauce. I mean, we make probably peanut sauce once a week. If you're a peanut, I'm a huge fan of peanut butter. So peanut butter, soy sauce, a little bit of hoisin sauce, some water, stir that up.

add it to a pan with whatever. Again, this is what's great. So great if you master these base recipes, you can use any type of protein. So I would use a tofu or a chickpea. If you eat meat, you can totally do that as well. And then add whatever vegetables you had to that sauce. If you can master the sauce, your concerns are no longer because it's going to taste delicious.

And can you do this like at the start of the week and then eat this? Totally. How does that? Because I think meal prep.

Monday to Friday. But I think that we can do some things to make it a lot easier to throw together these meals I'm talking about. So perhaps it's prepping a batch of rice at the beginning of the week when you get those vegetables into your home, slicing up the carrots and the bell peppers and the green beans so that when you're making your stir fry or you're making your pasta sauce, you can just throw them into the sauce rather than having to do the chop and the prep. So the

100%, the preparation is 90% of it. And quick point on the rice or other whole grains. If you prepare the whole grain and then you put it into the refrigerator, much like we talked about freezing the bread creates resistant starch, so does that. Refrigerating whole grains, including rice, will increase the resistant starch. If I freeze this, so let's say I make this and I'm trying to make a large amount and store some,

Am I losing the nutrients or am I actually like storing them better than if I left it in the fridge? No, I think that what you're doing is you're locking in those nutrients. And so to me, that's a great option is to prepare a whole bunch of

these things because I think you have one more, Carly. Yeah, soup. That's my favorite one. And I mean, we're heading right into soup season. I always say I'm transitioning into soup season. I just love soups. And this is just such a great way to get your plants in. We call them soup Sundays, like a big pot of minestrone soup. And I think this is like a cornerstone minestrone soup of the diets of some of the longest living populations in the world. This is very healthy. And it's

Again, any plants you have, but foolproof is to start with some garlic, onion, celery, and carrot chopped up. And then add a little bit of tomato paste, your broth, whatever veggies you have on hand. Frozen works great here too. And then you can use a grain. You could use bulgur. You could use pasta and make a great minestrone soup.

If you don't want to have something like a pasta in it, you can also blend that soup. So it's like a thick vegetable tomato soup. A great scrappy hack is I love to just have a reusable freezer bag in my freezer at all times. Whenever I'm prepping stuff, I'll have a second cutting board where I put my onion skins, my garlic skins and everything like that. Pop that into that bag. And once that bag is full, you can dump it into a stock pot with some water and create your own nutrient dense vegetable.

vegetable broth. Onions and garlic are famously known to contain a specific phytochemical called quercetin, and this has been associated with longevity. And it's interesting because actually the quercetin is disproportionately concentrated in the skins. So what you're saying is that you could get us better access to the nutrient that we really desire to have. Do you know someone who wants to eat more plants without breaking the bank?

Someone who throws away their banana peels and coffee grounds without knowing they're full of healthy nutrients. Why not share this episode with them right now to help them eat better and save money? I'm sure they'll thank you. One of our number one questions actually from listeners on the show was around soup.

and a concern that if you take your veggies and turn them into soup, then obviously like you're boiling them away. And then we're like saying, don't you lose all the nutritional value if you do this? Or does this continue to count towards those 30 plants? It kind of goes back to the conversation that we started a little bit earlier, where we were talking about the study at the University of California, San Francisco, where basically they showed that if you cook your food, it still has a beneficial effect on the microbiome. It's just slightly different.

So the same would be true for the soup. And in some cases, you actually get better access to nutrients because the water soluble nutrients are actually brought out by the soup.

So to me, I wouldn't be concerned about that. This just really comes back to the idea of consuming a diverse diet that includes not only many different types of plants, but also different types of cooking techniques. So if you were only eating soup, then you might potentially be missing out. But if you're eating these vegetables in a mix of ways, then some of them in soup, some of them not. Actually, you may be getting...

almost like more than you might have done if you were only eating them, you know, raw or steamed. 100%. And also the people who suffer with digestive health problems, people that have gut issues like IBS, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis,

These people struggle with raw foods and it makes it very hard for them to eat the types of food that we're talking about right now. Whereas when you cook the food, particularly a slow cook like a soup, it really helps to pre-digest the fiber and make it much more gentle on the gut and you still get tons of health benefits. But Jonathan, to your question, yes, there's a reason why we eat soup and salad together.

That's amazing. And so you're actually saying, I just make sure I'd understood that, that for people who are sort of struggling with putting more plants into their diet, and we see that definitely there's a bunch of people who go through Zoey members for whom that's definitely a struggle to go from like you're

that you now have normally in the States or the UK, which tend to be very, very low in fiber and that shift can be a shock and you can get some bloating, all these sorts of things, Will, that you've talked about on other podcasts here. I just wanna play back. You're saying actually sort of soup and things like this

can be easier as ways to sort of increase your plants than necessarily eating those in like a raw or a less cooked way? 100%. Slow cooked in a liquid foods like soups and stews and things of this variety are gonna be much more gentle on the gut because they're predigested. Smoothies, by the way, are also in many ways easier

than the whole food. And then if you were to cook the food like a stir fry, that also does make it a little bit easier than consuming the food raw, but not to the extent that you would get with the soup. To me, the soup is like, if you have gut issues, this is a great place to start. Amazing. I would like to do a quick summary if that's all right. And you guys keep me honest. And maybe I'm just going to share all these like brilliant facts I just learned today. So 40% of the food we throw away, which is absolutely shocking.

We throw away a lot of stuff 'cause we worry about expiry dates, but you know what? There's no expiry date on a banana. We just use our senses. We should feel confident to feel the same way about a lot of the stuff that's in our refrigerator. We should be aiming for 30 plants a week and Will explained why that's so important. And it turns out there's a lot more ways you can get there. So for example, I just discovered you can eat the leaves of carrots.

Who knew? But basically there's a lot more. Like generally if these plants are edible, then actually it turns out that all these things that you're cutting off them probably are edible as well. I think that's like a real, for me, like a really big change of thinking about it. I love this idea that in Canada, you peel off the peel of the potato and eat the peel because that's clearly where all the good bits of the potato is now that I've thought about it. But I love that. Coffee grounds. Who knew you could bake a cake with coffee grounds?

frozen foods are often better than the fresh foods in the fruit and vegetable aisle, despite the fact they're much cheaper. And I think...

That's a really powerful way to rethink about it because of course they also just sit in the freezer. You don't throw them away. Sprouting is magic. I have never done this. I've heard Will talk about it repeatedly, but you know what? Carly does a much better job of making it feel accessible, Will. So I am going to go away and do that with the kids because I can see that that sounds fun and we will definitely have a link on the show notes. The water from a can of chickpeas is magic and has a name. Aquafaba.

And I'm going to be Googling that later just to check that it's not a huge trick. But I believe the two of you. Try base meals as a way to think about what you can eat. And I think the two that I took away as really accessible is this veggie bolognese. You can just like put a whole bunch of these veg that's left over in the fridge, just add it to a sauce. And that, you know, Carly, you convinced me I'm not going to...

make something that is completely inedible. So I'm gonna try that. And then finally, we talked about soup and Will, you talked about the way that it makes a lot of plants really accessible to people, even if they might have some digestive issues, but also it doesn't just boil away all the value of the plants, which is what I'd sort of had a bit in my mind.

It sounded delicious. I like the big pot of minestrone soup. And I guess critically, you need to make sure that it's because you're drinking the soup because you said like a lot of the nutrients go from the vegetables into the water and since because it's a soup, you eat all of this. So we should all be having more soup in our life. I think so. I think it's a great time for it too. Brilliant. Thank you both so much. I have lots of ideas for what I need to do. Make me feel a little bit more confident in the kitchen. I hope that's been the case for a few listeners as well.

Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you, Carly. This was fun. Now, if you listen to the show regularly, you already believe that changing how you eat can transform your health. But you can only do so much with general advice from a weekly podcast. If you want to feel much better now and be on the path to live many more healthy years, you need something more. And that's why more than 100,000 members trust Zoe each day to help them make the smartest food choices.

Combining our world-leading science with your Zoe test results, Zoe is your daily companion to better health for life. So how does it work? Zoe membership starts with at-home testing to understand your unique body. Then Zoe's app is your health coach using weekly check-ins and daily guidance to help you shift your food choices to steadily improve your health. I rely on Zoe's advice every day and truly it has transformed how I feel. Will you give Zoe a try?

The first step is easy. Take our free quiz to find out what Zoe membership could do for you. Simply go to zoe.com slash podcast, where as a podcast listener, you'll get 10% off. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolfe. Zoe Science and Nutrition is produced by Julie Pinero, Sam Durham, and Richard Willett. The Zoe Science and Nutrition podcast is not medical advice. And if you have any medical concerns, please consult your doctor. See you next time. ♪♪