Recap: Scrappy ways to eat healthier and save money | Carleigh Bodrug & Will Bulsiewicz
Episode
12 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Health & Wellness
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Meal planning impact: Checking your fridge and pantry before shopping, then planning all meals for the week prevents duplicate purchases and can reduce household food waste by approximately 50 percent of grocery spending.
- ✓Bread preservation methods: Freeze half your bread loaf immediately after purchase to prevent waste. Stale bread transforms into croutons, breadcrumbs, panzanella salad, or even cake before reaching the mold stage.
- ✓Frozen bread nutrition: Freezing bread converts regular starch into resistant starch, which feeds gut bacteria instead of providing human calories. This creates prebiotic benefits and reduces caloric content while supporting digestive health.
What It Covers
Carleigh Bodrug and Will Bulsiewicz reveal how consumers waste 40% of purchased food, contributing more emissions than airlines, while sharing practical strategies to reduce waste and costs.
Key Questions Answered
- •Meal planning impact: Checking your fridge and pantry before shopping, then planning all meals for the week prevents duplicate purchases and can reduce household food waste by approximately 50 percent of grocery spending.
- •Bread preservation methods: Freeze half your bread loaf immediately after purchase to prevent waste. Stale bread transforms into croutons, breadcrumbs, panzanella salad, or even cake before reaching the mold stage.
- •Frozen bread nutrition: Freezing bread converts regular starch into resistant starch, which feeds gut bacteria instead of providing human calories. This creates prebiotic benefits and reduces caloric content while supporting digestive health.
Notable Moment
Freezing bread actually improves its nutritional profile by creating resistant starch that feeds beneficial gut bacteria rather than adding calories, making frozen bread healthier than fresh.
Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome to Zoe recap where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today, we're talking about something we're all guilty of, food waste, A forgotten yoghurt at the back of the fridge. A stale hunk of bread. A bag of dry wilted greens. They may seem insignificant on their own, but collectively in every kitchen across the world, they add up to a global environmental crisis. So can we change the way we approach food and help curb this epidemic of waste? I'm joined by Carly Bowdreug and Doctor Will Bolsoich to show us how a few simple changes can lead to a greener home, better health, and even a lower grocery bill. A shocking 40% of the food we buy winds up in the waste. That's almost half. So, if I'm paying $60 or pounds at the supermarket, I'm actually throwing away 25 of that. So I'm not only throwing money down the drain, but I think you're also explaining I'm contributing to huge amount of waste that's harming the environment, and presumably, like, loads of nature that's been plowed into fields to make food that we don't even use. But, Carly, you wrote a book that offers ways to solve exactly this problem. It's full of a lot of fun tips and recipes and brilliant facts about food waste we ignore, which I can't wait to hear about. But I'd like to start by, like, sort of understanding the problem a bit more that you just sort of picked up on in the quick fire. Carly, why does so much of our food wind up as waste? When I first heard that statistic that somewhere around 40% of food ends up in landfills, I really thought, okay, is that that much of an issue? Because it just decomposes. Right. But unfortunately what happens when food does end up in landfills and it's mixed in with things like plastic, it emits a really powerful greenhouse gas called methane, which is a not so good thing for our environment. Food waste actually emits more emissions than the entire airline industry. So this is a huge global issue. And then when we think about how many people are hungry across the Western world and beyond, and then also inflation and grocery prices, it's just nonsensical to be throwing food in the trash. My mind also went when I heard that statistic to thinking, okay, is that from a consumer level? And if we're looking at a pie chart, consumers more than grocery stores and restaurants, consumers are actually wasting more. And I think it's just because we're so busy. We're all go, go, go, go into the grocery store, grabbing a bunch of well intentioned vegetables, and then not thinking about what to do with them. And so I might have thought that, like, a lot of it would not be in my house. I might have …
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