Recap: Why you should eat 30 different plants every week | Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall & Tim Spector

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 plants. For years, our diet's been guided by a simple three word slogan, five a day. While it's well established that eating fruit and vegetables is good for us, some experts believe the five a day message puts too much emphasis on quantity and not enough on vara So is it time to adjust our guiding plant principle? I'm joined by professor Tim Spector and chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, who advocate for a new goal, eating 30 different plants each week. Together, we'll explore why diversity is key for your microbiome and share some delicious ways to bring more plants onto your plate. How big a role overall should plants be playing in our diets? And where does this number 30 come from? So I think first thing to be clear on, which isn't clear on all the guidelines, particularly The UK ones, is what constitutes a plant? You know, most people just think of them as fruits and veg. And that's where this The UK, and many other countries, five a day comes from, where at least one can be orange juice, which is ridiculous to have that as a core health outcome. And really we're forgetting that nuts and seeds and herbs and spices are very much part of that mix. And that's where a lot of these outdated guidelines have gone very wrong because it's it's much broader than people think. So when you're talking about five a day, which one is a drink, you've only got four to have, which can accompany your steak. You know, a few little accoutrements around there and you think you've you've done it. Whereas, whole point is to make plants the center of the meal and actually have the fish and the meat as either optional side plates. So interesting that. I mean, from a chef's point of view, we traditionally have, and a lot of us still do, including myself from time to time. We get very, very excited about animal protein, about meat and fish, and we make a massive fuss of it. We obsess over how we're going to marinate it or get the skin crispy or get the crackling. Once you've obsessed over those ingredients, you haven't got a lot of time left to think about the plant or the veg, which does then become the bit on the side. So we have to recognize that they're slightly tyrannical ingredients, meat and fish. I'm still an omnivore. I enjoy them both. But we've gotta just put them on one side from time to time and then focus on making plants delicious, which turns out not to be hard at all. Not least because from the plant kingdom, you've got the greatest variety of textures and flavors and aromas far greater than you could ever get from …