3270: AI, Health Data, and the Vision Behind Zoe's New App

[00:00:03] What if the key to a better health and better lifestyle isn't just in your DNA, but in the food that you eat? And what if everything we thought we knew about nutrition turned out to be, well, completely wrong? Well, in today's episode, I'm joined by Jonathan Wolfe, co-founder and CEO of Zoe. And they are on a mission to rewrite the rules of food, health, and human potential.

[00:00:29] From transforming ad tech smarts into personalised health tech to running the world's largest nutrition science study, not to mention launching a free app in the US. Zoe isn't just making health more accessible, it's making it personal. So today, Jonathan is going to be sharing his origin story, how artificial intelligence and microbiome science and peer-reviewed research are converging to help people take back control of their health.

[00:00:59] One meal at a time. So I want to learn more about the staggering impact of ultra-processed food, and why self-awareness is the real superpower in changing your habits, and how Zoe's technology is on a mission to add years to your life, starting with what's on your plate. So, in a world drowning in food misinformation and wellness noise, how can we all start making choices that actually serve our future selves?

[00:01:25] Well, it's time to get Jonathan onto the podcast, who's going to share his story and much more. So, thank you for joining me on the show today. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Absolutely. I am the co-founder and CEO of Zoe. Zoe is a science and nutrition company. Our mission is to improve the health of millions. And we created Zoe now eight years ago, because it turns out the food that we're eating is making us sick, Neil.

[00:01:55] And a lot of what we've been taught about food is downright wrong. And Zoe has been set up in order to help us to understand what we should be eating, personalised to ourselves, in order to really transform how we feel, and to put us on a path for many more healthy years. And there's so much I want to talk with you about today. I'm reading more and more about ultra-processed foods, food deserts that are being called, that are being termed, where you could be in the UK or the US and live in an area where it's almost impossible to buy natural foods.

[00:02:24] You only can get processed foods. But to start from the very beginning, can you tell me a little bit more about Zoe and the mission that ultimately drives everything that you do? Because you're a huge deal here in the UK. People in the US and around the world might be hearing about you for the first time. So tell me about that mission. Let me do that. Maybe I'll give you a little bit of context of my own background prior to Zoe. So Zoe's actually not my first startup. It's my second startup. I was previously chief product officer at a company called Criteo,

[00:02:52] that was using what we now call AI, and at the time we called machine learning, to create individually personalised ads. And when I joined that company, there were maybe 30 people. There was no revenue. Seven years later, we were 2,000 people. We were close to $2 billion in revenue. We were public on NASDAQ. It was about a $3 billion market cap business. And so I saw this amazing hockey stick. I saw this amazing power of using AI. But at the end of the day, we were using it to get people to click slightly more often on ads.

[00:03:20] So there seemed to be this huge mismatch, I think, between the core of the team was actually engineering team in France. And I think we had many of the smartest engineers in France working on this product. And it just seemed to be this horrible mismatch between the quality of the people and what was possible with this new technology and the end purpose, which was to sell slightly more shoes than otherwise, which is not a bad thing. But it didn't seem like the most important thing you could work on. So I left a couple of years after we went public.

[00:03:49] And I knew I wanted to do something else using data science and AI, but something that would matter more. And I just took a break. I didn't know what I was going to do. And during that break, I met my co-founder, a guy called Professor Tim Spector. And Tim is the real deal. He's one of the top 100 most cited scientists in the world. And he's really the world leader in the microbiome, which is the trillions of bacteria inside our gut. And eight years ago, I had never heard about this. I went to a public talk. He'd just written his first book.

[00:04:19] And I was just amazed to understand that our health wasn't just shaped by our DNA, which is what I'd understood. It wasn't just shaped by how you're brought up in your first few years. Actually, these tiny, tiny bacteria are central to our health. And you can change them. And your journey from physics and ad tech to health and nutrition is a fascinating pivot.

[00:04:42] And in what, three and a half thousand interviews on this podcast, one of the things that I'm hearing more and more is those stories of happy accidents, how people leave a particular industry or job role and then have a happy accident of bumping into someone that they normally wouldn't meet. So was there a similar story there when you met your founder? Did you know him before? What was that story? And how did you know it was the right move? I didn't know him at all. So it was definitely a happy accident. I think one has to be in the right place at the right time.

[00:05:11] Like, I don't think Zoe could have happened if it had been my first startup. And the answer is, he was actually, he had written a book. It's called The Diet Myth. It's a fantastic book. Tim has gone on to write a whole number of sort of popular science books around the microbiome and food since then. And I was personally interested in nutrition.

[00:05:34] I've been on my own journey around nutrition for probably 20 years, ever since I got a sort of set of food intolerances in my early 20s. And so I was just personally interested in it. I didn't think at all it was going to link to what I was going to do next. And then Tim came and talked. He talked about his own science. And he'd been running something called the UK Twins Study. So he'd been following about 12,000 twins for what is now 30 years. They are the most intensively studied population on the planet.

[00:06:03] So he has in his freezers in King's College, London, almost a million biological samples going back 30 years. And so he was using this to understand what role genetics and upbringing has on any disease. And he was talking about this. And it was fascinating because he said he had started off this study with his assumption that everything was about genes. And he was going to discover all these genes that would explain why he got sick.

[00:06:29] But he actually got more and more interested in why it was that you have two identical twins. So they are like genetic clones. They also brought up in the same house. So they have the same environment. And yet, if one of those twins gets cancer, actually, there's not more than a half chance that the other twin gets cancer. And he also had all these twins where one of them ends up living with obesity and the other doesn't. And at the time, sort of 10, 15 years ago, there was no answer for this. It's like, well, that doesn't even make sense. How can they be different?

[00:06:58] And so that is what got him onto the path of many years of investigation to try and understand what explains that difference. And after doing all of this work, he came out and discovered there's basically two things that shape those differences. And that is the gut microbiome. And that is nutrition. So in other words, the food that you eat. And those two things seem to explain why one of these twins might get breast cancer and the other didn't.

[00:07:20] And when Tim was explaining this on the stage, I think for me, it was just like a light bulb went off because here he was applying large-scale data, large-scale data science to human health. And what I thought was, that's amazing. He's understood that everybody's different, but he doesn't understand how to give you individual advice. And that's really what machine learning and our AI is all about, is how do you take all of this data and then give somebody a piece of advice for them that is different?

[00:07:46] So I tracked Tim down and I pitched this idea that we would create a company where anybody could understand their own personal advice. They can do a test, which they could do at home to understand their own microbiome and use that data to get personalized advice to understand how to change what they eat. And so it was a sort of happy accident. I would say that when I met Tim, he told me afterwards he thought that I was mad. I was there with my other co-founder, George. He thought this crazy guy had come in. So he said, yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds really interesting.

[00:08:16] But none of this, the data doesn't exist. So if you want to do this, you need to raise enough money to go and do this big scientific study to get the raw data to power the first version of this algorithm. And that'll cost about 7 million euros. So I said, yeah, OK, great. And so he said, he said goodbye. I thought he'd never see us again. And three weeks later, we came back and he said we'd raise the money. And could we start? And Tim was like, oh, OK, I guess I'm sort of committed. And so I think the story started very much by chance of meeting him.

[00:08:44] But also, I think, because somehow I was in the right place at the right time. And I think that also the technology was at the right place at the right time. Wow. What a fantastic story. I love stories. That's one of the reasons I record this podcast every day. And from that moment, you built Zoe into this science-led company that has reached well over 100,000 members globally. But what were some of the biggest challenges that you had in bringing that to life from that moment?

[00:09:10] I mean, I think anyone who tells you there's not lots of challenges in a startup is lying, Neil. It's like nothing but challenges. And it's the second time around I've done this. And the challenges have been different, but they're very real. The first three years were very easy, actually. The first three years, we just ran what became the largest nutrition science study in the world, where we had like a thousand people come into the clinic and measure all of their data over a week and go home and give us all of this raw data. That was quite straightforward.

[00:09:40] Then just as we were getting to launch our first product, suddenly COVID hit. And I hate to bring up that word on this podcast because I'm still half your listeners are like, oh, I'm going to press skip. I don't want to think about it anymore. But I promise I'm not going to get too much detail. But COVID hit. We ended up suddenly saying, like, we've got to do something about this. So we actually sort of pivoted the company for the next 18 months.

[00:10:01] And Tim and I created something called the Zoe COVID study based upon all this remote data collection technology that we've been building over the last three years as a way for people to share their health. And we had a crazy six days where we built it. We launched it on day six. And over the next 24 hours, we suddenly had a million users sharing their health with us. Over the next few months, they'd got to four and a half million users in the UK, in the US.

[00:10:30] And we also did it in Sweden to be able to have like this comparison. And we were then basically deeply involved in the science of COVID. We ended up publishing about 50 or 60 peer-reviewed papers. We were the first scientific group to understand the symptoms associated with COVID and to build models to be able to understand that. So we ended up being very, very involved with COVID, which I never expected to happen, which I think I will still look back on as probably the best thing we've done at COVID.

[00:10:59] I know that there were a lot of people who discovered they had COVID and said, like, I didn't go and visit my parents or whatever as a result. So very confident that there are people who stayed alive as a result of that. I think the whole team was very excited. Then as we came out of COVID, we sort of pivoted back to the original business plan, which was how do we transform people's health through nutrition? And there again, I think, as you described, we saw an amazing run up in the UK where we're very well known.

[00:11:29] And we've had, as you said, more than 100,000 members, hundreds of thousands of members actually doing the core test, millions of people listening to the podcast. And we've also had our challenges. We scaled very, very fast on the back of that growth. And last year, we had to take the hard decision to realize we'd actually overscaled the year before last and reduced the size of the team, which I think across all the things I've had to do over the last 15 years is definitely the hardest.

[00:11:58] And if there are other entrepreneurs listening, they'll know how difficult that process is of trying to get the business right and go through turbulent times. We're through that. We have been working very hard on continuing to push forward the science, which is the most important thing that we do at Zoe. So we've actually published more than 70 peer-reviewed papers now around the science.

[00:12:20] And I would say the most exciting thing that's happened to me last year is that we actually published a paper in Nature Medicine, which is sort of one of the most important scientific journals in the world. Most of my scientists we work with explain that it's a bit like getting an Oscar if you're published in Nature Medicine. Most scientists in their entire life never get something in Nature Medicine.

[00:12:41] And what they published was a clinical trial of Zoe, where we basically did a full randomized control trial comparing the efficacy of Zoe against the best advice that you would get if you went to see your physician in the US. And we proved that Zoe worked better. So that was very exciting. And the reason we did it is because the scientists that I worked with said, we can't keep working at Zoe unless we prove that this works in the same way that we were doing anything that we were working in academia.

[00:13:09] So that was probably the scariest thing I've ever done, Neil, because basically they're very, very strict rules about how you do a randomized control trial. So you have to define in advance exactly how you're going to measure it. You have to put it all onto a website called clinicaltrials.gov where you define exactly how you're going to measure it. And that's because this is how they determine whether a vaccine is safe or any other sort of drug is safe. So there's very, very strict rules and you're committed to publish it.

[00:13:36] So if you do the test and you prove that Zoe doesn't work, you still have to publish it. And so I had in my mind, how am I going to explain that to my board and all my investors that we did this big study, we proved that Zoe didn't work. And then we're going to basically put it out in lights and say it didn't work. So I think that was the scariest thing I had ever done. But the good news is we had great results and showed that it does work and that for people who really follow the advice, they felt better within weeks.

[00:14:00] They had more energy and we saw real improvements in their microbiome and real improvements in sort of the traditional markers that your doctor would be interested in, whether those are blood markers or waist circumference, loss of weight, all the rest of it. Wow, it's absolutely phenomenal what you achieved there.

[00:14:18] And with over 70 peer reviewed papers and products already in the market, I'm curious, how do you, Zoe, balance rigorous science, that approach that your company was built on with business growth and consumer engagement? I would imagine it is quite a fine balance. I think it's a really interesting question, Neil. I think I would have said to you four years ago, oh, it's totally straightforward. There's no conflict or challenge whatsoever. But I think that would be wrong.

[00:14:44] The challenge is not about saying you want to say something that's not true. That's easy. I think saying like we're really clear, like our mission is we want to improve people's health. So and if you want to do that, actually, you want to have the best science because that's going to give them the best advice. That's going to have the biggest impact. So that's quite straightforward. I think the thing that has been most challenging is to realize that the problem is not just to give people the best advice.

[00:15:10] And I very naively assumed at the beginning that if I can give you the personalized advice for you about exactly how to change what you're eating to best improve your health, then that's the problem. And if I give you the right advice, it's all solved, Neil. You're going to change what you're going to eat and you're going to feel great, right? You're going to sleep better in a few weeks. You're going to have more energy. Your mood will lift, all of the rest of it. And what I've slowly realized is that behavior change is just as important as giving the right advice.

[00:15:40] And I think that has really been the big discovery for us over the last couple of years is that understanding how to help people to make change is and stick with it long enough to feel the benefits is. Is a necessary starting point, even before you get people to understand what to change. And so I would say that has been the biggest challenge.

[00:16:03] And so one of the things that we've been working on over the last, I guess, six or nine months is a brand new app, which I actually can announce here because it's literally by the time this comes out, it will be live in the US. So a brand new app in the US is completely free. It's still called Zoe. So if you go into the app store and look for Zoe, you'll find it, which is designed to allow anybody to get involved with Zoe without having to pay any money whatsoever to get this personalized nutrition advice.

[00:16:31] But it's very much focused on building a habit that allows you to understand how to do something that we call mindful eating, which is starting to be aware of what you're eating, discovering what's really inside your food. And I'm sure we'll talk about that in a minute. But what's really inside your food is shocking in most countries. And honestly, it's the most shocking in the US of any country that we've looked into and then gives you this personalized advice to understand how to make a change.

[00:16:58] And what we've realized is you need to start on that journey for most people before you're even ready to then say, OK, now I want to go and do these tests. I want to get my microbiome. I want to understand what's going on inside my blood so I can get further levels of personalization. And so I'm very excited about that.

[00:17:15] And I think we will be continuing to work very hard on how we support that behavioral change, support that creating a habit of being aware of what you eat, because I think that's probably the biggest discovery. If you start to understand what you're really eating, Neil, then after a while, you will change what you eat because you start to understand that a lot of what people tell you is food isn't really food in the way that our grandparents would even have understood it. And we'll dig a little bit deeper on that in a moment.

[00:17:45] But as this is a tech podcast, one of the things I've got to highlight here is we're seeing rapid advancements in AI, data science and microbiome research. And they're all impressive in their own right. But I think when they converge, that's where the magic happens. And hopefully it will pave the way to a more proactive than reactive approach to our health care where we wait for something to go wrong before doing anything about it.

[00:18:10] So I'm curious, from where you are, how do you see these technologies shaping the future of a more personalized health? I think it's really interesting. I've been talking about this for a long time, right? So when we started, Zoe, we talked about AI because we'd come out of a business that was jeans. But, you know, over the last couple of years, this has obviously transformed with the arrival of these large language models. I had no idea that they were going to work in the way they have done.

[00:18:34] And if you meet someone who says that they knew that was going to happen, I'd be like, I don't believe it because everyone I was talking to, there were proper researchers in AI. They didn't expect it to work in the same way that it has done as the scale of the data grew. It's suddenly changing almost everything we're doing at Zoe. So if you think about that app that I've just described, one of the central parts of that app is the ability to just snap a photo.

[00:19:01] So mindful eating starts with just snapping a photo of your food. And it could be any food, like a plate of whatever's on it. It could be some sort of cereal bar. It doesn't really matter.

[00:19:14] It's not perfect. Magical.

[00:19:42] My children actually love doing it to see what happens. Then we use our AI to be able to look at all of those components, understand what's inside them and understand how healthy they are and to give you back a score. And again, none of this would have been possible without this confluence of all of this big data and the ability to run these models at the back end. Now, I think what's really exciting then is to say, what does the AI unlock in terms of advice? And I think there we are earlier.

[00:20:10] But I think it's incredibly exciting. If you think about what you can do today with ChatGPT and effectively talk with ChatGPT and get advice, I believe that what you're going to see is a really profound improvement in the ability to get personalized advice for what you need to do around health, providing the right data is being fed in.

[00:20:32] And I wouldn't advise anybody right now to ask ChatGPT or any of these models on how to improve your nutrition because they source all their data from the open internet. And one of the huge problems that we have in nutrition is that a vast amount of the things that we're told have turned out not to be true. And there's a sea of misinformation, much of which I believe is sort of directly funded and supported by big food. So I don't think I would want to trust my nutrition advice to ChatGPT.

[00:21:01] But if you could combine these sorts of models that allow you to have conversations and be personalized to you with like the real science that's actually going to give you good advice, I think that's going to be profoundly powerful. And I think that we are moving to a new world where people feel they want to take more control of their health before they're really sick. So when I was growing up, the assumption was when you're sick, you go to see the doctor. The doctor figures out what's wrong with you. They give you a pill, you go away.

[00:21:30] And until you're sick, you know, you should never bother the doctor. We now know that's completely wrong. We now know that if I was going to take dementia as an example, the damage that happens to your brain starts many decades before you show any signs of dementia. If we think about heart disease, I've had a lot of professors come on to the Zoe podcast and talk about this. You already start to lay down plaques in your artery, even as you're a teenager. So this is, again, happening over decades and decades and decades.

[00:21:59] And so that means if you want to live many more healthy years and if you want to feel good now, then you want to proactively be influencing your health. While, in fact, you don't feel really sick, you don't want to wait until after you've had some sort of shock and you're sick and your doctor tells you that your cholesterol is too high or your diabetes. You have prediabetes or diabetes. And so I do think that is the direction we're moving into.

[00:22:25] We are starting to see all of these amazing ways in which you can collect data about your own body at home. We've talked about microbiome. You can test your own microbiome at home now in exactly the same way as historically you would do in a lab for tens of thousands of dollars. And you can do the same with your bloods. And we can now track your exercise and your sleep.

[00:22:46] I think all of that data then provides the input into algorithms that can start to understand what is your state of health and what is it that we can advise you to do to make changes. And that is only going to get better. So I think if we fast forward 10 years from now, I think that is going to start to be really sophisticated and we will start to really see that we can make an impact on public health as a result.

[00:23:15] And I think there's also an increasing awareness around the dangers of ultra processed food. I spend a lot of time in the US covering tech conferences and from Chicago to Vegas. The phrase I hear time and time again is nearly so difficult to eat healthy in this country and find food. So let's bust a few myths on the food. One thing we all share in common, no matter where people are listening in 165 countries today, is we all need to eat food.

[00:23:42] So any myths or misconceptions about food you want to bust here? Yeah, well, let me talk about processed food. So one of the reasons that we've just launched this free app is we've been working on something called the Zoe Risk Scale for Processed Food. And that is a big piece of work because it turns out that the majority of the food that we now eat in the US or the UK or anywhere in the developed world is processed.

[00:24:08] And so that means that it's been modified and manufactured by food companies for various reasons. However, what we now know is that some of this processed food is really bad for us, Neil. But the challenge has been how do you distinguish between something like olive oil, which technically speaking is a processed food because it's not just an olive, right? It's been squeezed and all the rest of it versus something like a Twinkie Bar.

[00:24:33] And so we have created a risk scale that distinguishes between processed food, which has no risk whatsoever, through to processed food, which has a significant risk and processed food, which has a high risk to human health. And what we've discovered is there's a very significant amount of the food that you would buy in the supermarket, which is actually high risk processed food. And what does that mean? That means that if you are eating large amounts of this, this is going to have a detrimental impact on your health.

[00:25:03] And not just in the sense that maybe you're going to live fewer healthy years, but actually this is going to have an impact on how you feel very rapidly. So if you are tired, if you're sleeping poorly, if it's affecting actually just making you feel like a lower mood, all of these things follow from this food. So why are we getting this? And the answer is we're getting that food because it's incredibly cheap to make and it has incredibly long shelf life. So if you are a big food manufacturer, that's really exciting.

[00:25:32] You save a lot of money. But the other thing is, it's the result of 50 years of incremental technology advancement to try and make sure that you eat more of it each time that you open it. So all of these clever nutrition scientists working in big food companies are tinkering with the recipe for your cereal every year to try and say, oh, can I make it so that Neil will eat 5% more of this cereal than before? Because if I do, I'm going to sell 5% more and I'm going to make more money.

[00:26:00] And so these foods have been slowly optimized so you can't stop them. And they are very cleverly designed with particular combinations of salt and sugar and fat. So they sort of overrule our natural inclinations to stop eating. And if you keep eating them often enough, they actually change your brain. And what we see today is we've seen this epidemic of obesity that started in the US. We've now seen it across the rest of the world.

[00:26:30] And now we're seeing an epidemic of a Zempic and other drugs to treat the obesity. And I think that they are actually wonder drugs. I think that's fantastic. But I think you need to step back and say, why is it that we need these drugs now that we never needed them 50 years ago? And it's because of this epidemic of these processed foods and particularly these high risk processed foods, which if you eat them often enough, they are addictive. They literally damage every part of your brain. They transform your microbiome. They basically they don't feed your good bugs.

[00:26:59] They do feed these bad bugs that you don't want to have. That then has influences in the rest of your body. And it's it's really shocking. And I happen to believe that the manufacturers are very aware of the detrimental impact of these foods. And it's exactly the same situation we saw as we saw with cigarettes. These manufacturers are like, it's not our problem. People want to buy them. We're going to try and fund lots of research that confuses the matter and says to everybody, oh, it's just because people aren't doing enough exercise. It's not true.

[00:27:28] These foods are bad. They're hiding. Often you will see that the food that is worse for you will have all sorts of special labels on it saying has vitamin C or high in protein or low fat or fat free. Actually, Neil, if you see those sorts of labels on a food, that's normally an indicator that you shouldn't touch them. Wow.

[00:27:50] And I think as a result of everything you just mentioned, our public health in the US, the UK and beyond are all facing significant pressure right now. So from your perspective, what kind of systemic changes are most needed and where can innovation and technology make the difference here? So I think our perspective now, having been in this in eight years, is the most important thing is awareness. And so the reason why we've just launched this free app is that up until now, people have said, well, like what you're doing at Zoe, that's really great.

[00:28:17] But, you know, you have to be able to afford to buy the product, to use the app and to understand what's going on. And so the first thing we did is we launched this podcast. And I'm pleased to say that it's the it's the number one nutrition podcast in the world now. And that was trying to give a lot of this advice for free. But I think what we realized afterwards is this processed food is an enormous issue. And so we want to launch this app. We're launching it in the US.

[00:28:42] The capability to understand this processed food will be available in the Zoe app in the UK very soon as well for everyone who's who's members. And so therefore understanding what's in your food, I think, is the first step, because I think then the second step starts to be consumers voting with their feet and saying, I'm not actually going to eat these foods and I want to have foods that is not high risk when I eat it. And I want to give my kids food that is safe because the kids food is the worst of all. And I think manufacturers do respond to incentives.

[00:29:12] I think we can see big food changing what they eat. But I would also like to see more regulation. We expect our water to be safe. Right. We don't think it's our job to decide whether or not to drink the tap water because it's fine if there's pesticides and toxins in our water. It should not be OK for the food we eat to be similarly dangerous. And none of this is saying you can't have treats. One of the things we believe at Zoe is no food is off limits. Food is to be enjoyed. Of course, you can have cake. Of course, you can have a biscuit.

[00:29:42] But these ultra processed foods are hidden. People are frequently actually making active choices to buy foods they think are healthier. And actually, they're much worse than the alternative they thought they were going to buy. And I think that should not be possible. And what I love about what you're doing now is it's no longer just about a device, a test, a subscription for maybe well-off people who are constantly worried about their health or even obsessed about it. But it is open for everyone now.

[00:30:11] As you said that, I think that is the most important message here. Getting that free app before thinking about, hey, I need this test or I need this device. Learn about it first and understand and educate yourself. That seems to be the message, right? That's exactly right. And I think what I would say is I think one of the most interesting things for me talking to all these scientists over the last eight years is I'd always assumed that unless you make changes to your health when you're young, it's too late.

[00:30:39] And actually, it turns out that's not true at all. There's these amazing studies where actually they've taken people who are in their 70s and they've got them to change what they eat and they've got them to start to do quite light exercise. And literally within like one or two months, they see profound improvements in blood markers, in energy, in sleep.

[00:31:02] And there's also amazing data now that shows that if you were to switch from sort of the worst diet to the best diet, you would be able to extend your number of healthy years by almost a decade. So I think it's not something you have to have done that is like whoever's whatever age you are, whether you're listening to this, whether you're 25 or you're 75, it's not too late to make changes right now. You will feel the impact within weeks and it really will set you up for more healthy years, even if you are 75.

[00:31:31] So if we have people listening in the UK or the US, they've got the app, they've educated themselves, they've got the head around it and why they need to make changes. Just tell me a little bit about that at home test kit and personalized nutrition program, just help people listening how that works too. Absolutely. So let me start with imagining that you're in the US listening to this. So you'd start by just downloading the app for free off the website from Zoe. That will start you already on this journey of understanding what's going on in your food.

[00:32:00] You can then upgrade that to the premium app, which allows you to get fully personalized advice based upon basically comparing all the data you give us with the hundreds of thousands of people who's participated in the study. And then you can say, you know, I really want to understand and get this even more personalized. So I would like to go and get a test kit. And that test kit will allow you to measure exactly what's going on inside your microbiome.

[00:32:25] So we do something called shotgun metagenomics, which is the approach that is used by the most advanced microbiome researchers. And with that, we can understand the exact DNA inside your gut and discover how many of the 50 good bugs and 50 bad bugs you actually have inside you. This is something that I've now done about 20 times. I've been on this fascinating journey where I've been steadily improving it.

[00:32:49] I then had some like hardcore antibiotics because I managed to drop a heavy weight on my big toe and smash it to smithereens. And I killed almost all the good bugs. So I had managed to get up to almost 40 good bugs out of 50. After those antibiotics, I was down to about five now. And over the last year and a half, I had slowly been pushing that back up. As I follow my program from Zoe in terms of advising me on what to eat, I'm back up to about 25.

[00:33:17] So you can literally understand what's inside your gut and you can therefore see the impact of changing your diet. So you can actually see I am actually improving my microbiome. We also measure your blood to understand things like your cholesterol. We take all of that data and that allows us to then give you personalized advice about exactly how any meal scores for you. And that allows you to understand, OK, so I'm eating this particular meal today. How might I adjust it in order to make it score better?

[00:33:45] And if you can do that, you can look at basically your sort of the score that you get each day. And if you can increase that, you will feel the impact fast. So you will actually feel more energy. You'll feel more sleep within weeks. When you retest your microbiome after about three months, you will, in the vast majority of cases, already see a shift in that microbiome. And all of this is about being sustained. So the most important thing, I guess I would leave everybody with is you don't have to be perfect.

[00:34:14] You definitely don't need to like log all your food. This is not like calorie counting or anything like this. But you do need to say, how am I going to make a change to my life that is going to be sustained? Because if I can shift when I'm eating on a sustained way, that's probably the most important thing that you can do for your health. And I think you have a very important message out there. You don't need to be perfect because here in the UK, if you visit the doctors, you now get your blood tests or scan results from a health care visit sent directly to your phone.

[00:34:42] And a doctor recently told me that this is great. But the problem is many people will take those blood test results in the grand scheme of things are completely fine. But put them into chat GPT or Google, et cetera. And then start getting anxious and worried or thinking they've got something that they haven't. Do you put anything in place just to ensure that users don't get too anxious or obsessed with those results? We're very careful that we are a wellness product.

[00:35:08] And it's a line that we are very careful to make sure that we don't get on to the wrong side of. So we're not giving medical advice. I would say that one of the things that we're very aware of is trying to avoid disordered eating. There are a lot of nutritionists who have been part of Zoe from the very beginning. Like food is our most wonderful pleasure, but it's also something that is tied into all sorts of anxiety and can very easily become disordered.

[00:35:36] And so that's been really important for us from the beginning. So we never say that a food like is so bad that you can never have it. We do not believe that there are such things as toxic foods, assuming that it's not actually been left out to go rotten in the sun. And so I think what's really important is to be compassionate, compassionate to yourself. Recognize that perfection is not what's required. What's required is to start to make a shift.

[00:36:04] And the thing I guess I would say is I have slowly and steadily transformed my diet since I started at Zoe. And I thought when I started at Zoe that I had a good diet. Now I know that almost everything I was eating was terrible for me, but I haven't had to do that in one go. I'm slowly learning and I eat dark chocolate on the sofa, you know, after dinner almost every night. You know, like I'm not perfect. No one's perfect.

[00:36:28] And I'm OK with that because what I recognize is I'm eating a lot of food that really support my microbiome, a lot of food that supports those good bacteria. And that actually makes my health much more robust. But that means it doesn't have to be perfect. It's OK. I can have a slice of cake. I can do those things. But I am very conscious that I'm providing a lot of food that feeds those good bugs. And I think coming back to your original question, the very beginning about these food deserts and all of this processed food.

[00:36:54] One of the challenges is you can go to a tech conference in America and literally look at all the food and say, I don't think I can find a single thing that is going to provide any nutrition to those bugs inside my gut. But that is shocking. And I really hope that we'll be sitting here and even in five years time and say, you know what, that's really shifted because the sort of people going to these tech conferences really recognize that they need to look after their body. If you can't have a healthy body, you can't have a healthy mind. I think that's a beautiful moment to end on. But we started talking about your origin story.

[00:37:24] You've enjoyed a hugely successful career. And I love how none of it was part of a master plan. So for anybody listening, maybe a wannabe startup founder or someone earlier in their career that they're considering a bold shift in a career or pursuing a purpose. What have you learned about trusting your instincts and building something meaningful from scratch? Because I think these words might inspire someone at the very beginning of their career. Thank you. I mean, the first thing is, I definitely never had a master plan.

[00:37:51] So I would say that I would say don't follow a master plan. And try and do the thing that right now you feel really excited about. In my experience, both for myself, but also for people who've been working for me, if you're doing something you're really passionate about, you just do a much better job. Neil, you're obviously very passionate about doing this podcast. As a result, you're doing this great podcast. So I do think pursuing something you feel excited about because you're just going to do a much better job at it is great advice.

[00:38:20] And often things are a little bit by chance and step by step. So grab the opportunity. And the other thing I would say is doing something where you really do feel passionate about the mission and you feel that it's important. Makes tough days much easier. Like if you feel that what you're doing has value, then you feel really good about it. You feel good that your kids are proud about it.

[00:38:46] Or maybe you don't have any kids because the fact that your friends and your family, like they all recognize you're doing something that feels like it has value. This is really rewarding. I don't think human beings are meant to just pursue money or something that's quite empty. I think actually we want meaning in our lives. And I think if you're able, if you're lucky enough to feel like there's meaning in what you're doing at work, I think that is really amazing.

[00:39:13] And it gets you through a lot of the challenges with a startup, which there are a lot of difficult days. And I think I have constantly feeling like I'm not doing a good enough job and I'm letting people down. And what sort of an idiot am I? Absolutely love that golden advice. And I always like to have a bit of fun with my guests. You've shared your insights, your story today, but I want you to leave one final gift for everyone listening.

[00:39:37] We have an Amazon wishlist where I ask my guests to add a book that means something to them or has a particular message that they'd like to deliver through that book. What book would you like to add and why? So I'd like to add a book that I read in the last year, which is called Hooked by Nir Eyal. E-Y-A-L. And I think if you listen to this podcast, you won't be surprised that it's all about saying, like, how do I help to support behavior change with a product? And it talks all about this idea about how do you build a product that's habit forming?

[00:40:07] And I guess something like Duolingo would be your best example. I'm sure many listeners have been hooked on that. What is the underlying sort of behavioral science about what happens with human beings? And how could you think about that as you build a product to try and create a habit? I hope that listeners listening to this will use this for a habit for something good rather than a habit for something bad. Sadly, the most obvious examples of this are products like Instagram, which are making the world more miserable, not happier. But it can be used for good.

[00:40:37] And that excites me. Fantastic. I will get that book added to the Amazon wishlist. And for anybody listening, maybe you want to download the app. Maybe you want to check out the podcast or find more information about all things Zoe. Where's the best starting point? Well, if you want to listen to podcasts and since people are on a podcast, I suspect that might be a good place to go to. Then it's just Zoe, Zoe Science and Nutrition. If you're interested in the product, go to the website, which is Zoe.com.

[00:41:05] Well, I love learning more about the origin story of yourself and Zoe. How it's evolved into this science-led company that's reached over 100,000 members globally, currently expanding into the US. So for everyone listening in the US, I urge you to check out Zoe. And I'll leave links to everything in the show notes. But more than anything, just thank you for joining me today. Neil, it was a real pleasure. Thank you very much. I think Zoe's mission makes one thing clear.

[00:41:30] The future of health won't come from a one-size-fits-all diet book or a magic supplement, a silver bullet of sorts. It's actually going to come from just understanding your own body better, better than anybody else can. Whether that is simply recognising the risks of ultra-processed food, increasing your awareness of the food that you're buying,

[00:41:56] tuning into your microbiome and understanding that, or even using AI to better guide your food choices. Zoe is giving individuals a few tools to take ownership of their health. And the bigger question is, how well do you really know what's on your plate? And what would you change about the food that you eat if you did? Let me know your thoughts. This is a topic that impacts every single person listening to this podcast.

[00:42:25] So please email me, techblogwriter at outlook.com. LinkedIn, just at Neil C. Hughes. Equally, X and Instagram, just at Neil C. Hughes too. Let's keep this conversation going. Let me know your thoughts. And as always, thank you for listening today. I'll be back again with another episode waiting in your podcast feed tomorrow. And remember, don't forget to check out the newly launched Tech Talks Network. Tech Talks Network dot com.

[00:42:51] I now have eight different podcasts split up into separate niches so you can explore niche topics. So let me know what you think of that too. And I'll speak with you all again very soon. Bye for now.