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Okay, hello and welcome to On Brand with Alf and me, Rory Sutherland. Each month I'll be talking to household names as well as challenger brands about success, challenges and future opportunities in the advertising, marketing and media industries. And today I'm joined by two guests.
Firstly, Jonathan Wolfe, co-founder and CEO at Zoe, the science and nutrition company. Secondly, Charlene Lopez, founder of Medifesto, was founded in 2012 as the first branding agency serving the health technology sector. Now, Zoe was founded by a team of three, a geneticist, an engineer, and a tech specialist. That sounds like a really bad joke, but it isn't. It was literally a geneticist, an engineer, and a tech specialist.
who set up the company with the aim to improve the health of millions. Since its launch, more than 130,000 people have signed up to Zoe's personalised nutrition programme in the UK and the USA, including, as we'll hear, quite a number of celebrities. Zoe customers can be spotted by the circular, the yellow arm patch, which means they're wearing a blood sugar sensor. Recently, Zoe launched its first food supplement. Daily 30. It's a whole food supplement containing over 30 plants.
Now, Charlene's been brand building in the healthcare sector for global pharmaceutical companies such as Imperial College London and GSK for many years, and like most of us, is very familiar with Zoe. So, Jonathan Charlene, first of all, welcome to the podcast. And we'll start maybe with a question for you, Jonathan. Seven years ago, I think, you co-founded Zoe with George Hadziorgio, an engineer, and Tim Spector, who's the professor of genetics and a familiar figure on TV and radio.
Since its launch, Zoe has generated huge social and PR coverage with the help of well-known ambassadors such as Davina McCall, Stephen Bartlett from Dragon's Den, and the Good Diary of the CEO. So we'll go right back to the beginning. What led you to launching Zoe and what makes it unique? Thank you, Rory. And I'd never realized that my founding was sort of like one of those jokes where three people walk into a pub.
So I'm going to have to rethink the whole way I talk about this in the future. That's not how I thought about it at the time. So my background, actually, I was chief product officer at a company called Critio, which might be familiar to quite a few of your listeners because this is marketing technology. and we invented something called personalized retargeting. So if you've ever been stalked across the internet by a pair of shoes or a holiday home, that is basically my fault.
I'd spent seven years there. The company had gone from sort of 30 people to 2,000 people and more than a billion dollars of revenue. So I've been very, very successful using an amazing amount of technology. Like at the time, by the time I left, there were more than 500 engineers.
engineers in Paris. Many of them, I would say, the smartest engineers in France, because if that was before, there was a Google or a Facebook or any of these people in France. This was like the most exciting tech company there.
And they were spending all their effort to get you to click slightly more often on an ad in order to buy slightly more shoes. I will, by the way, when consumers complain about being stalked by shoes, and of course, occasionally they have bought the shoes and they're still being...
snort, in which case I sympathise. On the other hand, you could argue that someone who has become very close to buying a pair of shoes is literally 20,000 times more likely to buy that pair of shoes in the future than someone selected at random. So it is a behavior which, although irritating to the consumer, kind of makes sense, doesn't it? We ought to defend that, I think.
I don't feel bad about doing Critio. I think what I realized was, like, ultimately, we help companies to sell some more shoes. We help to pay for publishers to run their sites. But I didn't feel like I was making the world a much better place. And a couple of years after we went...
public on NASDAQ, I decided that I wanted to leave and do something that felt more important to me. At the time, I had just one son who was about seven. I've talked about this on the Zoe podcast quite a few times, and I just realized... He didn't pay any attention to what I did, Rory. He only paid attention to what I said. He only paid attention to what I was actually doing. And so it felt important to me to explain to him at this point what my values were.
And just continuing to work at Criteo wasn't going to do that. I wanted to do something that I felt like he could understand. what was important and what wasn't. So I left Creatio. I had no idea what I was going to do. And entirely by chance, I ended up meeting my co-founder, Professor Tim Spector. And he was actually doing a public talk around his first book about the microbiome. which was called the diet myth. And to me, it was just like this sort of...
amazing hour. I had no idea that like inside me were these trillions of bacteria, that they were actually more important for my health than almost anything else. Basically, if I fed them the right food, they were going to do all these magical things for me. But if I fed them the sort of diet that I actually was eating at the time, I wasn't doing anything good for them at all. It's interesting, isn't it? Because the microbiome doesn't share any of our DNA, does it?
So in other words, there may be more cells in the microbiome than there are in our body. But because they don't actually share our DNA, it's fair to say they don't necessarily have our best interests at heart. Well, so what's interesting is...
I think if you went back to sort of speak to doctors 20 years ago, they say, oh, yeah, you've got these bugs inside you. Maybe they're harmless or maybe they can do all like bad things if they get out of out of line. And so you should just keep taking antibiotics. anything wrong, take antibiotics, kill them.
What we now know, Rory, actually, is that most of the bacteria inside us are good for us. And actually, Zoe has published a series of papers in Nature Medicine and elsewhere, discovering a whole set of bacteria that we now know are...
really good for us. So we actually talked now about sort of 50 good bugs, 50 bad bugs. And what's happening with these good bugs is you think about each of these microbes, each of these little bacteria, it's like a little chemical factory. What happens is they eat what we eat. So that's what goes into this little factory. And then they create all these chemicals that we don't normally get. We don't get them just from our food.
And we are built to have all of this bacteria inside us, right? All of our ancestors forever. In fact, basically almost every like multicellular organism has these bacteria inside it. And those chemicals, they then cross.
from the gut into our blood and they go everywhere. And so what's interesting in the last couple of years, we understand it's not just like our metabolism that it helps. It's not just that it's good for like our heart, but we now understand it has really big impact on our brain.
So we know that it affects our mood, our energy, and there's even new studies now suggesting that it really affects risks of things like dementia. So I think the answer is you should think about these bacteria as being your friends, but then...
If you're looking after them inside you, you also have to say, well, am I eating the right food to feed these bacteria? And that was really the start of Zoe, is discovering this from Tim. And in fact, they actually affect personality, if that's right. That's true as well, isn't it?
So I don't think that there's any like proven clinical trials that sort of say that they shape your personality. I think what is clear is that they affect mood. And there is like, I think, increasingly strong evidence that there's very strong. evidence for example that if you change the food that you're eating you can have a significant impact on serious diseases like depression.
in very short periods of time and that actually changing the food you eat is as effective as the most effective drugs that are currently being used to deal with clinical depression, which is just, I think, a sign of how much...
food really is medicine. It doesn't mean that medicine isn't also a good thing, but just how much the food we eat matters to us. And I think maybe just to finish the story of Zoe, it's like... I think the key thing that I also realized over time since starting Zoe is that we live in this environment where we're surrounded by terrible food that is making us really unhealthy.
If we are able to change the sort of food that we eat, if we make smarter food choices, we can really transform how we feel very rapidly. So feel more energy, feel more mood, but also put ourselves on the path for like many more healthy years. But it's hard. hard because we're in this food environment where almost everything that's been pushed to us by probably, again, some of the clever marketers on this call.
It's playing on our worst instincts and it's really hard to resist. It's ultra processed food. And if you're listening to this in the UK, we now eat by far the highest levels of ultra processed foods in Europe and our children eat the highest level of ultra. processed food in the world that's the uk is literally the highest in the world for children it is the worst in the world
That's intriguing. How do you define ultra process as distinct from process? So, I mean, so one of the things that Zoe does is... We do a lot of science. And right from the very beginning, we said, you know, when I asked him if he wanted to come and sort of create something, taking his science and turning it into something that could be.
useful for people. So could we take all of this science? He's one of the top 100 most cited scientists in the world. So very, very credible. But the reason why he started writing these books is like he wanted to make an impact actually on the world and on people's health.
Well, look, what you're saying is very complicated and food is really complicated. And you're also saying everybody has different bacteria inside their gut. So the right food is not exactly the same, Rory, for you as it is for me, as it is for Charlene. you've done this, you know, all these studies, but actually you're not able to tell people what to do. That's really what AI and data science is for. And that's what I had been doing at Criteo before.
What about if we take all of your science, we create the idea that, you know, anyone can join Zoe, they can give us data, they could do a test to give us more information, and then we can personalize that advice, but also we can use an app. to help you to understand step by step how to make changes. And amazingly, Tim said, you know, yes, that's a great idea. However, I'll only do that
if you do the real science to make it work, because that science doesn't exist. There isn't enough data out there to do that. He said, to go and do that, we have to do a massive study, like the biggest nutrition science study that's ever been done.
in order to start doing this. And I'm not interested unless you do that. And so... uh he said afterwards he said like i left and george left he thought he'd never see us again he's like well they're gone um and we came back three weeks later and we said well we've raised the uh you know the seven million dollars to go and do this study uh can we start tomorrow And Tim was like, oh, I guess I'm committed now. So that was really, that was the start of Zoe. You called his bluff.
I called his bluff. And for the next three years, it was basically a pure science experiment. We had 1,000 people, almost all of them twins, mainly in the UK, 100 in Mass General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts as well. to get this raw data to understand how all of these different individuals respond to food and also understanding how much of that was genetics and how much wasn't. And what we discovered, which is really interesting, is that almost everything that I had been taught is wrong.
And actually, I would say my story of the last eight years, Rory, is that almost everything I knew about food turns out to be wrong. And every year... I like to discover more that is also wrong. But in this case, you know, I'd always assume that basically, you know, what happened to you later in life is entirely driven by your genes and also your upbringing. Right. So you can completely blame your mom and dad. Because they gave you your jeans, they brought you up, and you have no responsibility.
But it turns out it's not true at all. Actually, your genes have a very small impact on how you're responding to food once you're grown up. And actually your microbiome, right? So these trillions of bacteria we've been talking about is much more important, but your overall lifestyle is much more important and the food that you eat shapes this over time.
So you must notice, I'm just guessing here, I mean, the temptation to consume high sugar and salt products is always going to be there. Do you have a huge Zoe sign-up season in January? Does it coincide with the New Year's resolution? So firstly, Zoe as a commercial entity is still quite...
early Rory. So we ended up doing this science for a very long time. So we did like three years of science, then COVID happened and we sort of pivoted for a couple of years. We're very, very involved in trying to fight COVID. So actually only launched the product really about two and a half years ago. And the reason I'm saying that is, you know, our understanding of the cyclicality is still early. You know, if I compare that to most businesses, right, that have many years of trading.
And the answer is yes. What we see basically is that the day after Christmas Day, suddenly everyone says, you know what, I've got to start thinking about my health. There's a further sort of acceleration as you get to New Year. Day, I think for everyone who's like, you know what, I'm going to worry about it after New Year's Eve. And I think people wake up.
And particularly, you know, if anyone's listening here in the UK or like the East Coast of the States, right, you know, these are northerly places that are cold. I think you wake up in January, you sort of had all those nice things, Thanksgiving and Christmases and whatever. You wake up in January and you're feeling bad about yourself. It's dark. You've probably not been taking good shape. And it is this point where you suddenly sort of reassess.
And so I think the answer is that yes, people think a lot about how they can be healthy. I think the danger is lots of people say, I'm going to do something really extreme. I'm going to make a whole bunch of commitments that are impossible. They set themselves up to fail because...
just like, I'm going to do everything, right? I'm going to give up all alcohol. I'm only going to, I'm going to eat no gluten and no dairy, all the rest of it. And I'm going to the gym five days a week. And sure enough, by like, you know, middle of January.
You've not managed to keep all of those. You're depressed and you give it all up. This is setting yourself up to fail. So I think the good thing is... i think it's great to say i want to go and improve my health i think we really believe that everyone has an amazing ability to
improve their health. And I have been interviewing all of these scientists on, so Zoe has its own podcast and been interviewing all these amazing scientists now for the last couple of years. And I think what's really interesting is across all disciplines, whether you're talking to people, talk about the microbiome or talking about nutrition or talking about exercise, is that no matter how old you are, actually, if you make a change in one of those things.
you can see the impact in like real blood markers in just a couple of months. And so I think, you know, there is this amazing thing. It's not too late. No matter where you are, you can always make an improvement, but it's not going to.
make any difference if you just do it for a month so what you've got to think about is how do i make a change that i can stick with and so that change has to be sensible and it's step by step you know and in my own case i would say i've been on and now an eight year
journey with my nutrition where every time someone asks me it's like oh now I've got it all figured out and then if you ask me a year later it's like oh no I've changed stuff because I've been talking to all these other people and realizing that actually there was other things I didn't know or just that my own abilities have changed. Like if I think about what I eat now and enjoy, like I just would have been like, oh, you'd never like that. That's all like, you know, sounds disgusting.
So to some extent, it is self-reinforcing because you recalibrate your food preferences over time as part of the program. Absolutely. And I think part of the reason that happens is it turns out that is your microbes themselves. So there are some really interesting, rather shocking studies that suggest that if you were to eat... mcdonald's even for like a couple of weeks non-stop you see this profound shift in the bacteria inside your gut and they may be they're creating all of these chemicals
And there may be some sort of reinforcement loop that's making you crave all of this ultra processed food. And you asked me at the beginning, like, what is ultra processed food? Like, I think the best definition I've heard is food.
with a whole set of ingredients in that you could never find in your kitchen. So if you look at the ingredients label, it's got all sorts of things like... gums and emulsifiers and sweeteners, none of which you ever buy in the supermarket and put into your food, but which are basically like only could do in a sort of massive. you know, laboratory, that's basically ultra processed food. And I think what's shocking is this ultra processed food
is hiding in a lot of places. So for example, most of the fast food that you eat, actually it's full of ultra processed ingredients. And most of the ready meals that you would buy in a supermarket are full of these ingredients if you turn it over. course, the junk food that we're all familiar with, we're not surprised now, I think, to discover is full of these. And so sweeteners is a great example of that, where...
I was always taught, oh, sweetener, right? Like it tastes sweet, but it has no impact on you whatsoever. It's zero calories. And so one of the mysteries of the world is like we all gave up the fat Coke for the dark Coke, right? But none of us lost any weight.
We now understand, and there's some really interesting new science on this, some of these sweeteners are having a real impact on our bacteria, and those bacteria are then being influenced. And so these sorts of ultra-processed foods are having an effect. that we don't really understand. But I think what's scary is we are running this experiment on our children and ourselves in a way in which I think many of us would prefer that we had better data before we did that.
And it's interesting. So you almost need to rethink your diet in the sense that you're feeding your microbiome or the good components of it. In other words, you have this kind of inner creature which is separate from you. You know what I mean?
I absolutely do. And this is how I try and... It's a sort of Tamagotchi. It's almost a kind of Tamagotchi model of how to eat. I love the way that you go there. And this is sort of exactly the way that I explain it to, you know, my daughter, who's only five. Um, because I think trying to tell, I was always like eat your vegetables. It's not a very like appealing story, but understanding that like, you've got these good bugs and they need some stuff like the Tamagotchi you're describing.
I think is very powerful and it just helps to reframe this a bit. And it's not like you therefore have to be perfect either. It's more like saying, how do you add? One of the key things about Zoe always is, how do you... add food into your diet that is going to support your health so it's less about taking things away it's not all about deprivation it's not like give up things actually it's really about adding a lot and once you start to think about
Your body is needing all of these things. I think it helps you to make that change. And as you said, the good news is you will shift what you like quite fast. We are trained to eat. food that I think our ancestors would have considered baby food. And they're like, how do you eat that all the time? But we've got so used to it. But actually, once you wean yourself off. quite fast, you discover, oh, I really like this stuff that has crunch. And actually, even after four weeks with less sugar...
you get all the same sweet response you had before. You've just sort of like lowered the requirement. Because there's an absolute bugger in the food industry, which is sugar and salt and things. aren't necessarily added for taste reasons, but as a bulking agent. I think that's right, isn't it? They're used for lots of different... And I'm not a nutritional scientist. So what you have to say is, once you start to...
like really turn these foods into stuff that's not really food. And so you take a yogurt and you rip out all the fat. If you take all the fat out of a yogurt, it's disgusting. So no one wants to eat that. So what do you do? Well, you go and put in lots of sugar into it. Of course. To make up for the fact. And you add like weird gums. So you get that sort of lovely feel of the fat. And so you create this new product that's really been designed to say, well, I wanted to make a loaf.
And sure enough, you have made a low-fat yogurt. And the government advice, by the way, was eating low-fat is good for your health. We now know that that is one of many, many diet myths. It's absolutely not true. And actually shifting from that full fat yogurt to that low fat yogurt that I just described is going to be worse for almost everybody. So they do this.
And it also varies, if I'm right, it varies by person. So there are people who look at insulin spikes after eating. That seems to vary a great deal between different people. Is that right? What foods actually spike their insulin levels? You would have assumed it was a simple kind of glucose calculation, but apparently it's weirdly more individual than that. Is that right?
That's right. So I think I described earlier how my co-founder Tim said, well, before we can do any product, we've got to go and do this really big science study. And today Zoe's actually running the world's largest nutrition science study. who joins and becomes a member can choose to participate in that. But in that first study with a thousand people, we were really looking at these personalized responses. And what we found, which is...
which was really a big shock for all the scientists involved, is there's this huge variation between people in terms of how we respond to the same food. And so what can happen is that, you know, I might eat... you know, porridge, you know, oats for breakfast and my wife might eat it and you might look at what happens to my blood sugar. And in my case, my blood sugar spikes really high.
Which you wouldn't expect with porridge, which has got a low glycemic index normally. The theory was that you wouldn't expect that. But actually, I see this huge spike. And then, you know, my wife might eat it and it still spikes, but not as much. And so we see this big variation. same thing in terms of responding to fatty foods. So you could have somebody who eats two avocados and a bunch of olive oil, that's really healthy fat.
You know, I actually have almost no response to that. Somebody else might have a higher response. And so we see these variations. You know, in my case, it turns out my fat control was quite good. My blood sugar control was very bad. And there I was eating a diet that was full of starch.
was not a good place to be. And that's one of the first big shifts that I made as I ended up sort of discovering Zoe for myself. I'll move on to Charlene now. So Charlene, you worked in the health technology sector for quite a few years. Well, actually, I'm going to ask you the first question. How did you get into it? And how important do you believe that brand and marketing is in supporting just the adoption and spread of health technology solutions?
Yeah, I think listening to this conversation about nutrition is really interesting. Before the days of Zoe and before the days, this is the days of Jillian McGee. Do you remember when she was... criticized for trying to add pseudoscience to food. And people like Deliciously. Before all of that, I worked in the clinical nutrition arena.
And what was really interesting was actually that nutrition itself, it just didn't have the kind of credibility of other areas of healthcare. So one of the issues that we came across when I was working in the clinical nutrition was enteral and frontal nutrition was actually that...
GPs don't have any training in nutrition. It just doesn't factor at all. And we look at the food that's available in hospitals. I think we're trying to change that now. But the food that's available in hospitals is it's not supportive of recovery and health.
And I think those key opportunities that we missed at the GP and all of those kind of healthcare touch points, I think we really missed the opportunity to raise the awareness of healthcare and supporting your healthcare, maintaining good health, which is what the conversation is about now.
NHS are trying to go from sick care to preventative care. And one of the challenges we came up with was medicines management who were making the decisions about prescriptions of clinical nutrition just weren't informed on it. Didn't see it as anything that had a real impact on any of the healthcare outcomes. And actually it was a real shift in helping them to understand the importance of nutrition. It's a foundational impact on recovery times, bed times.
falls in care homes. And I think what I see that Zoe has managed to do through their brand is they've managed to make nutrition scientific, which has therefore seemed to give it more of a credibility. And I think there's been a huge vacuum there. The NHS have picked it up. Public health has in part, but not really to a very great degree, I don't think. And I think that's the vacuum that I see that Zoe has managed to...
has managed to fill. They've managed to make nutrition scientific and I think raised its value in the eyes of everybody in terms of looking after your health and it's a key factor. I also think that the acknowledgement of the... The importance of the microbiome is central to us understanding this. And I don't just mean science understanding it, I mean the public understanding it. Because...
What you tended to have was either very crude heuristics, like, you know, it's fresh, therefore it's natural, it's frozen, therefore it's unnatural, okay? And you also had... I assume, Jonathan, you're a skeptic about calories in, calories out. Are you pretty much? Absolutely. The science is clear that it doesn't work for the vast majority of people. Okay.
So, I mean, I always think marketing and understanding, in a sense, marketing and understanding gut science, the first step is to understand that this is complex. We need a fundamentally new mental model in the public.
in terms of their approach to diet. And I think what everybody's been trying to do effectively is to... um come up with i mean there are there are useful heuristic rules i'm sure but i think what we've got to do is start with the science and then develop the heuristics whereas what we've done is we've done it the other way around in a way
I think where the public health campaigns around nutrition have gone wrong is it's been very prohibitive. You must do this and you must do that. Whereas I think with things like, particularly going on diets, I think... What Zoe's got right is their whole, and I'm actually a Zoe fan, I'm not a member, but I just bought the recipe book. And I really like this ethos that it's about, I can do positive things. So I might.
So I think with exercise, you do it and it's done. You can take the box. Whereas dieting has always been the other way around. Intuition is always the other way around. I have to all day not do something. And I think it's the same thing when we've looked at smoking cessation programs, that you're all day not doing something. And once you can reframe that, for example, smoking cessation, you're saying, actually, I normally smoke 20 a day.
Today, I have not done this 20 times. And when you can start adding numbers and making this an additive factor rather than today else make zero, actually, you can start seeing much more of that kind of gain.
feedback that you get which then motivates you to carry on the cycle and I think smoking cessation and dieting have got the same kind of thing I think that's where Zoe's been very clever I can do something today I tick the box I've done it I've added seeds on my on my toes this morning I've done this And I think that's where they've been really clever, this idea of abundance and trying lots of different things and adding things. I think it's been a really clever approach.
Tell me a bit of your origin story. So you've worked for GSK, is that right? You've worked for a couple of the large pharma companies. Yeah. And then you effectively got into... effectively taking marketing skills home there and taking them into kind of the behavioral change area, I guess. Yeah, exactly. So I started my career in life sciences, probably about 10, 15 years working with the large ones. And I think they're...
Life sizes are very aware about brand. This was the time you had the blockbuster branding. Things have obviously changed now. But they were very brand-centered, and that's what we used to do, was look at how do we build the brand, how do we reinforce the brand, how do we do brand value-add. And then coming into the health tech world, what's been really interesting is they're either founded normally by clinical founders or by...
people who are tech and want to do good and so go into healthcare. That's the kind of majority of the kind of profiles that we see. And I think there's a real, they're really missing a step in terms of brand. There seems to be a huge focus on product.
You know, the fight over engineers and Haltex is enormous. There's a huge demand on them. There's huge pressure on them to get the next features and benefits out. And I think there's a real... gap here which which which is where um my agency manifesto has been working on is how do we all of those values and ethics that you put into your products how do you get them into the brand and how do you make them be part of the whole brand experience
And I think that's something that people don't really think about. They think this is the clinical evidence. We can evidence that we're the best brand, we're the best product, we're the best healthcare outcomes. But that doesn't make you win. You know, when you look, I compare it to mobile phones, you look at mobile phones.
I haven't a clue on the tech spec of all the phones in the category. I just know that I like mine. It fits in my pocket, fits in my hand and does the two or three things that were essential if I wanted it to do. And I think we need to recognize that. whilst healthcare is scientific-based and health tech is based on science and it has to be evidence-based and you have to improve healthcare outcomes, they all do. They all have to. That's the cost of entry.
So you have to have what's that angle that you can have. And I really do think it's this brand experience piece that we're missing within health tech that life science is inherently new and health tech are a bit slow to adopt. No, I can see that. And it's also because you have this problem in any tech group, which is, it's just as prevalent in advertising that a large part of everybody's motivation is to impress their peer group. And therefore... Engineers and technologists wanted...
produce impressive technology to impress their peer group. Sometimes it's completely misaligned with what the consumer wants or ends up in a product that's far too complicated, for example. A technologist will automatically see a marketing solution as cheating. Absolutely. At the amount of times I hear people say, we've done all this without marketing. Yes. That's such a shame. Imagine how many more people who could have helped with marketing.
Well, let me tell you the funniest thing, which I suddenly had this flash of inspiration, which was to go back and say, okay, we generally assume that marketing, and this is the general... belief in marketing, that it's very useful if you want someone to buy crunchy nut cornflakes rather than Cocoa Pops. You want them to move their arm five feet to the right. Marketing works. But marketing, therefore, is unnecessary.
if you've got a really big idea. And then I realized something, which is if you've got a really big idea, it almost certainly requires a lot of behavioral change. And behavioral change is difficult. So I went back and I said, let's look at some really great ideas. Okay. which are just incontestably fantastic. And I went for probably the best idea of all time, although we can debate it, which is smallpox vaccination. We can debate that, but I'd put that in the pantheon of...
Jesus, you know, you scratch someone's arm, they get a tiny bit ill, they won't die horribly or end up hideously disfigured. Jenner spent basically 30 to 40 years of his life effectively marketing. And possibly, we can debate this, eventually they made it compulsory. I think that was about 35, 40 years later. Parliament actually mandated smallpox vaccination.
But the decisive marketing moment was probably a social influencer campaign when you've got the royal family to vaccinate their own kids. Now... What's so interesting is if an idea as obviously good as that requires extensive marketing, fighting against vested interests, religious authorities, prejudice, simply the idea, maybe the idea...
that it's too good to be true, actually. There may be a simple problem, which is that consumers tend not to believe things which seem too good. Chocolate being healthy. Well, you know, it's fundamentally hard for us to believe that, okay? So...
Actually, the really big ideas require a large amount of marketing. And it's always interesting, I think, to look at really good ideas that have failed for marketing reasons. The example would be nuclear power, for example, which was a very bad example of branding. generally don't name an energy source after a weapon. It's just a tip. And so this is fascinating because if we can actually create a kind of community of people, which I think you rather beautifully.
bridge this space between marketing knowledge and technical and medical knowledge. And if you create a community that understand that they're fundamentally interconnected and that marketing isn't the last minute thing where you add a bit of magic fairy dust to the top of the really serious work that's been done by the app designers or the app builders.
I was just thinking, Rory, as you were saying this, that I've had a very similar experience, Charlene, as you're describing. So I have my technical co-founder, Tim. I also have my chief scientist, Sarah Berry. They're both professors. They're both like... world leaders in nutrition science. And they actually said to me a couple of years ago,
you know, this is great. We've delivered this ZOE membership. It's got this program. Now you need to do a randomized control trial. I was like, you know, what's that? And they're like, well, that's the same thing you do with a drug like smallpox to prove whether it works. And I'm like, okay, just talk me through it. I say, well, what we'll do is we'll do this full study.
We'll put half the people will get Zoe, half the people will get the standard of care in the US. So the same advice you get if you go and see a doctor and we'll measure everything and we'll have all of these blood measurements and everything after three months and we'll know which is better and then we'll publish it.
And I was like, well, I can see that'd be very cool. We'll prove Zoe works. What happens if it doesn't work? And they're like, oh, we have to publish it anyway. These are the rules. So you put the whole thing onto this clinical trials website.
And if it proves that Zoe doesn't work, we have to make public to everybody that Zoe doesn't work and we have to produce all the results. And I'm like, so I just want to make this, I just want to make sure I've got this trade. So we're going to do this. We've now spent, you know, at this point, six years and a hundred million dollars or something. We're going to do this whole study.
And if it fails, I need to just publish everyone and tell everybody like Zoe doesn't work. And they're like, yes. And I'm saying, and what happens if I don't do the RCT? And Tim and Sarah say, well, we quit. So I'm like, okay, so I don't really have a choice. So we're going to go and do this randomized control trial. I'm still sitting here. So the good news is that it worked. We actually had the results published in Nature Medicine a few months ago, which is very exciting. But I can tell you.
that from a work perspective, that was the scariest day of my life, Rory, where they finally, and they only unveiled the results because everything has to be blinded. Again, there are all these rules, which is great. This is how we know that drugs are safe. For them, the most important thing was doing this right, doing the science right in the credible way that they've been taught for many decades.
And interestingly, Charlene, they just assume that now they've proven it works. Everybody will buy it. Absolutely. Nobody. And I'm like, I think it's really cool. We did it. Honestly, it's had. not very much impact on sales because most people don't understand this and this level of credibility. And so they hear all this stuff, you know, everybody puts things on an advert saying like this.
vitamin will help your immune system based on no trials whatsoever. We could have a whole nother, I'd love to do a whole podcast about the crazy advertising laws in the UK, which are really remarkable as regards. health claims and foods and things like this. But basically we did that.
I'm delighted we did it. I think that it is, you know, I'm making a joke about it. I think it's amazing to prove that it works, but it is fascinating, that huge disconnect between the way the experts think and... So in academic physics, the publication is the end. A marketer would... go, that's actually the beginning. Okay, you can have absolutely sensational, robust proof of things, and it doesn't change behavior by one jot. Seriously.
Okay. So I have to start with that, Roy. If you look at it, we had robust Richard Dole publish his study on smoking and the effects of smoking. And basically, it took another... 20 to 30 years, pretty significantly to permeate behaviour. So, no, no, this is fascinating. I think one of the interesting things with this was in COVID. It felt to me like this was just about a brand battle.
So I don't think anybody looked into the clinic. The majority of people did not look into the clinical evidence of the vaccinations being offered. Because they didn't, then you default to other ways of making decisions, don't you? And for me, they just fell down to brand. People were assessing whether the country brand, the life sciences brand, and that's what we made our decisions on, and the government brand.
For me, it was about brands. I think it was in Serbia where it was kind of political because you got to choose which vaccine you had against COVID. And people, I think people who are kind of communists chose the Russian vaccine. Okay, so it literally was a kind of, you know, there was no research for scientific evidence whatsoever. People chose effectively the vaccine according to their political proclivity.
But I think that's what brand is, isn't it? You express yourself through brand. Brand is an expression of who you are and how you see yourself and your identity. I've worked in advertising for years, and that has really dumb effects. but it also has hugely beneficial effects because it makes decision-making, you know, effectively.
There's a great quote by Dan Davis, who wrote the book, The Unaccountability Machine, which I recommend to everybody, by the way. But it's the idea that making the world comprehensible to people. Our ability to process information in the world is every bit as important in economics as supply and demand.
I think it has great power. We've done a bit of work with both Waitrose and Marks and Spencers in the UK. And I would say I've been incredibly impressed. I'd never had anything to do with the food industry at all before. I've been incredibly impressed with how serious...
Obviously, they take the quality of what they want to deliver in their brand. And therefore, as a consumer, I bought lots of things from both of these stores. I found that like incredibly reassuring that in a sense, when I'm going in and buying this food and I realize now, like you have no idea.
like what's happened in this food beforehand. So I think you do have to rely very strongly on these brands. And the good news, I think, is that there are obviously a lot of companies who have a brand around sort of quality and reliability that... that you can rest on because you need to. I'll give you an analogy here, which is, you know, I talk to environmental groups and I go, for F's sake, okay, what you need to do is you need to have solar panels on sale in John Lewis.
Because then people walk into John Lewis, there's a bit of social proof, there's a bit of brand reputation, skin in the game. People go, okay, these solar panels, they're a thing. At the moment, you've got to ring a company you've never heard of. and arrange for people you don't know to fix something on your roof. Okay? People aren't going to do that. I mean, if necessary, you know, mandate. Okay, John Dewey and Homebase sell solar panels. Now you're off to the races, right?
And yet people have completely failed to understand this. They assume that, you know, people will, you know, my brother in Venice, who's an astrophysicist, when he bought an electric car, he did go into all the kind of energy efficiency per kilowatt hour. 95% of people are never going to do this because they don't have time to study physics for seven years. Okay.
or Electrum Engineering before they make a purchase decision. Well, there's the Kate Byron thing as well, isn't there? That we know about the brands. We know a little bit about the brands that we buy and nothing about the brands that we don't. You know, you just don't go into a category to research everything.
But evolutionarily, of course, habit and social copying are the two default modes of human behavior. And that's why it makes perfect sense in evolutionary terms, because I've done it before. I'm still alive. I can probably do it again. And lots of other people do it, so it's probably okay. Totally rational. I mean, you wouldn't be rational as a species if you didn't make inferences from either past effects or the behavior of others.
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How do you combat the retention problem? So in other words, are the people who join in January slightly less likely to stick it out than the people who join in July, I guess? I haven't noticed that people who join in January are...
less motivated than other people. I think that motivation is the... biggest challenge for anything that involves behavior change it's hard to make a change it's hard to stick with it and i think one of the biggest things that we've been focusing on is we've been so steadily working on the product which is just sort of two and a half years old how do we support you better?
to understand how to make step-by-step change and also to sustain it. And it's one of the reasons we have this membership, but a lot of the work that we're doing right now is how do you try and ensure that the app is sticky enough, you stick with it long-term.
see the benefits because we know that with people who do stick with it we have you know i mentioned sort of the clinical trial evidence we also just have a self-reported evidence you know if you can get through to um uh sort of about three months then suddenly like oh i just feel so much better i've like locked in some of these changes and you tend to just
continue them. So I think that is a profound problem for us. And I think if you were talking to someone who was a physical trainer, talking about exercise, they'd be saying exactly the same thing. Trying to make this stick is the biggest challenge I think we face as a company. You have, luckily. The science has actually come out as a good news story here, which is that if the activity is additive...
That really helps. I mean, one great thing I will suggest is a bit of free marketing advice. I would have thought a brand partnership with Ocado would be a very clever thing to do because, of course, in a sense... If people adopt this behavior and a cardo makes it easier by dint of delivery to actually have your full repertoire.
that it's good news for them in terms of repeat orders, and it's good news for you in terms of repeat sales. I think that brand partnerships is where an awful lot of businesses should start. It's not a big business, partly because it doesn't have a big budget. There's an irony in marketing services that the things that are inexpensive to do are actually under-focused on because they're not expensive.
You know, the brand media budget gets a massive amount of attention, whereas the brand partnership budget gets two people working on it part time, despite the fact that it can be absolutely hugely valuable. But this is, I think, something that the whole stickability thing is something we'd love to look at. I think it is because it doesn't require constant self-denial. I think we can be hopeful here, particularly if you tell people.
you know, you'll only notice the difference. This is a very strange thing, okay? But you could borrow here from the Silk Cut launch campaign, which was... They actually had the two-week challenge because they realized people wouldn't change their brand of cigarette unless they stuck with it for two weeks. They moved people. In fairness, it was a lower-tar cigarette, so we can give them a tiny bit of credit. Okay, not much. Okay.
But there's an ad which will never, ever be shown because it's actually set on, basically, it borrows from Zulu and Rourke's Drift. You can find it on YouTube. But nonetheless, the two-week challenge was a great idea. So I think that stickiness is fascinating. The other question is to both of you, actually. In both cases, how would you see yourself maintaining a lead in the sector as technology changes? I actually think that for us...
All of the technology that allows you to measure better what's going on in your body is incredibly exciting because all of that is basically data to allow us to understand better what's going on, apply this science to give you then this personalized advice to start to give you.
basically effectively better control over this preventative health that we're talking about. How can you like extend the number of healthy years? And so actually... historically you could only get information when you went to a hospital or maybe you know a uh a doctor's and today
You can wear a continuous glucose monitor and measure your blood sugar for two weeks, or you can have a device on your arm that is measuring your exercise. I think that's incredibly exciting. The more we get, the more that powers us. Ultimately, it's the science that can take all of this data, compare it with hundreds of thousands, millions of people in the future that makes it really work. And the microbiome story is like that. We use this shotgun sequencing. It's sort of the most...
advanced technology to understand all the bacteria in your gut. But actually, the underlying technology is delivered by other companies that actually create the physical device. The important thing is how do you then take the hundreds of thousands of samples and understand how to understand it. So I think I review all of those as very exciting. I wish that there was more. The faster it comes, I think the better for us and for everybody else.
Do you also see a sort of social component? Is the programme stickier if you get... two partners, for example, to participate simultaneously? Definitely. The biggest challenge that we find is people who say, like, my partner is really resistant and doesn't want to change. And the biggest win is, oh, my partner's really into this and we're doing it together. And in those cases...
places the the chances of success are very high so that is it's really interesting like it's um you know we're talking increasingly like zoe is a sort of a way of life and so if if you're living your way of life and it matches with the people around you it's very easy If they're all like, oh, we're all going to go to McDonald's now, right? You're making this, this is hard. Got it. I think this idea of motivators is really interesting.
The messaging that goes, I mean, you can nudge people to do certain behaviors, but actually I think it's really important on the messaging that goes out and why you're nudging their behaviors. Because yes, you can nudge people and get into sign-ups, but are you actually going to attract the right kind of members who are then going to...
be retained and actually improve their health and achieve the mission. A recent research project that I did in Lebanon was try to create a donor blood system because there isn't one. And a lot of research was into... Yes, you can financially motivate people into donating blood. But actually what we found out from that, from the research, was actually that you're going to be getting unsafe blood donations. So people who have got blood disease.
Yeah. So actually you have to be really, really careful on the messaging. You're not just nudging people to donate blood. You're making sure you're tapping into the right audience who, and if you get the messaging right, there's actually a cohort of people who, if you go through altruistic messaging. You're likely to get a higher quality blood, as in absent of diseases.
And repeating over years and years, because that's what it's all about. It's about people repeatedly doing the same action. It's much easier to get one person on board who's going to repeatedly do this than the last 10 people who are going to do this once and then have low quality budget surprise.
I think it's really, really important when you do those nudges that it's done in a mindful way of actually who are the people we want to attract and what's the long-term actions and value to the company. This is actually incredibly important. I always think it goes back to that Aesop fable, sort of, what is it? Must be now pretty much two and a half thousand years old, of the north wind and the sun competing to get someone to take their coat off. Do you know that?
The Aesop fable. And the wind tries to do it by force, which causes the man to hold onto his coat more and more tightly. And the sun is simply... beats down on the man until he's warm enough to want to take off his coat, which is the whole lesson that persuasion is actually better than, is fundamentally better than compulsion because it doesn't create this resistance and reactance.
Actually, a brand partnership with Gusto or HelloFresh must be on the cards as well. That would be very interesting because that's, of course, food purchased collectively. by repeat purchase. So it could be very, very interesting. An awful lot of dietary advice came from a very narrow set of medical studies and was based on assumptions, for example, that dietary fat...
led directly to bodily fat, for instance. I think that was one of the big assumptions, wasn't it? And also that dietary cholesterol necessarily leads to bodily cholesterol. And effectively, one of the great things is that... This is why it's such genuine progress. It is effectively the abandonment of some very lazy and convenient assumptions. I mean, it's interesting, of course, that it's only in English that the word fat...
and the word fat is the same word. If you think about it, it's a peculiarity of the English language that the bodily condition and the description of the food type happen to share an etymology. which you might say is a disadvantage for the Anglosphere in terms of them rethinking their kind of health.
That's interesting. I never thought of that. Maybe this is why if you're Mediterranean, you're happy to pour olive oil all over your food because you know it's a great source of health. And many of us were brought, I was definitely brought up to believe that like covering something in oil was bad for you.
And we now understand that, you know, olive oil is one of the healthiest things that you could add to your diet. There's almost nothing that you wouldn't make healthier if you added olive oil. But I think many of us are like, well, hang on a minute, but that's like full of fat.
How can that be good for you? I think nuts is another great example, demonized in the past because they're very high in fat. And we now also know, based upon a lot of clinical trials, that these are some of the healthiest things, which is not that surprising because it's got... all the goodness wrapped up inside it right to build a new tree you know once you start to think about it you can see and it's
got all of these amazing polyphenols because it's got to survive, keep that thing alive potentially for years, protect it in the environment before it becomes this new tree. So I would say just more broadly. It's hard to eat well. And I don't think anyone listening to this should feel bad. And I think there's two big reasons. The first is that...
Much of the government guidelines that we have been given in the past have turned out to just be wrong. And Rory, you just mentioned a couple of them, right? Don't eat food with cholesterol and it will give you cholesterol. Absolutely proven to be false now. Don't eat too much fat because it will make you fat. Right. This is what people used to say. Absolutely proven not to be true. And just sort of.
limitless series of these guidelines have been reversed, which leave people confused. There is some good news, isn't there, for the indulgent, which is I read somewhere that high-quality ice cream is actually pretty healthy. Haven't heard that one on ice cream, but what I can definitely say is that high quality chocolate.
we now know is healthy. And that is because chocolate is a plant. It's actually a very complex plant with a lot of fiber and lots of other nutrients in it. And so if you were eating a dark chocolate, particularly something that is sort of like at the 70%. level actually that's pretty good that's my excuse to eat an entire bar every night after dinner which is maybe a little bit more than i should be doing but um i think that is good news and the other one that's really interesting is coffee
which again, Tim tells me there's a doctor in the 80s. He was constantly telling people at heart risk, you must stop drinking coffee. It might kill you. And the evidence now actually is that if you're drinking coffee regularly, could actually reduce your risk of death. And one final question. Is this something where people are in pursuit of these aims? First of all, you make it easier by making it additive rather than subtractive.
which I think is really significant. And letting people know that effectively, I think that's a really, really important insight because behaviorally, that's much easier than the opposite. Is it also something where if you fail once a week and you're starving and it's 10 o'clock and you tootle down to the fast food outlet, does that undo all the good work?
Because that's not. And I think that's really key, Rory, which is that you don't have to be perfect. And one of the reasons that... zoe's delivered as a long-term membership is because you can't just it isn't about like here's a list of foods just go and follow them and do this this is about understanding for you with the food that you eat and we all eat such different food right that's when you go into a supermarket There's such an enormous variety of things there. How can you help? How can...
How can we help you sort of step by step to make changes and recognize that you aren't going to be perfect? And that is fine. Like anything that is built upon this idea of perfection is going to fail. It's not. realistic. And actually the biggest thing is just rethink this idea and to start thinking about diversity and how am I able to add things into my diet, but recognize that it's not so easy.
to understand how to change these things. And one of the things we've ended up doing is providing more and more support around recipes and all these sorts of things to understand, okay, how can I actually make these changes? And one thing we ought to remember is that, you know, generally fresh vegetables, although frozen vegetables are actually extremely good value for money, aren't they? Absolutely. Presumably you're okay on frozen food.
Well, interestingly, again, like total, again, one of the many myths that the food manufacturers have delivered to us. Interestingly, frozen vegetables are often... better for us in terms of health than fresh vegetables, which sounds crazy, right? Food plausible.
yeah but well i i feel like again you know the we've been sort of trained like the freshly must be better because it's much more expensive but because the frozen food is basically frozen immediately the point it's picked right you can get this blackberry which will have been picked and immediately frozen or this pea that's immediately frozen versus something that might have spent you know a week coming to us and also has to be like sort of
grown carefully to survive for a long time before you buy it in the supermarket. So weirdly, actually... tinned food as well, often the nutrients in tinned food might be better than the nutrients in something that's fresh. And I think that's quite exciting because people often say, well, hang on a minute, if I'm going to eat more plants in my diet, isn't that going to be really expensive?
Actually, one of the biggest changes I've made in my diet is I eat a lot more beans than I used to. And they're just about the cheapest thing. that i can buy at the supermarket is a tin of beans and even a tin of organic beans is incredibly cheap so there is It's not really expensive, but it does require you to start to understand how do I shift when I'm eating? And I think that is probably the biggest thing we end up helping people to do.
This is one of the worst problems. I've worked with a few people in this domain. And one of the worst problems, of course, is organic. Nobody knew what it meant. They just took it to mean posh food. Okay. And similarly, we have this idea that fetishization of fresh is very unfair on people who are more income-restrained, because what the government was effectively telling people was, eat like a middle-class person.
And that struck me as fundamentally problematic advice because, A, it's expensive. There's a greater degree of food waste, potentially. Okay. You know, what was interesting during the cost of living crisis is that frozen vegetables did not go up in price at all. There were whole categories of tinned and frozen food, which was unaffected.
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Visit eonnext.com today. Next pledges a 12-month fixed-term tariff. Rates adjusted quarterly to stay below Ofgem's price cap. Your bill depends on usage. T's and C's apply. And I thought the government could have stepped in then and actually given a little bit of a peon to Iceland, okay, and actually tried to... It's a very weird thing, by the way. If you go back in the UK, in France, there's this bizarre...
chain called Pica, which is upmarket frozen food. It's their equivalent of M&S Simply Food. And accidentally and unintentionally, M&S did a disservice. to the british diet in a weird way in that because they did fresh ready meals everybody assumed that because mns does it therefore fresh is better than frozen And there's nothing scientific behind that really at all. In many cases, frozen would be much better than fresh for obvious reasons of requiring fewer preservatives.
And yet every British person is fixated with this idea that the freezer cabinet, the whole freezer aisle in the supermarket is slightly stigmatized. I think if we step back, the really big challenge is that... we are all eating food that is completely different from the food that our ancestors ate. Up until like our great grandparents, they all ate the same food. They had this microbiome diversity that was immensely...
greater than today. And as we all know, we're the first generation that's basically going to die sooner than our grandparents, which is shocking if you think about the improvement in medical technology. And that is down above all. to the food that we eat. And I think what has happened particularly in places like the UK and the US is we don't have as strong a food culture as somewhere like...
Italy, for example. And so we found it quite easy to move to an environment where the majority of what we're eating is... pre-processed by big food manufacturers who are driven by their incentive to make a profit, right? They're trying to make as much money as possible. So what do they want you to do? Well, they'd like you to eat as much as possible.
So you buy as much as possible and they would like the cost of their ingredients to be as cheap as possible. In their defense, by the way, I don't think it's as intentional as people think. If you think about it, it's evolutionary, which is food that's slightly addictive will sell more. I actually totally agree with you. They may exist, and I may be being completely naive, but I've never, in working with large companies, come across this group of evil scientists who are deliberately creating...
habituation and addiction and the foods they produce. But it's a natural product of the food industry that when capitalism unintentionally discovers a mind hack, that will be a disproportionately profitable business. And consequently... you know, will grow. And the world coffee and tea industry, I mean, I suppose the three really big industries in the 18th century were booze, tea, and coffee, which uncoincidentally were all kind of addictive products.
in some shape or form. I can give you half of that, which is I think that that is right. I think that the food scientists have been working away in any of these big companies each year have just been saying, okay, how can I sell slightly more? So how can I make this, you know, how can I make somebody eat? 10% more of this ice cream or this cookie.
However, what I also think is we were going to look back on this in 20 years and say this was exactly the same as tobacco. These big companies have been sitting on the knowledge for decades that their food is directly causing...
death to people, ill health and death, and that they have done everything they can to obscure the reality around that. So funding very large amounts of scientific research to try and get you to say, oh, no, it's just about the amount of sugar or it's just about saturated fat. I remember when I was a kid, companies like Coca-Cola paid for sports.
equipment in your school because it was all like, well, if you just do some more exercise, it's only about calories in versus calories out. So there's no problem selling all of this ultra processed food to children. because you just need to do more exercise. And I actually think, so I don't have the evidence, I can't prove this, but I believe that we will look back and see that it's really very similar to the situation we've seen with smoking where, you know, these...
Big food companies are aware that this ultra processed food is unhealthy and they're doing what they can to obscure the conversation when really there is a health issue, particularly when we're thinking about our children. And today, you know. We look back and we think it's inconceivable that you could have people advertising.
you know, cigarettes on TV at the time that children could watch them, or indeed that you could smoke indoors around other people, all of this. And I think we will look at a lot of this ultra processed food in exactly the same way. But equally, what's interesting is your proposed diet is not one of complete self-denial. You mentioned chocolate. And so it's possible we can create a kind of vaping equivalent of food where you can still enjoy food as an indulgence without the...
without the malign consequences. I want to be clear. I love food, Rory. I think food is one of the great pleasures. And I think one of the other diet myths is that somehow being healthy is giving up. gluten and dairy. And, you know, if you want to drink, none of this is true. It's about understanding how you're putting together across the week, something that is really healthy and supportive. And of course.
You can also have a cake in there, Rory. I feel like, you know, I don't want you to be like, oh, I can only have dark chocolate. And I think the... biggest challenge is that the food that we're surrounded by sort of by accident has taken out so much that is good for us so you have to be really thoughtful i would love to be in a situation where you don't have to try and convince everybody to eat frozen vegetables just the
food that is around us when you walk into the corner store, like a lot of that is actually good for you because that was the situation until recently. And I think if we started to have all these really smart food scientists... focusing more on like, okay, how do we support the health of everybody instead of squeezing out, as you said, the extra 5% of sales, we could transform this and still have something that you would say was delicious. One of your next steps might be licensing labeling.
We did see a huge success in the labeling of the energy efficiency of domestic appliances. You know, A, B, C, D. But... What happened was actually twofold. First of all, the energy efficiency of an appliance was never really top of mind at the point of purchase. You looked at the gizmos and you were looking at questions like, does it fit in my kitchen, et cetera. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, okay.
So the energy efficiency was too far down your list of priorities, and the labeling took it to the top. After about a year or two of labeling, the retailers, such as John Lewis or whatever, went to the manufacturers and said, unless your products can be at least a B, we're not going to stop them because it makes us look shit. So if you had labeling based on really, really good data, this would be hugely beneficial, I think, to everybody.
OK, what the problem is that sometimes you get legislation now where I think on the London Underground, you can't show butter, if I'm right. So Gusto or HelloFresh or one of these companies had a picture. of someone preparing a food from fresh ingredients. And because it included a small amount of butter, they weren't allowed to show the picture. Now, that seems just completely dumb. I mean, that's just kind of blunt. That's blunt instruments.
intervention, isn't it? Well, firstly, since I mean, I would say butter is probably one of the healthier things that I would have seen advertised on the tube. So I'm going to follow up on that. That's fascinating on butter.
One of the things that our members find most useful is this app that allows them to understand the score of... any food and so that's one of the core things that people become members use and so they basically get their own label personalized to them on everything and one of the big things that we've really been trying to figure out this year is like how do we get
this app into the hands of many many more people so by the time listeners listen to this we will actually have announced a big reduction in our monthly membership prices and one of the things that we've realized is we've reached the point now with what we've been able to develop on the technology and the scale.
pull the prices down a lot in order to get this app into a lot more people's hands because I would love to get that label on everything in the stores. This is hard. I've had some conversations. It turns out it's hard to get labels to change. And so in the medium time, if you use the Zoe app, you can actually effectively understand for everything, how does it score for me? And I agree that over time, we already see some of this.
manufacturers would be like, well, I would like my product to do well. And I think particularly supermarkets, interestingly, I think are keen to make sure that the products that they're delivering are healthier. And so I think that it's not all doom and gloom. I'm here actually feeling very optimistic that... If we can continue to build this movement about...
improving the health of millions through the food we eat, we can really transform the food environment. So I think, you know, if you think about cigarettes, we aren't in the same situation we were in the past. And I think we can do exactly the same thing. I think this is brilliant because I think we... We can look to the success of labeling in domestic appliances and energy efficiency as a real success story. It's also, as I said, it's healthy libertarian in that...
You know, for weird reasons, I know quite a few pretty right-wing economists, including Deirdre McCloskey. And they're completely in line with the government, for example, providing people with better information to make better consumer decisions.
against cross because she said the government must buy lots of computers and know which ones work and which ones break down they should publish that information to help informed consumer decisions for example and so i think i think there's a very happy the great thing about persuasion as distinct from compulsion is that if you've got a good reason not to be persuaded you can ignore the persuasion
whereas you can't ignore legislation. Do you see what I mean? I mean, there are reasons why you might break the speed limit in front of a speed camera. Not very many, but they do happen, okay, to avoid a worse action. for example, or to avoid braking dramatically with a car that's tailgating you. You can think of conditions, okay? And so because persuasion is context sensitive in a way that economics isn't and legislation isn't.
This is the place where we should undoubtedly go first. By the way, you've also convinced me because I regarded an awful lot of dietary advice as basically class snobbery dressed up as health advice, which made me... Which made me slightly suspicious that it looked to me as if it was a status game being played out in the dietary arena, which didn't connect all that well to actual dietary stuff.
And as you said, if you say that butter is healthy, this is very interesting because we're starting to get really dumb legislation. What's cheese like? How does that come out? So the answer, I think I said butter was healthier. Interestingly, cheese is quite a lot healthier than butter, it turns out.
And this is again down to the magic of these little bacteria. So it turns out that all of these fermented products tend to end up healthier than the unfermented products. So when you go from... milk or butter and the bacteria ferments it into yogurt or cheese, or even better something like kefir, which means you've still got live bacteria inside it.
It's actually sort of transformed the chemistry of it at this tiny level. Don't ask me any more details, Rory, because I'm not the nutritionist. I can't explain how. But basically, interestingly, there's all of these studies now. And actually, something like yogurt is pretty healthy.
It's not at the very healthiest. And it's not to say I was talking about something like extra virgin olive oil, but actually it is significantly healthier than the butter or the milk. And actually cheese is pretty good. The answer is if you had a choice between for most. of our listeners to swap out a piece of...
supermarket bread and a piece of cheese, they'd be much better eating the piece of cheese. Despite all of that bias in their head that's like, no, but the cheese is like this really big fatty thing. Actually, you'd be better to throw away the sandwich outside the cheese and just eat the cheese on average. for most listeners. And this is absolutely fascinating because there's finally some genuine science behind this rather than...
pretty dumb heuristics, actually, you know, which seem to drive dietary recommendations beforehand. So I'm absolutely intrigued. So I'm going to actually, I've got to do a plug now because it's at the end. Jonathan, Charlene, thank you so much for joining me today. But normally I do a plug for Alf Insight, quite correctly, because they're the sponsors of the podcast. But how do...
Does anybody listening get in touch? How does anybody sign up for Zoe? Because I think we'll probably have a few converts as a consequence of this. What's the web address? Very easy. It's just Zoe.com, Z-O-E.com. And if you're... We also have a podcast, which is also Zoe, which you will find on your favourite podcast source. Superb. And Charlene, how do people get in touch with Metafesto? Yeah, so it's metafesto.com.
We've got a website launching very, very shortly. So just sign up to the waiting list and we shall, yeah, that's the way to get in touch and keep in touch with us. It's been an absolute joy. Thank you very much indeed for joining me both. I think I'm a convert actually.
Because it's finally advice that I can believe, because I'm naturally someone who's generally very skeptical of advice, which I think, you know, as I said, an awful lot of dietary advice was be more middle class, as far as I can see. It struck me as, you know, it was possible but implausible that the middle class had somehow stumbled on the secret of eternal life when most of their activity is generally driven by signaling.
So anyway, but thank you very much indeed. I'm convinced. Absolutely superb. You've been listening to On Brand with Alf and Rory Sutherland. If you want to do business with health and tech brands, contact the Alf Insight team on their website, www. You can also find the link in the episode description below. The series is produced and expertly edited by Ultimate Content. And to make sure you receive the next episode, please do subscribe.
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