Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

On this podcast, we often talk about things that you can do to improve your diet.

However, you're not the only person who has an impact on your health.

The truth is that our food system, from

government policy to supermarket placement, has a profound influence on what we eat, how we

eat, and ultimately how healthy we all are. So what steps can we take to improve not just our

own health, but the health of society as a whole? Today I'm joined by Professor Brian Elbel and Professor Tim Specter

to explore the forces shaping our food system

and the changes that could benefit our collective well-being.

So maybe we can just start off by explaining what is population health

and how does it impact the individual?

I think population health is a couple things.

I think it is really looking at the health of populations. By that, we mean we're averaging over a bunch of different people, right? So, you know, while you may be looking at one or two people in certain smaller studies, we're averaging over a whole big group of people. So that means a couple different things. It means when we're looking at solutions, we may be looking for a three to five percent sort of change that could be quite meaningful at a population level. Then maybe wouldn't be what you're looking for if you're looking at sort of individual studies. So I think that's one big kind of key distinction and difference. I think another is the type of data that we're using, right? To look at population health stuff, we need a lot of data on a lot of people.

And that's something that's quite different from smaller studies where you're down there collecting in the weeds individual data.

For my studies, I'm using big data that are collected for generally other reasons, right?

They are data that are collected for big national health surveys, right, that are looking at

bunches of different things, or their data maybe from food companies

themselves and directly and looking at some of those studies as well without taking their money

to do it. And Tim, from your perspective, what's the biggest threat to our dietary health today?

It's the fact that we don't know that we're eating very unhealthy foods that are impacting our gut health and making us overeat

them, that we just don't know the real properties of the food we're eating, and people are

being misled into making wrongful food choices.

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