ZOE Science & Nutrition

Floating through all of our bodies is a complex network of hormones. You can think of it as an internal postal service, delivering vital messages and instructions to different organs and systems.

But what happens if these messages get intercepted, mixed up, or worse, not delivered at all?

In this episode, Dr Andrew Jenkinson tells us about a hormone that plays a crucial role in weight regulation and the undesirable consequences when it isn’t functioning properly.

He also shares three simple tips you can do tomorrow to make sure your hormones support your health.

🌱 Try our science-backed and tasty wholefood supplement Daily30

🌿Let your gut microbes snack on the ZOE Gut Health Bar

Get our brand-new app and Gut Health Test designed by world-leading gut health and nutrition scientists to build healthy eating habits 👉 Join ZOE

Follow ZOE on Instagram.

📚Books by our ZOE Scientists

The Food For Life Cookbook

Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati

The Appetite Reset by Dr Federica Amati

Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector

Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector

Good Mood Food (preorder) by Prof. Tim Spector

Free resources from ZOE

The Smart Snacking Guide: How to feed your gut, fuel your day, and snack without guilt

The Hormone Harmony Guide: Tuning Your Body’s Internal Orchestra  

Eating for Better Brain Health: Your brain-gut blueprint

How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health

Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition

Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks 

Better Breakfast Guide

Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here

Listen to the full episode here

Growing up, many of us were taught to just stay calm and carry on - as if stress was all in the mind, with no real effect on the body. But chronic stress can change your brain, raise your risk of heart disease, and even shorten your life.

In this episode, we ask: what happens when a stress response built to last minutes never switches off?

Today, Professor Carmine Pariante, one of the world's leading researchers on stress, helps us understand what’s happening in your body during a stressful moment and why chronic stress disrupts sleep, appetite, and energy levels. Carmine also explains how worried you should be about cortisol, and whether "cortisol face" and "cortisol belly" are backed by evidence.

By the end, you’ll understand why stress can be so powerful, when it becomes harmful, and have some evidence-based ways to manage it.

Next time you reach for wine, your phone, or something sweet after a hard day, ask yourself: is this helping you cope, or helping you avoid how you feel?

🌱 Try our science-backed and tasty wholefood supplement Daily30

🌿Let your gut microbes snack on the ZOE Gut Health Bar

Build healthy habits. Download the ZOE app today and start your trial for just £2.30 for your first week. 👉 Join ZOE

Follow ZOE on Instagram.

Timecodes

00:00 Intro

01:10 Should you be aiming for zero stress?

06:13 Inside your fight-or-flight response

11:19 Can stress actually cause a heart attack?

13:15 Why your stress response won't switch off

15:33 Why stress eating isn't a willpower problem

17:15 Why emotional stress feels physical

21:00 The earliest sign of chronic stress

22:05 There's no such thing as "it's all in your head"

25:15 Stress causes the same inflammation as a cold

29:54 The blunt truth about chronic stress

31:07 How stress clogs your arteries

32:55 Why chronic stress can steal your joy

35:10 What a brain scan reveals about chronic stress

37:07 Is "cortisol face" actually real?

38:49 Does the viral cortisol cocktail actually work?

41:20 Why control is the key to coping with stress

42:46 How singing for one hour lowered cortisol

45:15 Why exercise is such powerful stress relief

47:57 Foods with the strongest evidence against stress

49:45 Why alcohol doesn't actually relieve stress

50:58 Is your phone making your stress worse?

54:04 The first thing to do when stress overwhelms you

56:06 Why modern life never switches your stress off

📚Books by our ZOE Scientists

The Food For Life Cookbook

Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati

The Appetite Reset by Dr Federica Amati

Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector

Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector

Good Mood Food (preorder) by Prof. Tim Spector

Free resources from ZOE

The Smart Snacking Guide: How to feed your gut, fuel your day, and snack without guilt

The Hormone Harmony Guide: Tuning Your Body’s Internal Orchestra

Eating for Better Brain Health: Your brain-gut blueprint

How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health

Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition

Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks

Better Breakfast Guide

Mentioned in today's episode

Effect of anti-inflammatory treatment on depressive symptom severity, The American Journal of Psychiatry (2025)

Implementing a group singing intervention for depression, Frontiers in Medicine (2024)

The Relationship between Diet and the Occurrence of Depressive Symptoms, Nutrients (2023)

Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here.

Episode transcripts are available here.

Today we’re talking about gut microbes.

Professor Tim Spector often refers to the microbes in our gut as ‘mini pharmacies’. This is because they provide us with powerful chemicals that help support our health.

But not all gut microbes are on our side. In fact, there’s an ongoing battle in our digestive system between the beneficial bugs and those that wish to do us harm.

I’m joined by Tim Spector and microbiome researcher Nicola Segata join me to explore this microscopic war, and explain how simple changes to your diet could help tip the balance toward the good guys.

🌱 Try our science-backed and tasty wholefood supplement Daily30

Get our brand-new app and Gut Health Test designed by world-leading gut health and nutrition scientists to build healthy eating habits 👉 Join ZOE

Follow ZOE on Instagram.📚Books by our ZOE Scientists

The Food For Life Cookbook

Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati

Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector

Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector

Good Mood Food (preorder) by Prof. Tim Spector

Free resources from ZOE

The Hormone Harmony Guide: Tuning Your Body’s Internal Orchestra

Eating for Better Brain Health: Your brain-gut blueprint

How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health

Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition

Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks 

Better Breakfast Guide

Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here.Episode transcripts are available here.

Is fat good or bad for your heart? For decades, we blamed fat and cholesterol for clogged arteries and heart attacks. Now you choose low-fat yogurt to protect your heart, while others cook with beef tallow.

In this episode, Dr. Alice Lichtenstein, a world-leading expert on dietary fat and heart health, helps settle the debate.

Dr. Lichtenstein explains which fats protect your heart and which to cut back on, you'll learn what raises your cholesterol, and why the type of fat you eat matters more than how much of it you eat. You’ll leave the episode with some practical food swaps to protect your heart and live longer.

Have you swapped butter for "low-fat" alternatives loaded with sugar? Could that choice be working against your heart?

🌱 Try our science-backed and tasty wholefood supplement Daily30

🌿Let your gut microbes snack on the ZOE Gut Health Bar

Build healthy habits. Download the ZOE app today and start your trial for just £2.30 for your first week. 👉 Join ZOE

Follow ZOE on Instagram.

Timecodes

00:00 Intro

01:33 The most common myth about fat, busted in one word

03:20 What fat actually is, and why your body needs it to survive

11:29 Why butter and beef tallow turn solid at room temperature

13:12 How saturated fat raises your risk of heart disease

15:36 Heart attack or stroke: which one saturated fat actually raises

17:12 Are all saturated fats equally bad for you?

20:07 The flawed rabbit study that shaped decades of egg advice

21:41 What actually makes your cholesterol go up

24:04 How high cholesterol quietly clogs your arteries

27:04 The 1960s study that proved swapping fat saves lives

30:32 How your liver secretly turns sugar into fat

32:37 The verdict on beef tallow and butter

36:32 Simple food swaps for a heart-healthy diet

38:10 Does eating more fat make you gain weight?

40:35 The truth about grass-fed beef and omega-3

42:53 Is beef tallow really a healthy fat?

44:40 Is fermented dairy actually healthy?

45:19 The checklist to delay premature aging

47:52 The pantry check that could improve your heart health

49:56 The 1990s mistake we made with low-fat yogurt

51:47 Why knowing your cholesterol numbers matters most

📚Books by our ZOE Scientists

The Food For Life Cookbook

Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati

The Appetite Reset by Dr Federica Amati

Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector

Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector

Good Mood Food (preorder) by Prof. Tim Spector

Free resources from ZOE

The Smart Snacking Guide: How to feed your gut, fuel your day, and snack without guilt

The Hormone Harmony Guide: Tuning Your Body’s Internal Orchestra

Eating for Better Brain Health: Your brain-gut blueprint

How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health

Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition

Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks

Better Breakfast Guide

Mentioned in today's episode

Dietary trans fatty acids and cardiovascular disease risk, Current Atherosclerosis Reports (2014)

Unsaturated fats, high-quality carbs lower risk of heart disease, American College of Cardiology (2015)

Effect of Low-Carbohydrate and Low-Fat Diets on Coronary Heart Disease, JACC (2026)

Rabbit models for the study of human atherosclerosis, Pharmacology & Therapeutics (2014)

Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here.

Episode transcripts are available here.

Today we’re talking about the immune system.

It’s one of the most important systems in our body, yet it’s also one of the hardest to understand. You can’t see it, you can’t feel it working, and there’s no simple way to measure whether it’s strong or weak.

But when it fails, we certainly notice.

Everywhere we look, supplements and superfoods promise to ‘boost’ our immune system. But how many of these claims are actually supported by science?

Professor Daniel Davis joins me to explain how our immune system truly works, and what the evidence says is the best ways to support it.

🌱 Try our science-backed and tasty wholefood supplement Daily30

Get our brand-new app and Gut Health Test designed by world-leading gut health and nutrition scientists to build healthy eating habits 👉 Join ZOE

Follow ZOE on Instagram.

📚Books by our ZOE Scientists

The Food For Life Cookbook

Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati

Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector

Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector

Good Mood Food (preorder) by Prof. Tim Spector

Free resources from ZOE

The Hormone Harmony Guide: Tuning Your Body’s Internal Orchestra

Eating for Better Brain Health: Your brain-gut blueprint

How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health

Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition

Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks 

Better Breakfast Guide

Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here.

Episode transcripts are available here.