It occurred to me the other day that you can trace the arc of ‘personalised nutrition’ company ZOE entirely through Postal Service Lyrics. Here, I’ll show you.
Act I
TIM.
Just a man with something to prove, slightly bored and severely confused
Tim sits at his computer, copy and pasting results sections from PubMed into a document titled ‘book manuscript hehe’
All the news reports recommended that I stay indoors
Nutritionists, dietitians, academics, and doctors with pitchforks slowly close in on Tim
Act V (denouement)
TIM.
I am not permanent
Looks forlorn, tiny violin plays in background
(For legal reasons, this is entirely scientific satire lololol)
Honestly, that was going to be my whole post. Some edgy, experimental shit for the paid members.
But then.
BUT THEN.
Then ZOE announced their new ‘supplement’. Because of course they did.
Daily30+ - that's a whole lotta seeds to sprinkle on your grilled fish 🥴
I text my mate – you might know him – Dr. Josh Wolrich, to see if he had any thoughts on this he said ‘‘It’s basically trail mix’.
When I text Podcast Lucy to say ZOE had made a supplement that was ‘basically trail mix’, she replied ‘except horrible’.
When I told my husband that they had made a supplement that was ‘basically horrible trail mix’, he said, ‘wait, the people who go on about needing personalised nutrition say we should all take the same supplement?’.
Friends, he is a MATHS GUY and even he knows; this is some Bull. Shit.
Five types of seeds: flaxseeds, pumpkin seeds, hemp seeds, grape seeds, sunflower seeds, chia seeds
Three types of nuts: almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts
Red lentil flakes (lol)
Baobab fruit pulp (ZOE love some food imperialism)
Chicory root inulin (yum)
Nutritional yeast flakes
Puffed quinoa (nobody likes flat quinoa)
Five spices: parsley, thyme, rosemary, turmeric, cumin (just bizarre)
Buckthorn (casual)
Beetroot Flakes
Carrot Flakes
Garlic
And finally, nine types of mushroom: lion’s mane, reishi, chaga, shiitake, cordyceps, maitake, white mushroom, tremella
I just want to point out that there is considerable overlap in the nutritional value of some of these ingredients - like the five different types of seeds or nine types of mushroom - a sort of nutritional redundancy, if you will.
It costs £39/month, unless you get a subscription where it’s a steal at £33.25. If you add that to the price of the daily Gut Shot and the app and the monitor and everything else you need to pay ZOE for in order to access the ‘Elite’ nutrition echelon, well, you have to be pretty rich.
The USP of this trail mix is that it isn’t powdered so it ‘maintains its food matrix’ - this is an important concept we’ll come back to when we look at the nutritional ‘usefulness’ of this product.
Like the Gut Shot, the premise of this supplement is that it’s for busy people who need to supplement their diet when things are hectic, not a replacement for a healthy diet (but you should still take it every day). They say, it’s great for getting a plant-based boost ‘when you’re juggling work, childcare, social commitments and the strains of modern life’. Then they suggest adding it to roasted vegetables and grilled fish, making me think that they don’t fully understand the constraints on the average family or household. Plainly, if you're grilling fish and roasting vegetables, I think you're going to be fine without this shit.
Look, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with adding some seeds and spices to your food if that’s what you want to do. And frankly, I don’t care if you buy this or not. What I care about is the predatory marketing that makes this seem like it’s some kind of nutritional revolution, when, as we have established, it’s basically just ‘horrible trail mix’
Capitalising on a Nothing Narrative
‘The main selling point seems to be that it contains 30 different plants’ says Registered Dietitian Maeve Hanan when I asked her for her take on the new product. ‘So it's using the popularity of the 'consume 30 plants a week' message (off the back of one study)’ she continues. A trend, I would argue, that has been constructed in large part, by ZOE.
I’ve previously done a deep dive into the single study that Maeve mentions.
In short, it found that the more plants you eat, the more microbial diversity we have in our guts (kind of a ‘no shit science’ moment). What it doesn’t establish is 30 being any kind of magical number, or having benefits over and above the recommendation to eat your 5-a-day. Perhaps more crucially, it wasn’t linked to any concrete or long-term health benefits. The number 30 was effectively plucked out of thin air.
The suggestion that we need to eat 30 different plants a week is not evidence based. It’s marketing.
‘Consuming a supplement that contains powdered and flaked versions of plants in a small daily dose is unlikely to be the same as consuming a variety of actual plants’ Maeve rightly cautions. I don’t like to get caught up on numbers, but to help us illustrate Maeve’s point, to see the kind of nutritional benefit associated with better health outcomes, we’d be looking for a serving size of 80g; we’d be lucky if there’s a few milligrams worth of beetroot or carrot flakes in this product.
ZOE – with their ‘science-first’ approach to nutrition – have quite successfully undermined well-established, evidence-based public health nutrition advice. Good work guys!
We also need to notice how this product has upped the ante. Previously we were told we need to eat 30 different plants a week. This product gives the impression we need 30 plants per day. And yes, I’ve seen their Social Media Manager working overtime in the Instagram comments, reassuring people that it’s not a replacement for a ‘healthy diet’ and you don’t need to have it every day. At the same time the product is literally called DAILY30+. It’s listed on their website as cost-per-day. There’s a monthly subscription with a 30-day-supply. At the very least they’re giving mixed messages.
And look, nobody is saying that as a population we don’t need to eat more plants, but ZOE’s particular brand of personalised nutrition underscores neoliberal responsibilisation of health. It occludes all the barriers to health that people face - from a decimated NHS, to 4 million children in England living without enough food to eat.
‘Zoe claims that this supplement is 'proven by science'’ Maeve points to a single unpublished poster abstract presented at a conference that ZOE are using to claim the benefits of Daily30+. They may go on to publish this in a scientific journal, but it is, as yet, not peer reviewed. And even if it was, it's still just one study.
The study they conducted lasted just 6 weeks, but that’s not the only limitation with this research. ‘Some of the main benefits being promoted about this supplement are an improvement in energy, sleep and gut symptoms’ Maeve notes. ‘These results are based on self-reported data which has its limitations, but importantly they were secondary outcomes of the study so not what it was designed to investigate. Basically secondary outcomes don't provide strong evidence or definitive answers, they should be used to improve scientific understanding and tested in further studies.’
With ZOE, we get a double whammy of science-washing and the appeal to authority fallacy. Someone without scientific training will very reasonably and understandably see that ZOE has done a randomised control trial (RCT) on this product and find that impressive. Particularly as ZOE makes a point of calling this the ‘Gold Standard’ of nutrition research. This is a misleading statement because a single study does not constitute a body of evidence. Further studies may refute the finding of this one. Better designed studies (I speculate) would probably find no meaningful or tangible difference between this product and a bag of mixed seeds from Tesco that costs £2.25 for 300g. Plus, we should all be at least a little caution about companies who fund their own research.
The second hit is from Tim Spector himself. The appeal to authority fallacy exploits people’s feelings of respect or reverence for someone, particularly someone with an academic pedigree such as Spector’s, to bypass critical thinking. They trust Spector, and so assume that any study he puts his name to must be watertight. They wholeheartedly trust any advice he gives on social media or on a podcast. They implicitly trust any product he endorses because he has cleverly positioned himself as an oracle.
This science-washing and appeal to authority fallacy are the foundation of ZOE’s business model.
Coming back to the study, I can’t tell much from the abstract, but it certainly isn’t bullet proof. As well as the problems Maeve has mentioned, we don’t know what the baseline or follow-up diets of the participants were - have dietary changes confounded the outcomes? What if they’d used a control that wasn’t just matched for energy, but also fibre? It’s also important to note that this study was conducted on healthy individuals (and not very many of them).
‘Using a change in microbiome species as a primary endpoint to the RCT in order to argue in favour of selling this ‘supplement’ is incredibly reductive’ say Josh. ‘Individual microbiome research is still in its infancy and the study they attempt to link to in order to argue this is in review and not even published yet. I’m not sure how a claim in an improvement in health can be made based on this metric can genuinely be made’.
I’ll keep this bit brief, although it could be a whole essay in its own right. There was something so deeply uncomfortable for me reading ZOE’s comments in the marketing for this product. ‘We’re helping people reengage with their food culture by adding this to a dish to improve its taste and texture’.
When so many of the ingredients in this product are non-native to the UK, this feels like a peculiar choice of words. Chia seeds are indigenous to Mexico, Baobab is a culturally significant plant to communities across Africa, reishi and shiitake mushrooms come from east and south east Asia respectively. So whose food culture is it we’re trying to reengage with? It seems to me we are confusing ‘our food culture’ with centuries of extractive food imperialism which decimated indigenous foodways, devastating colonised communities along the way. By over consuming foods for our own 'health', such as quinoa, we devastate indigenous populations who end up reliant on UPFs because that's all they can afford.
Make no mistake, when ZOE say that people should eat less UPFs, they specifically mean white people.
(My food culture is battered Mars bars, porridge, and Irn Bru btw)
‘The advertising surrounding the new ZOE Daily30+ supplement blatantly uses food anxiety as a marketing tactic’ says Maeve. Those of us who support people with their relationship to food are starting to see the idea of achieving 30 plants a week a source of worry for our clients; a sense of panic that they’re damaging their health if they don't, causing micromanagement and a worrying focus on minutiae.
‘An ad on instagram paints a catastrophic picture using videos of explosions and saying things like ‘every time you eat is an opportunity to improve your health’ and then positions this supplement as the solution to a 'broken food environment' that is full of dreaded UPFs’ Maeve adds noting the exploitative marketing tactics that are tapping into insecurities of people who are already general healthy - the worried well.
The imagery of explosions is particularly distasteful given Israel's ongoing bombardment of the Gaza strip, where not only are people being bombed to death, they are being denied basic nutrition; and unlike the imagery ZOE evokes, there, food is quite literally a weapon of war.
‘I’m a bit conflicted,’ says Josh. ‘I think looks better and much tastier than the bog standard powders or capsules and you can buy at the moment’, he says rather diplomatically. ‘But it being sold as some sort of God send and capitlising off the UPF fear mongering makes me uncomfortable’.
Ok, ok. There are some issues around the marketing and narrative of this product and the science is sketchy but does that negate its usefulness as a product? Myself, Maeve and Josh all weigh in on this product's helpfulness as a nutritional supplement.
Let’s check in with Maeve first:
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