 Doing things you never thought possible. That's the mark of a maker. The KitchenAid Food Processor Collection. Welcome to the British Library Food Season 2020. It's wonderful to have you all here today for this event I just cannot wait to hear. My name is Polly Russell. I'm a curator at the British Library and the founder of the food season. And this year I've had the huge pleasure of working with Angela Clutton as the season's guest director. When we were planning this season, we really wanted it to be eclectic, loads of different events, but also relevant. And then COVID happened. And so we sort of have to change all sorts of things around, introduce a few new events to make them really relevant. And I can't think of a more relevant event than today's. I mean, 2020 has been for everyone, I think a long year. And it's impact on people's mental health has been well-documented, profound, disturbing, concerning. And so today's event, Mood Food, with Jack Mumrow, Kimberly Wilson, and chaired by Zoe Williams is just perfect. So I'll hand over to Zoe in a second. But first of all, a couple of the housekeeping points. You've all got tabs on your screen and those tabs will let you do various things. One of them is please do ask questions. If you post questions, the panel will answer them and would love to do so. The second is that there are books by these wonderful panelists available on the tab. So have a look at those. There's also a feedback form. So tell us if you love it or if you hate it. And also there's a tab about how you can support the BL. So those are all the kind of tab instructions. But now I'm gonna hand over to Zoe Williams. Zoe Williams, as I'm sure you all know, is a journalist, economist and an author. She is the author of two books, Get It Together, Why We Deserve Better Politics, and also Bring It On Baby, A Pregnancy Survival Guide. She writes for The Guardian regularly, The New Statesman and numerous other places as well. She is one of the funniest, most incisive writers and thinkers that I know and an all-round brilliant person. And she is the perfect person to chair this event over to you, Zoe. Well, thank you very much. I'm humbled. Yeah, so just to reiterate, do feel free to put questions up as soon as they occur to you because if they're relevant to the discussion we're having, I'll just ask them straight away. We don't need to stand on ceremony. Now, I am really thrilled by this event because it's so, there's just so much that we don't know about food and the brain or just, you know, in layman's terms. And I can't think of two people better place to tell us. Kimberly Wilson is a psychologist and nutritionist and a finalist on the Great British Bake Off. I bet that always comes first when people normally introduce you. Jack Monroe is, of course, the bootstrap cook on Twitter and is just about to put out good food for bad days. But previously, her writing has absolutely revolutionised the way we think about food and food poverty and food banks and completely changed the way that conversation was had and I think made a huge difference. So to kick off straight away, I mean, Kimberly, your book, which came out at the end of last year is probably the most relevant thing that anybody could read this, could have read this year. Yet How to Eat for a Healthy Brain. Well, sorry, Good Food for a Healthy Brain. Now, what do you think people understand about nutrition and their mental health and what do you think they could understand better? I think an awful lot, actually. So the funny thing about the book is it came out literally a week before we went into lockdown. And so I was out doing all of these kind of launch events and then everything being shut down and then suddenly having to put lots of these things into practice and certainly that's what I did on social media. When I meet people in clinic, because what I do is to integrate this information as part of my clinical intake. So along with the standard stuff that you have in a therapy assessment, I also want to know about how you're sleeping. I want a five-day sleep diary. I also want to know what you're eating because what you're eating tells me quite a lot. Our food and our food intake is really indicative of what's happening in our lives. And most people just are completely unaware that what they eat has any effect on their brains. You know, we have it as a slightly vague concept, but actually in terms of the details, the intricacies of the nutrition and how it affects the brain, the idea, for example, that your brain is made of food, that your brain uses up about 25% of your calories when your body is at rest, are new pieces of information for people. We don't realize that the brain is the hungriest organ in the body. And after that point, then we can start having a conversation about how we can eat and feed ourselves to help support overall healthy brain function. And I mean, you talk about the brain using so many calories. Do you, does the brain care where the calories come from? So yes and no, right? So essentially your brain's preferred fuel source is glucose and it's your, if you eat starchy foods and carbohydrates, your body will break down sufficient amounts of those starches to make the glucose for your brain. Your brain needs about 25 grams of glucose per day, function properly. The thing is, is that as well as having an energy demand, your brain also has a nutrient demand. So if you're getting that glucose from just kind of added and free sugars, then you're not getting the B vitamins that come with whole grains, but your brain also needs to function well. So it makes a difference because actually it's not just the energy, it's also the nutrient demand that if you're not getting, your brain is already also having to work a lot harder to do your basic functions. And just to go back a second for me, which were you first interested in? Were you nutritionist first and then psychologist or psychologist and then nutritionist? Well, I don't even call myself a nutritionist. I'm a psychologist with a degree in nutrition. And so psychology will always come first. I think I would deal with my first love, although I also call myself a hungry girl. So I have always been interested in food, cooking and eating, competitive baking. And so it's actually quite a nice synergy for me of the two things I love the most. And actually a lot of my work now sits at that overlap as a Ben diagram. I sit in that interlink that overlap between food and psychology. And do you, I mean, I think people will be surprised because the big bug bear, even people who know nothing about nutrition and how it relates to the brain know that if you have too much sugar that will probably do something bad somewhere just in terms of kind of glucose spikes and making you knackered afterwards, et cetera, et cetera. So I think people will be quite surprised by your love of baking. Are you quite evangelist for the fact that you can eat, you can have sugar, you just need to have it hold it in balance? Yeah, I think that's largely because we have a very dichotomous language and conversation around food. We like to split food into extremes where I'm eating healthily or I'm eating unhealthily. This is a good food and this is a bad food. I'm on track or I'm off the wagon. And those sorts of kind of binaries in food are massively unhelpful because we miss the nuance where you can eat a nutritionally rich diet and also enjoy cake. Like I do not want to be the person at the birthday party eating celery sticks. I want a slice of birthday cake. I want to be able to live my life and engage because it's worth knowing this stuff, knowing how important food is for brain health for mental wellbeing, but it's also really important to understand that food has a much broader function in our social lives, in our religious lives, in our cultural lives, in our friendships. And so it's important to balance our nutritional needs with our kind of just human needs. And that's a different area of psychology where I think a lot about our emotional relationships with food, but I absolutely want people to have a good relationship with food as well as being able to eat well to protect their mental wellbeing. Yeah. Jack, if I can kick over to your book. Are you, is it mainly recipes and is it mainly for a particular mood or do you cover a number of different moods? So it's a recipe book, it's got 75 recipes in it and it covers various moods. So I've got ADHD, autism and anxiety. I'm just collecting all the aids there in my jar of stuff. So sometimes I can be quite manic and quite organised and be in the mood for batch cooking and be like, yeah, I'm going to get myself prepared for the week. Sometimes I've got no energy. I'm slumpy. I just want something that I can grab and snack on. So it's partly about preparing things in advance when you've got the time, the effort, the energy, the inclination to do so and to have them on hand. And it's also partly like one pan stuff. You can just shove in a roasting tin and bung in the oven. And it's also some five minute things like hacks and snacks that you can just chuck together when you're really feeling like not doing anything at all, not caring for yourself at all. So it's a combination of different sort of moods and hopefully foods that help to satisfy wherever you are. Why inspired you to do this? I mean, do you find that the way you eat does affect how you feel? And did you kind of notice that by chance or is it something you've always known? I'm more the other way around. I tend to identify that I'm falling into problematic mental states personally when I either stop cooking or step back from enjoying food or lose my creative bent in the kitchen because I spend a lot of time cooking and eating. It's my job. And when I have those days where I'm just sort of like huffing white bread out of the bag or just eating salt and vinegar crisps, like one day like that fine, three or four in a row, I start to check, have I slept enough? Like where am I at mentally at the moment? Is there anything particularly stressing me out or where am I in my menstrual cycle kind of thing? So it sort of ties to, I know that when I eat well and I eat healthily and I sort of tick off things on my checklist, then I tend to feel better. But also that those things can't insulate or isolate you from like low mood or like life experience is knocking you for six. But my, I refer to it in the book as keeping your reserve tank topped up. So it's kind of like, if you're going to go out on a long drive, you don't know what you're going to encounter on the way. You don't really know what the traffic situation on the road situation is going to be like, but you want to make sure that you've got enough fuel in your car to get there. So whatever you do encounter, sort of breaking down, running out of petrol isn't one of them. So I've got like a checklist of things I try to eat on a like rotating basis and like fish and greens and stuff. And if I sort of keep that topped up, then at least I've got sort of a good base plate. So if life goes a bit wrong to start to tackle it from. And when you talk, when you mention anxiety, are there particular foods that are calming or do you think are calming? In making of dishes, I find things like risotto quite like nice and all that it's very, it's such a cliche, but it's true that stand and stir, anything with them that reminds me of like my parents cooking. So my parents did a lot of Greek secret food when I was growing up. I find that's quite evocative. There's a Greek soup that my mom used to make that's called Avga Lemono. And it's like the carcass of your Sunday roast chicken cooked up into stock. And then it's just you remove the carcass, leave the little floaty bits of chicken in there. And it's just rice cooked in that stock. So it goes all starchy. And then you mix in egg and lemon to it and some black pepper. It's really simple, but it reminds me of being a child. So whenever I'm like really properly down and in need of some comfort, if I can't just pop around to my parents and be like, make me some soup, then I put a pot of that on and I find it sort of really calming and sort of chills me out a bit. And Kimberly, break it down a little bit for us. What are the mechanisms by which food can actually speak to your brain? Apart from, you know, your brain needing energy and nutrition, what is the relationship between the gut and the brain? Oh my. Okay. This is honestly a dissertation. I will try to keep it succinct though. So there are lots and lots of ways. So when we think about the gut brain axis, people would typically thinking about what's called the vagus nerve, which is the longest cranial nerve. It goes from the back of your, like in the base of your brain, all the way down, it connects into your lungs, into your heart, it goes down through the back of your throat, loops in under the ears, it, you know, kidneys spleen and then finishes up in the gut. So it's the kind of major structural component of the gut brain axis, this kind of highway between the brain and the gut. And if you think about it as a highway, as a kind of motorway with 10 lanes, actually seven or eight of those lanes, 70 or 80% of the nerve endings are going upward, sending information from the body up into the brain. So that's a bi-directional mode of communication. That nerve though, is also the main component of what's called our parasympathetic nervous system. So our rest and digest system, which is the kind of alter ego of the fight and flight system. And only one can be on at a time. So when you're stressed, anxious, fight or flight, nervy, worried about public speaking, then your rest and digest system shuts off, which is why when, you know, you can't eat properly really, or you lose your appetite when you're very nervous, you're not really thinking about eating and digesting. But then there's the components of the microbiome and how they talk to the brain. So when your gut bacteria break down fiber in particular, but also things like plant chemicals found in dark, colored leafy fruits and vegetables, they produce metabolites, which can cross into the bloodstream, go up into the brain and affect brain function. And then on top of that, there's also the actual nutrients themselves. So for example, the main structural fat in your brain, literally the building blocks of your brain come from the best sources of those are, they're omega-3 fatty acids and they come from oily fish. So literally those foods go in and make up the structure of your brain. So there are lots and lots and lots of relationships. And then there's also a stack of saying, the way that we feel about food or the way that we're feeling in ourselves affects the foods that we want, crave, need. And that's an important relationship in terms of what foods we choose as well. I've just had a great question from a member of the audience, actually, John Stethridge, which is in the kind of, obviously in a pandemic, everybody's anxious all the time. Is there, this is for both of you, what should we be eating in a kind of really drawn out crisis like 2020 has been? Shall I kick it? Well, kind of in terms of the technical response, what we know about stress and the body's response to stress is there is increased utilization of certain nutrients. So when you're stressed in particular, you have increased utilization of things like your B vitamins and magnesium and zinc because on top of making all of your other neurotransmitters and hormones, your estrogen and your serotonin and your dopamine, you're also pumping out adrenaline and cortisol and your glucocorticoids. And so that has an additional nutrient demand. And for example, when you're stressed, your body essentially dumps magnesium. We don't know why it's not massively helpful because magnesium helps us manage stress. So it's this kind of vicious circle that gets created. But you dump magnesium and magnesium is what's required for smooth muscle relaxation, for muscle relaxation. So it's one of the reasons that when you're stressed, your muscles tense up. And so magnesium is actually crucially important for managing stress. And if you're going through a prolonged experience of stress, it might be worth, almost as a backup or as a kind of insurance policy to be thinking about making sure you've got sufficient supply of micronutrients. And certainly there are some really beautiful studies demonstrating that people who have gone through kind of acute stresses, earthquakes and one study looked at a terrorist attack. People who had adequate supplies of micronutrients in the case of the studies through supplementation had reduced experience of stress and reduced risk of PTSD. And that's about giving the brain sufficient building blocks to tolerate the higher level of stress because stress over a long period of time is actually corrosive for the brain. Where do you stand on supplements? Because a lot of people are really snooty about them and say, unless you get it from the actual source, there's no point taking them. But I get the sense that you don't think that. I think I'm half and half. I think what much of the evidence tells us is that if there isn't deficiency, taking a supplement isn't gonna make a massive difference. Where there is deficiency, most of the trials do demonstrate that actually supplementing is beneficial. Also, there are some supplements that have better evidence than others. So I would always say food first, if you can. But I think we also need to be mindful of what is available for people, what people have access to. And full disclosure, I do take, and I take an amethyst supplement and a B supplement. I take supplements for things that I think are particularly important for my brain. You've read far too much research. I'm Jack, I mean, what have you been eating in the pandemic and what would you tell the rest of us to eat? Well, I've basically been eating as I normally would, although right in the beginning of lockdown, some of the stuff that I would normally rely on wasn't available in my local supermarket, like tin pulses and like canned tomatoes and things. But I try to make sure I get like a lot of tin-doily fish in my diet and me and my son have this breakfast routine where we'll have like some whole grain cereal together and then we'll have a banana. And I don't know if it's just because it's like a routine for me, but if I don't have my banana in the morning, I don't feel quite right for the rest of the day. And so bananas are a good one. Leafy greens, I chuck them in like stews and soups to sort of smuggle them away, but my boy's quite good at eating greens now. So I don't need to hide them so much anymore, but it's just an easy way of getting loads of them in. So yeah, basically greens, fish, bananas, beans and pulses, whole grains tend to be the things that I lean towards. And I've just continued to do that really. And I think I might just turn this into the corona section of the discussion because we've got another question from Taylor Beckman in New York, which is that, like so many people, he's been snacking constantly throughout lockdown. Now, where do you stand on, you know, whether to have three meals a day or graze all day and where do you stand on how to have a kind of a healthy snack? Jack, I'll go to you first. Oh, I'm the worst person to ask for this because I used to do this whole three meals a day thing. I'm now basically eat when I'm hungry. And some days that is, you know, I will be like a pack man chomping my way through the house. And other days it will get to like 4 p.m. and I'll suddenly be ravenous because I'll have worked so much. I'll be like, oh no, I haven't eaten anything. So although I really wish I was a three meals a day person, sometimes it is just, oh, I'm quite hungry. I'll just have like a tin of fish and some bread or I'll just grab something from the freezer or whatever. So ideally I'd like to do three meals a day, but my lifestyle and work routine and just general chaotic nature don't allow for that. But I try to keep healthy snacks on hand. So in, we've got snack covered in kitchen and eye level and grab level is the like healthier things like seaweed crisps and like little bags of nuts that I've portioned out and stuff. And the chocolate biscuits and chocolate bars are on top of the cupboard. So I've got an I'm only five foot one and a half. So I've got to locate a stool, climb onto it, climb on the worktop to get it. So by the time I've sort of done a whole gladiator routine, I feel like I deserve much chocolate biscuit anyway. So yeah. Kimberly, what do you, I mean, yeah, where do you stand on that? And what does the brain need? Well, the brain kind of just wants adequate nutrition. The brain wants strictly micronutrients, omega-3 fatty acids, sufficient water and as little stress as you can throw at it. Like that's pretty much it. It likes a constant supply of energy. The brain is really bad at storing energy, unlike the rest of your body, which has a fat store and allows us to kind of carry on working physically at a pretty good optimum level. Your brain is not very good at storing energy, which is why, you know, breaks to energy supply to the brain are really dangerous. But broadly, again, I'm always thinking about the language and the discussion that we have around food, not condemning food, not thinking that, you know, we should be eating in a particular way. The question that I get quite a lot is, you know, what's the perfect way to eat or some iteration of that? And actually, I think we really need to get away from the idea that someone out there has a perfect plan for the way that you eat, because the way that you eat will be affected by your genetics, your family, your relationship with food, the history of the way that you used to eat, how busy you are, how stressed you are, a range of factors that change with the individual, but also with the context. So, you know, I would want people to be nourishing themselves, but also knowing that, you know, if they want a snack, not to turn it into a massive moral dilemma, that you're okay to have what you want to eat, satisfy yourself, so then you can stop thinking about it and get over the rest of your life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Jack, do you, I mean, obviously you get, the way you describe food is as a huge source of comfort and distraction and engrossment and, you know, a really positive, beautiful thing in your life, but has it always been that? And will it always be that? No, I mean, ironically, when I first rose to prominence as a food writer, I was strongly advised to never discuss what I'm about to talk about, but as we'd see, I'm not very good at taking advice. When I was a teenager, I went to an all-girls grammar school and I wasn't well off, a lot of my peers were very well off, and I felt under a lot of pressure to fit into a system that didn't, that I didn't fit into socially, academically, mentally, and there was no, I just, I really didn't enjoy my school at all. And from the age of about 11, I developed an eating disorder. I was anorexic until I was about 19 years old, 19, 20 years old, on and off, mostly on. It was very thin. I couldn't do PE by the time I was 14, 15, because I didn't have the energy levels. We had a sick bay in the school and I would be literally sent there for PE lessons to just lie in bed in the basement of the school while everybody else played netball. And I only really kicked out of it when I was in the fire service. And I was in the control room, no marks from 999 calls, directed fire fighters, dealing with emergencies. And they started recruiting for firefighters and they were recruiting internally. And I was like, this is what I joined to do. But in order to pass the physicals, I needed to pack on some muscle gains and weight, get fit. And I started to do that. And I started, almost I shifted my focus from being thin to being strong. And it took a huge amount of, I couldn't say that quite flippantly, but it was a massive, like mental and physical process for me. I passed all the physicals and then fell pregnant with my son and ended up not going out onto the fire ground. But I was then in a healthier and better mentality and a much better relationship with my body to then start to nourish the little child that was growing inside me. And sometimes I look back and because I was always so meticulous about reading packets and learning about food and calories and nutrition from the wrong end of the spectrum, that's actually served me really well as a food writer. And when I was a single mum using food banks, all the foods that I used to previously avoid because they were so calorie dense were suddenly the things that I was obsessed with getting hold of because I knew that they could provide a good level of like calories and nutrition for very little money. So ironically, it kind of is fed into what I do now, but it's okay. And I really, I look back sometimes and I think I hated food as a child. Like I enjoyed it, but I had such a terrible relationship with it. And I never, I would never have imagined that I could have recovered to a point where I eat butter from the packet now and literally just like with a spoon and have no qualms whatsoever about it. Like I genuinely love food and I mourn that 10 years where I miss out on all of these incredible experiences that I know that. I mean, it's amazing, isn't it? Because you can't talk about food in relation to your brain and your mood without considering just how emotional so many people's relationship is with food, whether it's an eating disorder or disorder or just kind of a lower level of disorder eating. There are very few people whose relationship is completely neutral and just food as fuel. Kimberly, what do you, I mean, do you see a lot of that in your work and how do you kind of, is it possible to flip somebody's response to the way they think about food in relation to themselves? So I would go further and I would say, I think everybody has an emotional relationship with food. I think that's fairly unavoidable and that's from our very, very early life in which the, you know, for a baby in arms, the feeding experience isn't just about the nutrition, it's about being picked up, about being soothed, about being spoken to, about being held, it's about warmth and that comes as a total situation. It all comes wrapped up together and that forms the foundation of our understanding of food, nutrition, relationships. They're actually quite deeply interwoven. Now, how that becomes your, you know, the foundation for your further relationship with food depends on kind of other environmental factors. You know, whether that becomes something with which you can have a joyous emotional relationship with or an anxious emotional relationship with a controlled one, one that is, you know, very academic and good from the outside, whether you use your food for validation, that's where the complexities come in. So I think there's a baseline level in which everybody has an emotional relationship with food. I think the nature of that can be tweaked if it's an unhealthy one, but I think that it's very difficult to do that by yourself because when we're thinking about food, we're also thinking about body and when we're thinking about body, then we're thinking about overall self-concept. So they're incredibly complicated. And this is one of the reasons why problems with eating and feeding, eating disorders are some of the most complex mental health conditions that we face is they go incredibly deep. Yeah. I'm sticking with, you know, that kind of your first experiences of food and how food shapes you as a child. Jack, first of all, do you, because, you know, you've always written about your son and he's like, he sounds like the most amazing child for eating foods, frankly. That's the thing I talk about. I mean, how did you, did he change the way you ate as well, or were you already kind of pretty much who you are today in terms of your nutritional preferences? I mean, sometimes I would, I've cooked for him and cooked for me separately, but a lot of the time we just eat the same stuff because it's just simpler. So whether that's just adding a spoonful of yogurts or curry to temper it down for him a bit, or, you know, just picking the mushrooms out of his dinner or whatever, we tend to eat the same things because he's, I grew up with my parents for foster carers and every evening we would all sit round the table together when my dad came in for work and we would eat. And I would shove it to the side of my plate and try not to eat, but we would have some time together. Although we're just a household of two, me and my boy, I feel it's really, really important for us to have that end of day, sit down, connect, chat about the day and make it a positive experience for us. And it's nice to sit down and have dinner together. He's been through his phases, as most children do, where suddenly he just wanted beige things, he just wanted chicken nuggets and chips and when he started at school, his old school did school dinners, so he had school meals and he would come home and be like, I prefer there lasagna and I would be like, ha! But, you know, it's fine. We just adapt and his tastes change. I've got a list on the fridge that is a dislikes list that he can only, at any one time, have like five items on the dislikes list of things that I promise not to cook for him because otherwise it gets to a point where it's like, it's just things you maybe aren't your favorite. And I've got a dislikes list as well on the side of the fridge. So if he suddenly turns around and says, actually I don't like mushrooms, then I look down the list and say, well, do you dislike mushrooms more than sweet corn, more than mushy peas, more than like fresh tomatoes? You've got to pick something that you will reintegrate into your eating. Then otherwise you just end up with this, I don't eat this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this sound just like right, you can have five things I'll never cook for you but you've got to have everything else. And even if it's not your favorite, just, you know, just get it down your hole. It's what you made for you, it's good for you. That's a great idea. Kimberly, are there kind of phases of human development where it's more important than other times to get good food like in toddlerhood or in adolescence or should we basically be eating good food all the time? This is the point where I get on my soapbox and fly the flag for Amiga Threes, essential fats, DHA in particular. So as I said, the brain is made of these fats in particular DHA and so there's a great demand for them when the brain is in development. And so that's in utero and in early childhood. The problem is that the latest, or certainly the latest study that I read 2017 showed that only 4.5% of children were getting sufficient intake of oily fish to supply the fats needed for brain development. And that's one of the key concerns. Yes, there are other factors. Yes, we're living in a changing technological landscape, but it's one of the key concerns for researchers as to the rising rate of mental illness in our young people. Because if we're thinking about these fats as I say, the building blocks of a house, if you don't have them, then you're starting off with a more fragile structure. One that it'll work is kind of like a house where maybe there are a few bricks missing, it'll stand up and it'll be fine when the weather's fine. But when there's high winds, when there's a hurricane, then that structure is much more vulnerable. And so it's a huge concern that our population levels, I mean adults as well, but if we're thinking about starting early in terms of protecting brain health and mental wellbeing, then the population low levels, inadequate intake of these essential fats is kind of my primary concern and the kind of message that I'm always going on about and trying to get people to understand. I think I speak for every parent when I say, is there any way you can get these fats that isn't an oily fish? Yes. If you don't eat fish, if you hate fish, if you don't like the taste of fish, if you're vegan or any reason, moral, ethical, then what you'll be looking for is an algae-based omega-3 supplement. So I keep saying DHA, the main three types of omega-3 are ALA, which is found in plant sources, so flaxseeds and walnuts and then the other ones, EPA and DHA found in marine foods, oily fish and seafood. Your brain likes these two. A lot of vegan sources are ALA, but the body can't convert that very well into the other two that the brain really needs, but the algae is where the fish get it in the first place. So the algae synthesize it, the fish eat it, concentrate it, we eat the fish and get the fats through them. So an algae-based DHA supplement with around 500 milligrams of DHA and EPA each. So ask in your health food stock. I'm gonna get that today. Now we've got a follow-up from Dr. Plotton, who's actually the guest curator, I mean, guest director of the season. How important is it for children to eat breakfast? And this is not just kind of, should we really be pushing this more? But after a full year, when kids have been basically not at school and kids from poorer families are kind of struggling to get three meals a day, what kind of impact is this gonna have? Okay, other soapbox, I'll be quick though. So the brain is in development actively growing, laying down myelination connections and protection up into your mid-20s, up into around the age of 25, you're still basically an adolescent. And it's really important that children's brains that are still growing get sufficient energy intake. But also because in the same way that adults get hangry and irritable and a bit moody when we don't get enough food. And also when our sugar levels drop, our cortisol levels go up. The same thing happens in children. And when children have high cortisol, they are agitated, aggressive, maybe a bit disruptive. And certainly studies I interviewed Amal McConnell who is the founder of Magic Breakfast. And children who get breakfast have better academic performance and also they're less disruptive. They reduced fights in first play by 30% simply by giving children breakfast. And that's really important when we're thinking about A, that the most important lessons in school are in the morning, math, science, English are in the morning. And if you're hungry, you can't concentrate on those important lessons. But B, that a child who is labeled disruptive, difficult, can't settle, ends up then having poorer academic and educational outcomes. And that can make a real difference in their life trajectory. So oily-fisher children, breakfast for kids. That's why my message. And I mean, Jack, do you feel like, you know, you've done a huge amount of work just flagging up the basic difference to your life it makes when you don't know where your next meal's coming from. But that does seem to be really omitted from the conversation often about schools and about diet, that how much people are struggling. Do you think there's a way, do you think we should be just thinking more about this? Do you think we should be trying to make sure when we have a conversation about nutrition that we're always talking about economics and poverty as well? Yes, absolutely. There's some brilliant work being done on it at the moment with Marcus Rashford is highlighting how many children are still going hungry in Britain's day. Their new national food standards report that Henry Dimbelby authored highlights that as well. He spoke to Carmel McConnell as well, massive, massive fan of Carmel and all that she does with magic breakfast. I think that work is absolutely vital. I think that there is definitely still an element of denial in some many areas of our society that children in Britain today are going hungry. And I think it's because it's such an emotive and difficult concept because children are innocent, children are, they didn't cause national debt, they didn't vote for austerity, they didn't spend all the money, they didn't do all the things that the adults are routinely being accused of doing that apparently ran the country into the ground. Children are the innocent party. So to think that they are suffering as a result of economic policies in justice, inequality or austerity is unthinkable to people and they just put their fingers in their ears and they're like, I must be the parents, they must be spending their money on Sky TV and iPhones instead, drugs and tattoos and handbags. It can't possibly be, it can't possibly be, it's not our fault. And it's something that I've come up against time and time and time and time and time and time again over the last seven years doing what I do is people are just either in denial or refusing to hear that children are hungry. And I think it's impossible to have a conversation about the importance of early years nutrition without also pointing out the difficulty in accessing that for literally millions of children in the UK at the moment, literally millions in it's, the work that Carmel does, it's fantastic. The work that the Trustle Trustle is fantastic. Schools up and down the country hold breakfast clubs and after school clubs that for some kids, they're the only meals they'll get in the day along with their free school meals. In the pandemic, when those clubs are all closed down suddenly you've got hungry kids. You've got in the summer holidays and the half-term holidays, children who rely on those provisions in order to get even the most basic nutrition don't have it. And it's a conversation that is difficult to have and it's complex, but it's kind of like, well, just feed the kids and we'll sort out the underpinning issues later. Like just feed the kids. It's not hard. We've got the money. We've got the resources. We've got the food. Just feed the kids. Like just, it's not, I just, it drives me slightly mad that it's so simple, but it's always shrouded and all these complex reasons why not to. And it's like, I don't want to listen to the excuses. Just feed the children. That's it. It should be the least controversial statement anyone has ever made. So it's like, I know. Somehow we end up in these arguments. It's unbelievable, but it's also, I think the idea that it took a footballer to essentially shame the government into feeding children blows my mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, leading on from that, there's a, you know, it's often said that, I mean, I think it's true that the UK eats more processed food than anybody else in Europe. And there is a huge amount of moral appropriation, I think, attached to the kind of choices that you know, when it's a very easy place to throw the spotlight, people eating, making poor choices rather than having not enough choices. But what is the, I mean, this is to both of you, whoever wants to take it first. What, where do you stand on processed foods? Are they as bad for your mental health as they appear to be for your physical health? And what is, where does responsibility lie? Is it corporate or is it individual? Well, whenever we have conversations about ready meals, they always seem to be about a certain kind of ready meal. They would seem to be about the freezer meals, the one pound, you know, supermarket value meals. And they never seem to be about the Charlie Biggs, Aiquid Lasagnas or the M&S dining for two for 10 pounds or the, you know, the delivery boxes, the Pampard chef things and all of that. Here's me doing myself out of a thousand sponsorship deals here. But, you know, we never have the conversations about the luxury end of that market. And the ready meal market is propped up by very, very expensive meals, very, very expensive ready meals, very expensive processed food. And it's not just like cans of macaroni cheese that people are feeding their kids. It's a two-sided, it's a two-sided thing, but we only ever seem to have a go at one end of it, I think. And I mean, in my opinion, I think ready meals and processed food has a place. I know that when I've been in particularly low pits of depression and despair, I've still got a child to feed. So it's better for him that I can take a spaghetti bolognese out of the freezer, bungs and frozen veg in it, sling it in the microwave and feed him something that's a baseline meal than not. Like, they're handy. And I think looking after yourself mentally and emotionally, as well as like trying to balance your diet all the time is as important. I think we shouldn't beat ourselves up for sort of having some quick fixes kicking around. And Kimberley, where do you stand on the impact on brain health? So I think there are a couple of angles to take it. So, you know, strictly in terms of the research, we know that there is both a correlation in the epidemiology but also kind of mechanistic evidence and explanations as to why diets that are high in overly processed foods, you know, those high in free sugars, high in saturated fats, you know, standard Western diet are associated with poorer mental health outcomes, more depression, worse depression, treatment resistant depression, the greater risk of Alzheimer's disease, those sorts of things. What's also true on the other side, on the policy side, is that in order to meet the national guidelines for a nutritious dietary intake, people in poorer income brackets have to spend 40% of their disposable income, whereas people in wealthier brackets spend 8% of their disposable income. And so it's about, again, affordability and how much, again, we condemn people for making choices when actually their choices are slightly guided by what's available to them and what they have access to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With that, there is still, everybody's very fascinated by children, unsurprisingly. So I need to take a view on what your view, on where you stand about pack lunches versus school meals. First of all, Jack, you're laughing like... I am laughing, I am laughing because my son has been to a couple of different primary schools over the years. And one primary school, we had a list of allowed and not allowed things that were sent up, that we were allowed to put in pack lunches. And I actually worked with Henry Dimbleby on the school food plan in 2014 and about kids' school meals, pack lunches and the recommendations. And then when it actually came round to me and I had to adhere to it, I was like, oh, this is an absolute bureaucratic nightmare. And then his next school was a Catholic primary school and they did school meals and he had school meals and that was lovely and that was really useful and really handy. And the school he goes to now doesn't have a kitchen so we're back to pack lunches. And I mean, I've got a mental checklist that I follow to try to make sure that that pack lunch is balanced but it's an absolute minefield of what you can put in, what you can't put in, what they have, what they can't have. And my son's school's pretty good. They don't do the whole lunchbox inspection or the confiscation thing. But I get sent lists of people's arbitrary rules on Twitter and one school this week sort of hit the news for saying that you could have homemade sausage rolls but not shop bought sausage rolls. And I was like, well, you're just gonna get a load of parents just like bashing their sausage roll up on the side a bit and like poking a hole in it to make it look a bit homemade and then sticking it in the lunchbox, aren't you? I mean, what is the difference between a processed meat wrapped in pastry, whether it's been made in a factory or made in your kitchen? I mean, a sausage roll is a sausage roll. So pack lunches are, once you've sort of got the formula to them, I just do kind of like a ham or cheese sandwich, like a piece of fruit, some chopped up veg and some sort of healthy snack bar thing and some like water or juice. And I think I'm pretty covered. Sometimes it's yogurt, sometimes it's some cheese. Someone somewhere is gonna be sitting there going, that's not an especially balanced one. But, you know, he eats it. He does he in the afternoon, he runs around, has some energy, still has some energy by the time he gets home and it doesn't break the bank. So I've kind of worked it out, but over the years, I've had so many different permutations of kids' school lunches to deal with. It's been slightly more than flowing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Kimberly, you talk about how every individual has kind of different needs from their diet but are there kind of other differences between groups of people? So do men and women need different things? And, you know, is there that kind of distinction? Well, yes and no. So for example, and this comes up a lot when people are talking about things like fasting, women's bodies respond differently to energy availability through the day than men's bodies do. So that becomes an issue when people are experimenting with this different kind of fasting and time-restricted eating protocols. Some of the other differences, and again, something that I'm thinking about a lot as we head into winter is things like vitamin D requirements because people who are culturally vegetarian, for example, but have come from maybe a Southeast Asian background or an Afro-Caribbean background, the latitude of sunlight in the UK is not adequate to make up for the absence of vitamin D rich foods which tend to come more from animal foods. Compared to the sunlight availability that would have been in the kind of cultural country of origin. So certainly I'm always telling all my friends and family, Asian clients to be thinking about vitamin D as we head into winter because that's so important for immune modulation which also then has a separate effect on the brain. But also it's worth saying that, you know, our diets change A through our lifespan and also through the year. So I'd be wanting people, again, A to have a little bit of knowledge, enough knowledge to know how to look after themselves, how to feed themselves, but also then to have developed, and I think this takes time and practice and trust, trial and error, to develop enough self-trust to also be able to respond appropriately to their hunger and their needs and their desires in the moment as well and that it's a balance between those two. It's a balance between knowledge and nutrition information and also desire, sense, taste, touch, pleasure in order to have a satisfying relationship with food. And there's words that people, that nobody's eating enough of. I mean, it sounds like you're going to say macro, but... It's macro, isn't it? That's what, that's the thing. And leafy greens. Macro, leafy greens and fiber are the big ones that are missing. Fibers are the big one. People are getting on board with the gut microbiome now. I guess people aren't maybe as aware as how important it is for the brain, but we should be aiming for around 30 grams of fiber. Most people are getting 18 grams or less. And the hungry microbiome is just a problem. It's not a good thing. So my big three would be fiber, leafy green vegetables and oily fish. Okay. And Jack, do you, and you know the new kind of kombucha fermentation trend, are you really into this? I was just about to ask. I was about to literally say, can I ask you a question, please? Because I have recently started to brew my own kombucha because I have become that person now. And it's because I gave up drinking like 21 months ago and I wanted something that I could have at my desk of an evening. Like it was a little bit grown up tasting. But kombucha is expensive. And I was like, it's basically made of tea and sugar and a big snot of like bacteria. I'm pretty sure I can make this myself. Now, my kitchen, I'm not organized enough to pick my phone up and go and take you to it because it will just go wrong. But it's currently looks like, I don't know, like Walter White's lab. It's just got like crock jars and kiln jars of stuff. And like a hydro alcohol measuring thing sticking out of one of them. And just it's mad. And I love it. And I love experimenting with all the different like teas I've got in like, you know, OSM goodie bags over the years, like making all these fancy different kombuches. And I love it. I'm a little bit like nervous a bit. It's like rose, like big snotty biscuits of murk and they just float around and they eat all the sugar and they drink all the tea and they convert it into something that's apparently good for me. Now, I'm not drinking it for health benefits because I don't, I'm not, I can, you can go down rabbit holes on the internet and look and you can get told a thousand different opposing views about how it's great for you and gonna kill you. I just drink it because I like the taste of it. And also the science, it's like, it genuinely thrills me that I can make something fizzy out of tea. But I'd be really interested to hear Kimberly's views on the whole kombucha trend. And if, you know, if I'm helping myself a bit more than just, you know, having a fun science experiment kicking about in the kitchen. Yeah. Well, so there isn't, so there isn't tons. And this is common for things like homemade fermented food. There isn't tons of evidence because no one's funding it. But, sorry, I dropped my lamp. But the, there's good reason to believe that, you know, there's good mechanistic reason to believe that certainly won't be hurting yourself and you're likely to be helping yourself. A, partly because of those, those prebiotics, those live bacteria that produce all the fizziness. So as they go through, they can, I consider them like the carnival when it goes through town. Like they don't stick around for ages, but they can just make everything a bit better on the way through, so you get the bacteria. But also obviously the tea and there's lots of really lovely research on the benefits of tea and the catechins and the polyphenols in tea being neuroprotective. Essentially, as far as the evidence is concerned, all the tea you can drink is really supportive of brain health. And what happens when you, when the bacteria get to the teas that they make it more bioavailable. And that's the same thing. If you, in your second fermentation, Jack, I've been brewing for a little while, in your second fermentation, because I will use like grape juice. I've made some elderberry cordial as well. And I'll use that in my second fermentation. And what they do, you know, I was talking about dark skin fruits and vegetables. The bacteria will also make those polyphenols more bioavailable for you as well. So I'm on board, yes. I'm so tempted to like run and grab one of my like five litre jars of it. But I'm just like, I just, my kitchen's only around the corner, but I also know that I am a chaotic human being. And I would just fall over the hoover on the way past and it would just go. Somebody in the audience has a follow-up question about men and women and fasting, by the way. Kimberly, Chiara wants to know just a little bit more about how it affects women differently. Okay. It's all around, annoyingly, female reproductive and fertility hormones. Essentially, irrespective of whether a woman wants to have a baby, has already had a baby, is interested in all of that at all. Her body is acutely aware of energy availability. In our evolutionary past, that would have been around issues of infant mortality. So that, you know, if a woman were pregnant in a famine, because food was never as available as it is now, we would have had feasts and famine experiences. And during famine, infant mortality would be higher. So a woman's fertility shuts down when her body gets the information that there isn't sufficient energy in the environment. It's why we see amenorrhea, loss of menstruation in anorexia, for example. So a woman's body is acutely aware and looking out for signs of energy availability from the environment. And as far as your body is concerned, there's no reason why you wouldn't be eating a consistent intake of nutrients if it were available. So dieting, restriction, fasting can be an indicator to the woman's body that there isn't, you know, we're in a famine. And it can affect female hormones. And obviously that's an issue for fertility, but also estrogen, for example, is required for bone health. But estrogen is also neuroprotective. It's one of the reasons that women's brain health risk is twice that of men's, particularly after the menopause when we lose the neuroprotective effects of estrogen. So it's not saying that women absolutely can't, but we should be really mindful of any shifts in your periods, any changes in your hormone level, you know, your experience with your hormones, if you're practicing with something like time-restricted eating, or any of the kind of many fasting protocols. Okay. And aware that we don't have much time, I just want to go to both of you for your ultimate comfort food. You first, Jack, like what really does put you in a good mood? Well, it is my mom's Avgolimino soup, but in the absence of that, it absolutely has to be a cheese and marmite toasty dipped in a can of tomato soup, like obviously warm up the can of tomato soup, cheese and marmite toasty, or a cheese and like sardine. So you make it sort of like, there used to be a restaurant in Hammersmith that did sardine savouries, and it would basically like a cheese and sardine toasty, but just posh. And those just dumped in like tomato soup were just absolutely lovely. And that sounds delicious, actually. Kimberly, it's good. It would have to be a big bowl of pasta, spaghetti and meatballs, or maybe like just a really saucy like puttanesco with like lots of olives and anchovies and really like too much garlic, big fish and chilli. But on my own, I don't want to talk to anyone, just me and pasta, the duvet and Netflix for me. Well, thank you both so much. All you've made me want is to read both your books now, because it's fascinating as this discussion has been. I just feel like there's so much more. Thank you. I'm going to hand back to Polly now to say goodbye properly. Thanks so much. Thank you. That was just so fantastic. I feel like, you know, if there's going to be a run on anything now, it's not going to be Lou, Paper and Pasta, it's going to be Amiga DHA. Running out and getting that. And I'm now, I've just got to see a photograph of your kitchen at some point, Jack. Just sounds amazing. Really amazing. And yeah. And I think the nation will be having Marmite and cheese toasties. And of course, yeah, Netflix and a moral pastor, of course. So amazing. Thank you so much. And so beautifully chaired by Zoe, of course. Thank you, everybody for listening. Thank you so much to our sponsors, KitchenAid. If you have enjoyed this event, we've got events going through till the end of October. I'll just mention two that may well be of great interest to you. This evening at five fifteen, we've got Melissa Helmsley and Gelf Anderson of the River Cottage doing a cooking and chatting and talking about food and taste and waste. And I've tried some of the recipes and they're everything. Vegetable barges are just out of this world. That's at five fifteen tonight. And then on the ninth, Friday the ninth, we've got feeding children. So really relevant to today's event and lots of the questions that people were asking with B. Wilson, Jason O'Rourke, Gita Mistry, Anna Oluftida and chaired by Sheila Dillon, which I think will be fascinating. So those are two events coming up. Please do fill in the questionnaire about whether you enjoyed the event. But otherwise, we'll see you at the next food season. And thank you so much to our amazing panel. Bye-bye.