ZOE’s best health tips of 2025 - Part 1

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
Welcome to this special ZOE episode, the first of our Best of 2025 series, a collection of moments that you told us changed the way you eat, think and feel this year. It's been an incredible year. We spoke with world-leading scientists, uncovered surprising insights and shared practical tools that you can use to feel better every day. And in this special highlights episode, we're bringing you the very best moments, including one surprising discovery about a bright green drink that took over the world this year. Whether you're starting fresh in the new year or building on progress you've already made, this episode is packed with simple ideas you can take into 2026 Here at ZOE, we know that change isn't always easy. So if you're looking for a little inspiration, look no further than Rich Roll, who went from an overweight junk food addicted workaholic to one of the world's fittest men, all after the age of 40 If you're heading into the new year feeling tired, stuck, or unsure where to begin, Rich's story is the reminder that change is possible at any age.

**Rich Roll** (1:19)
Throughout my 20s, I had a struggle with drugs and alcohol that really took me to some pretty dark places. I was able to get sober at 31 I went to treatment for 100 days, which is a long time to be voluntarily incarcerated in what's kind of a mental institution for the temporarily insane. But that really changed my life and provided me with a new set of tools around how to organize my decision making and my actions. When I emerged from that experience, building a foundation of sobriety was my number one priority. I went all in on my recovery and over the next nine or so years, was very focused on that. But at the same time, I was also very intent upon re-establishing myself as a respectable human being who could show up on time and be relied upon and the like, and rebuild my career as a result. During that period of time, I really overlooked my health and well-being because I was so focused on that one thing. It's only in retrospect when I look back on it that I realized the extent to which my relationship with food and lifestyle habits was still very alcoholic. I was using food to medicate my emotional state. Shortly before I turned 40, I was about 50 pounds overweight, so I wasn't obese, but I was quite sedentary. I had been an athlete in college. I swam for Stanford in the late 1980s at a pretty high level, but really hadn't taken care of myself in quite some time. I had an incident walking up the staircase to my bedroom where I had to take a break halfway up. I was literally winded by the exertion of just walking up a simple flight of stairs, and I had some tightness in my chest. It was a scary moment. Heart disease runs in my family. My grandfather, who had also been a standout swimmer, had died young of a heart attack.
Heart disease was something that my mother was always telling me, you got to be careful with your heart. Everything snapped into focus as a result of that, that experience and I realized that not only did I need to make some pretty significant changes in how I was living, like I actually wanted to, like I was blessed with like a level of willingness to actually take action on that. And I think the reason I bring up the sobriety aspect of my story is because I'd had that history, like I'd had that bottoming out moment where I made a decision, acted on it and made a change that changed my life dramatically. And I felt the same energy. I was like, I think I'm having another one of those experiences. And what I learned about that prior experience was that you need to take action quickly because these, it's sort of a sliding doors moment. Like if you don't act upon it with some level of urgency, whatever willingness you're experiencing tends to fade pretty quickly.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:22)
This moment was huge for Rich, realizing his diet wasn't just affecting his health, but limiting his energy, his happiness and the life that he wanted to live.

**Rich Roll** (4:30)
I was on what you would call the window diet. Do you know what the window diet is?

**SPEAKER_1** (4:34)
Tell me about the window diet.

**Rich Roll** (4:35)
The window diet is when you drive up to a fine dining establishment, you roll the window down and they hand you food into your car. That was the diet that I was on. So a lot of fast food, a lot of late night takeout in the law firm in which I was working as a lawyer, Pizza Hut, Domino's, McDonald's, Jack in the Box, cheeseburgers, fries, you name it.