Dr Rupy: Hey, it's Rupy. I'm taking over my own podcast this week. I have a few things I want to talk about. I generally don't do these solo episodes. I've done in the past where I talk about health goals like mental wellbeing, brain health, inflammation, etc, and the science behind those. I do enjoy those, but I also enjoy the interviewing process. But I think this year, I mean, I'll talk about it when I do a bit of reflections on the app in general, but I think this year I do want to do a few more solo episodes where I can really break down some concepts and give you some clear takeaways as well. I did an episode recently with a good colleague of mine on thyroid health, and during that episode, I was trying to break down all these quite difficult concepts for you, the listener. Hopefully, that will be really useful when it comes out. And during that episode, I really thought, this would really be a cool thing to do in a shortened episode, so more like 30 to 40 minutes where I break everything down just myself, give you some infographics that we can support the podcast with via the newsletter, and allow me personally to dive into particular topics and explain those in as clear, as detailed as possible without too much jargon and too much meandering, because I'm a chatterbox. I love to chat to my guests about lots of random stuff and sometimes that can be quite derailing for the listener anyway.
Dr Rupy: So yeah, that's the podcast stuff. I want to talk about the new book, Dr Rupy Cooks, why this is a slightly different direction in that it's a bonafide cookbook. It's fully photographed, all 100 plus recipes have got images. It's something that we haven't done on previous cookbooks before. I want to talk about some of the key learnings from the book and why I doubled down on the recipe side of things. I want to read an extract from the introduction of the book as well, because I think that's pretty poignant as to why, it gives a good reason as to why I chose to really focus on the healthy, easy, flavourful recipe route, rather than too much on the nutritional medicine side, which I believe I can explore a lot more fully through the podcast and having conversations.
Dr Rupy: I also want to give an update on the app, the direction of travel, what I'm struggling with, where we're succeeding. And I want to talk a bit about the studio as well that we're going to be building a purpose kitchen in, a fit-for-purpose kitchen that's going to be for The Doctor's Kitchen cooking show that's going to be on YouTube. I've tried unsuccessfully to get a proper show on TV. I mean, there's the cooking in The Doctor's Kitchen, thrifty cooking in The Doctor's Kitchen that you can find on BBC iPlayer, but a sort of regular cooking show where I show you, the viewer and listener in this case, if you're listening on the podcast, literally how to cook using basic ingredients, how to conjure up healthy recipes, what the kind of principles you should be employing when you do create your own recipes, and how to have fun with it as well. So hopefully this episode will give you sort of like an overarching view of what's going on in my mind and where Dr what the exciting developments are going to be with Dr's Kitchen and hopefully how that will further help you and support you in your own health journeys.
Dr Rupy: And I do want to round off with what I'm focusing on in 23 and a particular theory or philosophical concept that I'm personally obsessed with. I've talked about it in the podcast before, it's mimetic theory. It's a theory of human behaviour and culture that suggests human beings are learning machines and we learn and mimic from each other, and that's been critical for our survival. But I want to talk a bit about that and where the benefits are, the downsides are, and how I'm navigating the propensity to always feel that you need to mimic other people. It kind of plays into why people feel FOMO or feel jealousy or envy, particularly if they're heavy social media users, which although I try and steer clear of, as part of my job, part of it is going to be on social media. So anyway, we'll talk a bit about that in a second.
Dr Rupy: So, let me talk first of all about my latest cookbook, Dr Rupy Cooks. I'm super excited about it. It's out on the 9th of January. It's available in all good bookstores, online, all that good stuff. You can pre-order it now. It's coming out, I think, the day after this episode goes out. So you'll be able to find it in bookstores, support your local independent bookstore if you can, or pre-order it online. There's the bookshop, there's Amazon, all that good stuff. Why is this different? Well, everything is geared towards healthy, easy, flavour. That is the tagline of the book. And I've really streamlined the content and focused on recipes because I feel that's actually where people struggle most. It's not the nutrition information, it's not the science or the deep dive into the mechanisms as to why this particular ingredient might have these benefits or why this impacts the gut. That's all really, really interesting stuff and I love talking about that. I've done that in previous books, like the first Doctor's Kitchen book. I've done it in Eat to Beat Illness, which is where I deep-dived into individual elements and individual silos of the body, like the brain, the heart, mental wellbeing, and I've broken down exactly what studies support food and nutrition as medicine and the other lifestyle factors as well. But really, after chatting to thousands of people in clinic and patients and also colleagues as well, what I've really discovered is where people fail, it's around consistency. It's around putting those, putting that information into practice on a day-to-day basis. This is sort of like the diet industry's dirty little secret because it's not about a strict regime to maintain calories. It's not about a particular macronutrient combination, one that is lower in carb or higher in fat or higher in protein. It's not about restricting all meat to zero. You know, all these are different strategies, but what it comes down to is consistency. And there are plenty of studies that demonstrate that if you consistently eat a certain way that in general removes the crap and focuses on plants, diversity, and lots of colourful foods, you're going to be supporting your brain, your mental wellbeing, your hormone levels, your cholesterol ratio, it all sort of makes sense because when you provide your body with the right fuel, it knows innately how to look after itself. And interestingly, I mean, that was the final chapter in my Eat to Beat Illness book. If you read that, if you've got that book and you read all the different chapters, I deep dive into and I zoom into all those different areas of the body. And in the final chapter, I invite you, the reader, to look through all the chapters at the summaries and realise that it's all the same thing. It's all about eating whole, eating plenty of fibre, plenty of colourful, diverse ingredients, largely plants, and unprocessed your diet. And quality fats, obviously. You know, it's a simple formula. The science is, I always say this, the science is complex, the solutions are simple, the implementation is hard. I was going to say that again. The science, all the stuff that I talk about with the microbiota, inflammation pathways, how the brain signals to the gut, you know, and vice versa, the skin, all that kind of stuff, super, super interesting, super, super complex. Solutions, unprocess your diet, increase your vegetable content, maintain a whole, colourful and diverse collection of foods in your weekly shop and eat that. Great, simple solution, right? Implementation is hard. The reason why it's hard, well, there's time barriers, there's cost barriers, there's culinary ingenuity barriers. You know, what do I do with this half a radicchio and red pepper? There's obviously the accessibility of certain ingredients, particularly when you're in a poor food environment. And so if, you know, you are from a strata of society that is in a lower economic area, you're going to struggle to find places where you can eat cheaply and well. You're also going to struggle when it comes to all the other factors as well. If you don't have the luxury of time, and it is a real privilege to have the time to cook, you're going to struggle as well. So the implementation bit is hard, which is why, you know, this book is really dialling into healthy, easy, flavourful meals. What are the meals and the strategies of creating easy meals that you can do midweek when you're super tired, when you're cooking for a family of four? And that's why most of the recipes are one-pan, minimises the washing up, mainly things like tray bakes, casseroles, stews, curries. Most of the recipes you can batch cook, a lot of them are freezable. I generally, I always get asked whether a particular recipe is freezable or not. A good general rule of thumb is if it's in a sauce, if it doesn't have a texture that is necessary for the for the meal, so like there isn't like a crispy texture, there isn't like a nut or anything like that on the top, there isn't like a gratin which has like a a particular lovely crunch to it, it's probably going to be freezable. Obviously, barring things like salads and the like, it's most likely going to be freezable if it's in a in a stew. So a general rule of thumb is that if it's a stew, casserole, curry, it's freezable. If it's a salad or anything that has any element of crunch in it, probably not going to taste great when it's reheated. And everything else in between and whole whole ingredients, like if you've just sautéed broccoli or you've made some rice or you've made a pot of beans, freezable. Those are the general rules of thumb that you can just use as a simple heuristic. So yeah, so the recipes that I've focused on are really to help you maintain consistency. Consistency is the key thing that I just wish everyone would would recognise. Because there are a lot of companies, particularly in the US, where they're offering you a layer of a sort of simple guide to how you can optimise your diet, the correct ingredients you should be eating, the foods that don't spike your glucose level as much, doing a genomic test to figure out exactly what foods you should and should not be eating. I guarantee you, 80 to 90% of what people are recommended is probably going to be the same. I really don't think it's that different when it comes to whole, unprocessed foods. So if you are suggested to not have a particular brand of crisps or a particular food like ice cream or a high fat, high sugar product, guess what? Most people aren't going to be recommended that either and most people are going to have a negative reaction to it. So always think about it through the perspective of what is the main thing I should be, what is the elephant in the room that is true for everyone? It's consistency. It's unprocessing your diet, removing the crap that most people recognise as crap and increasing the healthy whole food ingredients that most people will know is good for them. And it really comes down to consistency. That is the one thing that I want people to take away from it.
Dr Rupy: The other thing that I would say is diversity. So you've probably already heard by now, there's plenty of research and lots of PR around getting as much diversity in your diet as possible. And that's very true. The more, the analogy that I always use whenever I'm talking about the gut microbiota, it's as if you've got some bored kids in your gut. And if you give them the same food over and over again, they're going to get, they're going to get bored, they're going to get cranky, they're not going to like it. If you give them a diverse smorgasbord of all these different ingredients, they're going to have a party, they're going to absolutely love it. They're going to be feeding on lots of different, interesting new substrate or foods, such that they flourish and that they populate your gut and do the best work for you of metabolising your food, of producing other neurochemicals and other chemicals in general. It's like a, it's like a pharmacy down in your gut and actually having a better relationship with your skin, with your brain, because there are different axes that communicate directly and indirectly to your gut microbiota as well. So diversity is absolutely king and that's why whenever you look at one of my recipes, you'll notice there's plenty of spice, there are plenty of different ingredients that I always use. There are interesting ways of preparing them and trying to do the best in terms of not overcooking things, lightly steaming, and also the process of how you layer flavours into your food is super important as well, which is why you'll see like pops of herb or pops of colour at the end of a meal or me stirring in spinach right at the end so it gently steams in the residual heat of the pan or the casserole or whatever I'm cooking. So that those are different elements that you'll find. It's hopefully simple enough such that you can maintain consistency and it's also going to be full of diverse ingredients. Not necessarily exotic ingredients, things that you can find in your local supermarket or your local market, but certainly ingredients that are combined in a way that maintains diversity for the benefit of your gut microbiota.
Dr Rupy: The other thing is whole food. So whole food that's minimally processed, we're moving away from white refined bread, for example, to things like sourdough, things like rye, things like breads that you could use as a weapon because it's so so dense and heavy, like a German rye bread is like a perfect example of something that's really, really rich in fibre. And then you do have sort of people who fare less well with bread just because of the fact that they might have celiac or non-celiac gluten sensitivity, but also people who just can't deal with their sugar spikes. And I view bread as a as a luxury staple for me. I know personally, I've tried a plenty of different breads, gluten-free varieties, rye varieties, and I use it as something that I enjoy a couple of times a week, but perhaps not every single day. The staples in my diet are things like beans, legumes, plenty of cruciferous vegetables, greens. That's exactly where I want to be focusing a lot of my ingredients when it when it comes to what I want to be introducing into my into my gut that will ultimately serve my health as well. So the whole foods is certainly something that I think people should also think about and hopefully you'll find lots of interesting ideas of how to combine whole foods into delicious recipes in this book as well. It's almost like a blueprint. Hopefully you can see how I'm layering different foods onto each other, whether that's in a curry or a stew or a tray bake, the strategy is fairly similar and there's lots of substitutions as well. I've actually put substitutions in the book as well.
Dr Rupy: So those are, I mean, just to summarise those things, consistency is the main, main takeaway. Diversity of foods, whole foods. I'm often asked, particularly, I mean, this happens quite a lot because I'm doing the PR for the book at the moment, from, you know, anyone from a broadsheet to a tabloid to a website, a newsletter, they ask really, really similar questions and unfortunately, it perpetuates a particular idea that I think is pretty rampant because we all have this desire to have a quick fix. And that is what ingredient is best for X. And, you know, if I was trying to be quick and clever about it, you know, I could say pumpkin seeds are good for this because it's got vitamin E and magnesium and all the rest of it, or butternut squash is great for skin because, you know, it has carotenoids and a whole collection of vitamins that we know are critical for collagen building and all the rest of it. And whilst all that is true, the main thing that people need to focus on is the collection of all the different ingredients that coalesce and work synergistically to improve your body's innate ability to maintain skin, maintain your brain health, maintain cardiovascular health, maintain metabolic health. It's really about focusing on getting a huge collection of all those different whole food ingredients rather than the individual ingredients themselves and ensuring that you have those individual elements in your diet. I love talking about the different compounds and bioactives that you find in things like cruciferous vegetables and kale and I love talking about things like sulforaphane and the evidence around how if you, you know, use sulforaphane in an experimental environment, you give it to lab rats, for example, their measures of inflammation go down and then you put that in a human trial and then, you know what, it reduces the impact of environmental exposure and it actually increases the excretion of particular toxic compounds in our environment. There are studies that have done this with broccoli sprout extract. We're talking about that on a future podcast and we've talked about it on a previous podcast as well. I love all that kind of stuff. It's great. It's really, really interesting for me and I think it's going to be interesting for listeners as well. However, it does pose a bit of an issue at the same time because I think it perpetuates this idea of singular ingredients as the key to improving one's health and longevity. And really it comes down to the diversity and the consistency of your diet. And I'm going to sound like a broken record here because I'm just going to say consistency consistently and consistently say consistency because it's that important. It's really about getting a diverse collection of all these wonderful ingredients that have these wonderful impacts because if I guarantee if you're just going to eat broccoli your entire life, it's not going to be healthy because you're going to be lacking in certain other elements as well, things like proteins, things like the fibres that you find in different pulses, etc. So you really got to think about whilst that's super interesting, great, you know, sunflower seeds and hazelnuts are great for vitamin E, magnesium and zinc and that might be good for things like inflammatory skin disorders or clear skin. It really comes down to the overall picture of your diet, the food matrix and the way in which all these different ingredients combine with each other. And all this is to say, you know, the reason why this book is shorter in the introduction section, I go through some really key concepts, basically the ones that I'm going through with you right now, and focusing on the food and the food that has been designed and tested in a way to ensure maximum diversity, ease, flavourful cooking that is also super healthy because of all the reasons that we're discussing here. That's why, you know, my focus is really trying to help you become consistently a better cook, a more confident cook, because that's going to have the biggest bang for your book, not just, you know, another book about why different foods are super interesting. Because nutrition science hasn't changed a massive amount over the last few decades. We all know what we should be eating, but it's the implementation. That's the, that's the bit that's hard.
Dr Rupy: On the subject of gut health, I think because it's a really important topic, it's a very popular topic as well, I did do a short chapter on gut health and basically how everything starts in the gut. And the three or four things that you need to focus on when it comes to gut health, all the things that I've listed above, but largely plants. So there is some pretty convincing evidence, I would say, that a largely plant-focused diet, so one that is 80 to 90% plants, is universally beneficial for your gut. And I think even those in the sort of carnivore community, the low-carb community, paleo community, I mean, it's interesting to call them communities. I guess, you know, they're online communities or whatever. Even those pretty hardliners are coming around to this idea of introducing more plants into the diet. And actually, if you listen to my TED talk, when you analyse most of these diets, they are pretty plant-focused. They remove the crap, they introduce a lot more plants. Some of them have meat, some of them don't, but in large, they do have very similar qualities, which is why if you can maintain that particular diet without shifting and being tempted by excess sugar and overeating and all these other things, then it's no wonder people have pretty profound outcomes on them if they enjoy it and they're consistent with it. So largely plants, I think is a good heuristic for most people to have. Prebiotics, the unsexy cousin of probiotics. So prebiotics are fibrous foods that have unique fibres that will in particular that are particularly good at improving your population of gut microbes. So it will improve their ability to thrive, it will improve the diversity of the microbes that you have in your gut. They are uniquely positioned to do that. And these prebiotics are not really, really expensive and perhaps that's why they don't get as much attention. So it's things like inulin that you'll find in chicory. It will be garlic, asparagus, artichoke, Jerusalem artichoke. You know, fantastic, easy, accessible ingredients that we can try and get into our diet as much as possible. If you do have a particular issue with increasing fibre, particularly if you're going from a low-fibre diet to a high-fibre diet, you might find some symptoms of bloating and uncomfortable abdominal aches and pains. We're going to be talking about that actually with Dr B, who's a gastroenterologist who's written a fantastic book himself actually about increasing fibre and the potential pitfalls of increasing fibre if you're not used to having these kind of ingredients in your diet. So I always recommend people go slow and just ramp it up in increments over weeks rather than all of a sudden having a really high-fibre meal. So just something to bear in mind.
Dr Rupy: Probiotics are absolutely fantastic as well. Kimchi, sauerkraut, all the different sort of fermented foods that you can find like kefirs and kombucha. There are some studies showing that fermented foods are particularly good at improving your gut microbiota, even some that demonstrate more so than high-fibre foods themselves. I would wait to see whether this is replicable in other studies. I'm only aware of a handful because nutrition studies are uniquely pretty hard to do and very expensive and there's not much funding for it. But I would say, you know, if you can get probiotic foods into your diet, whether that's making the probiotic food yourself, sauerkraut, kimchi, all that kind of stuff, it's very easy to do. You can look up online, there's tons of recipes, then do. And as an example, let's say I'm having a breakfast, I do this very often, I'll have leftovers and I'll warm it up and then I'll put some sauerkraut on the side of that with maybe a little bit of aged cheese and maybe a handful of nuts as well. Like my breakfast is so, so simple. The ones in the book are like recipes, but when I, when it comes to consistency, I'm really thinking about all those different hacks to maintain the quality of my overall diet. And so that can be a handful of nuts, a little bit of aged cheese or marinated tofu. I do mix it up all the time, and having some sauerkraut or kimchi on the side as well. Really, really easy additions. And again, like leaning on my, on my TED talk, if you're just thinking just one more, can I get just one more portion of fruit, vegetable, nuts or seeds into my diet every meal time, you're well on your way to having a diverse, consistently whole, unprocessed diet that will put you in incredible stead when it comes to preventing the likelihood of all these lifestyle-related illnesses that we're at risk of because we live in a highly processed, poor food environment. Well, a lot of us do anyway.
Dr Rupy: And the other thing is polyphenols. So I've said for gut health, largely plants, prebiotics, additional probiotics, and polyphenols. That is basically another fancy word of saying, getting as many colourful ingredients into your diet. Fruits, vegetables, absolutely fantastic. Get the rainbow in. And I know it's cliché to say get the rainbow in, but those different colours represent all the thousands of different polyphenols that you'll find in coloured fruits and vegetables. And colour is a really good heuristic as well. It's a nice rule of thumb. So going for a radicchio which has dark red, a real deep colour, the pigment, that's indicative and the bitter taste of it, those are indicative of the collection of different polyphenols that you'll find in a radicchio or a kale, for example, or cavolo nero. Again, it's got a real deep, bitter colour, a bitter flavour and a deep earthy green colour to it as well. And that is a concentration of all those different polyphenols. There is some, you know, stuff online about how all plants are out to get us. You know, there's a bunch of popular books about lectins and anti-nutrients. I think anti-nutrients is a is a bit of a scary term to use. And I always use the example of turmeric. So when you look at these polyphenols at a cellular level, what they do is actually elicit an inflammation response. So they actually, to put it in a in a sort of broad term, they attack your own cells and what that does is it generates a response that is net anti-inflammatory. So it's the antioxidant reactive response, basically. So what it does is it encourages your cells to react in a way that generates an anti-inflammatory response and so the net effect is anti-inflammatory. The parallel to this is exercise. So if you, if someone was to say, okay, when you do exercise, what happens is your blood pressure goes up, sugar gets dumped into your bloodstream and you have a net inflammatory effect because of all the shearing that you do to your muscles. If you look at it just through that very small lens, you would determine that exercise is uniquely bad for you and you should never, never do any exercise. But if you look at a long enough period of time, you'll realise that regular exercise, even though it has those short-term potential downsides, over time, what it does is it encourages resilience. It encourages your body to become more resilient to any other stresses. And so the net effect is anti-inflammatory, the net effect is anti-cancer, the net effect is pro-cardiovascular health. So just be aware of how it's very easy to use specific small insights to argue a particular point of view that actually might be counter to what might be helpful. So that's my little tip bit about, you know, reading too much into individual ingredients and how they might be harmful. If you feel well, if you're unprocessing your diet, you've got lots of whole foods, you ain't got to worry. It's really down to consistency.
Dr Rupy: One other thing before I move on from the book, I want to, I do want to talk about the flavourful aspect. So, you know, I've talked about healthy, talked about easy, flavour and the perception of flavour is very, very important. I'm going to read a section from the book. I've never done a reading from my book before. I mean, most of my books are like, you know, recipes. I don't think anyone would like me reading out recipes. But I do want to talk a bit about the flavour experience and the tasting experience. So, part of my job as a doctor is to show you what to eat, but as a home cook, it's also to ensure that you enjoy both the cooking and tasting experience. This might be a bit of an esoteric way of looking at food and it might seem contrived. However, there is some science behind it. Sensory information about food is coming from all the receptors in your body, your nose, your mouth, your ears. You know, when you go into a restaurant, the anticipation of getting that food, you know, you might have seen some things on Instagram about what the dishes are, you know, you've got the smells, you've got the wonderful waiter, all these conjure to give you the ultimate experience that you have whenever you go into hospitality. So I'll go back to the book now. All these different receptors measuring the sensory information gets processed in the primary sensory cortices of the brain. If you eat a subjectively delicious tasting meal, these stimuli coalesce to create a positive experience that rewards your behaviour and encourages repetition. We get the opportunity to have these rewarding experiences two, three times a day, which over time creates a habit. Now, to create a healthy eating habit whereby the choice of foods that serve the function of your body becomes subjectively desirable and automatic, we must strive to make this a positive experience sensorially and physically. This is to say we can't rely on willpower alone. This is going back to what I was saying about the implementation element being very hard. This is to say we can't rely on willpower alone to want to eat green vegetables, legumes and fruit just because we know they're good for us. The consumption of these foods has to be a pleasurable experience, which is why my recipes intertwine flavour and function. And then I go on to talk a bit about pleasure research and, you know, the mindset around eating foods, which is something that I think is quite overlooked, and the anticipation and how we describe healthy foods to us. So a lot of effort that I went to when I when I wrote the book was actually talking and thinking about the descriptions of the recipes. It was talking about, you know, putting effort into like, how do I make this sound and how do I make the descriptors sound super delicious such that you just really want to dive into this meal. It's another reason as to why I was really adamant to make sure that this book had photographs for every single recipe because what is the main driver, you know, me as a massive cookbook fan, what is the main driver for me wanting to cook a particular recipe? It's the image, it's the photo, it's what it looks like. It's the shine on the on the food, it's the, you know, how the spoon is placed, you know, the styling of it. I know these all sound very contrived, but as like a food lover that I am, all these different elements are really, really important when it comes to making healthy eating a pleasurable experience that encourages repetition. And the repetition element of it, the the sort of the the the need to have that pleasurable experience, I think is, you know, something that I think will create a habit. I didn't talk about this in the book, but part of how I made healthy eating a pleasurable and habitual experience for me when I got ill over 13 years ago now, 14 years ago now, was by making healthy food pleasurable. And so the use of spice, the use of of playful elements, you know, garnishes, textures, all those things are really, really important because, you know, I didn't want to just eat spinach, brown rice, you know, some boiled chicken, maybe a couple of other vegetables. A lot of people do, particularly those on meal plans, you know, it's got to be something that you absolutely love. And that will encourage repetition. So hopefully, you know, that's my little sell for Dr Rupy Cooks that you can buy in any bookstore, but even if you don't, you know, hopefully what I've said in this bit of the podcast will encourage you to really think about, okay, how I'm going to unprocess my diet, how I'm going to make sure that I'm going to make healthy eating, whole food, habitual, and also thinking about all those different elements of your gut health, largely plants, polyphenols, and prebiotics. You can't really go wrong when you're just focusing around those things. And, you know, I would not say ignore. I think particularly when it comes to investigations, like continuous glucose monitors, DNA tests, microbiota tests, at-home blood tests, I think they can be motivators for the first bit of improving one's diet or giving some insights into how damaging certain elements of your diet might be. You know, it's unlikely to be whole unprocessed food that's going to be damaging to your diet. It's most likely going to be all the other elements that you can probably recognise are going to be unhealthy. So I think those are good motivating factors. They don't dial into the consistency and that is the dirty little secret I was talking about earlier. The consistency part, that's something that we really need to dial down on. And, you know, it kind of lends itself as to why I started my app because my aspiration for the app is to using smart technology, things like machine learning and AI, to enable you to plug in your tastes, your preferences, to learn from your choices as to what you love eating, click a button, it creates your meal plan for the week. It can be for your partner, your kids, it could be for anyone that you want. It already recognises what their dislikes and likes are. In a click of a button, all your meals are generated in terms of your meal plan for that week. You can remove the days that you don't want or the meals that you don't need. You can also add filters, things like, you know, price, I don't want to spend more than X amount every week, or I want my particular ingredients to be ethically sourced, I want them to be organic, I want them to be as organic as possible given my budget. And then you click another button and then you have your shopping list and then you can either take that to the market or you can go to your online grocer. That's the simplest flow of how shopping should be. Right now it's really, really hard. I've been chatting to a few users of the app, I've been chatting to a few people who absolutely love recipes and cooking, but they fall down at certain areas because of the food environment that we unfortunately have to contend with, both online and offline. And so, you know, that's sort of the direction of travel that I'm going in with the app.
Dr Rupy: We're also going to be doing some other more educational features with the app as well. So I might as well talk about the app on this part of the pod. As part of your subscription, for those of you who've got an annual subscription or monthly subscription, I want to be doing regular Q&A events and regular live cooking events where I can sort of help you in a bit more of a one-to-one basis. I know Android users, I know you're waiting for an Android. Trust me, it's really, really hard and costly to create technology in general, like putting out an app on an app store is really expensive and very, very complicated, particularly when you don't have your own tech team. So it's, it is very hard. It really comes down to me. I'm literally the one jumping in on customer service emails, responding to comments, making sure that the app works properly, ensuring the quality assurance of the app, you know, removing any bugs or flagging them. It's tough. But that being said, we are working on it and hopefully soon we'll have an Android version and everything will be fine and dandy. But yes, for existing app subscribers, we're going to be looking at trying to give as much value as possible from a subscription to the app. So this will include things like cooking, live cooking sessions, live Q&As with me. The best way to find out about that will be if you are a subscriber to the app newsletter, and you can find that on the app itself. You just go to profile and then toggle subscribing to the app newsletter. I'll also shout about it in the regular newsletter as well, just so no one's missed or anything like that. And yeah, really excited about that. And the reason why we're going to be able to do more of that stuff is because I'm going to be investing in a studio. So the studio is going to be an amazing space where we are going to build a fit-for-purpose kitchen. We're just building a kitchen from scratch in this in this space. It's going to be all kitchen, Doctor's Kitchen branded. We're going to have some podcasts there, some like cooking shows. We're also going to be doing a lot of socials and all that kind of stuff from this space. It's going to be big enough such that we can do intimate supper club events. I also want to do live podcasting there as well. I think that would be fantastic to invite, you know, people to come to come to the studio and have that sort of in-real-life connection. It's going to be like a place that we are just going to be, we're going to be like a Willy Wonka's for healthy cooking and recipes that make it easy for you to eat well every day. So I'm going to be looking for a food producer, someone who really understands flavour, who understands the challenges of cooking midweek meals, meals for families, meals for fussy eaters, meals for health needs. You know, the nutrition sort of arm is going to come from me and the research team, but we're going to be doing a lot more of that stuff of there. So yeah, having a food producer, having a dedicated space, I think is going to be a real unlock for creativity for The Doctor's Kitchen. So I'm super excited about that. And we're also going to be doing another newsletter. It's going to be called Seasonal Sundays. Every Sunday, we're going to do a deep dive into a particular ingredient. It's going to be starting in February. So if you're a regular newsletter subscriber that you can find on the doctorskitchen.com/newsletter, you'll be able to find the, we're going to shout about it in that newsletter as well, so you won't miss it. But I'm really excited about that because we're going to do deep dives into what I love talking about, which are the mechanisms, the the just how how varied our ingredients are and how wonderful they are, and giving you ideas about how you can eat seasonally as well on a budget too. So there'll be that and we're going to be doing a lot more stuff in the studio around seasonal Sundays, different ingredients and obviously recipes as well.
Dr Rupy: So that's all the sort of app and studio stuff, talked about the book. What I'm focusing on in 23 is, it comes down to this idea of mymesis. So just to explain mymetic theory in very simple terms, it's the idea that we learn and want things because we see others wanting and having them. It's easier, there's a saying I think from René Girard who is sort of the founder of this of this philosophy or way of thinking, it's easier to desire things once they have been first desired by someone else. And it's accelerated that wanting, that desire is accelerated the closer that person is to your circle. So the closer you are to someone that has desired something, you're more likely to desire that. I'll give you a very simple example. So let's say your best friend turns up to your house or flat or whatever and they've got a brand new car. And you know, you might be happy for them, you might be, you know, really encouraging and it's good for you, good for you. But then all of a sudden, it implants in your head this idea that maybe I want a car, maybe I want a sports car. Why don't I get a car? Or maybe it's another example where someone goes on holiday and then one of your friends and then you see them having a great time, they're frolicking in the sea and then if you're being really honest with yourself and you're being really vulnerable just with yourself, you will probably unveil the slight envy, the hint of jealousy and the overwhelming desire to want to have the same thing, to want to have the same experience. This is mymetic theory, the theory of mymesis in a nutshell. And I think as someone who spends a lot of time on social media, on, you know, platforms that essentially will publish the successes of other people, it's very easy to fall into the same trap, no matter where you are in life, whether you work from home, whether you're a full-time carer, whether you have a high-flying job in the city, whether you are an entrepreneur with tens of millions in the bank, it does not matter. We are all vulnerable to the power of mymesis. If anyone hasn't come across René Girard and the theory of mymesis, I highly encourage you to to look it up. It was on, I featured it on one of my newsletters, I think this year, with a little video explaining how René Girard came up with this theory. He basically recognised in some of the best stories and the most well-renowned novels that there was always this repeating theme of the protagonist having been inspired by the successes or the wants of someone else, whether it might have been a mentor, maybe it was someone who was before their time. They've always been inspired by someone else to want the same thing. And it's just, it's just very funny because it can be a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing because, you know, mymesis exists, particularly with, you could use the example of babies. Babies mimic, they mimic their older siblings, they mimic their parents. It's a way of accelerating learning. It's a way of learning the rules of life and getting to grips with the ropes of what is a good thing to have and what is a bad thing to have. It's a bad thing because it leads to envy, it leads to wanting the wrong things, it leads to inappropriate desires and it leads you further away from your truth. It leads you further away from actually what can actually fulfil you. And actually being aware of mymesis, being aware of the pull of desires that are conjured by other people and focusing on actually what truly makes you happy, you have to scratch away at the at the sort of the foil and the and the surface and and the crust of of where that truly lies, that's how you'll get a lot more fulfilment. And so one thing that I was given actually by my my wife, she she gave me a picture of a quote and it just says, own, six words, own lane, own pace, own race. Own lane, own pace, own race. And I think this is particularly useful for me because I see the successes of of other people, of of my colleagues, of, you know, and it's very easy to be pulled into lots of different directions and you might be having the same pulls as well. So whether or not this is this is relevant for you or not, I think it's a good saying to constantly keep aware of or it's a it's a good philosophy, it's a good sort of um framework to to constantly be reminded of the pulls of of mymesis and you'll find it everywhere. You'll absolutely find it everywhere. In your friendship circles, in your professional circles, in your online circles, when you're browsing online, the pull of mymesis is everywhere. And since I've learned about mymetic theory and since I've become a lot more aware of it, I see it everywhere. I see it everywhere. I see it in my friends, I see it in my family, I see it in my most cherished friends, my most loved ones. And it's, you know, it's not a bad thing, it's not a good thing. It just is. It just is and it's I think it's something that we just have to accept. So that's what I'm focusing on in 2023, the pull of mymesis and being more intent and purposeful about what I allow myself to dive into and what will actually lead to a lot more fulfilment, which is my studio, my creating my own cooking show. I've tried for years to, you know, create my own weekly healthy cooking show, something that goes out on TV, something that, you know, rivals some of the biggest cooking shows that is all geared towards health and geared towards everything that I talk about in Dr Rupy Cooks. And you know what, I'm just going to do it myself. So, you know, that's the reason for the studio, that's why we're going to be doing Dr's Kitchen cooking on on YouTube. I just want to dive into into that. So if you, if you are watching this on YouTube, please do subscribe or, you know, if you're listening to this in the podcast, an easy way to support would be to subscribe to the newsletter to the newsletter and and YouTube. And hopefully the app is going to be a huge unlock for a lot of people looking to improve their health in 2023 and beyond as well because I'm truly, truly committed to making this the best app possible, to making it continually better, to investing in more health goals, women's health and menopause are going to be high on the priority for Q1 this year and a lot more features as well that we are, I'm constantly looking through everyone's comments and we're going to be doing a lot more deep dive sessions as well with app subscribers. So definitely looking out for that as well. So I really hope you enjoyed today's ramble. I'm going to try and do rambles like this but a lot more focused and a lot more structured and deep dives into particular areas that I'm really interested in. I want to take feedback from you guys about how I can improve the pods as well. We've got an incredible lineup of people that I'm interviewing. Next week we have Tim Spector, we'll have Dr B, we'll have Dr Amy Gajar, we have a ton of people that I want to interview as well on the subject of nutrition but also looking a little bit wider on the subjects of philosophy, fulfilment, what actually makes us happy and frameworks that you can use as well to improve your self-belief and ultimately how you can coast through life and be unaffected by the steals of pleasure which are surrounding us and to become impervious to that. That's sort of like what I'd love for this podcast to also lean into. It's it's that that element of of wellbeing. So thank you so much. I really appreciate your attention and I look forward to chatting like this again with you. Thanks a lot.
