ZOE, the personalised nutrition company, is at it again. At the end of June, the brand launched a “first-of-its-kind” supplement called Daily30+. Made up of nuts, seeds, vegetables, herbs and some lesser known plants, the minimally-processed mix promises to “help people create better dietary habits and fibre intake” with trial participants citing improvement in energy, mood, gut symptoms and sleep quality. It retails for £39 a month.
When I first received the press release, I was equal parts intrigued and sceptical. For one thing, isn’t it ironic for a company that emphasises personalised nutrition to sell a daily universal supplement? For another, the type of person who would be able to afford this supplement would surely have a fairly diverse diet already. So who is it really for?
At first glance, the mix looks like a dense, red-tinted bag of seeds and smells mainly like thyme. It appears to be a posh savoury granola. Still, I wanted to reserve judgement until I tried it. As one of the one in five UK adults with IBS, I’ve some experience in the name of eating for my gut: I am part of the Big Fibre lobby who has found my life much improved by increased fibre (Daily30+ promises a daunting 353 different types of fibre). I am optimistic that it could be more beneficial to scoop up several mouthfuls of seeds than pop a tablet supplement.
Plus I wanted to see how realistic it is to roll this into a daily routine – how many meals do I really use it on? Does it make everything taste the same?
I spent the last week carting around my resealable space bag of ZOE bits and collecting my thoughts, all the while speaking to Lucy Kerrison, specialist consultant dietitian in gut health and ZOE’s own Dr Sarah Berry for their own thoughts.
What is the ZOE supplement?
As the name promises, Daily30+ is a blend over over 30 plants, made up of “353 different types of fibre and 7,000+ plant chemicals” aiming to improve your health and diet. This breaks down into:
- Five types of seeds: flaxseeds, pumpkin seeds, hemp seeds, grape seeds, sunflower seeds, chia seeds
- Three types of nuts: almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts
- Red lentil flakes
- Baobab fruit pulp
- Chicory root inulin
- Nutritional yeast flakes
- Puffed quinoa
- Five spices: parsley, thyme, rosemary, turmeric, cumin
- Buckthorn
- Beetroot Flakes
- Carrot Flakes
- Garlic
- And eight types of mushroom: lion’s mane, reishi, chaga, shiitake, cordyceps, maitake, white mushroom, tremella
Upon looking through the ingredients, Kerrison says “it’s a really interesting supplement”, and that the blend “does use aspects that we know can benefit gut health like a variety of different plant based products”. All of these listed ingredients contribute in particular to increasing fibre intake (which ZOE explains “can reduce inflammation, risk of heart disease, risk of metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and improve mental health”) and the mix as a whole is a source of omega-3s, polyphenols, plant protein and copper.
However this is not unique to Daily30+. Though there are some ingredients that you might be less familiar with (howdy, baobab), the majority of the supplement’s ingredients, Kerrison points out, are ones “you can find in a supermarket”.
She also points out the high number of mushrooms. “[This] is a deliberate inclusion I think, because there’s so much hype around mushrooms at the moment.” Mushrooms are, like other ingredients here, rich in fibre, but the specific mushrooms included (such as lion’s mane) are particularly popular in wellness health spaces, with claims around improving energy and brain fog. (UK consumer watchdog Which? have scrutinised the trend recently, saying “there isn’t enough evidence yet to suggest they work — and the vast majority don’t have authorised health claims in the UK”.)
What are the health benefits?
As with their other products, ZOE sells Daily30+ as nutrition that is science driven. To that end, they tested this product with a randomised control trial, which they call the “gold standard of clinical trials”.
The participants in the clinical trial were tested for the diversity of their microbiome over the course of six weeks with one group taking the supplement, another a single strain probiotic, and another having croutons. As well as improved microbiome diversity, participants reported improvement in energy (51 per cent), indigestion (55 per cent), constipation (35 per cent), mood (45 per cent) as well as 21 per cent reporting a reduction in hunger from the start to the end of the trial.
Kerrison tells me “it’s good that they’ve done a large scale study on the supplement, because lots of supplement companies don’t do that”. However, she questions the conclusions drawn.
Other than the microbiome itself, these results are self-reported and, as Kerrison explains, that makes it very hard to determine if there was a real effect or just a placebo effect. The difference between a dense, savoury granola and bread croutons is quite obvious and could easily influence participants’ perceptions.
“For outcomes like mood and energy, those are really, really tricky ones to interpret with an unblinded study – if you’re having a plate of different plant-based products, then you’re likely going to feel a bit better whether that be a placebo or not.” These outcomes are also not what the study was designed to test and so are far less robust.
For another thing, it’s not peer reviewed. “It’s a little bit frowned upon in the scientific community for the company themselves to be speaking so widely and so positively about a study when it’s yet to be peer reviewed.”
The study also claims improvements to gut symptoms like constipation, flatulence and bloating, but there is another fundamental piece of information missing: how the participants are eating outside of the study. “With gut symptoms like this, we really need to know what’s causing those symptoms and what the underlying reason is, rather than using a supplement for it.”
It also leans on the 30 plants a week concept, one that has less robust backing than many assume.
In a comment to the i, Dr Berry says that “we recently presented an abstract at the Nutrition Society Meeting (July 2nd) which underwent peer review. The full manuscript is currently in the peer review process, and we hope it will be published within the next four months.”
On the subject of self-reporting and influence on participants, she adds that “we used validated data collection methods for these subjective measures, which are widely used in clinical trials.” The Daily30, as well as the two control arms, were delivered to participants in “generic non branded bags”.
Dr Berry says that “participants reported their food intake throughout the study, which allowed us to calculate their nutrient intake and how healthy their baseline diet was. Between the beginning and end of the study, there were no significant increases in overall diet quality as measured using a diet quality score (the ‘Healthy Eating Index’).”
What is it actually like
After a week I’ve concluded this supplement is… fine. It’s perfectly palatable, a little sandy. It tastes vaguely savoury and adds a subtle crunch to its recommended serving (over scrambled eggs). But I was surprised by how hard I found to actually take the recommended dose each day. I was incorporating one scoop (the recommended addition), though in their trial participants were consuming double that. Dr Berry explains: “In the RCT, we saw significant improvements in 6 weeks, a result we would expect to see with one scoop day over a longer period of time.”
A scoop is far more than it looks, and the nature of it being so bitty made it hard to eat unless you plan ahead. There’s a reason scrambled eggs are Tim Spector’s go-to – they’re wet enough for the grains to have something to grip onto, but dry enough that it’s palatable to stumble on random crunchy bits. The kind of thing that works on an open-faced sandwich or salad, but would be hard to eat on a slice of pizza or a broth-based soup.
If I’m honest, making sure I was eating in a way to suit the supplement was the main challenge of the week. I do not have savoury breakfasts on weekdays (who has the time) so it falls to lunch. Here you face the wet vs dry conundrum, plus the added complication that it is almost impossible to add to anything self contained without a level of forethought. If I’d really tried I could maybe have had my dose with a falafel wrap, but far more would end up on the floor than in my gut.
I will say that pouring it on my meals did very much fill me up. But I’m not sure why that should be a surprise. It’s food, which has a tendency to alleviate hunger. Plus, I was spending extra time chasing seeds around my bowl in order to get my “money’s worth” and made sure no morsel was wasted, for science.
As for other symptoms it’s honestly hard to tell. I have felt good this week – I’ve been eating well, but not overeating, I’ve had no IBS symptoms and everything has been wonderfully regular. But I’m cautious of putting that down to Daily30+.
I have three main triggers for IBS: poor diet, PMS and menstruating, and stress. This is important context as I started taking this supplement once I returned from a two-week holiday. I’d spent two weeks chasing cravings, not appetite, and had accidentally subsisted on bread, cheese, and chocolate. I endured PMS and my period just before I returned to work. And I returned to work, crucially, not stressed.
There’s no doubt that the supplement had something to do with my good week. I am, as I said, pro fibre, and this was definitely a dose of the good stuff. But because of the nature of the mixture I was choosing healthier options as they simply made eating all those seeds easier: an overpriced salad over a convenient wrap; an egg-based breakfast rather than a croissant; and far fewer delicious granola breakfasts.
This would have affected my fibre and plant intake as much, if not more, than the supplement itself.
At £39 a bag, this supplement felt more like an overpriced, glorified salad topper than a game changing supplement. As Kerrison says, “it’s mainly products that you can get from the supermarket and put together in an easy format – you can actually buy your own seed mixes, frozen fruit and veg, mixed nuts, etc, and use those instead”.
There are defintely people for whom this could benefit. Well-off, busy people who have the bag with them on days where their food options are limited will be pleased as punch. But as Kerrison puts it: “Would I say that for the general population is it worth £40 a month? I’ve got a bit of a question mark on that.”
Dr Berry says that:
“The Daily30+ should be seen as a whole-food complement designed to bring more food diversity and fibre to your meals. While it does not equal 30 plants a week, by adding a scoop of Daily30+ to your favourite meals every day, you’re giving yourself a helping hand with your plant diversity, alongside increasing your fibre intake too.”
As for me, I’ll probably sprinkle it on salad or eggs as and when but will no longer be carting the bag around like a gym bunny with their strawberry cheesecake protein powder. It’s just not the life for me.