Davina McCall is renowned for having one of the most killer bodies on television and, in recent years, setting a positive example of healthy living to women everywhere.
The 57-year-old, who had an operation to remove a benign brain tumour in November, is a loud-and-proud fan of multiple exercise mediums – from walking and yoga to more hardcore mode sports like plyometrics and weight training.
"I want to inspire everyone to get up and go do something,” Davina told HELLO! in 2022. “Doing anything will make you feel good about yourself – it doesn't have to be a spin class or boxing class, it could be a simple walk. Just do something!"
And while exercise is key to a healthy life, the mum-of-three's secret weapon for a toned physique and feeling better now than she did at 25-years-old is actually a nutrition app.
© RedfernsThe presenter calls ZOE, a health programme that you manage through your phone, an “absolute must” after more than two years of using it.
“I want to feed my gut the best way I can because that’s going to feed my wellbeing going forward,” she shared. “I keep talking about it but physical and mental wellbeing is everything to me.”
ZOE scientific co-founder Professor Tim Spector calls the programme a ‘holistic way of looking at food’, which makes diet recommendations based on baseline diet, personal characteristics, blood sugar and gut microbiome.
“Put all that together, and that gives us a way to score all your individual foods that you may be picking just for you with a score out of 100,” he said.
What comes in a ZOE test kit and what does it do?
With your gut microbiome playing a key role in overall health, ZOE’s approach is centered on understanding and nurturing your unique biology. You can start your membership with a ‘classic’ test kit, including three key tests (stool, blood sugar and blood fat) that work together to build a personalised picture of how your body responds to food.
- Stool test: Created by ZOE’s team of scientists, this test begins with a fun twist: you’ll eat two specially formulated cookies – a blue one to provide insights into your gut health and a white one to establish a baseline for your blood analysis. After that, you’ll provide a stool sample, which is analysed to identify the microbes in your gut and what they may be doing for (or against) your health.
- Blood sugar tracker: For up to 14 days, you’ll wear a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) on your arm. As you eat your regular meals, the CGM tracks how different foods affect your blood sugar levels in real time. You can view these responses through the ZOE app, giving you a clearer sense of which foods help keep your energy stable and which don’t.
- Blood fat test: You’ll collect a small blood sample at home and then send it to ZOE’s lab to assess how your body processes fats, which the company’s scientists say is an important, but often-overlooked, marker of metabolic health.
Once your results are processed and uploaded into the app, you can start scanning or entering foods to get personalised feedback. Whether it’s a single ingredient or a full recipe, there will be indications of how it might impact your unique biology.
Where can you get a ZOE kit?
For a limited time only, ZOE is offering 50% off its classic, three-part test kit on its website – and says this is its “biggest discount ever”.
However, supplies are limited. So, if you want an in-depth understanding of your metabolic health and gut microbiome, you might want to act fast.
“It's hard to change what we're eating if we're not really mindful about what we're eating,” says Professor Sarah Berry. “But I think what should motivate people to really try to change, despite the broken food landscape around us, is the incredible benefits it's going to have to our health, to our lifespan, to our health span and how long we're going to feel healthy for.
“There's some great research showing that if you go from the kind of diet that many of us currently eat, that if we change from that diet, even at the age of 40, it will add 10 extra years to our life.”
Experts in this article
- Professor Tim Spector, leading expert in genetic epidemiology, personalised medicine and gut microbiome, as well as ZOE scientific co-founder
- Professor Sarah Berry, associate professor at King's College London who has run more than 30 human nutrition studies
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