Tim Spector - Food for Life

Tim Spector is a professor of genetic epidemiology at Kings College London and honorary consultant physician at Guys and St Thomas hospitals. He is a multi-award-winning expert in personalised medicine and the gut microbiome, and the author of five books, including the bestsellers Spoon-Fed and The Diet Myth. He appears regularly on TV, radio and podcasts around the world, and is one of the top 100 most cited scientists in the world. He is co-founder of the personalised nutrition company ZOE and leads the worlds biggest citizen science health project, the ZOE Health study. He was awarded an OBE in 2020 for his work fighting Covid-19.

Identically Different

The Diet Myth

Spoon-Fed

To my children, Sophie and Tom, and planet Earth

Writing this book felt like starting my own version of Phileas Foggs adventure, setting off in his hot air balloon; armed with a map of what the world of nutrition science had in store, and a time frame in which I wanted to complete my journey, but not yet knowing the many twists and turns my voyage would take. My curiosity about food and nutrition was first piqued after a frightening episode at the top of an Italian mountain in 2011. My blood pressure shot up, having been normal two weeks before, and I was left with double vision and an anxious few weeks when I thought I had a brain tumour, multiple sclerosis, or a stroke none of them good news. Luckily, I fully recovered after a few months, but that incident prompted me, like many people with similar life-defining moments, to start exploring my own health and nutrition. My job as an epidemiologist had been to look at the health of large populations; my own health scare forced me to look from an individual perspective for the first time.

The first phase of my journey led me to the new concept of the gut microbiome. In The Diet Myth I outlined the central role of our gut microbes, and in Spoon-Fed I introduced personalised nutrition. Both books showed why we have been so misled by bad food advice and generalised guidelines, which hardly anyone follows anyway. Yet the questions I most often get asked by readers are about individual foods and ingredients. Is brown bread always good for me? Is wild rice healthy? Is it OK if I eat full-fat yogurt, or cheese, or soy milk? These questions laid the foundations for the piece that was missing: a more practical and positive guide to nutrition, focusing not so much on the misinformation about food, but drawing on new scientific understanding to discover different food types and individual ingredients, and the many extraordinary things that happen when we eat them.

This book is an eaters guide to food and nutrition. I will show you what we should all know about the food we eat, and how to navigate the mass of information to make good, informed and practical eating choices for our health and the health of the planet. I will introduce the true complexity of the new science of food, but you wont need a degree in advanced chemistry to decipher it. We will look at individual foods using the latest scientific knowledge about key chemicals, genes, and the role of the trillions of bacteria that live in our guts collectively known as the microbiome and discover how they all interact in unique and highly personalised ways. We will also explore the latest technology which allows us all, in theory, to have our genes, gut microbes and blood sugar and fat responses tested with home kits.

Researching this book made me appreciate the fantastic diversity of food and drink available to us and has strengthened my admiration for traditional, artisanal or whole foods, by which I mean those not made with complex processing in giant factories. Most of us have unprecedented choice in what we eat every day with large supermarkets stocking tens of thousands of items. But we are overwhelmed by the choice on offer and find ourselves returning to the same foods for our weekly shop or work lunch.

We have lost our innate relationship with foraging, growing and producing food for health and wellbeing, and need to re-discover food as preventive medicine. We have known for centuries that food and health are closely linked. Hippocrates realised that food should be treated with respect and can be both harmful and beneficial. My Our food decisions are the single most important modifiable factor in preventing common diseases and staying healthy. Using food sensibly alongside modern medicine gives us unprecedented potential for good health. Harnessing the power of our microbiome and using evidence-based information, rather than relying on myths, marketing or snake oil, is the key to unlocking this potential.

Countless books have been written about the culinary properties of food and the scientific processes that take place when we cook it. Many other books have been written proposing different diet plans promising to help us lose weight, live longer or even improve our brain power. But we now know that there is no single diet that will work for everyone, just as there is no such thing as a superfood or a toxic food. As we will see with a few exceptions no food is simply good or bad. Provided it is a real food, there is no such thing as a bad ingredient. There is also no miracle cure to detoxify our bodies. When it comes to our nutritional health, we should stop looking for a single villain or magic pill. This book aims to do something different. My intention is not to tell you what to eat, though I will share some tips and ideas that Ive picked up along the way. Instead, I want to look in detail at the many different foods we can eat, and reveal what the latest science has to tell us about them, to allow you to make your own informed choices.

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Some of us want to know about food to keep our weight under control, but we have been brainwashed into thinking that counting calories is the best way to do this. Even if calorie counts were accurate (which they rarely are), this would mean that eating equal calories of bread or yogurt, ultra-processed foods or whole foods would have precisely the same effect on metabolism and appetite, or that eating the same meal at breakfast or lunch would have an identical effect. Unfortunately for the food industry, calorie-control diet companies, and the hundreds of millions of followers of traditional diet plans, none of these statements is true. Calorie counting has been the main obsession in nutrition for decades. Much like counting the macros of fat, protein and carbohydrates, keeping count completely ignores the complexity of our metabolism and the individual and variable response we each have at every meal.

Yet food and ingredient labels continue to rely on outdated notions about the importance of calories, and are made purposefully more complicated than necessary. Take this one:

Aqua, vegetable oils, fructose, sucrose, dextrose, starch, carotene, E306, E101, nicotinamide, pantothenic acid, biotin, ascorbic acid (E300), palmitic acid, stearic acid, (E570), oleic acid, linoleic acid, malic acid (E296), oxalic acid, salicylic acid, soluble fibre, purines, sodium, potassium, manganese, iron, copper, zinc, phosphorus, chloride, pigments, chlorogenic acid, procyanidins, flavanones, dihydrochalcones, prussic acid, 50 k calories per 100 grams.