Let Food Be Thy Medicine: Use These 5 Food Facts Everyday To Heal Your Body | Tim Spector

in terms of the good things people should be focusing on then so we know the importance of guts Health in terms of those Foods or the types of foods that you would love people to be focusing on more what are they well gut Friendly Foods so you know I'm hoping one day we'll have a a nice label on the food that gives it a like a calorie score a gut friendly score and you are seeing some of the some of the companies starting to you know have these labels on it but they're it's the wild west they can anyone can put anything on at the moment you don't trust it so what do you got to think of is what do your microbes want to eat when you when you're when you're picking them and generally if you pick foods that your microbes are going to be happy eating they're going to be good for you and they're also going to be good for the planet so as a very general rule uh that's a pretty good one and what microbes like to eat is they like to eat predominantly plants they like to eat a high fiber plants that are complex and they um like a variety so there's no point only eating one type of salad every day even if you love it do mix it up because we've done studies showing that the sort of sweet spot for the number of plants you should eat in a week is around 30. and you know that's not a precise number but you should be aiming for at least 30 plants different plants a week so bear in mind that's so all you generating as many species of microbes that can feed off all the chemicals in each of those plants so it's like the perfect nourishment for them is to get that variety across the week so if someone let's say loves broccoli and thinks you know I've got to eat more vegetables because I know it's good for me I love broccoli okay I'm gonna have broccoli five six seven times a week compared to not having that I guess that would have an improvement but are you saying that for that person because I think there'll be people listening to this right now like broccoli you like broccoli or whatever green beans or kale yeah they've got their favorite one and they have that all the time can you just sort of expand on that for that person that actually that's great but you might want to think about expanding it more yes I mean so you've got to think of it as yes you love broccoli and broccoli has lots of fabulous nutrients in it but it's going to generate certain microbes that like eating the broccoli and the broccoli side of side products but if you just changed it slightly to okay I'm gonna have a bit of cauliflower to the same family but it's got different chemicals different nutrients you'll introduce different microbes to your to your gut and eating both together would actually create different chemicals that we've made by our microbes and have even better results but if you are a big fan of broccoli you you know occasionally go for purple broccoli which also has slightly different nutrients in it yeah to to straightforward ones so it's it's about thinking uh about how you can just subtly change you know you can still eat your broccoli but mix it in with other things that are similar and try other ones there's so many uh crucifers that are uh fantastic to eat so I think that's that's the idea it's about mixing it up it's about trying new stuff and it's about enjoyment in food as well so we all get into ruts you know however interest you are in nutrition you know even myself I get into food ruts and I sometimes have to go to a restaurant and say I'm going to pick something new I've never heard of oh I don't know what that is I'll have that one um or you go to foreign country and you know there's some vegetable you don't know what it is pick it and I think that's what we've got to we've got to change our attitude that uh we have our comfort zone of of particularly vegetables that I think you know whether it's avoiding the ones from school or it's actually wanting the ones from school but realize that even within certain varieties like lettuces or cabbages they're a huge range you can now buy you know cut carrots with three different colors yeah and they're all nutrition different so the way they're bred and and and the chemicals in them are different so for your microbes they're seeing them as different you might call them all carrots but they'll be different similarly you know different range of sweet potatoes and and baked potatoes and they can be purples and all these other things so it's that variety that's important but don't get obsessed that we're only talking about different varieties of kale here because the 30 includes um in nuts and seeds and herbs we don't know exactly how much but increasing studies are showing that just adding spices spice mixes to your uh your diet every at least you know a couple of times a week can enhance your gut microbes so increasingly the evidence is is building it's this the people who have the more diverse diets do better so snap yourself out of your routines whether it's for your salad or your breakfast and and try and work this in so you mentioned out of those 30 that you recommend there's a ballpark figure fruits vegetables nuts seeds herbs spices lentils and things like beans as well black beans chickpeas all those sort of things yes I mean because suddenly the Thirsty when you include all that it doesn't sound quite as daunting as when it just oh what 30 vegetables yeah exactly you think of a plate and I've got to get 30 different vegetables on my plate every day no um I mean I you know I cheat and for my you know my breakfast which I start now with a you know a full fat yogurt with kefir you know I will have a mixed bowl full of mixed nuts and seeds and it gives me eight straight away it's not on the day with eight yeah I'm you know and then I'll if I've got something in the fruit bowl I chop up whatever's in the fruit bowl a pear or an apple and so I might have you know start with ten so if that's Monday morning I've only got to you know find another 20. um and that's just one meal so as long as you start thinking how you can introduce things what meals are you know good to sprinkle stuff on and you keep an open mind and you you know I I think it's not only it's it's a practical tip but it's actually it's a way for people to really enjoy food and get excited about food again and and and not have this uh this problem that you know in the US and the UK we food is a sort of punishment because of you know it's something it's a fuel and it's a problem because you know we eat too much of it we've got to start getting back to enjoying it and enjoying seeking out those foods and not just eating for the sake of it you know on the run so you know that's that's the other side of it but a lot you know so I think there's 30 rules some people say immediate oh that's terrible it feels like a burden but it can be so easy and you know just by preparing big jars of stuff and buying berries when you see them and freezing them or yeah you know a new seed or not and you just add it to your mix it's incredibly easy for someone who may be on zero or or five at the moment and they hear 30. what does the research show in terms of yeah look from wherever you are even if you go from five to ten a week you're gonna get an improvement aren't you you're gonna improve the quality and the diversity of your microbiome thirsty maybe the ultimate Target but for some people who can't achieve that I guess we don't want them feeling bad about that it's a case of look start where you're at and just see what you can do absolutely yes the 30 is just where we saw on the curve in the population that people sort of reached the maximum diversity to go to 40 didn't really give them much more diversity on average not average I mean of course you know as you know we've talked about before it's all individual so there's lots of individuality here so you know some people might be fine on 20 others might need 40. we don't know yet so we're setting a a rough rough bar so don't knock yourself out if if you're only on 28 one week and you feel like you're a total failure um you know it's fine I think it's it's an aspirational goal the more more important is to just keep it in mind your mentality you're looking for that everyone has weeks where it's hard they're working you know they're having to travel they're not prepared or you're at someone's house and they're serving your boring food you can't say oh is this all you've got you know this is terrible um you know we live in a practical world yeah and yeah just on average have that as an aspiration and see how you get on but as he you said for your breakfast which I find fascinating you'll get eight to ten which almost insulates you from some of the issues that may arise with working late or traveling you know if you've got eight to ten on a Monday morning you're in a pretty good shape going into that week so just talk me through that breakfast again we'll be back to the conversation in just a moment now many of us struggle to find time to eat all of these incredible Whole Foods that's why I'm a big fan of good quality Whole Food supplements like this one that's been in my own life for over three years now it contains over 75 Whole Food Source ingredients vitamins minerals pre and probiotics and can help us support our energy focused digestion and our immune system athletic greens are giving my audience a fantastic offer one year's free supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first order you can see all the details at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more or simply click on the link below now back to the conversation what I know is that people really enjoy the conversations I have with you they feel really inspired to change and I think hearing that you get eight to ten plants and a breakfast I think may be super helpful for people so would you mind just sharing that again exactly what do you do for breakfast when you have it in my usual breakfast which doesn't mean I have it every day and I do vary it depending on where I am it's it's now become a a full fat yogurt a 50 50 with kefir which is fermented milk kefir as it's pronounced in the U.S and which has even more so there's like two probiotics in that wow with perhaps uh we think about 15 my microbial 15 to 20 microbial species between them if you're lucky so that's also I've got a probiotic start as well and then I will go to my my jar where I keep um generally dried nuts and seeds which I sort of collect as I go around supermarkets and other places or markets and see trying to find new ones wow and uh it was almost like a hobby a Pursuit for you to see these things and pop them in this jar it is yes and uh it varies sometimes it gets a bit low and down the bottom of scraping the barrel and it's a bit grainy and things and other times it's it's it's it's over over bulging but I I I am aiming to get uh you know you because it's quite easy that the common ones but the idea is you know you can buy easily the you know chia seeds and uh these ones but you wouldn't want to eat just those um so the idea is to is to mix them up with common ones and there's nothing it's not particularly the ones that are expensive or not it's just this variety uh you you can put in there and I add also to that you know I got for example at the moment some pomegranate seeds yeah um and then just stick those in um and um whatever's around I I will use and whatever's in the fruit bowl I generally chop up um I've I used to eat a lot of bananas but since I did my Zoe test and realized that they are really bad for my blood sugar I've swapped them around and I use chop up pears pears and apples a particularly uh fine for me and they will often go in but anything I've got lying around will go in that mix and I have that with a uh a double espresso which is also um people should know of a very good source of polyphenols and fiber and is very good for your gut and coffee drinkers are healthier and live longer and have less heart disease so cough so it's it's completely that's a great study to reverse if we like coffee isn't it yes if you don't like coffee it's a bit tough for you but uh are you a coffee drinkers I am very much so but most people don't realize that there's more fiber in the average cup of coffee than in a glass of orange juice and we all know what orange juice does to your blood sugar so I think it's changing our idea of what's healthy yeah and what's unhealthy because just for context 10 years ago I was eating a you know a bowl of muesli with some low-fat milk uh a cup of tea and often a bit of a Tropicana orange juice and that's terrible for me because this gives me a very large Sugar Peak which is uh my blood sugar goes up from its uh normal level overnight to over two or three times what it is into a pre-diabetic range so I stress my insulin levels and as it comes down I get a sugar dip and that makes me more tired and more hungry several hours later and increasingly if I do that every single day as I did do it causes stress on the body increased inflammation and Alters my metabolism so I will put on weight very gradually and not feel as good as I would if I wasn't having those Peaks so and this is only new science and new technologies teaching us that because based on those macronutrients I was having with my muesli and my tea and my my low-fat milk it was a very low fat breakfast which ticked all the boxes in you know USDA guidelines or whatever they are and most GPS would say that so oh pretty good breakfast there you know you're healthy you're not having eggs and bacon or whatever and it turns out for me you know it was processed moosely and you could buy expensive ones but they're still pretty much Ultra processed there might be one on if you're luckier one or two nuts in there but far outweighed by the negative effects of the sugar yeah so I think that's the that's the big shift I've made so I think breakfast is probably the most crucial meal of the day for a number of reasons you know we can discuss some of the other ones but for people who do like breakfast do you like eating it's the one we can all change ourselves generally in our home we're in control of the situation and we've got into a rut because we most of us have a very similar breakfast every day and it's the one that's easiest to change and change all our habits and if you change that I think it sort of sets you up your mentality for the rest of the day the rest of the month the rest of the year you've just got that in your mind first thing you go I'm gonna get my microbes off to a good start one way or another and for me it it works and I know the difference when I'm staying at someone else's house and they're I'm offered you know toast and marmalade and uh well I was in France in Paris recently and I couldn't resist uh a croissant and you know if you didn't like croissants where you got piano Chocolat or a baguette you know that was the that was the choice so you know you realize it can be hard but it's changing what you you think is normal and I think that's really important what happened in Paris because you're very in tune now with your body you measure blood sugar regularly you measure my you might buy them regularly you're in tune with how you feel after certain foods so I get it you're in Paris you get tempted by the smell you look at it yeah you know what I'm gonna have that so number one were you measuring your blood sugar at the time when you had that croissant and number two what did you feel like could you tell man I'm like were you hungrier was your mood off were you you know what were some of those things that now that you are in touch with this that you were quite aware of in a way that you may not have been in the past so yes I I was tempted and who who can go to Paris and resist a croissant and I get it and uh I think we've all got to realize that you know there's nothing wrong with that either there's absolutely no problem with it and as long as you enjoy it and it's a good one and but if you you know if you do feels it's dodgy and you feel it's just been reheated don't eat it but if it's a good one absolutely eat it and enjoy it um you may want to try another yogurt afterwards but I couldn't get one um yeah so I had I had the croissant and uh I was my sugar went up to uh ten and a half I was 10 and a half yeah can we just give some guidelines to people who are not familiar with those terms I know what ten and a half is um what should it be for people what should they be looking for the range well so my resting one is about five and a half um when I wake up in the morning find our mini moles and you'll have to do the calculation in the US um yeah we could stick to that five yeah which yeah and so it's uh normally you well I say normally we know from the the Zoe predicts studies there's about a tenfold difference in how people respond to the same croissant so there's no out but the average of if you took 100 people they would go from maybe four and a half to about uh six and a half okay so you get a small increase in your blood sugar when you have something uh like a a croissant or a baguette or a bit of white bread and so that that's a normal response we all go up a little bit but there are some people that go up less and there's some people go up more there's about a tenfold variation that we saw you know tenfold from what the the lowest rise to the top rise yes wow yep so and you went up to ten and a half yes and I mean I've been higher than that you know if I had my orange juice it would have you know taken over 11 the same as with I have a a bagel which I used to think was fairly healthy but for concepts of people I know it's possibly not quite the same thing as it's you know blood it's a continuous monitor as opposed to uh you know let's say an hba1c a three-month average but you know on that 6.5 or above is type 2 diabetic if that's your average right 66.5 in the UK well 66.4 I guess is pre-diabetic in the UK I think it's 5.7 to 6.4 in in America um so 10 and a half is clearly very very high you certainly wouldn't want that to be happening day in Day Out no exactly and after it you know I I do feel more tired and I sort of regret my croissants after that this Village full of guilt you know especially when you see the resultant result in your blood you get this instant sort of um oh dear why'd I do that um it wasn't that good you know but um I'll try and find better one next time uh but yeah and you do I find that three hours later I am feeling hungrier than I would have done if I had my uh high fat breakfast which suits me um but I do realize I'm I'm different and my wife is quite happy to have a lot lots of croissants and doesn't have any it doesn't go up does sugar in the same way no not at all wow and so there's a few terms that have come up so far Tim like fermented foods polyphenols Ultra processed foods um breakfast potentially being the most important meal and I definitely want to come to those four points specifically because I think there's a lot to say on each one but we we are talking a lot about this personalized nutrition uh your company Zoe these continuous blood sugar monitors let's take an overview we're understanding more and more now with science with research that we all respond differently to Foods the truth is I've just seen people thrive on a whole variety of different diets we know humans have always been opportunistic omnivores right our diets can wildly vary depending on where we live on the planet geography climate all these kind of things so personalized nutrition potentially is going to help us explain this why are some people crushing it on a low carb diet why are some people crushing it on a whole food plant-based diet do you think personalized nutrition potentially is the missing piece here I think personalization is a key missing piece of the puzzle that we really haven't paid attention to and could help a lot of people in deciding which food to eat and to do that we've got to do away with the fact that one size fits all advice works and that it's all about this simple reductionist ideas we are all omnivores but we're all different we're all unique we've all got totally unique gut microbes and I think we need to both think of foods that are going to help our gut microbes which are all going to be individual but also to get to the other that other half of perfecting our nutrition it absolutely has to be personalized yeah you mentioned about improving our gut microbes have you got evidence at the moment that let's say let's say someone has currently got quite a Barren gut microbiome they've not been nourishing it let's say their diet hasn't been good and there's all kinds of other lifestyle factors like stress and sleep deprivation that can impact the gut of course which we can maybe touch on later they've got micrograms not in a good place so certain foods at the moment may have a certain response certain foods May Spike their blood sugar do we know yet if they then spend a few months working on their gut microbiome aiming to increase the amount of plant Foods the amount of diversity and they improve the health of it it's more robust it's more diverse do we think then at that point the same food might generate a different response because their microbiome is different we believe that's potentially likely but we haven't been able to prove it there aren't enough longitudinal studies so the evidence base is that that makes sense that that's what we see cross-sectionally so if you just take people at one point in time and you compare them to lots of other people another point in time we see that you know there's a correlation but we don't know its causation and it's slightly difficult because we know that there's a two-way process If you're sort of unhealthy and you're giving off inflammation from having too much sugar Peaks it's going to affect your gut micro yes in that direction so make them worse and attract sort of unhealthy microbes at the same time we know that if you can dampen down those unhealthy microbes you can actually improve things so certainly in in rodents it works like that what we don't know is yet in humans but we're going to have the answers pretty soon as people for example doing the Zoe test get retested and we can see the people that have really changed their gut microbes you know can they change their their responses my my guess is that it's it's not going to be quite as easy as that and it's not going to happen overnight I think it's a very slow process that could take you know months and years as you change your physiology but we do know cross-sectionally that people have got robust gut microbes do react less to say Ultra processed foods and we've got some data now again from about 20 000 of the Zoe participants that um the snack snacking is also you can tolerate snacking better if you've got a good set of gut microbes so there's a sort of interaction going on cross-sectionally that we're seeing that I'm hopeful in it we'll we'll see in real life so I think that's the aspiration effect that's what I tell people is that the idea is to build up this really robust community of microbes which are I think best thought of as like your own personal Pharmacy so you want to have a pharmacy that's well stocked you don't just want to only have paracetamol and calpol you know that's it you know and a Band-Aid you want the hot you want to have everything at your dispose I want to do that you've got to give everything to your Pharmacy have it Mass supplied with everything it needs so microbes are pumping out these healthy chemicals and if they do that your body's in better balance it can then deal with these stresses yeah and it's not just stress of food it's stress of everything it's the stresses of life it's you know dealing with poor sleep it's dealing with um everyday problems as well yeah what I found in practice 10 this is without any uh of this kind of high-tech testing I remember certain patients who were quite reactive they they felt they were reacting to quite a few different foods in sort of an intolerance and as I help them improve various aspects of their health you know reduce stress physical activity better sleep yes and gradual changes to their diets which no doubt would have increa would have improved the health of their gut microbiome over a period of time sometimes maybe two years later they would report back and I've experienced this myself actually that certain foods that I used to find problematic I no longer find problematical those patients no longer would find them problematic they would no longer in many ways feel that they were intolerant to those Foods now I find that fascinating because I don't have any data to prove this what was going on there but I suspect that working on these four pillars food movement sleep and relaxation with them helping them improve the health of their guts it made them more resilient it gave them more of a buffer so that a couple of years later they they just have got more as you say more resilience I guess like a garden isn't it where if the garden is well started it's got a diverse plants you know it's less likely that one species or one foreign species or a weed is going to be able to overtake it all and overgrow it because you've got that resilience is that is that a fair analogy it is and I think the thing we've forgotten is that the way the might a lot of the way the microbiome works the chemicals that they produce is through the immune system and so most of the things we're talking about is having also a really well-balanced immune system that isn't overreacting you know and a lot of people's currently these modern food allergies Etc are caused by an immune system that's just out of kilter it's either overreacting or under reacting and I think that's also the key to this that the chemicals your microbes produce are going to keep all the the lining of your the gut where most of your immune system is all those cells in the perfect condition the right tune so that they're not going to overdo it and if you get that system right then you're in this better balanced State you know it's like you're generally fitter it's like an athlete yeah who can do all kinds of things but I think it does take time to say nothing yeah and I think what your point is is that you know in the modern world we're looking for a quick fix yeah and everyone says oh I've got you know my tummy hurts when I eat this you know I've got I think I'm set getting sensitive to this I want a quick fix so I've got to cut it all out and people just we need to really educate people that it's a journey it's not like there's a three-week course and you cut this out your diet and you're done it's you know you need to we've got such a long way to go back to the guts of our ancestors that didn't have these problems that you can't do that in six weeks you know this is month this is years and but it's worth doing and it's not a hard thing to do and it can be a a pleasurable thing to do and I think that's what is changing that mindset that everything's got to be fixed quickly a quick diet a quick uh healthy snack bar or whatever you know some pills to saying okay this is a journey I'm going to change my idea about food and once I do that I'm going to build up this slowly build up this resistance like you you know if you're an athlete training and you wouldn't expect to be super fit and run a marathon in in in four weeks so that's the real difference and I think I think we're in agreement here and it's and it they all connect with each other so they all do and the microbes you know we talked to we didn't know when we started these studies how important things like sleep would be on your blood sugar responses and speak to that a little bit yeah so we the this crucial study the Zoe predicts study was a thousand people all eating Foods at the same time in precisely the same manner we've replicated this now thousands of times and it turns out that if you got poor sleep the night before you had like a 30 greater sugar Spike eating identical meal that's incredible the same food but the way your body handles it the yeah the potential damage or the inflammatory consequences off that food are completely different depending on your sleep that that's huge isn't it so yeah and also the you know the way you reacted uh you know there was obviously a link also people did a lot of exercise had lower Peaks than those who didn't so that was another Factor when did you last do your exercise and you know whether you what sort of meal you had the night before also influenced the next day so and how much Gap you had in that that time so things that you wouldn't even have thought about um are all coming together and they all interact a lot through the gut microbes as well so it's not like they're all in independent they're sort of working together with each other so we know that shift workers for example who get poor sleep have poorer gut microbes and higher sugar responses so we also we've just done a study on what we call social jet lag of people whose big party people at weekends there might be some people listening who who can say that you know very good during the week and then they get go to bed at completely different times and they change their clocks at weekends and they have on the Monday morning bigger sugar spikes and their microbes are also [Music] suffering as a consequence so everything's about getting this balance right between all parts of the body and because of the technology we've got now in measuring microbes and measuring these sugar responses you know we as you said we can suddenly start to see see it and not just uh guess it how tricky does this get as a scientist because it's not just looking about food is it and saying how does that food affect me with my current gut microbiome you know should I eat more of them should I eat less of them depending on my sugar response because as you've just mentioned there's other inputs going in how stressed you are how sleep deprived you are what time you had your previous meal the night before so how easy is it or how difficult is it to actually make a to draw a conclusion what this food does for me or you or for anyone else because of all the other inputs that are there as well when we do the Zoe scores for example once you've done the test it is a holistic test so so we are accounting for your sleep your exercise and your meals and your age or weight all these things together so and and we've talked about sugar Peaks but we haven't talked about the fat Peaks which is the other part of the the test is that we're looking at how fast the fat is dispersed from your body which we know in some people is very slow so if you've still got lots of fat molecules hanging around in your blood at six hours after a fatty meal that irritates the blood vessels causes inflammation and is going to cause the same sort of metabolic problem so it's combining all those things together gives you a holistic score about which foods are better or Mitch or worse for you and so you can make those choices and at the same time you know we do give people lifestyle advice advice realize you know if you're sleeping terribly you're doing shift work and you're only getting four hours sleep a night it's going to be really hard to whatever you're eating to be healthy so I think increasingly the advice on exercise and uh and and food and sleep and stress Are all uh related yeah um so absolutely and that you know I know that's that's your your core uh teaching I love that there is a line in your book where you say you're very unlikely to be average it's something for that effect and it was very powerful because what I've seen time and time again is that different people respond to seemingly quite different diets and this is why I sort of I'm very much diet agnostic in the sense that I support minimally processed food I support eating inadverts commas real food as much as you can but I personally don't like to put myself in in a camp anymore or a belief system or or a religion around food because the truth is I've got patients who follow a whole food low carb diets some are doing excellently well I've got some patients are doing a whole food vegan diet superbly well and so therefore it's like well I can't say that this is going to work for you or not and I kind of feel as a healthcare professional that my job is yes to get the best advice I can but also to kind of stay open-minded try to be agnostic in terms of which diet I subscribe to and go actually what would you like to do what are your beliefs because I I could have a particular opinion and then my patient might come and go look I've got a moral problem or an ethical problem with eating animals so okay well if that is the case I have to be able to give you advice in the concepts of your beliefs so I think this whole idea you know you also said that the science is now telling some of us what we already knew and that's really powerful because I think a lot of us kind of know that oh the diet that my mates on I kind of tried that it didn't work well for me but your research I think has given that a lot of scientific validity now which I think is very helpful for people yeah well I think what you just said what you just said about um uh giving your patients the choice is very refreshing but most people in medical profession don't do that and we're told there's one recipe you know it's not a menu um and all the experts and I I've been told off for writing these things in newspapers I got some sort of vitriolic uh correspondence when I was uh talking about the the diabetic uh diets and um you know go on these liquid uh milkshake diets to cure your diabetes saying well listen that's fine but you know these uh high carb low fat approaches may not be right for everybody and you know let's also do the same thing but perhaps with uh low-carb high fat which seems to be successful and you know people would attack you from both camps um saying you know no no no ours is the right way uh you're right and that's because there's this huge sort of cognitive dissonance that people just saying well I've been doing this for 10 years this is my life this is what I do and the whole academic scenario keeps going around that they get more grants to do that they can't be seen to you know be talking like us uh to say well clearly if you look at the world you know there's a huge range of different diets in healthy places these blue zones they don't eat the same thing they don't make sense at all other than in this idea that you know you find the the food that suits you you know there's a few certain rules like yeah naughty oh don't eat ready meals and uh junk food all the time um I think we'd be hard-pressed to find any camp yeah around nutrition who would disagree with that so anyone who would disagree with that actually some would some would say it's all to do with calories wouldn't they and actually it doesn't matter where they come from well people from the food industry and those that they pay and they have a lot of influences uh you know who who go around saying this stuff saying you shouldn't blame uh companies that you know have extra chemicals in their food to make it taste good because it's important that it's low fat and it's low like and it hasn't been proven to be harmful so there is there are people that do Still project that in the same way that people were promoting you know low low tar cigarettes um you know it's not very different because you haven't proven there bad for you uh because the studies haven't been done just because you've got chemicals in it we shouldn't knock it and in a way it's the the same people knocking the um uh Pure Food movement the clean eating movement so we're going the other way and say well let's not go overboard and it's fine to eat lots of lots of chemicals so I think but you won't find many um academics saying that that's definitely true but I think we do have to um make this distinction and that's why I want to keep coming back to this this almost almost everything you know vast number people do agree that eating plants uh is good and avoiding large amounts of regular Ultra processed food is bad and outside that I think uh you know there is quite a lot of room for individuality and finding what works not only in what you eat but also how you eat and I think that's that's the other thing that's been coming out of our studies is um you know it's not just what you've got on your plate it's you know whether you break it into into portions what time of day what you did the day before how much sleep you got you know it's incredibly complex this this whole this whole idea and once you throw all those balls up in the air uh it's really interesting to see how you know the perfect way they could fall for some people and uh how others would do really badly um through that mix if they get it wrong just because of Dogma just because that's the way everyone does it around here that's the time everyone has their tea around here that's the you know you've got to have your breakfast because uh uh you know that's the way everyone's done it for the last 50 years um I just want you know people to question all this stuff and start saying what works for you because a lot of this this Dogma about we must do it this way we must have you know it's like snacking you know why uh why do we suddenly start snacking about uh 30 years ago and this idea of a healthy snack and oh it's high protein low fat healthy snack free from gluten you know I mean did we need it were we really gonna faint um if we didn't no and you know you only look around the world and see how now and I think we don't do that nearly enough is is make these comparisons with other countries that are much healthy in their our own to say you know what it isn't normal to have six meal events in a day around the world um doesn't suit most people I read this ask on the guardian a few years back um I think you know there was some book out about the French and I think it was something to do with why French kids don't miss behave or something something like that you know there's a there's a Punchy uh kind of probably misleading headline why French French wives are always skinny or something yeah so exactly and and actually what was really interesting is that the one thing I do remember from the article was I think they were just saying that actually in in France as a as a culture there's not much snacking or certainly French kids actually you eat what you eat at meal times because after that meal time when it's when the doors close on meal time you won't get anything else until the next meal time and I think actually the French are there's something we can learn from the French I think here in in Britain but in terms of foods you just mentioned and I very much agree with this that it's not only what you eat it's how you eat sort of when you eat right all these things play a role which I think your research is is really helping to showcase um but why you know the French for example you know they don't do a rushed meal typically like we do we they won't have their you know let's say they've still got their healthy lunch let's say they're probably not going to be having that in front of their computer whilst answering their emails and I know that to be the case that it's still because I I had an interview with a French journalist about 18 months ago and I asked her I said hey look you know we hear this about the French can you just tell me is this still part of French culture she said yeah absolutely the only place where this appears to be different now is in Parisian offices of international firms this is pre-pandemic uh when he says that the sort of international culture of having food at your desk seems to be infiltrating and I found that's interesting so in terms of your research on personalized nutrition I wonder what are some of these non what's on your meal components what what what is your research showing up is there any sort of insights you've got for us well uh basic plan which we've been doing for the last three years is to give thousands of people um identical meals and see their responses to them and then start giving those meals at different times and see how that affects them and um we haven't yet got into the details of snacking or not other than that we know that if you snack you will uh a couple of hours before a meal your metabolic response to that meal is poorer than if you didn't snack okay just say that again because I think that's really important if you do snack before your meal your metabolic response is poorer at the next meal and just for people who are listening don't understand that what do you mean by metabolic response so what we're measuring is these uh peaks in your in your blood in three ways one is your blood sugar level which normally goes up about 30 minutes after you've eaten and that is your blood sugar and your insulin level um get a little Surge and that's normal after you eat and we also measure your lipid levels so triglycerides is one of the commonest fats in Blood and they go up after a meal and they we look at those six hours after a meal and at the same time you can measure something called inflammation which is like the irritation in the in the blood and you can measure those levels so those three markers we think that people who have food that gives them regular spikes of these things uh large spikes so they're lasting longer or the fat is hanging around for a long time before it goes back to normal uh long term will have more metabolic problems gain weight and have uh increased hunger lower energy and that's what we're showing so what we're trying to do is to match what people eat with these responses and how they eat with these responses and we're finding that so many things influence the height of that response even with the identical food so the timing of the day and whether you had something like a snack just before it or you had a free example a a high carb breakfast before the lunch will interfere with that second meal so it's all connected is what I'm saying so this is why uh and it's not just the French but the Italians the Spanish all the Mediterranean countries really don't snack at all like we do they don't usually have a big breakfast and many of them skip it and but they would always have a decent sized lunch where they take time out at least half an hour to eat it and in the evening they would have you know and they don't eat in their cars they don't eat in in front of the Telly they sit down and have them and they have more to eat but they have less snacks and and I think this is probably where we've been going on it's not just about calories it's about the way we're eating and how that's changed in the last 30 years I mean obviously the quality of the food's also really important because it is so much better in those Southern Mediterranean countries than what we're eating but I think better better in what sense Tim less process less sort of ultra processed and highly processed foods when we say better what do we mean by that very right to pull me up on that I know because uh you know the whole point of what I'm writing about is that we shouldn't gauge quality of food by calories and fat level or even sugar level it's about the natural products things that resemble the actual plants they came from rather than some derivative put together as 20 chemicals so people have different um definitions of what Ultra processed food is but if it's 10 or more chemicals and you don't none of them are the original ones uh you know that it's it's not corn it's the corn syrup or it's the uh the extract of something that's Ultra processed food that has nothing to do with the originals is poor quality food in the UK 50 of our meals are Ultra processed by those definitions in the US it's 60 percent and in countries like uh Portugal and Europe it's 10 wow there you go and it's not because Portuguese are rich for those that don't know it's just because they don't have a culture of eating this kind of uh cheap ready meal uh frozen foods that we've been overrun with and it's no surprise that in Europe you know we are the fattest in the world the US is the fattest is is the direct correlation yeah I mean you could almost just that stat there with in Portugal 10 of their food comes from Ultra processed food products for uh that in itself to him if I think about that that could almost cut right through all the dietary Tribal wars right there in the sense that is it carbs V fat the Protein that's the issue or actually is it simply that the food that you are reading let's make it minimally processed let's actually make it more close to its natural state you know it's hard for me to draw any other conclusion as I get in certain instances you can play around with macronutrients and get a good outcome I I get that I've done that before with patients but but by and large I'm not sure if we're we're going down the right Road there it's the the massive the billion dollar food companies that have been setting the the agenda about research have have managed to avoid any decent studies comparing uh junk Foods against normal foods and they've continued to fund all this work about low calorie products low-fat products and kept these in the guidelines without ever talking about this other sort of element in the room because it's not in their interest because every year they are selling us more of this stuff that gets relatively cheaper compared to the um not more natural foods that you know have a proper food Matrix and don't just get you know instantly dissolved as soon as they hit your stomach um and they've had this vested interest in doing this and that's why we're we're deluded into make having ridiculous TV programs about calorie counting and the dangers of fats and and this Obsession on our labels which most people don't understand anyway which detract again from the quality and only a few countries have got this only a few countries and but you know there's some examples in the book and I was quite a few in South America like Chile have managed to take on the companies and the government and managed to get instead of a food labor they just have a black dot that says Ultra processed avoid and all the kids now understand that and they took off the cartoon animals off the cereal packets you know in the same way we did we did with smoking cigarette packets it was no longer we used to have Cowboys on them and glamorous women and various other things it's you know it's not different um it's the same way but this is you know and it's all a smoke screen to cover up the fact that every year we're eating more and more uh Ultra processed junk food that has just got more and more chemicals to all to the mouth feel so it makes up for the lack of natural stuff and it's it's hurting our by having it sort of you it doesn't lend itself to a good meal and so yeah it lends itself to this perpetually snacking grazing uh World which is really bad metabolically for us and the one study that was done on on this um has clearly shown that you you've got these two matched meals to these randomized group it was done by the NIH uh just every a year ago um and you know there's a clear difference in appetite and going back for more if you give people buffets or both they liked both Foods equally um they were done to be highly appetizing but the processed food made people it didn't satisfy them they kept going one back for more so they ended up eating 30 more yeah that was Kevin Hall's study I think wasn't it yeah I mean remarkable what was Mark was just how few studies there are like that why um you'd think you know this is these are like drugs we take every day of Our Lives if it was a medicine um every time there was a new uh processed food product it would have to go through some testing you know and and the pharmaceutical companies have to spend a billion dollars to get a new drug uh these guys say okay it's fine and if you complain they say well you can't prove it's um bad for us therefore it's fine so they've reversed the whole life yeah I know I know and you take that with you know I have this particularly about artificial sweeteners yeah um and um I've had arguments to these these companies and you know and they have these pressure groups and you know action against sugar and they're sort of sponsored by the artificial sweetener companies and um and their view is well show us the study that proves it's dangerous I would say well you don't do that for drugs you have to first prove it's not harmful yeah show us the study it improves it's safe right but in the diet myth I think he spoke about artificial sweeteners and pretty sure you express a bit of concern about them so what is your current view on artificial sweetness all the data suggests that when you do a clinical trial and you give kids or overweight adults um either two cans of of fizzy drinks with sugar or two cans of the diet equivalent and you do that for six months or or so you do not see any difference in weight or diabetes risk or any other metabolic parameters so there's no clear benefit from swapping from someone from a sugar drink to a a diet drink except uh maybe for if you for your dentist okay so the dentist like it because definitely it it's good for your teeth um and so that just that fact alone think about it in each you know the average can we'll have maybe 150 calories so people have two a day at least it's 300 calories less why are these why are these kids and these adults not losing some weight no it wouldn't be massive but you know we're told that that would be about 15 of our intake sweat so if you believe the calories in calories out actually they should lose weight they don't so clearly in my view something else is happening metabolically to the to these individuals either their brain is being reset by the sweetness chemicals so it's at a neural level or something is happening metabolically and you are getting some change in insulin in ways we still don't understand and I've put myself with monitors and given myself sucralose and I can see uh I I do get a Sugar Peak and I insulin peak strangely with the sweetness which I can't explain or more likely it's affecting our gut microbes and so they don't know how to deal with these chemicals which are all derived from things like petrol and [Music] paraffin very Ultra things that we're never supposed to eat and so they they produce weird chemicals in response and those chemicals then have a reaction on our body which um interferes with metabolism and in a way either makes this put on some weight or or predisposes to diabetes in the same way as the sugar so we don't know the mechanisms yet there may be differences between them they're definitely work in different ways and some people might be okay with some and not with others because you know I admit everyone is is unique but I think the whole idea of reducing sugar by just adding unlimited amounts of these chemicals which is you know one side effect of the sugar Levy yeah um has to be thought through and we should be weaning people off Ultra sweetened products which make them more likely particularly kids to seek sugar and avoid sour things which may be good for them and that's my major worry so um you know I'm looking forward to seeing whether Stevia for example which would appear to be the more natural of these ones does have any particular benefits but I suspect that this whole sweetness thing by artificially creating these these sort of flavors that people crave um is going to have some other knock-on effects down the line that we don't have we should be treating teaching kids and you know adults how to go back to enjoying things that uh like water or like teas and herbal teas and things that have a bit of interest in it rather than this this Blunderbuss massive amounts of sugar whether it's fake or real it's amazing you know my kids are sort of 10 and 7 at the moment and it's amazing how many of their friends don't drink water they're allergic no you know what it's kind of it's it's it's really sad actually on on a deep level because I think if you think about it in in terms of our evolutionary Heritage we could never have survived if we didn't drink water right you know 500 years ago I don't think we had the choice to not drink water whereas now we have that choice and I suspect it's because it's being conditioned out of them uh via Society by averse and choices that they've been given um because I just fundamentally cannot believe that a human being cannot drink water but I but just to be super compassionate to parents who are listening who might struggle with their own children I get it I get it can be tough but actually it's very unnatural to not so not drink water no I totally agree but I think it's as you said part of conditioning and uh you know I go into the water business in the book in a fair way and you know we've been conditioned that tap water is perhaps bad for us and it tastes bad or has metallic things in it or they've been you know history of you go abroad and ever so don't don't drink the water you know what are you gonna it could be deadly uh and that that fuel this whole rise in um mineral Waters and uh this Con that basically you know Pepsi and Coca-Cola and Nestle take tap water and they they just stick it through a processing plant and um re-bottle it uh minus any taste and uh do that but uh and then then have to add some flavorings to it as they they were doing with um for kids to add a Twist of fake lime or orange to make it palatable yeah no absolutely I think we really important we get kids taste back re reset the thermostat away from the super sweetness that uh it is the problem because they can't then appreciate other Foods because in a way everything's set so high yeah that they need it and I I love that phrase reset the thermostat that's exactly what it is really um I think I can't remember how I put it in my in my very first book The I wrote about you know if a child's you know 100 years ago you know the taste of a ripe Peach on a some you know a nice in the peak of Summer that would be like a tree it would be man this is so gorgeous and sweet whereas I think if you're used to having it's like haribo's or um you know every day and that becomes your definition or your normal sweetness is a packet of sweets that of course a peach no longer holds the magical of your that it used to and I think it's just been this steady downgrading of our taste buds when did you ever asked to have a grape that was slightly Tangy you know when I was a kid they were always a bit sour and uh you know there was the odd sweet one but you you like that sweet sour sort of mix but they've virtually disappeared now they're all bred for super sweetness yeah and so you just can't get uh you don't we're losing that range yeah of taste because and I think a lot of this is because of sugar and artificial sweeteners and the fact that um it is the kids are brought up you know through this uh this mechanism and and that has a knock-on effect on the ability then to taste you know to have bitter vegetables and uh and all these other things I think it's such an important point I want to keep just on the topic of children uh when I was refreshing myself this morning uh with the book uh just as a sort of preparation for our conversation today I don't think I'm giving away the book when I can read the last time can I read the last line of the book I think it's for me one of the most important lines in a book on Foods education is our main hope we need to be teaching our children about real and fake foods with the same Zeal that we teach them how to walk read and write Tim that really hit me when I when I read it this morning um you know I've got two young kids until they went to school I felt we had a pretty good handle on what they were reading how much when you know you know since going to school particularly as they're getting older and older obviously that that control and then maybe all parents struggle this goes away from you somewhat but what's interesting to me is what is normal in schools now okay now appreciate your kids are a bit older than mine so I don't know that that's changed I wonder if you had this experience when you were a dad of young kids although maybe you weren't tuned into nutrition in the same way as you are now but there's a snacking culture that's promoted right so morning break is snack time you have to have a snack right it's you know it's just it's part of the school timetable there's morning snack time afternoon snack time which of course we were mentioning before how snacking is a reasonably modern invention certainly to the degree that we have it in this country um I know this is controversial but I wonder if you could elaborate on some of your views on nutrition in schools and what we possibly should be doing well everything you've said is um absolutely true around this country and probably uh very prevalent places like Australia and in the US and it is different from when I was at school so we didn't have a uh mid-morning break for snacks we were expected to last until lunch without fainting and I think this this whole idea and it all comes to this idea that you know you you have to give kids regular food otherwise their blood sugar level drops and their uh they can't concentrate and they run a mock and this uh this idea was probably came about it was a brilliant idea probably for some marketing marketing executive uh selling selling you know chocolate biscuits or you know one of these big companies and so they started it and then probably did a lot of really bad promoted a lot of bad studies in nutrition departments to show there was some correlation between uh kids who ran a mock and them not getting a snack at uh at 10 30 right they didn't get a chocolate fix or whatever I think of their chocolate finger and and they did a correlation they ran a mock well the fact that Little Johnny Iran and mock was the sort of kid who would just forget about it to pick up his Satchel or whatever um or you know had refused breakfast because he was you know a bit hyper um it was irrelevant because that became ingrained in in the Pediatrics and in uh school education that it was really important to keep maintaining sort of high sugar levels uh in school and it and this is where the problems absolutely start so why why I think this is so important to him is because if kids get ingrained and conditioned with this from the age of three four five six seven it is so hard to change that conditioning later and you know we've not put this video out I met it with Gareth last week about you know food in schools and I personally believe in the current climate where one in three kids in the UK start Secondary School overweight and obese and we know how much the environment influences our choices you know and some would argue are they even choices in a very obesogenic environment I really struggle to to make the case that schools should have vending machines anymore with fizzy drinks and with chocolate bars with crisps I can't see the case for an ice cream van in the middle of a big secondary school anymore but I feel sometimes as though saying that it for some reason that's quite controversial to say that it's almost as if you know when I've spoken to teachers about it and some teachers say some teachers agree but they say well we're too scared of parents and what they'll say so we don't change anything and other teachers say well we want our children to have choice but I think I don't think people understand true choice I don't think they understand what goes on the Bliss point of food how their manufacturers are particularly you know Spike that dopamine beautifully well so you know I don't think people get it right there's no choice if you put a big pile of chocolate biscuits in front of me now I'd have a nibble you know yeah because they're specially designed uh for that and kids are so vulnerable um but I agree it's like a religion and and some people and many parents feel you know they've been educated the same way they've been indoctrinated the same way and they feel they would be really bad parents if they let that kid have a sugar dip or you know their energy level went down because such is this Dogma that if you don't have some carbs you know your sugar level drops your energy goes down and and what we've shown in our recent studies in the predict study is complete opposite you actually have a sugar dip after you have a carb load so it is the complete opposite of what everyone thinks uh and so what they're doing is they are giving their care if you give your kid a chocolate biscuit or whatever it is at 10 o'clock they're gonna have a sugar dip and a third of them will have real problems of fatigue and concentration for the next hour we've we've done these studies in adults not in children but it you know it there are we see these sugar Dippers they don't know they're dipping because we've got these monitors on them they don't know what's happening and they report their concentration levels their fatigue levels and it is not because they're not eating it's it's after they've had that uh sugar load in our case it was muffins but the point is exactly the same that it is madness to think that this happens and you only got to look I mean I I was in Tanzania um with this hunter-gatherer tribe and I get asked this all the time you know oh um everyone needs breakfast otherwise you can't concentrate um they didn't have a word for breakfast uh because it didn't exist no one was there you know up at dawn getting everything ready to uh otherwise they couldn't make it through the day nobody had anything before about 10 10 30. um and usually just wait until lunch but the the point was that these people they would go hunting they didn't need the equivalent of a chocolate biscuit to uh keep them going otherwise they'd faint uh Evolutions you know wouldn't do that you know it's Madness and so we've actually been poisoning ourselves with the exact opposite uh and but as you as you can see from the reaction of teachers and parents it is so ingrained this idea that you're a bad parent if you don't do this yeah and then the other thing which happens and I know many of my listeners will resonate with this bit in particular that what it does is that when you're trying to educate and bring up your kids to know the value of food and know the value that it's for physical health mental health and mood Focus concentration etc etc if you subscribe to the viewers idea that schools should be the model educationally behaviorally but also nutritionally then you just start to create that friction where well Mommy and Daddy are telling me one thing at home but like at school you know yesterday my son said you know I said hey guys how was it and you know school and it goes yeah you know what you know what my friends had today we've got pizza and chips for lunch um and we don't you know what's really tricky is that I'm not saying that that is something that no one should ever eat right I get it but I actually feel that schools are taking away some of the parental choice and responsibility because why not let parents decide if and when they want to give their kids a bit of sugar or a cake or a dessert I know what I'm saying is against the grain of what a lot of people now think um but but I really do think schools need to need to take this seriously no I think they need to take responsibility because what they are doing is is for the rest of that kid's life they're dictating what's normal exactly and and so yeah you can have parents that are stricter or more relaxed but your idea of authority and what's you know the way the rules are yeah is that the rule is little Johnny has uh you know a car break at 10 o'clock and another one at three o'clock and he has he can eat whatever he likes at lunch and that is just plain wrong and you know and it all and it's again because of brainwashing you know you can't blame any of these two people there is no there's no great expert that stands up there you know you know in England we've got Jamie Oliver who who tried to do this and got a lot of you know a lot of fun a lot of flack for trying to to do this but he didn't take on really the whole concept of how much you need to eat during the day and you know this this idea I was brought up on uh this that grazing was better than gorging I talk about the book yeah and it ended up this pathetic study of about you know 10 people uh done 30 years ago that um doesn't stand up to any scrutiny and yet this one study you know has had had ramifications because obviously this whole industry came around it and people felt you know what it's really important to keep people um you know topped up and uh how are you going to top up these kids because otherwise they'll go crazy and so suddenly it was a guilt thing if you if you took it away and then they did something then the parents would blame them and then then this responsibility comes up so it's gonna take someone Brave to do this yeah but I just hope that you know some people will read the book and say okay well you can blame me now um you know some had had teacher might be listening say you know what I'm gonna change this let's give it a go for a term uh you know and uh be unpopular but give these kids something some similar to what really is normal yeah and what other kids in healthier countries are doing but there are studies Tim that have shown like I've seen numerous studies where they've shown that if if a kid has you know let's say they have breakfast before they go to school but it's let's say based on real food like you know good source of protein let's say eggs or I can't remember what exactly was in the study but it showed clearly that actually that's sort of breakfast can actually not only sustain the but improve performance at school as well which again doesn't really surprise anyone if you understand the impact that nutrition can have all over the body and I agree you know maybe someone will read your book maybe a head teacher will and go you know what yeah I'm gonna do this for three for three months I think it will take that kind of strong leadership and and I I thought long and hard about this but I feel so strong about it in my next book which is on uh how to lose weight in a responsible and sustainable way I've got a section on scores in there and I'm going to direct people to the to my website where I've written letters that people can use to send to their Headmasters to try and actually make it easy for teachers and for parents who feel strongly more for parents would say you know what I felt I wasn't sure what to do but if I and my mum's WhatsApp group we all download that letter and send it in maybe in our school this you know a change will start to happen and I I don't know if it will have an impact or not maybe we can talk about teaming up for that see if we can do something because I really think if we get it right for our kids now that maybe in 15 20 years actually they'll be the ones who are adults and they possibly won't have all the problems that much of the adult population has today but also the the kids will uh teach their parents yeah so I meant what we all forget is you know kids have a big influence on the family as well you know and it's not always that the other direction so I I think yeah if we keep failing our kids and you know a lot of the agenda in schools has been driven by the food companies you know this idea that you can have as much sugar as you like as long as you go into the playground yeah um just complete nonsense and it's all been funded by you know big food and drink companies and to distract us from the rubbish and distract us from the idea that you know we we're just feeding these kids rubbish food all the time they don't know what different vegetables are and they and they they're no wiser about how to cook or understand what natural ingredients ingredients are you know it really hasn't changed at all since I was at school you know if you're lucky you might be able to make a bad brownie you know that's about the extent of it and yet you know everyone really now once you get you know beyond middle age you do realize that nutrition is probably the most important thing you can be educated in yeah because you know and there's no reason that nutrition shouldn't be and food shouldn't be at the heart of the curriculum you know whether you can study the science of it the Ecology of it you know the environment is becoming so important um you know many things we don't need to learn in school yeah you know we hardly anyone uses algebra and yet for the 99 of people who never use it they're told it well you know let's start changing some of the um things that we do insist on curricula yeah and what we're talking about schools you know same goes in medical school but you know uh in a way that's that's a whole other conversation so that's the whole other conversation but I but I think you know and and in a way you know I think getting it right for schools and teachers is probably more important um and again it's this this idea of you know from the ground up I think teachers will love it Sim because actually teachers will find actually that their kids because I I you know teachers probably go into education I'm guessing most of them because they enjoy imparting knowledge and wisdom and and inspiring a generation of kids to think about the world in a certain way you can have more engaged kids when they've been fed properly when they don't have blood sugar roller coasters and less than when they're going to be moody they're going to be more attentive and more switched on to what you're trying to teach us why I actually think there are there are benefits the same goes for workplaces if they helped encourage you know no one wants to be out you know no one wants their employer to tell them what to eat but there are ways to sort of not make it easy to eat junk right I think that's that's what I come down on it a little bit um but Tim right you mentioned before if we go back to your personalized nutrition studies so I can't stop thinking about what you said before that if you snack or or in some of in some patients if they snack before a meal it changes their metabolic response to that meal so I wonder if we could just dive into that a little bit so let's say you're gonna have your dinner at 6 pm but at 4 30 p.m you have I don't know cake piece of cake you know with a cup of tea how might that impact the same meal that someone has at 6 PM if they've not had that cake well it's gonna vary for different people because I've told you there's this uh unique response but we're generally saying a high up uh insulin and glucose Peak uh if they've snapped before they've snacked before so there'd be more stress on the body uh having snacked than if they hadn't eaten at all it will depend on the time of day and other things like this because again it's not a simple you know black and white type relationship but everything that you eat you do before you have whatever it is you're eating has a role in that response to that meal and so for most people who have anything to eat before that time that will induce a sugar surge will cause an even bigger one in the subsequent meal okay so so this is why once you start thinking of food in a different way is a chemical reaction in your body you realize that you don't want to have these big sugar Peaks these fat Peaks after food you want to yeah you accept some of them but you want to balance it for your body so that your body's not overreacting all the time and in a sort of stressed inflamed state which is what we think is happening for people on very bad diets they're just constantly stressing the body the incidence being pumped up inflammation levels go up vessels start getting inflamed long-term stress equals weight gain and you know concentration problems and energy problems so what you know getting a good night's sleep having a good rest between meals um trying to work out whether you should be eating your food early in the morning or late at night depending on your particular circadian rhythm all these things are important but absolutely we should be eating less meals we should do with serving two decent meals a day rather than this standard six which we are now being told it is still the right way to eat I want to buy the you know just happen to be this these these cheap snack foods you can you can buy that parents are told is good for their children you know and it's just complete nonsense we have to break that cycle realize break it down again and start you know people experimenting and getting people used to and kids particularly you know you imagine a child that's used to eating six or seven times a day how do they cope with the fast you know after two two hours they're conditioned to start looking for something else to eat uh whereas the French kid the Spanish kid the Italian kid they'll be patient they'll wait you know and they'll wait for some decent food and I think that's the other thing it's this conditioning that's yeah maybe just as bad as this metabolic uh problems yeah and I think that the uncomfortable Truth for many of us as parents is that our Behavior can also condition our own kids right so what they see us doing and if we've let's say picked up habits that maybe ideally we would change but we haven't yet our kids are around us and seeing it they're also going to pick up that as well and I think you know I say that as a reminder to myself just be careful how much you snack you know it's not it's not like looking down on anyone it's it's purely understanding that we're all susceptible um but these religious you know but I'm a big fan of you know fasting and virtually every religion has had fasting in there as a way of training um you know as a sort of Health thing and bonding the community together but I think it's a great training for for kids uh to be able to fast for a period of time to realize that you don't you're not going to die if you don't eat you know and you just wait until the next day or uh you know when the Sun goes down or whatever it is uh and and it's very sad that we you know slowly being lost and suddenly in the Christian world it's virtually lost uh and it's only the other other religions that do it but but bringing back you know some non-religious fast day yeah um for the whole family might have been a fun thing that everyone should do you know that um with a big Feast at the end yeah to celebrate yeah you write this sort of feast famine type pattern that we've no doubt had in Evolution how can we bring that back when you say you're a fan of fasting um what do you mean by fasting because if I don't clarify this we'll get a ton of questions afterwards what do you mean by fasting are you talking about intermittent fasting time worships that he's saying how many hours you know all those questions will come up so I'd love to know what what does Professor Tim Spector think of fasting well firstly everything in moderation so I'm not someone who believes in multiple day fasting um you know I've never fasted for more than 24 hours and uh I wouldn't recommend it but I I do think just in general principle the idea of going on a fast psychologically is really important so that you remember what hunger's really like and you remember that you can distract yourself from hunger and that also you can paint a nice picture of you know having this enormous breakfast the next day and amazingly you can fall asleep and get around it so until I started doing I I didn't believe that was sort of possible yeah I I thought I'm too weak I'm not going to do that but so the just the principle of any any fast um it's quite just a thing to do for your own the psychological well-being I think uh to realize that we've you know we've got this we've got these chemicals in our brain and they're telling us to do this and but you can switch them off you can divert them you know when you don't have to it's fine and most of us will come across some medical thing that we have to fast uh but you we usually just distracted by that medical thing that we do it and if that's interesting that that's quite easy um but when you do it voluntarily it's summer harder so the principle is I like it um I was a big fan of uh intermittent fasting when it first came out because it allowed you to um eat less food but not in a restricted way so you could have you could pick what the food was you were going to eat and just had only a quarter of the amount on that day and I don't think it was shown to be better than any other diets but you could stay on it for longer because you had the variety you could change it all it wasn't dull it didn't you know didn't interfere with anything else and um when you say intermittent fasting Tim can you would you mind just elaborating on what that means exactly okay so intermittent fasting I'm talking about things like the 5-2 diet so you would have um two days during the week not consecutive where you would have 25 of your normal calories and or or some people would have less but yeah it would be the idea that you'd really reduce it down um maybe just have an apple and a bit of clear soup and um something in the evening I always had a glass of red wine As a treat in the evening but uh which which used up most of my uh allowance um and then the next day you could compensate do whatever you liked really so that it was a and you could do that for two days a week and most people found they did lose weight or was a way of controlling weight that didn't give you the the same rebound that you got with uh calorie counting or doing anything like that now like all things it turns out to be not as you know amazing as as we we thought um but it it did allow a lot of people to carry on doing it for years and I do have people who have been doing it for years and every now and again they just say okay I'll just have a hungry day and do that and to my mind because they're not changing the food they eat it can still be healthy I like that it's not like they're having something out of a can or a you know artificial milkshake or a low-cal product they're not going and saying I'm going to get zero calorie this and that you can have exactly the normal Natural Foods um but I think what is interesting is the moment is that is time restricted feeding yeah um which is a lot of the news at the moment um and has very uh a lot of animal data supporting it but so far hasn't lived up to expectations in the clinical trials interestingly so been a couple of Trials recently where it hasn't shown to be as dramatic as you would expect from the um the the animal studies and it could be that again this individuality those trials always look at the averages yeah and it could be that some people would benefit from a different time scale um for some people isn't enough some people might be too much and so I would still advise everybody to give it a go and particularly this idea of whether you're a morning person or an evening person in our studies um when we gave identical muffins to people every uh three hours or every four hours across the day most people's um metabolic Peaks these these these stress Peaks I was talking about got less uh during the day um so yes so you know the other way they they went up during the day so three out of four people got worse during the day with the same food um one in four people actually uh got better so and I was one of them so it suggests that for some people eating later in the day would be better than eating early in the day so some people are morning people and like the Dogma tells us you metabolize better your carbohydrates in the morning you break it down quicker you get less of a Sugar Peak eating The Identical food and we compared lots of people doing this but one in four people it's the opposite wow so some people are better off not having a large breakfast um also either skipping breakfast and having a lunch and a big evening meal like most people in the Mediterranean those people will do better so again it's all about self-experimentation there isn't one size fits all and there's many complicated bits go into food yeah and it's necessary to maybe deconstruct it all without losing the you know the fun bits of eating yeah because there is this huge social side that's really important mustn't lose sight or but let's not stop eating breakfast just because everyone says you have to eat breakfast and they say oh Mommy I'm not hungry well you know try it for a week without breakfast and see you know it's not going to kill them um and if it doesn't work out you you know you change your mind but generally humans are pretty good at if you listen to your body it will tell you most people are not starving when they wake up in the morning you don't wake up at 7 30 oh my God you know I've got to eat something you know and so that and some people they don't get any feeling of hunger until you know maybe 11 12 o'clock I think energy is a big one it's in some ways the currency of life isn't it it's we all know what it feels like when we've got low energy we don't want to do anything our food choices are effective we don't want to cook something fresh we take the quick and easy option you know energy is everything I think and I would argue that if there's one thing we want to improve certainly in my experience more than anything else it's energy because all our decision making all our behaviors I find are so much better when we've got energy but as you know so many people are struggling with that given that it's personalized um and I know you've sent me as opk and I still haven't done it week on Monday I will be doing it so when you come on the podcast the next time when your next book is out which I'm really excited about um we'll definitely talk about how I found it and what results I got given that it's personalized are there some general trends that are applicable to people who haven't done it yet who are like okay I get it's personalized but is there anything I can learn from what you have learned so far yeah I mean I think if I tried to say well what have I learned without knowing what my results were just looking at other people's results is that many you know there's a proportion of people that are really sensitive to carbohydrates and there's a proportion that aren't and it's hard to tell obviously if you've got a lot of perhaps diabetes in the family you might suspect that that's that's that's true is that refined carbohydrates and whole food carbohydrates yes yeah it is I mean the more the more refined the worse but it's a spectrum there isn't a an absolute cut-off no I just as you expand there just to share my own experience because I have used the CGM continuous glucose monitor a couple of times I don't use one regularly um but I did early one in the year and I've I've got one on at the moment and last week over dinner it was pretty healthy meal and I think the carb with it was sweet potato mash that my wife had made oh man I can't what it went up to but it was a big rise up with my blood sugar about an hour maybe an hour hour and a half after the meal which really surprised me and I found with other things like if it's a few boiled potatoes or a small amount of white rice actually it doesn't anywhere near to the same degree now there's a few other things I need to tweak and I need to replicate with different foods just to see which one it was but sweet potatoes are considered you know a healthy carb a whole food carb sure it was mashed so that was you know that's changed it somewhat but that was really interesting for me because I may have continued eating that but that will definitely make me think again about how much do I want to have this if it's going to push my sugar that high so that I guess speaks to what you're saying and what you're finding with people some people are exquisitely sensitive to carbs even Whole Food ones and yeah and there's and different carbs so you know there will be some things that you know there's a difference between pasta and rice and and bread for some people and and understand there's a huge difference you know within those ranges and I mean people will say okay well porridge is healthy isn't it most people tell me oats that's healthy but you know for me they're not but you know I tried three or four different types of um oat porridge and what that tells you is the more refined the more ground up the more it's been factory made and the quicker it is to make the the higher my sugar Peaks go yeah so as a general rule if you pick things that are less refined less processed and take longer to cook it's because you know their outer coating is you know that that those that energy is stored much much and it's harder to get out so so steel cut oats things you have to you know cook overnight don't have half the Sugar Peak of the identical um you know Quaker Oats uh instant Meal which for me is just like pure sugar so I think it's just so telling porridge is healthy doesn't mean anything no for who sorry since interrupts if you are enjoying this content there's loads more just like it on my channel so please do take a moment to press subscribe hit the notification Bell and now back to the conversation and it's the structure of food because you've broken down that oat it can be in its whole form you can have it you know cut you can have it rolled uh you know or you can have it so finely powdered and dry air dried that that Sugar just you know rushes out and you haven't got any fiber so understanding the differences between Foods I think is is a really important lesson so that we mustn't over categorize again reduce everything to saying this is good this is bad within each category there are good and bad foods that we all need to learn about it's like hummus and chickpeas or you know almonds and ground almonds you know they have totally different amounts of things in them when the structure changes given how much data we can learn about ourselves through continuous sugar monitors are we not getting to the point where it's almost and every single person's best interest to at least do a two-week trial with one of them to at least say oh man I'm having that every day maybe I shouldn't be having that obviously you've got to be careful with people's relationships with food and food is so much more than just the blood sugar response isn't it but I don't know if you've got any comments on those things I think um people can get obsessed with blood sugar monitors and there are people you know will get obsessed about all kinds of things about food and reducing it to purely a Sugar Peak uh is not the right answer because you can go down complete the wrong direction and just by adding double cream to everything you can dampen down the sugar response yeah that doesn't mean that eating a bucket full of double cream every day is good for you so um I think you've got to see it in the in that holistic light of all the things we talked about and your fat response some people can cope with a lot of fat other people can't and there are good fats and bad fats as well so it's just part of the equation but I think it does give people like an insight into you know the fact that something we shouldn't necessarily need the orange juice actually is not a health food and it's uh you know it should be in the alcohol category or something like that that you take um it's not good for anybody really um which if everyone did have a glucose monitor on every time they they had a glass of orange juice they would see it's uh you know the same as a Coca-Cola and it would just be put them in the same sort of category and so you say well okay um that should go in the same so it would it would change people's ideas of things and I think you know I I there will be a watch soon that I I think probably within five years that does the same as a yeah a glucose monitor and once that happens everyone like counting steps and things they'll probably want it but I think we have to be very careful we don't don't then over you know make the same mistakes of reductionism that we've made up to now because humans love to make it simple and nutrition of food is anything but yeah I mean I was playing Devil's Advocate a bit asking should everyone have one because my concern with trackers in general which is why I've used this twice so I have two weeks at the start of the year I'm in a two-week cycle now I it's I've said this before on the show but I always noticed this with blood pressure monitors with patients people say should I get one should get home blood blood pressure monitor and you know it would depend on some patients would and then it was pretty much a 50 50 split for some people it was awesome they check it once a week or twice a week they wouldn't stress about it they'd use it as a way of keeping them on track with their lifestyle changes the other 50 would check three four times a day anytime it was slightly up they'd recheck it they get anxious they'd come back in that would drive their blood pressure up even more and I thought wow the same tool can be helpful or problematic depending in some ways on the personality type depending on who that person was and I and I suspect you know because that's tracking everything now there's sleep trackers there's step trackers there's blood sugar trackers and I think we've just got to be careful as you say I think a blood sugar tracker for two weeks for anyone is you bring stuff that you don't know about that's hidden inside you you bring it into the light like if you suddenly see your glass of orange juice that you think because of all the packaging it's got vitamin C and all the things the packet says is helpful for you and you see yourself going to 10 or 11 on you know way over the diabetic range you might think twice about having that you know several times a week and if all that does for you is is help you realize or maybe someone who has porridge every day and they realize wait a minute porridge is spiking my blood sugar massively it's gonna you know do this for five years I'm gonna end up taxi diabetic then that has value because they can then use that and they don't have to check it all year they can just they can move on or maybe they do it I don't know maybe it's the sort of thing in the future they'll do once a year or once every six months ago oh this is what's happening at the moment okay I want to make some changes I'm not going to look I'm going to work on my gut microbiome and then six months later I'm going to put it back on again just to see I think that's how I'm going to be using this um just because I think I could also potentially because of my personality type I think I could run the risk of getting obsessed which is why I'm very cautious about trackers yeah no I totally agree and I I I don't see this as a permanent feature on the human body I think it'd be a real mistake uh we'd be creating super neuro neuroses and you can artificially you know you can cheat the system yeah and and again forget the point of it which is getting quality food into your gut microbes um so I you know I think doing it once in a programmed way it's not actually that easy to do it yourself and I think oh that's interesting I mean we've found you know I I've done several times I've told people oh for radio programs you know do it and we'll discuss it if unless you've got clear guidance on what to do what to look at what the Peaks are when to measure it uh it's you get the wrong impression about things yeah and which can be even more problematic yeah you measure the wrong time after eating a bread you miss the peak you know you don't know what's going on you can't compare it to anyone else you get the wrong impression so I think in a standardized way um doing it but I wouldn't do it more than once a year I don't think yeah and I found that even though I've used maybe 20 times or so you know I'm not obsessional about these things and I do often forget I've got it on I sort of know how I'm going to respond to things now yeah and so you have that early lesson which is really good gives you a real sort of jolt about gosh I was wrong about food you know I was wrong about my breakfast you know this is I'm gonna educate myself more that's what I think we should be aiming for which comes back to this you know yeah the idea we were what is good food how do how do we tell and for people without a glucose monitor yeah one in four people do feel uh energy levels and I think uh what they feel them going down down yes but some people don't you know and you mean when their blood sugar spikes and crashes some people get a low energy but other others don't at that time well or they're not particularly observant enough to to notice it unless they're being prompted you know and so I think but I think this is perhaps one thing we should be promoting is that you know if you're doing self-experiments and you you know you haven't got the money to to pay for these things which are still not in everyone's Reach how to listen to your body more to say well am I hungry what's my energy level like and just sort of make a note or you know keep a diary of things is the other way to do this and yeah there are certain portion of people who can judge pretty well what foods are but the nice thing about our study was people were blind to it yeah they didn't know their results and so when we saw these Peaks and troughs which one in four people had really big ones you know we'd and they were un they didn't know why they were feeling tired they just reported they were tired on the app and I think that's really interesting yeah you mentioned breakfast a few times um you often appear in the media uh with some Mr breakfast yeah some pretty crazy headlines now I've I've been around the media enough to know not to trust the headline um but skipping breakfast potentially being good for us is something that's often attributed to you now can you expand what is your view on breakfast um and I guess the the the kind of context here is that for many years people have said breakfast is the most important meal of the day they have and that that's the way that where I came into it and really writing the diet myth my idea was to look at the data and challenge some of these myths which I thought it was a long-standing one and strangely it's still there if you go to the NHS eight to eight healthy eating tips it's still there um despite all the evidence saying that there is no evidence that uh skipping breakfast is bad for you so that's the first well the countless studies now show it it is not bad for you it doesn't cause metabolic problems it doesn't cause diabetes or you to gain weight which is or even it doesn't cause kids to perform badly at school which was the other worry that was planted by the food companies in people's minds some Studies have shown that it actually can induce some weight loss now that's not totally consistent but it is certainly going in that direction the matter when you combine all the studies together that's what you show but increasingly um the idea that this might be true is supported by science showing that it may not be the the breakfast itself but just the Gap you're leaving overnight and this whole question of not just what we eat but how we eat is becoming more and more important and everyone's heard about intermittent fasting but the the new thing that all the nutritional scientists talk about is restricted time eating yeah which I'm I'm sure you've talked about many times but the finding about skipping breakfast was was in a way a pointer to that actually we've been missing this whole idea that the idea of we should be eating little and often uh throughout the day has actually been the wrong advice and that we should be compressing our meal times yeah perhaps doesn't matter whether it's two or three meals but they should be in a shorter time frame and so the sweet Point seems to be somewhere between you know in about 10 hours of eating and and 14 hours of um not eating and that's that might be the reason that skipping breakfast for most people not everybody and again I think there's quite a bit of individuality here there are some people who generally feel hungry when they wake up and feel tired if they don't have some breakfast but I would say the majority of people don't and it's just a cultural or a sort of Lifestyle reason to get some food in you when you're in your your home comfy environment but increasingly I you know I've started myself to either skip breakfast or have it at 11 o'clock yeah and particularly post covid people are working at home now they are in much more control of their meal times yeah and it's a great time to to start so that that's a bit of practical advice that everyone can do either try skipping it and see how you feel and if that doesn't feel right or you still enjoy breakfast with you know its ability to have your your yogurt and your or your nuts and seeds which would be a you know if I missed out on that would be problematic um have it later and uh have it as a or either as a brunch or just a couple of hours before you you have your other meal yeah I think it's super helpful and as you say the problem with these cultural uh fixed ideas are that often people are not paying attention they're not feeling hungry but they think I should have breakfast because I keep hearing that and the scientists say it's important to have it and the problem is it's very hard to say breakfast good or bad because it depends number one what do you mean by breakfast right what time is it is it at six a.m is it at 11 A.M you know um it also depends on the rest of your life do you enjoy a big meal with your family at nine PM right maybe people are working late and actually that's the way that they connect at that point or whatever in which case you know at 7am you may not be hungry whereas if you eat like I try and eat with my kids at you know what I can around work about five half five like I genuinely feel at my best when I'm doing something like um I'd say an 8 A.M till 6 p.m or a 9 A.M till 6 p.m eating window even sometimes a tent or say it's like an eight hour eating window I feel great I don't feel hungry before I don't feel hungry afterwards I sleep like a baby and it works for me my job and my lifestyle at this point in time at this point in time exactly so therefore these studies and and I I say with all this public health advice I'd encourage people to you know think a little bit you know become take a bit of agency over themselves use what you're saying or what I'm saying or what they hear but also try and filter and apply it in the context of your own life I think that's important isn't it yeah and it's very different if you've got young kids you're going to have a different time scale than if you're you know uh grandparents and uh and you've got you know the time is is in your and you've got you know you can plan everything yourself so because there's a social aspect to food of course yeah and we mustn't forget that really important that people don't obsess about yeah I I do worry that um and certainly uh looking at some of the Zoe customers in the US it's about 30 percent are already on restricted time eating when they're coming into the program so it's huge in the US compared to the UK but some people might get so obsessed about their eating times that they forget uh the healthy aspect of the food they have to eat and the enjoyment and the social aspect and I think again for people who are a bit you know obsessional on it uh you have to make it not so extreme and I think that's the danger of people trying to outdo each other and say oh I can I can only need to eat in four hour window and I'm fine and it's just not you wouldn't get people in in Italy or Spain or France who enjoy the long meals and the you know and the socializing doing that and they're the ones who live longest and you know are healthier so we have to remember that some of those countries of course are having later breakfast aren't they they're all they're sort of technically skipping the breakfast that we might have in the UK certainly at that time yeah well I I work in Spain a lot and you know you usually don't finish eating till 10 p.m uh sometimes 11 but you rarely see anybody having breakfast before 11 if they do or they don't bother it's just a it's just a coffee yeah so I think differently there's ways to it we've just assumed that Lots everyone has you know the same habits in different countries but you know there's a north-south divide in in times of people eating in Europe and but in the South it's not like they're at 7 A.M eating breakfast yeah um and I think the ones who tend to eat earlier tend to have more earlier breakfast but I think it's it's very personal and it is and but most people I speak to when you say well the first thing you wake up you know and you've had a cup of tea or coffee most people don't feel really hungry you know it's not like that's the first thing on your mind if you had a choice of things to do you know yeah just to finish off this conversation Tim uh We've mentioned polyphenols and fermented foods we didn't go into that much detail on either one could we just briefly go through what are polyphenols why should people think about getting more of the men how can they do that and they're potentially the same for fermented foods as well so polyphenols used to be called antioxidants and they are a group of well over a thousand different chemicals that are in plants in all plants to different levels and their defense chemicals that plants use to defend themselves against sun or predators and they are often when you eat them have a slightly bitter taste can cause a stringency just like if you have a a really old red wine it gives that that taste on the tongue that's because the skin of the grape has a lot of these polyphenols in it and they are in brightly colored Foods they're in slightly bitter foods and they're in complex Foods and so they're in things like coffee dark chocolate red wine extra virgin olive oil nuts seeds berries particularly so these are all Health Foods and these polyphenols we now know are useful for us because they feed our microbes and those microbes then convert them into other healthy chemicals we can't really use them ourselves so it's quite interesting it's they really are like specific fish food that we're eating that that provides us then you know the name these chemicals then get back into our bloodstream and dampen down inflammation and keep us healthy so that's really important and there's big differences between Foods you know like the choice of a cooking oil between you know a highly refined vegetable oil and extra virgin olive oil is massive um can you see that in Zoe as well um well it's reflected in the scores yeah so we would give a different score to vegetable oil than we would for uh uh extra virgin olive oil but depending on the quality of the fats but also its effect on your your gut microbes so all of the scores do reflect uh polyphenols and um for the fermentation which is the next thing we're talking about which also affects the gut so polyphenol is really important and uh but it's you've got to understand more about the food so chocolate for example all chocolate has some polyphenols in it but it's only in the cocoa part of it not the um the artificial bits and not the sugar and not the milk which is why the dark chocolate is dark chocolate is packed with it milk chocolate is is has very little and is overridden by the sugar so again it's it's all about the quality and looking at the labels and seeing what's on the food and you know difference between picking a really brightly colored lettuce or a an iceberg lettuce is massive um in terms of the difference of the polyphenol so the color of the leaves and the way the lettuce is gives you a different indication of how many polyphenol so what are we looking for when we're picking our lettuce um you're looking for one with loose leaves um that is brightly colored uh often different colors Reds and that's true for a lot of food so generally it's a bit like the berry the bright the colored berries have more of these things than the other ones do so this is a you know we're just understanding this this sort of science so some some things we thought were good for us aren't and uh this is another thing to look out for so polyphenol is really good fermented foods are anything that has live microbes in it so it's like probiotics naturally occurring in food so by the time you're eating it it's actually got live microbes that can still replicate and produce chemicals and so everyone knows yogurt has that but kefir has several times more microbes than yogurt and it's a thinner version of it and then you've got um uh you've got kombucha which is fermented tea which is becoming more popular which has even more than Kefir in it and has a different fungi and yeast so often up to 30 different microbes you can find in a in a proper kombucha and you've got then sauerkraut used you know in Central and Eastern Europe which is fermented cabbage and of course getting one level above that you've got kimchi one level above that in terms of the number of microbes number of microbes and diversity because you've also got as well as cabbage you've got uh you've got garlic you've got chilies uh you've got onions and other peppers and things so the more complex it is often the the greater the richness and that's super helpful because sauerkraut is known to be a for people who are you know who read about gut health they know that sauerkraut is one of those fermented foods that's really helpful but this idea that you can upgrade to kimchi because it's not just cabbage it's like going back to the very start of this conversation the diversity it's got more plant Foods in it therefore um it's gonna you know feed more and more microbes that that's super helpful I think yeah and there's and then you move on to the if you like Japanese food of course anything with miso in it is uh is is really important because miso is fermented soy and so there's plenty of fermented soy dishes that you can get as well that uh tempeh and uh otherwise other ones like this so fermented food is really big be careful you don't buy ones with vinegar in it yeah that are killed and you know try and smell that when you open open it check it hasn't got vinegar in it and you can use your tablet smell if it's if it's live or not and having a small amount every day is what I try and do and there's no point in having a feast once a week we know that these things die out so for practical reasons try and have a small shot of one or two of these every day and that's why if you have it at home in your fridge you're near the for breakfast or your first meal you've got it or you have it you know at night when you come back I love that that reminds me of what I talk about a lot which is like I you know a lot of people who listens to show know that I do a five minute strength workout every morning whilst my coffee is brewing it's a habit that I've stacked onto that so I never miss it because I never miss my coffee so I never miss that little five minute workout every morning and I always say that I I found that little regularly actually has a very powerful effect on the body no matter what habit it is what no matter what Behavior we're trying to bring in and I guess bringing that into gut's Health as well a little bit every day with the fermented foods is better than binging on the whole jar maybe on a Sunday when you have more time something like that yeah and I've changed you know and cheese is the other thing of course which we forget is is fermented if it's real cheese but um you know we're not talking about craft slices we're talking um that you know cheese that doesn't have to be unpasteurized although it helps because you do get extra microbes if it's raw milk cheese but most cheeses are good the ones with blue lines and fungus on them or have even more microbes and just having a small amount of that every day is absolutely healthy there's a myth that cheese is bad for your heart and things absolutely no evidence that's true um a small regular amount of that had you know and instead of a pickle that might be high in sugars and salts a traditional English pickle you know try sauerkraut or kimchi with it and I think increasingly you can just build this into your your daily diet so you are having these things regularly and you just have something in the fridge you just pop on your plate as an extra you know and I think that's what I found is having the ingredients ready around you so you can just add them whether it's you know the original seed mix or it's the the kimchi party you just grab it and you stick it in and you you know like like your or just after your coffee you have a you know if you're in a hurry just have a quick a shot glass of your your kefir or your kombucha and uh you're sorted so that's fermented foods and I think everyone you know needs to learn about them yeah uh other countries have been doing it for centuries and we we've just lost out just before we finish I think it's important points to make that something I'm observing a lot it's a a lot of people or certainly you know that there's a significant amount of people who struggle to increase the amount of plants to their diet they get symptoms they get bloating they don't feel good and you will have seen this online as I have that there is a growing movement towards more and more severe diets more and more restricted diets now a lot of people follow these days uh what what has been called a carnival diet which is you know all meat or predominantly uh Meats with very few other things in it and I know people I know patients actually and and I know people who are thriving on these diets compared to how they felt before a lot of people say my joint Pain's gone um I've got more energy my Skin's better so therefore you can see from their perspective that they're feeling better compared to where they were before yet they're now hearing someone as respected as yourself talk about all the the benefits of plant foods for the gut microbiome and I think a lot of these people feel stuck between a rock and a hard place they they want to apply what they're learning but they also know that they feel better on quite a wildly different diets um have you come across this and do you have any kind of thoughts on that Yeah well yeah I've had people write to me saying I've been on a Carnival diet for two years and I feel great you know I don't understand what you're on about you know um and I say well everyone is different you could have a unique set of gut microbes that seem to cope with this but My worry is that although initially changing from say a high carb diet or Ultra processed food diet to carnivore diet you will get you will feel better in a number of ways long term I worry that you know we are omnivores and our gut microbe diversity does depend on giving enough to feed if you're only eating meat you're going to have a very limited range of gut microbes to produce all these chemicals and vitamins for you so I would just urge those people you know not to give up meat but to start introducing small amounts of regular different plants it doesn't have to be huge quantities but you know it doesn't have to be starchy ones either it could just be you know the leafy green ones which there is a variety you know certainly nuts and seeds and mushrooms uh you know also good you know we haven't talked about mushrooms but no I've the last few years I've become a real big fan you know of this is an amazing source of protein and nutrition that um I think is you know probably going to say end up saving the planet as uh as we move forward but you know there are lots of um nuances but there isn't one size fits all and there may be people out there who don't need 30 plants a week I'm not uh saying it is absolute rule uh I'd love to do some studies on these people is so it'd be fantastic if some carnivore darters did the Zoe study and we could look at their gut microbes well I have someone who I'm gonna someone just for you actually someone who is literally thriving and has tried vegan diets before has tried low carbs and literally finds that going full carnivore and I know this lady super well and she is thriving high energy High cognition can work all day can can run marathons I'm like there's something going on here where she is thriving on this diet and so I'm gonna I'd love to know so I'm actually going to talk to her and put her in touch well you know because I'll be interesting wouldn't it what's actually going on in the microwave well I mean you know hopefully in five years we'll be looking back at this and say well we didn't know much did we you know because I'm sure we will science is uh exciting and it's always changing and you know our views you know we found a year ago this this microblastocystis which is in one in four British people have this parasite it's not a micro it's a parasite that a few years ago you'd have had to go the tropical medicine place and that have given you powerful antibiotics to get rid of it because they said oh you that will give you a traveler's diarrhea now we know that it says we're good health and lower fat levels isn't it with lower also immune risk as well potentially yes it dampens down inflammation visceral fat uh and one in four Britain so we've discovered only one in far one in 20 Americans have it wow but it's in a hundred percent of all Hunter hunter-gatherers 100 of all uh Indians that have been studied of all developing countries this is our normal state to have this parasite so we still know so little yeah about what's going on that who knows there could be hidden fungi or uh other other parasites inside our body that love meat and can produce sorts of chemicals I'm not ruling it out yeah I'm just saying on average you know do be careful because you might get great short-term benefits but don't wipe out your microbes because it's really hard to get them back there's quite a bit of research out there and again these are all averages that people saying eating half eating the bulk of your calories in the first half of the day seems to have a better impact on you know sort of Weights that actually if you have the the bulk of a calories in the second half of the day now of course these are just averages and I think to be clear I don't think they were saying it has to be a breakfast it could even be a you know breakfast is what meal one right so meal one can be at any time I think even if it was at 10 10 30 and people were eating most of their food by 4 4 30. I've seen quite I think at least three trials and one of them is a Spanish one actually suggesting that actually there's a positive impact now I get that's not the case for everyone and it's not not the case where people are older as well we showed in our studies that there's an age effect so all these studies generally done on students in nutrition departments right so they're generally in their 20s but increasingly as you as you get older these patterns shift and these circadian patterns this this morning predominance is gets lost and so it's uh much weaker when you you know you get over 50. is that really that's super interesting and I think really for me that almost the work you're doing in some ways it makes all previous studies redundant in some way because if they haven't taken into account individual variation then it's very hard to draw you know we can draw an average conclusion but then as you say you know for that individual it's like well the trial says that but that ain't working for me and you need to look at the trial in real detail and say okay these are 20 year old Americans or whatever am I you know as a you know a 40 year old you know non-american in another country is this really appropriate for me you know why don't they show a wider range of individuals ages you know realize that it's far more complex than they're showing and that you need to do your own experiment in some way and hopefully we will soon be able to do that you know these these with everyone having their own monitor I think so I mean I mean obviously you know the company I'm working with Zoe uh you know launched a couple of weeks ago the products in the US so you can for a few hundred dollars buy the product in the US do four weeks of testing in a way get your own scores um get your own report and then go and then see how you get on just by using an app that tells you what your scores are and then you work out does that you know how do I feel on that and you can actually do your own proof which is a faster way than spending six months trying to do it yourself uh but I think the general principle is that these devices these tests the microbiome testing all these things that input into these predictions are going to get much cheaper much more available and we're all all going to be using an app uh I think that's personalized for us you know within within five or ten years wow I I just think it's the most only logical way to deal with a complex problem because you know I've just given you a little snapshot of how complicated these things are about just eating one meal and but if this is reduced by some algorithm to tell you your score is this you can then make some lifestyle choices based on that and then have a much you know do two weeks then see does that work for you or not you know I think that the the the real beauty of doing it individually is that you're really empowered to make a change when you see it on yourself right when it's not someone else's data I actually I nearly got a blood sugar monitor at the start of the summer and I think I just got busy with the book edits which frankly took me all summer um I thought oh I'll get that in and then I'll play around with with and seeing you know what happens to my blood sugar after certain meals so I didn't get that but I did get the Sleep uh tracking device which I think is is certainly what I can tell one of the best ones out there and what's really interesting for me is that if I eat close to my bedtime within within two hours of bedtime it takes a lot longer for my heart rate to drop at night and I can see that in real time when I played around with it and and that affects you know you're Readiness score the next day and how much you've recovered and it affects certainly for me my levels of deep sleep so when I see that consistently and play around with it I'm like ah okay I know that that is not suiting me so I've literally changed that so I won't eat now very rarely will I eat within two or three hours of bed it's very much even if I get that Pang at nine nine thirty I'm like you know what I'm not gonna do it and and that a the feeling goes because half the time you're not really hungry it's just you're a bit bored and you just want something in your mouth but I kind of see the same thing with blood sugar monitoring right it must be when you see it for yourself you're then empowered to make that that change have you seen anything or have you done any work yet within the data about eating close to bedtime because I'm guessing in Spain you see late but I think they go to bed later as well don't they yeah everything's later so it's like jet lag you're just sort of uh they never go to bed before one so um yeah so they may still not be eating for two hours before bed potentially yes yeah yeah they wouldn't go to bed straight after eating no yeah so and they wouldn't eat in the morning so they'd have a longer because you've got the you've got the you're looking at it just from one point of time whereas actually you might say well actually you know what about your metabolism at lunch time you know after you've had that I mean yeah it's all related yeah what did you have the day before and should you be exercising before or after meals you know how does that change your metabolism but that that's only blood sugar though isn't it because you guys are measuring three things blood sugar uh triglycerides in the blood and also um what was the other thing you're measuring inflammation so you're measuring three things can you get a lot of that from just the blood sugar because a lot of a lot of self-experimenters are getting the blood sugar testing and doing that but you obviously in your testing are doing it a lot more you know there's there's two more parameters so what what can we take from that yeah I mean blood sugar alone certainly picks up things like having a real pre-diabetic tendency you know knowing whether you really have a problem with carbs the sugar dips um but it doesn't tell you whether you should be replacing everything with fats or not because some people have problems with fats and they don't if you just the easiest way to get a good blood sugar reading is just to have fat you just put butter and cream on everything and it wipes out the sugar response so everything that's just based on sugar is always got that flaw that um you're never quite sure whether you're doing yourself more harm or not because you don't know what your your six hour triglyceride is whether those fats are going to hang around your body all overnight uh causing inflammation giving you heart disease all these kind of things which so I think it is important to do both but you can certainly get a lot of insights and it's just I think just psychologically really important suddenly when you you see instantaneous bit of the sugar that you know on your phone you can actually see things going up when you thought something was healthy you know so I I changed wow for a while to eating porridge for breakfast out out and there was this huge myth that oats were amazingly good for cholesterol and uh your heart and speaking in the US is massive campaign and you have all these varieties I tried about four or five different uh oats and I thought felt really being healthy but then I saw my my sugar levels really high until I got to uh those steel cut stuff that you had to sort of boil overnight and uh was really thick you know hard to digest and then that was the only one that sort of worked and you see these real life experiments for yourself and then I gave one a monitor to my wife and we're having the same meal and you see her quite happily uh tucking into bread and toast with no sugar Rises at all and me you know all over the place so that those sort of little insights will stay with you forever yeah much more than reading an article uh in a in a paper so I think this personalized thing is a real way to to elicit change yeah and and you won't go back after that you know I'll never look at bread the same way um and I just wish I'd had you know eat more pasta in the last 20 years than bread because that's much better for me but you know kind of things that aren't necessarily intuitive yeah and did you say you can't get from the trial and I know I remember reading that in the book about um instant porridge oats versus steel cut oats and again it's sort of coming back to what you said before about you know Grandma probably wasn't giving us instant purchase which is probably it was the real deal um I mean so I'm getting about the book because you know I could talk to you for hours about all kinds of different things that the book really has got a beautiful structure you really I think it it's very actionable you take on various myths and you walk us through the science you know a bit of Storytelling there sort of really with a practical take home from that which I really like obviously we're not going to go through all of them now given given how long we've already been chatting for but there's a few things I think one of the the myths was that fish is always good for you and I quite liked that chapter um I wonder if you've got any insights on fish for people because there is a there is a feeling out there isn't there that fish is like a Wonder Foods uh what what's your opinion on fish well I was a big fan of fish uh and I've been trying to force my son to eat fish all of his life and then give him fish capsules and uh which I only found years later it's stuck under the bottom of the uh in a drawer in the in the kitchen to rot uh very carefully um and it it turns out that a a omega-3 fish oils don't pass muster when it comes to randomized trials so they don't so the fish oil extract which everyone thought was the important thing of fish doesn't uh reduce heart disease which is a shock to many people and fish itself you know it's another meat people forget that fish is meat it's just uh floating around in the water um and it's been given magical properties uh through maybe these Blue zone areas and uh the Japanese eating fish although they had lots of other things but a lot of people who were centenarians never ate any fish in Sardinia and Greece they just at masses of uh goat and other things you know greasy other animals and the data really is pretty modest in terms of the the benefits of fish average trial show you know five to eight percent reduction in mortality which given observational studies is is not significant and increasingly fish is farmed so majority of the fish we eat in the world now comes from a farm not swimming around naturally and so it's full of chemicals it's full often pesticides antibiotics full of microplastics now and if we did what we were told to is all have two to three portions of fish a day fish would very quickly go extinct or we'd be having to produce so much grain and soya to feed the fish farms uh that they you know would also run out of produce so um you know I used to call myself pescatarian um you know I love fish but it's massively over hyped and I think we just need to stop the and realize that um have it as a treat get good quality stuff but a lot of the fish we're eating now is either fake or very poor quality Farm stuff that's ruining the environment and so I think that's the the sort of balancing message here yeah and that the idea of these Miracle Foods is rubbish and it's just that's a really good example of uh over hyped food that uh you know has no real basis um other than the fact we haven't found anything wrong with it at the moment apart from you know Mercury and uh and eating lots of plastic hey what about people who would say that fatty fish like like say it's not Farm like wild salmon for example contains you know high levels of Omega-3 which we know are helpful for brain developments and function I mean what would you say to people who who was sort of um you know who would sort of pose that query I'd say absolutely go for high quality occasional high quality uh fish when you can have it um but don't reduce it to a few chemicals something like fish has hundreds of different chemicals in it uh and vitamins and nutrients but we can't just take one thing from it and say that's really important that's why I'm having it um yeah in Scandinavia it has vitamin D so it helps some people with vitamin D deficiency through the through the winter but it doesn't mean it's a miracle food it doesn't mean that we should you know religiously bend over backwards like we have for every other spirulina or every other fad uh that comes along that you know with Chia seeds or super berries or yeah whatever it is um it should be part of this whole balanced idea of food and I'm actually saying yeah do eat fish but do it in a way that's environmentally aware go for high quality not the cheap uh fake stuff that's being produced in farms that's destroying a lot of the world and don't believe all the hype and that's just a really good example of of how you know we've said that red meat is bad fish is really good and of course it the devil's in the detail high quality bits of both in small amounts uh I believe are absolutely fine it really strikes me that what you're advocating [Music] using the very latest science is actually a Back to Basics approach it's kind of saying eat food that's been around that's kind of being around for a long time this kind of natural food that's as close to Nature as possible play around with it figure out which ones work best for you I'm gonna eat more of that you know I don't mean to reduce down at all the the incredible work you're doing but but actually I think that's a really empowering message I mean would you agree with that yeah with a caveat that I think I what I believe in is diversity and range of foods yeah so one of the reasons I don't like people saying fish is a Wonder food is that some people have sort of fish twice a day and means they don't get many of the other stuff because they're like the people who like carnivore diets you know fill their plates with with meat there's no space for anything else or the obsessional uh vegan who just has uh three types of kale um any anyone who who tries to reduce things down to a few superfoods is denying themselves the diversity of plants that is really at the core of what I think is good advice that we need to be having a much bigger range of foods uh both for Taste texture the planet um but also for our gut microbes because there's this key formula which I do talk about in the book but you know to get your maximum diversity of gut microbes which is gives you the greatest health for your immune system and your brain and all the chemicals they can produce you should be having around 30 species of plant a week and so as long as you stick to that that could be back to basics but keep it diverse do not get uh you know diverted down some narrow tunnel of propaganda or religious fanaticism about a particular range of foods or this is super this or super that or I'm only going for these B vitamins or I'm only doing this this reductionist nonsense is the new technology is making mockery of that you know we're we're incredibly complicated uh chemical factories our microbes are chemical factories you know we've got 26 we've got 20 000 genes 26 000 different chemicals in food we we're producing you know we have thousands of species producing that have thousands of genes and it all of these are interacting and so all our knowledge so far has been so reductionist picking one vitamin one nutrient one of this and everyone thinks they're an expert because oh do you realize that you know how much phosphate is it is in a carrot yeah and people often catching me out because I I've got no clue about you know because I I I've got no interest in that because I I'm interested in the fact that you know a carrot has 600 different chemicals yeah and I we don't know yet half of it but you're probably more than half of that we do know that if we just took one of them and put it into a vitamin uh made that in a factory in China and said this is you know carrot vitamin uh I could make a lot of money on it but it wouldn't be the same as eating carrots yeah now I I really do like so much of the approach 10 minutes it's it's what it's I've got to be honest it's you talk about in food it's one of my frustrators in medicine actually that I think we have become super super reductionist in how we look at things even to the point of this is a guts problem this is a chest problem this is a heart problem and I get it right and I understand that there is Merit in that but actually you sort of said something at the start of the conversation that a lot of your colleagues actually are stuck studying one area and you have almost this kind of super generalist approach where I one thing I've noticed that you you've pivoted quite a few times in your career with that sort of underlying theme of what you stand for you know you started with the twins and genetics but you've you managed to Pivot and apply those principles to lots of different areas which I find really really fascinating uh you mentioned him the carnivore diet there and I just want to spend a couple of minutes on it because it is something that is taking off hugely where do you come down on it in the sense that let's say an individual patient let's say it was one of your patients who was struggling with pain and all kinds of symptoms and they you know found someone on Twitter who was advocating it and they then go away and start doing it and a lot of their pain and symptoms go away which is seemingly what is happening what would you say to them based upon the research you've done what you're seeing in your trials what you know about the gut microbiome because for that individual they're experiencing a benefit so what should they do with that in view of what the research shows well I think I should um but it's a good question because I mean I have it as well and a lot of people do come to me and say listen you know I read your book but I I but you know I do very well on this yeah yeah so shut up you know um and I can't argue with that because you know they know best what they feel like all I say is that any diet that restricts you um I think is likely cause long-term problems so by people who've gone you know whether it's uh high fat or uh High meat uh means they are excluding other stuff and some of that stuff they might have got rid of might have been very bad for them you know lots of starchy carbs and things like this that didn't agree with them all I would say is long term if you deprive your your gut of fiber all the studies show and you know one of the experiments was on my son who uh took McDonald's only for 10 days and took three years to recover um you're a proper scientist yeah I mean you can't get the funding just put your son on the McDonald's diet everyone should use their children that's the message here um but no so by all means carry on doing what makes you feel good but try and introduce some plants that aren't likely to mess up your blood sugar that keep the you know if it is this 70 fat that you know the keto diet thing I you know I absolutely do believe it works for some people but I do think there has to be that short-term balance of uh improving their symptoms with a long-term one to say well you don't want to be messing up your gut microbes so you've got no immunity later on you know once you've got you over your pain and your initial problem you need to be uh and it these can be just by eating lots of seeds it can be eating a lot of herbs you know it can be eating nuts you know it doesn't have to be restrictive so people just keep in this mind that okay I can do these things but I must try and maintain diversity you know what other ways can I feed my gut microbes then I'm very happy for people to do their own thing and I you know I embrace it because I think you know a lot of these things are trial and error but don't don't let be dominated by someone else telling you what worked for them because they had their special book and they cured it that way you know everyone's got to just look at the science and say okay I'll try this but under no under underlying it I know long term I need to look after all the organs in my body and your microbiome is one of the most important organs in your body yeah I think that's a really sensible approach one that I very much agree with and and I sort of I feel also that it's not just food actually so let's say someone is crippled with pain and then symptoms and that's how they go carnivore and that pain gets dramatically better well also there's a knock-on effect in terms of how they feel about themselves their life their stress levels I've seen over and over again that persistently high stress levels can absolutely impact um the way people feel after certain foods you know I've I've seen patients who actually thought they were intolerant to a food and actually what it appeared is that they were entirely to actually eating in a stressed out State like not switching off and I I'd be interested as your research uh continues whether there'll be any work done and actually you know stress levels while ceasing how that impacts blood sugar response how that impacts inflammation because I would I would imagine it will have a response but I don't have the data uh to show so so do let me know if you if you study that at some points yeah well yes it's adding the stressometer to the uh to the recordings but uh we you know in a way I think we are asking people about um uh General contentment how they're feeling at the time and they're as they logging on their Foods yeah and so we do get an idea of uh their well-being at various times in the day so uh as well as sleep and exercise and uh fatigue and these levels they're all interrelated so I think we are going to start asking uh quantitative things about stress and see how that fits in so I think but you do need big numbers to do that and that's yeah but we're now up to about we've done about three four thousand people now uh in great detail and hopefully with this commercial stage we should be able to get to 10 100 000 people fairly quickly and then we can answer these yeah more subtle questions wow and you know yeah and so there's really no limit um if you can keep getting enough people to do these tests yeah to work out what's really going on and where realize how complex we all are yeah so look I could go for hours there's so much I want to talk to you about that we've not done yet um but I think we should close off this conversation I think it's been a three different one to our first one back on episode one uh you know all the way back I would love to encourage people to pick up your books being fed one almost everything we've been told about food is wrong I think for anyone who's got even the remotest interests in this area I think that I find it super enjoyable to read but also Illuminating um to sort of finish this off Tim I don't know if I used to ask this on episode one or not I'll have to go back I'm not sure I could better listen to myself on episode one but one thing I tend to ask people at the end is I say well this podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of our life and if you have everything you've done with personalized nutrition in this book but also in the diet myth before that I'd love for you to think about some really practical tips that people can think about now the end of our conversation they can think about applying them into their own life immediately to start improving the way that they feel first thing is to realize that everyone's unique okay so once you realize that um you can explain a lot of the way you you interact with health and food and exercise and your environment and you should be free to self-experiment and I want everyone to get out there and realize the amazing amounts of good interesting foods are out there and that I don't want people to read this book and get worried about uh themselves and the food environment and chemicals and whatever it's really important that people remain Fascinate about food and enjoy it because it's incredibly powerful bonding Human Experience eating so I want people to experiment try some new dishes you've never tried before try going for a week without meat or if you try only eating vegetables or try skipping breakfast try doing things in a different way so exercising after you've had your meal rather than before it try mixing everything up really and the important thing to realize is that if you can start to think of everything you put into your body is important not just for the pleasure it gives you immediately your metabolic responses but also you're feeding your aquarium if you like or your your tank of gut microbes and they can produce chemicals to make you feel happy and relaxed and try and find that that right balance and it can take all of your life to find that but if you can do it in a way that's fun and enjoyable then that's that's the most important thing so people shouldn't be stressed out about this they should really take us as a positive challenge to try and improve themselves by understanding more about food and teaching everyone else about it and I think we we've all got so much to learn and it's such an exciting area at the moment that I really want everyone to be passionately involved and everyone to be a citizen scientist I think a lot of people hear information about food and guts health and inflammation and the immune system and often they get confused so you are renowned as a global expert on these topics and so I thought maybe we could start with the question why is guttail so important because it's a crucial organ in our bodies and it is one of the few things that we can really control so there's a huge range of gut health across the population we know that we've lost half of our gut microbes compared to perhaps even 50 or 100 years ago and that's affecting us in many ways and yet it's not like genetics that you can't change it's something that all of us can improve and all of us needs to understand more about gut health so that we can improve many things in our life very simply just by altering our food choices so it's it's becoming apparent that it's uh something that the public can change you don't need doctors you don't need Specialists to do it it's all within our power to really nurture and improve our our gut microbes which in turn are key for our gut health so influences you know all everything to do with our body our mood our brain and our metabolism our weight Etc yeah a lot of people think about gut health and digestion and they think yeah the guts if I can get my gut functioning better my gut's going to feel better but as you say that it's not just about your gut is it it's about many different things yeah it's not I mean as you said I think in the past people have said gut health oh that just means you know to avoid heartburn or bloating or constipation or whatever it is and now we know it's nothing like that even if you feel perfectly normal you can have poor gut health which is going to affect how long you live how many chronic disease you get whether you get allergies whether your immune system is going to fight off covid all kinds of things in your mood the next day your sleep all things we hadn't even thought were related so we have to think much more widely when we talk about gut health I think it's nearly a sort of uh it's like talking about holistic holistic view of your body that comes back to the you know the ancient Indian teachings that says it all comes from there which if you said it that way sounds a bit pseudoscience but if you just instead of that you call it the gut microbiome then it's starting to make uh sense again yeah you mentioned that what's really great about the science of gut's Health is this idea that we don't need to go and see a doctor or a specialist we can manipulate it we can change it for ourselves now as a fellow medical doctor that's something I'm incredibly passionate about how can we disseminate information to people that means they can be I guess the architects of their own health rather than need to rely on other people what have you found since you started spreading that through your books through your podcast you know through all these mediums that you use what sort of feedback have you had well amazing feedback really of of people writing me letters sending me presents um all kinds of messages saying that just reading my my book um the Dartmouth or spoon fed and saying it changed the way they thought about food and actually they taught the rest of their family and suddenly they're feeling healthier they're feeling better and there's nothing quite like that as a doctor yeah to feel that you've made not just a change to someone for a few weeks but actually change something probably for the rest of their life and that's incredibly empowering for me to know that you you know just by writing some books and and talking on podcasts you can actually change people's attitudes long term and so that really is a major motivating factor for me rather than the hundreds of papers I've written that you know only a few academics read I think getting these messages out and doing doctors out of a job is really what um is it Spurs me on and probably you too yeah for sure and and Tim you know I've been really thinking long and hard over the past years what does it mean to be a medical doctor for me at least in 2022 because when I was at Medical School I always imagine it would be you know I would make impacts by seeing people and helping them change their lives and you know one-on-one do some tests make some changes and of course that has incredible value but I've realized more and more if we do our jobs right through spreading this information through the media through podcasts and books I kind of feel we're still doing our job as a doctor just in a very different way well reaching many more people and being much more efficient about it and not trying to just sort out the short-term problems which I think is what modern medicines still unfortunately dealing with and predominantly dealing with pharmaceutical solutions to those problems and that's just the way it's set up at the moment so I but I think we are seeing more and more well I I'm things optimistic is is uh you know doctors like you and many others who are suddenly uh having a voice and speaking well because it was very hard to find any any doctors 10 years ago that would you know prepared to do this without feeling they were going to be ridiculed or told off by their peers or you know would simply not have the right language to appeal to the general public so I think we're certainly I mean it was a bit more advanced in the US I think yeah but certainly in the UK we've been very behind with doctors really scared to to talk out and and say what they think yeah in terms of practical things we mentions that improving our gut health can improve all kinds of things in the body and you mentioned food as a powerful driver uh it's a powerful tool to use for our gut's health what are some of the things that people should think about bringing into their diets to improve their gut health well the first thing I think is to to realize that we're not really in an obesity crisis we're in a food crisis and that's because we've lost an idea of what good food is and the first thing to do is to realize you know the difference between good and bad food and forget a lot of what we've been told about calories and fats and sugars and the fact that you can really tell a product by its calorie count or its percentage fat on a stick on a label and most people don't really realize you know the difference between Ultra processed foods and Whole Foods because they're the same category you know a bread is a bread for most people and so I think the first thing is to just realize that actually virtually all the population don't fully understand what food is so I think educating more about what food is is really important realize that the quality is something we should be talking about and we should absolutely stop talking about calories so in a way that's the first mindset shift I would like people to to do and everything we're doing now and doing with the company Zoe is to completely ignore the c word nutrition shortly because I think that is really revolutionizing the way we are all going to think about our diets in the future you mentioned you want people to forget thinking about calories now to a lot of people that's a very controversial statement I happen to agree with you on that but could you elaborate why is the idea of focusing on calories or even calorie counting in your view potentially problematic well there's several reasons the first is that if you judge a food or choose a food based on its calories you're ignoring the quality and manufacturers of foods use calories to disguise the poor quality of the ingredients all the other chemicals there affect the highly High effect is highly processed that's going to have lots of other negative effects on your body second is it's the estimates of how many calories are in it are wrong um even in manufactured processes they're sort of plus or minus 10 percent and in restaurants they're plus or minus about 200 percent so you can't judge what's going in you also can't work out what how many calories you actually burn in a day either huge differences the idea that you know all men have two and a half thousand calories is at all ages is complete nonsense and you know different times of year and all kinds of factors mean it impossible that you can work out what the right amount of calories is so even if you could accurately measure the amount of calories going into your body it wouldn't be personalized for you it wouldn't be worthwhile and even if you do go on calorie restriction diets over time your body adapts and so it changes its metabolic rate therefore equalizing so that's why calorie restricted diets simply don't work and also in this country in the U.S people are the more they go down those routes the more they tend to go down low-fat low-cal processed foods and so they're often swapping calories for quality and this we know that these other products of food understand what's in Ultra processed foods is actually will drive your hunger drive your Cravings make you more tired all kinds of things that they're not supposed to do because we're just supposed to think about calories and fat content and so it's driving people down the wrong direction and that's why we've got it so wrong over the last 50 years that's why obesity rates are going up diabetes rates are going up and Ultra processed food rates are still going up in the US and the UK which are the two top countries in the world so that's the first thing so it's it's about firstly understanding you know the differences between Foods there's a huge difference between you know a cooking oil that's made in a highly processed way or olive oil there's a huge difference uh between a bread that's bought in a supermarket that's been hanging around for a year Frozen and reheated in front of you and a sort of artisanally made Rye sourdough massive difference and yet they're all called the same and in most guidelines oh well you know that they'd be equivalent so it's understanding those differences between ready meals and some of you do yourself it's yeah all those nuances that we need to start thinking about much more than this ridiculous concept of calorie counting yeah I mean I always say that look if someone's listening or watching this and they have found calorie counseling helpful for them I'm like hey go for your life you know I'm not certainly I'm not trying to change what anyone does if they're finding it useful I've just never ever found it useful with any of my patients at all well one percent might like might like it so let's yeah yeah so yeah if it's working great a couple of things to respond there um a few days ago because when did it come in in the UK mandatory calorie labeling came in what a few months ago and I was in a cafe down the road from here a few days ago and I can't remember what I chose but it had some avocados and had some nuts in it and I think maybe some salmon I can't remember what it was then when I looked at the ingredients or something I was looking at the menu then the calorie thing popped up and it was I wasn't used to it because I'm not used to seeing calories on the food that I look at and the calorie count was pretty high actually so now I happen to I think know a reasonable amount about nutrition and what foods are nourishing me and I thought wow if you don't know you may look at that calorie week out and go no no I'm not going to eat this because there's a lot of calories I'm going to get something else instead which may have lower calories but maybe Ultra process and have detrimental effects on multiple aspects of our body that's one thing I wanted to mention the second thing is this reductionist way in which we often look at food now and constituate parts of that food it's become so reductionist that particularly the focus on calories that I think we're missing that big picture on what food is and what quality food is it's information isn't it it's it sends the body signals it can influence our inflammation our gut's health our moods uh hormones uh genetic expression all kinds of things are influenced by food and I think we forget that and it goes back of mind when we simply look at just the calorie number yeah absolutely so we're agreed we should ban it and uh get it get it or in a font so small you can't see it on the on the label which is what they do to the other interesting stuff that you do want to know about but uh the restaurant stuff is interesting because New York um introduced this over 10 years ago and I've been doing stuff there have been lots of Publications on it and show that it works for a few weeks and then ultimately fails and then ultimately has a sort of reverse effect that people um will choose the lower calorie options and eat much more of it than they would have done otherwise so it's uh and if you talk to the also the people preparing the meals they just guessing what's in those in those meals they've got no real idea and it's totally depend on portion size and so which can change so easily so it's not only misleading but it's also likely to be unhealthy for us and it's just a a tick box for governments to say oh I've done something that you know the food industry won't worry about and they'll be quite happy to go along with it and you know it ticks a box with doing something for People's Health but it is absolute of no use and totally agree it's obscuring all the other good things that are in that food that people should be picking it on so that's yeah we're agreeing when you go to restaurant you know look at the ingredients not the calories if you enjoyed that conversation all about the negatives of eating too much sugar I think you are really going to enjoy this one about the specific foods that you can eat to prevent disease we are actually all forming cancers in our body all the time maybe you can prevent tumors from growing their blood supply you can actually keep these cancers harmless so this is what foods are able to do

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 440,794

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: DvzAX5dMEVo

Length: 169min 49sec (10189 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 16 2023