Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Food Is Wrong | Tim Spector

the massive billion dollar food companies that have been setting the the agenda about research have have managed to avoid any decent studies comparing 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 and they've had this vested interest in doing this and that's why we're we're deluded into making having ridiculous tv programs about calorie counting and uh the dangers of fats and and this obsession on our labels which most people don't understand anyway which detract again from the quality [Music] i've definitely never had anyone come in saying that someone thought that they were my dad so i think that's probably a good place to start yes genetics and uh yeah so the cab driver and giving your address and getting closer said uh oh you're wrong and dad then uh you know come to see him and uh yeah so as long as i'm his brother maybe you know can't be looked that old but um spotting concept she did have a face mask on i had a face mask on yes and you've got a fabulous town at the moment i do have a yes a good a good tan and i've probably got some asian jeans as well so my kids had uh these uh uh asian birthmarks that you know they they get from from genghis khan or whatever it was well we'll get to genetics the main reason for getting together today is you've written a fabulous book spoon fed why almost everything we've been told about food is wrong and i mean you know we could talk about this book for days basically there's so much in it but i think that subtitles quite interesting why almost everything we've been taught about food is wrong so what did you mean by that well i had to slip the almost back in there uh from my agent the publisher who uh always like a and even punch your title as you probably know so it took me a few weeks to get almost back in there um but yeah so it turned out that uh the title came at the end of the book really so once i'd finished it and i got my 23 myths uh things about food we got wrong that we came up with this title uh but then um and it it did come across that so much we've been led to believe over the last few decades has really been manipulated by you know poor science industry advertising uh and just general you know peer pressure um and so i wanted to focus highlight those things particularly but at the same time i didn't want to throw out and sound like a complete nutter that says uh you know i'm the only one who knows the answers um you know everyone in nutrition is you know is wrong of course not but it is hopefully highlighting uh the fact that most people agree that eating more plants and fruits and vegetables is a good thing um and that was that's that's core to most of the nutrition advice and that's what people do agree on but um what people don't really understand is even professors of nutrition don't actually agree on things that they the public think they do agree on and what we're told is what we're spoon fed if you like and we did a uh a survey of 13 professors of nutrition really uh academics who've been in the field 20 years in the u.s and uk gave them 100 foods to rank common foods and we looked to their correlations and basically you'd expect to see a really good correlation between these scores because that you know these weren't wackos these were establishment figures uh all be it with some with strong views and 50 of the foods they agreed on 50 no agreement at all and of course they agreed on things like olive oil and um plants uh eating fruits and veg but all this huge area in the middle like dairy meat um lean meat versus fatty meat diet drinks buttery margarine no agreement really at all and i think that's what i meant by the almost um but i think people forget that there is some common sense out there and i don't want to feel that i'm a total anarchist um uh because you know after i'm an academic so um that's important to me to not feel that i'm just trying to blow the whole thing up you know there is some agreement but there's massive disagreement and yet all the guidelines all the nhs websites all the stuff you know whether it's my food plate or whatever guidance particularly in in the countries like uk us australia all makes it out that we know the answers and we're sticking to the status quo of whatever we've been told for the last 30 years because no one really wants to admit a mistake and i think that that is sort of trying to sum it up and i did it in a way that i i thought was bite-sized people get into these ones have conversations about it because i want people to talk about these things because i think that's really that's the vital bit we're not going to necessarily see change from the top down i think what i'm hoping is there'll be enough people from bottom up to start affecting a change to start demanding uh that these things are taken notice of and we can stop stop the rot stop passing on this misinformation to our kids yeah i think you've done a great job with that tim and i really agree with you about this bottom-up approach because we're seeing that at the moment aren't we we're seeing that for all the the cons of what happened on social media there are many pros as well and many people are being empowered they're being informed they're experimenting themselves and going actually i didn't know about this way of eating but it's actually working really well for me and i want to delve into that a bit later on about the whole movement of personalized nutrition which i think you're very much at the forefront of but i'm super interested you mentioned you're an academic so why is it that an academic like you cares so much about food what happened did you leave medical school like that or did something happen along the way i definitely didn't leave medical school like that definitely didn't leave junior doctors like that and you know for a large part of my career you know believed my consultant's advice that you know everyone who gets fat is just lying and uh you know they're they're cheating on the biscuits and uh if we eat less you you get slim so it's really only the last 10 years i think i've really got into nutrition seriously i've done many different things in my my career but they've all been based around the last 25 30 years abound twins and so that has been a platform that i set up where you study identical versus non-identical twins you look at nature v nurture and you've got this one model that you can then apply to any common problem or disease or exposure and so this is an amazing resource it's the largest in the uk one of the biggest in the world you know we've written 700 papers using these twins and it's given me the freedom to actually not only look at 100 different diseases but also different risk factors and start thinking about things in a much broader way than most people ever do totally multidisciplinary really because everyone else i'm surrounded by in academia is very focused on a very small area of research they can't see the big picture and none of my medical colleagues were interested in nutrition because it was seen as the poor cousin very primitive very you know basic ways of filling in questionnaires with pencil and paper um it wasn't glamorous it didn't have sexy genes it really was very very dull and nothing was happening in it and you couldn't get grant so nobody really wanted to do it then really it all came out of this my twin work really because i slowly transitioned from being really excited that identical twins were so similar and you know picked up a glass uh of beer with the same little finger sticking out or some weird traits like that that as humans we all pick up on to the fact they're realizing well actually identical twins usually die of different diseases they um get different cancers they uh you know much more different in terms of health than people think although they look very similar they look um you know and their expressions and whatever you as humans we over uh exaggerate that because that's what we pick up on the smile the witty comment the voice but actually the health stuff is really different so why would that be why do you identical clones who end up so different so that's got me into this area called epigenetics which is how you can switch your genes on and off and for five years i i was looking at that and there were some differences between twins in these signals that you can get from diet and you can get from the environment or pesticides or whatever it is but it was pretty obvious that we didn't have the great tools to study it and the effects were quite small so i was looking for something else and the other big thing that suddenly hit about 10 11 years ago was the gut microbiome even in identical twins they their microbes are really different and so suddenly i had a a reason to explore that and once i really went into the gut microbiome is this new organ that's really different even in clones and is shaped by our diet and our environment suddenly that was a sort of aha moment that said wow if if that's so important then this is how we can really study nutrition this is everything starts to become explainable in a sort of modern era approach as opposed to a 100 year old approach of calories fats and proteins because it's down to the chemical levels down to the interaction level and you can still start to measure it all and quantify it in a way you couldn't do before so it was it was a combination of these these insights about the gut microbiome plus it was the technology that you could suddenly measure gut microbes with genetic sequencing which i was well versed in from my my years in genetics and you could also measure other things in food so much as the chemicals you can break food down not into the three groups that we all know and hate but um into 26 000 different individual chemicals and and you can do that with this this whole approach of mass spectrophotometry but it's basically just drilling down into the detail and in a way seeing food and nutrition and your gut health in a completely different light to what we were able to do 10 years ago and suddenly that transformed it into this you know you know from going from a village fate type way of looking at cooking to this high molecular big data algorithms uh giant computing way of of looking at things that we could suddenly crack the problem and that really was that that's what put it together for me and that's also that introduced this whole idea of this pers personalization really came from the uniqueness of our gut microbes no i think there's two people on the planet that have exactly the same uh gut microbiome and and yet when we compare that to our dna um you know we're probably fourth cousins genetically we share over 99 of our dna with each other but you and i are not going to share many of our microbes um however much uh you know we spent bond bonding in camps together or whatever we would be very still remain very unique which means our response to the environment our responsibility to food is always going to be unique so that's what really excited me about this whole field that we all these things were coming together just at the right time uh and i was in this unique position because of having this twin cohort to really work out how much of this is nature how much is nurture you know we can start to do these big scale studies with these amazing you know 12 000 volunteers that um have been you know i've been working with for the last uh 25 years yeah it's incredible to hear the journey how much has your personal health challenges in the past played into the direction your career has taken um i think it's changed quite a lot uh and for people who aren't familiar perhaps you could sort of elaborate on what happens yeah yes so um around 10 years ago i was doing some trekking up a mountain doing some ski touring in italy uh high altitude stuff uh 3 000 meters and uh the last day of the holiday wasn't feeling very well and got to the top of the mountain and then uh got a really i felt a bit dizzy and it was nearly falling down all the way down and got to the bottom and started i could see double so i had double vision and that lasted for three months and was very stressful at the same time my blood pressure shot up um from being completely normal to being hypertensive and that was it turned out that was a micro occlusion like a mini stroke but it was a wake-up call to me to lose weight and then try and work out the best diet for myself and that started my journey of really self-experimentation and in-depth investigation into the whole field because i didn't really have any great prejudices other than as a doctor where we were told that fat is bad for you and that you should have you know mainly starchy vegetables and you know the classic uh and you should have margarine and not butter um were you overweight at the time um slightly i was about 84 kilos but i've managed to lose 10 kilos um so i'm now you know 74 75 kilos um i didn't feel you know until i started thinking about it my weight had been creeping up by about one kilo a year uh for the last 10 years um you know hospital canteen lunches and things had conferences and you know orange juice here and there but uh so that that really was a turning point for me and i think most people have that that at some point in their lives you know you didn't worry about stretching until you had back pain at you know the age of 30. that was a nice that was a trigger for me so most people need to learn from their own experience they need a slap in the face it's very hard preventively so if you don't do that you'll get x well i'm for you know it's i needed a wake-up call um naturally a bit lazy thought i can get away with it as most people do um but it's interesting to him if you look at the nutrition space within the medical profession which as you well know more and more of us are becoming passionate about this as a very much under tort area and underutilized area when we're you know looking at patients and trying to help them it's interesting how many of the doctors and other healthcare professionals as well who've gone down this route have had some kind of personal experience either to them or a family member where maybe they were diagnosed you know i know many doctors who were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes didn't really want to take the medication thought well hold on hold on a minute before before i go on lifelong medication is there something else i can do and with that self-experimentation they then become very vocal advocates for you know lifestyle as a way of providing medicine i think it does take a shake-up of that kind uh particularly in doctors i think it's a good observation um you know as as a wake-up call and it's either that as he said you know a family member who suddenly gets really bad advice is the other way it happens their parents suddenly get diabetes or something they say hang on a minute what sort of crazy advice are they getting about about that um but uh i and i was no different really uh except that i um got the wake-up call and you know then started doing this experimentation to improve my gut microbes that was the first five years was really all about that and then the last three years have been all about uh personalizing and realizing that um everybody's different therefore you know even the advice i was perhaps giving before won't suit everybody and that we have this unique response to food and that i started wearing all these these gadgets these wearables these uh continuous glucose monitors and measuring everything i possibly could you know being one of the most investigated people probably on the planet for food because i was in this unique position um and that moved me in a way further down this road uh for the last um three years as i was uh found out that i was uh pre-diabetic and that you know certain foods were pushing me over the over the limit quite regularly and so having just gone from being you know having a bit of hypertension and being overweight uh and this cardiac risk suddenly i said well i've also got a potential glucose problem here so that was really another insight that only someone in my position testing all the stuff would have so yes it's incredible to have access to so much testing on yourself i'm sure many people listening or watching will be wow i wish i had that on myself and what comes to that you know tim you have this double vision you're obviously you're trying to get down a ski slope that is scary i'm sure and worrying and then presumably you saw a doctor of some sort to try and sort of provide some perspective on what might be going on here were you offered conventional advice at that time did you try and lose weight and sort of get on top of your blood pressure and health using conventional methods that didn't work is that what also fed into this uh i had i went through the conventional medical things of scans and the cardiologists and the eye doctor and nobody suggested diet uh would be of any use except the uh my consultant in hypertension who said of course you should always now give up salt um which is is about the only really the advice that um they they tend to give so it was very standard stuff um and these people were experts in their field teaching hospitals uh but nobody nobody said go and experiment uh try and do some different things um it just wasn't on on the card basically you use drugs to control these things uh you had special glasses to your for the double vision and yeah and at the time nobody did the sort of checks to see if i had pre-diabetes for example um because they didn't do those challenges so uh that's why i i said well you know i can do much better job myself just by some self-experimentation i think that really spelled it out to me how little even experts in this field do know about the the general world of of nutrition and about how we should be encouraging um patients really to to think more themselves about what they can do and to bring out all the things they probably know themselves because they're worried that their doctor will say no you can't do that you've got to have the low-fat margarine you mustn't deviate from this course yeah but so now i've sort of gone the other way and i you know i want everyone to experiment with food and find out what works and not just accept that you know if if i'd accepted what my colleagues have said well you know i i i would never go to a restaurant uh because that would give me too much salt uh and i'd never have a an interesting meal ever again because uh life without salt is is is pretty horrendous and you know it would only improve my my blood pressure by one millimeter um so that's it's just putting everything into context and that's where in a way why i wanted to write this book to start putting some of these bits of advice into a context for an individual rather than you know groups of people the idea that there is this average person there who's gonna benefit from all these things when actually the truth is you know we're all so different and um we need to find our own way i love that there is a line in your book where you say you're very unlikely to be average something to 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 diatagnostic in the sense that i support minimally processed food i support eating in adverse commerce 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 give the best advice i can but also to kind try to 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 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 it's like 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 of you know you you also said that the science is now telling some of us what we already knew i think that's really powerful because i think a lot of us kind of know that oh the diet that my mate's 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 it is very refreshing but most people the 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 vitriolic uh correspondence when i was uh talking about the the diabetic uh diets and um you know going 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 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 the 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 uh 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 always 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 not eat don't eat ready meals and uh junk food all the time um i think we'd be hard-pressed to find any camp around nutrition who would disagree with that so anyone who would disagree with us 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 are you know who uh 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 you say you haven't proven they're bad for you 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 sort of 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 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 of 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 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 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 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 yeah 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 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 going to faint um if we didn't no and you know you really look around the world and see how and i think we don't do that nearly enough is is make these comparisons with other countries that are much healthier 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 you have to do with why french kids don't miss paper 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 it's also 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 but it's still because 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 when it 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 uh components what what what what's your research shown up is there any sort of insights you've got for us well our basic plan which we've been doing the last three years is to give thousands of people 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 so i think that's really important if you do snack before your meal your metabolic response is poorer at the next meal 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 um 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 that one of the commonest fats in 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 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 um 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 for example a a high carb breakfast before the lunch uh will interfere with that second meal so it's all connected is what i'm saying so this is why um and it's not just the french but the italians the spanish all the mediterranean countries really don't snack uh 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 uh 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 uh than what we're eating but i think better better in what sense tim less pro less sort of ultra processed and highly processed foods what when we say better what do we mean by that sure very right to pull me up on the no i'm just because uh you know the whole point 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 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 you know 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 uh we 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 percent 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 and in the world the us are the fattest 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 that in itself tim 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 v protein that's the issue or actually is it simply that the food that you are eating 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 massive the billion dollar food companies that have been setting the the agenda about research have have managed to avoid any decent studies comparing 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're selling us more of this stuff that gets relatively cheaper compared to the um 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 and they've had this vested interest in doing this and that's why we're we're deluded into making having ridiculous tv programs about calorie counting and uh 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 manage to get instead of a food label 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 that we did with smoking cigarette packets we no longer had we used to have cowboys on them and glamorous women and various other things it's it 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 chemicals to alter the mouth feel so it makes up for the lack of natural stuff and it's it's hurting our and by having it it doesn't lend itself to a good meal and so 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 has clearly shown that you you've got these two matched meals to this randomized group it was done by the nih uh just over 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 they kept going back for more so they ended up eating 30 more yeah that was kevin hall study i think wasn't it yeah i mean remarkable what was remarkable is 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 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 everybody yeah i know i know and you take that with you know i have this pic particularly about artificial sweeteners yeah um and um i've had arguments with 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 and i would say well you don't do that for drugs you have to first prove it's not harmful show us a study that proves it's safe right but in the diet myth i think you spoke about artificial sweeteners and i'm pretty sure you expressed 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 either two cans of of fizzy drinks with sugar or two cans of the diet equivalent uh 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 maybe for if you for your dentist okay so the dentist like it because definitely it it's uh good for your teeth um and so that just that factor don't think about it in each you know the average can will have maybe 150 calories so people have two a day at least it's 300 calories less why 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 percent of our intakes right 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 uh metabolically to the to these individuals either their brain is being reset by the sweetness chemicals so it's at a neural level or uh 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 uh my insulin peaks 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 uh 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 the metabolism and in a way either makes us 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 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 uh 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 know about we should be teaching kids and you know adults how to go back to enjoying things that uh like water or like teas and um herbal teas and things that have a bit of interest in it rather than this this blunderbuss massive amounts of sugar yeah whether it's fake or real it's amazing you know my kids are sort of ten and seven 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 five years ago that we had the choice to not drink water whereas now we have that choice and i suspect it's because it's been conditioned out of them uh via society diverse 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 to 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 never said well don't don't drink the water you know what are you gonna it could be deadly uh and that that fueled 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 minus any taste and do that but and then then have to add some uh flavorings to it as they they were doing with um for kids to add a twist of fake lime or uh orange to make it palatable yeah no absolutely i think we really important we get kids taste back reset the thermostat away from the super sweetness that uh is the problem because they they can't then appreciate other foods because in a way everything's set so high yeah that they need it 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 at the i wrote about you know if a child you know a hundred 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 there's like haribos or um you know every day and that becomes your definition or your normal sweetness is a packet of sweets then 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 last 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 of taste because and i think a lot of this is because of sugar and artificial sweeteners and the fact that um it is 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 a 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 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 night 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 eating how much when you know you know since going to school particularly as we're getting older and older obviously that that control and maybe all parents struggle with this goes away from you somewhat but what's interesting to me is what is normal in schools now okay now i 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 the school time table 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 uh absolutely true around this country and probably 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 mid-morning break for snacks we were expected to last until lunch without fainting and i think this this whole idea and it it all comes to this idea that you know you you have to give kids regular food otherwise their blood sugar level drops and they're uh they can't concentrate and they run a mock and this uh this idea was probably capable 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 they didn't get their chocolate finger and and they did a correlation they ran a mock well the fact that little johnny ran a mock uh was the sort of kid he would just forget to 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 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 meant it with it with gareth last weekend 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 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 soon as saying that if for some reason that's quite controversial to say that it's almost as if you know when i speak to teachers about it and some teachers say some teachers agree but they say i'm 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 they're manufactured to particularly you know spike that dopamine beautifully well so you know i don't think people get it right 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 the energy level went down because such is this dogma that uh 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 and and so what they're doing is they are giving their ki if you give your kid a chocolate biscuit or whatever it is at 10 o'clock they're going to 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 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 uh in our case it was muffins but the point is exactly the same that it is madness to think that uh 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 everyone needs breakfast otherwise you can't concentrate they didn't have a word for breakfast 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 you know they would go hunting they didn't need they couldn't have 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 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 what it on 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 how guys how was it and you know at school and then he goes yeah you know what you know what my friends have today they have 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 well i get it but i actually feel that schools are taking away some of their 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 ten 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 guys 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 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 uh i talked about the book yeah and it ended up this pathetic study of about you know 10 people 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 how you're 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 that then this responsibility comes up so it's going to take someone brave to do this yeah but i just hope that some people will read the book and say okay well you can blame me now um you know some head head 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 be unpopular but give these kids something similar to what really is normal yeah and what other kids in healthier countries are doing because there are studies tim that have shown like i've seen numerous studies where they've shown that if 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 sort of breakfast can actually not only sustain the but improve performance at school as well which again doesn't 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 three months i think it will take that kind of strong leadership and and and i i thought long and hard about this but i feel so strongly about it in my network which is on uh how to lose weight in a responsible and sustainable way i've got a section on schools 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 go 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'll 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 then 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 kids will uh teach their parents yeah so i mean 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 to 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 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 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 will you know let's start changing some of the um things that we do in system on curricula yeah and what we've talked about schools you know same goes to medical school but you know uh in a way that's that's a whole other conversation that's a 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 sin 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're going to have more engaged kids when they've been fed properly when they don't have blood sugar roller coasters and lessen 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 actually you think there are there are benefits the same goes for workplaces that they helped encourage you know no one wants to be 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 where i come down on it a little bit um but tim wright you you mentioned before let's 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 that 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 going to have your dinner at 6 00 pm but at 4 30 p.m you have other name a cake piece of cake you know with a cup of tea how might that impact the same meal that someone has at 6 p.m if they've not had that cake well it's going to vary for different people because i've told you there's this uh unique response but we're generally seeing a higher 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 um 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 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 uh 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 as 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 insulin is 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 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 be serving two decent meals a day rather than this standard six which we are now uh being told it is still the right way to eat i want to buy that you know just happen to be this these these uh 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 uh 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 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 maybe just as bad as this metabolic uh problem yeah and i think the 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 and and it's very sad that we you know it's 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 uh but bringing back you know some non-religious fast day for the whole family might be a fun thing that everyone should do you know that um with a big feast at the end yeah to celebrate yeah you're right this sort of feast famine type pattern that we've no doubt had an 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 you saw my intimate fasting time with shits that he's saying how many hours you know all those questions will come up so i'd love to know what it what does professor tim spec to 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 is really like and you remember that you can distract yourself from hunger and that also you can paint a nice picture of 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 so i i thought i'm too weak i'm not gonna do that but so the just the principle of any any fast um it's quite just a thing to do for your own 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 but you we're usually just distracted by that medical thing that we do it and if you and that's interesting that that's quite easy um but when you do it voluntarily it's somewhere harder so the principle is i like it i was a big fan of intermittent fasting when it first came out because it allowed you to 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 you 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 percent of your normal calories and or or some people would have less but 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 something in the evening i always had a glass of red wine as a treat in the evening but which used up most of my uh 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 as a way of controlling weight that didn't give you 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 thought 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 uh 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 their food they eat they 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 normal natural foods um but what is interesting at the moment is that is time restricted feeding yeah um which is a lot in 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 it's 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 uh 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 mourning 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 uh a lunch and a big evening meal like most people in the mediterranean uh 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 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 of but let's not stop eating breakfast just because everyone says you have to eat breakfast and they say well 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 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 yeah i think the main thing for me is if i sort of which what i always try and do is try and relay what you're telling me from the science and this kind of cutting-edge science that you're involved with and i'm sort of trying to relay it to what i've seen with my own patients okay well how does that marry up with what i've seen it really fits so beautifully that first of all everyone's different secondly we got us i think we've got to it's about empowerment and responsibility in the sense that i think too too many of us are relying on some external source to tell us what is the right diet for us you know doctor you tell me what should i eat and i think we can provide guidance but i kind of feel the only way to really own it long term is for you to feel it and go actually you know what i don't really care what anyone else is doing because when i have my breakfast at 10 a.m and let's say i eat until i have a dinner at 7pm actually you know what that seems to work for me yeah i know my best mate has breakfast at 7am and he seems to be thriving but it it's kind of just about and i think there's something in society's him there's something that's really changed over the last 500 years i just wonder actually in some ways it's interesting isn't it nutrition always used to be taught to us by our parents or our grandparents and our local community and as communities have become more dispersed and we've moved away from family and of course many of us have emigrated to different countries and set up new homes and new lives we're now almost looking for you know scientists and researchers and doctors to tell us how to eat and again i appreciate i'm adults trying to encourage people to say well you're a doctor you're a researcher but you know what i mean is there something is that not in some ways part of the problem yeah it's the missing grandmother generation really you know yeah um yeah that's this cultural void particularly in the anglo-saxon world uh you know since the second world war we just haven't had this this these experts who told us what good food was this is good traditional food i'll teach you how to make it for your kids you know this is what it looks like everyone knows how to make that dish for example yeah and they know what the raw ingredients are they can you know chop up the onions and and do it all and that is passed on and that's still ex southern mediterranean has it northern europe doesn't have it but you know every single kid in south korea knows how to make a kimchi um and they eat it two or three times a day and they're you know their grandmother has their own special recipe and they pride themselves on knowing their national dish and being experts in it and we have nothing nothing at all well i i sometimes feel that we're swimming against the tide here you know in terms of what populist opinion is i mean you you said before you you mentioned you get attacked you know how do you feel individually actually as a as a very esteemed and respected doctor professor researcher how does it feel for you individually when you get blasted on social media um well i realized today i'm relatively protected because i'm uh a respected professor in a and i do see a lot of the abuse that goes on to other people that's much more than i get so i realized that i'm uh relatively free of this um i've got it was quite hard i used to get quite upset about it um now i think it's quite funny or i try and work out you know who they're working for or what their particular angle is and once you see that you know you realize well you know it's just like religious fundamentalism it's um they're never going to be particularly happy but i've i've been fairly lucky that i'd i'm quite hard to attack uh because i do do the research and they can't say well they've done the research and it disproves me or whatever it's a theory but certain areas like you know i know i never win and vitamins is one of them um there are some areas that are really like fundamental religious beliefs that people feel very very strongly about and i don't think it matters what science uh you i produced uh those people in their lives times will never ever drop uh that particular belief and um and that's it it's a belief right that's and that's often what we're we're up against tim you know the personalized nutrition as someone who's had probably more uh needles and tests done on them then possibly anyone on the planet maybe what have you changed in the way you eat since doing some of this testing well ten years ago i started changing really towards my gut and i had this without a huge amount of evidence just the idea that i wanted to feed my gut microbes was a pretty good principle to go on and the last three years i've been doing these more precision tests on myself with with monitors with measuring my fat levels etc etc and that's taught me about something i got i realized i got some things wrong and it's it's changed my breakfast for example and um i now have really pretty much ditched the carb breakfast and will if i i try and skip breakfast a couple of times a week although i like breakfast i i feel slightly better without it i was so conflicted because nothing quite like a really good breakfast but if you're rushing it and you know you don't need it i try and skip it but you know i will go for the full fat yogurt the kefir i have fermented food every day now i'm really if i don't i feel sort of um i'm lacking something i'm i feel guilty like a parent you know letting down their poor microbes we've got starving from my babies they've got like to eat um so i i have a fat i have fat and nuts uh maybe a small amount of fruit in the morning um and my lunch time i've sort of said i'm either gonna have a proper lunch or i'm not gonna have one right and i i feel if i'm working really hard uh i i don't often feels hungry enough i absolutely have to stop and have lunch um and it's probably not good for me to carry on working i must say so i i but on the times i do i do have a proper break and then have a proper lunch otherwise i will just have some nuts and uh an apple and i found that by cutting out bread at lunchtimes i didn't get the sugar dips and spikes that i was was getting uh when i had my hospital you know tuna and sweet corn sandwich uh that was always seem to be the same and you get into a rut about having that but when you see that effect on your blood sugar um it really puts you off um and so and then the evening um you know i really have whatever i like uh that that's good and i don't really hold back so i think the the sugar monitor has really helped um what did you have did you have one of these continuous monitors which would sort of feed like bluetooth to your phone sort of what was going on you could really see in real time so what sort of time would you have your evening we are now uh it depends which country i'm in um say in spain you can't really eat before nine o'clock in the evening uh when you know people going to bed but they don't you know and said they don't seem to have problems with it because they don't eat much in the morning so it's all about not about much of the time you eat it's perhaps when you go to sleep and then when you have your next meal so it's the spacing out of the meals is important um so i yeah i what i try and do is at least twice a week um have a 14-hour fast until the next day yeah and i do feel better on that and i've discovered that and i also try and exercise whether it's swimming or going for a run or cycling you know not immediately after um i try to exercise first before before eating and that seems to suit me better as well it's interesting you've seen this in real time so one thing i'm super interested in because 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 uh impact on you know sort of weights that actually if you have the the bulk of the 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 quality i think at least three trials and one of them was 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 it 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 so 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 their 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 things with everyone having their own monitor yeah 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 uh get your own report and then go and then see how you get on just by using uh 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 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 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 from what i said 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 your 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 going to 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 yes i eat 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 just sort of 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 i mean you've got the you've got the you're looking at it just from one point of time because actually you might say well actually you know what about your metabolism at lunchtime 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'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 everything 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 problems so what what can we take from that i mean 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 bet 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 has 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 um triglyceride is whether those fats are gonna be hanging around your body all overnight uh causing inflammation giving your 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 to suddenly when you it's the 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 while ferrari eating porridge for breakfast oat oat and there was this huge myth that oats were amazingly good for cholesterol and your heart and particularly in the u.s 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 sugar levels really high um until i got to uh those steel-cut stuff that you had to 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 and i just wish i'd had you know eaten 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 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 porridge she was probably it was the real deal um i mean tim getting back to 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 uh given given how long we've already been chatting for but uh 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 chat sir um i wonder if you've got any insights on fish for people because there isn't 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 and i've been trying to force my son to eat fish all of his life and then give him fish capsules and which i only found years later it stuck onto 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 omega-3 fish oils don't pass muster when it comes to randomized trials so the fish oil extract which everyone thought was the important thing of fish doesn't uh reduce heart disease um 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 the japanese eating fish although they had lots of other things but a lot of people who were centenarians never at any fish in sardinia and greece they just get masses of goat and other things greasy other animals and the data really is pretty modest in terms of the the benefits of fish average trial shape you know five to eight percent reduction in mortality which given observational studies 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 for often pesticides antibiotics full of micro plastics 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 that they you know would also run out of produce so 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 the idea of these miracle foods is rubbish and it's just that's a really good example of a 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 i mean what about people who would say that fatty fish like let's say it's not farm like wild salmon uh for example contains you know high levels of omega-3 which we know are helpful for brain development and function i mean what would you say to people who who were sort of um you know who would sort of pose that query i'd say absolutely go for high quality occasional high quality fish when you can have it but don't reduce it to a few chemicals something like fish has hundreds of different chemicals in it 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 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 obviously saying yeah do eat fish but do it in a way that's environmentally aware go for the 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 um how you know we've said that red meat is bad fish is really good and of course the devil's in the detail high quality bits of both in small amounts i i believe are absolutely fine it really strikes me that what you're advocating [Music] using the very latest science it's actually a back to basics approach it's kind of saying eat food that's been around that's kind of been 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 uh 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 both for taste texture the planet but also for our gut microbes because there's this key formula which i do talk about in the book that 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 can 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 we'd have thousands of genes and 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 it's in a carrot and you know 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 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 tim and it's 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 frustrations 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 and that's 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 one thing i've noticed that you 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 i mean tricky question i know it is 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 put you know i do very well on this 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 i think is likely to cause long-term problems so by people who have gone you know whether it's high fat or 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 uh 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 ten 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 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'm 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 if 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 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 i've seen patients who actually thought they were intolerant to a food and actually what it appeared is that they were intolerant to actually eating in a stressed out state like not switching off and now i'd be interested as your research uh continues whether there'll be any work done and actually you know stress levels whilst eating 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 to show so so do let me know if you if you study that at some points 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 as well as sleep and exercise and fatigue and these levels they're all interrelated so i think we are going to start asking 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 realize how complex we all are yeah so look i could go on 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 very different one to our first one back on episode one uh you know all the way back um i would love to encourage people to pick up your book spoon fed why almost everything we've been told about food is wrong i think for anyone who's got even the remotest interest in this area i think they'll 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 bear to 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 in view of everything you've done with personalized nutrition in this book but also in the diet myth before that i'd love you to think about some really practical tips that people can think about now at 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 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 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 yeah love it and of course you'd encourage people to aim for that sort of 30 plants a week as well i'm pretty sure 30 plants a week diversity regular fermented foods and you know avoid ultra processed foods whenever you whenever you can the occasional binge is fine but just make sure it's not regular and and if you eat real good foods you shouldn't need vitamins or supplements that's the other really important message and you know as your and just uh you know realize that whatever you do it's going to be unique uh but just make it fun yeah tim i've really enjoyed our conversation today thank you for making the journey here and i look forward to round three at some point in the future been my pleasure press subscribe to get more inspiration and ideas on how to feel better so you can get more out of life and if you have a moment why not check out this conversation that i've picked out as a perfect follower remember lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better you live more

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 909,269

Keywords: feelbetterlivemore, drchatterjee, feelbetterin5, food, nutrition, eating, kings college, gut microbiome, health, processed food, junk food, calorie counting, artificial sweeteners, grazing, fasting, diet, personalised nutrition, diet agnostic

Id: xKZiI3XGmGI

Length: 117min 49sec (7069 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020