Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | The New Science of Eating Well | Professor Tim Spector #419

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Today’s guest rarely eats bananas these days and he treats a glass of fruit juice as he would a can of cola since discovering his own, personal metabolic response to them. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 350 of the podcast with award-winning scientist, professor of genetics and world-leading expert on the gut microbiome, Professor Tim Spector. In this clip Tim shares why he’s changed his mind on some of the health benefits of certain foods and the concept that food can be medicine. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/350 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

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10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 350 of the podcast with award-winning scientist Professor Tim Spector. In this clip, Tim shares why he's changed his mind on some of the health benefits of certain foods and the concept that food can be medicine. You've been researching, exploring, exploring studying writing about nutrition to me at least for a good decade now and i thought what would be interesting is to

start by talking about where you've changed your mind perhaps some foods that you previously thought were healthy and were going to help you with your short-term and your long-term health, but you've now realized that's not the case. Well, there's plenty of them, because I sort of came into this when I first started, yeah, over a decade ago with a fairly open mind. Well, I'd say that, but in retrospect, it was the sort of traditional medical mind, which is what we've been spoon fed. As I've dug deeper and deeper into this,

obviously new things are coming up all the time and, you know, the evidence is changing. And I think that's what's really exciting about nutrition is that it's not standing still. It is changing. And we need to treat it much more like a science than a religion. Bananas, I believe, is something you've changed your mind on. Bananas. Yeah. They were my go-to fruit. So I think they're the number one fruit people eat for the US and the UK. And it was pretty much my go-to fruit every day. And I thought it was always going to be healthy for me and really good. And by doing my research into bananas in great detail for the book, I've discovered that maybe not so great to have it every day. Still, you know, all of these things you can have every now and again, no problem.

But for me, it was because of personalization, actually, that I discovered that bananas for me were actually something I shouldn't be having every day because they gave me sugar spikes. They're fine occasionally, but for me, they were not something I should be having. And since I've discovered what my scores are, I know that they don't have as much fiber, they're not as good for your gut microbes, and they do have this ready available sugar in them. I'm much better off having other fruits instead. So I just get apples and pears. It was this individual journey of my poor health and then testing myself that suddenly got this insight

that everyone responds differently. And we come back to that sort of classic, the Zoe Predict study that showed, you know, given the same food, everyone responds 10 to 20 fold differently to an identical food in terms of sugar and fat peaks. So the realization that what could be a reasonable healthy food for some people might not be as good for others has been a slowly evolving idea, I think. But the other point is that we shouldn't get too obsessed with one food yeah

and i think i don't want anyone listening to get the idea that you know they have to ban bananas if they have a low sugar control like myself um we should be eating any proper food and you know but it means we don't necessarily have it every day, or that we have it with other things that are much more important. So it's this holistic view of food. So it's very hard to take one food out of this context of when people, you know, are sort of changing their habits, not only, you know, what they eat, but when they eat. And it's all part of this whole picture. And I've just found I don't snack nearly as much now as I used to, because I was being driven to that, as we now know from

our research, that either having ultra-processed foods or high sugary foods, for some people, just makes them hungrier three hours later, they will overeat and they'll be seeking other similar foods to keep it going so once you break that cycle you definitely don't you're not as hungry and your mental state is much flatter and now you're remembering i mean i remember at work in the hospital um i went and got my sandwiches which which I thought were healthy, came back with my Tropicana or whatever. I did struggle with the afternoon with concentration and tiredness. And I don't get that anymore. That whole idea of I needed three coffees to get me through the afternoon is no longer the same just because of the changes I've made to my diet. And I think that's really

revealing. Yeah. I think a lot of people still don't realize that often, not always, often their hunger or certain behaviors they engage in, let's say, I need coffee or tea in the afternoon to get me through, is a response. It's a symptom. And we're not addressing the root cause. It's like, no, I get a dip at 3 p.m. I need coffee at 3 p.m. Okay, maybe you do, maybe you don't. Maybe it's because of your breakfast choice or your lunch choice. And I think once people, if they choose to consume breakfast, let's put it this way, once people change the first meal of their day, it is pretty remarkable what can happen. If you have a meal with a stable blood sugar, it is remarkable how many compensatory behaviors you

no longer engage in because you don't want to. You have used the CGM, continuous glucose monitor, to help you understand what certain foods are doing for you. I, like you, think they can be very, very helpful tools if used responsibly. And if given with good education and a good, you know, help people understand what it actually means. But what interests me is how we can use trackers like a CGM to help us be more in touch with our own bodies. For example, when I eat a food like this, let's say a banana, and I have a big sugar spike and then a sugar crash two to three hours later, I feel hungry again. I feel a bit jittery. I feel a bit of brain fog. Oh, when I stop doing that and I'm having an apple instead, let's say, I don't have that drop two and a half hours later.

For people who are coming to this for the first time, Tim, why is what's happening to our blood sugar day-to-day important? Everyone has blood sugar peaks. This is part of our natural physiology Everyone has blood sugar peaks. This is part of our natural physiology, and we've evolved to have them. Sugar goes up, it goes into the bloodstream, and gets absorbed if we need it, and then insulin is released to bring those levels back down because too much sugar, if it hangs around too long, is not good for our body. And what we see, in some people are susceptible is very high sugar peaks, which if you have them regularly, will predispose you firstly to

type 2 diabetes. There's increasing evidence that is the case. That's not really new. What is new is the fact that these sugar spikes um you know if they are prolonged then you get inflammation related to it so it means that the body is under stress and that all the cells in the body are sort of pressurized they're not happy and just because that environment for them is causing them distress and so if you've got distressed cells in your body long term, because you are every two hours getting a sugar spike, then over years, that's going to cause considerable harm. You mentioned the hospital sandwich and Tropicana. I remember, Tim, as a junior doctor, I'd go to the Sainsbury's in Edinburgh and I'd buy Tropicana because, you know, I was earning money. I could afford this freshly squeezed,

this is what the packet said, orange juice. And I'd have that in my fridge and I'd have it with breakfast. I'd have it after work because I thought it was healthy. This is a long time ago now. We all did, yeah. We all did. So talk to me about fruit juice. What have you changed your mind on that? Well, they're not healthy. There's virtually no fruit juice that is healthy. We're not deprived of vitamin C.

We've just been misled by all the marketing that this is the same as eating oranges. And there's no doubt oranges are healthy, but you wouldn't eat 10 oranges in one go and just use the liquid from it rather than all the fiber and the other good bits. So I think when you compare it and you do these studies with CGMs, you'll find that drinking a glass of orange juice is actually, for me, it's slightly worse than drinking a Coca-Cola or a Pepsi. In terms of what?

The blood sugar peak. Drinking one glass of orange juice is not going to be bad for you. It's having these things as a regular consumption, but also with the fact that it's promoted as a health drink and promoted to kids as a health drink. And it really should come with a health warning, not on the health shelf. So it's the idea of these regular sugar spikes causing stress to the body, these regular sugar spikes causing stress to the body, inflammation, type 2 diabetes, and all the epidemiology studies show that it is related to heart disease. And there's even some suggesting that it might increase your risk of cancers. So I think that's one reason that we shouldn't be

having orange juice because we've been sold it as a health food that gives us vitamin C and it gives us all these marvelous nutrients you have in an orange because it's very different. Most of the orange juice we're drinking is at least two years old, even though it's sort of portrayed as fresh because it's been sitting in some vat in Florida or Brazil in taste of nothing. And they add in these taste packets that are these chemicals that give it back the orange taste that they took away so it doesn't go off. It's ultra-processed food. And what I object to is the fact that it's sold as health food and generally regarded that way. That's much worse. I'd much rather people actually drank Coca-Cola because it's pretty obvious that's not good for you.

That is a treat, but nothing says it's great for you and your teeth. Whereas orange juice is, in my view, just as bad. In terms of your 20 tips, Tim, I really like this one. In fact, I've got it underlined. Tip number 16. Understand that food is medicine, and the right diets can be as effective as many drugs. Yes, and I've changed my mind on this.

Certainly, you know, since I was a practicing doctor where, you know, we dismissed nutrition as being pretty trivial compared to our powerful drugs that we all love to prescribe. compared to our powerful drugs that we all love to prescribe. I think the field of cancer has really opened my eyes to this about the power of nutrition. But just epidemiologically, calculations have said that if we move the UK from its current diet to an optimum diet, we would reduce chronic illness, chronic diseases by about 70%.

70%. So this is extrapolating from, you know, you take the health, the sort of healthiest quartile of the population, the worst quartile, and you move the average down to the best one. There's not many medicines that would have that effect at this population level. Of course, these are models and you can criticize those. But the other thing that makes me really believe this

is our work in cancer. And I was running a consortium between a Dutch group and our group in the UK on melanoma, people who had metastatic melanoma, who in the past, you know, had very poor prognosis and outcome. But now there's new immunotherapy drugs that, you know, suddenly save lives. So they're suddenly getting a third or more of people surviving forever. It's very dramatic. And rates are getting higher all the time.

Now, we looked at effective diet on the baseline and the microbiome, and it nearly doubled the success rate of the drug just by being on the right diet and having the right gut microbes at the beginning of that study. So you suddenly start thinking, wow, in a way, it's acting just like a drug, this food. And if we just knew and if it had the same backing as pharmaceutical products, we could do so much with it.

And there's lots of data also about using things like mushrooms as adjuvants for chemotherapy yeah where they increase survival rates by 20 so we're getting all this really good science now building up to show the key importance of what's what foods we eat what's how that affects our gut microbes this huge effect on our immune systems and that's why you know when we take these artificial sweeteners there's a new study out last week saying erythritol which is one of these sugar alcohols, has really big effects on immune cells and could be used either for good or bad. In terms of autoimmune disease, it could save people

or it has other effects. So I think once you devolve food to its chemical form and we take it more seriously, rather than as calories and macronutrients, it becomes just like pharmaceutical products and very little difference. Artificial sweeteners, what are they? They're chemicals made from the petrochemical industry.

So they can be good or bad. So the same, we can visualize that. We don't see food in the same way. But once you start to do that, it makes sense that food definitely is medicine. You know, every time you go to the supermarket, all you see is reduced calories, only 400 calories, only this. And so for most people in this country, where we lack a food culture, that's the number one thing that most people have been bombarded with. Oh, I can't have that. I should have this. Eat this. And it's a total distraction from the quality of the food. And we now know that you give people two meals of identical calories but completely different quality and makeup and

macronutrients, it'll have a completely different effect on your body. The quality of the food is far more important. If you eat good quality food, it doesn't make you as hungry. It changes when you next eat your meal. I think people do realize it, particularly if you look after your gut microbiome, all those immune benefits start to build up and have this great impact and reduce problems of aging and help protect you against cancer, help you deal with adverse problems in life. life and i think we've just got to get this across the more people that do understand these these key things about calories and ultra processed food the better and that's the way we can change the world and that's you know what i want to do hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip i hope you have a wonderful weekend and i'll be back next week with my long-form conversational wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.