Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - Tim Spector: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Food Is Wrong #131

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

It’s a bold claim: that (almost) everything you’ve been told about food is wrong. But by the end of today’s conversation, I think you’ll be questioning what you previously thought was true and embarking on a new way of eating that’s right for you. My guest, Tim Spector, is a Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and Head of the Department of Twin Research at King’s College London. He’s a leading expert on the gut microbiome whose work has transformed what we know about nutrition and health. Tim’s latest work highlights how much we really don’t know about food. Aside from the consensus that plant foods are good for us, ultra-processed junk foods are not, there’s very little evidence or expert agreement on anything else. So there’s most definitely not a one-size-fits-all ‘correct’ way to eat. During our chat we cover calorie counting, artificial sweeteners, the dangers of ultra-processed foods and how poor science lets the food industry maintain that its products are healthy, simply because they’ve not been proven to be harmful. We discuss the benefits of fasting, and the perception that you need to graze all day. The diet industry perpetuates the myth that if we don’t have a snack to hand at all times, we’ll have an energy dip, lack focus and we might even faint! For most of us, it’s actually the reverse that’s true. With this in mind, we agree that nutrition should be at the heart of the curriculum in schools. Our children can cope at school without mid-morning and afternoon snacks. I share Tim’s passion that we should be teaching our children how to recognise real versus fake food with the same enthusiasm that we teach them to read and write. I find the concept of personalised nutrition hugely empowering. As Tim states in his most recent book, ‘You are very unlikely to be average’. I’ve seen it first-hand with my patients, many of whom respond completely differently to the same ways of eating. It’s why I describe my approach as ‘diet agnostic’ and, like Tim, I’d actively encourage you to start experimenting with what, how and when you eat. I hope this conversation inspires you to explore what makes you thrive.  Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/131 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.

The billion-dollar food companies that have been setting the agenda about research 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 element in the room. And they've had this vested interest in doing this. And that's why we're deluded into having ridiculous TV programs about calorie counting and the dangers of fats and this obsession on our labels,

which most people don't understand anyway, which detract, again, from the quality. Hi, my name is Rgan Chastji. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. Hello and welcome. How are you doing? As I record this intro, I'm sitting in my studio on a dark, cold night in November, and there is no question that the season has changed and that winter is on its way. But I hope today's podcast can brighten things up a little for you. The conversation today is all about food, and my guest makes a very bold claim in his latest book, Spoonfed, that almost everything you've been told about food is wrong.

He's none other than Professor Tim Spector, head of the Department of Twin Research at King's College London, medical doctor, and leading global expert in genetic epidemiology and the gut microbiome. In fact, Tim was my very first guest on this podcast about two and a half years ago, a long time ago, when actually the podcast format was quite different. It was a lot shorter. It was quite a different style. So if you want to go back and listen to a 30, 40 minute conversation where I talk to Tim about gut health, that will be episode number one. But in our chat today, that will be episode number one. But in our chat today, we go deep. We cover calorie counting, artificial sweeteners, the dangers of ultra-processed foods, and how poor science lets the food industry maintain that its products are healthy simply because they've not been proven

to be harmful. We discuss the benefits of fasting and the common perception that you need to graze all day. You see, the diet industry perpetuates the myth that if we don't have a snack to hand at all times, we'll have an energy dip, a lack of focus, and we might even faint. But for most of us, it's actually the reverse that's true. We talk about schools, and Tim and I share a passion that we absolutely should be teaching our children how to recognise real versus fake food with the same enthusiasm that we teach them to read and write.

Tim's latest work highlights how much we really don't know about foods. Aside from the consensus that plant foods are generally good for us, ultra processed junk foods are not, there's very little evidence or expert agreement on anything else. So there's most definitely not a one size fits all correct way to eat. I find the concept of personalized nutrition hugely empowering. As Tim states in his new book Spoonfed, you are very unlikely to be average. I've seen it firsthand with my patients, many of whom respond completely differently to the same way of eating. It's why I describe my approach as diet agnostic. And like Tim, I'd actively encourage you to start experimenting with what, how and when you eat.

By the end of our conversation, I think you'll be questioning a lot of what you previously thought to be true and hopefully will feel empowered to start experimenting to find a new way of eating that's right for you. And now, here's my conversation with the wonderful Professor Tim Spector. 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, yeah, so the cab driver genetics and uh yeah so the the cab driver and giving your address and getting closer said uh oh you rongan's dad then uh you know come to see him and uh yeah so wrong his brother maybe you know can't be look that old but um it's probably in concept she did have a face mask on i had a face mask on yes and you've got a fabulous tan at the moment i do have a yes a good a good tan and i've probably got some asian

genes as well so my kids had uh these uh asian birthmarks that you know they get from from genghis khan or whatever it was well we'll get to genetics uh the main reason for getting together today is you've written a fabulous book, Spoonfed, 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 subtitle is quite interesting, why almost everything we've been told about food is wrong. So what did you mean by that? 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 from my agent, the publisher, who always like an even punchier title, as you probably know. I know full well. So it took me a few weeks to get almost back in there. But yeah, so it turned out that the title came at the end of the book really. So once I'd finished it and I got my 23 myths, things about food we got wrong, that we came up with this title. But then 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 and just general, you know, peer pressure. 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, you know, I'm the only one who knows the answers. You know, everyone in nutrition is, you know, is wrong. Of course not. But it is hopefully highlighting the fact that most people agree that eating more plants and fruits and vegetables is a good thing. And that's core to most of the nutrition advice, and that's what people do agree on. But what people don't really understand is even professors of nutrition don't actually agree on professors of nutrition don't actually agree on things that 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 survey of 13 professors of nutrition, really academics who've been in the field 20 years in the US and UK, gave them 100 foods to rank, common foods. And we looked at their correlations. And basically, you'd expect to see a really good correlation between these scores. Because these weren't wackos. These were establishment figures, albeit 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 plants, eating fruits and veg, but all this huge area in the middle, like dairy, meat, lean meat versus fatty meat, diet drinks, butter v. margarine, no agreement really at all. And I think that's what I meant by the almost. 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 because, you know, after all, I'm an

academic. So 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 MyFoodPlate or whatever guidance, particularly in 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 is sort of trying to sum it up. And I did it in a way that I thought was spite-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 to start effecting a change, to start demanding that these things are taken notice of and we can 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 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? 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, you know, they're cheating on the biscuits. And if we eat less, 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 career, but they've all been based around the last 25, 30 years about 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. 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 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 basic ways of filling in questionnaires with pencil and paper.

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 grants. 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 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 that realizing, well, actually, identical twins usually die of different diseases. They get different cancers. They, you know, much more different in terms of health than people think, although they look very similar. They look, you know, and their expressions and whatever.

As humans, we over-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 get 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 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, their microbes were really

different. And so suddenly I had a reason to explore that. And once I really went into the gut microbiome as 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 that's so important, then this is how we can really study nutrition. 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 suddenly start to measure it all and quantify it in a way you couldn't do before. So it was a combination of 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 years in genetics. And you could also measure other things in food, so much of the chemicals. You could break food down, not into the three groups that we all know and hate, but into 26,000 different individual chemicals. And you can do that with 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, from going from a village fate type way of looking at cooking to this high molecular, big data, algorithms,

giant computing way 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 person personalization really coming from the uniqueness of our gut microbes no i think there's two people on the planet that have exactly the same gut microbiome. And yet, when we compare that to our DNA, we are 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. However much, you know, we spent bonding in camps together or whatever, we'd be very, still remain very unique, which means our response to the environment, our response, particularly 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. 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. We can start to do these big scale studies with these amazing 12,000 volunteers that 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. And for people who aren't familiar, perhaps you could sort of elaborate on what happens. Yeah, so around 10 years ago, I was doing some trekking up a mountain, doing some ski touring in Italy, high altitude stuff, 3,000 meters.

And the last day of the holiday, I wasn't feeling very well and got to the top of the mountain and then I felt a bit dizzy and was nearly falling down all the way down. And I got to the bottom and 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 from being completely normal to being hypertensive. And 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 mainly starchy vegetables and the classic, and you should have margarine and not butter. Were you overweight at the time? Slightly. I was about 84 kilos. I've managed to lose 10 kilos. So I'm now 74, 75 kilos. so I'm now 74, 75 kilos. I didn't feel, until I started thinking about it, my weight had been creeping up by about one kilo a year for the last 10 years. Hospital, canteen, lunches and things, and conferences and orange juice here and there. So that really was a turning point for me. And I think most people

have that at some point in their lives. You didn't worry about stretching until you had back pain at the age of 30. 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 to say if you don't do that you'll get x well unfortunately you know it's i need 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 sim 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-taught area and under-utilised 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. I know many doctors who were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes didn't really want to take the medication, thought, well, hold on a minute 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, particularly in doctors. I think that's a good observation. You know, as a wake-up call, and it's either that, as you 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, and they say, hang on a minute, what sort of crazy advice are they getting about that? And I was no different really, except that I got the wake-up call and 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 personalizing and realizing that everybody's different. Therefore, 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 gadgets, these wearables, these 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. And that moved me in a way further down this road for the last three years as I found out that I was pre-diabetic and that certain foods were pushing me over the limit quite regularly. And so having just gone from having a bit of hypertension and being overweight and this cardiac risk, suddenly I said, 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 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 when we come 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 cardiologist and the eye doctor. And nobody suggested diet would be of any use, except a consultant in hypertension who said, of course, you should always now give up salt,

which is about the only advice that they tend to give. So it was very standard stuff. And these people were experts in their field at teaching hospitals. But nobody said, go and experiment, try and do some different things. It just wasn't on the card. Basically, you use drugs to control these things. You had special glasses for the double vision. And yeah, at the time, nobody did the sort of checks to see if I had pre-diabetes, for example, because they didn't do those challenges. So that's why I said, well, you know, I can do a 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 general world of nutrition and about how we should be encouraging patients really 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.

So now I've sort of gone the other way. I want everyone to experiment with food and find out what works and not just accept that if I'd accepted what my colleagues had said, well, I would never go to a restaurant because that would give me too much salt and I'd never have an interesting meal ever again because life without salt is pretty horrendous. And it would only improve my blood pressure by one millimeter. So it's just putting everything into context. And that's 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 groups of people, the idea that there is this average person there who's going to benefit from all these things when actually the truth is we're all so different and 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 am very much diet agnostic in the sense that I support minimally processed food. I support eating, in adverse commas, real food as much as you can.

But I personally don't like to put myself in a camp anymore or a belief system 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 of 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 in 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 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. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health,

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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 in 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've been told off for writing these things in newspapers, I got some sort of vitriolic correspondence when I was talking about the diabetic diets and, you know, going on these liquid milkshake diets to cure your diabetes saying, well, listen, that's fine. But, you know, these 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 saying, you know, no, no, no, ours is the right way. You're wrong.

And that's because there's this huge sort of cognitive dissonance that people just saying, well, I've been doing this for 10 years. This is my life. This is what I do. And the whole academic scenario keeps going around that. They get more grants to do that. They can't be seen to, you know, be talking like us to say, well, clearly, if you look at the world, you know, there's a huge range of different diets in healthy places. These blue zones, they don't all eat the same thing. They don't make sense at all, other than in this idea that, you know, you find the food that suits you.

You know, there's a few certain rules like yeah not eat don't eat ready meals and junk food all the time um i think we'd be hard pressed to find any camp around nutrition who would disagree with that is there anyone who would disagree with that still 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 influencers who go around saying this stuff, saying you shouldn't blame companies that have extra chemicals in their food to make it taste good because it's important that it's low fat

and it hasn't been proven to be harmful. So there are people that do still project that in the same way that people were promoting low-tar cigarettes. It's not very different. You say, we haven't proven they're bad for you because the studies haven't been done. Just because it's got chemicals in it, we shouldn't knock it. And in a way, it's the same people knocking the 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 chemicals. But you won't find many

So I think, but you won't find many academics saying that. That's definitely true. But I think we do have to make this distinction. And that's why I want to keep coming back to it. There's almost everything. Vast amount of people do agree that eating plants is good and avoiding large amounts of regular ultra-processed food is bad. And outside that, I think 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 the other thing that's

been coming out of our studies is, you know, it's not just what you got on your plate. It's, you know, whether you break it into portions, what time of day, what you did the day before, how much sleep you got, you know, it's incredibly complex, 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 how others would do really badly 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, you know, that's the way everyone's done it for the last 50 years. I just want, you know, people to question all this stuff and start saying, well, what works for you? Because a lot of this dogma about we must do it this way, we must have, you know, it's like snacking. You know, why do we suddenly start snacking about 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? If we didn't, no. And, you know, you only 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 in their 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 article in the guardian a few years back um i think you know there was some book out about the french and i think it was something to do with why french kids don't misbehave or something something like that you know there's a

there's a punchy uh kind of probably misleading headline. Why French wives are always skinny or something like that. Yeah, exactly. 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 France as a culture, there's not much snacking or certainly French kids, actually you eat what you eat at mealtimes because after that mealtime, when the doors close on mealtime, you ain't getting anything else until the next mealtime. And I think actually the French are, there's something we can learn from the French, I think here in Britain. But in terms of foods, you just mentioned, and I very much agree with this 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 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, they don't do a rushed meal typically like we do. They won't have their, you know, let's say they've still got their healthy lunch, let's say. They're probably not going to be having that in front of their computer whilst answering their emails. And I know that to be the case, that it's still, because I 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 was pre-pandemic when it says that the sort of international culture of having food at your desk seems to be infiltrating. And I found found that's interesting so in terms of your research on personalized nutrition i wonder what are some of these non what's on your meal components what what what what has your research shown up is there any sort of insights you've got for us well our basic plan which we've been doing for 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 we haven't yet got into the details of snacking or not other than that we know that if you snack you will a couple of hours before a meal your metabolic response to that meal is poorer than if you didn't snack

okay just say that again because i think that's really important if you do snack before your meal your metabolic response is poorer at the next meal. Just for people who are listening who don't understand that, what do you mean by metabolic response? So what we're measuring is these peaks in your blood in three ways. One is your blood sugar level, which normally goes up about 30 minutes after you've eaten. And that is your blood sugar and your insulin level get a little surge, and that's normal after you've eaten. And that is your blood sugar and your insulin level. Get a little surge and that's normal after you eat. And we also measure your lipid levels. So triglycerides, one of the

commonest fats in blood, and they go up after a meal. And 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 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, large spikes, so that they're lasting longer or the fat is hanging around for a long time before it goes back to normal, long-term we'll have more metabolic problems, gain weight, and have increased hunger, lower energy. And that's what we're showing. So what we're trying to do is to match what people eat with these responses and how they

eat with these responses. And we're finding that so many things influence the height of that response, even with the identical food. So the timing of the day and whether you had something like a snack just before it, or you had a, for example, a high carb breakfast before the lunch will interfere with that second meal. So it's all connected is what I'm saying. So this is why, and it's not just the French, but the Italians, the Spanish, all the Mediterranean countries really don't snack at all like we do. They don't usually have a big breakfast. Many of them skip it.

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... And they don't eat in their cars. They don't eat in front of the telly. They sit down and have them. And they have more to eat, but they have less snacks. And I think this is probably where we've been going on. It's not just about calories. It's about the way we're eating and how that's changed in the last 30 years. I mean, obviously the quality of the food is also really important

because it is so much better in those Southern Mediterranean countries than what we're eating. But I think... Better in what sense, Tim? Less sort of ultra processed and highly processed foods what when we say better what do we mean by that sure yeah very right to pull me up on the no i'm just because uh you know the whole point of what

i'm writing about is that we shouldn't gauge quality of food by calories and fat level or even sugar level. It's about the natural products, things that resemble the actual plants they came from rather than some derivative put together as 20 chemicals. So people have different 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, it's not corn, it's the corn syrup or it's the extract of something. That's ultra-processed food that has nothing to do with the originals is poor quality food. In the UK, 50% of our meals are ultra processed by those definitions.

In the US, it's 60%. And in countries like Portugal and Europe, it's 10%. Wow. There you go. And it's not because Portuguese are rich. For those that don't know, it's just because they don't have a culture of eating this kind of uh cheap ready meal uh frozen foods that we've been overrun with and it's no surprise that in europe you know we are the fattest 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 get that. I've done that before with patients. But by and large, I'm not sure if we're going down the right road there. It's the massive, the billion-dollar food companies that have been setting the agenda about research have managed to avoid any decent studies comparing junk foods against normal foods.

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 more natural foods that have a proper food matrix and don't just get instantly dissolved as soon as they hit your stomach. had this vested interest in doing this. And that's why we're deluded into having ridiculous TV programs about calorie counting and the dangers of fats and this obsession on our labels, which most people don't understand anyway, which detract, again, from the quality. And only a few countries have got this, only a few countries. And, but, you know, there's some examples in the book, and I was quite, a few in South America, like Chile, have managed to take on the companies and the government and managed to get, instead of

a food 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 did we did with smoking cigarette packets it was no longer we used to have cowboys on them and glamorous women and various other things it's you know it's not different um it's the same way but this this is, you know, and it's all a smokescreen to cover up the fact that every year we're eating more and more ultra-processed junk food that has just got more and more chemicals to alter the mouthfeel so it makes up for the lack of natural stuff. And it's hurting our, by having it sort of, it doesn't lend itself to a good meal and so it lends itself to this

perpetually snacking grazing 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 these randomized group that was done by the NIH just over a year ago. And there's a clear difference in appetite and going back for more. If you give people buffets of both, they liked both foods equally. they were done to be highly appetizing but the processed food made people it didn't satisfy them they kept going one back for more so they ended up eating 30 percent more yeah that was kevin hall's 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 You'd think, you know, these are like drugs we take every day of our lives. If it was a medicine, every time there was a new 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. These guys say, okay, it's fine. And if you complain, 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 argument yeah i know i know and you take that with you know i have this particular thing 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 their view is, well, show us a study that proves it's dangerous.

I would say, well, you don't do that for drugs. You have to first prove it's not harmful. Yeah, show us 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 fizzy drinks with sugar or two cans of the diet equivalent. And you do that for six months 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 diet drink, except maybe for your dentist. Okay. So the dentist like it because definitely it's good for your teeth. And so just that fact alone, think about it. The average can will have maybe 150 calories, so people have two a day at least. That's 300 calories less. Why are these kids and these adults not losing some weight? It wouldn't be massive, but we're told that that would be about 15% of our intakes.

So if you believe the calories in, calories out, actually, they should lose weight. They don't. So clearly, in my view, something else is happening metabolically to these individuals. Either their brain is being reset by the sweetness chemicals, so it's at a neural level or something is happening metabolically and you are getting some change in insulin in ways we still don't understand. And I've put myself with monitors and given myself sucralose and I can see I do get a sugar peak and my insulin peak strangely with the sweetness, which I can't explain. Or more likely, it's affecting our gut microbes. And so they don't know how to deal with these chemicals,

which are all derived from things like petrol and paraffin, very ultra things that we're never supposed to eat. And so they produce weird chemicals in response. And those chemicals then have a reaction on our body, which interferes with metabolism and, in a way, either makes us put on some weight 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 I admit everyone is unique.

But I think the whole idea of reducing sugar by just adding unlimited amounts of these chemicals, which is one side effect of the sugar levy 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 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 sort of flavors that people crave, is going to have some other knock-on effects down the line that we don't know we should be treating teaching kids and you know adults how to go back to enjoying things that uh like water or like teas and 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 10 and 7 at the moment and it's amazing how many of their friends don't drink water they're allergic no you know it's kind of it's it's it's really sad actually on on a on a deep level because i think if you think about it in terms of our evolutionary heritage, we could never have survived if we didn't drink water, right? You know, 500 years ago, I don't think we had the choice to not drink water. Whereas now we have that choice and I suspect it's because it's been conditioned out of them via society, by certain choices that they've been

given. Because I just fundamentally cannot believe that a human being cannot drink water. 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 there have been, you know, a history of you go abroad and they say, well, don't drink the water. You know, what are you going to do?

It could be deadly. And that fueled this whole rise in mineral waters and this con that basically, you know, Pepsi and Coca-Cola and Nestle take tap water and they just stick it through a processing plant and re-bottle it minus any taste and do that. And then have to add some flavorings to it as they were doing for kids to add a twist of fake lime or orange to make it palatable. No, absolutely. I think it's really important we get kids' taste back, reset the thermostat away from the super sweetness that is the problem.

Because they can't then appreciate other foods because in a way everything's set so high yeah that they need it 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 years ago, you know, the taste of a ripe peach on a, you know, a nice, in the peak of summer, that would be like a treat. It would be, man, this is so gorgeous and sweet. Whereas I think if you're used to having things like Haribo's or, you know, every day, and that becomes your definition or your normal sweetness is a packet of sweets that of course the peach no longer holds the magical of yore that it used to and i think it's just been

this steady downgrading of our taste buds when did you have a last have a grape that was slightly tangy you know when i was a kid they were always a bit sour and, you know, there was the odd sweet one, but 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, 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 with the book,

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 line. 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 read it this morning.

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. Since going to school, particularly as they're getting older and older, obviously 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 if 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 part of the school timetable. There's morning snack time, afternoon

snack time, which of course we were mentioning before how snacking is a reasonably modern invention, certainly to the degree that we have it in this country. 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 absolutely true around this country and probably very prevalent in places like Australia and the US. And it has differed 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 whole idea, and it all comes to this idea that, you know, you have to give kids regular food, otherwise their blood sugar level drops and they can't concentrate and they run amok. And this idea was probably came about, it was a brilliant idea, probably for some marketing executive selling chocolate biscuits or 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 kids who ran

a mock and them not getting a snack at 10.30, right? They didn't get a chocolate fix or whatever. They didn't get their chocolate finger. And they did a correlation. They ran amok. Well, the fact that little Johnny ran amok was the sort of kid who would just forget to pick up his satchel or whatever or or, you know, had refused breakfast because he was, you know, a bit hyper. It was irrelevant because that became ingrained in pediatrics and in

school education that it was really important to keep maintaining sort of high sugar levels in school. And this is where the problems absolutely start. Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health.

And together, we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life. And I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour. I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've

been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision-making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits, and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal, and as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you.

One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three-question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through

in detail all of the questions within the three question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal, or click on the link in your podcast app. So 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 made it with Gareth last week about, you know, food in schools. And I personally believe in the current climate where one in three kids in the UK start secondary school overweight and obese.

And we know how much the environment influences our choices. You know, some would argue, are they even choices in a very obesogenic environment? I really struggle to make the case that schools should have vending machines anymore with fizzy drinks and with chocolate bars, with crisps. I can't see the case for an ice cream van in the middle of a big secondary school anymore. But I feel sometimes as though saying that, 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 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 many parents feel, 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 their energy level went down. Such is this dogma that if you don't have some carbs, your sugar level drops, your energy goes down. And what we've shown in our recent studies and 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 so what they're doing is they are giving their kid, 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 done these studies in adults, not in children, but 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 after they've had that sugar load. In our case, It's after they've had that sugar load.

In our case, it was muffins. But the point is exactly the same, that it is madness to think that this happens. And you only got to look, I mean, I was in Tanzania with this hunter-gatherer tribe. And I get asked this all the time, you know, 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, otherwise they couldn't make it through the day. Nobody ate anything before about 10, 10.30 and usually just waited until lunch. But the point was that these people, you know, they would go hunting.

They didn't need the equivalent of a chocolate biscuit to keep them going, otherwise they'd faint. Evolutions, you know, wouldn't do that. You know, it's madness. And so we've actually been poisoning ourselves with the exact opposite. But 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 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, et cetera, et cetera. If you subscribe to the view as I do, that schools should be the model educationally, behaviorally, but also nutritionally, then you just start to create that friction where, well, mummy and daddy are telling me one thing at home, but like at school, you know, yesterday my son said, you know, I said, guys, how was it? And, you know, at school, and then he goes, yeah, you know what my friends had today? They had pizza and chips for lunch. And we don't, you know know what's really tricky is that

i'm not saying that that is something that no one should ever eat right i get it but i actually feel that schools are taking away some of the parental choice and responsibility because why not let parents decide if and when they want to give their kids a bit of sugar or a cake or a dessert. I know what I'm saying is against the grain of what a lot of people now think, but I really do think schools need to take this seriously. No, I think they need to take responsibility because what they are doing is, for the rest of that kid's life, they're dictating what's normal. Exactly.

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, is that the rule is little Johnny has, you know, a car break at 10 o'clock and another one at 3 o'clock and 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 people. No, no.

There is no great expert that stands up there, you know. In England, we've got Jamie Oliver who tried to do this and got a lot of, you know, a lot of flack for trying 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 idea, I was brought up on this, that grazing was better than gorging. I talk about the book and yeah and it ended up this pathetic study of about you know 10 people uh done 30 years ago that um doesn't stand up to any scrutiny and yet this one study you know has had had ramifications because obviously this whole industry came around it and people felt you know what it's really

important to keep people um you know topped up and uh how are you going to top up these kids because otherwise they'll go crazy and so suddenly it was a guilt thing if you if you took it away and then they did something then the parents would blame them and then 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.

You know, some head teacher might be listening, say, you know what, I'm going to change this. Let's give it a go for a term, you know, and be unpopular, but give these kids something, something similar to what really is normal. Yeah. And what other kids in healthier countries are doing. But there were studies, Tim, that have shown, like I've seen numerous studies where they've shown that 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 them, but improve performance at school as well, which again, doesn't really surprise anyone if you understand the impact that nutrition can have all over the body. And I you know maybe someone will read your book maybe a head teacher will and go you know what yeah i'm going to do this for three for 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 next book 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 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 who are to 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, a change will start to happen. And I don't know if it will have an impact or not. Maybe we can talk about teaming up for that and 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 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 think, yeah, if we keep failing our kids, and, you know, a lot of the agenda in schools has been driven by the food companies, you know, this idea that you can have as much sugar as you like, as long as you go into the playground. Yeah, just complete nonsense. And it's all been funded by big food and drink companies to distract us from the rubbish and distract us from the idea that we're just feeding these kids rubbish food all the time.

They don't know what different vegetables are. And they're no wiser about how to cook or understand what natural ingredients are. 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, hardly anyone uses algebra. And yet for the 99% of people who never use it, they're told it. Well, you know, let's start changing some of the things that we do insist on curricula.

Yeah. And what we're talking about schools, you know, same goes in medical school. But, you know, in a way that's a whole other conversation. 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 sim because actually teachers will find actually that

their kids, because teachers probably go into education, I'm guessing most of them, because they enjoy imparting knowledge and wisdom 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 in lesson, 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. So, I actually think there are benefits. The same goes for workplaces. If they helped encourage, you know, no one wants to be out, you know, no one wants their employer to tell them what to eat, but there are ways to sort of

not make it easy to eat junk, right? I think that's where I come down on it a little bit. But Tim, right, you mentioned before, if we go back to your personalised nutrition studies. So I can't stop thinking about what you said before, that if you snack, or in some patients, if they snack before a meal, it changes their metabolic response to that meal so I wonder if we could just dive into that a little bit so let's say you're going to have your dinner at 6pm but at 4.30pm you have I don't know 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 uh insulin and glucose peak uh if they've snacked before they've snacked before so there'll be more stress on the body a higher insulin and glucose peak. If they've snacked before. If they've snacked before. So there'd be more stress on the body having snacked than if they hadn't eaten at all. It will depend on the time of day and other things like this because, again, it's not a simple black and white type relationship. But everything that you do before you have whatever it is you're eating

has a role in that response to that meal. And so for most people who have anything to eat before that time that will induce a sugar surge will cause an even bigger one in the subsequent meal. Okay, so 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 concentration problems and energy problems. So 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 having two decent meals a day rather than this standard six which we are now being told it is still the right way to eat

i want to buy that you know just happen to be this these these uh cheap snack foods you can buy that parents are told is good for their children. And it's just complete nonsense. We have to break that cycle, break it down again, and start people experimenting. And getting people used to, and kids particularly, 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 problem.

Yeah. And I think that the uncomfortable truth for many of us as parents is that our behavior can also condition our own kids, right? So what they see us doing, and if we've, let's say, picked up habits that maybe ideally we would change but we haven't yet our kids are around us and seeing it they're also going to pick up that as well and i think you know i say that as a reminder to myself just be careful how much you snack you know it's not it's not like looking down on anyone it's purely understanding that we're all susceptible um but these religious you know but i'm a big fan of you know fasting and 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 a 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're not going to die if you don't eat. And you just wait until the next day or when the sun goes down or whatever it is. And it's very sad that it's slowly being lost. And certainly in the Christianian world it's virtually lost and it's only the other other religions that do it but but bringing back you know some non-religious

fast day yeah for the whole family might be a fun thing that everyone should do you know that 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, you're right. This sort of feast famine type pattern that we've no doubt had in evolution. How can we bring that back? When you say you're a fan of fasting, what do you mean by fasting? Because if I don't clarify this, we'll get a ton of questions afterwards. What do you mean by fasting? Are you talking about intermittent fasting, time restrictions that he's saying, how many hours? You know, all those questions will come up. So I'd love to know what does Professor Tim Spector think of fasting?

Well, firstly, everything in moderation. So I'm not someone who believes in multiple day fasting. You know, I've never fasted for more than 24 hours, and I wouldn't recommend it. But 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 round it. So until I started doing it, I didn't believe that was sort of possible.

So I thought, I'm too weak. I'm not going to do that. But so just the principle of any fast is quite just a thing to do for your own psychological well-being, I think, to realize that we've got these chemicals in our brain and they're telling us to do this, but you can switch them off, you can divert them. 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 we're usually just distracted by that medical thing that we do it. And that's interesting that that's quite easy.

But when you do it voluntarily, it's somehow 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 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 to interfere with uh 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 have two days during the week, not consecutive, where you would have 25% of your normal calories. Or some people would have less, but it would be the idea that you'd really reduce it down, 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, which used up most of my allowance. And then the next day you could compensate, do whatever you liked really.

So it was, 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 calorie counting or doing anything like that. Now, like all things, it tends out to be not as amazing as we thought. But it did allow a lot of people to carry on doing it for years. And I do have people who have been doing it for years. And every now and again, they just say, okay, I'll just have a hungry day and do that. And to my mind, because they're not changing 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 an 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 food. But what is interesting at the moment is time-restricted feeding, which is a lot in the news at the moment, and has a lot of animal data supporting it, but so far hasn't lived up to expectations in the clinical trials, interestingly. So there have been a couple of trials recently

where it hasn't shown to be as dramatic as you would expect from the animal studies. And it could be that, again, this individuality, those trials always look at the averages. And it could be that some people would benefit from a different time scale. For some people, it isn't enough. Some people might be too much. And so, I would still advise everybody to give it a go. And particularly, this idea of whether you're a morning person or an evening person in our studies um when we gave identical muffins to people every uh three hours or every four hours across the day most people's um metabolic peaks these these stress peaks I was telling you about, got less during the day.

So yes, so no, the other way, they went up during the day. So three out of four people got worse during the day with the same food. One in four people actually got better. So, and I was one of them. So it suggests that for some people, eating later in the day will be better than eating early in the day. So some people are morning people. And like the dogma tells us, you metabolize better your carbohydrates in the morning, you break it down quicker, you get less of a sugar peak eating the identical food. And we compared lots of people doing this. But one in four people, it's the opposite. So some people are better off not having a large breakfast, also either skipping breakfast and

having a lunch and a big evening meal, like most people in the Mediterranean, those people will do better. So, again, it's all about self-experimentation. There isn't one size fits all. And there's many complicated bits go into food. 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, oh, mummy, 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 go well how trying to relay it to what I've seen with my patients go, 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 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 7 p.m., actually, you know what? That seems to work for me. Yeah, I know my best mate has breakfast at 7 a.m. and he seems to be thriving, but it's kind of just about, and I think there's something in society Tim there's something that

has really changed over the last 50 hundred 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 a doctor trying to encourage people to eat 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. Yeah, that's this cultural void, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world. Since the Second World War, we just haven't had 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 do it all. And that is passed on. And that still exists. Southern Mediterranean has it. Northern Europe doesn't have it. But every single kid in South Korea knows how to make a kimchi.

And they eat it two or three times a day. And 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 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 something you get attacked you know how do you feel individually actually as a as a very esteemed and respected doctor professor professor, researcher,

how does it feel for you individually when you get blasted on social media? Well, I realised that, A, I'm relatively protected because I'm a respected professor 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 relatively free of this. It was quite hard. I used to get quite upset about it. Now I think it's quite funny or I try and work out who they're working for or what their particular angle is. And once you see that, you realize, well, it's just like religious fundamentalism.

They're never going to be particularly happy. But I've been fairly lucky that I'm quite hard to attack 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 there are certain areas like, you know, I know I'll never win and vitamins is one of them. 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 I produced. Those people in their lifetimes will never, ever drop that particular belief. And that's it. It's a belief, right? And that's often what we're up against. Tim, you know, the personalized nutrition, and that's often what we're up against. Tim, you know, in the personalised nutrition,

as someone who's had probably more needles and tests done on them than possibly anyone on the planet maybe, what have you changed in the way you eat since doing some of this testing? Well, 10 years ago, I started changing really towards my gut um 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, et cetera, et cetera. And that's taught me about something.

I realized I got some things wrong. And it's changed my breakfast, for example. And I now have pretty much ditched the carb breakfast. And I try and skip breakfast a couple of times a week. Although I like breakfast, I feel slightly better without it. Although it's a conflicted, because I think quite like a really good breakfast. But if you're rushing it and you don't need it, I try and skip it. But I will go for the full-fat yogurt, the kefir.

I have fermented food every day now. If I don't, I feel sort of I'm lacking something. I feel guilty like a parent, you know, letting down their poor microbes. You've got starving my babies. They've got nothing to eat. So I have fat and nuts, maybe a small amount of fruit in the morning. And by lunchtime, I've sort of said, I'm either going to have a proper lunch or I'm not going to have one.

Right. And I feel if I'm working really hard, I don't often feel hungry enough. I absolutely have to stop and have lunch. And it's probably not good for me to carry on working, I must say. 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 an apple. And I found that by cutting out bread at lunchtimes, I didn't get the sugar dips and spikes that I was getting when I had my hospital, you know, tuna and sweet corn sandwich that always seemed to

be the same. And you get into a rut about having that. But when you see that effect on your blood sugar, it really puts you off. And so, and in the evening, you know, I really have whatever I like that's good and I don't really hold back. So I think the sugar monitor has really helped. 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 meal now uh it depends which country i'm in um so in spain you can't really eat before nine o'clock in the evening uh when a lot of people go into 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 not about 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 that is important.

So what I try and do is at least twice a week have a 14-hour fast until the next day yeah and i do feel better on that i've discovered that and i also try and exercise whether it's swimming or going for a run or cycling um uh 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 the bulk of your calories in the first half of the day seems to have a better impact on weight than actually if you have 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 quite a bit 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 for people who 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 uh 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 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 and say, okay, these are 20-year-old Americans or whatever.

Am I, you know, as 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, non-American in another country, is this really appropriate for me? You know, why don't they show a wider range of individuals, ages, you know, realize that it's far more complex than they're showing and that you need to do your own experiment in some way. And hopefully we will soon be able to do that, you know. With everyone having their own monitor? Yeah, I think so.

I mean, obviously, you know, the company I'm working with, Zoe, you know, launched a couple of weeks ago, the product 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, get your own report, and then see how you get on just by using an app that tells you what your scores are. And then you work out, 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, I think, that's personalized for us within five or 10 years.

Wow. I just think it's the only logical way to deal with a complex problem. Because I've just given you a little snapshot of how complicated these things are about just eating one meal. 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 do two weeks of that

and see does that work for you or not? I think that 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. I thought, oh, I'll get that in and then I'll play around 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 tracking device, which I think is certainly from what I can tell, one of the best ones out there. And what's really interesting for me me is that if I eat close to my bedtime, 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've played around with it. And that affects 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 9 9 30 I'm like you know what I'm not going to do it. 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 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, they 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 they may still not be eating for two hours before bed potentially. Yes. Yeah. They wouldn't go to bed straight after eating, no.

Yeah. So, and they wouldn't eat in the morning. they'd have a longer, because you got the, you're looking at it just from one point of time, whereas actually you might say, well, actually, you know, what about your metabolism at lunchtime, you know, after you've had that? I mean, it's all related. Yeah. What did you have the day before? And should you be exercising before or after meals?

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, triglycerides in the blood, and also, what was the other thing you're measuring? Inflammation. So you're measuring three things. Can you get a lot of that from just the blood sugar?

Because a lot of 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 two more parameters. So 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, knowing whether you

really have a problem with carbs, the sugar dips. 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, easiest way to get a good blood sugar reading is just to have fat. You just put butter and cream on everything, and it wipes out the sugar response. So everything that's just based on sugar has always got that flaw that you're never quite sure whether you're doing more harm or not, because you don't know what your six-hour triglyceride is, whether those fats are going to hang around your body all overnight, causing inflammation, giving you heart disease, all these kind of things.

So I think it is important to do both, but you can certainly get a lot of insights. And it's I think just psychologically really important to suddenly, it's the instantaneous bit of the sugar that on your phone phone you can actually see things going up when you thought something was healthy you know so i i changed while for a while to eating porridge for breakfast oat oat and there was this huge myth that oats were amazingly good for cholesterol and uh your heart and particularly in the u.s is massive campaign and you have all these varieties i tried about four or five different oats, and I felt really being healthy, but then I saw my sugar levels were really high

until I got to those steel-cut stuff that you had to sort of boil overnight and 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 monitor to my wife and we're having the same meal. And you see her quite happily tucking into bread and toast with no sugar rises at all. And me, you know, all over the place. So that those little insights will stay with you forever. Yeah. Much more than reading an article in a place. So those sort of little insights will stay with you forever, much more than reading an article in a paper.

So I think this personalized thing is a real way to elicit change. 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, 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 as you say, you can't get from the trial. And I know I remember reading that in the book about 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 oats. She was probably, it giving us instant porridge. It was probably, it was the real deal. I mean, Tim, getting back to the book, because, you know, I could talk to you for hours about all kinds of different things. The book really has got a beautiful structure. You really, I think it's very actionable. You take on various myths and you walk us through the science, you know, a bit of storytelling there, sort of really with a practical take home from that, which I really like.

Obviously, we're not going to go through all of them now, given how long we've already been chatting for, but there's a few things. I think one of the myths was that fish is always good for you. And I quite liked that chat, sir. I wonder if you've got any insights on fish for people. Because there is a feeling out there, isn't there, that fish is like a wonder food. 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, which I only found years later.

It stuck into the bottom of the, in a drawer in the kitchen to rot very carefully. And it turns out that 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 reduce heart disease, which is a shock to many people. And fish itself, it's another meat. People forget that fish is meat. It's just floating around in the water. And it's been given magical properties through maybe these blue zone areas and the Japanese eating fish, although they ate lots of other things. But a lot of the people who were centenarians never ate any fish in Sardinia and Greece.

They just ate masses of goat and other things, greasy other animals. And the data really is pretty modest in terms of the benefits of fish. Average trials show, you know, 5% to 8% 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 full of often pesticides, antibiotics, full of microplastics now. And if we did what we were told to is all have two to three portions of fish a day, fish would very quickly go extinct, or we'd be having to produce so much grain and soya to feed the fish farms that they would also run out of produce.

So I used to call myself pescatarian. I love fish, but it's massively overhyped. And I think we just need to stop the bullshit and realize that 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 sort of balancing message here. And the idea of these miracle foods is rubbish and it's just that's a really good example of a overhyped 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 fun 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 would of, you know, who would sort of pose that query? I'd say absolutely go for 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.

In Scandinavia, it has vitamin D, so it helps some people with vitamin D deficiency 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 that's 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 believe are absolutely fine. It really strikes me that what you're advocating using the very latest science is actually a back to basics approach. It's kind of saying, eat food that's been around for a long time, that's 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 going to eat more of that know i don't mean to reduce down 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 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 meat. There's no space for anything else. Or the obsessional vegan who just has three types of kale. Anyone 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,

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 to get your maximum diversity of gut microbes, which 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, 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 chemical factories.

Our microbes are chemical factories. You know, we've got 20,000 genes, 26,000 different chemicals in food. 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 in a carrot? And people often catching me out because I've got no clue about that, you know, because

I've got no interest in that. Because I'm interested in the fact that a carrot has 600 different chemicals. Yeah. And we don't know yet. Half of it. Even probably more than half of it. We do know that if we just took one of them and put it into a vitamin, made that in a factory in China and said this is carrot vitamin,

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 gut problem, this is a chest problem, this is a heart problem. And I get it, right? And I understand that there is merit in that. But actually, you sort of said something at the start of the conversation that a lot of your colleagues actually are stuck studying one area. And you have almost this kind of super generalist approach where one thing I've noticed is that you've pivoted quite a few times in your career with that sort of underlying theme

of what you stand for. You started with the twins and genetics, but you've managed to pivot and apply those principles to lots of different areas, which I find really, really fascinating. You mentioned some Tim, 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 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 they should. It's a 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've read your book, but I do very well on this. Yeah. So shut up, you know. 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've gone, you know, whether it's high fat or high meat, means they are excluding other stuff. And some of that stuff they might have got rid of, might have been very bad for them, you know,

lots of starchy carbs and things like this that didn't agree with them all i would say is long term if you deprive your your gut of fiber all the studies show and you know one of the experiments was on my son who took mcdonald's only for 10 days and took three years to recover um you're a proper scientist you know what i mean you can't get the funding just put your son took McDonald's only for 10 days and took three years to recover. You're a proper scientist, you know what I mean? If you can't get the funding, just put your son on a McDonald's diet. Everyone should use their children. I think that's the message here.

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 the 70% fat that, you know, the keto diet thing, you know, I absolutely do believe it works for some people. But I do think there has to be that short-term balance of improving those 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. Once you've got over your pain and your initial problem, you need to be... And this can be just by eating lots of seeds. It can be eating a lot of herbs. It can be eating nuts. 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 are the 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 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 i sort of i feel also that it's not just food actually so let's say someone is crippled with pain and in 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 the way people feel after certain foods. You know, 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 I'd be interested as your research uh continues whether

there'll be any work done on 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 uh to show so so do let me know if you if you study that at some point well yes it's adding the stressometer to the uh to the recordings but 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 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 ten hundred thousand people fairly quickly and then we can answer these yeah more subtle questions wow uh 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 we'll realize how complex we all are yeah tim 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 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. 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 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 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 fascinated about food and enjoy it because it's an 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. 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 tank of gut microbes, they can produce chemicals to make you feel happy and relaxed and try and find 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 the most important thing. So people shouldn't be stressed out about this. That's the most important thing. So people shouldn't be stressed out about this. They should really take it as a positive challenge to try and improve themselves by understanding more about food and teaching everyone else about it.

And I think we've all got so much to learn. And it's such an exciting era 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 uh regular fermented foods um 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 if you eat real good foods,

you shouldn't need vitamins or supplements. That's the other really important message. And just realize that whatever you do, it's going to be unique, 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 be my pleasure that concludes today's conversation what did you think me, what I loved is the underlying theme that we are

all unique. What works for me may be different from what works for you. And with that, I think comes empowerment. You see, experimenting to find the right approach for you is something that is completely aligned with my view on health. And this experimentation can actually be helpful with all aspects of health and not just nutrition. In my brand new book, Feel Great, Lose Weight, which comes out in just a few weeks, I help you to discover the right way of eating for you. I also cover in detail the reasons behind why we make the food choices that we do. Are we eating to fill a hole in our we do. Are we eating to fill a hole in our stomachs or are we eating to fill a hole in our hearts? You see, I think my new book

will really help shine a light on areas that are often not considered when we try to improve our health. And the reality is that it will be helpful for all of us, whether we're trying to lose excess weight or not. I can't wait for the book to come out. And if you want to get hold of a copy, it's available to pre-order now in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in paperback, ebook, and as an audiobook, which I am narrating. Now, to see all the links, you can visit the show notes page for this episode on my website and you will also see links to Tim's brilliant new book Spoonfed and other interesting media

articles about Tim's work. Of course, please do let Tim and I know what you thought of our conversation today on social media. And if you get a second, please take a moment to review the show on your podcast platform and share with the people in your life who you think would really benefit. I think that's so important. If you've had value from this conversation, why not share that value with friends, family, and work colleagues? Don't forget this episode, like all of them, is available to watch in high definition on YouTube if your friends and family prefer videos as opposed to audio podcasts. A big thank you to my wife, Vedanta Chatterjee, for producing this week's podcast and to Richard Hughes for audio engineering. Have a wonderful week. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time with my latest

conversation. Remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it.