Just As Well, The Women's Health Podcast - How to Lose Weight and Eat Well Your Way, with Prof Tim Spector

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

Welcome back! We hope you enjoyed the Christmas break, in whatever shape yours took this year. Hopefully there was plenty of resting and you’re feeling ready to support yourself - in mind and body - through what looks set to be a few more challenging months*. We thought we’d kick off the year talking about food and, specifically, why in 2021 it might be worth ripping up the healthy eating rulebook. That’s according to Professor Tim Spector OBE, a genetic epidemiologist at King’s College London, co-founder of personalised nutrition app ZOE and author of Spoon Fed: Why Everything We’ve Been Told about Food is Wrong. As that book title would suggest, Professor Spector has a reputation for being one of the most formidable myth busters in the world of nutritional science and he certainly lives up to his rep in today’s conversation. He argues against placing too much emphasis on counting calories and he’s not a fan of counting macros either: he thinks both are a bit boring, reductive and unlikely to help you achieve your health goals in any meaningful or lasting way. Professor Spector believes letting go of tired dietary rules, replacing them with a few core principles, and then - on the specifics - working out what works for your body should be your new M.O. Eat for yourself, he argues, and you'll experience fewer energy crashes and be able to reach a healthy, sustainable weight (if that's a goal for you this year) without excess restriction, calorie cutting or unnecessary misery. While Professor Tim's reasoning and evidence may be highly scientific, his solutions are pretty simple: in essence ‘don’t count your foods, change your mindset’. Sounds good, right?  Follow Professor Tim Spector on Twitter: twitter.com/timspector Follow Roisín Dervish-O'Kane on Instagram: @roisin.dervishokane Follow Women's Health on Instagram: @womenshealthuk Topics:  Why nutrition science has been oversimplified Why you should make 30-plants-a-day your nutrition target The case for being playful with your diet How calories can be useful - and really not  The benefits of experimenting with meal timing *Please note: we recorded this episode before the latest national lockdown - stay home and stay safe, everyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Way better. Save on insurance by switching to Bel Air Direct and use the money to fix your car. Bell Air Direct, insurance, simplified. Conditions apply. Hello, you are listening to Going for Goal, the weekly Women's Health podcast. I'm your host, Rochene Deverscher Kane,

and this is your weekly chance to plug in and be inspired to work on your health and wellness. So, welcome back. It's January, it's 2021, we hope you enjoyed the Christmas break in whatever shape yours took this year. Hopefully there was plenty of resting and feasting and fun and you're ready to take on what the next 12 months have in store. We thought with kick off the year talking about food and specifically why in 2021 it might be worth ripping up the healthy eating rule book. That's according to Professor Tim Specter MBE, a genetic epidemiologist at King's College London, an author of Spoonfed, why everything we've been told about food is wrong.

As the title of the book might suggest, Professor Specter has a reputation for being one of the most formidable myth-busters in the world of nutritional science, and he certainly lives up to his rep in today's conversation. Professor Spector argues against placing too much emphasis on counting calories, and he's not really a fan of counting macros, you know, fats, proteins, carbs, either. He thinks that's a bit boring, a bit reductive, and it's unlikely to help you reach your health goals.

What he is a fan of is personalised nutrition, and as co-founder of health science company Zoe, he's helped create a revolutionary new app that uses artificial intelligence to create a personalised eating plan for users based on their unique gut microbes and dietary inflammation, which will soon be available in the UK. But while he's working on the tech that can, as he puts it, help us match foods to our biology,

He believes that we can actually all practice the principles of personalised nutrition right now by letting go of tired dietary rules, replacing them with a few core principles, and then, on the specifics, working out what works for you, by listening to what your own body tells you. Eat for yourself, and you will, as he puts it, have fewer energy crashes and spikes, less inflammation, and if weight loss is a goal for you this January and beyond, help you reach a healthy, sustainable weight without excess restriction, calorie cutting,

or unnecessary misery. Professor Spector's reasoning and evidence may be highly scientific, but his solutions are actually pretty simple. In essence, don't count your foods, change your mindset. Sounds good, right? Let's get into it. Professor Tim Spector, hello. Welcome to Going for Goal. Hello there. Great to have you on. So it's been, you're just saying before we started recording how busy you've been, and it has been a big 12 months for epidemiology. And I feel like you have barely been off our screen and airwaves talking about the COVID symptom study app. And so I hope it's somewhat of a pleasant reprieve to be chatting about something non-COVIDy today. Yes, a bit of light relief.

Yeah. Do nicely. Absolutely. So today we're going to be talking about the science of nutrition and how people can tap into it to realize their goals this January. But before we get into that, you've had. had such a fascinating career in science and health research. Can you briefly talk us through the work you do as an epidemiologist? And the moment you realise just how fundamental a role food and nutrition play in our health? Sure. Well, I've had a varied career over the last

30-odd years. So I trained as a doctor and as a rheumatologist and a consultant rheumatologist dealing with aches and pains, joints and bones. And I was always interested in research and epidemiology at an early stage, but there wasn't much of a career in it at that time. So that's why I went back into clinical medicine and then set up about 25 years ago the twin registry at St. Thomas's Hospital. And that's the largest register of twins in the UK. And we have about 14,000 of them. And they kept me very happy for many years playing with them as they're a perfect natural experiment. They're amazing people who volunteer all bits of their body for science. And I got increasingly involved in the role of food and nutritioners.

I discover that even identical twins often ended up with different diseases. One would get cancer, the other would, one would be depressed, the other wouldn't, one would get fat, the other would stay skinny. And so you realize that although I also am trained as a geneticist, genes weren't everything. So there must be something else going on. Was it their diet? Was it something else? And then I came across about 10 years ago this new magical field of gut health and the microbes. And really from that moment on and realizing that identical twins were very different in their microbes,

suddenly opened up this whole idea that. many of our diseases and problems related to our nutrition and the interaction with our gut microbes. And so that was very much an aha moment in my life when I moved away from genetics being the all-dominant thing that we were grown up to believe in, to thinking actually food is a very underrated treatment. And the new science of the microbes suddenly made it very much exciting and suddenly possible to really test it in a, in a modern way. Yeah. And that's come on so far, hasn't it?

Because I know from, well, I think when I first started my career in health journalism, that's about eight, nine years ago, I think it was just awareness was kind of creeping up. And now, and then it was kind of on the edges and a bit woo-woo-wee for a while. And then now it's so gut health and the awareness that we have of how our microbes impact everything. It's so, it's pretty much mainstream now, isn't it? It's amazing. I think it is. You know, 10 years ago, all people knew that it was something you'd be.

put, it was in yoghurt and advertised as, you know, helping your, a few gut problems. But that was it. And so now we think we realize that it's, it's essentially a new organ in our body, just like we've discovered the liver or the spleen or the kidney. It's now realizing, you know, it's the same size as our brain in terms of weight. And it's probably literally as important. So, realizing this connection between our food, our microbes and our health, those three things together mean that everybody now can be their own pharmacist and give the microbes the right food and improve their health. So I think we suddenly realize how crucial this new organ, this collection of microbes is to us. It's so vital for our immune systems. It's vital for our mental state

and it's vital for our metabolism and our control of appetite and weight. And many other things too, probably, you know, things like cancer and heart disease. So, yeah, it's a fantastic time to be studying it because suddenly we've got the tools to be able to do it, which we just didn't have before. Yeah, absolutely. And there we're talking about one area of science that you're so excited about, and you think there's a lot of good research. but I want to kind of talk to the other side

because you've got a bit of a reputation for being one of the most formidable myth busters within the world of dietary science and your latest book Spoonfed basically kind of flips the script on so much of what we believe to be true about healthy eating. So what inspired you to write it?

I think realizing that so much that I'd been taught and I'd been telling patients was wrong and realizing that this field hasn't really shifted much in its young history of about 50 years nutrition. And it's still teaching things that are very outdated, that haven't been, had the same scrutiny as in other areas of science. And that also there were many other external factors that made that possible. So lack of funding for do proper studies and the enormous influence of the food industry

on what we were led to believe as true or not. And that really sort of got me angry and the more I read about it than when I realized that these things are actually based on nothing other than continued promotion. And so the fact that these myths are many of them related to selling us more highly processed unhealthy foods. And it was something that I thought really important that someone at my stage in my career who was difficult to sack. can get away with, with someone younger criticizing their bosses or taking on the industry or, you know, a lot of these vested interests would have more trouble with. So I thought, if I can't do it, then, you know, no one else can. And I also, I mean, there was a personal interest as well. I mean, I, you know, as in all these stories, I got sick about 10 years ago,

developed high blood pressure, had a mini stroke and wanted to do that. I wanted to be a personal interest. and wanted to change my diet, lose weight. And so this is also a journey of discovery for me as I started from a fairly low base of knowledge, despite having written 50 papers on obesity and diet, still knew very little generally about what was going on, like most doctors. It's this voyage of discovery as I got more and more into it

and worked my way through it. And to selfishly improve my own health as well, as trying to help others. And there's so much in it. It's really, and there's so, I think it's clever the way, the way the book goes through and you kind of almost tackle, you tackle all these bits of received wisdom that we've picked up over the years. And there's so much to cover.

But I think when people analyze their nutrition habits and that's what people will be doing right now, January, you can often kind of break it down into a few areas. So you've got the actual foods that they're consuming, but then also the amount, so like portion sizes and how much we think we need, and then there's when, so the frequency of meals we eat. And given there is so much in your book, I'd like to go through each area one by one so you can tell me what we're getting wrong and maybe what people should be doing instead.

So big ask, but let's start with the actual food, so the nutrients that people are eating. what are some key pieces of received wisdom that should be consigned to the bin? Really, that you can reduce food down to such a simplistic idea of fats, carbs and protein and then finished off with this idea that calories are it. And we've essentially shown that what's on the label really doesn't help you very much at all in most cases and it detracts from the quality of the food. So we've been blindfolded really by the industry, these fancy labels, fancy ingredients to avoid things with fat on it, actually very healthy, and pick these low-fat, highly processed foods

that are very unhealthy and tricked into thinking that something's got reduced sugar because it's got some other chemical in it, etc. And this is just all making us dumber in terms of recognising good quality food from bad quality food. And food is so complex. It's not just these four items. It's 30,000 different chemicals at least, all interacting with the millions of microbial chemicals. It's one of the most complex sciences that's been dumbed down to easily digestible to sell us rubbish. Interesting. So we should be thinking, even though, and again, in the health and fitness space, something that people think about quite a lot is macros and thinking about their ratios to fats and

carbs and protein. It's missing the point. Each of these things, whether it's fat or carbs, have good and bad fats and carbs, but also in the context of how you're eating it. So, you know, there's lots of saturated fat in many foods. And you take olive oil, for example, has lots of saturated of fat in it, but it's probably one of the healthiest things you can eat or drink. And there are many other examples like that. So it's stopping people think about the food as a whole and reducing it to these simple ingredients, whereas other countries aren't as easily obsessed with these macronutrients as we are because they have a strong food culture.

So they've been told by their grandmother that this stuff is good, this other stuff in a packet that you have to microwave is not good. And this is how you make the good stuff. And so people just instinctively know they're not going to be fooled as easily as we've been in the last 25 years. So when we're talking about someone's personal response to food, I know you've done lots of work on into this idea of personalised nutrition. The book I wrote before Spoonfed Diet Myth really focused on how you can eat to improve your gut microbes. And that's something everyone can do. There's a generic advice that is unlikely to be wrong, unlikely to be harmful, everyone's going to benefit. And that gets you a certain bit of the

way. But what we've discovered recently is that if you give people identical foods, they will respond very differently. And we did, we've just finished the first part of a huge series of study is called PREDICT, which we've been doing for the last three and a half years with this company called Zoe, who have taken thousands of people and we did, there were about 800 twins we've done so far, gave them identical meals and looked at their responses in their blood and their body about what was going on. And it turns out there's about an eightfold difference in how you respond to an identical muffin in normal people. We're not talking about disease people, which is just selected normal UK and US populations. So what we're realizing is that even identical twins

give an identical meal respond differently. Some will respond more to fats, some more to carbs. So once you get your head round this idea, it's a sort of wow. That means that, you know, what works for my best friend next door's cabbage diet may not work for me. The keto diet may be completely the wrong thing for me or it might be perfect. And suddenly this whole other area of nutrition opens up where we don't have to be led by, you know, whatever it is, weight watches or this strict idea of you must eat this. And if you eat this, you'll instantly lose weight. otherwise you're a failure, actually we are all totally different. And whether, you know,

you're eating fruit, how you react to a banana or an apple will vary. And so all these studies have come together now. And with the company Zoe in the US, we've had this product in the market for several months now. People can actually do the test themselves at home and get an algorithm that appears on their app as a score for each food, which means that some people will score very highly for eating some particular food, be fine eating bagels or croissants and others will have really bad scores for that and be told you can only have that occasionally. But what we are finding is that everyone is different.

Virtually nobody in our tests has had exactly the same blood results on having the identical food. So I think this is really the future that we're going to go down is that people will follow the basic rules, as I've said, which I think make absolute sense when you think of the best way to nourish yourself is to nourish your gut microbes and we can come on to what those factors are. But this new era of personalisation will really tell people whether you're someone who should be starting breakfast with a carb meal or a fatty meal or maybe nothing at all. All these three options will vary by person, depending on whether they're a morning person, evening person, how much fat stays in their body afterwards, etc., etc. So this

personalisation is absolutely fascinating and it is definitely where, you know, we're at the cutting edge of it because we've got these amazing apps. We've got these incredible microbiome tests now that can sequence every bug in your body. And I didn't mention that the algorithm not only looks at your response to sugars and fats, but also tells you how it scores for your gut health as well. So you've got these three things together, which allow an overall score. So in future, this is how we're going to be eating.

And the idea is not to restrict people eating anything. And it's just actually, once you've got an app that shows you all these different foods, it might actually open up your eyes when you go to a certain. supermarket or whatever and actually pick different things because one thing that links all of this together is actually the concept of food diversity, particularly plant diversity. Every study coming out now, including our own, shows that if you can get 30 plants a week, different types of plant, not 30 kale smoothies, but 30 different plants, you'll maximize your gut microbes. And in general, you know, those things will be healthy for you. Some might be

more healthier than others, but these are the general rules. Diversity is the key to this. And there isn't really anything you can never eat. If you want to go and get a burger and a occasional pizza or whatever, or a cream cheese bagel, whatever, you know, you do it. And there's no calorie restriction because that's another myth that I like to bust. It's complete nonsense. You just, if you follow this pattern, you eat for yourself, you eat for what's right for your biology, you'll get less sugar peaks, less fat peaks in your blood, less inflammation. And naturally, the first thousand or so people have shown it who've done the studies, their hunger level goes down and they have more energy.

And that's just finding what's right for you is really the exciting way forward. And it's experiment. I think the one thing I want to really emphasize is that life is an amazing experiment. And for too long, we've been very boring with what we eat. And we all need to experiment both on the times we eat and what we eat and just try new things and see what works for you. Check out the big stars, big series, and blockbuster movies. Streaming on Paramount Plus.

Cue the music. Like NCIS, Tony and Ziva. We'd like to make up our own rules. Tulsa King. We want to take out the competition. The substance. This balance is not working. And the naked gun.

That was awesome. Now that's a mountain of entertainment. I love that because I guess nutrition, as you say, there's so much that we don't know and we're just getting these little pieces of the puzzle so you're never going to have all the information so you've kind of got to be your own science experiment. Yeah, I mean, we're just starting this journey of personalised nutrition and you know, at the moment we've got about 5,000 people have done this test but we need to probably get to half a million before we can sort of work out every meal combination

for everybody. So it reads huge numbers. So until we get to this perfect world, it's still a good mantra for everyone to keep experimenting, trying and listen to their body. You know, work out whether when you skip breakfast, do you feel better or worse later in the day? When you eat earlier in the day,

does that make, you know, does it make you sleep better? How does your sleep affect your meal? These are all things where we know work, but most people don't think to ask themselves there, and, you know, that we're just going along in the way that we've been told or we've been brainwashed to think in this country. You know, it's like snacking. Why do we snack so much?

Because it's our culture. We don't have anything stopping us snacking, whereas in the Mediterranean countries, nobody snacks. They have good proper meals. Whereas we're fed rubbish. but they're all called as high protein, low fat, you know, super bars. And we're sort of fooled into thinking, oh, that's going to stop me fainting at 11 o'clock.

And look at that. It's high in protein and low in fat must be good for me. It's not. So we're talking there about like the actual nutrients. So we've talked about how macros are too simplistic and thinking about the way people respond differently to foods. Now you've said we've talked multiple times about calories. So this is perfect because I want to bring you on to maybe what's wrong at the moment with how we measure our food and we think about the metrics with healthy eating.

So I read in your book that you referred to calories as a disaster for the average consumer. Lots of people find them useful. Do you think there is some use for them? And if so, what is it? They're a unit of measure. It's a bit like weighing your food and saying, okay, this one's heavier than that one. I'm going to have the lighter one. Clearly, calories do work at some level.

They'll tell you that eating spinach has less calories than ice cream. But most people know this. Occasionally you can be surprised. It's something you're eating regularly has large amounts of calories because manufacturers try and disguise it. But I think the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages of looking at calories. Because in a way, when you look at a calorie label,

someone else is making the decision for you, that that is better to eat. There's plenty of evidence that in the US where they've had calorie labels in restaurants, for example, that after the first two weeks they don't work and some evidence that actually people would pick an extra dessert because they'd pick the low calorie starter. and they feel virtuous.

So we're using it to trick ourselves into something. And the other point is that using calories as a way to lose weight has never been proven to work. So that's a really important point, that there's no long-term study showing that people, by calorie counting and restricting, keep off their weight. The body will always compensate for that. And so it's much more important to focus on

foods that are good for your body that aren't causing harmful spikes, inflammation, etc, rather than this poorly measured unit that is in real life, unless you only buy stuff from a supermarket with a label on it, is virtually impossible to measure, even if you're a nutritionist. There's absolutely no evidence that we're all the same in how much energy we expend, really hard to measure as well. So the whole thing is a, it's been given this false aura of something that's really scientific and easy

and calories in, calories out. And it's so much more complex that no one can really sensibly use calories as a way to pick their best foods and lose weight. That's my basic concept because also identical calorie foods can have with made of either, junk food or with fats and carbs will have very different effects on your body, very different effects on your appetite. And there have been a number of recent studies on this showing that a low calorie, highly processed food will make you eat much hungrier and make you come back and

want to eat much more. And that's one reason to absolutely avoid it. Yeah. That's kind of interesting what you're saying there. So when we're talking, calories might be useful if people don't know anything about nutrition at all, but when you are, as all our listeners will be, very interested in their health and their nutrition. Totally, and looking to optimise wherever possible, it's a bit basic. It's probably not going to work for their objective. There's just so many errors in it that using it as a guide, they'll be fooling themselves into thinking, oh, that's fine. I've maintained, I'm down at 1,500 calories. I can therefore have a nice gin and tonic tonight or I've been to the gym and my watch tells me I've burnt off, you know, 300 calories,

therefore I can have another donut. This is all nonsense. And, you know, we're all so variable and these measurements are so poor that there's really no point in trying to estimate that. And that's really the point that it's a sort of brainwashing all of us into a false sense of security that we're in control of our nutrition. And, But as I came back to the beginning, my biggest fear is that by looking at the calories on it, you are not looking at the quality of the food. And if people stick to high quality, many plant foods that you recognize and you can eat and you can dissect it and see there's real food in there and it's not just in a microwave or packet

with 20 ingredients and all kinds of things that chemicals, additives, there's artificial sweetness, emulsifiers that are standard in all these foods. That's the biggest contract. So go back to good basic foods, mainly plants, and often you can eat as much of those as you want without having any problems and without feeling hungry all the time. And what would you advise for women and women come in very different shapes and sizes with different training demands and all sorts? but what's a way of thinking about portion?

Is there an easy way for thinking about portion size with things like carbohydrates? Sometimes people would struggle with that so they kind of go back to calories. What's an easy kind of rule of thumb that you would advise people keep in mind? If you decide that you know you want multiple plants on your plate, the key really is, you know, I don't mind filling that plate, but just put different things on there. So it isn't just all potatoes and chips. and you know but if you've got spinach you've got kale you've got you've got a yogurt dip

you've got three or four other vegetables on there you can fill it up as much as you want and that that's really the key it's it's again it's it's a different mindset it's not about measuring oh i can only have you know two potatoes it's saying well fill your plate up so there's little room for potatoes. Basically, you know, you don't just want the starchy carbohydrates, you want the full range of them. And the more you mix it up, the more you know, go for more Mediterranean-style meals or Middle Eastern mezzay style with olive oil and and we know that fats and high-fiber foods fill you up faster as well, then you have less problems. So it's just changing the ratio. Obviously, it's not a good idea to have massive plates, American-style ones,

that you get in restaurants, throw them away, because we do know that if you have a smaller plate and actually smaller cutlery, interestingly, you do eat less. I mean, within reason, it's like, you know, I know I drink more if I have a big wine glass, so I've thrown, they break anyway, but I've not replaced it. I've not replaced it. I'm not. the big ones. And these are just little, little tricks. But generally, I'm not about, it's not about counting your food on your plate and doing this.

It's about changing your mindset to say, well, I know that the more variety of plants I've got on my plate, the happier my microbes are, the less hungry I'm going to feel. And I don't feel guilty about, you know, having a whole plate of that stuff. I think that's where we need to change people. And if necessary, you know, most people are eating five meals a day, try having really two substantial meals a day rather than these five eating events. And there's increasing evidence that the time in which you eat is really important for some people, particularly in controlling hunger.

And I routinely now, you know, have started to start. skip breakfast, although I do actually enjoy it, unlike some people, for my health. And I find at least once a week skipping it actually makes me feel better and more energised. So people just need to experiment and not, there isn't one size that fits all, even for timing of eating, as well as what's on your plate, and whether you'll prefer more fats or you prefer more carbs. but, you know, there's plenty of things you can do that are good for your microbiome, like as well as eating 30 plants. And that includes nuts and seeds.

So don't forget nuts seeds and all those things on top. Plus fermented foods, we haven't talked about them. But having a regular shot of something fermented, whether it's a good quality yogurt or it's kefir or kombucha, kimchi, whatever, that's great and a full variety of plants with this occasional fasting and and you're and avoiding the ultra-process stuff and that will really help your your gut microbes and get you at least half the way there fabulous so when we're talking there about the timings of when to eat so why would say two meals a day or three meals that they'll be better than five eating events as you put it

We don't know for sure, but the current theory is that there's two reasons. Every time you eat, you get some spike in your blood sugar and your blood fat levels. And that triggers inflammation. And normally at low levels, that's fine. It's part of the normal press. But if you are prone to, they cause more inflammation than all, that will build up and you end up with a sort of stressed body that deals with food worse. and so you end up putting on more weight and feeling less well.

The other reason is that the gut microbes like a rest. They don't like to eat all the time. They're not like cows who graze. They're perhaps more like dogs or whatever who eat once a day. So the longer you can give them a rest that tidies up the gut, it makes it more efficient. The gut lining is tighter. and the whole thing seems to work much better if you do that.

So I think they're the two main theories, avoiding the constant peaks which cause inflammation and improving your gut microbes. And if people are listening to skip breakfast and there's just alarm bells of horror going off in their mind because they are decidedly three meals or more a day people, there's lots of interesting things about windows in which you can eat now, isn't there?

So in the way that you could maybe increase your opportunity for fasting overnight. Can you tell me a bit more about that? Is there any particular time frame that's shown to have the most evidence? It's still the early days for working out the optimum times for eating. And we think that the idea is to have at least 14 hours overnight or since your last meal. So most people might eat their meal at 8 o'clock in the evening. and have their breakfast at 7 o'clock. So they'll be leaving about 11 hours,

but many people have snacks or something whilst watching telly, and so would still be nibbling up to about 10, 30, 11 o'clock at night. And so they have very little time overnight to really work fast. So moving that window to 14 hours overnight seems to be where most of the researchers are saying the sweet spot is. we don't really know whether it matters when that time is, when that 14 hours is, because some people might, if you're in Spain, for example,

you don't get to finish your meal to 11 o'clock at night. But most Spaniards don't eat breakfast, so they probably don't eat until 2pm the next day. They naturally do an overnight fast, which explains how they can get away with some of the things they eat maybe. but what we're finding is that there are some morning people and some evening people and so I think we're still working this out that some people might be better off skipping breakfast but others might actually better off skipping their evening meal

and so again people need to experiment themselves and see what they feel happy with I hate skipping my evening meal I feel bereft when I've done it very hard So I'd always rather, you know, most people don't wake up starving in the morning when they wake up. It's not the first thing you reach for is, you know, it's not a donut, is it? Whereas in the evening people tend to. So, you know, and realize that we weren't naturally meant to have breakfast. I spent some time in Tanzania with these hunter-gatherers. They don't know.

They were there eats before 10, 30, 11. and there's no word in their language for breakfast. And so it's only been around 150 years that we've been regularly having breakfast. Interesting. And so, you know, and Mr. Kellogg had something to do with that, I think, introducing that into that concept that, you know, we couldn't. And then the food manufacturers kept that myth going. There are a few studies that said that people who skipped breakfast ended up getting, putting on weight or,

doing badly at school. But in fact, it was probably the other way around that if you did badly at school, you were misbehaved and therefore you, you know, ran out of the house or came from a poor background that didn't have the facilities to give you breakfast. So it wasn't, it was a result of rather than a cause. And the trials have now corrected that.

So there's no evidence that skipping breakfast is bad for you. Interesting. Or for most people, say most people, not everybody. There's always, there are always exceptions and that's what we're learning. Absolutely. And coming back to what you were saying before, it's the, it's kind of the most fun thing, well, maybe not fun when you're hungry in the morning, but it's kind of that it's on

each individual to experiment a bit and play and see what works for them because they're, it's the kind of scary thing, isn't it? When you think about diets and nutrition, and when you're told that there are, you're, you think there are certain rules and you think, like, for example, with calories and macros, and then when you learn that maybe there aren't no rules, maybe there actually are no, those rules don't apply, it's quite overwhelming, but it's also quite cool. I think it's quite liberating. I mean, we're finding people who've taken the Zoe test and got their results. Many of them have done, you know, in the US 20 different diets.

and find this is the only one that makes sense anymore because all the other ones contradict each other. They're just giving you conflicting advice to say, ours is the only way. You're either with us or against us. Whereas I think this is, you know, this approach seems to make much more sense in terms of biology. And it's free to anyone, you know,

you can be vegan, you can be someone who likes meat, you can eat a lot, eat little, it doesn't matter. You know, this is something that can be fitted into anyone's style of eating. It's just working out how you fine-tune it for yourself while still keeping enjoyment of food and not making it punishment. You know, food is a fantastic pleasure. It's a great social bonding experience and it's really important that we keep that. and don't make it a punishment to go on any form of restriction.

Absolutely. So that message of abundance, that message of experimenting and slightly of cushioning out the noise and listening to your body sounds in sum what your message is. Do you have anything else to add? I think we need to relearn how to listen to our bodies. And we've got so far with dogma telling us what to do and just believing, the rules and being fooled for so long. We need to go back again to just really say, well, everything's out the window now. I'm going to try this and see what works for me. And if you

keep that in mind about what gives you the best energy, you know, which dumps you down, how am I sleeping, put all these things together. Then I think, and we combine this with this amazing new technology that's going to help us get there, then I think, you know, we can or eat happily and enjoy food and hopefully lose weight and be healthier at the same time. So that's the big hope for everybody. And it certainly worked for the people I've seen so far. This approach works for me. One of the most hopeful and, yeah, as I expected to be,

but one of the most hopeful conversations that I've had about nutrition. I hope so. Which is great, because it can feel so circular sometimes. I guess because you're regurgitating the same information. Yeah, and we want people to also get back to looking at real ingredients, going to markets, you know, picking new vegetables they've never seen, cooking new things they've never have. You know, and it's all this new trend of getting food boxes

and getting stuff delivered from farms, some odd-looking vegetable that you've never come across. You should say, well, that's fantastic. My microbes all love that. And I'll just check on the app to see that I can have as much of it as I like, which normally you can. And away you go. So I think it's moving us away from this dependence on supermarkets, labels and stickers that tell us what to eat and just getting it back to ourselves and our own biology. And I think if we do that, we've got an exciting future. And I think COVID has really told us how important nutrition is.

And that's really important now that, you know, these lockdowns have been terrible for many of us. 30% of people put on weight and snacked more. But 20% of people actually got better. So we're sort of diverging. But I think everyone is realizing how food really is the best medicine for the future. Absolutely. Well, I think that's a wonderful place to end. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. You have been listening to Professor Tim Specter, Kings College Genetic Epidemiologist and author of Spoonfed, why everything we've been told about food is wrong, talking about the new science of weight loss and eating well. If you've enjoyed this episode, please remember to rate and review on Apple Podcasts as it really helps other people find the show. And if you want to comment on anything that's been raised in the show, you can get it. in touch via the usual channels. All of those are in the show notes. That's all for me for this week. Remember, if you have a goal in mind, get in touch and tell us what it is and we could be helping you realize it with the help of our experts in an upcoming episode. See you next week.