The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 107 - Why Counting Calories Doesn't Work: Tim Spector

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

In this moment Dr Tim Spector unravels the myth of calorie counting for health and weight loss. Dr Spector discusses how dieting is not just a simple case of tracking calories in compared to calories, as it is nearly impossible for even professionals to accurately count calories. Furthermore, just as people and their lifestyles are not the same, neither are calories. Calories from either quality whole food or ultra-processed can have radically different impacts on your health. Instead of obsessing about calories Dr Spector believes you need to be focused on the quality of your food. Listen to the full episode here - ⁠https://g2ul0.app.link/uqBbGwMhlzb Tim: https://www.instagram.com/tim.spector/?hl=en https://tim-spector.co.uk Watch the episodes on YouTube - ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. One of my friends is a prolific calorie counter. And, you know, he eats a lot of Domino's pizzas. He listens to this podcast. He's going to know exactly. He's going to know that I'm atting him. He eats Domino's pizzas all the time. He eats like a real, you know, processed food diet, but then says to me, it's all about calorie counting. Now, with all due respect, friend, he's never managed to, I shouldn't say that, but it's not necessarily worked for him in terms of

the goal that he set himself. So when I was reading about your view on calorie counting in your book, Spoonfed, it was, I screenshotted it this morning and sent it to him. And I sent, I said, you are a bullshitter. That's what I said in the message. And we had a good laugh your book spoon fed it was i screenshotted it this morning and sent it to him and i sent i said you are a bullshitter that's what i said in the message and we had a good laugh about it this morning but what is your view on calorie counting and this idea that we can you know weight loss or being healthy is just about having a calorie deficit it's complete nonsense thank you i will clip that and send it to him there's never been any long-term study showing that calorie counting is an effective way to lose weight and maintain weight loss after you know the first few weeks so yes

very strict calorie counting if you deprive yourself for a few weeks you will lose some weight but even if you're successful your body's evolutionary mechanisms will make you hungrier and hungrier every week you go by where you're depriving yourself of energy. Your body will go into sort of shutdown mode. Your metabolism slows down. So you're not expending those calories. And inevitably, I'd say more than 95% of people will go back to their baseline and many go above it. There's a rebound back if they're doing this style of calorie restriction. Now, calorie counting is a part of that.

So people try and say, okay, I'm not going on a dramatic diet, but I'm going to just try and reduce by 10% my calories in the day, which in the old theory was supposed to make you lose weight well it's virtually impossible even professionals to count calories and because uh they're not very accurate for a start everything on the packet you have to weigh everything and in restaurants now we're supposed to have these calorie counts they're plus or minus about 30 percent because the portion size makes such a huge difference to it that it's and it's been shown in the us to be a worthless exercise anyway so you can't count them going in you can't really count your metabolism going out either we're all incredibly different you know your friend's

probably been told 2500 calories is what he's allowed well that's an average uh but it doesn't mean it relates to him my average is much lower i mean i tested it so everyone is an individual and this is another thing we need to move away from this one size fits all guidelines but i think more importantly is that the whole calorie counting assumption means that it doesn't matter what form that calorie is it has the same effect in your body therefore whether you're cutting out fat calories or carb calories or you know low calorie sodas or whatever it is, it's going to be fine. But we now know that's not true. And there's several science experiments

which now absolutely nail that. One was in America where they gave people identical meals for two weeks in a sort of enclosed semi-prison. And one was homemade and one was ultra-processed, both identical calories, macros the same. The group with the ultra-processed foods overate by about 200 calories every day.

They kept coming back to the buffet for more. Okay, so yes, the same calories, but the effect on the body meant they were hungrier. Why is that? We don't know for sure. It could be that those chemicals in the ultra-versus-foods affect the gut microbes, and they then send signals to the brain saying, eat more, this isn't a natural, you know, this is a really weird chemical.

It's doing something weird to me. I'm producing something weird in exchange. It could be they get absorbed much quicker quicker so you get a big sugar rush and you know the nutrients get in to your body in a way faster than they should do in nature and so your brain doesn't have time to say i'm full it normally takes 20 minutes or so to to get that fullness um or you know it so it could be the matrix of the food it could be the chemicals in the food it could be its effect on the gut microbes but it also could be things like your sugar spikes so in the zoe predict studies where basically we've given now 50 000000 people in the US and the UK

the same foods at the same time, same time of day. Everyone's got these muffins. We show that people, one in four people who have these muffins and we wear glucose monitors, which tells you for two weeks what's happening in your glucose, one in four people get a real sugar dip three hours later. So this is where you rise in sugar, which is normal, and then as it comes down, it goes below baseline.

But only in one in four people. And when that happens, those people end up overeating in their next meal, and during the day, they feel more tired, more hungry. That's this sort of 11 o'clock slump if you like if you've had a carby breakfast some people feel that others don't and what's really interesting is that so one in four people eating an identical muffin of identical calories will then overeat by this you know another 10 that day so you can see how that just blows the calorie idea out that the calories in equals calories out everything's the same and and the third thing is

that ultra processed food says it has the calories that's equal to the whole foods but often they don't account for the fact that it's ground up, it's highly refined. And so if you take like almonds or something like this, they might use ground almonds. And you compare ground almonds to whole almonds, there's perhaps 30% less available calories in the whole almonds than a complete nonsense and it's there because the food industry wants you to focus on the calorie the fat content sugar so you don't have to think about the quality of the food and it's something that they can control very easily get their profits higher keep adding stuff to the product that's synthetic when we know that a lot of things they're adding are harmful for our gut microbes so that the artificial sweeteners are harmful the the glues they stick the foods together the emulsifiers some people react quite a lot to

those and they cause problems so the whole thing is like this giant camouflage and that's that's really one thing i'm you know it might probably my number one bugbear is to get people to see the light stop obsessing about calories and start thinking about food much more as quality and what it does to your body quality food what is quality food in your definition of the phrase it's the opposite of ultra processed food which is whole food which is made with from the original ingredients of plants mainly plant-based but it's not exclusively that contains all the nutrients that those those plants produce without it being stripped away or boiled up or highly pressurized deformed and so they have to add in back those nutrients so you know it's things in their pure form so it's it's nuts it's seeds it's it's grains that haven't

been ground up super finely it's all the amazing plants and fruits and vegetables that we've got. They're healthy foods. But it's not straightforward. Yes, I've got this list of 10 superfoods. It's understanding that many foods are healthy for us. Most of them are in their in their original form berries nuts virtually every vegetable is healthy for us if it's in that original form it's only because we've we had to learn to preserve things we had to do trickery to make you know margarines and things that with chemistry that we've moved away from

that but you know going back you know olive oil for example is a great example of something that vilified often because it has lots of fats in it and you know certainly i was told oh the med trains they have they have olive oil and everything. It's horrible. It's all fatty. Turns out that's a perfect, you know, it comes from the olive. The good stuff, extra virgin olive oil has very little done to it. And that is a good, healthy quality food. But it can be refined. You can take that and you can keep refining it.

You can take corn on the cob as an example and then you you know and then you've got i don't know uh tortilla chips or something down the other end is which bears or corn flakes which bears no resemblance to the original and they're all versions on the spectrum god it's so confusing you know because what you've said to me is, you know, based on research and studies, but then when I go to a supermarket, labelling, even I was just thinking then cornflakes, I think I grew up thinking cornflakes were healthy because it says corn in the title. You know what I mean? And it's and when you're trying to navigate, I was just thinking if I'm going down an aisle now, hearing what you've just said that that quality food is food that is not ultra processed and kind of resembles its original form when you walk down

the aisle in the supermarket everything is trying to pretend that it's good so how do I know what is good I mean I can go to the vegetable aisle and I can say okay that looks like a cabbage it looks like no one's messed with that there's been no study done on that too it hasn't been through a laboratory but how do I like if I'm in an aisle tomorrow how do i know what food is good and what is not well you've said the first thing if it's not in a package um you're pretty sure it's good okay so um if it's concealed in some package that's got you know happy children and signals of vitamins in it that should be a warning sign uh you know the more they have to advertise the food and say what its additives are and everything,

the more you should be wary about it. The number of ingredients is another pretty good sign. So once you get over 10, particularly if there's lots you've never heard of you wouldn't find in your kitchen, you should also be wary that that is ultra-processed food. Anything that says low calorie, that means they've had to add in lots of artificial sweeteners

or protein extracts or something else, is also a big danger sign. Low in fat means they've replaced the natural fat with something else that's cheaper. And these are all warning signs. you know. And, you know, you take breakfast cereals. I mean, I used to eat lots of breakfast cereals. I was brought up on them, highly sugary stuff. And then I thought I was being healthy when I moved to mueslis and posha stuff. But actually, when you still, still you know that appearance of healthiness it's still got lots

of additives in it it's still got lots of sugar in it it's just and those cereal packets have added vitamins in it but they're often in a very poor form i did the experiment once where i um took some cornflakes or special care i can't remember that says added iron and if you mix it up you can put a magnet on it you can get off the iron filings they're so cheap that they're just added to tick a box saying it has iron but they don't get into your body or do anything so anything that's got these things added with this in it, low in this, is a sign that they're obscuring the quality of the product. So it's, you know, but there's a lot of brain, you know,

we've been brainwashed for years and decades in this. And, you know, I was as well as a doctor. You know, I should know better. And yet I've completely changed my two of my meals completely so i've gone from having muesli with low-fat milk and an orange juice and a cup of tea because i i did you know i started doing these tests for zoe i found out that gave me a massive sugar spike and it was a terrible way to start the day. And I got these dips at 11 o'clock to a high full-fat yogurt, nuts, seeds, a few berries,

and never have orange juice. That's a really unhealthy drink for everybody. And I have lots of black coffee, which I now know is good for me so that's totally different i changed my lunch for at least 10 15 years um when i got in the hospital i was having a hospital lunch which used to be in the canteen then it was marks and spencers got a healthy looking sandwich with brown bread sweet corn and tuna and a smoothie in a little bottle and that gave me a massive sugar spike and i wouldn't have known that and i was told that should have been a healthy thing to eat so you know there's there's general rules but also

there are specific rules and this whole idea of individuality is coming in so it could be that you could you might be fine on that don't know um i was very annoyed because when i started we were starting doing this testing for zoe i had all these spare kits and i gave my wife one as well and we sit down and she's um french belgian and loves croissants and so we'd have croissant each mine would shoot up she had no change at all in her her her sugar which is really annoying yeah so but it also brings brings home the fact that you know everyone loves simplistic rules but you can only get so far with them you have to start experimenting yourself and see what works for you and not just take everything for granted and

that's really the that's the whole essence of really you know setting up this personalized nutrition research and zoe and everything else but on top of this general advice about changing a whole idea of food i think because i think they do go hand in hand that if you realize there are these individual differences you realize it's not as simple as you've been told it's not that fats are evil it's not that calories are bad you know it's it's much more nuanced