The Dr Louise Newson Podcast - 077 - Spoon-Fed: Food & Tim Spector - Tim Spector & Dr Louise Newson

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

Tim Spector is a Professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College in London and also co-founder of Zoe. In this podcast, Dr Louise Newson talks to Tim about his newly published book, Spoon-Fed. This ground-breaking and informative book really leads the reader to question their current diet and their relationship with food. Dr Newson and Tim discuss the importance of gut health and gut biodiversity, in particular with respect to our mental and physical health. Many diseases could be prevented by having the right knowledge of food and cooking from scratch rather than eating processed foods. They also talk about simple ways to improve health and nutrition. We are all individuals and our way of eating can be individualised to optimise our health.  Tim Spector's Three Take Home Tips: Try and eat 30 plants a week, that includes nuts, seeds and herbs. Think diverse! Have some fermented foods every day. Think the Three K's: Kombucha, Kefir and Kimchi but also yoghurt and cheese.  Look at fasting and the timing of how you eat. The longer you can rest your microbes overnight, the better your metabolism is. Trying to rest between 12 and 14 hours a night can really help you. Click here to find out more about Tim's new book 'Spoon-Fed' Find Tim on Instagram: @tim.spector Twitter: @timspector

Welcome to the Newsome Health Menopause podcast. I'm Dr Louise Newsome, a GP and menopause specialist, and I'm also the founder of the Menopause charity. In addition, I run the Newsome Health Menopause and Well-Being Clinic here in Stratford-upon-Avon. So today I'm very privileged and excited that I have another male guest, actually, which is always good, but I have with me Professor Tim Specter, who is a professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College in London. He also is a co-founder of Zoe, and in addition, he's the author of two incredible books. One is called Diet Myth, and the most recent one is called Spoonfed, why almost everything you've been told about food is wrong.

So welcome, Tim. Thanks for so much for joining me today. Hello, then. It's a pleasure. So I read your Diet Mith book a few years ago. When did it come out now? It's about five years old now. Yeah, there's a edition coming out actually in a few weeks. Which is brilliant. So actually I had pancreatitis about six years ago and I don't drink alcohol. I'm not in medical school. I'm sure you were the same. You were taught it was 40, fair, fat. There's a different female. There's lots of Fs.

More likely to have gallstones which can contribute to pancreatitis. But I didn't have gallstones. either. So I was doing a lot of experimenting with my diet at the time and my diet's always been very healthy. But actually reading your book was quite a game changer because I just ended nodding all the way through actually and thinking, gosh, this is incredible that you've written so clearly and so beautifully, but in a way that everyone can understand. Because it's very hard, I think sometimes you read a medical book and often it's wrong about diet and then you read a book for women or for men that isn't medical and it has all this pseudoscience in it. But you managed to combine the science in a way that could be read. So that must have taken a huge amount of work.

It did. I mean, I did manage to take some nice sabbaticals doing it. There was a plus side. It had a few spaticles in Spain. I was also on my own health journey at the time. And actually, a lot of the stuff I was learning from you. So I had to simplify it for myself as well. And so it made sense to write in a way that first I could understand and then right on everything and then make it understandable to, you know, the general reader who doesn't have a medical or science background. But, yeah, it's very rewarding

because I think sometimes when you make it really simple, you know, you can see the bullshit. And if it's too complicated to explain, then often it's probably not true. But at the same time, also understand that diet is very complex and that people who claim to make it, you know, incredibly simple are fooling you. It isn't all about one nutrient or one cause or one simple solution.

Yeah, and it's very interesting, isn't it? So certainly when I was at medical school, we were taught very little about nutrition. We were talked about the basic food groups, but even in biochemistry, it was just all about calories, calories in and what you burn. And it's so much more complicated than that, isn't it? It is. And although we've learned how much more complicated is, you know, still medical students still today, don't do it. You get a couple of them. And it's terrible. So sadly, most doctors are not very well informed on this.

We're still repeating many of these myths that we've had for years. And, you know, as you said, the calorie is a great example of how, you know, a little bit of scientific knowledge is actually quite dangerous because all our understanding of nutrition is based around this one number. And it makes it really confusing for people. doesn't it? And I know actually when I had pancreatitis, I was really poorly. And one of my patients, who was morbidly obese, said to me, seed actually, all those seeds you eat, it doesn't help, does it? You could still be really ill. And actually, she was 76 and she managed to lose five stone in weight.

And I think it's because I kept going on and on at her. And she literally just cut out her piece of cake in the afternoon. She stopped eating low fat labelled foods and started to just cook a little. Her husband had died. And she was incredibly lonely but then decided to learn to cook from scratch. And even in her 70s, her weight just fell off in a healthy way and it transformed her life. She battled and battled and battled for years, but she had been sucked into this labelling, which you talk about a lot in spoon-fed, don't you? You know, the way that you can, as someone who doesn't know anything about food, go to a supermarket and you think you're doing the right thing because of the labeling, it's a way.

It's a real problem. Yeah, and I think it's one of the things that got me most angry in all this discovery of what was going on is realizing what was behind it. And once you sort of understand that the reason why this has happened, it all becomes clear because you go in there and everyone says, well, I know about calories. I want to pick something low calorie. And I've been told fat is bad, therefore I'll pick low fat. And you go to that counter and all the labels have got happy, healthy signs on them and saying, this is fantastic for your health and this is good and all the marketing is around making you buy these products, whereas in fact, they're probably bad for you and worse than the high calorie, high fat version that would actually be simpler

that it wasn't highly processed. And so we're in a way deliberately being misled by this reduction of quality of food into these simple numbers, like this is the calorie count, and this is our arbitrary tick box that's low in fat. That's the big difference there. And it is so, I mean, I remember in the 70s and we all had street parties for a Jubilee, and there was hardly an obese person around.

I think we had one fat child in the school and her parents in a fish and chip shop, so she knew why she was a little over. way, actually, she wasn't. But it just wasn't a thing, was it? You look around photos in the 70s, and we all had full fat milk, we all had butter, we had cream as a cheat. I don't remember anyone talking about diets then, and there certainly wasn't the range of food that you can buy now, and we just drank water. Maybe a bit of squash, if you were lucky, but it certainly didn't have the plethora of choices of food and drinks that we have now.

No, so as nutritional sciences evolved and the idea that, for example, fat was bad for us, the manufacturers actually loved those recommendations because they went and reformulated their products into cheaper versions of the same thing, that they could substitute the fat for starch or other sugary things or extracts of soy or something else or 10 other chemicals to give it the same mouth feel as fat from, say, dairy products. And that meant that they, making it artificial, they could actually have a bigger profit margin and at the same time sell it as a healthy option rather than the previous natural one, which was just neutral. It was just what you ate. So that's how we've been conned in all this.

And so we're now driven because of these outdated food guidelines, which no longer really bear relationship to what at least half of the nutritional specialist believe. And all this reformulation, meaning that we're eating increasing amounts of ultra-processed food. And the UK leads Europe in that chart. So, you know, over 50% of all the meals we buy are ultra-processed as compared to. 10% in countries like Portugal. It's a huge amount, isn't it? 50%. I mean, that's massive.

And people think they're doing the right thing, don't they? And it's also, I mean, I've got three children, and I cook from scratch, and I'm busy, so I cook a lot for the freezer. So there's always something in there. But you think you're doing the right thing. But actually for children, it's setting them up. I worry about them more, actually,

because they've got another generation, haven't they, to have all this processed food. Yeah, and they're getting ever cheaper. So the British, we don't spend very much on food compared to other countries. And so we're going to this culture of going to a supermarket, looking at the special offers, looking at a label and saying that's low in calories, that's low in fat, you know, that's easy to cook. I'll just take that and that, you know, it's got a tick box where you say added vitamins.

So you think it looks like this is all approved by doctors and things like this. This must be fairly good for the family. So we're all being misled, and yet, and the other part of this is not just individual meals that we know that if you put two identical calorie meals, one made from scratch, one ultra processed. There's not supposed to be any difference, but studies are now done show that people eating the ultra processed foods are going to be hungrier faster and going to actually want to eat the next meal earlier and they'll feel more tired after it. And we've all had that. We know the effect of these chemicals on us that are brilliant at making us eat more. Everyone has popped a can of pringles

and tried to eat one and not come back for the other. You know, you know, you guys are geniuses at making you eat more of the bad stuff that naturally just doesn't occur. You just get naturally full. So that's one main reason we're in trouble. The other is this, our food culture has changed, from the 70s, and that snacks are now part of our meals.

So as the school kids in the 60s, the 70s, didn't have to take snacks in, their parents didn't worry they were going to faint or start eating their fist because they were so hungry. This is, again, marketing has told us that we need to have at least five or six meal event than a day. And so we eat these foods, which are continually spiking our glucose, our insulin, our fat levels and this isn't healthy. And the other element of this is that all of these things are bad for our gut microbiome

causing us more problems, although superficially they look fine because, oh, well, it's low calorie, says it's a healthy, high protein snack. It's got vitamin, oh, look, they've got extra folate, little immediately for Johnny's brain, you know, it's fantastic. It's all actually smoke and mirrors and rubbish. And every year we're eating more of this stuff, less people are cooking. less children know how to cook. And it's a real vicious circle that is proving really hard to break,

particularly, you know, with the politics of it. I mean, it's an absolute disaster, actually, isn't it? If you look at rates of type 2 diabetes, it's no rates of obesity, it's out of proportion to what even people predicted when, certainly when I was at medical school, you would never believe we would be at this sort of nation. And, you know, you're saying about these sugar spikes and, you know, the increased risk with diabetes,

diabetes, but also the gut health is something that certainly I never even thought about, really, until a few years ago. And reading in Diet Myth, when you're talking about the experiment you did with your son, who had, well, he didn't even complete it, didn't he? He was supposed to have McDonald's for how many days was it? Well, we had various targets. I wanted him originally to do a month at McDonald's, but we got it down to 10 days, which I thought wasn't likely to do any permanent harm. But after four days, he was. He came to me and said, I'm not feeling very well, going off the food. I, you know, my work is suffering, you know, can we stop?

And as a good father, clearly concerned, I said, no, you're going to carry on. We're going to publish this in the Sunday Times. And that's what we did, the well-known publication. But the point was that 10 days was eating junk food only and had virtually no fibre, and he lost about 40% of his gut microbes in that time. 40%. Yeah. And that's a lot, isn't it?

And I sent him immediately parcels of fruit and veg and tried to feed him up. But it took about two or three years before his levels got back to anywhere near normal. Gosh, that's a long time, isn't it? And just with 10 days. Yeah. Because he must have worked out a lot of his bacteria that, you know, can normally survive the odd burger or pizza. But when they're two meals a day of this stuff, It's anecdotal, of course, just end of one,

but I think it gives you an idea of people who are eating continuously this kind of food that never get proper vegetables do run the risk of losing their new remaining beneficial microbes. And once they've died off completely, it can be hard to resuscitate them. Yeah, and they're so important, aren't they, for, well, I think probably every system in the body, don't they? They're not just about keeping your gut healthy,

It's keeping your brain reducing inflammation in the body. Every week we learn some new thing that they do for us. And I think the most interesting is how it's kind of important that currently, obviously with COVID impact on the immune system is huge. Really, we've got virtually no immunity if we don't have all the gut microbes. But I think the brain is also the other one that in trials now, probiotics work as well as antidepressants. and it's not to say that's not a huge target because antidepressants are very variable in their response

on people but the other thing was actually just giving people a really good high plant diet that's good for your gut health again had even better effects than the equivalent to antidepressants in a randomised trial in Australia so I think this really is changing the corner that we're now in an era where we can really say that food is medicine. Yes. And it just hasn't been understood how it worked in the past because we've just thought of our gut as a hollow tube. We've not realized that there's this new organ in our bodies

that interacts with every part of ourselves and interacts with our brain, our immune system, our nervous system. Every drug we have, every hormone, there's going to be an interaction. So I think this is really important because suddenly we've got this organ and actually we ourselves can be our own pharmacy and we can dish out the treatments to improve that organ or make it worse. So I think it's really empowering once you realise that fact. Yeah, it totally is and it's just such a shame that we're misguided as healthcare professionals and people are misguided when they go to a supermarket. And certainly I know when I was like I say experimenting with my diet. five years ago, actually, I did end up having my gallblender removed and I did end up feeling

a lot better. But for about a year, I was really meticulous about my diet because any little improvement would make a huge difference to the way I was living my life. But the better I ate, the better I felt. And like I say, I was coming from having a good diet to an extremely good diet, but even making very small changes that I don't have any sugar or processed food, I cut out caffeine, I don't drink alcohol. So it's quite extreme and restrictive for some people. But I don't but actually I feel so much better. My migraines went. My energy was better.

My sleep was better. And you think, good, it's worth it. And now, actually, if you said to me, oh, Louise, I've got a whole tray of donuts, would you like one? I actually wouldn't want one. It doesn't do anything to me? But it takes a while, doesn't it? I think you have to miss or avoid something for a week, 10 days, and then your brain changes, doesn't it? So it can be done, can't it?

Absolutely. it's like any habit or mild addiction that since birth you've been told these things are good for you, these are tasty, this is what everyone's thriving for. So we're all susceptible to that. And I noticed this when I started 10 years ago experimenting with my diet. And the first thing I did was give up meat. And the first few weeks, it was quite tough, you know. I was in Spain at the time, so they had lots of hamon and rice.

But then you start to realize that when you go to a cup, to our parties and people have passed plates around, you've actually got to start thinking about what you're putting in your mouth. And it says the whole process of discovery you start thinking, well, in the past I'd just take anything with a drink in my hand and carry on chatting. And now my default is to say no, unless I know exactly what it is, think about it a bit more. And then after a while, I really wasn't craving meat.

I had five years without eating meat at all. and then did go back to it and my B-12 level started to drop. But I went back to it, maybe eating, you know, once a month. And even then I could never have a whole steak anymore. My idea of what a proper portion size has completely changed.

So in a way, your body will adapt. But as you said, you can't just do it overnight. You've got to train yourself a little bit. Like training yourself to have more plant on your plate and achieve, you know, the thing about meat eating is not about, I don't think there's anything particularly bad about meat. It's just it takes up too much room on your plate,

which you could have vegetables on. And once you start thinking in that mindset, every expert I've ever come across will agree that more plants you've got on your plate, the healthier your diet is going to be. So how do we make that happen? And one of them is eating less meat, having meat three days, except for changing those habits.

And the ultimate aim to get your heart. 30 plants a week, which is the sort of level I set people now, is the goal of the microbes. Which sounds a lot, but it's not really, is it? And I think it's also the type of meat that you eat because there's so much, even meat that you think, you know, chicken breast in some supermarkets is not going to be the same as one way you know where the chickens were grazing and it's from a butcher. And, you know, I don't eat meat, but my children do, but they don't eat meat every day because I cook them really good meat, so I would prefer them to have more expensive meat

that I know the sauce, but less often because I shove a whole load of vegetables and, you know, if I'm making a casserole, I'll add lentils and all sorts of vegetables that they would never have if they were on the side of their plate, but it's all shoved in a casserole, and sometimes mixes and pasta, if it's got pasta, they don't care about eat it.

And, you know, it's a tricking them, but actually I don't mind because they're eating healthier. And even when my middle daughter was about four or five, Her mood was so dependent on what she ate. You know, if she could have a home-cooked lasagna that would stabilize her blood sugar and keep her going throughout the day, it would be wonderful.

If we went out for a meal and she had a, it was always chicken nuggets and chips, isn't it, on a children's meal. It's just lethal to her mood. And even then I could see how, you know, she again, experiment one of one, but it still makes an effect on your mood. And it's bound to, isn't it?

If you're having all these different changes going on, mesobotically in your body. Yeah, I think we're just discovering now, because people didn't really believe that before. They just thought these were, you know, neurotic mums and crazy kids and everyone had their stories and, you know, it's like people feeling faint at 10 o'clock if they didn't have their met vitis. But it's only now we're starting to collect the data to realize this huge variation between people, people who were eating bad foods. And that some people People can cope with them much better than others, and others are really sensitive. And we've been doing these series of studies called the Predict Studies with the company Zoe that I help found, which is this healthcare company.

So for the last three and a half years, we've been basically giving the same people identical meals and seeing how they respond with glucose monitors and fat recordings and blood lipids and looking at their microbiome. And it turns out you give people identical muffins as a tenfold difference. in how they respond. With the glucose margins, we see some people after the muffin will have a sugar dip. About one in four people, have a really marked sugar dip,

and they don't know that's happening because they're blinded for it, but they're all reporting, they get more tired, they're more tired and they're more hungry and they eat their next meal an hour earlier than people who don't have those dips. So, you know, that's one in four people

just with that particular food. There could be another, one that react more badly to fats. And suddenly we're starting to change a whole idea of nutritioners rather than just being this rather random anecdote into getting real science behind it and saying

also how that links to our gut microbes that we now know that the gut microbes actually control your response to sugar and your response to fats. And the more you improve your gut microbes, the more you can dampen down those responses So, you know, the good news, it's not like genetics, which, you know, I used to do a lot of, where you just say, oh, the good news and bad news, good news, we know the answer, bad news is you're stuck with your genes.

There's only a limited amount of things you can do. Suddenly, because of this gut, diet, health, axis, that now we've got a clear relationship between, and we're knowing now it's the diet feed in to help the microbes, which then help your health, it's a very exciting time in personalized nutrition that we could imagine five years ago. This company doesn't have a product in the UK, but in the US for the last couple of months we've been selling these personalized nutrition tests and getting great results. People just getting a list of their foods and seeing how they score on an app that they can use in everyday life just because that's how they react to it, because everybody,

but he's different. And I think this is a really exciting test of the future. I mean, it's potentially transformational, isn't it? Because, I mean, food is something we should all enjoy. It's not like whether you smoke or not, you can choose. You can't give up food. But actually, the amount of women, when I only see women in my clinic, but even as patients, men as well, who would really restrict what they ate. And it would be a torture for them. And all they would do is spend the whole day thinking about their diet and how many calories they had. And actually, you food is so important to enjoy because we have to do it. And the more we enjoy it and the healthier we eat, the better we feel and the better our future

health is. So for me as a physician, obviously, certainly with the menopause, I want to empower women with the right knowledge and give them the right treatment. So they have a disease-free existence because that's important. And we know that eating the right food can certainly reduce diseases as well. I certainly agree about, you know, making food enjoyable and I'm totally against restrictions. People should be able to eat anything they want. And if you get the diversity in there, you get people thinking about extra different things they can eat

because we all get into ruts when we're eating. But if you take calories out of the equation and you just start talking about quality of food and start telling people about food you can eat that are not going to mess up your sugar spikes or your fat spikes. They're going to be good for your gut. Really, you empower.

people have given even more choice of what to eat left. I think that's absolutely crucial. And let people do their own experiments. Yeah, it's not being scared, is it? We have an amazing nutritionist Emma Ellis Flint who works with us and she's very into gut health and she runs fermenting workshops for us as well. But people don't really know sometimes how easy it is to eat healthily. They always think when I'm working too hard, I don't have time. It's a lot easy to pick something up. But actually, cooking can be quite enjoyable places, but you'd actually have to cook. You can just grate a few vegetables together, can't you, and have some nice olive oil and some lemon juice and a few spices. And that's quite nice, isn't it? You know, it doesn't

have to be complicated. Well, my breakfast has changed a lot over the last 10 years. And, you know, there's no cooking involved. I get some high quality full fat yogurt. I mix it with some kefir, which is fermented milk, I sprinkle on some mixed nuts and seeds, and whichever fruit I've got flying around, whether it's berries or an apple or a pear or something, and suddenly I've already had about nine of my 30 plants for that week in that one meal. And you've got to see how you feel on that. Do I feel better on my yoghurt than I did on my mooseley? Some people will, some people won't.

I do. I think, yeah, I mean, I used to have two wheatobics and sugar every day as a student, with skimmed milk. I mean, how ridiculous is that? And now I'm like you, I have exactly the same part from I make my own granola because if you buy granola, it's got so much sugar in it. But I make a massive tub and it lasts me six weeks or so.

So I have a sprinkling of that. And it's actually my most enjoyable meal of the day, even though it's quite repetitive, because I change the fruit. But actually then I eat my breakfast at half six and then I don't think about food again until lunchtime because I'd feel full, whereas my wheatabics, I'd always be having digestive with my cup of tea in the morning,

you know, between let me. But if you feel full, it's just a lovely feeling, isn't it? Because then you can concentrate on everything else. And your brain still works because it's being fueled the whole time. Yeah, and that's coming back to our idea of not having this fixed idea about how many meals you've got to have a day. You know, this idea we have five meal events, you know, 11 days and then tea time. And then, you know, most people will do pretty well on just two meals a day. But people will vary.

Some people are quite happy to skip breakfast. and other people are actually happy to skip lunch or skip the evening meal. So people just need to experiment because there's huge variety in where our metabolism is. We were told everybody has the same metabolism. Everybody should eat all their meals beginning of the day. That's the end of the day. Everyone says, if you remember that phrase, we should be grazing, not gorging. We're all brought up on that.

And that's completely nonsense and just really to help the snack food, manufacturers give us rubbish, so-called healthy snacks. So it's all about just throwing most things out the window, keep a few basics, listen to your body and use this amazing modern technology to help you understand your body's metabolism. And it's going to change, you know, the same things that when you were 20 or 30 are not going to be true when you're 50 or 60. You know, we change. So we mustn't get stuck in our ideas. Very important. No, really good advice and just bringing it back to the book, the myths that you have throughout the book are just so interesting and real food for thought. And I think the most important thing is to have confidence to make changes.

And sometimes even the very small changes, just as you say, maybe changing the time that you eat, even if you're eating exactly the same, can make a huge difference. But it's just doing little things. And also, you know, I look at what my husband eats and we eat at different times. Sometimes he's fine without breakfast. I get migraines, so I can't cope without breakfast. But that's fine. There's no right or wrong, is there? I think that's, everyone wants to conform and they want to, you know, have the right diet and they tell me all the names of all these plans that they're on.

But actually there isn't a one-size-fits-all, and that's really important, isn't it? Absolutely. One message that came out of this three years of study, which is probably the world's largest intervention studies on diet, was that everybody's unique. We didn't see anybody who had the same pattern of glucose, insulin, fat levels, inflammation after an identical meal. And that included identical twins. So if genetic clones are different, just think how different, you know,

your diet's going to be to your neighbor or sister or whatever who's saying, oh, you must go on this diet. It was perfect for me. Can you get upset because it didn't work for you? And you just told, oh, that's just your willpower. It's all complete nonsense. And these people who say, oh, you've got to go on a low-fat diet. You've got to go on a high fat diet.

You've got to go on, you know, keto, carnivore, cabbage, whatever. They're made for the average, and there's no such thing as the average person anymore. So we've got to realize that these are little more than tossing a coin about where they're going to work with you. And generally, they're not sustainable because it's such a blunt instrument. You cut out too many food. And that's long-term bad for your gut, so it's going to fail. So everything should be about long-term, plan, something that's very sustainable over long term. Every diet works for a few weeks.

It's what happened after then when you get stuck of it. Totally. Brilliant. That's a great way to end thinking about we're not all average. No one's average. So I like that to him. So just before I end, I always ask for three take-home tips, actually. So I'm going to put you on the spot, I'm afraid, and ask you for three tips for people who are wanting to, I'm going to say change their diet. I'm not going to say lose weight because I don't believe it's his about. losing a weight. It's about changing their diet to be healthier because looking at, we've already mentioned, disease prevention. So if someone was listening to this and thinks, right, I'm going to make three easy changes to improve my future health. What would be the three tips you

could give? Try and eat 30 plants a week, and that includes nuts and seeds and herbs. And the reason for that is diversity. So think diverse. Go for unknown things on the menu. You haven't thought about before. Have some fermented foods every day. British don't have many fermented foods. You've got the 3Ks, kombucha, kfir, and kimchi. But you also got yogurt and cheese. And then look at fasting, I think, and look at timing how you eat. And this increasing view that the longer you can rest your microbes overnight, the better your metabolism is. So currently, if you can get 12 and ideally 14 hours of rest overnight, a few times a week, that's going to really help you.

So you can eat exactly the same amount. It's just how you eat. Start moving it around, experiment. And the key really is to listen to your own body and do your own experiments and have fun with it. You know, join new things, new vegetables you never tried and enjoy food doing it. Brilliant. Great, great advice. And just once again, Tim's new book is called,

called Spoonfed, available in all good bookstores and Amazon as well. So thanks ever so much for your time today, Tim. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. For more information about the perimenopause and menopause, you can go to my website, menopausedoctor.com.uker. Or you can download our free app called Balance, available through the App Store and Google Play.