The Food Medic - S1 E3 - Obesity and genetics

Episode Date: June 25, 2018

Hazel sits down with geneticist Dr.Giles Yeo to discuss his area of research - obesity! We chat about how our genes influence our chances of becoming obese, at home genetic tests, the clean eating movement and the sugar tax. Follow Giles on twitter at @gilesyeo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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$0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Hello and welcome to the Food Medic podcast. I'm Dr. Hazel Wallace, founder of the Food Medic. I'm a qualified doctor, personal trainer, blogger, and best-selling author of the books of Food Medic and the Food Medic for Life. I'm passionate about maximizing our health through how we live our lives, including the food that we eat, physical activity, and stress management. We will hear from leading experts in their field who will be sharing evidence-based advice on how we can live healthier lives and we will cut through the confusing information that we find online.

I like to think of myself as one of the first of a new generation of doctors. Hi guys, it's Hazel and welcome back to the Food Medic podcast. Today I'm here with Dr. Giles Yeo, who is a geneticist with nearly 20 years of experience studying obesity and the brain control of food intake. His current research focuses on understanding how pathways in the brain differ between lean and obese people and the influence of genes in our feeding behavior. Outside of the lab, you might have spotted Giles on TV, in particular, the documentary series BBC Horizon, including one very famous episode, Clean Eating, The Dirty Truth. And also, as on BBC Two's Trust Me, I'm a Doctor. Giles, welcome to the Food Medic podcast.

Thank you very much for having me, Hazel. I'm very excited to have you. I have heard you speak before and I really enjoyed it. So when I was writing out who I needed on here, put you down, top of the list. Thank you so much. So I know lots about you, but I don't know how much everyone else does. I'm sure they've seen you on TV, but it would be great if you could just give us a little bit of information about yourself, how you got into genetics and why you got into obesity as your field of research. Oh my goodness. Okay. Well, I'll try and be brief. It's a complex story. I'm a geneticist

by training, but how did I get here? My parents are Singaporean. Ethnically, I'm Chinese, but my parents are Singaporean. So I was actually born in London. I followed my dad around when he was doing his training. And so I popped out when he was in London. Actually, I was born at King's College in Lambeth. But then that day when I was born in 1973, the nursery ran out of power. There was a power outage. So they had to put all the babies into like one big basket and kind of literally roll them across the road. And across the road from Lambeth King's College, there was a small hospital now closed called St. Giles Hospital. And so in lieu of calling me King Yo, which would have caused me all kinds of problems, this is why I'm called Giles.

Anyway, I pinged around a bit from Singapore to San Francisco and then finally ended up in Cambridge to do my PhD. And I did my PhD in genetics, molecular genetics, with Sidney Brenner. Now, Sidney Brenner, he won a Nobel Prize actually in 2002 after I left, I have to say. But my PhD was on the evolution of complement-related genes, immune-related genes, in the Japanese pufferfish fugu rupepis. Wow.

Which is very niche. Slightly. Yeah, very niche. And when I finished, I didn't think that that was going to really help me pay whatever mortgage I was going to get. However, I was trained as a geneticist. And so what I did was that I walked around the department,

literally walked around the department. I decided to stay in the UK because my girlfriend at the time was going to stay in the UK. And then I bumped into this guy called Steve O'Reilly. And at the time, he had just discovered the leptin gene, which we'll talk about in a bit. And I asked, did you need a geneticist? He says, yes. And I joined him. So I'm trained as a geneticist. That's why I'm in genetics, undergraduate and PhD. Obesity was entirely by chance. He just happened to be the guy who needed someone. I was the right person at the right place at the right time. And that was 21 years ago. Wow. What a story. Amazing. And you also do a bit of TV and that just came out from kind of like your research in obesity. And obviously it's a very topical subject just came out from kind of like your research in obesity and obviously

it's a very topical subject now was that kind of the the lead-in for that was the leader that was the lead-in so i i did a program on bbc2 called what's the right diet for you i think it was in 2015 and they needed a genetics expert so it's just an expert and i went on there and i did my genetics expert thing yeah but then what happens the bb runs a tent at the Cheltenham Science Festival. And so the BBC said, you know, would I go do a Q&A with the presenter, who was Chris Van Tulligan, and the producer? I said, sure. You know, I'd never been to Cheltenham Science Festival. So I went there.

And because the Q&A was all about genetics of obesity, I just answered the questions. I ended up doing most of the talking. Unbeknownst to me sat in the front row was the editor of horizon and so it became an audition without me knowing was it was an audition he came up to me after he spoke to me oh wow and then one thing led to another before i knew it a couple of producers had come up to cambridge to see me and then bang i was in and the moment they felt that bold chinese people were something that people would listen to that's it

then I got in and that was 2050. Amazing so it seems like your career is really has taken off on these series of fortunate events really and bumping into the right people at the right time what I have brought you here today to talk about is obesity and obviously it is super complex condition and I think sometimes the media oversimplifies it and, you know, brings it down to simply due to lifestyle factors such as our diet and exercise. But we know that it is an interaction between our genes as well, which is kind of your area of expertise. And what I want to know, and I'm sure what a lot of people want to know, is how much do our genes have to play in the development of obesity? So our genes, just more broadly, have a role to play in the development of everything about us, every single trait. The trick is how much the genes have a role to play and how much the environment plays. So that's always the tricky thing.

Now, that is a number which is difficult to actually land on so i'll answer by saying that from twin studies okay the heritability of obesity is thought to be about 70 percent now what a white twins and what does that mean so they're going to be identical twins who share 100 of dna and they're going to be non-identical twins okay and they will share 50 of their dna like you would with your brother or sister or for that matter, your mom or dad. Now, if you can take, okay, if I had hair, my hair would be black. And I would argue that hair color is something which is very, very powerfully genetically influenced with very little environmental impact, except if you use peroxide. That's something separate.

Whereas, if we take a look at another trait, such as freckles. Now, freckles are also clearly going to be genetically influenced, but whether or not they appear, how many appear, even amongst identical twins, depends on whether or not you stand in the sun.

You wear a t-shirt, okay? So that's an example of something with a powerful genetic influence and environmental influence. If you use those numbers and that same model and the same maths, then you actually end up around 70%. So 70% heritability of body weight and body shape is going to be from your genes. And 30% is going to be environmentally determined. Now that's amongst identical twins.

Now clearly that's going to change depending on who you are and what your lifestyle is like. And so the range is really quite big, 30 to 70% is going to be down to your genes. What you're saying there is you can have these genes and we know there's not just one gene, there's multiple genes that are involved in obesity, which we can chat about in a minute. Whether those genes are kind of switched on or actually act depend on your environment so it's kind of physical inactivity low socioeconomic status diet x y and z that's right because you all your genes do is reflect the i mean what are they there for they they have been there to help you adapt to the environment and so they change depending on what the environment is is actually

you know did you have too much food did you have too much food? Did you have too little food? And then what happens is it reflects that environment. And so our changing environment has driven our obesity. But not everyone has become obese in the same changing environment. And that's where the genetics lies, right? So all of us have these, leaving aside big mutations, okay, all of us have these very slight variations in our genes. They're called polymorphisms. And what happens is they influence very subtly how each of our genes respond to differing environments and differing traits.

And so this is why in this changing environment, there are some people who are more susceptible to becoming obese in this changing obesogenic environment, we call it, okay, where there's, you know, too much easily available food, cheap, and we don't move enough. Together, this environment has then influenced some people and actually got them to be more likely to become obese than others. And if you have a predisposition, so if you have the gene that could potentially make you obese in the future, do you have full control over preventing that from happening through your lifestyle?

So can you stop that from happening, basically? It depends on which genes you're talking about and how big the change is. There are going to be some mutations, we'll call them mutations, actual big changes to the genes, such as deletions or something really bad happening to it, in which you have very little control over. These are what we call monogenic diseases, single gene diseases. So an example of a single gene disorder is something like muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis. So these are mutations to single big genes. Now, if you have one of those in one of the genes which control food intake, you're going to end up not being able to control your body weight at all.

But the vast majority of us have these very subtle variations. And we don't have 100 hundred percent control okay but we can actually do something about it and why don't we have a hundred percent control we now know they're probably about i don't know a hundred to a hundred and fifty genes that are linked okay in a subtle way to our body weight and body shape and body size okay very subtly and some people are going to have more of these variations, the risk variations of becoming obese. Some of them are going to have some of the more protective variants, okay? And what happens is someone with a higher risk of

becoming obese, but simply feels slightly hungrier all of the time. Not like 10 times hungrier, not like twice hungrier even, maybe a few percentage points hungrier. And so it is always going to be more difficult to say no to food if you are hungry, no matter how skinny you are. If you're skinny and someone tells you to stop eating when you're hungry, that's not what we evolved to do. We evolved to eat when we're hungry and stop when we're not. So if you are hungry all the time, over a lifetime, you end up eating more and you become obese. So some people, you know, a lot of people say that it's a disease of choice. People can always say no. It's true. But for some people, it's going to be more difficult to say no.

Yeah, I think that's really nicely put. And I'm sure that you come up against this all the time, but we can see these at-home genetic tests that people are getting through their postboxes. And you can test now to see if you're susceptible to things like obesity or whether you're lactose intolerant or whether you're going to go gray early or X, Y, Z. There's loads of different things you can test for. I'm a bit skeptical about these because obviously you have gone through such rigorous training

to be able to interpret genetic tests. Do you think these things are safe or is it the way of the future? Do we need these things? Okay, that's an interesting question. I think they are the way of the future? Do we need these things? Okay, that's an interesting question. I think they are the way of the future, for sure. The problem is we are really not there yet in terms of interpreting the information that's there. Now, let me just to be clear, there are some things that we are ready to go now. Okay, so you mentioned lactose intolerance, your ability

to metabolize alcohol is something else. Whether or not you have blue eyes, do you have red hair? These are all things down to single genes. And so therefore, if you do a genetic test on those different variations, it is predictable. Okay, so in other words, you can predict whether or not someone is going to have those particular conditions. I, for example, am lactose intolerant. I found this out taking one of these tests, which you believe, because it's down to a single gene. But these companies mix these genes together. So if you go look now, there are many of these companies that are actually out there. Some focus on exercise, some focus on diet, some actually mix it all. But they mix it all together. So there are some of the traits which they measure, which are single genes. I happen to know which they are

because I'm a geneticist. But the vast majority are very, very complex conditions. So obesity, diabetes, aerobic capacity. I mean, someone tried to predict my aerobic capacity based on my genes, like seriously. And that's completely just nonsensical to be able to do it without me running on anything, breathing or anything. they only knew my sex and my age you know and they tried to predict my aerobic capacity based on genes so we're just not there yet is it dangerous now that is the 64 a million dollar question people say well what's the harm what's the harm it's a little bit of fun i can tell how much viking i am you know and this and that most people i would, would deal with

this in a sensible fashion. But let me give you an example. Say for, I'm making this stuff up now. So say, for example, the test says that, oh, I have a sensitivity to salt. Okay, let's just, let's, for example, so I've got to watch the salt in my diet. I, however, have a neutral effect of fat, meaning that I don't have a hypersensitivity to fat, you know, I deal with fat normally. Okay. Now there are two different ways of viewing those two pieces of information. You can say, Ooh, I better not have so much salt. That's not going to kill you. Okay. That's going to be perfectly fine. The problem is what happens if your interpretation of the neutral fat result is that I can eat as much fat as I want. And so, because I have no problems with fat, I have,

you know, neutral sensitivity. And then you go have too much fat, and that then causes problems. So that I think it's the interpretation of the information which they give you. They interpret something over simplistically, the consumer then looks at it. And then there's no control over how the consumer responds to it. And I think in some cases, they can actually end up doing more harm than good. Yeah, when you talk about that, I kind of bring that back to when we're working within the hospital and you when someone comes through A&E and we order, you know, a series of tests, depending on what symptoms they have, there's the bog standard tests you do for everyone. And then you add on whatever depending on symptoms. But one of the things that like i have really learned from working um clinically

is that you can just over order these tests and then you end up with all this information that may not be useful in that time but then because you have it you feel like you need to do something about it and you end up finding things that you didn't need to find well you didn't need to find because unless there's a symptom say there's's a particular symptom, and then you measure it, then you say, okay, well, could this be the cause of the symptom? If you start looking for things, say, for example, if I had a raised total cholesterol, let's just say, for example, okay? If you ask, well, what's your cholesterol? There's always a number. You give your number.

And you're going, well, why did you get it measured? Did you have a worry about it in your family? Did you have this? Did you have that? If the answer is no, and you are perfectly healthy, then why are you making that specific measurement? And so I think there's got to be a reason to be doing the measurement rather than just measuring everything willy-nilly.

Yeah. What you're saying is for some tests, it's useful like lactose intolerance, but we're not quite there for all of these measurements. Well, let me give you an example of why we're not quite there with a lot of these measurements. It's a complex answer, but I'll just give you this analogy. And the analogy is, none of these companies are lying. They're based on real studies

and there are actually increases of risk when each of these changes are studied across the population. But these changes are very subtle. So if you buy one lotto ticket, now, in order to increase your chances of winning the lotto, you buy two lotto tickets. If you buy one lotto ticket, okay? Now, in order to increase your chances of winning the lotto, you buy two lotto tickets. If you buy two lotto tickets,

you have increased your chances of winning the lotto by 100%, right? Relative chance. What are your chances, actual chances of winning the lotto? Oh, still very low, okay? And so I think that is probably a good analogy to use, where you're going to end up with one of these jeans. You have a double the chance of getting something, but the baseline chance of getting the problem to begin with is so low

that this is not a problem. So it's the lotto example. Yeah, I love that. Now, back from genetic testing to obesity. So I've actually just come back from a conference on food and food systems, and there is people from all over the world. And it seems that obesity is not just affecting developed worlds, but also developing worlds. And we see this hybrid of malnutrition from overnutrition to hunger.

And it's actually so sad to see and very eye-opening as well. And we can't deny the fact that obesity rates have tripled since the 70s. We're now seeing children as young as nursery who are obese. What we're seeing is that there's a lot of campaigners now in the media and they have said that they're going to war with obesity. And that is the phrase slashed across the headlines at the moment. Do you think this is the right approach? And do you think by radicalizing our food environment with sugar taxes is going to have a meaningful difference on the rates of obesity? I know that is such a huge question. Let's tackle each of these independently. We'll deal with obesity and the stigmatization of

obesity. So what do we know? Okay. Now, if I use the word obesity, I'd like to think I never used the word obesity pejoratively. Okay, I use it as a description. People may disagree that it's a good term to use, but it's a clinical used term. Obesity is a clinical used term where you carry too much fat. It's undoubtedly the case that if you carry too much fat, it increases your risk for a whole host of different diseases. The trick and the difficulty is how much is too much? And the problem is too much is different for all of us. Okay. My too much is going to be different from you. Too much is

going to be different from someone else's. So the trick is to find out rather than being blunt about saying that, oh, you know, beyond a BMI of X, you're going to become ill. You got to understand how much too much is for the individual but that's the difficulty right it's a nuance it's very difficult so that's the first thing the second thing is also how you then get a message across that having too much fat is uh too much in inverted commas okay for you is going to be bad for you and so you've got to try and reduce that the issue is how you get that across without judgment and without stigma. I think it's entirely possible for you to provide empirical information.

Mrs. Smith, you are carrying too much fat. You can say you're obese, you can say you have a weight. Too much fat without being judgmental, toxic, or stigma. Now, that's very easy, or it's easier to do on a one-to-one basis. You're a doctor doctor you know that yeah very difficult very tricky to do in a public health scenario when you are pretty much in effect blaring it out to everyone and people i think you're going to always offend a specific sector of society so i think it is a balance i think the public health people have got to try and actually fix that balance. War on obesity.

I mean, I think, you know, the term is fluid. And I do think that at the moment in this ultra judgmental time that we're actually in, it's time to actually be more mindful of the language. I didn't think that the problem with using the word obesity and even saying something like war on obesity was necessarily a huge problem, say something like 15 or 20 years ago, okay, when there was stigma around fat people and obese people, but I really didn't think that the term obesity, when used non-pejoratively, had an issue. I think it is today, and I do think we need to be careful about it. But we still need to give the information out. That's the trickiness. That's the thing. It's the communication of information. And I think that's where we're going wrong. But anyway, the next question, what I'm interested in. The next question is taxes. Yeah. Now, which is legislation. Now,

I think some people can, you know, think of me as naive. I just in general have a problem with taxation and legislation as a blunt tool. And it is a blunt tool. And the reason I have a problem with it is because if you tax something, you're always going to disproportionately affect the poor. And that never sits well with me. In particular, since that the people putting on these taxes tend almost universally to be more privileged than the people in which they're applying the taxes to.

That is a problem I have. Saying that, I do think we need to do something about the availability of certain types of foods. Now, I think I'm probably in a camp where we do need to do something with sugary drinks. And when I mean sugary drinks. Okay. And when I mean sugary drinks, I don't just mean Coca-Cola or Pepsi or any of the soda pops. I mean all sugary drinks, including fruit juice. If you're going to try and level a tax, okay, then you have got to

do two things. You have got to A, make sure you don't just randomly pick out what you consider to be junk. Okay. In order to put the tax on. You've got to look at it empirically and say, well, how much sugar is actually in here, period, okay? And it doesn't matter if it's from fruit juice or Coca-Cola, they're the same sugar. And the second thing is, if you're going to do that, then you better make sure that the healthier options

are always going to be there for people to actually buy. Now, if bottled water, and people can say you can drink tap water, and it's actually buy. Now, if bottled water, and people can say you can drink tap water, and it's true, okay? But if bottled water is more expensive than Coca-Cola, then someone's going to buy Coca-Cola, okay? So you got to make sure that the proper options, the healthier options,

the lower options are actually also there before you do something like a tax. Everything else, I don't know. Because I think if you eat sugar, okay, and I think eating sugar is substantively different from drinking sugar. If you drink sugar, oh my God, I mean, you can get now a thousand calories of sugar in a drink before you even say boo, okay, like literally in three minutes. Whereas when you eat and start chewing, what happens is your body starts to respond. Your body's like, oh, food's coming down, food's coming down. And you get yourself prepared to receive calories.

Drinking, okay, bypasses a lot of that initial preparation. So that's why against sugary drinks, I probably can just bear a tax. Everything else, we need to consider ourselves about poverty. We need to consider ourselves about choices, about education and food literacy, rather than a blunt implementation of tax. Yeah, I agree. And I mean, in Mexico, they have seen a drop in sales on sugary drinks when they brought in the tax and more people drinking water instead. And they've seen that in the lower income communities as well,

which is reassuring, given what you've said and what we know here, that it does seem to affect certain populations so i mean i'm not a sugar nazi i just want to point this out i am not a sugar nazi no and i completely agree i think that's the right right approach to have and you made a very um important message there that when you consume sugar in a drink it's very different to how you eat sugar and again sugars in a drink tend to be free sugars, which your body is going to process differently to say sugar that you're consuming, especially if it was in a piece of fruit, which is coming packaged in a different vehicle. It's coming in fiber, surrounded by lots of other nutrients.

Your body's absorbing it very slowly. We don't really need to worry about that. But I do agree that a lot of people are kind of getting most of their energy and calories from drinks now. And we just don't really realize because it's just marketing. It's exciting. We've got like Frappa Wappacino's coming left, right and center. And I do think we do need to allow people to make informative decisions and give them the option.

And that is end point. But like you said, it's not going to solve everything. It's a blunt tool. It might make a difference. Let's hope it does. Okay. Now, can we talk about the documentary, Clean Eating, The Dirty Truth? So it was very eye-opening for a lot of people,

and it did unveil a lot of misrepresented signs, particularly online and within social media. What was your biggest takeaway from creating this? And why was it really important for you to be a part of that documentary? The reason why I wanted to create the documentary was because as a person who studies obesity, genetics of obesity, by definition, I'm studying the genetics of food intake. Yeah. And how the brain controls food intake.

And because some people find it more difficult to say no than others, I was interested in from an environmental point of view, what was being offered. If I'm Mr. Smith and overweight, okay, and I want to lose weight, what options are there if I choose to go some of these dietary advice and some of these things? And so I was interested in trying to find these things out. So clean eating was new to me. I now know that clean eating is not one type of eating, but it's a suite of different dietary approaches, all of which are far older than the term clean eating. So a lot of these are actually quite relatively old diets, but clean eating is something which has emerged, I would probably say, 10 or 15 years ago,

together with the rise of social media, actually. So I think a couple of things have emerged is that clean eating was driven in large part by social media, and by chance, perhaps. And secondly, clean eating uses food as medicine or considers food to be medicine. Now, let me clarify what I mean. Clearly, if you're overweight and you need to lose weight, you need to change your diet. If you are susceptible to type 2 diabetes, you need to change your diet. That's very different. That's trying to improve your eating behavior. You're not necessarily removing the drugs that are there to help you better. And so what happens is using food as medicine within, I think, the vast majority of the clean eating community they use food to replace empirical scientifically proven medicines that act that actually work that's the

first thing the second thing is there's also a reek of post-truth about clean eating where in effect there is a lot of pseudoscience that's involved a lot of uh passionately uninformed passionately ignorant people making making uh comments. And what they're doing is they're tying in anecdote to evidence. Okay, it worked for me, so it should work for everybody else. So it was very interesting to actually explore this whole world. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's been a couple of years since that's been out, and I hope it's still available for people to to check out if they haven't but um so interesting you know some of the kind of the diets that you really delved into particularly the alkaline diet which is based around the ph of our body and

how food changes the ph of your blood which is scientifically unfounded and it's something that I still find that I'm trying to dispel quite a bit despite how many times I talk about it. Because I think a lot of people kind of know the basic science around what that diet is based on. So they know that they remember the pH and like how different things can change your pH. But I'm like, if someone comes into A&E and we check their pH

and if it has changed at all, we know they're so unwell. I'm like, you know, close to like getting every other test in the book to make sure what's going on. We know that that person is unhealthy. If you have a piece of red meat or a sugary cake and your pH changes, there's something terribly going wrong. It just doesn't happen. But that's just one of the diet myths that you dispelled in that actual documentary. And I talk about this all the time because I'm a blogger. I'm a social media influencer.

And I see quite a bit that there's lots of science, which is cherry picked from online. People are just reading abstracts of papers or they might just read it off some kind of website. And then they'll write it in a caption and make it sound kind of fancy and sciencey. I'm super passionate about dispelling those myths and saying, yo, this is what the facts say. So what I would love to know is, what is the biggest myth you would love to bust and see off the internet? I think the biggest myth is that there is one correct diet out there that helps everybody. And that is just the biggest myth of it all, because I think you got to do you. And there are going to be diets that suit some. Okay. Okay. Let's just clarify. I'm not saying that something like the alkaline

diet, because that's complete bogus. But there are a lot of diets out there. If you choose to go keto, okay, if you choose to be low carb, or say you choose to go Mediterranean, or you want to do intermittent fasting, all of those, okay, have their pluses and have their minuses will work for some and not others. So to my mind, when you talk about diets and you talk about nutrition, it is tribal. I mean, people are there, they're arguing, oh, they defend their corner to the death. And that's the biggest myth. There are going to be pluses and minus to all diets.

Not everyone is going to respond to all diets. That's the biggest myth that's out there. The biggest myth that's out there that I want to try and actually put out there. And I think a lot of people know that on some level, but we're still searching for that silver bullet that's gonna cure everything and just make us glowing happy people i mean that's the problem right i mean people are trying to sell simple answers to where they at the moment anyway there are no simple answers yeah yeah it's a lot easier and it's a lot more attractive to buy a simple answer than it is to accept that it's going to be difficult hey listen people who need to lose weight depends what you mean by healthy for some people it means losing weight for other people it's going to be difficult. Hey, listen, people who need to lose weight,

depends what you mean by healthy. For some people, it means losing weight. For other people, it means trying to fight their heart disease. For other people, they want to try and get rid of cancer. The bottom line is this, okay? If you need to lose weight to become healthier, and it's difficult, it's because it's meant to be difficult. Your body is going to fight tooth and nail to try and stop itself losing weight, because we're not evolved to lose weight easily. So as long as you know that it being difficult

doesn't mean you're bad, it doesn't mean you're bad, it just means you're fighting biology, then I think we can begin to have a real conversation about putting a strategy together to make it slightly easier for some people using specific approaches. That is again, denture genes and how we can help that. And just like we spoke about before, it's changing the environment, changing policy, and also not falling for these crazy diets, but having basic principles in your back pocket.

And I think we can all agree on certain principles and there are things like eating more plants, getting more fiber, cutting down on saturated fat, cutting down on sugar. They're just not sexy and no one wants to buy into them. But that's the truth. That is the truth.

Moderation is still the truth, no matter how boring it is. Yeah, absolutely. So that's probably all I've got time to chat to you about. But I want to know what's next for you. What are you researching? Are you going to bring out a book? Are you going to do a TV show?

Are you going to do a movie? I you going to bring out a book? Are you going to do a TV show? Are you going to do a movie? I'm going to say no to no movie. Hopefully there is another horizon that I finished filming that will be coming out soon. Okay. Great. There is a book coming out. Amazing. A book.

Yay. So it comes out two days after everyone is stuffed with turkey. So December 27th. And it's a book called Gene Eating. It's about the science of obesity and the truth about diets. So that's coming out December 27th and it's a book called gene eating it's about the science of obesity and the truth about diets so that's coming out december 27th and can we pre-order or it's available now for pre-order but that's it comes out in december okay amazing oh and and season eight of trust me my doctor so that's coming out that's coming out as well no and that's on

what channel bbc2 bbc2 and finally can you leave us with three small healthy habits that you believe we should all be doing? It doesn't have to be about food. It can be anything that you think would add to our lives. Healthy habits? Yeah. Oh, my goodness. I only have unhealthy habits. I only have unhealthy habits.

What is a healthy habit? I think we all have to. Is moving more? I mean, that's the most boring thing in the world i mean i i think if you can use the stairs even if it's just a little bit on the stairs every day like literally like it's an additional five seconds use the stairs and those stairs add up over your lifetime that's easy that's cheap it's not going to cost anyone any money okay that's the first thing oh my god i mean look i'm a carnivore i am a carnivore but i do think we need to eat less meat yeah we do need to eat less meat i'm trying my best to eat less meat you did a vegan month i did a month as a vegan for trust me i'm a doctor and it it did me the i'm now no longer afraid of

it and so i now do vegan maybe twice a week and that you know that takes that much meat off the menu and that's gotta be a good thing yeah okay and thirdly eat more oily fish that stuff is just great for you it's really great for your brain really good for everything you know omega-3 that you get in oily fish like salmon or tuna does wonders for the brain but again just a little bit every week is fine it's not something that we need to over overkill not because this is just everything a little bit a little bit of stair walking cut down on your meat slightly and maybe a little bit more fish yeah i think that's going to be great that's amazing and where can we find you if we want to find out more you know i could give you the various websites, professional websites that I'm on, but you fall asleep before that. I've got a weird name, Giles and Yo,

Y-E-O. And if you Google me, you'll find me. That's the easiest way. Okay, amazing. Well, thank you for coming on the Food Medic podcast. It was super interesting for me and I'm sure for everyone else. Thanks to everyone for listening and we'll see you again next week bye thank you so much for tuning into the food medic podcast please do subscribe so that you are the first to hear about any new episodes and if you are enjoying them please leave us a five-star rating and a review so that we can reach as many people as possible. Check out my website, thefoodmedic.co.uk, where you can find tons of recipes and articles.

Follow me on social media, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at The Food Medic. And my new book, The Food Medic for Life, is out now, which is packed full of loads of recipes, nutritional advice, myth-busting and feature pages on topics such as sleep and mindfulness. You can grab both my books on Amazon or in any good bookstore. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time. Thank you.