The Wellness Scoop - Diet Myths

Episode Date: November 19, 2019

Should we eat little and often or three big meals? Why does one meal make one person lose weight and another person gain it? Is it really calories in versus calories out? What about ultra-processed food, how does it impact on us? What happens if we eat just McDonalds for 10 days? We’re exploring personalised nutrition, diet myths and nature versus nurture with scientist Tim Spector. Sign up to our newsletter here - www.deliciouslyella.com Tim Spector, Identically Different and The Diet Myth - http://www.tim-spector.co.uk/# Link to the DIETFIT study - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2673150 Link to the British Gut Project - http://britishgut.org/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is an ad from BetterHelp Online Therapy. We always hear about the red flags to avoid in relationships, but it's just as important to focus on the green flags. If you're not quite sure what they look like, therapy can help you identify those qualities so you can embody the green flag energy and find it in others. BetterHelp offers therapy 100% online, and sign-up only takes a few minutes.

Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Deliciously Ella podcast with me, Ella Mills, and my husband and business partner, Matthew Mills. Hi, everyone. Hope you guys are having a great start to your week. We have been busily getting our cover ready for our brand new cookbook, which we will be sharing in our newsletter. If you're not signed up, that comes out every other week, and it's full of brand new recipes and ideas and what we've been loving.

So you can sign up on www.deliciouslyella.com, and you'll be the first to see our brand new book cover, what it's all about, and the details of our big book tour, which we're going to be doing next year with some of our favorite podcast guests as well. So it'll be like Deliciousiella Live. So please stay tuned for that.

We're super excited. Yeah, it's been a busy time. There's so much happening at the moment. I suppose the thing I'm most excited about that we've been doing this week is we're moving all of our breakfast range into bag and box so we'll have a fully recyclable solution which we're really really excited about we've worked on for a long time that will be going into stores early next year yeah and we so appreciate all your feedback on that you know

being as sustainable as possible is so important to us and community feedback is so important to us and I promise it would have been sooner but these things are so much more complicated than I could have possibly understood and putting them into store means delisting all our current cereals and then relisting them again so that's just why it takes a little bit longer but they are coming next year and we cannot wait. So today we're talking diet myth versus reality nature versus nurture and the power of our micros with Tim Spector. Tim is a professor of genetics at King's College London whose work focuses on the microbiome and diet. Having published more than 800 research articles he is ranked in the top one percent of the world's most cited scientists and we're honoured to have him on our podcast today.

So welcome Tim and I was saying to you earlier my sister-in-law and her identical twin actually took part in one of your studies last year so we saw a little bit firsthand how some of your work happens. But can you just kind of give us a bit of a background? How did you get started in this area? Sure. It all happened about 27 years ago when I had the only really good idea of my life. And it just happened to be the right one, which was to study twins and set up a UK adult twin registry, which has really been my life ever since, following up 14,000 twins from all over the country, both identical and

non-identical. And the first 10 or 15 years, we were doing cutting edge research into nature v. nurture, working out that for virtually everything we saw, identical twins were more similar than non-identical twins for all kinds of diseases, personality traits, behaviors, even things like religion and food preferences. And then I spent the next 10 years really discovering genes for hundreds of diseases, working with people around the world. But then the last 10 years, I started focusing on more the differences between identical twins. I started thinking, well, isn't it strange that these identical twins, who are essentially clones, who've lived 18 years of their life together, are not more similar? That they do get very different diseases, particularly autoimmune diseases, cancers, and they die at different times. Didn't seem to make any sense based on

how similar their genetics were and how important we thought that all was. And that led me to start working on a whole new area of gut microbes and what we call the microbiome, which is the community of 100 trillion microbes that live throughout our bodies but most of them 99 are in our lower intestine the colon and they're like chemical factories these guys produce thousands of chemicals and about half the vitamins and nutrients that flow around in our bodies. They're important for our digestion, our immune system. These chemicals interact with our brains to make the difference between us being happy or sad. They can make us full or hungry.

And they're really important for controlling allergies and the immune system and basically keeping everything under control and the way to think about this microbiome is is not as a diffused set of nasty bugs sitting in your poo but actually as a virtual organ so that is really how we've been forming these ideas slowly over the last 10 years. We now realize that we've discovered a new organ in our bodies. And my work has really been looking at how our diet interacts with that organ and that interaction, how that leads to disease or prevention of disease or general health. So that's really where I am today. And I think this is the most exciting part of medicine going on at the moment and many people agree with me yeah well i definitely agree with you on it and i was reading your book the

diet myth and what's fascinating is how you're kind of showing that it's it's your microbes for example that determine why one person can eat one meal and another person can eat the exact same meal and yet it can have a completely different impact on them why someone will gain weight eating the same amount of calories every day as someone else you know some people are kind of predetermined to like exercise and others aren't is that is that right yes we found that identical twins although they share 100 of their genes only share about uh 30 of their gut microbes, which is quite amazing, really. And we know that everybody out there has a completely unique set of gut microbes. You need to see more than 10,000 people to see anyone.

All those 10,000 will have a unique microbe or a species that no one else has that is capable of maybe producing a chemical in response to a food or a stimulus that other people aren't. So once you understand that enormous variation, of maybe producing a chemical in response to a food or a stimulus that other people aren't. So once you understand that enormous variation, you realize that, you know, we've been thinking of our differences in base of our genetics, and we're 99.5% similar. So we're all fifth cousins, basically. You know, everyone in London is probably on average a fifth cousin but we're not when it comes to our gut microbes we we share only about 25 percent of our gut microbes with each other so that you can tell much more about someone from examining their gut microbes than you actually

can from their dna and then that's and this is me as a geneticist saying this. So I think we're just scraping the barrel of what we can understand with these. But once you realize this individuality, even within the same family, even if you've grown up together or you've been with your spouse for 30 years eating the same foods, you're going to have a very different response to the same meal and it starts to explain many of these mysteries that we've been looking at and i think the best example is a really good study last year in california of 609 overweight californians called the diet fits study they all wanted them to lose a little bit of weight they were slightly calorie restricted but not majorly it was a healthy diet and one was focusing on low fat and the other was on low carbs and this was supposed to be the definitive study to prove that a low carb high fat diet better, as the new trend is.

It's like a keto diet. Yeah, it was a sort of milder version of keto diet. It wasn't anything like as high levels of fat as that, which have to be over about 70%. And it turned out that both groups lost weight, as happens in most diets, but they both lost about five kilos. It was a complete draw. So the paper said, oh, this is terrible.

You know, we still can't decide what to do. But within each group, some people had lost 25 kilos and some people actually gained 10 kilos. So if you look to the individuals rather than the means, you store much more of an important story that if you could work out which diet was going to suit you you could be in that minus 25 category and avoid being in those people that that diet really didn't suit at all and we think you know these people did comply yeah and all the all the data in all the studies does show this enormous difference and at the moment everyone's just being told you're useless you should feel guilty you know you're not don't have the willpower of someone else. And yet the reality of the biology is that we're all so different.

The way we interact with food, even within the carbohydrates or within the fats, we might be responding differently to different types of them. So once you understand that, it sort of puts all the advice we get about food into a rather different perspective and the idea that there is one size that fits all really no longer makes any sense and so these people who prescribe weight loss diets you say you must do gluten-free you must do lactose free you must do the keto diet for everybody it's going to work for some people but absolutely not for everybody and it could be very harmful for some people and so is is that nature or nurture like is them is

our difference in microbes something that evolves as we grow up like what determines the fact that two siblings or even two twins or you know a husband and wife or flatmates or something have some such a different microbiome we start life with a blank slate so we're born pretty much sterile so we acquire all our gut microbes from day zero and that's why every mammal has a natural birth that's very messy the whole idea is that microbes enter the baby that way from the mother. And that allows the baby to then colonize with the right microbes in their gut so they can then break down the rather complicated carbs and proteins in breast milk. And that starts the whole process. So for the first three years of life, we're building up this complex relationship

of our gut microbes. But those first three years are quite crucial. And that's why we think that there's big differences in the first three years between babies born by cesarean section, which is now about a third of the population. And breastfeeding, of course, is another way to introduce the microbes as well,

which you don't get with normal formula feed. So everything is starting to make sense from a microbial point of view, what we know is healthy, natural birth, breastfeeding, and also not over-sterilizing that period of childhood, which we started in the 80s, sort of getting obsessed with spraying surfaces with detergents and wiping out all microbes, when in fact a healthy kid is someone who gets dirty and plays with animals and rolls around on the soil. So we shouldn't worry about our dog Austin licking Skye's face

as he likes to do now. Absolutely, you should encourage it, probably. I mean, as long as you know where he's been more or less hasn't rolled around it's a mystery to us hasn't rolled around with a dead badger or something but um in general studies show that your skin microbes are certainly a lot healthier if you've got a dog than if you don't have a dog because interesting you will swap quite a few of your microbes with your dog at home. So as adults, are there things that influence our gut microbiome? Because I know, again, I was just admitting to Tim that I've been stalking him and I was watching a YouTube video of him yesterday

and you were talking about a McDonald's study, which was really interesting. Yes, so there's good and bad things that influence your gut microbiome. You seem to want to start on the bad things. So for my book, I was doing all kinds of research. I did a vegan diet for six weeks. And then I did the French cheese diet for three days, which was only eating unpasteurized raw milk French cheese, which thoroughly recommend for a day, although not quite three days. And it definitely helps with red wine. And the next thing I was going to do was to have 10 days of eating all my meals at McDonald's. So it was just

a big mac and fries with an occasional bit of chicken nuggets and see what happened before and after my gut microbes. And I wasn't particularly looking forward to this. And I'd heard that people do get sick on it. Exactly, supersize me. He looked very ill after. So that's why I didn't want to do it for six weeks. Luckily, another volunteer came along who actually liked eating burgers and McDonald's. He was hard up for cash. He was a student and he also happened to be my son. So he ticked all the boxes. And Tom did this and he was a real celebrity at his university. People used to follow him to the local McDonald's and cheer him on as they used to give him extra free

portions and things. But he phoned me up after four days and said, Dad, I'm really feeling rather sick now. Everyone says I look rather ill. I think we perhaps ought to stop. And as a responsible parent, I said, of course, Tom, but we're going to carry on. There's no way you're going to stop. We've got to publish this in the Sunday Times. And that's exactly what we did. And he carried on for the 10 days.

And the important fact was that he lost 40% of his gut diversity. That's a measure of the gut health, is how diverse, how many different species of microbes you have in your gut. And he'd lost an enormous amount in that time. And I sent him various food parcels afterwards, lots of fruit and veg we tested him six months later there was no difference um there's no difference from before he hasn't picked up he hadn't picked up the ones he'd lost no so you know sent him some more and then by the time he'd come home and he was eating a lot of food with us and it was pretty good food and forgot about it for a while when the

but we tested him still two years later, and he was still in the bottom 5% of the diversity range. Wow, so he never recovered from it. Well, he has just now recovered. So it took him about three and a half years. Wow. The important lesson here is that like any garden, and I think the analogy of your gut microbes is best thought of in a garden analogy

is if you've got you may start with a decent uh supply of different plants and soil and microbes but if you neglect it you don't give it any fertilizer you don't give it anything to eat and everything's sugary and fatty and doesn't get down to the colon, they will die off and there may be nothing left to revive. And can you only manage that through food? No, you can do that through the environment as well. And that's a depressing message. There is lots of evidence that for shorter periods of time, if you're not really starving your gut microbes of fibre for 10 days,

which most people wouldn't do that, they'd have some fibre in that 10 days. So it was the missing fiber that was the fundamental issue rather than what it was, so high fat or kind of overly processed. It was actually what was missing, which was the fiber that was the fundamental issue. Well, that's our hypothesis. But in a way, the classical teaching of this would be

that junk food is bad for you because of the high sugar and high fat. I don't really believe that because most things get converted to sugar and fats. It comes back to our rather reductionist idea of nutrition that we've inherited for the last 40 years, perhaps from the food companies trying to distract us from the reality of all the extra chemicals in there, just by talking about, oh, this can be low fat, therefore it's fine, or low sugar, tick, and you forget about the 20 other ingredients. So we now know that many of the other ingredients of fast foods or ultra processed foods are bad for the gut as well. So artificial sweeteners, everything that's in a diet Coke,

a diet Pepsi, and many other foods now, because as they're trying to reduce the sugar content, they're replacing it with these chemicals, are not recognized by microbes as a natural chemical, and our body reacts and produces abnormal chemicals in response, which can make us fatter and more likely to have diabetes. So I think sweeteners are really one of the biggest threats to the future as we're switching from sugar to these artificial compounds, which no one's bodies have seen before. They're often made from coal tar or some industrial waste byproduct. And so microbes have no clue what to do with them and they struggle to break them down. But there's also emulsifiers and there's various acids and enzymes

and mixtures that go in these chemical processing that also probably play a negative role for our gut microbes. So I think it's that chemicals plus the lack of fiber has this dramatic effect, more than the old fashioned way of just saying, oh, it's a bit too much fat. Because, you know, in the end, you break it down to fatty acids and glucose. And so what's your diet made up of? It's always evolving. So, as I said, I don't think anyone knows what the right diet is. But I've slowly shifted my eating

based on a lot of my own self-testing as you were talking about the PREDICT study I've taken part in that multiple times I've spent several months with a continuous glucose monitor on my arm so I can see every five minutes what food is doing to me on read in real time by reading out on my phone, it's quite a revelation really when you realize how quickly your body's reacting to things. So 10 years ago, I would have what most doctors would call a healthy breakfast, which would be a bit of high quality muesli, bit of low fat milk or soy milk, a small amount of orange juice, and a cup of tea, or sometimes with some bread, maybe bread and marmalade. My sugars would go really high. If I have any kind of muesli or even porridge, my sugar levels would go up near the diabetic range.

So I'd be starting with this real sugar peak in the morning and i'd be sort of hungry again by lunchtime and you know it was just normal because that's what everyone did and i switched to a high fat breakfast now so i have full fat greek yogurt and berries nuts seeds and a black coffee i will occasionally have a bit of sourdough homemade sourdough bread with that either with butter or olive oil so i tend to eat less lunch because i worked out my hospital lunch for about 15 years was a tuna and sweet corn sandwich on brown bread which looked super healthy and it turned out that, again, was really bad. Any sort of bread just tickled my glucose right up, and I would have a few grapes,

and that was even worse. So I'd have been better off having a spaghetti bolognese or a full curry and rice would have been better for my metabolism. And so I've stopped having those regular sandwiches that most British people would have for lunch and that seems to have made a big difference to me and I generally now have a light lunch it might just be nuts and seeds and some fruit if I'm working and then I have a large mainly vegetarian meal so I've virtually given up. I did give up meat completely for a few years, but I got B12 deficient because I started with a fairly low B12 level for perhaps genetic reasons or had some nasty gut infection when I was about 18. And so I was having B12 injections

and I realised that doesn't sound very natural. So I now have meat once or twice a month, and that seems to keep my metabolism straight. So I might have fish two or three times a month as well. But I try and vary things. I try to also have a diverse range of plants, not the same plants all the time. Because we did a study with a citizen science project called the british gut project which teamed up with the american gut project that we run looked at 11 000 people's gut microbes they all sent in their samples called it the poo in the post study and they filled in questionnaires about what they were eating and it turned out

that people had the healthiest guts which is generally the most diverse were the people eating more than 30 different types of plant in a week and you say whoa 30 types of plant who are you you know you must work in a green grocers or something but people forget what a plant is a plant can be a nut, a seed, a grain. It can be a herb, a spice. And so it's actually not that hard as long as you don't have the same thing every day. And so that diversity was much more important than if you were vegan or vegetarian or meat eater. We also did a study about which alcohols might be better or worse for you, measuring gut diversity, and we did this in several thousand people in three countries, and the one drink that came out on top was red wine.

So drinking one to two glasses of red wine was associated with the healthiest gut diversity. One to two glasses, how frequently? Every hour, no, per day. So we're talking six to 10 glasses a week. White wine didn't have the same effect. There was a suggestion of a white wine benefit, but it wasn't significant.

And other alcohols had no effect or slightly negative effect. And we think that's because not of the alcohol, but of the other thing that's good for your microbes, these polyphenol chemicals. And so going back to your lunch and your discovery, that's all about the personal nutrition, right? So it's not necessary that everyone would react to bread in that way. Likewise, some people may have done better on your original breakfast than on your secondary breakfast. That's where personal nutrition comes in.

That's exactly right. Yes. So that's what we're finding in our studies that people's metabolism is very different. We're all told to never skip breakfast, eat little and often. This is what the NHS guidelines tell us. And in most countries, the nutritional guidelines will say it's dangerous to do otherwise. The data doesn't support that. Most of that data was 30 years old based on about nine people because their metabolism when you're young is actually generally better in the mornings

and it gets worse as you get later in the day and and how can someone go about finding what is the best setup for them really you've got to start doing some get involved in some personal nutrition trials so i've teamed up with some entrepreneurs in the internet who've been working with us for the last couple of years funding this big study called predict which has looked at several thousand people in the uk and the us giving each person two weeks of testing to see how they respond to their meals both in terms of their sugar levels and their fat levels so we give everybody the same food. So everyone has these standardized muffins. The idea is that you give everyone a standard meal and everyone responds differently.

So your sugar level changes eightfold between normal people in response to the same food and your fat level six hours later, how much fat is left in your body is also about eightfold difference that has never been shown before everyone just assumes we're average then you do this for thousands of people you can start to map out predict how anyone's going to respond to a certain food once you know about the food once you know about the person and that's what we're doing now we have a sort of prototype where we can having done this test for two weeks with these muffins, and you can now do it at home with a glucose monitor stuck in your arm and doing a few finger prick tests, we can predict with about 75% accuracy how you'll respond to any food and give you a plan, a meal plan that's going to say how to minimize your glucose peaks or to minimize how much fat is left in your body six hours after you've eaten it and i think this is very much the way forward that if we start to get hundreds of thousands of people doing this then we can

start to build really really clever models in the same way that the internet has done to know what you're shopping for on the internet those adverts for shoes will follow you around they're very accurate because it's based on millions of data points and that's what we can do with nutrition so we're entering this really new area where you can start to personalize it. And we already have an app that should be available next year that people will actually sort of Google in any food for them or scan a barcode in a supermarket and give them their personal rating in terms of how good is it for my sugar,

how good is it for my fat level, how good is it for my gut microbes. So cool. So we really are close to being able to do that on a mass scale we are it's going to be relatively crude initially but it's going to get better and better as we get more data as more people join up and do this so you know i think it's going to mean people will be able to make more better choices about the foods they eat. And hopefully it's going to also educate people more about the food and move away from this ridiculously the rubbish that's on those food labels saying low in sugar, low in this and ignore, you know, the realities kind of challenges of like exercise more and eat a teeny bit less and you idea that exercise, for example, is a good way of losing weight.

There isn't a single study that's any decent that's actually shown that. Unless you're a professional athlete, you're going to probably end up weighing more if you exercise because your body just reacts to it to conserve food and put on that fat later. And the way we all react to calories anyway is completely different. So all these myths are being dispelled now. And I think we are really in a tipping point here that it isn't just a few crackpots out there saying the system's wrong. We're hearing the people in the nutrition departments in Boston and Harvard and Tufts coming out and saying, you know what, we've got it all wrong. So what's the future? Because I think it's kind of equal parts exciting and a bit sad in a way that we have all this information, like it exists. As you said,

there's incredible research and data showing that this is the reality. And yet everyone's kind of peddled the same thing again and again. And again, I think also that, you know, undoubtedly probably impacts on people's mental health as well, because they think, you know, I don't have any willpower. How does that the reality become the norm? You know, how does that be what the NHS and, you know, the health systems across the world kind of base their work on well it's very hard to change these big institutions and i don't think there's any field that i've worked in that has such resistant stubborn views and i've worked in a number of different medical science areas where people are quite honest to say they've

made mistakes and reversed their views. But I'm confident... And why is that, do you think? Is that because food's such a kind of emotive, you know, personal, kind of almost quite touchy subject? I think so. The field of nutrition science is a new field. And it's only been going about 30 years, whereas things like physics or genetics, you know, hundreds of years of study. And nutrition science has never had the prestige of other areas. So I think there's a sort of insecurity there. It's also been underfunded.

And so most of the funding for all the universities comes from the food companies. So you've got to realise the influence they have. Most of the professors don't want to go out and say they're wrong and badmouth the food industry because their funding will stop. But I think it has to be a bottom-up approach, and I think people are showing that. We are going back to local shops. We're going back to farmers' markets. I think that's probably the way things are going to happen

rather than waiting for these these top-down approaches from government and i think personalizing nutrition as you said it is it's slightly scary because people say to me what does that mean you know you've got your family sit down to dinner and everyone's looking at their app and saying okay is this good or bad for me? But I think what it should show is that we're going to have to diversify our food. And if we just have a different meal every day, it will even out. And we have to be a bit more flexible about what we eat. It's so easy to get into food ruts. Yeah.

The average UK supermarket has over 20 000 different food products and we put the same things into our basket every time every time apparently we all have seven recipes you know that's our kind of repertoire is about seven recipes each what can we do to add to our who are microbiome as adults? Firstly, have many plant-based diet, high in fiber. Try and achieve as a goal 30 different types of plant. We should have regular fermented foods and things like the 3Ks, kefir, kombucha, kimchi. A small amount regularly is what you need, rather than one big feast every two weeks. So a little shot of something as you leave the house is good.

Then focus on high polyphenol foods. So these used to be called antioxidants. These are chemicals that all plants have as defense mechanisms, that they use to fight off the sunshine or infections or stop other animals eating them. And generally they're in the dark colored fruits and vegetables. So things like berries or red cabbage and things like this. And they're also in nuts, seeds. They're in foods like coffee, green tea, olive oil, and red wine. So they're like rocket fuel for your gut microbes. The other thing to do is probably to not graze as much.

So move away from this idea that we should be eating something every two or three hours. Microbes actually like a period of fasting. So we always fast overnight unless you're up at the fridge at two in the morning. Most people are sleeping and that's how the gut community comes out that cleans up our gut lining during that time. And instead of eating the food in your gut, they start to eat the mucus layer of your gut, which has sugars. It's actually quite sweet and tasty for them. And if they nibble away at it, it keeps it nice and clean. Other things are good. So good night's sleep. There's some evidence in animals that exercise is also good for your gut microbes. Avoiding antibiotics.

We use probably three times too many antibiotics. And a lot of people totally abuse them. And they can, in some people, wipe out your gut microbes. In others, it's only a temporary effect. It's hard to know. And avoid highly processed foods. So avoid all the chemicals that we were talking about, artificial sweeteners, et cetera.

And there's some evidence that actually sugar might be better for you than actually these artificial sweeteners. So Tim, we always end each episode with kind of three take-homes for our listeners, three things to really remember from everything that we've talked about today. What would they be? Everybody is unique because they've got a unique set of gut microbes feed your microbes and keep them diverse and they'll help you every time you eat realize that

with 100 trillion gut microbes inside you you'll never eat alone again. Yeah, so no one ever needs to be lonely. Well, Tim, thank you so, so much. It's been absolutely fascinating. It's been a real honor having you. Thank you so much. Pleasure. Have a lovely week, everyone. And we will see you back here next Tuesday. Thanks so much. Bye. Thanks, guys. Thank you. or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com.