The Wellness Scoop - The revolutionary diet advice we should all be following with Tim Spector

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

I’m joined by epidemiologist, gut health expert, and one of the 100 most cited scientists in the world, Professor Tim Spector OBE. Tim is leading the conversation on gut health and is pioneering a new and positive approach to nutrition. Looking beyond calories, Tim’s work focuses on how eating for your gut health can fundamentally influences many aspects of your physical and mental health, as well as tackling deeply embedded diet narratives.   We discuss:   Myth busting calorie counting Gut microbiome 101 Why eating to support your gut positively impacts all aspects of health Tim’s 3 pieces of diet advice Shifting the narrative about what we eat Why taking a long-term view towards your health trumps all   Each week I unpack a wellness trend with GP Gemma Newman. This week on Fact or Fad we’re looking at meal replacements.    Tim’s new book: ‘Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Food-Life-Science-Eating-Well/dp/B0B2WTDVR5/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=tim+spector+food+for+life&qid=1667292664&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIxLjg5IiwicXNhIjoiMS4zNiIsInFzcCI6IjEuMjYifQ%3D%3D&sprefix=Tim+spe%2Caps%2C62&sr=8-1   Join The Big IF Study https://health-study.joinzoe.com/intermittent-fasting?_ga=2.210987989.1941833140.1667292709-199716784.1666262151   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Oh, hi there! I'm Norma, the unofficial mayor of the Town of Destiny. Speaking of, FanDuel's Kick of Destiny 3 is happening live Super Bowl Sunday. You should watch. It's gonna be a hoot! While you're at it, download FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on touchdowns, turnovers, heck, even total kicker points, don't you know? Anywho, enjoy your podcast or whatnot. Please play responsibly. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling

or the gambling of someone close to you, please go to connectsontario.ca. Wellness. What on earth does it mean? And why would we need to unpack it? With over 58 million hashtags on Instagram, the topic has really never been more prominent. But, and there is a but here,

three in five of us feel that wellness is incredibly confusing. We want to feel healthier, we want to feel happier, but we have no idea what's clickbait and what's genuinely health enhancing. Who's an expert and who's peddling absolute nonsense and look I am right here with you on this at times I've also found this world really hard to navigate. So welcome to Wellness Unpacked our new podcast hosted by me Ella Mills author entrepreneur and founder of Deliciously Ella. This series aims to do just as it states, unpack the world of wellness with expert guests. These guests will be sharing with me and with you their three pieces of advice for a better life, to feel healthier and happier. This is a show and a conversation that's about progress it is not about perfection it's about

helping you make small simple sustainable changes and within that I'm going to be testing out a different wellness trend every single week intermittent fasting celery juice, collagen, ketogenic diets, CBD, you name it, I'll try it. I'll then unpick the trend, separating fact from fad, with my friend and NHS GP, Dr Gemma Newman. And together we'll be equipping you with the tools that can genuinely make a difference to your life and well-being, and equally helping you potentially put to one side the trends that may make a difference to your life and well-being and equally helping you potentially put to one side the trends that may make a little bit less difference. So are you ready for episode 13? Our guest this week is epidemiologist Tim Spector, OBE. Tim is a professor at King's College London and one of the 100 most cited scientists in the world.

He is truly leading the conversation on gut health. Gut health is obviously such a huge topic right now and he is pioneering this new mindset, this new approach. He is such an exciting man to follow and I'm sure lots of you have come across his work before. He really does have a very revolutionary approach to nutrition which is all focused on gut health and his insight has led him to tackle controversial and deeply embedded topics like calorie counting and diet culture, low-fat foods and so on head-on. He wants us to throw out all those old ways of looking at food and really just start again. So in this interview we're going to be talking about how we can make food choices that

genuinely prioritize our health and our happiness and the significance of humans ability to change and let's be honest we could do with a collective change in our health right now. I think you are going to love it. So Tim, welcome to Wellness Unpacked. It is such a pleasure to see you again. And I'd love to just kickstart the interview with the question we ask everybody. What does wellness mean to you? Wellness really is waking up every morning happy and wanting to get on with the day and trying to look at the positive sides of that day.

I think for me, it's all about incremental happiness in a way and an absence of bad things. So the balance of good is always better than bad. That's such a nice outlook. We've been talking quite a lot about that recently, about when the kind of health and wellness industry started. It was so fixated on the external, on kind of looking for aesthetic results. And there has, I think, been this really positive shift about making it something on how you actually feel on a day-to-day basis. But I'm really interested that you said it's about feeling happy. And I'm sure we'll talk about this as we go through the episode.

But how do you see that intersection of your physical health and your mental health? I think they're becoming inseparable in a way. As we realize, you know, from the scientific medical point of view, there really is no clear distinction between the two. And that we should see ourselves in a much more holistic way and realize that the two are so closely linked we can't really separate them we've recently got some interesting insights with the company zoe doing the first personalized nutrition customers we were really surprised that the major benefit they found was in their levels of energy and their mood not in their weight and so we weren't expecting that so we initially didn't ask it. And it's partly

that the science and the nutrition haven't really asked those questions in the past. So we've been missing a really important part of the equation, I think, which we really need to take on board. And absolutely now, whenever we do anything, it's got to include things like energy levels and mood as one of the key outcomes. It's not just about your blood pressure and your weight and your image. I think, you know, it's really important what you're feeling inside. Yeah, so it's this more holistic 360 degree look at your total health as opposed to, I think health has often been quite reductive, as you said,

is what's your blood pressure or your BMI, for example. And as as a standalone it's not necessarily the best measure of our total well-being and I was reading in your new book and and some pieces around it the fact that you're really keen to dispel you think you describe them as woefully outdated myths that exist in the health literature and narrative and obviously one of them is the fact that you know we're all the same so this one diet will work brilliantly for all of us are there any other myths that you feel we're kind of quite deeply entrenched with as a society and that we need to let go of the sooner the better i think the number one entrenched myth after that sort of guideline one i guess is the calorie And however many people are now speaking out against calorie counting, it's still pervasive because essentially it's a multi-billion dollar industry.

It's not going to let go of it very quickly. And it has huge power and influence over everybody, including governments. And it also suits the food industry massively to be able to quantify their food in a way that totally obscures the quality of the food. And so it becomes the number one overriding way we, particularly in the US and the UK, look at food. And it's become such a distorted way of assessing food. And I think is largely responsible for the fact that we are consuming ever more amounts of ultra-processed foods and getting unhealthier every year because of it. We can all point to the fact that we're using the calorie counting as a sort of

massive disguise. So we don't have to talk about the elephant in the room. It's actually what actually is the stuff we're eating. You have 30, 20 ingredients all dressed up and says, oh, it's low calorie. It's only 400 calories. That's marvelous. You know, you can have five of these a day. That's the worst myth I think all of us need to realize is nonsense. Not that calories don't exist. Of course they do. But in practical terms, using them in your day-to-day life is of virtually no value. That's what I've learned over the last 10 years and certainly with increasing intensity over the last six years since writing this book, how it's abused and how calorie counting regimes for losing weight, they all work for six weeks and then the body just fights back and ultimately people who go through these cycles end up worse off and we did some studies looking at our twins identical twins where one did weight loss calorie restricted diets and the other one

didn't the one who didn't do the dieting actually ended up a lower weight 20 years on than the one who did do it. So the body is telling you something else. And the idea that you can measure food by its calories is complete nonsense. And there's all kinds of other evidence we can go into that I discuss in the book, like the ultra-processed food trial, where they took identical foods of identical calories and made up a sort of whole food burger and an ultra processed food burger equal taste equal good ratings and the ultra processed one made people overeat by about 200 calories in that day 10 percent of their intake they kept going back for more compared to the other one so there's something very different about how that energy was being used by the body feel like that leads us on perfectly to your first piece of advice which

feels like the pinnacle of all your work which is that everyone should understand they do not and will not ever dine alone you've got millions of microbes eating everything that you eat and that is gonna fundamentally impact your health. Absolutely. Yeah, it's even trillions of microbes. And, you know, we still don't know all their names and what they do and realize that it's not just bacteria, but it's viruses that feed off them. It's fungi, it's little parasites, which turn out to be really often healthy for us we thought we'd want to get rid of them and essentially knowing that you've got this huge community which is like an extra organ our bodies which basically there to produce lots of healthy chemicals to control your immune system your brain your metabolism digest the food produce vitamins and neurochemicals, and fight aging and cancer.

And we want as many diverse ones as possible. So it's absolutely crucial that when we're deciding what to eat, we're thinking of these guys. And that's where I came up with the expression, you know, you'll never dine alone because i've made this transition from very crude thinking as most doctors do about food and its macronutrients to you know this really sophisticated way of trying to feed your own inner garden or your fish tank or your jungle or you know in a commutative way so yeah i think what I'd love people to do from reading this book is to alter their view of food and get pleasure from the fact that not only is it giving you pleasure, but actually there are other beings that are also benefiting from it. And it's quite a fun way to think of food and should expand people's horizons about what to eat, which, you know, I think we're always struggling to do as people get into ruts and they like to have the same

kale salad and whatever. You know, just say, well, kale salad is great for one particular group of microbes, but think of all the other ones that, you know know just by adding a few other veggies and seeds and and herbs and things you could encourage you know and to me that's that's the image i i really want people to think about in food and i think it's a it's a very positive one yeah i agree i think it's incredibly empowering and i'd love actually to talk about that a bit more and about this fact that i think so many of us feel that our health is out of our hands and things happen to us and whether or not actually we've got a lot more control to an extent over it than we potentially think or potentially the kind of public narrative is to an extent. rewind a second and just give a 101 really of what is it that these microbes do you know how do they impact our mental and physical health why are they so so so important well we're still on a

learning journey what we do know is that there are thousands of different species in our gut. And when you feed them something like fiber, so take your kale, it's foods that reach the lower part of the colon where they live. There are a few in the upper parts, but we don't think they're nearly as crucial as the ones in our colon. So they like food that has fiber because it hasn't already been absorbed and it's their job to then feed off it and they will attack that fiber, break it down. That's what we call fermenting. So in a way, they are doing the same fermenting job that happens in your yogurt or your kombucha at home and they break it down into other chemicals. And some of these chemicals are really good for us, we're finding out. So they'll break down fiber.

They get the energy out of that plant. They get the polyphenols from it, which are the defense chemicals, which give it their color and their bitter tastes. And we've only just recently discovered it's the microbes that actually use that for energy. We can't use it directly. And they convert that with this energy that allows them to reproduce, get more of them, and then they break more of the fiber down and they produce other chemicals. For fiber, they produce things called short-chain

fatty acids, which are really important for our immune system. So they send out messages to all the immune cells lining our gut to boost it, to help its anti-infection defenses, its anti-cancer defenses, its cell repair defenses. And that's really a crucial part of just keeping us alive and keeping our repair processes going. And then there's other ones that will break down foods to produce specific chemicals. So you might eat something that has cheese in it, like tryptophan, and then microbes will break that down into dopamine. And dopamine is a neurotransmitter that gets into the blood and can start to affect the brain cells to change you in your anxiety and depression state and change your mood. And there are hundreds of other examples like that where we're starting to understand how they do work. They make some vitamins.

They make some B vitamins that we can't make, for example. They also know they send signals to the brain about appetite as well. And there is one of the current theories about why it takes 20 minutes before you get a signal to your brain that you'll feel full is that in general it takes 20 minutes for microbes to sense food and basically double in size. And then once they've reached a certain size, then the idea is they send a signal back to the brain to say, okay, we're happy now. You can send a fullness signal. So it's quite possible that sending the right signals to your gut is important,

and that's why whole foods do that and ultra-process never reach the gut microbes maybe don't send that those fullness signals down so we're starting to learn all kinds of things about the microbes but generally the two things in food they really like that we know about are the fibers which are hundreds of different elements all put together different structures soluble insoluble everything in between and these defense chemicals these thousands of different chemicals, which we all call together polyphenols, that are like the rocket fuel for these guys. And do you feel, because obviously, as you were saying, this is such a new area of research, do you feel in a way you're just scratching the surface and another 15 years

from now if we were having the same conversation you would have even more concrete examples of the power that the microbes have in determining our health absolutely we're at the dawn of this and already we've got clear scientific hard evidence that it works and we have a few cast-on examples. I'd love to come back. I don't think it'll be 15 years. I think it'd be in five years. I'm going to come back with hundreds of examples showing where we thought food had an effect. We can now prove it and it's much stronger than pharmaceuticals or anything else like that. And I think that's increasingly being shown that

gut microbes are key to how we transform normal medical drugs. Because if you reduce everything to the idea of it's a chemical, you know, and they attack all the chemicals in food, why shouldn't they attack all the chemicals in your drugs? And depending on your microbes, they can have different effects on your body. So I think, you know, we are seeing enormous strides in things like cancer therapy now, where microbes are absolutely the center of deciding whether people are going to live or die. And I think there are some fields that are really pushing this, and where, you know know we can get over that resistance from the traditional group of scientists who are resistant to new ideas particularly if it

involves diet and i think because it's very scientific it's got a chance of doing it doesn't sound like mumbo jumbo anymore when you use genetic sequencing and you've got respected scientists saying it, whereas if you'd said that 10 years ago, oh yes, you know, plants can help you with chemotherapy. No one would listen to you seriously. Whereas now you say they can double your chance of survival because the microbes are really affecting the immune system, which is really crucial for something like chemotherapy. It's fascinating how much the narrative has changed. I remember when I changed my diet, when I was on well 10, 11 years ago, and I stopped eating ultra processed foods. And that confused people so much. You know, I remember, you know, very smart people saying, oh, it's all just chemicals, not going to make any difference. And it's been absolutely fascinating

to see the shift in narrative. But I was going to ask you actually on that, it sounds to me very much like it's a kind of paradigm shift, like a real new frontier in medicine, in healthcare. But what do you say to all the kind of criticism or backlash, both from the medical field, as you said, the kind of skepticism still that remains of what you eat doesn't really make a difference. And also from the public. I mean, just you obviously sent a link ahead of this conversation, for example, to some Daily Mail articles you'd written in line with the new book about changing your diet, moving away from ultra processed foods. And it just still feels like there's a lack of will in the narrative to take this on board and almost take

that ownership of your health on board. Yeah, well, overcoming decades of culture that people don't feel in charge of their health through their food. So I think for many people, it has to be a sort of revelation moment that, you know, they've got to read enough of this stuff. And, you know, I do get quite a sort of revelation moment that, you know, they've got to read enough of this stuff. And, you know, I do get quite a few of my readers who say, yes, I get it. I've read the books. I do understand. I've changed my life and my family.

But what proportion of the population read our books? It's very small. and they've been trained like me in thinking that really food is a pretty worthless point of discussion when it comes to health, just take your tablets and go away. And you're dealing with a food industry that has massive lobbying power in government to make sure that no one changes the message that cheap food is the best way for the population. And we've seen that, you know, the politics of that. So I think in the UK and the US, we are facing an uphill battle to fight our lack of food culture and the food politics, the food companies, the diet industry. And, you know, you've got to be quite strong as an individual to say

i'm going to you know actually do this myself i'm going to you know it's like you suddenly change religion and you say this does matter i'm going to take a gut-centric view of the world you know whether you're vegan meat eater whatever i say well i'll forget all that i'm actually going to these are the guys i'm going to look after. These are my animals. I'm going to do what's right and ethical for them. And I think that that's quite a big change for many people who, you know, just the idea of the calorie, people still get very upset at medical meetings

when I say, you know, calories are rubbish. They say, well, you can't say that. It's fact. It's, you know, one of the laws of thermodynamics and all this kind of nonsense. And they're very much stuck. It reminds me a bit like Galileo's time, you know, when arguing the world was round. But I think it's fast moving. And I've seen a change since I wrote my first book in how it's been perceived and how I'm not seen as quite such an outsider, wacko figure now. You know, the good thing about particularly the UK is the speed at which you can make changes in the supermarket. And who would have predicted five years ago that every supermarket would now have kefir and not only kefir but you've got kimchi and you've got kombucha in pubs it's not everywhere

in the country but in london you can get kombucha in most pubs now and i just think there is some hope there because by the consumer demanding this stuff you can change things and not have to wait for governments and the nhs guidelines etc and do you think because i think that analogy about the world being flat and the madness of trying to argue that it wasn't it's actually a really powerful analogy it seems to me from where I'm sitting that we've now got this large and ever-growing body of evidence that what you eat and how you treat your body has a fundamental impact on your health and disease etc but there there's definitely whilst there's fast uptake in some senses there's still frustration you look at food that's served in hospitals it feels like the polar opposite of what's feeding the gut do you feel in the long run the evidence will just be insurmountable and

the guidelines will just have to change gps will just have to change the whole narrative will have to be actually what you eat is fundamental and we will see this move away from the rise in ultra process and we will see this return to eating lots of plants, lots of vegetables, that will become our norm again? Or do you think that's just wishful thinking? Well, it's definitely wishful thinking. I'm not convinced that politics is going to change, but I do think there's a chance that we can change the way supermarkets think and work. I think they'll produce what people want to eat. And I think we've seen that with fermented foods already. So I think we can have more and more products that do help that.

I think it is going to be a bottom-up approach. And people will tell their GPs that they're wrong. And people who really don't know anything about nutrition will have to relearn it. Definitely. And I think that leads me on really nicely, actually, to your second piece of advice, which is the only guaranteed investment you can make in your health and happiness is to make the right food choices. And I think that's a really interesting statement in line with what you were just saying, but also the fact that I feel, again, if we're going to look at kind of government guidelines or the traditional narrative, it's always, you know,

exercise comes first. example you know if you want to lose weight exercise which as you said at the beginning doesn't actually work the science isn't there to support that but i'm curious why you've put forward just food as the main driver for your both the health and the happiness element i've just come to the realization that it's probably the number one you know yes you've got exercise yes you've got sleep yes you've got work yes you've got social relationships sex everything you know all these other things that are important but if you haven't got the food right you can have the most catastrophic effects and it's probably the one thing you've got most control of all these other things can

happen or not yeah they're not in your power and for most of us not everybody i realize some you know disadvantaged people have very little choice in the food in western countries but i think we make hundreds of food choices every week and that is actually empowering and at the moment we're not using that power. There was a stat that came out, there was a YouGov poll a few weeks ago saying 58% of people in the UK do not eat a vegetable every day, which is quite extraordinary.

It is and it just shows how ridiculous the government's five-a-day policy and the amazing failure of that has been. And I just think this is something that everyone can do. Not everyone can get out and run a marathon, or it's not easy if you've got young kids to always get eight-and-a-half hours sleep, for example, but everyone should be able to pick the right foods. And that would make the whole country happier have more energy and you

have less less illnesses and disease so yeah i when i was when i was thinking of it i said oh sounds a bit arrogant or amazing but actually i think it makes a lot of sense and if people are listening to this and thinking okay so what are the guidelines therefore that i should stick with if i'm thinking about my diet what's on my plate every day are there say three to five rules effectively that you say actually if we all live by that we would dramatically increase our chances of good health and longevity well i hate the word rules because that makes me sound like i'm you know i'm the prompt recommendation minister of health it's true and also rules are impossible because I do and I'm interested in your thoughts but I do think a kind of daily ish concept is much more powerful because it's highly unlikely

you'd be able to stick to anything all day every day 365 days a year yeah no of course and I'm I'm the perfect one who is often failing to meet my own aspirations. But general rules are if you can look after your gut microbes with your diet, then you're halfway there. And what should you be doing on a daily basis more specifically to be nourishing those microbes? My four suggestions would be first try and eat 30 different plants a week. And people go, oh, I can't have 30 types of kale. But a seed is a plant. A nut is a plant. I now count coffee as a plant because it is a fermented plant and actually it's super healthy. Herbs and spices, spice mixes are amazingly good for the gut microbiome.

So if you take a very liberal view of what plants are, then it's actually not that hard. One of the questions I always see on that is what constitutes a serving or a portion of one of those 30? Do you have to get that specific or are the microbes just thrilled to get any? I think they're thrilled to get any. We haven't got large enough studies to know about what the minimum amount is. Okay. And so it is to some extent guesswork, particularly when it comes down to herbs and spices. But we do know that the fact that herbs and spices means they're very concentrated in terms of the chemicals they've got. They're always the, you know, the sprouting bit of the plant. It's got most of the polyphenols. So

you may need hundreds of times less than you do eating the full mature plant. But for example, a teaspoon of a spice mix every day into food, you know, improve the gut microbes in a randomized controlled trial. So you don't need masses, but, you know, you need more than one grain probably. So put as much as you can without it messing up your meal. And clearly taste is still going to be the main reason. We've got to love food, otherwise, you know, we've lost the plot if we don't really enjoy what we're eating. And experiment. I'm always adding my seed and nut mix to my yogurts and the breakfast, sticking it on the salads. It's dead easy.

And keeping that jar full of interesting, every time you see a new nut or a seed, you fill it up. It's actually quite fun to find new stuff and add in. They don't have to be expensive ones. And that 30 rule is, you know, is a rough one. And then the second point is to try and pick from those 30 the ones that are highest in these defense chemicals, the polyphenols. So the bright colors, the bright berries, the bright fruits, the ones with the anthocyanins, the blues, the purples, the reds. And they often are slightly bitter as well. So which in recent years, we've sort of been weaned off by the manufacturers. So we don't like sour or bitter taste, but

get used to those again. And remember that remember that you know many things like dark chocolate is a very good source of polyphenols coffee i mentioned extra virgin olive oil you know the ones really good ones that make you cough and astringent and also the nuts and the seeds are also really good for that and then fermented foods regularly i think that's the the other bit that we the uk and the us really don't do well you know we have children's yogurts which should be labeled a health hazard because of the terrible ingredients and lack of any benefit there i think that's the same goes for the vast majority of children's packaged foods yes no i don't if you look at all the healthy countries in the mediterranean you know they don't have children's packaged foods yes no i don't if you look at all the healthy countries

in the mediterranean you know they don't have children's menus the children eat what the adults do and that's why they're healthier we have to change that culture which is just to help the manufacturers sell more rubbish to the kids and keep them with a sweet tooth i was going to say and presumably also because that's one of the things I'm really conscious of with my own children, is it sets their preferences and taste buds up for, let's be reductive and call it failure, from a very early age. Well, that's right.

It just notches up the threshold of sweetness. And so it's very hard for them to then have the bitter and sour taste that are where all the healthy food ranges. And even with artificial sweeteners they still that's still the same problem and so yeah i mean so fermented foods but we're talking healthy fermented foods without the sweeteners the ingredients the fake fruit all this other stuff and it's getting kids and adults to to learn to like it and you've got the full range there so you know yes full fat yogurt always have full fat because the fat actually has important nutrients in it no evidence anywhere that low fat dairy is is better for you and most experts now say it's

worse and yet that was the huge con of the last sort of 30 years. And they gave us extra starches and carbs and other sort of additives we didn't want to make up for the fat. And people do kefir. As I mentioned, it's quite common. Many people may not have actually tried it or think, oh, it's a little bit too sour for me. Start mixing it in with the yogurt. It has at least five times the number of microbes that

your yogurt has and then artisan cheese is good and then you've got the non-dairy ones which are important so you've got all the kimchi's the krauts which have 20 different types of fungus and microbe and they're really good you can just have tiny amounts on them. And, of course, I'm a big lover of kombucha, which is now all over the place, some better than others. Beware the big commercial brands that have long shelf lives and don't have that sediment in the bottom because they probably don't have much live microbe in there. But this is an area that's really, really exploding. And so there's plenty of fermented foods people can buy, but also make them yourself. I started from scratch and it's really dead easy. And it's much cheaper if you want to do it yourself.

And you definitely know you've got real microbes when they're growing in your fridge and you can smell them and they go off. I remember my first kombucha and I did look at it and think, I was pregnant at the time and I was like, is this okay to drink? But it's good. It's, yeah, and to help your immunity and things. And it's a small shot of this every day.

It's not like having a binge once a week that's important. We know that these products do stay in the gut for a couple of days, but they don't live there permanently. So you've got to keep replenishing them for them to have a beneficial effect. And then the final piece of advice is around two things.

It's reducing as much as possible ultra-processed foods. And so knowing what they are, knowing the difference between ultra-processed food and a lightly processed food it's very you can't totally avoid processing because even milk is a processed food under most definitions but is it all the emulsifiers and the stabilizers etc in the ultra processed foods and the lack of fiber is that what's really driving them being a problem yes the lack of fiber so there's nothing for the microbes to eat. Then to fill in the gap, because they've taken away all the husks and all the external source of the grains, they're using extracts of the original products in sort of chemical formulas that they stick together at high temperature and high pressure to make it look like cornflakes or something resembling the original and then to get it to stick together they've got these gums these emulsifiers these colorants these additives these preservatives and an increasing number of these chemicals that you never see or heard of and as we start test them on the gut microbiome, we find that many people have a bad interaction with them and that they do upset the gut microbes, get them to produce chemicals that they wouldn't normally produce, meaning they're not inert, just like the artificial to diet drinks, which they don't,

is because they're having this negative effect on metabolism. And I recently just found out saccharin and sucralose in one in three people cause a sugar spike. They do in me. And they shouldn't do according to the manufacturer's safety because they never test them properly. So it's knowing that how do you shift your food habits from buying, say, a bread that looks very healthy on the outside, but actually when you look closely, the ingredients has got 20 ingredients and is made in a totally artificial chemical factory, and the bread is all dyed brown, and it's got nice harvest details of label,

and it's complete rubbish, and hugely different to making your own sourdough or equivalent or having a rye bread packed with fiber that gets right to your gut microbes. So cutting back on the ultra processed foods realizing what they are realizing that yeah we can't avoid them completely and they are nice as an occasional treat i'm not going to be like the food police and i guess the final bit of advice is about fasting periods and this is a really interesting one that as we extend our fasting times overnight it helps our gut microbes to repair our gut and going back to what our ancestors did i

think is the other tip if you like and if you follow those things it doesn't really matter what else you do and you can do it in your own way or style doesn't matter if you're vegetarian or vegan or meat-eating pescatarian you will be healthier in a way it feels from what you just said that basically our narrative around food is just way too complicated it's just almost just strip it right back and eating those simple whole food ingredients as you said for the most part and feeling relaxed around what you do you know 10 20 percent of the time would set you up for success for the long term of your life versus jumping on this diet and then this diet and then this trend and then

falling on and off a wagon and feeling like yeah it just you can't get to where you want to be and it's fighting what i call reductionism where where, you know, what's the evil compound of the week? Oh, well, this week it's lectin. You know, next week it's nitrites. Next week it's carrageenan. Next week it's, you know, you've got to see food in a much more holistic light, made up of 30,000 chemicals.

And you can't reduce it to some one particular ingredient that just makes it easy to write a book about it we're going to eat good stuff and bad stuff but if you eat mostly good stuff it's not going to matter and it is going to really impact the trajectory of your health it's going to yeah be crucial and i think that leads us on very nicely to your third piece of advice which is realizing that we can all change and we have to be flexible and i think that leads us on very nicely to your third piece of advice, which is realizing that we can all change and we have to be flexible. And I think that really speaks to what you were just saying, which is moving this narrative on, changing the way that we think about and talk about food. And, you know, it's OK to let go of past ideas. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

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offering host endorsements 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. Yeah, and I just take from my personal experience. I was an arrogant doctor, thought I knew what I was talking about when patients used to come to me and ask for diet advice and I was giving them the wrong advice. And I was also eating wrong things myself in the era of low fat and high carbs and doing what I think was healthy. And I realize now, you know, my healthy breakfast then of, you know, muesli and orange juice and low-fat milk was just complete nonsense. And I've proven it now. So I think it's realizing that, you know,

there's nothing wrong with admitting we got it wrong and it wasn't good for your body. And we have to realize this the whole science is evolving so fast that ideas we had 10 years ago might well be wrong and in 10 years time we might chat to me and say what did i get wrong 10 years ago and i think we just got to be much more open about it realize that it is perhaps far from being the most boring area of science which it had its reputation as that's why no doctors ever deign to go into it it being the most boring area of science, which it had its reputation as. That's why no doctors ever deign to go into it.

It's the most exciting cutting edge of science. But in that, it's this huge complexity. And we as humans may not be able to deal with it without the help of technology and apps to find our way around it. The complexity of food, our guts, our own individuality, our personalization. I think we're going to need help. But first, we need the humility to think we don't have all the answers just because we've joined a particular food religion,

which might suit some people, but definitely not others. I know it does feel like food is far too emotive and personal. And it's one of the reasons I think it's so difficult to talk about is it almost feels like we sense that people are attacking us on a very, very personal kind of soulful level, as opposed to a discussion around choices about things that are actually largely unrelated to us all as individuals. But I'm really curious, Tim, just in your own personal life, having made all these changes, do you really notice the difference on a day-to-day basis in your health and your well-being? Yeah, I really do. Not only did I, without ever counting calories, lose weight slowly over 10 years, but I've also learned that I can feel hunger without any problem, whereas before that was sort of unimaginable.

I had a sort of feeling of an empty tummy in the mid-morning, and I had to fill it. Now I can sort of, my psychology has changed. I can eat or not eat and, in a way, embrace it, realizing that what I eat does change my energy levels, which I didn't focus on at all and yeah many of the things that i thought were good for me turn out not be good for me but also yeah realizing that you know i can be flexible and you know you don't have to be absolutely rigid about it you You know, I virtually don't eat meat, but occasionally you go to Spain or somewhere and they're presenting you with their finest hams and everything. And you

just say, well, yeah, okay. It's not going to make any difference to my health to eat this because I generally don't eat meat. I'm doing my bit for the environment. I think we're all going to have some flexibility in order to sustain these lifestyle changes and i think for some people it's easy to be rigid but i think for a lot of the population realizing you can you know have a day off cheat whatever doesn't matter as long as the over the course of that month that year your net choices have benefited your health you know the environment and you're happy with them ethically. Yeah. Then I think that's really important. I so subscribe to that. I think that we, I think if people take something away from this, I think the idea of looking at your health

over decades, not over days is so important. We're obsessed with a quick fix, a magic bullet, one answer that will solve everything or one pill that you can take. And I guess to conclude it would be fair to say that that just doesn't exist there is no magic bullet no but there is this idea it's a change in our whole culture and mindset and a whole different reason to eat and if you do that and you have a long-term relationship with your gut microbes, that's going to help you and it's going to help the planet. I love that. Well, thank you so much, Tim.

I so appreciate everything today, and thank you for sharing all your insights with us. My pleasure. So that was a pretty intense episode, I think. Tim shared the most extraordinary amount of knowledge with us really in a relatively short period of time and I hope you feel really inspired and empowered to start thinking about the power of your gut health, the power that you and we all have to influence that. I think that's what's so exciting about gut health is that so much of our health therefore sits in our own hands it's very

empowering although I appreciate also a little bit daunting and it's always almost unnerving to hear that so many of these deeply entrenched narratives and societal norms like calorie counting should just be chucked out the window so I appreciate if you feel that way but I hope that it's been incredibly insightful at the same time I have to say I loved asking Tim about this week's fact or fad I'm just going to be honest before we get into it this is one that I just can't get my head around and it's meal replacements so they're promoted as being both time-saving and nutritionally complete in liquid or powder form but what do we all actually think are they good are they not so

good let's get what tim has to say on the topic this is a very negative way for us to think about food and there are no long-term studies showing it's healthy to move us away from the enjoyment of real food is about the worst thing we could possibly be doing to ourselves. So unless there are real extenuating circumstances to replace meals, I'm absolutely against it. So is it a fact? Is it a fad? Let's find out what Dr Gemma Newman thinks. So Gemma, this week's trend is one that I am personally absolutely fascinated in. I think I'm right in saying that it's about a $12 billion industry and it's a brand new industry really, which is meal replacements. Well, you say brand new, but SlimFast has been around for a very long time. And that is one of the main reasons in the past where people would consider meal replacements is for weight loss.

And so I find it equally fascinating because it feeds into our ideas as a society about what we should eat and why. What are your instincts on meal replacement as somebody who is so passionate about food? To be totally honest, and there's always exceptions, I'm really anti them. I feel very, very passionately that we need to learn to eat properly because we've got to learn to live sustainable lives. And I mean sustainable in the widest use of the word, which is that our lives are really busy. Many of us live in busy cities or busy towns all over the world we're juggling all sorts of different things in our lives and I think we're always looking for what's the easy answer or what could I do when I'm on holiday or when life's really easy and life isn't really easy so much the time

like we do have complicated days or complicated periods of our lives and I think we have to learn to find elements of nourishment that are sustainable every single day. And in that, I think we do need to learn to eat properly. I mean, you know better than anybody the fact that as a total population, our diets are just nothing short of atrocious. And I don't mean to be kind of too alarmist about it, but it's extraordinary what we're seeing. I mean, there was a really alarming report, I think it was last week, about the rise in cancer cases in the under 50s linked to our declining gut microbiome because we just don't eat properly anymore. We don't eat enough fiber, as we were saying the other week. We don't eat enough fruit and vegetables, about 60% of our

calories from ultra-processed food. Our diets are appalling. And I almost feel like these meal replacements, I think they're being positioned as this magic answer, this quick fix. I don't need to cook for myself. I can just get this and I can get everything I need. And I think I really struggle to believe you're actually getting everything that you need. But as I said, I also think we've got to learn to eat properly. We've got to learn what is a quick, easy meal I can have on a busy week what's a 10 minute supper what's a great choice when I'm out and about what's a simple packed lunch and I'm not saying everyone has to eat 100% whole food ingredients all the time but I do think we've got to learn to eat properly and not have 60% of our food from ultra processed ingredients

and I feel like this is just fueling the quick fix disconnect from cooking from real food. Yeah thank you for sharing that. That was a bit of a soapbox. It was but I love an Ella soapbox rant. It was a bit of a soapbox. I love that. No you have to be honest and I think you are right I think you are right. I think meal replacement does take a lot of the joy out of food. And it's kind of sad when people feel that they have to rely on meal replacement in order to when it comes to weight loss. The direct trial, big trial, I think it was out of Newcastle on type 2 diabetic patients who were having a very low calorie diet. They used meal replacements. It was really successful. I really struggle with the idea of maintaining that way of eating. I think if you were going to do it for every meal, it would get boring very quickly. But even doing it for the occasional breakfast or lunch, I think it's hard to live that way. And who wants to live that way? Having meal replacement shakes and bars rather than actual food. I think it's a nice way of ensuring that you actually have a really balanced diet if you learn how to cook. But

again, it's nuanced. Not everybody is going to have the mental bandwidth for that. And people sometimes want to have a quick start way of being able to control the energy that they're taking in when they have been sort of habitually used to eating more energy than their body needs. So it can have its uses. And, you know, there are lots of people that say, well, my life is just too busy and I can't be bothered to learn how to cook but I still want to get those nutrients so for people who are in that situation and they really want to do it then go for it but as you say I don't think it's something that should be marketed as a this is going to be a real game changer this is what everybody should be doing because it's just kind of much less fun too. Yeah I worry that if fuels are on a bandwagon off a bandwagon culture which is so deeply entrenched I think in our society which is kind of okay I'm being

quote-unquote good and you know I'm not eating these sorts of foods or these sorts of foods and then you kind of have a blowout and then you go back on meal replacements and it just it's not good I don't think it's good for your mental well-being in that sense and you know it's bigger questions but like how do we really build fundamental building blocks of self-esteem and self-worth that we are worth taking care of and wanting to do that for our bodies it's not to say you could never have one but i think if we're starting to rely on them yeah and i'm really curious your sense as well because if you look at the ingredients it's impossible to have a full meal pulverized and put on an ambient shelf you know to be shelf stable without adding various different preservatives you know lots of emulsifiers in

yeah and again we obviously are now starting to see the research to show that ingredients like emulsifiers are really detrimental to our gut health, obviously key to our total well-being. So I think I'm also not convinced that in time the science is also going to come out. As you said, that there'll be benefits, for example, in very specific health cases of needing to control calorie intake or weight in a very quick way and I can see absolute merit there but I see that as a very very medicalized and supervised approach with this versus an everyday person out technically leading a healthy life and using these as shortcuts I'm just not sure that in a few years time the data will be so kind to the ingredients that they include yeah I, I think time will tell. You're right, there are some artificial ingredients there to help preserve the product and maybe boost the nutrient availability given that it's got such a long shelf life. And there will be differences

in quality as well. Like you say, some products boast meal replacement, but they don't live up to the expectations. You have to look for at least three grams of fiber in a shake, for example, and the protein content should be higher than or equal to the carbohydrate content, for example, if you're going to be thinking about meal replacements. And also they are low on calories. Like a lot of them will only have maybe 150, 200 calories, which is clearly much less than you would eat in a normal meal. And so again, doing that long term may actually be of a detriment when you're not necessarily looking to lose excess weight. And you have to be careful about allergens too with these things, especially if you have lactose

intolerance, for example, you have to check what the ingredients are. Emulsifiers, as you say, may be detrimental to the gut microbiome. So yeah, there's a number of nuanced issues with them, but I think the bottom line is that they're kind of boring. They take the joy away from eating and they remove those social aspects to food, like community, but it is effortless nutrition and it could save money for some people. There's no prep involved and it does help with portion control so I think on balance it's something that some people will find useful some of the time but as a way of eating I think it's um it's it's really quite depressing so would you class it as a fact or a fad it's a fact for a few people

in specific circumstances but I would much rather see people eat real food love that me too 100 times out of 100 i have to say that was probably my most impassionate response to a fact or fad um and i would love to hear what you all think as well as always just get in touch it's either podcast at deliciouslyella.com or at deliciouslyella on social let us know if there's any other trends you want us to look at, any other topics or guests you want us to get involved in. And next week, I'm going to be back here talking to Dr. Nicole Lepera, who is incredibly well known. We're going to be discussing how to truly live in connection with your body. So a little bit different from this week, a little bit more holistic holistic I think you're all going to get a lot from it she's absolutely fascinating and then

in fact or fad we're on another trend that I could soapbox about which is the keto diet and one I'm very excited to dissect with Dr Gemma Newman so I will see you back here next week thank you so much for listening for coming on this wellness journey with us. And as always, massive thank you to Curly Media, who are our partners in producing the show. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself

with podcast advertising from Libsyn ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements 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.