The Wellness Scoop - Why Calories Don’t Count

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

Why calorie-counting simply doesn’t stack up, with Giles Yeo. We ask: are all calories equal; what’s the connection between calories and weight loss; and are foods with fewer calories automatica...lly better for you? A debunk of every calorie myth, why we need a fundamental restructure of the food system and whether we really can be healthy at every size. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 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.
Starting point is 00:00:22 Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, and welcome to our podcast with me, Ella Mills. Our podcast, Delicious Ways to Feel Better, is a weekly show that is focused on absolutely everything that matters to us at Delicious the Ella and we really really believe that feeling good is about a holistic 360 degree approach to our lifestyles and that in that wellness is about so much more than simply just what we eat or how we exercise. It's also about our relationships both with ourselves and with others, our mindset, our sleep patterns, our stress levels, and just how we look after ourselves and understand ourselves on a day-to-day basis.
Starting point is 00:01:10 So on this podcast, each week, we're going to be breaking down all of these different topics, looking at absolutely everything that impacts on both our mental and our physical health, and in that, sharing small and simple changes that will hopefully inspire you to feel that little bit better. And today, we are talking about calories, which is particularly exciting. And before we get into that, a couple of things I want to talk to you about. First of all, this is our second to last episode for a couple of months. We're going to be pausing over the summer. We will be opening our restaurant, Plants, in two weeks time.
Starting point is 00:01:41 Bookings are now open. If you head to our website, you can book your table at Plants. I cannot tell you how excited I am to share this with the world. We have been testing and testing over the last couple of weeks and the food is just, it's so much more, I guess,
Starting point is 00:01:54 than what I hoped it would be as it all comes together and as the actual physical space comes together and the menus are printed and everything. And just this amazing array of things from salt-baked salario carpaccio with our own walnut parmesan to amazing asparagus ceviche to crispy mole empanadas with homemade creme fraiche. We're making everything in-house, including culturing our own butter and labneh, which takes 24 hours. And we serve the labneh with Romanesco sauce and these amazing roasted carrots.
Starting point is 00:02:24 We've got oyster mushrooms cooked as scallops with parsnip bacon. We've got this amazing aubergine bacon with a Caesar salad. I mean, it's so cool. So hopefully we'll see you there. But if you head to our website, you can book your table at Plant.
Starting point is 00:02:36 We're finalising a few very exciting parts of our food range. And actually, we've just finished recording the episode with Giles that we're about to get into. And I have to say, it made me really proud listening to it because I think one of the biggest things we've had in building our food products business is in some ways, Matt always says it's kind of like a giant experiment because everything we do is completely natural. We don't use any emulsifiers, any stabilizers, any flavorings. We make everything literally as you would at home,
Starting point is 00:03:01 just in bigger pots and bigger blenders and trying to bring that completely homemade approach to the food industry has honestly it's been a huge challenge and we've been turned away from loads of partners because they just can't work like that and we've kept at it and we've kept at it so to get to this point now and realize in having these conversations with the experts why that's so important that's yeah brought a lot of me. But as I said, we've got some really exciting things coming over the next couple of months that we'll be working on while the podcast is on pause and writing a brand new book. I've spent the last month researching an essay for my nutritional therapy degree on a vegan diet versus an omnivore diet. And that's really informing
Starting point is 00:03:39 the thinking for the new book. And yeah, it's going to be a deep dive and a serious few months of getting my head into it. But I'm very excited about that. And also finalizing everything for the desktop version of our app, which will be coming at the end of the summer as well. So just a couple of projects to be working on, which is why we're going to put this on pause. So we'll be back at the end of the summer. But to get into today's episode, we're going to be talking to Giles Yeo, who is a brilliant geneticist from Cambridge University, and he specializes in the topic of obesity, our mindset around our weight and calories, most importantly. And as I think we all know, calories are literally everywhere.
Starting point is 00:04:16 We get so many questions about them, and lots of you have asked us to talk about it on the podcast. So I hope this answers lots of questions. I know they cause a huge amount of confusion. So again, hopefully we're going to be able to clear that up today. So welcome, Giles. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Thank you for having me, Ella. So first of all, massive congratulations on the book. I've been really excited about this episode because you said at the beginning of the book, but I feel like calories, it's a word we just
Starting point is 00:04:42 see everywhere. It's a concept we're quite obsessed with. I know it's probably the number one question we get in our inbox. Tell me about the calories of this. Tell me about the calories of that. So I personally find your book particularly interesting. And I'd love just to start, I guess, the beginning and for everyone who's listening, the premise of this conversation, the premise of Giles' book is, I'm just going to quote you, you said, here's the thing that most people have no idea about, all in capital letters, or the calorie counts that you see everywhere today are in capital letters, wrong. So let's start there. Tell us why. I mean, very simplistically, we need to eat the food we're
Starting point is 00:05:18 eating and digest it so we can absorb it into our body. Then the second step, we need to be able to metabolize the food in order to then convert it to energy. And so if you have 100 calories of sugar, and you eat the 100 calories of sugar, actually, there's very little that needs to be done because sugar is sucrose. One cut, we absorb it. There's hardly any energy that's required. If, however, you had 100 calories of sweet corn, and you ate it, and then you looked in the loo the next morning, it's painfully clear you haven't absorbed anywhere close to 100 calories of sweet corn. But yet, when you take sweet corn, you desiccate it, you pound it into a cornmeal, you make a corn tortilla or make cornbread, whatever it is you want to do, suddenly the calories, exactly the same 100
Starting point is 00:06:00 calories of corn, you get more calories from that particular food. But my point is, if you are blindly saying, oh, for lunch today, I'm supposed to have 250 calories, but is it from sugar? Is it from sweet corn? Is it from celery? Or is it from a steak? And those caloric availability, which is the term I use, the amount of calories you can extract from a food is very, very different from the total number of calories actually stuck in the food. So just to delve into that, if I had my tin of sweet corn, and I put it into a salad and ate it whole, then that would be one way of doing it. If I blended it up myself in my blender,
Starting point is 00:06:42 and made it into, as you said, cornbread, even that is going to completely change the way that it's actually absorbed in the body. Yes, that will change it slightly. Now, clearly, it depends on what you do. Blending something will increase the caloric availability of the food, but slightly. Cooking it or completely converting it, because when you actually dry it and pound it and turn it into a cornmeal, that's beyond blending, right? You're doing something else to it. But the fiber is still going to be there. It hasn't been broken down. It's still going to be there. So that will still slow down the availability of calories that are there. But yes, blending will make a difference.
Starting point is 00:07:17 It's absolutely fascinating. And so that's the concept, right? That it's basically the calories that we're seeing. It's an oversimplistic representation, because there's so much nuance effectively. And I am right in saying that even as you said, like protein is calculated on fats calculated, but actually, if it's animal protein versus plant protein, again, that's a different number of calories within the body. That's correct. And there's different reasons why you might say, well, why is there a difference between animal protein and plant protein, just as an example? And that's because of the way they're actually put together. So plant protein are going to be stuck within the fibre of plants. Animals don't have fibre. So therefore, the way you actually
Starting point is 00:07:57 go in and take out the various nutrients is going to differ. And also how you prepare the food. Are you eating it raw? Are you eating it steamed? Are you eating it deep fried? Or have you slow cooked it on a barbecue for 10 hours? And all of that is going to change the amount of caloric availability. I just want to point out, it's interesting, I posted on the socials about the book, why calories don't count as the book. Oh my god, let me tell you who hated that specific title, the gym bros. So just to be clear, calories obviously count in a sense where they are a unit of energy. And if you're saying, I've eaten 200 calories of chips, for example, but I need to reduce my calorie intake. And so I'm going to have 100 calories of chips. Now that clearly is halving the amount of chips you're
Starting point is 00:08:41 eating and the amount of energy. And that is perfectly fine and perfectly reasonable my issue is comparing 100 calories of chips to 100 calories of sweet corn or 100 calories of steak or 100 calories of anything else that makes no sense whatsoever yeah and that was actually my next question for you is because i think that's something you see quite a lot is someone will say so take an avocado for, for example, high in fat, people will say, oh, it's a lot of calories. It's the same number of calories as a Mars bar. I could just have a Mars bar. Are all calories equal? Are our bodies going to absorb those two sets of calories differently? Yes, they are. You have three types of calories, broadly speaking. You have calories from carbs, calories from fat and calories from protein. Those are our three key fuels that we actually use once they actually get absorbed into us.
Starting point is 00:09:29 And how our body takes it apart or stores it or actually extracts energy from it is going to differ from each to each. So, for example, a calorie of protein, wherever it comes from, plants or otherwise, makes you feel fuller than a calorie of fat, than a calorie of carb, even though it's exactly the same energy. But the reason it makes us feel different and makes our brain sense it differently is because of the amount of energy within us that it takes to actually take it apart. But if you obviously have something with a lot of fiber in it, you have a whole wheat, whole meal, then you're probably looking at 92 to 95% available. So 92 to 95 calories, depending on what you're eating. Fat is about 98% available because it's very, very dense. We use it as our key fuel. But protein, any source of protein will be on average
Starting point is 00:10:18 only 70% available, which means that for every 100 calories of protein you eat, we as a human being will only ever be able to absorb and use at 70 calories of protein. So even just by that in itself, the calorie counts on the side of the pack is going to be wrong by 30% for protein in itself, because we give it off as heat. We never use it to power ourselves. That's absolutely fascinating. That starts to make sense. So it is true to say in a simplistic term, all calories are not equal. I think it is. So all calories are equal the moment they're in you
Starting point is 00:10:50 and as a unit of energy. But the problem is we don't eat calories. We eat the food. So it matters what food we're eating. Then you can take the calories in context and counting calories blindly removes that number from the context of the food from which it originated. I do think that's a problem. Yeah, no, I completely agree with you. And I think
Starting point is 00:11:12 certainly I see a lot of focus on calories in terms of deciphering whether a meal or something to eat is good for you or not, almost. And so this idea that something with less calories in is going to be good for you. And I know that's, you you know you said that's the question you get a lot of foods with fewer calories automatically better for you and it feels like sometimes again it's like a very simplistic way of looking at it and it doesn't then look at the nutrients and the fiber and things like that and again is it fair to say that it's not true that foods with fewer calories are automatically better for you? No it's not true at I mean, let's just take orange juice as the difference between orange juice and an orange. Now, clearly, the orange juice has come from the orange, right? But because
Starting point is 00:11:54 of the presence of fiber within the orange, your body does a whole lot of different things with the orange than it would with the orange juice. Now, the orange juice still has the vitamin C, still has the minerals, but it still has the sugar. Whereas what happens in the orange containing exactly the same thing, the presence of the fiber suddenly makes a difference. The level of glucose excursion, so how quickly your blood sugar levels go up after a meal, differs from an orange compared to orange juice, even though it's exactly the same thing. Now, given that's exactly the same thing, what will happen now when you take 100 calories of sugar versus 100 calories of anything else? It's going to be incomparable because of the way that our body actually deals with it. And you mentioned fiber there, and I know you've got so much,
Starting point is 00:12:39 again, in the book about fiber and how important it is. Will you give us a top line on that as well? I mean, there are any number of benefits to fibre, obviously, but the most important is it keeps your whole gut happy. All right. So A, the bugs in the gut love fibre and B, it keeps everything regular. It's critical that it's regular because our gut is a way of sorting out the food and then expelling the stuff we don't need. And fiber is critical for everything to function nicely. So that's the first thing. But the second thing, it does change the speed of which the calories that our body actually extracts the calories. And given that fiber is found almost entirely in plant-based products rather than animals, animals have very little
Starting point is 00:13:22 fiber of any fiber at all. So when we're talking about fiber, we are talking about plant-based foods. Then what fiber does is slow the release primarily of carbohydrates, but also of other foods that are actually going to be in there. And why is this important? This is important because even though we're eating the same calorie count of whatever it is you're eating, an apple, an orange, the rate at which the sugar, the carbohydrate, is released into the blood is critical. Because what happens is if it gets released into the blood slower, A, you feel less hungry for longer, and that's got to be a good thing if you're healthy eating. And once again, this is exactly the same foods, but with the presence of fiber. So that's the
Starting point is 00:14:00 reason why fiber is so very, very important to our diet. So then if we just take that a bit further, if, for example, and there's a question I want to come on to this, but if we had a piece of whole grain bread with lots of seeds and things in, and then you had a piece of sandwich bread, even if they were the exact same calorie count inside your body, the calorie count effectively is going to be quite different. So there is a story which I write within the book, and there was an experiment which was done. They took exactly the same cheese sandwich. They just said, here is a store-bought white bread processed cheese sandwich, and here is a whole meal slice of cheddar cheese sandwich. They matched it as far as they could for calories, and then got the same
Starting point is 00:14:40 group of people to eat both, randomised. And what they did was they measured a whole lot of stuff, but in particular, they measured, the term is called diet-induced thermogenesis. And that's the scientific term, but it's the heat you give off after you eat. And the reason we give off heat is because our body is sorting out the food, managing the food,
Starting point is 00:15:01 and this is the excess energy that's actually given off. It's a marker of how hard your body is working to take apart the food and this is the excess energy that's actually given off it's a marker of how hard your body is working to take apart the food and this is energy we don't store or use in ourselves and what is critical is that the people when they ate the whole meal bread versus when they actually ate the processed white store-bought bread they actually gave off a lot more heat and so that is really really interesting And so as a result, the exact same calories in exactly the same two meal, if you look on the table says, well, okay, one is brown bread, one is white bread, but they're both cheese sandwiches. It turned out to
Starting point is 00:15:34 actually have a substantial different amount of calories you ended up absorbing. That's so interesting. So again, coming back to what you said right at the beginning, which is that the label would say that they're both 500 calories, But then once they're inside your body, it's effectively incorrect. For me, it's so enlightening because I just think it's calories can become such a huge part of people's life and I think can make us make decisions which aren't necessarily always the best thing for our health because we're looking at really low fat yogurts, for example, which have had so much taken out and put so much in, which aren't perhaps as good for us. But we're choosing it based on the calories,
Starting point is 00:16:09 because we think that's the best indicator of health. And actually, it's so interesting that it's not. And I guess that leads us on to my next question. There's obviously that whole chapter in the book about ultra processed diets, which we know are becoming a bigger and bigger part of the Western diet. Where do those foods fit into this all? Obviously, it's implied in the sandwich experiment. First of all, let's define ultra-processed foods, because processed foods shouldn't be considered bad automatically, because processed foods have been around our society forever. Cooking is a process. So applying heat to something is a process. Pasteurization of milk is a process. Grinding up your wheat into flour is a process. So applying heat to something is a process. Pasteurization of milk is a process. Grinding up your wheat into flour is a process. So process is not necessarily bad. The definition
Starting point is 00:16:50 of ultra-processed food, which is a relatively recent concept, I want to say, probably only five, six years old, is the concept of which the processing of said food that you're eating cannot be done domestically, either in your home or in a restaurant. It's got to be factory done, extrusion, all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff, unpalatable to some, but it's a description. So that's an ultra processed food. And you might think, ew, ick, I don't eat that. Certainly here in the UK, North America, high income countries, we get 50% or more of our calories on average from ultra-processed foods. Now, the thing about ultra-processed is that I think we need to be careful
Starting point is 00:17:29 what we talk about when we talk about ultra-processed. You have to remember that the ultra-processed label also includes things like most of the plant-based milks, by definition, are ultra-processed. I'm just making sure that when we talk about food, that we talk about the nutritional contents. Ultra-processed is a label which tends to represent lower nutritional content in food, but not always, is my point. At BDC, we know being an entrepreneur means always being ready to take on challenges and seize opportunities. Get up to $100,000 with our small business loan to make
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Starting point is 00:18:49 Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point, as you said. So yeah, tell us more about it and how it's relevant to the calorie conversation. So the problem with most ultra processed foods is because of the level of processing that has been done. So when you actually have ultra processed foods, you are having foods that are typically lower in protein and or fiber and higher in fat, sugar, and salt. So that, in essence, is why we should limit our intake. There was a study done by a colleague of mine, Kevin Hall, at the NIH in Bethesda in Maryland. And he actually did a study in which he got a group of people and got them randomly to either have two weeks of ultra-processed foods
Starting point is 00:19:30 or two weeks of a non-ultra-processed diet. And they matched everything as much as possible, but they let people eat as much as they want. And what they showed was when exposed to the ultra-processed foods, on average, each person ate nearly 500 extra calories a day. Now, listen, 500 calories is a lot of calories. And this is before we talk about the absorption. This is just what they say on the side of the packet. So something about the ultra-processed foods that were made available to the people make us want to eat more of it.
Starting point is 00:20:05 The second example, which I find fascinating because it involves the brain, and this was done by a colleague of mine, Dana Small from Yale. So these are all very smart, professory type smart people. And what she did was she asked people to try and predict the number of calories in foods that were high in fat, foods that were high in protein, and foods that were high in carbs. And what she found was that human beings are very, very good at predicting, on average, energy content in foods that were high in fat. Why? Because this would be natural, they're there. We are less good at foods that are high in carbs in particular. But when you mix the fat and the carbs together, we suddenly have zero idea
Starting point is 00:20:49 about the calorie content of the food. She was then measuring the brain activity. And what she found was clearly fat tastes good. And so when you eat fat, the part of the brain that makes food taste good lights up, boo, right? And carbs, the same thing. But when you had fat and carbs together,
Starting point is 00:21:04 it was like someone turbo-powered your brain and people were going, the same thing. But when you had fat and carbs together, it was like someone turbo-powered your brain and people were going, this is delicious. Ultra-processed foods tend to be high in fat and carbs, and so it tends to turbo-boost it. From an evolutionary perspective, what is interesting is that, well, you have foods that are high in protein, you have foods that are high in fat, and foods that are high in carbs, naturally occurring. But actually, one of the only ones that are ubiquitously available is mother's milk. And so clearly, there is some drive for us to make sure we grow as quickly as possible as a baby to avoid becoming tiger food. So you need to grow as quickly as possible and high in fat and carbs, whereas naturally occurring foods, high in fat and carbs, exist very, very little in the wild. That's so interesting isn't it it's
Starting point is 00:21:46 such a unbelievably complex topic as you said but it's just interesting when you start breaking it down and you realize that actually the food environment that we're in is so difficult and i know that's a huge part of your work and what you're very passionate about if i'm right in saying is that it's this food environment that we're around and the challenge of navigating it that makes quite a lot of the kind of modern day issues in health with things like obesity and metabolic related diseases so difficult because the food environment is making it so difficult for us to make choices.
Starting point is 00:22:20 And it's so much more complicated than we think it is when we look at it on the surface level. It's not just simply like, oh, someone eats too much. That's absolutely right. And I think the problem is policymakers, the people that have the power to work on our food environment, take an oversimplistic view. Now, I understand in very many ways, because public health is difficult, so you need to try and get the messaging clear. But it is too oversimplistic and not understanding the underlying biology and how we respond to certain foods. And so what happens is there is a huge onus on personal responsibility that is actually placed.
Starting point is 00:22:56 And there is obviously some level of personal responsibility. It's my body. It's my children's health. You have to take some responsibility. This I understand. But I'm a geneticist and I study why we behave differently around food. So if you happen to have a genetic hand of cards that makes you find it more difficult to say no when someone places certain types of food in front of you, well then you are going to be more susceptible to the environment because of biology, not because of willpower, not because you're lazy, not because you make bad decisions. The vast majority of non-communicable health problems we have today, non-infectious health problems, is diet related. Undoubtedly. In amongst them, obesity, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, I think we all know. So we clearly have something to fix. But how do we do it? How do
Starting point is 00:23:44 we do it in an evidence-based fashion? How do we something to fix. But how do we do it? How do we do it in an evidence-based fashion? How do we do it effectively? And how do we do it without blaming the people that are suffering from the problem to begin with? And I think this requires non-judgmental discussion about the food environment, about what is a healthy food? What is an unhealthy food? Should anything be banned? What role should the government play? And there are no black and white answers here. And people get annoyed with me for saying that, but that's because there's not. And so I think we need to find what are we willing to accept as society about restrictions, about the restrictions between our freedoms versus enough control. So there is a public
Starting point is 00:24:26 health issue. We need to solve it in a mature, non-hysterical fashion. And what do you think about the legislation moving towards adding calorie counts to restaurants? There is benefit to having calorie counts at point of purchase. If you suddenly see that a blueberry muffin is 400 calories, my colleagues in Cambridge have actually shown that the calorie counts at point of purchase, as you're about to take out your credit card, reduces the person's likelihood of buying the food by about 8% and presumably consuming the food. So calorie counts do make you pause for thought, make you think, and because you think, you maybe buy and eat slightly less. And I think there probably is going to be use there. And so in that sense, I would probably support calorie counts just to let people know that they're there.
Starting point is 00:25:13 But I would still think that's got to be a better way of deploying it. So that's my very fluffy woolly nuance. But that's the answer. No, no, it's helpful. It is helpful. And also, I know you mentioned your book, and obviously it's such an extreme example, but if you go to, I think it was a baseball game or one of the big sporting events in America
Starting point is 00:25:30 that you can buy a meal situation that's literally 10,000 calories. And maybe if we realized that, that it would allow us, as you said, food for thought. But again, yeah, it feels quite simplistic in some ways. And then there was one other thing that I wanted to ask you about, and you mentioned in your book,
Starting point is 00:25:46 and it's, I think so many of these topics that you talk about, they're quite challenging conversations, obviously, because they are quite nuanced and there's a lot of emotion involved in our eating habits. And there is no one size fits all, obviously it depends so much on your current situation. But you talked about the body positivity movement.
Starting point is 00:26:04 And again, the challenge in having those sorts of conversations. And I wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about that. I just thought you spoke about it very eloquently. And I think, as I said, it's quite a difficult conversation. It is a difficult conversation. So I completely understand the body positivity movement. For those of you who don't know what that is, that is the health at every size. So in other words, we should celebrate our bodies. We should not judge people on their bodies and there is health at every size. And I completely understand that movement because people living with obesity, there's a lot of weight stigma and people make fun of them and there's awful things.
Starting point is 00:26:36 And so this is a kickback and I completely understand it. So let's ask this one question. What does obesity mean? Now you might say it means a BMI above 30. No, that's a number. That's another number, which doesn't mean a lot. So I'd like to think that obesity means carrying too much fat such that it begins to influence your health. But how much is too much? So people misunderstand what happens when you gain weight or lose weight. People think that you gain fat cells and lose fat cells. Not true. Your fat cell number stays broadly the same. They're like muscles.
Starting point is 00:27:11 They get bigger when you gain weight. They shrink when you lose weight. So each of them are individual balloons. And the safest place to store fat is in the fat cell because that is your professional fat storage organ. And if it's not in the fat, it then goes to places which begins to cause trouble, such as your muscles, such as your liver. That's when you become type 2 diabetic, high blood pressure, all kinds of other things that actually comes with it.
Starting point is 00:27:33 But what's interesting, we're now beginning to realise that how much fat that each of us can store safely is different. So famously, East Asian people, so Chinese people like me, South Asian people, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, don't have to gain that much fat before we increase our risk of type 2 diabetes. Whereas white people, or famously, Polynesians, can get very, very large before they actually become ill. And the reason behind that is because each of us has a different safe fat carrying capacity before the fat in effect is no longer in the fat and goes to the bits of our body that causes problems. So in a room or in a population, there is fat at many sizes, which means that you can have someone who's larger but have no type 2 diabetes, but someone who's skinny and yet have type 2 diabetes.
Starting point is 00:28:22 So clearly you can be different sizes and be healthy, but they cannot be in an individual, in me or you, health at every size. Because if you or I surpass our own personal safe fat carrying capacity, we will become ill. So that's the nuance, right? Yes, there are going to be large people who are healthy and skinny people who are unhealthy, but that doesn't mean that it's fine for everybody to carry a lot of fat. Yeah, it is a very difficult conversation, I think. Obviously, so much is such a difficult conversation, even calories, because I think some people, it's a big building block in the way they think about food and starting to challenge that can also be quite challenging.
Starting point is 00:29:02 I guess to wrap up, I wondered if there was one thing you wish everyone knew or one way in which we could all shift our mindset when it is something like calories, if you could give us what that was. I think there's three things I want you to think about
Starting point is 00:29:15 if I'm allowed, if I'm allowed. Three sounds great. I think the first, which I've already mentioned, and it's critical, that we eat food, not calories. Think about the quality of your food rather than the number of calories.
Starting point is 00:29:24 They are related to some small degree, but think about the quality of the food. Second, we need to be more concerned about our health rather than necessarily our weight. They are linked to an extent, but how much weight does a human being need to lose before they improve their health markers? Now, look, I wish I had a six pack and look like Brad Pitt, but life is life. And so I've got to deal with what I got to deal with. But if I lose a little bit of weight, it wouldn't make me healthier.
Starting point is 00:29:51 And if you think about health, your weight will look after itself. It may not be your own vision of beauty, but it will look after itself. And third, I think that when we think about the quality of food, we need to think about protein and think about fiber. Now, if you take a packet of food and look, or compare two packets of food, we need to think about protein and think about fiber. Now, if you take a
Starting point is 00:30:05 packet of food and look or compare two packets of food of exactly the same thing, cookies, cake, whatever it is you're buying, and you say, well, I want to make the better decision here. What better decision should I make? And don't tell me to replace a chocolate bar with a banana, because sometimes you want a chocolate bar, sometimes you want a banana, right? How do you make a chocolate bar healthier? You want to try and find a chocolate bar with higher protein and higher fiber. And I think that as a general rule will actually improve the quality of the food you eat
Starting point is 00:30:34 and hence will adjust and normalize for the amount of calories that you're actually trying to eat. Giles, thank you so much. I have to say, I mentioned in the intro how proud it makes me thinking about our food products and the way we make them. But hearing you say that about how to eat. Giles, thank you so much. I have to say, I mentioned in the intro how proud it makes me thinking about our food products and the way we make them. But hearing you say that about how to eat chocolate is literally the proudest thing ever because our chocolate has cashews in it and then it's covered in toasted nuts. So it genuinely is actually doing exactly what you want in terms
Starting point is 00:30:57 of the amazing take on a healthy chocolate bar, but it is so delicious. So that is a proud, proud moment. If you haven't tried it yet, it's in Waitrose. You can get it on our web shop. It's in Whole Foods and it's going to be coming to lots of other places soon. So please do try it. It does exactly what Giles says. Thank you so much, Giles. We so appreciate your time today. It's been a pleasure, Ella. And thank you guys so much for listening. We so appreciate it. We will be back again next Tuesday. Thank you guys all so much for listening. I hope it was helpful. Please do share it with anyone else you think might gain something from it and have a lovely day. Bye. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising
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