Episode 57: Professor Tim Spector
A chat with the author of ‘Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong’
In this episode, Tim covers:
🔹his most shocking findings from the largest nutrition investigation of its kind
🔹the biggest mistakes we’ve been making to eat healthily over the past few decades
🔹the most significant factors that affect how your body responds to foods
🔹what highly processed foods with sweeteners do to your gut microbes
🔹why your fitness tracker’s calorie count is misleading
🔹The surprising finding that upset him as a geneticist
🔹how a high-carb meal was found to impact blood sugar levels the next day
🔹myth-busting the best time of day to eat
🔹what exercising can do to your blood sugar
🔹if processed meat has been linked to bad gut bugs - what about unprocessed meat?
🔹can we make any generalizations about healthy eating at all?
🔹why Tim aims to eat 30 different plants per week
🔹and, does diet make a difference when it comes to avoiding COVID-19?
'Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong’
Prof. Spector says calories tell you nothing about the way a meal will affect your body
When I asked Professor Tim Spector what he thought were the biggest mistakes we’ve been making in our attempts to get healthy and lose weight over the last few decades, he didn’t pause for long before telling me about “the calorie myth… the idea that you can really quantify food and whether it's good or not by its calorie count.”
Prof. Spector is an epidemiologist from King’s College London and gut microbiome expert
“That's telling you nothing about the quality of the product, nothing about the composition, nothing about how it's going to affect your body," he told me.
Prof. Spector, an epidemiologist from King’s College London and gut microbiome expert, has built a reputation for myth-busting. One of his books is titled ‘The Diet Myth’. Its content was part of our discussion when he last appeared on healthHackers in 2017.
Fast-forward four years and Prof. Spector’s nutrition research has grown by leaps and bounds. He's been busy leading the PREDICT studies - said to be the world's largest in-depth nutritional research program. He also launched a COVID symptom study tracking app (currently used by over 4.5 million people), and released a groundbreaking new book - ‘Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong’.
It was while I was filming my review of the ZOE personalized nutrition plan recently that I interviewed Prof. Spector for this latest episode. He’s the company’s scientific co-founder. After questioning him about how ZOE worked, he kindly agreed to stay on the call to record this additional chat.
(Get a discount on ZOE here).
If you've never heard of ZOE, the premise behind it is to achieve better health by eating foods that work best with your biology. Your unique metabolism. That’s because everyone is different. Some people may not handle sugary food well; resulting in blood sugar level spikes. Others may have similar issues with blood fat levels after eating fat-rich foods. Both are thought to cause dietary inflammation in the body. And that’s what the ZOE plan tries to help you avoid.
Prof. Spector discovered in his PREDICT studies, there was as much as an “eight-fold difference between individuals given the same food in their blood responses.”
“That was a shock,” he told me.
“The second shock was seeing identical twins having a different food response.” The realization that genetics “was such a small player” in how each of us responds to food was tricky for Prof. Spector to swallow. “I was a geneticist,” - and one that had been telling people how important genes were for the last 25 years.
Also alarming to Prof. Spector and his team was the finding that information you see on a food label had only a minor effect on how a person’s metabolism responded to that food.
If you’ve been diligently following macro or calorie counts on labels for sometime, this may be shocking reading for you.
“The body resets itself after about six weeks” so the effects of calorie counting are lost
“All these things about macronutrients; the fat content, the carbohydrate content, sugar content… really paid a very small role.”
When I asked Prof. Tim about those people who have been successful in losing weight by calorie counting, he told me:
“I’m not saying nobody can lose weight on a low-calorie diet. And if it's extreme enough, you will do. But generally, the body resets itself after about six weeks and any effects get lost,” he told me.
What is it that Prof. Spector found to be driving our biology to work so differently to the next person?
“It was actually lots of different factors. Certainly, the microbiome played a big factor. And we know that even in identical twins, they have a very different community of microbes,” he said.
If you’re wondering why microbes matter, scientists working with Prof. Spector found 30 key bacteria that could play a role in how we biologically respond to food.
Half of them are considered ‘good’ bacteria because they’ve been associated with certain positive health markers. While the other half are considered ‘bad’ because they’ve been associated with less favorable metabolism, higher blood pressure, and worse glycemic responses.
Other aspects that influenced a person’s metabolism of food included:
![Fermented foods recommended by Prof. Spector include the “four Ks” - kefir, kimchi, kombucha and [sauer]kraut](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a92c9eef93fd48afb74b8cd/1617904747229-TRXEWBG0SC4MCX85N152/pexels-elevate-1267356.jpg)
Fermented foods recommended by Prof. Spector include the “four Ks” - kefir, kimchi, kombucha and [sauer]kraut
“… the time of day [that you eat], how much sleep you had the night before, whether you exercise before or after your meal, what you ate the day before. Interestingly, whether you had a high-carb meal the day before often had a follow on effect.”
Age and sex also played a part.
Watch episode 57 to hear Prof. Spector discuss other findings on whether breakfast is essential, what artificial sweeteners do to your gut microbes, plus where does unprocessed meat rank on the good vs bad scale for our microbiomes?
Even though Prof. Spector's research has convinced him one size does not fit all, and that nutrition should be personalized to each of us depending on how well we respond to fats and sugars, plus what state our gut microbiome is in… I wondered if there is ever a capacity in which we can make generalizations about healthy eating?
Prof. Spector suggested avoiding processed foods, artificial sweeteners and diet drinks.
“I think snacking is another one,” he said, highlighting increasing evidence “that the less meal episodes you have, the better.”
“Doing things to improve your gut microbes,” is another of his go-to recommendations. “Increasing the diversity of the microbes by increasing the diversity of the plants you eat. My rule of thumb is try to get 30 different plants in you every week, which you can do with nuts and seeds, sprinkling on things, quite easily. And use your imagination to try to pick some new ones every week.”
He’s also a fan of regular fermented foods, including the “four Ks” - kefir, kimchi, kombucha and [sauer]kraut.
“When you are picking your foods, particularly your plants, try and get ones that are high in chemical polyphenols, so brightly colored foods; things like berries, nuts, and, strangely, things like dark chocolate and red wine also have these marvelous chemicals - and are a good excuse if you want to drink and eat those.”
Follow Tim on Instagram and Twitter.
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