James Collier | Extraordinary Life Stories

0:11James, thank you for joining me. Good to be here, John. I've been really looking forward to this. Likewise. Tell me, who is James Collier? Who is James Collier? That's the question. Why don't I answer this a different way? Why don't I start from the now and work backwards? Love it. Okay. So most people know me as James Collier, co-founder of Huel. I'm a registered nutritionist. I've been a nutritionist for 30 odd years, showing my age. And more recently, I'm an author. Let's rewind. I, Huel was founded about 10 years ago by Julian Hearn as the principal founder and me as co-founder, the nutritionist behind Huel.

0:46I now run everything sustainable nutrition, so everything to do with the nutrition side of things and the sustainability side of things. Although sustainability isn't my area of expertise, we have other people in the business who do that, but I've got a keen interest in it and that's manifested into my ideas in the book. For people that don't know what Huel is, It's a complete food, so it's nutritionally complete food. We have powders, the RTD, the ready-to-drink bottles that people will see in the supermarkets across the UK. We've got bars and we've got the hot and savoury, which you mix with hot water and eat with a spoon.

1:19And we're all about providing good, complete nutrition in convenient, affordable format. But all the products are plant-based and have a low environmental impact too. But let's rewind before that. James Collier before that worked in the bodybuilding and fitness world. I started a website, muscletalk.co.uk in 2000 with a friend, and it went quite well. This was before social media, and it was a forum where people post comments, and it wasn't smartphones back then, and people would go online and do things a bit more thoughtfully. You could argue that forums were the beginning of the end of the world, because there was polarisation there, and there was negativity but it was slower and not as negative as social media can be these days.

2:08And that went quite well for a few years, Muscle Talk did, but then social media came along and kind of we lost a bit of traffic because of it and we changed the format of what we did. Rather than having other companies advertising with us only, we also started selling our own nutrition products and supplements and clothing and it didn't quite work out for us. But during that era as well, I was also a promoter in the bodybuilding scene, used to run bodybuilding shows myself. And that was quite hard work for very little reward, looking back. Rewind before that, I started a nutrition consultancy, which was giving one-to-one dietary advice, or writing, or doing talks, seminars, or, say, meal plans for care homes, for instance.

2:53Never really, it was always a supplementary income. It was never a big source of income, and it wasn't a huge part of my work, but it did cross over a lot with what I did at Muscle Talks. I'd see bodybuilders. It was entrepreneurial, though, wasn't it? There's a thread of entrepreneurial kind of prowess here where you were trying different things. And I've also missed out a lot of the other businesses doing the bodybuildings. You know, I had a clothing brand, which was really good quality clothing, but we just never took off because clothing's hard, and a few other things as well. and it was through the consultancy which was always there that Julian Hearn found me in order to bring me on board as part of Huel.

3:29But before that then I was an NHS dietitian for about seven years working at a couple of hospitals doing things like helping people with weight loss and food intolerances but more on the wards with people with eating difficulties maybe stroke rehab or enteral feeding if you know the nasogastric tubes or the peg tubes to support people there and then before that obviously was nutrition degree and before that was growing up and yeah tell me it's all fascinating so the why for me I've sort of got to know you before today okay and listened to and watched different things where there was clearly big influence through bullying and not feeling like you had any strength and muscles to then want to turn that into I'm going to be super strong and you've clearly carried that on now you look ripped.

4:17Yeah, maybe. So that physical fitness, if you like, was coming from a mental point of view. And then you had your mum diagnosed with, was it cancer? Yeah, when I was eight. That's super young, but she lived to see you do your first year at university through changing her habits. And you went into your own spiral of trying to research and learn anything that you could to try and help her live longer. Have I got that right? I didn't remember passed away when I I was 19, so I didn't have those skills then. But I do put the two factors that I got into nutrition down to the two things you mentioned.

4:49It's a serious why, right? Yes, it's a serious why. Yes, it is. So when I was eight years old, Mum was diagnosed with what I later found out to be terminal breast cancer. Although this was the 80s when medicine wasn't as good, but it was still good, right? The work the NHS did kept her alive for 11 years before she passed away. But she changed her diet and her mindset during this period. and that was definitely a positive influence on me. It was the first time I'd heard the C word when I was eight. What's cancer? They explained it to me in a lump. Shortly after that, she became a vegetarian. She followed this style of eating.

5:26And a lot of good food around the dinner table. There was a lot of discussion around nutrition around the dinner table, I mean. Her mental strength was very important there. And the food choice. There were some really good and nutritious foods. The other side, like you mentioned, John, I was, you know, a lot of teenage kids and young kids are bullied at school, but it affected me in quite a big way. I did go to a private school, so maybe it wasn't as physical as it could have been, although it definitely was sometimes. But it certainly affected me, and I hated it. And I really hated feeling like the little guy, the skinny guy.

5:59So when I was 16, one of my best friends, still one of my best friends today, a couple of years older than me, he introduced me to weights. And I never stopped, and I'm still doing it now. Brilliant. Yeah, it's great. And I wanted to do anything I could to try and improve my knowledge to get bigger muscles, because more knowledge equals bigger muscles. That's the way it definitely works, right? So I thought I'd go, you know, when it was time to go to uni, I could have done economics. I'd done that at A-level and I did quite well at A-level. Or I could have do a nutrition degree and I went with my, not with my, the logical one, I went with the passion one.

6:37It turned out the passion one was the logical one because I've had a career in nutrition for 30 years. Yeah, yeah, excelling in it. And also, it's following your passion, right? So you went into something from a nutrition point of view because of a really, really bad situation, like with your mum ultimately diagnosed with cancer. But you've ultimately then gone through a journey that's probably allowed you to be super knowledgeable. And now you're sharing that with others, whether that's through Huel or whether that's through the book that ultimately gets released tomorrow where you're giving knowledge.

7:07I'm someone that's always trying to be the best version of myself. I keep fit. I do what I do in the gym. I walked here like you today. We could have got the tube or a cab, but we chose to walk. You get in the fresh air as much as you can in London. But from a nutrition point of view, for me looking into that whole space, I can't wait to read your book and so on like I've read others. It's a bit of a minefield. So if I was to say to you, let's just stay on that topic of both of us want to have some definitions, some strength, feel good about ourselves. where do I go to get that from my nutrition specifically?

7:41And is that too much of a vague question? But there's so many people that want that because other people might want stuff to have different areas of fitness, different areas of health. But if you just use that as an example, protein, which protein, whey, plant-based and so on, it's a complete minefield. Firstly, I'm going to upset the audience here and then I promise I'll make it clearer at the end. Nutrition is complex. and we need to accept that it's complex. As humans, we like simple answers to highly complex issues and unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way. However, and this is a phrase from the book, nutrition science isn't rocket science.

8:21Sure, I've got good knowledge, I've got 30 years, there are academics that have got huge knowledge in a fairly narrow part of nutrition and that's great, we need that, but for most people, you just have a bit of splattering of knowledge. You have to know what sort of foods you should choose. And so maybe I can help a bit there. Okay, don't get too hung up on it, right? Just eat good food. Now, we all kind of know what good food is, and there's a lot of polarization in the nutrition field on social media at the moment. And I'm going to make a claim that I actually can't back up, but it's intuitively this feels right.

8:58Nutrition is more polarizing than politics. And if you look at some of the social media influencers who are evangelical about their diet ideology. And ideology is exactly the right word. In fact, that brings me to a term that I introduce in the book called dietology, a portmanteau of diet and ideology. And there's a lot I've written about that. And it's important because they have their way of thinking. And maybe they've had some health issues in the past and they've changed their diet this way and it's helped them. They've got to tell the world. They want to share it. And in a lot of respect, this comes from a good place.

9:32I'm not convinced it does with everybody, and they want to share this information, but actually they're doing more harm than good. How can they be if they're telling people to eat good food or real food, whatever real food means? But it's confusing and there's people who have other pressures and maybe this sort of dietary approach doesn't work for them because we're complex beings. We're complex physiologically, we've got different genetics and we've brought up different ways and that can affect our physiology. We've got different culturally as well. Now let me tell you about the word culture that most people don't know here.

10:08The etymology of the word culture, where does it come from? It's very similar to two other words, agriculture and cultivate. And the word culture literally means the tilling of the land or the acquisition of food from the land. So the key here, the actual word culture comes from food when we use it more widely in how we behave, how we dress, how we dance maybe, and then there's work culture. You've got a very good culture here at Jack, right? But the world actually comes from the foods. You can see why we're emotionally invested in why we eat, why people get so ideological about the food I eat.

10:42Because historically, you know, for thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years even, that's our culture and it's manifesting into the modern way of thinking. And cultivate obviously means take food from the land. Agriculture literally means field, from culture, field of food. So I think when you acknowledge that, it does become a bit clearer and you can perhaps become a bit more empathetic to people who are putting out this misinformation. This is what I was going on a couple of years ago, getting so frustrated with this misinformation. I still do. I still can't help it. But if you look at the motivations behind the individuals putting out bad information, you can actually can understand it a bit more.

11:22If you want to combat this, you have to understand why people are behaving like this. Now, if your question is now going to be, well, how do we try and minimise it? That's a bigger issue. Yeah, that's a rabbit hole. I've actually thought of lots of questions just listening to you then, including someone who's filmed on Extraordial Stories, actually, Jim Mellon, who is the biggest investor in the world in cellular farming. And so I noticed something that sort of longevity, if you like, living longer and better. And the fact that it's unsustainable to carry on this deforestation and farming as you know it.

11:59And, of course, the cruelty to animals that comes in. So it opens up, that's a whole chasm of... And that's covered in the book in quite a good detail. Together. I'll find that interesting. And I think what I wanted to ask you out of a number of questions was the whole eating bacon and egg in a few years' time made from sale, if you like, from the animals to then be made in a lab, where do you sit with that? Because I know a lot of people, when I've had these conversations, are like, I'm not doing that. I won't do that. But actually, is that the future? I think it has to be the future. It's a short answer.

12:29OK, people are going to be looking at it and go, of course you're going to say that. You create a food that's in that sort of world. Well, I don't. But we need multiple technologies to combat the increasing strain on the food system. Now, you use the word longevity there. And a lot of people think of the word longevity in the individual sense, like what can I do for my health to help me? We think very me focused well Perspective human selfishness. Yes in the West. We have a very individualistic culture Individualism, especially in America, but even in Western Europe as well where it's very me focused is about what you know What can I do to be better?

13:03And it's and there's a lot of positives of this in the East? And say Vietnam Cambodia China Japan is more we focused collectivism is the philosophical perspective here. Now I'm glad I've grown up in an individualist culture. If you look at the statistics there's generally higher standards of living and people doing better and living well older, generally. But I think we need to be a little bit less me focused and a little bit more we focused. Now talking about the cellular ag that you've alluded to there. Some people say that's not real food. Well, why isn't it? What's the difference? But the meat they're getting is from intensively farmed animals.

13:46Let's take the ethics aside of it, which I'm really very uncomfortable with. But let's take about the fact that they're given drugs, especially antibiotics, which is contributing massively to antibiotic resistance. In fact, at least 80-90 % of the antibiotics used are in animals, not in humans, and sometimes growth hormones as well and also that what are these animals fed? They're not fed the diets they've evolved to have, so why are you actually getting proper meat anyway? Now if you're one of those people out there that's fortunate enough to hunt, hunt game, or to get your meat from proper free-range farms where the animals are treated as well as can be and I realize that's a can of worms that we're not going to go down because it's up to ethics, the very word ethics is up for subjectively interpreted in different ways.

14:30So how, you know, we've got 8.1 billion people on this planet nearly and rising and experts say we're probably going to get to 9, 10 billion before it levels off. I don't know about this sort of thing, but how are we going to do that? And we're very fortunate here that we can sit and go, I'm not having that, you know, and you can go out there and choose and afford to buy foods that are a bit more expensive. Most people can't. And I mean that in the wider world. It's a privileged decision making. It's privileged decision making and there's even people locally, we don't have to go as far as other countries, but it recently had a cost of living crisis.

15:07And it's not just the financial either, it's the skills to cook food. And people say, well, that's the onus on the individual. Is it? If that individual has grown up with parents who have struggled and haven't taught them the right skills, is that the fault of the individual? Maybe there's a single parent working two jobs, then their children, how they're going to teach their children. We've got to look at it broader here. Yeah, let alone the environment, right? The actual impact on the environment. The impact on individuals. So we need to embrace these technologies as part of future foods. Not only, you know, with Heal we do complete foods.

15:41Then you've got GMOs, and that's a can of worms as well. But there's, and I'm not saying these things shouldn't be regulated. They absolutely must be regulated in the right way by the right people with the right incentives. That's a bigger topic. but the cellular agriculture, there's multiple technologies as part of the future of food system, then we need to be embracing them. And it concerns me, the resistance that people are saying really, really concerns me. People don't like change though, do they? I don't like change. And we've gone through so many changes that have ultimately been, but AI is amongst us right now and there's people that are scared of it, there's people that are embracing it.

16:12So I totally get that sort of falls into where this goes with cellular farming and agriculture. But another question I had when we were talking earlier that sort of make it really relatable back to us again is if I am someone that wants to get the most out of my day, my week, my life, and we go back to the sort of supplements and the what should I take in a day? So to give you an idea, I take a vitamin D tablet, I take a zinc tablet and I eat fruit and I try and eat vegetables and I have a mix of healthy food in my day. is there anything I should be doing and anything you take that you swear by that just helps you get through your day every day?

16:51There's no should or shouldn't. That's the first thing. And I want that to be underlined. Okay, that's the key here. I'm not here to preach. I have a bias here. I'm co-founder of Fuel and Nutrition. I totally get it. My question was more that is there a constant in people's lives where it makes sense to always have this in your diet? There's a few call-outs. So in the end of the book, I have 20 key call-outs. not just what individuals should have, but things we can look at more broadly, like food waste. But some of those will include, have a reasonable amount of protein, okay? And don't fret whether that's animal or plant-based.

17:25If it is plant-based, you need to give it a bit more thought and make sure you're having different sources of plant protein because they are on their own, they're incomplete, meaning they don't have the full array of essential amino acids. But you can do that. Now there's a lot of emphasis on protein at the moment and it's hard not to, you know, most of us are getting enough. Okay, it's not a problem, but there's a reason why protein is important. It helps keep us feel full and it helps, yeah, and it's all, it's also got a lower caloric availability. Now briefly what that is, if you have say 100 calories worth of sugar, you'll use about 99 of those calories.

18:01If you have 100 calories of protein, you may only utilize about 70 of those calories, so meaning we can have a bit more food to help keep us fuller for less energy. So there's protein. The other one is fibre. We're in a fibre crisis. Probably I think the British Nutrition Foundation in 2021 said only around 9 % of adults in the UK are having enough fibre. Now fibre is important for many reasons. It helps us keep our digestive system working properly. It can help give us a healthy cholesterol profile, reducing risk of heart disease and stroke, but also it's linked to cognition. We've got the microbiome, all the good microorganisms living with us sympathetically in our gut.

18:39They're sending messages to our brain. Now they thrive on fibre, so the soluble fibres in particular break them down to little things called short-chain fatty acids that are very good use in the body, but also serotonin. We're talking about mental health here as a key theme in Jack, right? Serotonin is a so-called happy hormone. This neurotransmitter makes us feel good. Now, 90 % of serotonin is released in the gut. So that's interesting. There's a lot more work needs to do down here. Your diet directly affects that. Yeah, absolutely. It affects that. So keeping your microbiome healthy, primarily through fiber, there are other things as well, is vital.

19:21Now, one of those other things is omega-3s. These are the fatty acids. We're all told to eat more oily fish. Now you can get omega-3s from plants as well, not those two, although you can from algae, algae provide EPA and DHA, but there's another one called ALA which is essential. Those other two are not technically essential because they can be synthesized from ALA, but you have to have your good intake of things like flaxseed, chia seeds, walnuts, hemp seeds and some other nuts and seeds as well. But there's also small amounts found in and a lot of other plant foods. Now the rate of conversion from ALA to the other two is not that efficient, but you also don't need actually need that much to be healthy of EPA and DHA.

20:04So if you have a plant-based diet, you can absolutely get enough omega-3s. You just have to pay a little bit more attention to it. I personally do supplement, and your products are rich in omega-3s, but I do take a supplement as well every couple of days, which is algae-derived omega-3s. Now, what about carbohydrates? Not technically essential, people say. Well, yeah, I think they're maybe not essential for life, but it doesn't mean they're not good use. So whole grains in particular. You've heard of the Mediterranean diet, and everyone's talking about that that's associated with low risk of chronic disease, and that's true.

20:42And they seem to live longer as well, right? Seem to, yeah. It's a whole lifestyle, not just a diet. But it is rich in whole grains, that's the point here, which are fibrous and have got a load of other vitamins and minerals as well. And then they also have oily fish, so they've got the Omega-3s. And so we've spoken about fats with respect of Omega-3s. Now that doesn't mean the other fats are bad, there's a controversy here, but there's one other group called monounsaturates, which extra virgin olive oil is also rich in. So things like avocado oil, extra virgin olive oil, they can be beneficial there as well, and just from nuts and seeds in general.

21:16And then just fruit and veg for the rest of the micronutrients and more fibre. That's great. Now you mentioned vitamin D, vitamin D3 in particular. Maybe that's worth supplementing, especially in the winter months in the UK. Especially being British, there's sort of five months where you hardly see the sun, right? And sometimes those formulas come with vitamin K2 as well, which is a different form of vitamin K. The standard form is K1 and the two vitamins together have some synergy. So you can get concoctions that have got them both in. Might be worth supplementing. I wouldn't say it's an essential one, but it is, especially during the winter months, maybe worth considering.

21:52So they're the key points. You mentioned fruit, for example, being really good for you. If I have a bowl of fruit on its own, no yogurt, no nuts, is that a spike in sugar? Because this is where you have these whole different viewpoints. So I've thought I was being really healthy, and I've always had fruit, and I've blended fruit. And then someone will say, if you blend the fruit, it goes into your system too quick, spike of sugar. If you just eat a bowl of fruit on its own, you get a spike of sugar and you're like oh my god how can that be these are strawberries and blueberries and all the things you read are good for you but it's how you eat them is there any truth to that a good bit of advice here anyone that starts talking about glucose spikes probably just turn them off swipe away okay i bet a few years ago you weren't really talking about glucose spikes and getting all scared about them i just thought i'm eating i tick tick the box of eating fruit and i've enjoyed it because sometimes you eat some food or have have things that you know are good for you but I don't particularly enjoy them.

22:43I remember starting to eat bananas when I was younger because the potassium and all the things are supposed to be good for you and I've learned to just eat them but I don't particularly enjoy a banana but I eat them in my diet because they're good for me. They're good for you but you should, oh there's another thing, it's worth both ways right, there's no food you should be having right, you can get those nutrients from anything else. If you don't like bananas, don't have them, have other fruit but for a start your bowl of fruit is brilliant, keep having it. People, you know, the very fact you've had to ask that question just indicates what's so wrong with what I was talking about earlier with misinformation on social media.

23:11It shouldn't be a question. You could have six people around the table and then you have a whole debate on you shouldn't do this, you should do that. You're like, which is why I keep coming back to you. What's the right thing to do? For a start, there's nothing wrong with glucose spikes. If your glucose isn't spiking, you've got something wrong with you. You have food, your glucose is going to go up. It's nature, it's biology. So don't fret about it. Of course, long-term, high sustained levels of glucose, that's not good. That's the risk of chronic disease, but it doesn't come from eating a bowl of fruit.

23:41Okay. It's just not a thing. You know, that's related to, you know, exercise and physically active your diet, just your diet in general, how stressed you are. You know, cortisol is linked to more sustained, higher blood glucose level. Are you getting enough sleep? They're all linked. You know, the thing I want to talk about at the moment, you know, how you eat and who you eat with, that plays into it. So let's not get too hung up on the minute here. Just enjoy your fruit. Sure. You know, so. And your journey as an entrepreneur interests me because I like the fact that earlier in this conversation you mentioned that there were things you tried and ultimately didn't pursue but coming full sort of to date having just written your book and being the co-founder of Fuel that has been a roaring success.

24:25Did you feel that at the time and talk to me about the journey of being approached by Julian and combining and whether you got that feeling that this could actually be something really really big because that's something that's happened right so Julian contacted me in June 2014 we launched in June 2015 and I'd met him a couple of times during that period and I actually thought this was a it was a good idea I thought okay this is going to be interesting and then when we launched I was about to get married in August of 2015 and we went on a honeymoon shortly afterwards and I was scrolling my emails just we'd launched what two two months by this time three months scrolling my emails and I said to my now new wife I said um I think this is going to be the one you you know, this is going to be, and I was right.