Moment 107 - Why Counting Calories Doesn't Work: Tim Spector

0:00This episode is brought to you by Me Undies. While Me Undies can't totally help your love life this Valentine's Day, they can offer you insanely comfy undies and loungewear to buy or gift. Me Undies has so many awesome Valentine's Day prints and styles. Plus, you can match with your partner, friends, or even your pets. This Valentine's Day, give the gift that'll keep them thinking of you and score huge sight -wide savings at meundies .com slash Spotify. That's meundies .com slash Spotify. Me Undies. Comfort from the outside in. One of my friends is a prolific calorie counter. He eats a lot of dominoes pizzas.

0:41He listens to this podcast. He's going to know exactly. He's going to know that I'm adding him. He eats dominoes pizzas all the time. He eats like a real processed food diet. But then says to me, it's all about calorie counting. Now, we all do respect, friend. He's never managed to. I shouldn't say. But it's not necessarily work for him in terms of the goal that he set himself. So when I was reading about your Vion Calorie counting in your book Spoon Ferd, it was ice cream shot at it this morning in center to him. And I said, I said, you are a bullshitter. That's what I said in the message. And we had a good laugh about it this morning.

1:19But what is your Vion Calorie counting? And this idea that we can, you know, weight loss or being healthy is just about having a calorie deficit. It's complete nonsense. Thank you. I will clip that in it, Tim. There's never been any long -term study showing that calorie counting is an effective way to lose weight and maintain weight loss after, you know, the first few weeks. So yes, very strict calorie counting. If you deprive yourself for a few weeks, you will lose some weight. But even if you're successful, your body's evolutionary mechanisms will make you hungry and hungry. Every week you go by where you're depriving yourself of energy, your body will go into sort of shutdown mode, your metabolism slows down.

2:05So you're not expending those calories. And inevitably, I'd say more than 95 % of people will go back to their baseline and many go above it. They're so rebound back if they're doing this. This style of calorie restriction. Now, calorie counting is a part of that. Some people try and say, OK, I'm not going to, I'm not going to a dramatic diet, but I'm going to just try and reduce by 10 % my calories in the day, which in the old theory was supposed to make you lose weight. Well, it's virtually impossible, even professionals to count calories. And because they're not very accurate for a start, everything on the packet, you have to weigh everything.

2:51And in restaurants now, we're supposed to have these calorie counts. They're plus or minus about 30 % because portion size makes such a huge difference to it. And it's been shown in the US to be a worthless exercise anyway. So you can't count them going in. You can't really count your metabolism going out either. We're all incredibly different. You know, your friend's probably been told, 2 ,500 calories is what he's allowed. Well, that's an average. But it doesn't mean it's relates to him. My average is much lower when I tested it. So everyone is an individual. And this is another thing we need to move away from this one size fits all guidelines.

3:34But I think more importantly is that the whole calorie counting assumption means that it doesn't matter what form that calorie is. It has the same effect in your body, therefore, whether you're cutting out fat calories or carb calories or low calorie sodas or whatever it is, it's going to be fine. But we now know that's not true. And there's several science experiments, which now absolutely nail that. One was in America where they gave people identical meals for two weeks in a sort of enclosed semi -prison. And one was homemade and one was ultra -processed both identical calories macros the same.

4:21The group of the ultra -processed foods over it by about 200 calories every day. They kept coming back to the buffet for more. So yes, the same calories, but the effect on the body meant they were hungrier. Why is that? We don't know for sure. It could be that those chemicals in the ultra -processed foods affect the gut microbes. And they then send signals to the brain saying, eat more. This isn't a natural, you know, this is a really weird chemical. I was doing something weird to me. I'm producing something weird in exchange. It could be that you get absorbed much quicker. So you get a big sugar rush.

4:59And the nutrients get in to your body in a way faster than they should do in nature. And so your brain doesn't have time to say, I'm full. It normally takes 20 minutes or so to get that fullness. Or, you know, it could be the matrix of the food. It could be the chemicals in the food. It could be its effect on the gut microbes. But it also could be things like your sugar spike. So in the Zoe predicts studies, we're basically with given now 50 ,000 people in the US in the UK, the same foods at the same time, same time of day. Everyone's got these muffins. We show that people, one in four people who have these muffins and are wearing it, we wear glucose monitors, which tells you for two weeks what's happening in your glucose.

5:52One in four people get a real sugar dip, three hours later. So this is where you rise in sugar, which is normal. And then as it comes down, it goes below baseline. But only in one in four people. And when that happens, those people end up overeating the next meal. And during the day, they feel more tired, more hungry. That's this sort of 11 o 'clock slump, if you like. If you've had a carby breakfast, some people feel that others don't. And what's really interesting is that so one in four people eating an identical muffin and an identical calories will then overeat by another 10 % that day. So you can see how that just blows the calorie idea out.

6:38The calorie is in equals calories out. Everything's the same. And the third thing is that ultra -processed food says it has the calories that's equal to the whole foods. But often they don't account for the fact that it's ground up, it's highly refined. And so if you take like almonds or something like this, they might use ground almonds. And you compare ground almonds to whole almonds. There's perhaps 30 % less available calories in the whole almonds, and there's the other ones. So the whole thing is a complete nonsense. And it's there because the food industry wants you to focus on the calorie, the fat content, sugar.

7:22So you don't have to think about the quality of the food. And it's something that they can control very easily, get their profits higher, keep adding stuff to the product that's synthetic. When we know that a lot of things they're adding are harmful for our gut microbes. So the artificial sweeteners are harmful, the glues, they stick the foods together, the emulsifiers. Some people react quite a lot to those and they cause problems. So the whole thing is like this giant camouflage. And that's really one thing I'm, you know, it might bring my number one blood bear is to get people to see the light, stop obsessing about calories and start thinking about food much more as quality and what it does to your body.

8:11Quality food. What is quality food in your definition of the phrase? It's the opposite of ultra -process food, which is whole food, which is made with, from the original ingredients of plants, mainly plant -based, but it's not exclusively, that contains all the nutrients that those plants produce, without it being stripped away or boiled up or highly pressurized, deformed, and so they have to add in back those nutrients. So, you know, it's things in their pure form. So it's nuts, it seeds, it's grains that haven't been ground up super -finally. It's all the amazing plants and fruits and vegetables that we've got.

9:00They're healthy foods, but you know, it's not straightforward. Yes, I've got this list of 10 superfoods. It's understanding that many foods that are healthy for us. Most of them are in their original form. Berries, nuts, actually every vegetable is healthy for us, if it's in that original form. It's only because we've had to learn to preserve things, we had to do trickery to make, you know, margarines and things with chemistry, that we've moved away from that. But, you know, going back, you know, olive oil, for example, is a great example of saying that the vilified often, because it had lots of fats in it and, you know, certainly I was done, oh, the Mediterranean day, they have olive oil on everything, it's horrible, it's all fatty.

9:55Turns out that's a per... you know, it comes from the olive. The good stuff, extra virgin olive oil, has very little done to it, and that is a good healthy quality food. But it can be refined, you can take that and you can keep refining it. You can take corn on a cob as an example, and then you know, and then you've got, I don't know, tortilla chips or something down the other end, which bears or corn flakes, which bears no resemblance to the original and their versions of the spectrum. God, it's so confusing, you know, because what you've said to me is, you know, based on research and studies, but then when I go to a supermarket, labeling, even I just think in corn flakes, I think I grew up thinking corn flakes were healthy because it says corn in the title.

10:47You know what I mean? And when you're trying to navigate, I was just thinking, if I'm going down an aisle now, hearing what you've just said, that that quality food is food that is not ultra -processed and kind of resembles its original form. When you walk down the aisle in the supermarket, everything is trying to pretend that it's good. So how do I know what is good? I mean, I can go to the vegetable aisle and I can say, okay, that looks like a cabbage. It looks like no one's messed with that. There's been no study done on that to, it hasn't been through a laboratory. But how do I, like, if I'm in an aisle tomorrow, how do I know what food is good and what is not?

11:16Well, you've said the first thing, if it's not in a package, you're pretty sure it's good. Okay, so if it's concealed in some package that's got happy children and signals of vitamins in it, that should be a warning sign. You know, the more they have to advertise the food and say what its additives are and everything, the more you should be wary about it. The number of ingredients is another pretty good sign. So once you get over 10, particularly if there's lots you've never heard of, you wouldn't find in your kitchen, you should also be wary that that is ultra -processed food. Anything that says low calorie, that says, means they've had to add in lots of artificial sweetness or protein extracts or something else, is also a big danger sign.

12:05Low in fat means they've replaced the natural fat with something else that's cheaper. And these are all warning signs. And you take breakfast cereals. I used to, I used to eat lots of breakfast cereals. I was brought up on them, highly sugary stuff. And then I thought I was being healthy when I moved to muslies and posh, posh stuff. But actually when you still, you know, that appearance of healthiness, it's still got lots of additives in it. It's still got lots of sugar in it. And those cereal packets have added vitamins in it, but they're often in a very poor form. I did the experiment once where I took some cornflakes or special care, I can't remember, that says, had added iron.

12:56And if you mix it up, you can put a magnet on it. You can get off the iron filings. They're so cheap that they just added to tick a box so it has iron, but they don't get into your body or do anything. So anything that's got these things added with this in it, low in this, is a sign that they're obscuring the quality of the product. So it's, you know, but it's a lot of brain, you know, we've been in brainwash for years and decades in this. And, you know, I was as well as a doctor, you know, I should know better. And yet I've completely changed my, two of my meals completely. So I've gone from having musli with low fat milk and orange juice and a cup of tea, because I did, you know, I started doing these tests for Zoe.

13:51I found out that gave me a massive sugar spike. And it was a terrible way to start the day and I got these dips at 11 o 'clock to a high full fat yogurt, nuts, seeds, a few berries. And I never have orange juice that's on my, that's a really unhealthy drink for everybody. And I have lots of black coffee, which I now know is good for me. So that's totally different. I changed my lunch for at least 10, 15 years when I got in the hospital lunch, which used to be in the canteen. Then it was the marks and spencers, got a healthy looking sandwich with brown bread, sweet corn, and tuna, and a smoothie, you know, little bottle.

14:39And that gave me a massive sugar spike. And I wouldn't have known that. And I was told that should have been a healthy thing to eat. So, you know, there's general rules, but also there are specific rules. And this whole idea of individuality is coming in. So it could be that you could, you might be fine on that. Don't know. I was very annoyed because when I started, we were starting doing this testing for Zoe. I had all these spare kits and I gave my wife one as well. And we sit down and she's French Belgian and loves croissants. And so we'd have croissants each. Mine would shoot up. She had no change at all in her sugar, which is really annoying.

15:25But it also brings home the fact that, you know, everyone loves simplistic rules. But you can only get so far with them you have to start experimenting yourself and see what works for you and not just take everything for granted. And that's really the whole essence of really, you know, setting up this personalized nutrition, research, and Zoe and everything else. But on top of this general advice about changing a whole idea of food, I think. Because I think they do go hand in hand that if you realize there are these individual differences, you realize it's not as simple as you've been told. It's not that fat cerebral, it's not that calories are bad, you know, it's much more nuanced.

16:15Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform you'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio. As over the last year, we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode.

16:50We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors. Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netSuite .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. That's netSuite .com slash Bartlett. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite.

17:27They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform. You'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio. As over the last year, we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode. We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors. Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netSuite .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning.

18:06That's netSuite .com slash Bartlett.