Professor Tim Spector and Dr Federica Amati on Brave New World (Preview)

0:04Hi, you're listening to The Standard Podcast, and today we're doing something a little different. We're sharing a preview from our sister podcast, Brave New World, which has just released a new episode in its latest series. Host Evgeny Levidev is joined by Professor Tim Spector and Dr. Frederica Amati, two of the leading scientific voices behind personalised nutrition company Zoe, to rethink everything we've been told about food. From the myth around good and bad fats to calorie counting obsessions, they explain why so much nutritional advice is outdated, oversimplified and in some cases actively harmful They also explore the impact of ultra-processed foods on gut health, question whether breakfast really is the most important meal of the day and unpack how time-restricted eating could optimise daily health

1:10here's your special preview to hear the full episode just search brave new world evening standard on your podcast app the problem in nutrition is most a lot of people have preconceived ideas that they don't change for the rest of their life they're sort of this i'm in this camp I'm a keto person, I'm a paleo person, I'm an anti-fat person, I'm a fasting person. Take religion. Yeah, and I think as many people no longer believe in God, this has replaced religion. And you can join a group, whether it's vegan, keto, whatever it is, gluten-free. There's a religion for you. But like religion, you don't like to give it up very easily or say, actually, I don't believe anymore.

2:05Welcome back to Brave New World, the standards podcast where we explore the cutting edge of science, medicine and the future of humankind. I'm your host, Evgeny Lebedev. And in this series, we're venturing into the realms of neuroscience, longevity, consciousness and the extraordinary breakthroughs reshaping human experience. Today, we turn our attention to a subject that affects every single one of us, food. More specifically, how we eat interacts with our unique biology, and why so much of what we thought we knew about nutrition is wrong. My guests are Professor Tim Spector, genetic epidemiologist, author, and one of the world's leading researchers on the gut microbiome, and Dr.

2:54Frederica Amati. medical scientist and nutritionist whose work translates the latest discoveries and gut health into practical everyday guidance together they're part of zoe the company and research program that has revolutionized how we understand food health and personalized nutrition larika and tim warm welcome to brave new world it's a huge privilege to have you both on the show I just wanted to start with something fun, but at the same time important and gripping, talking about myth-busting. What's the single biggest myth we can bust in nutrition? There's so many, and has it changed over recent years, I think is the other sort of question.

3:44because I probably would have said the calorie myth. But certainly in this country, I think the message has got out there that calories are not everything. And just by counting calories, you're not really going to lose weight. So I would have said that a few years ago. People are still worried about fat being bad, generally. And that's rubbish. So it was generally accepted that fat makes you fatter? Yes. and unhealthier and get your heart disease. And so it was a thing to be avoided, and that has caused all the problems, really, of the last sort of 40 years of nutrition. So I think they're still the two main ones, and I think we're making progress on them, but I think they're still out there as I think the big ones.

4:36You know, you go to the NHS website, it's still there. You know, the obsession with calories and fat is still written all over it. They haven't updated that for 10 years. And it was already 10 years out of date when it was put up there. So yeah, big myths we need to dispel. What is the truth about fat? Truth about fat is there's good fats and bad fats. And nothing wrong with fat in general, if it's the healthy type, and we do need fat to survive. And we shouldn't be avoiding all fats because saturated fat is the one that's generally demonized. But if you put that in the right product, like olive oil, it turns out to be overall very beneficial.

5:24And so by reducing things to these macronutrients of good or bad, we're totally missing the plot about how to select healthy foods and how to make the right food choices. So yes, there are some unhealthy fats. They're used in high-risk processed foods. Obviously, trans fats probably killed millions of people around the world. But there are also many good fats and products that are fatty products that are actually good for you, like yogurts and cheese. And just by fermenting it, you can transform it into something healthy as well. So we shouldn't make any link between the word fat, which just happens to be the same as being obese, with being bad.

6:09It's just terrible marketing, whoever came up with the word fat. And why does it take so long for the NHS to catch up? Great question. I think there's a lot of lobbying by the food industry to make sure they don't change anything because they realise that what they say does have knock-on effects on legal, you know, what claims food manufacturers can make and the foods that are produced. It can have knock-on effects on how government then prescribes food in schools, institutions, etc. So huge pressure not to change things because the food industry wants to keep everything the same. They want to keep making profits.

6:54They don't want any limitations or rules. The second is they're very conservative and they're very frightened about making any changes. But I think it's predominantly the pressure of the food industry. that stops the latest science getting into our guidelines. Because if you asked 100 nutritionists at the moment, you know, which of these NHS guidelines are correct, most would agree that there's many that, you know, should be changed. So the vast majority. So they're totally out of step with current science and current nutritional thinking. And it's very sad, really, because people are now dismissing them as any useful authority in this whole area, which means you don't then trust them to make any good decisions moving forward.

7:46So they still, for example, one of the top eight tips in the NHS is you should never skip meals. Right. One of the cardinal eight rules for healthy living. There have been over 20 randomized controlled trials showing that skipping meals or skipping breakfast does not cause any harm. and in many of those studies shows it actually has some benefits. So they're encouraging poor habits, snacking. The NHS is a huge operation. And when you think about all the competing interests, it still hasn't moved from treating disease to prevention. And oftentimes diet and nutrition comes into prevention. So it's not just a problem with nutrition, it's a problem with prevention as a whole.

8:30It's too big and so it's very slow to change. And to Tim's point, they don't look at scientific consensus to change policy quickly. It takes a really long time. But it's also because it's just underfunded and absolutely overrun. So it's hard to pinpoint one reason. It's like the whole system needs to change, really. Well, 10 to 20 years out of step is big. Yeah. I spoke about this in Parliament, about the fact that if prevention becomes more the norm, it would be a huge saving for the economy, but it seems to be not yet penetrating. Well, they couldn't change any of those guidelines without consultation with the food industry.

9:13It's sort of built in into this whole system that once they've made something that's favorable for the food industry, they can't really change it. And I think that's an inherent problem. It's like people being asked to mark their own homework. So why would you say, oh, yes, we got it wrong? They've never once said they've got it wrong. Whereas every good scientist should say, I've got lots of things wrong. I made lots of mistakes in my career, but the new science is this. They don't do that because they worry that they then will lose the respect of the population. They won't believe them, you know.

9:48And there's this mindset that's just wrong. So it probably just needs to be scrapped within your new system. That's what science is. It's always evolving and always changing. And good scientists admit that and move forward. I'll just shoot a few others at you. Carbs are bad for you? Yeah, no. Carbs are bad for you. It's like, what does that mean? So I think a lot of what we're touching on is this idea that one macronutrient is the problem or the solution. So on one hand, fat was the problem. And now you see online people who are going on fat-only diets. it's not the only solution either macronutrients are just groups of foods none of them should be demonized in isolation the whole point is dietary pattern so how you eat things together so carbs are bad also includes demonizing all fiber which we know is essential for good health so being like carbs are bad is like literally stripping like saying that trees are bad for the environment no it's not not how it works um i would say that again similar to fats the quality of your carbs is important.

10:52So if the majority of the carbohydrates that you're eating are sort of, you know, white bread loaf, then that's not going to be helpful for your health. Quality of the carbohydrates is important, but carbohydrates are essential for good health. I was lucky enough to have a consultation with you, Federica, and I was interested. It was very surprising to me that canned food, for example, isn't actually bad. Or long life milks. Those two were surprising. Yeah, sometimes processing can be helpful. That's why it's important to distinguish between processing that can be helpful, like freezing, canning, and processing that's higher risk.

11:29So again, an important distinction, not all processed food is evil. We've got a few others here. MSG is very bad for you. That's a good one, MSG. Yeah, that's had like a weird, it had very bad press, MSG. But really the human evidence says that it doesn't really, it's not. It's the most studied chemical in nutrition because I think it started in the 1980s. You used to get Chinese takeaway syndrome. And you used to have a Chinese meal and people would report having this terrible band-like headache around your head, like a migraine-type headache. And you instantly blamed it on your poor choice of a Chinese restaurant.

12:10and they'd put MSG in there to hide some other tastes and flavors. And this was all based on one letter to the New England Journal of Medicine. It was not a proper study, but it basically triggered a complete revolution in food. People were avoiding Chinese restaurants like the plague. And there were about 10 studies then done looking at giving people MSG and a dummy powder or something in their food, and they find absolutely no effect at all. So it was like a hysterical response of the population to this umami ingredient that adds savoriness. And so it's a common ingredient in Asian cooking and it's probably the safest one because it's been the one that's probably one of the few ones that's been most tested compared to all the other ones that we put in our food that aren't tested.

13:02So we've touched on this already, but I might as well expand a little. One of the myths is that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. We might as well talk about time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting, it's also known as, which does really work because I do it every day. So do I most days. And I guess it's worth saying intermittent fasting is really any interruption to your meals, either by reducing calories or increasing the time between meals. or going complete fasting periods. So it's all kinds of different approaches. But time-restricted eating is a more precise term, meaning that you eat the same amount of food over 24 hours, but you try and eat it in a smaller time window.

13:52So you're allowing, say, 12 to 16 hours when your gut is not working hard, and it can actually repair itself and improve your gut lining over that time. So what most people do for time-restricted eating is that either finish eating at 6 p.m., for example, and then start eating again the next day at 8 a.m. for breakfast, or, like myself, might finish at 9 and wait until after 11 a.m. the next morning to eat again. and we've seen that this suits many people but not everybody but if you can do it then you do get metabolic benefits you get some mental health benefits you feel better your moods better and it's definitely better for your gut microbiome and your gut lining in particular which needs that time to recover so I think this is perhaps how we used to eat anyway and And when I was spending some time with the Hadza tribe, hunter-gatherer tribe, they're not snacking in the middle of the night, getting up and raiding the fridge, having a bag of crisps in front of the TV or an ice cream late at night.

15:15Their guts are resting. And that's how I think we were supposed to always work. Remember, to hear the full episode, search for Brave New World Evening Standard. For all the latest news, visit standard.co.uk.