Ep.45 Why Aren’t My Diets Working? Food Myths, Weightloss & Calorie Counting With Dr Tim Spector

0:00I want to talk quickly about the keto diet. rubbish. I'm Tim Spector, best-selling author and medical professor, with over 1 ,000 original articles published in the world's top journals. What would be the biggest pieces of advice you'd give in terms of being able to lose weight? Should we be skipping breakfast? Well, food is complicated, our bodies are complicated. The key bit for your gut is to reduce ultra-processed foods. The average person isn't going to do well long-term on a keto diet. They can mix these chemicals to fool your brain in a way that we've never evolved to do go on break the internet okay

0:48welcome back to working hard hardly working the podcast i'm not gonna lie everyone this episode turned my whole life on its head i have to change my entire life which is a real pain but but you know these things have to be done. Tim Spector, what a scientist. I feel like every single thing that I just learned was more than I learned in my entire school career and I had fun doing it so that's nice, that's enjoyable for me and hopefully enjoyable for you as well because I feel like this is one of those episodes, I've had a few podcast episodes that I've listened to that I've literally sent to every single person I know and I know that sounds like just me telling you to send my podcast to other people but fucking hell this episode literally turned everything I know about food on its head and if you see me eating entirely differently then mind your business but also you will see why in this episode so I hope you really enjoy it get out your pen and paper get out your notes app write some of these things down because this will change your life

1:49do we really know what we should be eating multi-award winning expert Tim Spector argues that we might not professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College London an honorary consultant physician at Guy's and St Thomas's. He aims to point us in the right direction so we know the hard truths behind food fads, dieting, nutrition and gut health. Having written five books including the bestsellers Spoonfed and The Diet Myth, he is one of the most cited scientists in the world. His research aims to debunk eating myths and answers the most important questions like, should we be calorie counting? What should we be eating for our gut health?

2:21And why do most diets fail? Very excited to have you after your long cycle here. Long sweaty cycle. Yeah, Do you do that every day? I used to pre-COVID. I obviously don't if I'm working at home. Right. But yes, going to the hospital, that would be my normal journey. So yeah, I miss it a bit. Yeah. It's a nice routine to have beginning, end of the day. I want to go to the start of your career. Give us like a whistle-stop tour of what your career has looked like up to now. Skip the first 18 years of life or my birth and things and just go straight to medical school. I sort of ended up doing medicine really because my I guess my dad convinced me that even if I didn't know what to do I wouldn't be unemployed was he a doctor he was a doctor yes he was a pathologist he didn't he only saw dead bodies not not live people so I went along with it and I was a bit of a lazy student wasn't really into it until I did a bit of research as a medical student that that got me into the idea of research.

3:23So I sort of got better as I went on and actually started to enjoy it. So I did general medicine and I picked a specialty called rheumatology, which is bones and joints, and trained in that to be a consultant specialist in that subject. But on the way, I had to do some research to do a thesis like a PhD and did something called epidemiology. So I took a year out, did a master's, and that's about studying populations. So I was always quite much more interested in the why people get disease. And this was, at the time I was doing it in the 1980s, the real sort of cutting edge thing to do was to get these studies, work out what the risk factors were.

4:10That's how they discovered that smoking causes lung cancer. In the 1980s? Well, they did that earlier, but it was the group of doctors 20 years before that had actually done all that. So they were finding all kinds of things about breast cancer and age of birth and looking into the contraceptive pill and the risks and things. It was quite an exciting time to do that. So that's what I did. And I spent several years doing that, looking at arthritis. No one had really studied that and hormones and menopause and arthritis and what was causing some people to get these rather strange diseases. But then I went back to clinical work because I needed to get a salary and I was a consultant at St.

4:51Thomas' Hospital. And then I had the idea of starting a twin register, the UK's only adult twin register. And it just seemed really cool. It would link my desire to be a sort of medical detective, if you like. and we through various media appeals got thousands of twins to come and regularly come to St. Thomas's Hospital just up the road and now we have 16 ,000 of these twins so it's you know the biggest of its kind in the world and I've been doing that for 30 years so yeah that was probably my best idea I've had I think was to do that because it allowed me to first look at nature v nurture because twins are a perfect natural experiment.

5:36Of course, yeah. You compare identicals who are clones with non-identicals. Yeah. Any difference between them has to be genetic. So we were looking at lots of diseases and personality traits as well that no one else had studied. So we were the first to show that back pain was three times more genetic than breast cancer. Wow. And all kinds of diseases that people thought were just old age turned out to have a genetic basis. So lots of things like that. We got in the media and about, we did hundreds of these studies. And we also did kind of weird stuff like looking at the genetics of religion, see whether belief in God had a genetic component.

6:21That's so interesting. Which it does. We looked at sense of humor. We couldn't find a gene for... Really? No gene for sense of humour. But we also looked at political beliefs and even asked people about Brexit, which was interesting and found there is a genetic basis for left wing or right wing views as well. So a lot of the things that we think are our free will have some genetic basis. Is there an easy way to sum up the genetic predisposition for certain religious beliefs or no? What we showed is that it's not specific religious beliefs, and it's not whether you go to church. Yes. It's not your practice.

7:01Yeah. That's environment. Of course. But how spiritual you are as a person, how strongly you believe something that may be unprovable, has about a 40 % to 50 % genetic influence. My hypothesis is that as religion has got less common, it's now below 50 % of the population believe in God, it's been replaced by other similar traits like extreme views on the environment or veganism or particular dietary. Who knows the keto diet? Yeah. These personality traits want to belong to some group. Right. And I think this is part of our human nature. Yeah. So religion was one, but equally there's the genetics, you know, just as strong for atheism.

7:57Right. So it's a kind of pack instinct. Yeah. I think that's really what we're looking at. Yeah. So, you know, we've evolved and religion for a long time was very beneficial for humans helped survival. So it was a useful trait to have this sort of strong tribal belief in something and want to belong. So that was a sort of nice aside. Of course, I didn't get any funding for any of that. Yeah, right. They're like, back to work. And you're like, but atheism. NHS is not going to pay for that. I think that's so interesting. But often these philosophical ones. And so we also did stuff on sexuality and the genetics of female sexuality and sexual problems and all these things.

8:40Nearly everything we studied ended up having some genetic basis, which was cool. That's incredibly interesting. So, you know, and we were the first people to ask women about their sexual problems, you know, ability to orgasm and all this kind of stuff that turned out has strong genetic component. whereas most people think oh well it's you know yeah environment it's totally environmental it's my fault or whatever it is yeah so yeah that that really pushed me to say oh genetics is everything but then after after having done this about 20 years um on nearly every subject as you can imagine i could find yeah um i started looking at why identical twins were so different and because The weird fact is although they look so similar, they smile the same way, they pick up their coffee cup the same way, they laugh the same way.

9:32They age differently, they die at different times, they get different diseases. One gets cancer, one gets depression, the other one doesn't, etc., etc. Many, many examples of this. And I was just saying, so why? They're clones, genetic clones. They lived 18 years at least together. done virtually everything together. Why would one get cancer and the other one not? It doesn't sort of make sense. So that drew me to looking and I looked at something called epigenetics, which is how you switch genes on and off with little chemicals, like vitamins can do that. Just stress, emotional stress can do that.

10:16But I did that for a few years, but it never really gave me the big results I wanted. It showed small differences, but not the big ones. And it was then that I came across gut microbes. And that, for the first time, we showed something we could measure in your gut, you measure in a poo sample using genetic methods, the same genetic methods I'd been using. And I'd realized for the first time I'd found something that really wasn't similar at all in identical twins. it was really hardly any different to the random population whereas everything else had been so closely matched so suddenly i had a reason to explain why you know identical twins were reacting differently to the identical environment and that was a sort of aha moment i said wow this is incredible you know this we're all incredibly different in this sort of new organ in our bodies that hadn't really been thought about certainly not 10 you know 12 years ago when I was starting all this so that really got me on this journey to really said I've got to really move all my research away from genes into the gut microbiome because unlike genes you know where you can't really change your parents.

11:39You're stuck with them. You can change your gut microbes through food. And so suddenly this was a really actionable area of research. And has that set me up for the next 10 years? So that got me into writing books about it. I wrote a book called The Diet Myth. Started writing that about 10 years ago and it came out in about 2015. It was one of the first books on introducing this whole concept and how that changed our views on diet yeah and how we've got lots of things wrong because we didn't really account for it yeah we just treated the body as if it was some little furnace that you put yeah fuel in one end and energy and heat comes out the other end and it's totally simple it's all about calories so right the fact that you have this really amazing extra organ in your body, the gut microbiome, was quite illuminating and really changed, I think, the way we think about food and diet and everything else.

12:43And that story led me to, I was talking about the diet myth at a meeting six years ago in London. Two guys came up to me and said, we'd love to get together and do a company based around this individuality in your microbes plus some this new area of personalized nutrition yeah and that's where the company Zoe was formed which was you know the next phase in my career if you like that alongside all this research suddenly I had a company that was willing to fund a lot of the research to get whole personalized nutrition and the gut microbiome into center of stage do the really big studies that I couldn't get done through my normal funding routes.

13:28Right. I needed the millions that investors can bring and also the speed and energy that startup companies do. And so that's where Zoe was born. And that's this personalized nutrition company that's now doing very well in the US and the UK. Yeah. And that has now got 50 ,000 stool samples from customers who are basically, you know, you know, allowing us to do research on all their samples. Yeah. So I'm suddenly very happy with this and it's allowed me to continue with my area of research, gut health, microbiome. I've written two other books in that time, Spoonfed and more just recently, Food for Life, which is really just getting the word out about this new way of looking at nutrition and how everyone needs to forget all the old rules.

14:24Yeah. And start afresh, realize that we know so little. Yeah. We're so badly educated. And these, hopefully the tools people need for life so that they realize that the most important choice they make in their lives every day about their health is actually what to eat. Yeah. And I don't think people realize they have that power. Yeah. And I think that that's the real big message, you know that all this uh focuses around that's the number one thing that everyone has power to change their health every day with all the multiple food choices we make right i really want to talk about when you kind of first came to these discoveries about the gut i don't think i heard anything about the gut other than kind of this idea of probiotics and yogurt um in kind of advertising when I was little until a few years ago when it really became the thing when you first came out with this research was it just generally not talked about anywhere or kind of in the mainstream it wasn't in the mainstream at all so yeah when I wrote my first book diet myth um you know it did quite well but people never heard of any of these concepts right they'd never heard of fermented milk kefir or kombucha which are now if you live in places like London everywhere yeah right but so things have happened very rapidly and as you said I think most people vaguely knew through yogurt advertising yeah that microbes were something that you could you could eat you could buy yeah and basically those but all you knew is they came in the yogurt and if you bought it it was good and right if you didn't it was bad but you weren't really told that you had your own set of gut microbes that were important that you need to look after I think that was the big difference and this is because we didn't have the technology to do it you've got to realize that it's taken you know 25 years of genetics to do this amazing job so we can detect all these microbes before you have to grow them up on a little plate of a you know food and and that only allowed us to look at 1 % of them.

16:39Right. Whereas, I mean, just so people know they've got microbes. We're talking about 100 trillion individual microbes living inside our guts. If you put them all together, they weigh the same as your brain. So we're a couple of pounds if you put them all together. And they're this huge community of bacteria, viruses, fungi, even parasites that we've all got, that are all individual. and best way to think about what they do because you just think oh well they're just there eating your food right that's what we were taught you know they're just doing nothing waiting around the dark for you to eat something uh but no they they're mini pharmacies they're converting that food into really powerful chemicals for your brain you know changing whether you're happy or sad they're also key to your immune system so most of the immune cells are actually in your whole body are actually lining your gut so all these little chemicals from the microbes are talking to these immune cells making sure you don't get food allergy making sure you don't overreact to things but also making sure you're primed to deal with infections or early cancers or anything at all so they're key to that and of course our digestion metabolism they control our weight our appetite you know we we produce only about 20 at most of our own um chemicals for our gut whereas the gut microbes produce thousands of them and that's so we work and have evolved with them to do that yeah so we've never really given them much consideration sure and actually we've been trying to get rid of them yeah for most of the last hundred years we've been worried about them trying to eliminate them wiping them out with antibiotics wiping them out with junk food and we really haven't given them the dominance so hopefully this is the platform this is the era of our gut microbes and they can uh and realize you know if they're healthy then the rest of you is going to be healthy.

18:52Yeah, that's so incredibly interesting. From the beginning, just for someone who's coming into this, you know, not knowing anything about the gut, can you just quickly explain what the gut actually is? Like, is it your stomach? Is it a collection of places? What is it? The gut is basically the tube that runs from your mouth to your anus. Okay, lovely. Okay, so it's all the bits in between. Yeah. So you're right, many people point to their gut and they only think about the stomach but it's the whole the whole passage where food is ingested and go and comes out in the toilet that is the gut and it's made up of all these different bits and it's several meters long it varies quite a lot between people but we're talking you know if you rolled it all out it would be you know the size of a tennis court or whatever because it's got lots of little wrinkly bits and folds.

19:47So you've got your mouth, then you've got your gullet, which is your esophagus, which is a little tube. That goes down to your stomach. That's where all the acid is. Then it goes to your small intestine, where you get the little squashed up bits of your food, then gets digested in the small intestine, and the sugars and things like that get absorbed. All the other stuff, like the fiber in real foods, goes further down into the next bit, which is called the large intestine or the colon, and that's several meters long, and that's where your microbes live. And they eat on the fiber, all the green outer bits of plants, et cetera, and also some of the fats, and they digest that, and that's where they live and they produce all the good things.

20:34And then eventually it goes from the large intestine, it just goes down to the rectum and then gets pooed out as your stool. and every day we pull out about half of our gut microbes so they're a very fast and furious lifestyle you know right yeah i can tell you know they're going to live fast for them they're going to live fast so we're full of replicating microbes right all the time and they're very much part of this whole real key process but understanding your your gut and what it does is really important because when it comes to food, unfortunately, most of the food we have now is junk food, ultra-processed food.

21:14That gets absorbed totally in our small intestine, very early, straight into the bloodstream, leaving our microbes hungry. So for someone who's listening to this and thinking, cool, I need to make my gut healthier. I don't know how. Where would be a good place to start? What are the general hygiene things that we can do to maintain or create a healthy gut? The first thing is to eat more diverse plants. Microbes feed off different plants, and we have thousands of different species of them. Each of them is specially adapted to one type of plant. So if you only have the same prawn salad every day, you won't feed all the different microbes you could be feeding.

21:59So we're eating mushrooms every single day, rather than anything else. It's good for the mushroom eating microbes. Yeah, the others are sad. I love mushrooms, by the way. They're fantastic for your health. But either you need lots of different varieties of mushroom, which will have different chemicals in them. Yeah. Okay, so there are hundreds of species you can eat and hundreds you can't eat. Each of those has different chemicals, which will keep a little family of microbes alive. so it's the variety they like that's really important and so we did some research five years ago that shows the optimum for your gut health and we think gut health is getting a wide variety of species yeah that is associated with everyone who's healthy has a has that look about their microbes is to have a 30 different plants a week so it's not 30 um mushrooms 30 times a day it's it's you know making sure you've got your your mushrooms maybe different types of mushrooms uh you've got peppers that can be red red peppers green peppers it can be different types of bean black beans broad beans white beans it can be nuts it can be seeds all each of them counts as a separate plant.

23:24You can have a herb spice, an Indian herb spice that counts. And it's not as hard as it sounds if you have a varied, you know, and in places like London or whatever, where you've got lots of amazing different varieties of cooking. You've got the Middle Eastern cooking or Asian cooking often has a lot of these ingredients anyway. So it's embracing that diversity of plants is the first thing people should do. So rather than having meat and two veg or just the same beige food or ultra processed foods it's this variety second thing is to eat the eat the rainbow so i've talked about some of those colors the reason is in brightly colored foods there are these defense chemicals called polyphenols okay people will hear more and more about this it'll start to get on packets soon and this gives it they're both a bright color but also the bitter tastes okay good example is extra virgin olive oil i don't know if you like olive oil but um it's the everyone should use extra virgin olive oil if they're interested in their health right no other cooking oil comes close because it's a it's got a bright color and it's bitter if you uh drink it and it even some peppery you know can make you sort of cough that's because the polyphenols just like nuts also have that or even red wine if you drink red wine strong red wine yeah it's got tannins in it that's polyphenols and that's why of all the alcohol red wine is the only one that's been shown to be good for your gut micro thrilled with that news on the extra virgin olive oil thing i have been taught you know how it's in darkened bottles I thought you weren't you shouldn't be cooking with extra virgin olive oil you should be using it cold because if you heat it it's carcinogenic that's rubbish really I tell everyone that so if that gets out it's actually purely because of me yeah well you've got to read that chapter in my book so I talk about this that's my fun fact I'm not gonna have to find a new one yeah well again it's you know we've got to move away from this food causes cancer this food makes you live forever you know this is great for your sex life you know it's like we'd we're often taking one chemical out of 800 and saying that if you put that in a in a lab or you give enormous amounts of that chemical to poor old rats yeah you know that the equivalent of giving someone a thousand times the human dose you get cancer so all those artificial studies are worth nothing.

26:04Right, because they're in isolation. They're in isolation. They were done in small numbers. Or, you know, it was done by the sunflower oil manufacturers to wipe out their rivals, right? So there is no evidence at all that olive oil has any cancergenic properties. And you might be referring to the idea that if you burn oil, if you sort of, if you wok fried, you superheated your olive oil but basically its smoke point is around 200 degrees which is usually well above your frying levels yes I'm not that high and so only if you're doing really you know stir fry Asian food yes maybe then you don't have it but generally the smoke point is low and even if it did have that smoke point above it where you start to see a funny coloured you know in theory that's carcinogenic but in reality no one's really shown it's a problem i mean the main proof is that you've got thousands of people in studies being given either extra olive oil or nothing and the ones with extra olive oil always do better in every single study long term for health cancer heart disease whatever so it's rubbish so stop spreading that yeah stop spay the rumor everyone should be extra virgin olive oil for not only their salads but also their cooking they shouldn't be using a lot of these other highly refined olive oils that are much less stable much more likely to uh you know cause you problems with your health yeah gut much worse for the planet as well right okay well it's actually it's actually good news for me because despite having lost my fun fact i actually was cooking with extra virgin olive oil for a very long time and then was told this.

27:51The darkened bottles then, this really backed up my claim. So do you know why they're in darkened bottles? To stop them oxidizing so that they don't, the fat, because there's a lot of fat in olive oil, doesn't go rancid. Okay. So it's basically to protect it from sunlight, which would accelerate that process. So you can't have olive oil for years in your cupboard. You don't have to use it up. You can smell it and you can tell generally it's gone off and you shouldn't really buy olive ore in clear bottles and you should store it out of the Sun okay that's the reason it's just just to keep it fresh and stop it going moldy really okay great doesn't mean it's going to be deadly yeah no incredibly helpful so but it's a great example of these sort of food myths yeah sure and how I know reading the Daily Mail or whatever That is not where I got it from, just FYI.

28:45But I'm sure you can. Yeah. One week it saves you from cancer, the next week. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. The same things about coffee, you know, that was another thing. Even I wrote an article when I was young saying that coffee causes cancer. Right. I was guilty of one of those. And you retract that statement. I was totally wrong. And it's now obvious that coffee is a health food. Fantastic. And it's really good for your gut microbes. because it's got polyphenols in it and that's why it's bitter and it's made from a fermented bean so it's actually you know it's one of your 30 plants a week and all the studies now show it reduces heart disease and increases longevity so you know it's really important to not take one study out of context as the press as the press often do but a look at these all the studies together do something called a meta-analysis we summarize them but also putting in the light of what how it affects our gut microbes generally helps you realize if it's good or bad if it helps your gut microbes it's always going to be good for you and so you logically start to think of yeah is it diverse is it whole food is it brightly colored is it got these polyphenols is it fermented if it's a you know if it's fermented food which means it's got live microbes in it like your yogurt like good quality cheeses like your kefir kombucha kimchi sauerkraut then that's going to be good for you and good for your gut and that's been now proven it actually reduces helps your immune system reduces inflammation and they're the sort of key positive things then there's a few things to avoid so the other is to to help your gut avoid eating overnight so reduce your eating time I don't know do you eat late at night sometimes when I've come back from work late I do eat around you know I'll eat an hour before I go to bed which I know is bad and my heart rate monitor tells me it's bad as well because it calls me out on it in the morning so you know We all have busy work and sometimes you've got to eat and whatever.

31:03Yeah. But if you just in the morning delayed your breakfast so that you had at least 12 hours between eating episodes and ideally 14, we're doing studies now that showing that's pretty good for most people. And giving your gut a rest is really important. So if you end up having a late dinner, then have a later breakfast. Correct. And that's what, if you ever go to Italy or Spain, you can't get an early dinner and you sit down to eat and yeah, but they don't have breakfast. Yeah. They would have, you know, an espresso and a cigarette. Yeah. I'm not saying I have the cigarette. You know what I mean?

31:46So it's not a big deal. They don't say, oh, we can't go to work without it. And they would have something at, you know, 11. Yeah. maybe they have a snack at 11 with their next coffee yeah it sounds like I'm very much Italian so that's people just need to realise that you know if you are if you focus on what your gut wants then you can't go that far wrong so I think that's really important the other thing is you know the key bit is to for your gut is to reduce ultra processed foods 60 % nearly of all the calories taken in the UK are now ultra processed and most people don't know what an ultra processed food is.

32:27Yeah, what qualifies?

32:31So there are lots of different definitions and this is part of the problem and they don't have to say it on the packet. So it's up to the consumer to actually call it out. Generally, if it's in a packet and it's got health claims, it's usually a, it claims to be healthy, it's an ultra processed food. that's the very simplistic way of doing yes there's always exceptions but you know you don't get health claims on an apple yeah they do their marketing themselves but if you had a sort of apple puree or a puree spread for children or something it would say this is you know one of your five a day it's got vitamin c in it it's you know because they're disguising the fact that it's fake food they're basically ultra processed food is when they take some of the ingredients that are natural and they recreate it artificially to save them money or to get a health label so that they can reduce the fat content so they reduce the fat content artificially by taking something out of the milk for example so you only use milk powder and then you add in other stuff like starches or glues or gums to give it some similar feel in the mouth.

33:50And everything's always cheaper. Yeah. And so it's that substituting. So it's when you see a list of ingredients that you wouldn't have in your kitchen. Things like modified starches, xanthan gums, emulsifiers, lecithins, carrageenins, preservatives, all these things various lists of artificial sweeteners so most people think artificial sweeteners are inert and harmless and a good thing to have because they're avoiding sugar but we've been misled and increasingly we're sold these mixtures of chemicals in our foods as routine and we don't even think to look anymore whereas all of these products which we eat more of than any other country in Europe are being given to us, our children, being served in institutions, in hospitals, schools.

34:48And we now know that they are probably the main cause of the obesity crisis in this country. Not because of the fats, the sugars, the calories, which we've been told, because the manufacturers can get around that by producing low versions of that. But these foods have been shown to make us overeat. And so eating the identical food that's made in a factory, using these sort of fake ways of reproducing it versus the actual original food, huge differences you can see in how full they make you and how much you want to keep eating more. We've all known that with certain snack foods. There's some brilliant ones that taste incredible.

35:31You just say, I can't stop eating that. You know, I've got to keep getting those snacks back into me. That's because they can mix these chemicals to fool your brain in a way that we've never evolved to do. And that's why the UK is the most obese country in Europe and it's just getting worse. And it costs the country and the taxpayer, I think it was close to about£60 billion a year. that's a whole lot of money which is a lot of money that taxpayers are paying for to subsidize basically junk food's effect on on our health system what would you then suggest are the legislation changes that need to be made in order to encourage whether it's in like food labeling whether it's in any of that that would educate better on these types of things because it sounds like a lot of what we assume to be true 15 years ago perhaps isn't true and the legislation maybe hasn't caught up with it?

36:29We'll first have to stop effectively subsidizing these fake food companies because through the farm subsidies they get lots of benefits that way but I think we need transparency first of all so we need a independent group that would set up and say okay we're defining this as ultra-processed and you're you know it should have a black label on it saying this is ultra processed food should come with a health warning like cigarettes saying this will make you overeat by 10 every day for example or 15 whatever the exact figure is and so you're given a warning on it rather than this is health that they shouldn't be allowed to have health claims on those on those packets i've got no problem with people eating you know a mars bar or a Coke or a Pepsi because you know they're not good for you.

37:25Yeah, sure. Perfectly fine to have treats that you know are, but to falsely label all of this food as healthy when it's killing us just seems to be totally wrong. So it's not an easy solution to change the financial system. The sugar tax could have been expanded easily to include artificial sweeteners and artificial foods so that the relative balance between real food and junk food was less because it's getting bigger every year, getting harder to buy fresh fruit and vegetables for the same price as you can buy something made by robots in a factory. But that would have been a start is to expand that.

38:12But again, the food companies are so powerful, they will lobby against it. That's why you never hear anything about this, which is one of the biggest disasters of our time as we're growing up. We've never seen so many obese children that we have. It was never saw it when I was at school. It's happened relatively recently. The idea of snacking is a new phenomenon. the average Britain has six or seven eating episodes a day and this is now considered the norm okay what's your snack what's your preferred snack you go to Italy and Spain they don't even understand the concept they have proper meals yeah and that's what we need to get back to is this idea that we don't need to eat little and often you need just decent meals sitting down probably not at your desk you know which is the current thing that we're all guilty of um you know the french spend twice as long eating meals as we do in this in the uk and so it's also how you eat is really as important as what you eat and looking at it not eating in front of the telly you know um where you tend to overeat really being called out here um we'll do this stuff right and i do as well you know i i had a tv dinner last night i'm not saying i'm perfect right but i think you need to know what is yeah and then what is right and wrong and then make your own decision transparently yeah and everyone can make their own mind up but the fact that we know so little about nutrition and food and no one's taught to cook properly in school anymore yeah many people cannot cook i would have loved to have food tech in school um i mean I think it's very important to make sure that it's both the boys and the girls doing the food tech but I agree that like we shouldn't be getting to you know people talk about university almost as like the first time you learn to cook food thankfully first time boiling eggs yeah exactly and well I was astounded by how many people didn't know how to cook I kind of cooked for myself since I was you know 13 or something so I'm kind of pretty proficient but in terms of I could not believe how many people, you know, YouTubing, boiling an egg.

40:37Well, you know, everyone should be able to cook five meals before they leave school. Surely that's a better life skill than algebra. Well, I'd agree. You know, there are many things we learn at school that are useless for 99.5 % of us. and there's some skills you know like whether it's touch typing or it's yeah uh learning how to cook five uh dishes tell us about life yeah and you know how to do a tax return and these things yeah um god yeah i would have needed that you know not be frightened of of forms and things so i think learning stuff in school you know we're going to have chatbots anyway doing you know do or this for us.

41:21We need to do some of these practical things. Yeah. And that's really educating people about food, I think is really important. And learning how to cook is a key part of it because you do find that if you're actually touching food or children are touching food all the time, they get to know it. They've done horrendous surveys saying most children don't know, you know, where chicken comes from or the difference between fish and chicken in packets and things like this. do if you go to a supermarket because we're so distanced from the food itself yeah particularly meats and processed meats and things no idea how stuff is made yeah people knew you know i think it's it's it's terrible that we we have this uh blind spot for most important area of our health let's talk about diets you've done a lot of work and kind of spoken a lot about whether diets work what types of diets work, et cetera, et cetera.

42:19Could you give us a little kind of information on that? Do diets work? In one word, no, but there's also a caveat that for most people that don't work, okay? So if in terms of a diet, you're talking about a restriction in calories. So someone says, right, I'm gonna, the average woman, there's no such thing as the average woman though, But if there was, have 2 ,000 calories a day and they say, okay, I'm going to go on a diet. I'm going to reduce my calories by more than 500 or go to 1 ,500 calories a day. I'm going to count my calories. Very few people can actually do that accurately. But say they were really strict and they went to 1 ,000 calories.

43:06They say, I'm going to eat half of everything for the next six weeks. They will lose weight. if you manage it you'll lose weight but what we see is that the vast majority of people regain that weight because your body reacts it gets increasingly harder to keep those calories off your brain is screaming at you eat eat eat it sees you know you start dreaming about food you get delirious and you get a bad mood and you also your metabolism slows down so your body's conserving its energy so you're actually using less so you you you tail off you don't continue losing weight it pretty much stops so you have to get more and more extreme all the time to keep losing that weight and this is what all the studies have shown is that after a couple of years 80 percent of people have either gone back to where they were or have gone back above it.

44:10Okay. So there are a few exceptions. And when I've said this before, people say, oh, that's not true. I managed it very well. Those people are rare exceptions. And so the idea of dieting with a purely calorie restriction goes against all the science and all the data that we have. And these properly done studies. And that's in controlled trials. So you imagine you've got all these scientists looking at you, encouraging you to carry on, nurses phoning you up and saying, oh, how are you doing? Huge motivation. Most people don't have that anyway. So that 80 % figure is probably 95 % in real life. So that's why diets don't work if you're focusing on calories.

44:56And I think we have to give up the idea of the short term, unless you would just want it short term but i think people rulers could realize there is a bounce back yeah and often people who go through this cycle of uh sort of feast and famine do worse long term so they end up more overweight 20 years later and we've done some studies on twins where one was doing this dieting the other one wasn't although they started the same place the dieting one ended up more overweight than the one who didn't bother what we do believe particularly with my company Zoe is that changing what you eat does have a big effect so firstly cutting out ultra processed foods will make you less hungry you won't have those hunger pangs and you'll probably be eating less and cutting out some of these sugar spikes and fat spikes will also reduce your hunger pangs and sort of stress on your body as well so just shifting to eating proper food and eating for your gut will help but it takes it's you're not going to get a dramatic weight loss yeah but you should kind of think well do you want a dramatic weight loss if it's going to rebound no you want to do something gradual that's going to you you can sustain for years so little things like time restricted eating where you eating in a shorter window helps a little bit and change from ultra processed foods to real foods helps a little bit reducing your sugar spikes and your fat spikes using something like the zoe program also works but it's it's not the quick fix that the the diet industry once you believe it's not taking liquid meal replacements and it's you know it's not what people believe and so I think people have got to realise that you know the industry would like you to continue eating ultra processed foods just have the half the amount of it and carry on still being sick still having terrible gut microbes and sort of cycling between these these episodes so it's about understanding food really and I think that's why everything we talk about is trying to not just sort of give someone a recipe, they don't understand or they just got to follow it blindly for next weeks, it's got to be re-educating people so you know about food for the rest of your life and you can stay healthy because it's not all about weight anyway I mean, I'm a big believer that we need to sort of heal people from the inside out rather than the outside in if you sort out your gut microbes you know the rest will naturally follow and it won't be dramatic but it will be sustained and you won't be you know having any rebounds in a year's or two years time yeah that's really important because we you know gonna realize how unhealthy this country is compared to our ancestors and how our guts have we've lost half our gut microbes in the last hundred years they've just disappeared because we not giving them fiber not giving them real food we're hitting with antibiotics we're hitting with junk food all these things let's talk about antibiotics because i am always surprised about how little understanding there is of how dangerous it is to be taking antibiotics for everything i recently i'm going to call out my friends here i recently went on a holiday um and we went to indonesia which obviously is kind of well known for getting parasites and you know what they call barley belly etc etc and both the people i went on holiday with brought antibiotics in case which I understand the kind of idea of but instantly as soon as they got this bug started taking them I've always been told and I come from a family of science background so I'm pretty on it with this but I've always kind of been told you know not to take antibiotics unless it's really needed and recently as well my boyfriend had sepsis and had two recurrent well had a recurrence of it and was given so many antibiotics and obviously thank god he hadn't taken a lot of antibiotics for the rest of his life because they were able to work really effectively and that almost like shocked me into being like oh god yeah really to avoid taking them for everything but you are prescribed them for a lot of things that you go to the doctors with or general practitioners etc what should we generally be doing in terms of kind of taking antibiotics for illnesses infections whatever it might be yeah we were taught that there really is no downside to antibiotics yeah sure it's like smarties you just take them um a bit like artificial sweeteners it's a free you know zero calories total pleasure and that's nonsense um we've we know that both animal studies and some human studies have shown that if you take them regularly it can cause increase in weight it increases allergies in children so children had lots of antibiotics and that more have more food allergies okay and also you get antibiotic resistance which is so affects everybody so that the next generation will have no antibiotics left that are going to treat a really bad infection it's life-threatening so there's huge problems about this overuse we use about twice or three times as many antibiotics as the nordic countries right and you know we're still sicker than them so um we're overusing it although we under use it compared to some countries so there are still i think the us and um some places in southern europe use it but it's the idea you know They give it to animals to make them grow faster and get fatter.

51:01Okay. So next time your friends are thinking of taking an antibiotic or say, well, it's likely to give you a tendency to put on weight and food allergy. You might be less keen to take something just in case. Also dangerous. Some people take it multiple antibiotics can end up with really nasty gut infections. Right. Yeah, of course. That can be virtually uncurable. and it wipes out all the normal microbes in their gut. Everyone responds differently to antibiotics as well. We don't understand why. Some people seem to be quite resistant to it. Their bugs fight back and don't really change. Others, it totally changes their gut microbes.

51:42But if you just think about how important your gut microbes are to your health, you really don't want to be taking unnecessary antibiotics. But it can be life-saving. But we saw there was this recent scare about strep throat. Right. Suddenly, we ran out of penicillin because there was a mad rush. Every time anyone got a sore throat, they wanted to take this when 95 % of it was viral. No benefit and probably made the infection last a bit longer because you're damaging your immune system so it's yeah we overuse it definitely and people just need to think there's always a downside to everything and everything you put in your mouth whether it's a food or a chemical it's gonna have some interaction with your gut microbes and some people pop pop some pills like proton pump inhibitors you get over the counter for indigestion they all change the acidity of your gut and your microbe profiles subtly change to make you more liable to infections so nearly all these medicines we take have some downsides and yeah but and it it's quite interesting because the reason antidepressants don't work in some people is because we've got different microbes and you need the microbes to break down the antidepressant into the chemical that is good for your brain.

53:15So we're just learning all this stuff. It's very recent. It just shows you that be wary of everything you put in your mouth. It has a consequence. Yeah. I want to talk quickly about the keto diet. Obviously, it is an incredibly popular diet and has been for a long time. I know you've spoken about it before, about whether it works, whether it maybe doesn't work. Could you speak a little bit about that? Yes, so the keto diet, which classically means you're eating really just fats and proteins and you're trying to have 70 % of your meal as fats. I mean, some of them are milder than that, but that was the original sort of extreme one where your body is in ketosis.

53:55Works very well for childhood epilepsy. Right. That was the original reason it was used. Okay. We still don't really understand why. It's something to do with the salts. the microbes produce these bile salts in your liver when they get lots of fat and so this these have some amazing effects on the brain and a lot of people lost weight as well from this so there are some people that seem to benefit from these these diets nearly everyone loses weight short term some people find it incredibly hard to do others find it very easy yeah i tried it wants it turned into a monster like a real monster and it goes back to this this idea that we're all very individual when it comes to how you respond to any foods or diets and so i absolutely believe people that said it really works for them and they feel much better on it but i think those those numbers of people is quite small the average person isn't going to do well long term on a keto diet, although they might lose weight temporarily and then they'll put it on afterwards.

55:02If you have diabetes, interestingly, type 2 diabetes, a lot of people, and you're obese, a lot of people do do well initially by cutting out all the carbs and going on that. So there's a small group of people that do do well on this. Most people tend to struggle with it, don't find it helpful, feel unwell. And this is probably because we all respond to fats very differently and the zoe studies have shown that if you test everyone with the same fatty muffin which when you do it you'll you'll find out you eat this fatty muffin and then six hours later you've got to do a blood blood test on your skin prick test how much fat is remaining in your blood varies like 10 to 20 fold between normal people yeah so if if you get rid of that fat really easily you'll probably cope well with a high fat diet yeah and if it's still hanging around it causes inflammation and stress to your body yeah so there's this huge variability between people that I think explains why you get these different reactions but also why it's wrong for people to say the keto diets for everybody right but my main problem with the keto diet is that it's not good for your gut microbes long term.

56:18Sure. For all the reasons we explained, if you're not having vegetables, fibre, carbohydrates, then you're not nourishing your gut microbes. And they get very unbalanced. And long term, that's going to be bad. So it's not, to my mind, a long term sustainable diet. Although for some people with diabetes or obesity, it might be worth a way of kick-starting that particular problem but it's very specific group of people right so obviously we've been taught um i guess for well most of my life at least like these ideas on how to lose weight how to you know get towards a physical goal you might be going for if someone's listening to this and they're thinking well cool everything i thought works doesn't work what would be and they wanted to lose weight or what would be the biggest pieces of advice you'd give them in terms of kind of top tips to being able to lose weight well the first is to understand your what you're eating better you know to separate ultra processed food and real food look at how you're you're eating times you know are important whether you might want to skip breakfast to stop snacking.

57:37Do these sort of habit things before you get to worrying about how much do I eat. A lot of the how you eat, I think, is really important to sort out. Look at your diet objectively. So most people, just by switching to a gut-friendly diet, will be able to lose some weight over the next few months. It may not come off like that, but they'll move towards that and I think realizing they're not going to have the same frozen lasagna every night or the frozen pizza or the you know and not eating out takeaways all the time that contain all these other chemicals you wouldn't be putting into your home cooking also have a big effect so it's also realizing that some of the things that you thought should work for you don't.

58:30So there's a myth about exercise. Numerous studies, proper clinical trials have shown that exercise does not work for the majority of people as a weight loss tool. So what that means is that as many people gain weight when they exercise as lose weight. So you might be lucky. You might be in that small 10 % of people that find that it has a beneficial effect, but you're much more likely to have either no effect or actually put on weight because your body's reacting, thinking it's in a, you know, our ancestors on the African savannas, doing a lot of exercise, what happens? Your body shuts down, it doesn't, its metabolism slows right down, makes you hungrier.

59:18And so that's what it's designed to do. And so unless you're doing extreme ultra marathons or iron man which most people aren't i'm talking about the average sort of small amount of exercise generally it will make you hungrier so anything you'll be putting back on anything you gain so i'm all for exercise it's fantastic for all kinds all parts of health including mental health and i know you and i both exercise it's not a big deal but don't use it initially as a weight loss tool. Right. There's some evidence that once you've managed to change your diet, your lifestyle, whatever, if you're exercising at the same time, it stops it creeping back.

1:00:01Right. So it's a maintenance tool and it kind of, yeah. But a lot of people beat themselves up because they've said, I'm going to lose weight in January. I'm going to go to a gym. And they go on their treadmill, they do all this stuff, and they don't lose anything and they get very depressed and a bit of self-loathing and say it's all my fault and whatever, I'm useless, my skinny friend is doing amazingly. I think this information is really vital because it means it's absolutely not your fault. It doesn't mean exercise is bad. It just means you haven't focused on your diet. And all this nonsense that many gyms try and sell you in January or whatever is a false myth, not backed up by science.

1:00:49Yeah, because I mean, I've always had specifically good results, I guess, from exercise. Perhaps I'm in that 10%. Perhaps also I work a desk job, so I live a pretty sedentary life. And perhaps it's also that when I am adding more movement into my day, I may be less kind kind of bored in terms of like keeping my body active and therefore I don't know maybe consuming less snacks or whatever it might be I feel like I'm also happier when I'm less sedentary as I kind of explained before we started the podcast I always have you know I'll have this few days where I'll be a little bit grumpier I'll be a little bit more kind of tetchy and quick to frustration and I'll realize it's because I actually haven't even walked anywhere kind of in the past few days because I've just been zipping around doing as much work as possible so I guess yeah I mean obviously individualism very important kind of when looking at this but also would you say finding what works for you and finding what maybe doesn't work for you and maybe not just taking kind of people's recommendations at face value absolutely that's that's exactly my whole message really on all these lifestyle yeah myths is we're being told this works this works this and part of what you know i'm doing with my books and what we're doing with zoe is to try and myth bust and say well actually this doesn't work for the average person sure as i said we're all different yeah we're all much more different than we've been led to believe you know we can't just follow a recipe and everything is going to happen and we're going to get a six pack and we'll be doing this and whatever everyone's got to find their own route through experimentation through not believing a lot of the dogma that's out there it's like taking some magic supplement is going to make you lose weight or take you know uh this particular two minutes a day exercise is going to change your life yeah um or uh you know this particular food regime really you know limited food regime is going to uh revolutionize things so you know beware of the quick fix yeah realize you are different do experiment you know and and everything's up for grabs it's how you eat what you eat what you do you know and we've all got different lifestyles so we've got to fit it in yeah and it's all changed since covert anyway you know this sort of mixed working sometimes you're at home sometimes you're you know we've got to find our new way and realize that a lot of people do it differently and uh yeah and it's like are you a morning person an evening person and there really are no clear rules now.

1:03:30And I think this is a bit of a challenge for us all because we're not all doing the same thing. We're not all doing the same jobs. We're all in very different environments, very different pressures and stresses. But don't get freaked out if what you do doesn't work. Just say, well, that just might be me. I had a great example. We did this big intermittent fasting study. So Zoe's got this free health app called the Zoe Health Study app. And we've got 80 ,000 people to download it and for the first time do time-restricted eating, whether we're just eating within a 10-hour window and then not eating for 14 hours.

1:04:14And amazingly, most people manage to do it for at least three weeks. But some people find it really hard. and I know a couple of my colleagues Jonathan Wolfe and Sarah Berry who they are the people that were just dreaming of food in that time, they wanted that snack and they're snackers they can't really go without a snack and they found it really tough to do this they're little and often eaters and it was like the worst thing for them this experience, because I found it really easy and most other colleagues of mine find it really easy as well. So it's trying to work out what type of eater you are.

1:04:57Are you a fidgeter who likes nibbling lots of things? And that's fine. And you maintain good health that way. But everyone has to find what sort of person they are. And it changes. Every teenager doesn't like getting up early in the morning. But as you get older, that sort of starts to change. And I used to sleep till three in the afternoon. I don't know how I did it now, but now I'm much more of a morning person. And the same is true in our eating habits as well. Menopause, we looked at, changes women's eating habits and how they respond to it in a very big way as well. So you can't assume that everything that's been right for you is always going to work.

1:05:41And people know that because as a kid or a teenager, they could eat anything. And they suddenly get towards 30 and suddenly, oh you know I can't do that I'm suddenly putting on weight this is terrible it's because we're all changing educating people about their bodies and about the changing environments and everything else I think is really important yeah it's complicated yeah of course and that's what I try to get across food is complicated our bodies are complicated um we need to know more about it and I think in the future we'll all be using these apps to to help us yeah and that's what the Zoe app does it allows you to you know pick up foods you think were healthy scan it and see what your personal score is often I'm still surprised by some of the things yeah that I pick up because you know you can't retain all that knowledge yeah of course and before we close out I just want to you quickly you mentioned intermittent fasting and you mentioned skipping breakfast as a tool obviously this is something that we've been told kind of breakfast is the most important meal of the day etc etc I've not necessarily bought it because I work very well on intermittent fasting, I find it makes me less hungry the next day, it makes me less susceptible to kind of grabbing whatever there is.

1:06:52Should we be skipping breakfast? We should all try skipping breakfast. Some people do really well on breakfast, others don't. And what the studies now show, which is contrary to what's on the NHS and government guidelines, is that there's no harm in skipping breakfast. Some people find it really difficult and they overeat at lunch and they get very cranky. Other people, like perhaps you and I, are happy to skip it five times a week. But when there's a nice opportunity or you're a nice hotel buffet, you're going to say, oh, this is nice. I'll have this. Studies show that generally your metabolism is improved if you just have two meals a day rather than three or four or five meals a but generally it may be because you're just increasing that fasting period and in a way you could have breakfast if you ended up eating your dinner if you're a real breakfast lover so give it a try though, tell everyone try it for a week, see how you feel and you may want to go on with it there's nothing dangerous about it as we were told and it explains why some people just don't like breakfast.

1:08:07Most people don't wake up early hungry. Only a few people do. Yeah, that's really interesting. And our ancestors probably didn't. I mean, when I was with this African tribe, the Hadza, who are hunter-gatherers still, they didn't have a word for breakfast. Didn't exist, so as a concept. And nobody ate anything before about 10, 30, 11. So it's not really in our DNA. I think it's the breakfast cereal manufacturers have created a demand perfectly for us to want to sit down. Sweet things as well, because I'm such a savoury person and I hate a sweet breakfast. You never liked Cocoa Pops? I mean, well, specifically thanks to my parents, we actually weren't allowed anything with sugar in the first three ingredients.

1:08:56So none of that unless we were in a friend's house, in which case I'd have all of the Cocoa Pops. but I do think it's actually ended up now with me not necessarily like I couldn't have something that sweet in the morning no it's it's interesting but you know it's about how we've you know been as I said in my book spoon-fed this this stuff that this is normal and that you're a bad parent if you don't send your kids you know to school with a full breakfast and then now it's a snack and now it's a you know tea time and yeah right so they're massively over over consuming so yeah people want to do give it a go out there give intermittent fasting a go but if it's not for you don't worry about it find other ways to improve your health and diet it's all about empowerment really realizing you're not just getting some manufacturer's idea of what's good because it's got low calories on it it's all about giving power back to the individual to make these choices because these choices really are important not just for you but also, as I go in the book, for the planet as well, about climate change.

1:10:03Yeah, amazing. Well, thank you so much. It's been incredibly interesting. You've turned my world upside down. I will be going and eating a banana as a snack, but thank you so much. It's been incredibly interesting. My pleasure.