Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

by Tim Spector

With its mixture of genetics, microbiology, computing and biochemistry, the field of the microbiome is perceived as a daunting subject and a risky, lonely and unsupported career move for nutritionists.

The assumption we are all identical machines, and that we all respond to foods in the same way, is the most prevalent and dangerous myth about food. It is the basis of all so-called diet advice.

normal people can vary tenfold in their blood sugar responses to identical foods.

we were told around 2000 that the data showed that diesel-fuelled cars were better for the environment. In 2018, governments reversed the advice and announced we should switch to petrol or electric cars. They openly admitted mistakes had been made, and it transpired the German car industry and its lobbyists had supplied much of the false information.

The wealth of data from PREDICT is being exploited by a large team of academics worldwide, and using machine-learning algorithms, the company ZOE that I am helping has launched a smartphone app to predict how any individual will respond to any food, based on the algorithms and their own personal information.

Recently, I tested my glucose responses to my old ‘healthy’ breakfast using the new continuous blood glucose monitors (CGMs) as part of the PREDICT study. My blood sugar (glucose level) rose sharply from a resting level of 5.5 to 9.1 mmol and produced a surge in insulin to get my levels back to normal an hour later. I asked my wife to be a guinea pig and have an identical breakfast. Her blood sugars started lower than mine at 4 mmol, but hardly moved above 5.7 mmol.

This research clearly shows that if you want to find the foods that work best with your metabolism, then you need to know your personal nutritional response – something that can’t be predicted from simple online genetic tests.

What about a black espresso or tea without sugar, which can provide fibre and polyphenols but little in the way of energy?

Fibre?

The many microbes have a circadian rhythm similar to ours and vary widely in composition and function when in fasting and fed states.

Some of us are programmed to prefer eating food earlier in the day and others later, which may suit our unique personal metabolism and gut microbes.

Most of our bodies burn through enough energy in twelve hours to light an 80W lightbulb.

Light the bulb for how long?

some people eating a handful of daily nuts would unknowingly consume around 700 calories more over a week than others.

Studies in humans and mice are now showing that we put on less weight eating identical calories if they are consumed within an eight- to ten-hour window rather than grazing all day.

Even trained dieticians with obsessive traits find it impossible to live a normal life and count to within about 10 per cent the calories they ingest. You would need to cook every meal by yourself from ingredients that you had weighed and measured with complete accuracy, taking into account the precise heat exposure of the food, and then eat an exact proportion of everything you cooked.

we now know that our liver naturally produces most of the cholesterol in our bodies and that cholesterol in food doesn’t alter its levels in the blood to any extent.

There is more saturated fat, for example, in a tablespoon of olive oil than a lamb chop,

We construct most fats in our liver, but are unable to make from scratch essential poly-unsaturated fats such as omega-3, which we get from our diet.

For over seven years, 135,000 people from eighteen countries were followed as part of the PURE study and the results showed that people eating dairy and higher saturated fats were associated with lower mortality than those eating more carbohydrates.

These early margarines contained trans fats that were chemically engineered by the food industry to allow the fat to be solid at room temperature. Our bodies couldn’t deal with these artificial creations and they increased the risk of heart disease threefold, killing an estimated 250,000 Americans each year.

we wildly overestimate the benefits of supplements and underestimate the risks. Virtually none has been proven to work, and the evidence increasingly points towards their doing more harm than good.

People think that because studies have shown favourable effects of eating foods like fruits, vegetables and oily fish on our health, consuming a few of the chemical components found within these foods as supplements will bring about the same health benefits. We know from large clinical studies that this isn’t true.

Americans spend over a billion dollars a year on fish oil supplements. A recent review that combined seventy-nine randomised trials involving 112,000 people concluded, however, that taking long-chain omega-3 (fish oil, EPA or DHA) supplements neither benefits heart health nor reduces risk of stroke or death from any cause.

Spin-offs such as omega-9 supplements are another massive fraud, selling us non-essential fats that are in almost every food already. Our ignorance makes us vulnerable.

Despite what the government, public health bodies and food companies tell us, healthy people don’t need supplements. Instead, we should simply eat a diverse range of fresh foods and get a few minutes of sunshine a day. For 99 per cent of people, this will provide all the healthy vitamins and minerals you will ever need.

We fall for these fads because we want a quick fix and a miracle health boost, and a daily vitamin and mineral supplement might seem like the perfect solution. Everyone likes to feel that ‘they are doing something good for themselves’. But popping pills won’t outdo a bad diet and the science behind supplements simply doesn’t stack up.

If they had been bitter and not sweet, we would have treated them like toxic drugs, which would have required many robust clinical trials before contaminating our food supply.

You can call a loaf of bread ‘healthy sourdough’ even if it contains less than 1 per cent sourdough flour,

There is no such thing as sourdough four

If the entire population were to follow the government guidelines, the oceans wouldn’t be able to sustain it,

A large follow-up study of 126,000 adults conducted over nearly thirty years found that while a high intake of healthy plant foods (wholegrains, fruits/vegetables, nuts/legumes, oils, tea/coffee) was associated with substantially lower CHD risk, less healthy plant foods (juices/sweetened beverages, refined grains, potatoes/fries, sweets) was associated with higher CHD risk.

Why is tea and coffee listed as healthy?

The effects of caffeine drunk before six in the evening are likely to have worn off by the time you go to bed,

Not true

coffee is a reasonable source of fibre, with each cup having around half a gram. So drinking a few cups throughout the day gives you the same amount as eating a bowl of cereal or small banana.

If you suspect a food intolerance, by all means experiment with your diet by conducting an exclusion and re-challenge diet,

A whole range of observational studies have followed hundreds of thousands of people from many countries and consistently found a good diet, one particularly high in plants and seeds and variety, is linked to reduced levels of depression, while diets high in junk food and low fibre and diversity increase the risk.

the link between food and mood has been confirmed by recent randomised clinical trials in humans.

On average, patients with depression have a less diverse set of microbe species, especially in those with the commonest form of depression associated with anxiety. A large recent Flemish-Dutch population study of over 2,000 people showed mood and depression were affected by gut diversity, and the microbes that were missing in depressed people were those producing the key dopamine brain chemicals.

A study in 2019 showed that patients having psychotic thoughts had abnormal gut microbes that when transplanted into lab mice could make them also behave psychotically and altered brain chemicals (such as glutamates and GABA).

There is some limited evidence that poo transplants could work to ease depression, from studies both in mice and in a few Japanese patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) whose depressive symptoms improved after transplant.

if you have mood or behavioural changes, changing your microbes via your diet should be a priority. Natural probiotics in the form of fermented foods like cheese, yoghurt and kefir (and kimchi and kombucha, if you are adventurous) are likely to be beneficial.

A diverse Mediterranean-style diet with a range of fermented foods to keep your microbes happy is looking like the best present you can offer your brain, both to cheer it up and keep it working well.

ironically the countries that buy most bottled water have some of the safest, most tested and controlled tap waters on the planet.

in 2017, two new US studies conflicting with the official advice were published, showing that when 333,000 people were followed over twelve years, those that drank one to two units of alcohol a day lived longer and had around 20 per cent less heart disease than teetotallers.

Other studies looked at effects on the brain. One followed 3,000 Americans for thirty years of later life and found that light drinking protected against memory loss and dementia. This was supported by a detailed 2017 study of 550 British civil servants followed for thirty years looking at their brain scans.

a UK study comparing farm shops and mass distribution methods found that driving yourself to the local farm shop is worse than having your vegetables delivered in a van to your door in terms of carbon emissions, though cycling is better than both options.

Importing them from Spain is actually more sustainable in energy-efficiency terms than to produce them in heated greenhouses in the UK. It’s also cheaper for the consumer.

you can probably go without fresh strawberries during the winter months, so instead opt for blackberries, sloes or frozen berries.

Has he tried eating sloes?

We need to abandon our misguided reliance on counting calories, following guidelines and believing misleading labels with fat and carbohydrate percentages; we must fight the need to snack or hydrate constantly, and not be frightened of the occasional extended fast or skipped meal.

eat a diverse diet, mainly plants, without added chemicals.

The more plant species we can eat in a week (ideally twenty to thirty), the healthier and more diverse our gut microbes become, which helps to keep our bodies in good shape. This is not as hard as it sounds and includes eating all parts of the plant – grains, leaves, bulbs, flowers, seeds, nuts, roots, herbs or spices.

So-called probiotics or fermented foods are helpful to give our gut community a regular exposure to fresh live microbes. As well as eating good-quality cheese (ideally made with unpasteurised milk), consuming natural full-fat yoghurt regularly is healthy for most people. For an even more concentrated dose of multiple microbes, try fermented milk called kefir or fermented tea (kombucha) or add fermented vegetables like sauerkraut or kimchi.