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

00:00When your cat is acting weirder, or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower. Hello, Ted? Your cat seems thirstier. Whoa, slow down, buddy. Or your puppy is acting clumsier. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. Vedge ER for Pets. This is Kate. Vedge: the better, kinder ER for pets.

00:30One of my friends is a prolific calorie counter. He eats a lot of Domino's pizzas—and he listens to this podcast, so he's going to know exactly that I'm atting him—he eats Domino's pizzas all the time and a real processed food diet, but then says to me it's all about calorie counting. Now, with all due respect, friend, he's never managed to... I shouldn't say that. But it's not necessarily worked for him in terms of the goal that he set himself.

01:06When I was reading about your view on calorie counting in your book *Spoon-Fed*, I screenshotted it this morning and sent it to him. I said, "You are a bullshitter." That's what I said in the message, and we had a good laugh about it this morning. But what is your view on calorie counting and this idea that weight loss or being healthy is just about having a calorie deficit?

01:31It's complete nonsense. There's never been any long-term study showing that calorie counting is an effective way to lose weight and maintain weight loss after the first few weeks. Yes, very strict calorie counting, if you deprive yourself for a few weeks, you will lose some weight.

01:58But even if you're successful, your body's evolutionary mechanisms will make you hungrier and hungrier every week you go by where you're depriving yourself of energy. Your body will go into a sort of shutdown mode, your metabolism slows down so 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 rebound back if they're doing this style of calorie restriction.

02:30Calorie counting is a part of that. Some people try and say, "Okay, I'm not going on a dramatic diet, but I'm going to just try and reduce my calories by 10% in the day," which in the old theory was supposed to make you lose weight. Well, it's virtually impossible even for professionals to count calories because they're not very accurate for a start.

02:54Everything on the packet, you have to weigh everything. In restaurants now, where we're supposed to have these calorie counts, they're plus or minus about 30% because the portion size makes such a huge difference to it. It has been shown in the US to be a worthless exercise anyway. You can't count them going in, and you can't really count your metabolism going out either.

03:19We're all incredibly different. 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 related 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 guideline.

03:37I 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 on 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. There are several science experiments which now absolutely nail that.

04:10One was in America where they gave people identical meals for two weeks in an enclosed semi-prison. One was homemade and one was ultra-processed. Both had identical calories and macros were the same. The group with the ultra-processed foods overate 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.

04:41Why is that?

04:43We 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 chemical; it's doing something weird to me and I'm producing something weird in exchange. It could be that they get absorbed much quicker, so you get a big sugar rush.

05:07The nutrients get into your body in a way faster than they should do in nature, so your brain doesn't have time to say "I'm full," which normally takes 20 minutes or so to get that fullness. So it could be the matrix of the food, the chemicals in the food, or its effect on the gut microbes.

05:30It also could be things like your sugar spikes. In the Zoe Predict studies, where basically we've given now 50,000 people in the US and the UK the same foods at the same time, everyone's got these muffins. We show that one in four people who have these muffins, while wearing glucose monitors, get a real sugar dip three hours later.

05:58This is where you get a rise in sugar which is normal, and then as it comes down, it goes below baseline. But only in one in four people. When that happens, those people end up overeating at the next meal and during the day. They feel more tired and more hungry. That's the 11 o'clock slump.

06:21If you've had a carby breakfast, some people feel that, others don't. What's really interesting is that one in four people eating an identical muffin of identical calories will then overeat by another 10% that day. So you can see how that just blows the calorie idea out—that calories in equals calories out and everything's the same.

06:48The third thing is that ultra-processed food says it has the calories that are equal to whole foods, but often they don't account for the fact that it's ground up and highly refined. If you take almonds, for example, they might use ground almonds. You compare ground almonds to whole almonds, and there's perhaps 30% less available calories in the whole almonds than there is in the other one.

07:15The whole thing is a complete nonsense. It's there because the food industry wants you to focus on the calorie, the fat content, and sugar so you don't have to think about the quality of the food. It's something that they can control very easily to get their profits higher.

07:31They 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. The artificial sweeteners are harmful, the glues that stick the foods together, the emulsifiers—some people react quite a lot to those and they cause problems. The whole thing is like this giant camouflage. That's really one thing I'm into: getting 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.

08:12Quality food. What is quality food in your definition of the phrase?

08:18It's the opposite of ultra-processed food. It is whole food which is made from the original ingredients of plants—mainly plant-based, but not exclusively—that contains all the nutrients those plants produce without it being stripped away, boiled up, highly pressured, or deformed so they have to add back those nutrients.

08:48It's things in their pure form. It's nuts, seeds, and grains that haven't been ground up super finely. It's all the amazing plants, fruits, and vegetables that we've got. They're healthy foods. It's not straightforward as in "I've got this list of ten superfoods." It's understanding that many foods are healthy for us; most of them are in their original form.

09:18Berries, nuts, virtually every vegetable is healthy for us if it's in that original form. It's only because we had to learn to preserve things, we had to do trickery with chemistry to make margarines and things, that we've moved away from that.

09:40Olive oil, for example, is a great example of something that was vilified often because it has lots of fats in it. I was told "the Mediterraneans have olive oil on everything, it's horrible, it's all fatty." Turns out that's a perfect food; 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.

10:08But it can be refined; you can take that and keep refining it. You can take corn on the cob as an example, and then you've got tortilla chips or cornflakes down the other end which bears no resemblance to the original. They are all versions on a spectrum.

10:32It's so confusing because what you've said to me is based on research and studies, but then when I go to a supermarket, the labeling—I was just thinking then of cornflakes. I think I grew up thinking cornflakes were healthy because it says "corn" in the title. When you're trying to navigate an aisle now, hearing what you've just said that quality food is food that is not ultra-processed and resembles its original form, everything is trying to pretend that it's good.

11:03How do I know what is good? I can go to the vegetable aisle and I can say "okay, that looks like a cabbage, no one's messed with that." But if I'm in an aisle tomorrow, how do I know what food is good and what is not?

11:17Well, you've said the first thing: if it's not in a packet, you're pretty sure it's good. If it's concealed in some packet that's got happy children and signals of vitamins in it, that should be a warning sign. The more they have to advertise the food and say what its additives are, the more you should be wary about it.

11:41The number of ingredients is another pretty good sign. Once you get over ten, particularly if there's lots you've never heard of and wouldn't find in your kitchen, you should also be wary that it is ultra-processed food. Anything that says "low calorie" means they've had to add in lots of artificial sweeteners, protein extracts, or something else—that's also a big danger sign.

12:08"Low in fat" means they've replaced the natural fat with something else that's cheaper. These are all warning signs. Take breakfast cereals—I used to eat lots of breakfast cereals, I was brought up on them. Highly sugary stuff. Then I thought I was being healthy when I moved to mueslis and posh stuff.

12:34But actually, that appearance of healthiness still has lots of additives in it and lots of sugar. Those cereal packets have added vitamins in them, but they're often in a very poor form. I did an experiment once where I took some cornflakes or Special K—I can't remember—which said it has added iron. If you mix it up, you can put a magnet on it and you can get off the iron filings. They're so cheap that they're just added to tick a box saying it has iron, but they don't get into your body or do anything.

13:08So anything that's got "these things added," "low in this," is a sign that they're obscuring the quality of the product. We've been brainwashed for years and decades in this. I was as well, as a doctor. I should know better, and yet I've completely changed two of my meals completely.

13:37I've gone from having muesli with low-fat milk, an orange juice, and a cup of tea. When I started doing these tests for Zoe, I found out that gave me a massive sugar spike. It was a terrible way to start the day and I got those dips at 11 o'clock. Now I've moved to a high, full-fat yogurt, nuts, seeds, a few berries, and I never have orange juice—that's a really unhealthy drink for everybody. I have lots of black coffee, which I now know is good for me.

14:16That's totally different. I changed my lunch for at least 10 or 15 years when I was in the hospital. I was having a hospital lunch which used to be in the canteen, then it was a Marks and Spencer's "healthy-looking" sandwich with brown bread, sweetcorn, and tuna, and a smoothie in that little bottle. That gave me a massive sugar spike. I wouldn't have known that, and I was told that should have been a healthy thing to eat.

14:51There are general rules, but also there are specific rules, and this whole idea of individuality is coming in. It could be that you might be fine on that, I don't know. I was very annoyed because when we were starting this testing for Zoe, I had all these spare kits and I gave my wife one as well.

15:13We'd sit down—she's French-Belgian and loves croissants—so we'd each have a croissant. Mine would shoot up; she had no change at all in her sugar, which was really annoying. But it also brings home the fact that everyone loves simplistic rules, but you can only get so far with them.

15:37You have to start experimenting yourself and see what works for you and not just take everything for granted. That's really the whole essence of setting up this personalized nutrition research in Zoe. On top of this general advice, I think they go hand in hand. If you realize there are these individual differences, you realize it's not as simple as you've been told. It's not that fats are evil, it's not that calories are bad; it's much more nuanced.

16:13When your cat is acting weirder, or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower. Hello, Ted? Your cat seems thirstier. Whoa, slow down, buddy. Or your puppy is acting clumsier. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. Vedge ER for Pets. This is Kate. Vedge: the better, kinder ER for pets.

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17:01When your cat is acting weirder, or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower. Hello, Ted? Your cat seems thirstier. Whoa, slow down, buddy. Or your puppy is acting clumsier. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. Vedge ER for Pets. This is Kate. Vedge: the better, kinder ER for pets.