Moment 178: They're Lying To About Low Fat Foods, THIS Is What They're Doing!: Tim Spector

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01:03Quality food. What is quality food in your definition of the phrase? It's the opposite of ultra-processed food, which is whole food, which is made from the original ingredients of plants, mainly plant-based, but it's not exclusively, that contains all the nutrients that those those plants produce without it being stripped away or boiled up or highly pressurized deformed and so they have to add in back those nutrients so you know it's things in their pure form so it's it's nuts it's seeds it's it's grains that haven't been ground up super finely it's all the amazing plants and fruits and vegetables that we've got they they're healthy foods but you know it's it's not straightforward yes i've got this list of 10 superfoods it's it's understanding that many foods that you know are healthy for us most of them are in their in their original form berries nuts virtually every vegetable is healthy for us if it's in that original form it's only because we've we had to learn to preserve things we had to do trickery to make you know margarines and things that with chemistry that we've moved away from that but you know going back you know olive oil for example is a great example of something that

02:36vilified often because it has lots of fats in it and you know certainly i was told oh the Mediterranean, they have olive oil and everything. It's horrible. It's all fatty. Turns out that's a perfect, you know, it comes from the olive. The good stuff, extra virgin olive oil has very little done to it. And that is a good, healthy quality food. But it can be refined. You can take that and you can keep refining it. You can take corn on a cob as an example and then you you know and then you've got i don't know uh tortilla chips or something down the other end is which bears or cornflakes which bears no resemblance to the original and they're all versions on the spectrum god it's so confusing you know because what you've said to me is you know based on research and studies but then when i go to a supermarket, labelling, even I was just thinking then cornflakes. I think I grew up thinking cornflakes were healthy because it says corn in the title. You know what I mean? And when you're trying to navigate, I was just thinking if I'm going down an aisle now, hearing what you've just said, that that quality food is food that is not ultra processed and kind of resembles its original form. When you walk down the aisle in the supermarket, everything is trying to pretend

03:53that it's good. So how do I know what is good? I mean, I can go to the vegetable aisle and I can say, okay, that looks like a cabbage. It looks like no one's messed with that. There's been no study done on that to it hasn't been through a laboratory but how do i like if i'm in an aisle tomorrow how do i know what food is good and what is not well you've said the first thing if it's not in a package um you're pretty sure it's good okay so um if it's concealed in some package that's got you know happy children and signals of vitamins in it that should be a warning sign you know the more they have to advertise the food and say what its additives are and everything the more you should be wary about it. The number of ingredients is another pretty good sign.

04:36So once you get over 10, particularly if there's lots you've never heard of you wouldn't find in your kitchen, you should also be wary that that is ultra processed food. Anything that says low calorie that says means they've had to add in lots of artificial sweeteners or protein extracts or something else is also a big danger sign. Low in fat means they've replaced the natural fat with something else that's cheaper. And these are all warning signs, you know. And, you know, you take breakfast cereals. I mean, I used to eat lots of breakfast cereals. I was brought up on them, highly sugary stuff. And then I thought I was being healthy when I moved to Muesli's and posher stuff.

05:24But actually when you still, you know, that appearance of healthiness, it's still got lots of additives in it. It's still got lots of sugar in it. It's just, and those cereal packets have added vitamins in it, but they're often in a very poor form. I did an experiment once where I took some cornflakes or special care, I can't remember, that says it had added iron. And if you mix it up, you can put a magnet on it you can get off the iron filings they're so cheap that they're just added to tick a box saying it has iron but they don't get into your body or do anything so anything that's got these things added with this in it low in this is a sign that they're obscuring the quality of the product so it's you know but there's a lot of brain you know we've been brainwashed for years and decades in this and you know i was as well as a doctor you know i should know better and yet i've completely changed my seven two of my meals completely so i've gone from having muesli with low-fat milk and an orange juice and a cup of tea because i i did you know i started doing these tests for Zoe I found out that gave me a massive sugar spike and was a terrible way to start the day and I got these you know dips at 11 o'clock to a high full fat yogurt nuts seeds

06:54a few berries and never have orange juice that's on my that's a really unhealthy drink for everybody and I have lots of black coffee which I now know is good for me so that's totally different I I changed my lunch for at least 10, 15 years. When I got in the hospital, I was having a hospital lunch, which used to be in the canteen. Then it was Marks and Spencers. Got a healthy looking sandwich with brown bread, sweet corn and tuna and a smoothie in a little bottle.

07:31And that gave me a massive sugar spike. And I wouldn't have known that. and I was told that should have been a healthy thing to eat so you know there's there's general rules but also there are specific rules and this whole idea of individuality is coming in so it could be that you could you might be fine on that don't know I was very annoyed because when I started we were starting doing this testing for Zoe I had all these spare kits and I gave my wife one as well and we sit down and she's um french belgian and loves croissants and so we'd have croissant each mine would shoot up she had no change at all in her her sugar which was really annoying yeah so but it also brings brings home the fact that you know everyone loves simplistic rules but you can only get so far with them you have to start experimenting yourself and see what works for you and not just take everything for granted and that's really the that's the whole essence of really you know setting up this personalized nutrition research and zoe and everything else but on top of this general advice about changing a whole idea of food i think because i think they do go hand in hand that if you realize there are these individual differences

08:53you 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, you know, it's much more nuanced.