The Food Doctor: "Extra Protein Is Making You Fatter!" The 6 Food Lies Everyone Still Believes! (Brand NEW Food Science) - Tim Spector
Guests: Tim
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
I brought everything that I could find in the supermarket that was making a claim that it was good for me. And I want you to take a look at it. That, Tim Spector, is definitely healthy. Or not. Avoid that one. Terrible. Complete rubbish. Not as bad as the other one, but then we're going to unravel all these secrets. The return of the world's biggest gut health expert, Professor Tim Spector. He's an award-winning scientist, best-selling author. And he's co-founder of the company, Zoe, the home kit for personalized nutrition.
Everything I'm about to throw at you has a whole industry of people behind it. The first one is protein supplements. Protein is massively hyped. Most people are having nearly twice as much protein in their diets as they need and most of it will be converted to sugars and fat. Coffee. It's definitely a health food and you'll live longer. Mouthwash. You're more prone to infection and actually worse smelling breath long term. Really? Yes. No hard data that you should be drinking eight glasses of water a day.
Ten minutes in the sun will get you all the vitamin D you need. And there's some actual data showing that if you've got too much excess fat on your body, exercise alone is a terrible way to deal with it. You need something radical. You and many others like you are a victim of marketing. But we are in a fibre crisis. We think only about one in 20 people are getting enough fibre for good health. has a dramatic effect on avoiding cancers, mental health and your longevity.
So you brought this... Yep, that's the magic potion. A handful of that, you reduce your risk of death by 14, 15%. Two handfuls of 30%. And it's incredibly easy to do. Tim, what is the benefit to me if I change the way that I'm eating and start thinking through the lens of my gut microbiome and start taking the advice that you talk about in your books? What is the benefit to both me and society in terms of statistical outcomes? Why does it matter?
It matters because we are suffering an epidemic of common chronic diseases. So we're getting increases in cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity. We, you know, majority of the population are overweight or obese. That has enormous consequences. Also on our economic output, it costs the country and the taxpayer nearly £60 billion a year. As a country, we don't want someone like you to become unhealthy so that it's difficult for you to work, you're not functioning properly.
The state then has to provide for you extra health care, et cetera. There's that individual level. But also, we don't want you to get mental health diseases, depression, anxiety. anxiety, all these things that we know are also linked to poor diet, as well as increased cancers and other elements of it. So it's a combination of the medical, the mental, the social, the economic. All these things are related to having good nutrition. And I think we've taken it for granted that it doesn't really matter what we eat.
It's all about weight and these things, but that's maybe only the small side of it. I think there's much more to it than that. Someone like me, I'm 30-ish years old, and I like to think that I'm in good shape. I exercise every day, very active. So sometimes I think I can fall into the trap of thinking, because there's no obvious sign of disease in me, that I can eat what I want because I'm working out. And then I sat here with a doctor a couple of months ago, and he said a sentence to me that sounded something like, we can see disease growing in you decades out.
That really made me change my thinking on health. Because if it is like a seed of health or a seed of disease that's growing in me, irrespective of my current physical abilities and my, you know, think I'm in good shape, it's kind of like compounding invisibly inside of me disease, for better or for worse. And that means that even someone like me, I can stop 50-year-old Steve's disease now at 30 by nudging my health in a slightly different direction in terms of nutrition.
Yeah. Is that an accurate assessment of, because there'll be people that are listening that are so healthy, apparently healthy on the outside because they can run fast or because they haven't got any problems with their bones or back. Yeah, well, when I was your age, I didn't think at all about my nutrition really. You know, although I was a trained doctor, etc., I said, I don't want too much fat, I want this, and, you know, I'll try and get a nice-looking steak rather than the cheapest one.
But I didn't think in that way that I wanted to look after my health in 20 years' time. It's a tough concept for people who are, you know, doing so much else and still feeling good. You know, still getting out of bed, fresh in the morning, energised. and not really feeling the effects of aging. So I think it's true, but it's quite a tough concept to sell to the whole population, particularly people in their 20s and 30s, about the future. And that's why I think focusing on things like mental health do resonate perhaps more than saying, think about what you're going to be like when you're 50 to most people i've spent definitely the last 10 years of my life believing that in order to grow big muscles which has been an aim throughout my life i need to have protein supplements what do you think about that i still have protein supplements in my house protein powders come home from the gym big scoop of protein drink it what do you think of that protein is massively hyped There are very few people who are protein deficient in this country and need supplements.
There are a few, but I would say it's less than 5% of the population are not getting sufficient protein to perform either their normal activities or, like you, build muscle. Because it's so inherent in our normal food. We evolved to be omnivores and to get enough protein. and our ancestors didn't fall apart because we didn't get protein shakes. And I think the fact that we're focusing on protein is you and many others like you are a victim of marketing.
That everywhere you look at the moment, protein is the thing that sells products. If it's got protein on the pack, it's, you know, that's ringing, oh, I need extra protein. And protein has this ring of only good about it. There's nothing bad about protein. It's like just gonna get me big and strong and I don't worry about calories or getting fat. You know, I use it or lose it and that's fine. And it's completely wrong with the, all the evidence is that most people are having nearly twice as much protein in their diets as they need for normal protein balance.
And the only people that really need to worry are if you're elderly and you're not eating very much. OK, so young people generally yourself will be getting enough food that a percentage of all that food is going to contain protein. There's very few foods that don't contain protein. People don't think about it, but every time you're eating pasta or grains, you're eating protein. It doesn't have to be steak or eggs. And. But the elderly, if you're not eating, you've gone off your food, you're sick, you're on some medication, might need some extra protein sources or to focus on it.
Or if you're a strict vegetarian or vegan, in that position where you're not eating much or you're sick or you're elderly, then those people do need something. Now, if you are a bodybuilder and, again, you're trying to lose weight at the same time, then you might need some protein supplements. But if you're eating a normal diet, there's no evidence the vast majority of people need any extra protein. They can get it all from normal food. And normal food, in my opinion, is a much better way of getting it because that's how our bodies have evolved rather than getting it in a drink or a supplement or a powder where it's often mixed with other chemicals.
It's not in its natural form. We're not sure that it's all used. And the excess protein you have isn't, for free, protein gets broken down and it either gets eliminated in your body or it's stored as fat as it gets concerted to sugars and then to fats. So people think of protein as only in muscle and if it's not going to my muscle, I just pee it out, it doesn't matter. Not the case. If you're having lots of protein that you can't use up in your muscles because you've already got so much on board, you can't store it anywhere.
Some of it gets eliminated, but most of it will be converted to sugars and fat. This goes against everything they told me. Because I thought that you could have as much protein as you like, your body can't store it, so I must just be like pooping it out or something. I don't know. Can't store it as protein, but it gets converted. It's broken down into small pieces, and that gets stored in your body for the future. So how much protein can I process in like a day?
How many grams of protein? How many kilos roughly? Oh, 90 kilos. I'm going to say 91 because there's people listening. It's all muscle though. So around roughly that amount of protein, because it goes with weight. The more your weight is, the more protein you need to repair your muscles and keep it going. So the official amount is normally around 0.8 pounds. grams per kilogram. Okay. So, but if we think, you know, we want to be on the safe side.
So most people are 95% of people, that's the, a safe level. But most people in this country are having like 1.4 grams per kilogram. So they'd be having for you over a hundred grams of protein and Basically, if you don't anything extra, so you might do a little workout. That might increase it a little bit, maybe 10%. So you might be able to use 10% of that if you're doing a lot of weightlifting, et cetera, but not huge amounts. So if you took 300...
grams of protein most of it is just going to be either you'd be getting rid of it excreting it in some way or it would be converted into sugars and fats stat i found here the average daily intake of protein in the uk is 76 grams per day for adults aged 19 to 64 and 67 grams a day for adults aged 65 years and over. So that's how much on average people are consuming with their normal diets. Yeah, so it's just roughly, depending on the size of people, it's just over a gram per kilo.
And they're getting that without protein, most of them without protein powders, just for their normal diets. I mean, as an example, my normal breakfast gives me, I worked out, over 30 grams of protein. which is sort of what you want to kickstart the day in order to get muscles repairing things. But if I took, you know, an extra protein powder, give me an extra 100 grams, that really wouldn't have any effect at all other than slightly increasing my weight.
What about fiber? I've got two questions here. What is fiber in the most simple terms? And... Why is it important? And are we consuming enough fibre in our natural diets in the UK? So unlike protein, where 95% of people are absolutely fine and not deficient in protein, 95% of people are deficient in fibre. We think only about 1 in 20 people are getting enough fibre for good health. So this is the imbalance between the marketing. People just don't make money on fiber like they do on protein.
So all the commerce is going to – everyone's protein deficient. You've got to have protein, protein, protein, protein. Who's supporting the spinach or the fiber people? Hardly anybody. We're massively deficient in it. It is the bits of carbohydrates. So carbohydrates are made up of sugars, starches, and fibers. So fibres are the parts of carbohydrates that are not broken down and absorbed early on in the system. So they go through to the deeper parts of the intestine.
They meet the microbes and they have to be digested much slower, much lower down your system. And they're food for your gut microbes. And it could be soluble ones. They've been insoluble ones. They're just different degrees of how hard it is to break it down. And we used to think of it as roughage. It used to be called roughage. When I was a medical student and a junior doctor, you used to eat this stuff and it was just to clear out the toxins. It was just like you have this stuff, it scrapes your pipes and cleans it up.
And that's all it was thought to do. But now we know it's absolutely crucial for health. The average in the UK is about 20 grams of fiber. So if you just increase that by a quarter... not very much, five grams, that's a handful of nuts or seeds or something a day, you will increase, you reduce your risk of death by 14%, 15%. And if you did two handfuls of nuts, 30%. Each one, it goes up. So it has a dramatic effect on your longevity. And it's also important for avoiding cancers and mental health and nearly everything that we've looked at.
So it's really the forgotten element of our diet that... I think at the moment we're in a fiber crisis. We're certainly not in a protein crisis. And yet everyone's talking about protein. It's really a fascinating interplay between what the real problems are and what the marketing and the commerce of this whole field is. So we need to improve everybody's fiber amounts. All the healthy countries in the world are eating much more fiber. And it's also diverse fiber.
It's lots of different things. It's not just fiber. having kale. When you came on the podcast last time, you said something which I found to be quite daunting, which was this idea of trying to get 30 plants into my diet a week. You've brought some food with you today, Fimi, that you say can help me with this. Jack, could you grab the food that Tim brought with him today? So you brought this jar of what looks like a bunch of nuts and seeds, Yep, that's the magic potion.
Magic potion. Tell me more. So this is what I call my diversity jar. So do have a nibble, but basically there's about 10 different types of nut and seed in there that each time I see some packet of mixed nuts or I find something new in a shop, I add it to that jar and I keep it full, mix it around. And that's what I throw on my yogurt and kefir in the morning. or I would put on my salad at lunch. And that basically is a hack that instantly gets me 10 plants for my week.
So you're saying how hard it is to get to 30 plants. Well, just by doing that, you've only got 20 to go. So you're a third of the way just by having a few hacks like that, which incidentally also gives you your protein. OK, so rather than your protein shakes and your whatever handful of that, you've got significant amounts of protein. But the important thing for this is the 30 plants. People forget that a plant doesn't have to be, doesn't look like spinach or kale.
It can be a nut and a seed, which are so nutrient dense and so useful that they will keep whole colonies of hundreds or thousands of different microbes happy in your gut, munching on the different chemicals in there. And they're very high in fiber, very high in protein. I was going to say about the fiber thing, this is a way to get the fiber as well. Absolutely, yes. So they're high fiber and high protein, and that's why they are so nutritious and why, if you're having this sort of stuff, you really don't need chemical supplements.
And so that's just one of several hacks about how you can add these to your foods very easily, as well as mentally just thinking, I wanna try and find add different things to my meal. I don't want to have the same meal every single day. People get stuck going to their local sandwich shop and saying, I'm only having that prawn salad. Prawn salad, prawn salad, prawn salad. Just think every day, go something different. And if people start thinking differently about food, not only does it excite the taste buds a bit more and gets you out of your rut, but it's also going to generate many more microbes.
So You know, if you're going to beat me, you need to be getting more diversity in there to grow more species so that you can, you know, keep them all happy. And they live, you know, they live off diversity and variety just as we humans do. So when I got my Zoe results back, one of the PDF shows all the bugs in my stomach. is that what you call them bugs or microbes let's call them microbes then uh just because it makes me sound smarter so all the microbes are my in my belly and i had a very narrow group of microbes now if i you're telling me that if i expand that collection of microbes my overall health will be better i'll process my food better my mental health will be better is there anything i'm missing from that list Your immune health would be better.
So immunity would be better. So you'd get less food allergies. You'd get resistance to infection would be better. So how do I bring... I know this sounds like a super stupid question to ask, but I looked at that list and thought, okay, so I almost thought of it like little pets living inside me. Where do I get the new pets from? Like the new animals from to put inside my body? Because I was thinking, my girlfriend's got loads of them, I'll just kiss her.
Yes. Well, you could kiss your girlfriend. There is quite a lot of swapping between partners, by the way, in microbes. So you're not wrong there. But unless they had something to eat, they'd die off. Okay? So what you're doing is... You know, we are continually surrounded by many of these microbes. We are swapping microbes with all our close friends and family all the time. But unless you've got the fertilizer in you, they're not going to survive.
And the fertilizer is diversity of foods. Yes. And you may have, you know, you've kissed your girlfriend, you've got some of her microbes, and they're just sitting there waiting for... to be fed, right? They might be in a very dormant state. Many of these microbes can go into spore formation and stay there for years doing nothing in tiny amounts. And they only wake up when, you know, a peanut hits them on the head or something and says, oh, you know, Stephen's given me some food at last.
You know, I can eat this. I couldn't eat the other. I can't eat Nando's. I'm going for this. So that's the concept that you want to... give them this rich soil so that they can flourish. And you can gain microbes from going to other countries, eating a variety of foods, and there are microbes that live on a lot of fresh produce that you can get. You get them from dogs. animals, just by having a pet around the house or going to the countryside, you can get more microbes in you.
But it's a lot of them are actually inside us waiting. And places like our appendix may be sources of tiny amounts of these microbes that are just waiting for the right signal to wake up. I, after our last conversation, was always going through the supermarket trying to figure out what's fermented and what's not. How do I know what's fermented? What does fermented even mean? And you brought this array of things with you to show me how easy it is to ferment things in your own home, I guess.
Yeah, I think people are frightened by fermentation and it's important to know what it is and what it isn't. So fermentation is a word, lots of different meanings, but it's when food is modified by microbes to produce something that is taste different, taste better and is also healthy for you. And in a way, it's a probiotic food because what we're doing is we're taking basic whole foods and we are adding something like salt or sugar. And that then allows natural food.
microbes on those plants to flourish and change the composition of that food. So they make it acidic. They get rid of all the bad bugs and make it into something super healthy. And all the microbes are growing just like they would be in your gut if you fed them. So it's like a mini version of your gut is what we're seeing here. And it's incredibly easy to do. So that's why I brought this stuff along so that I can demonstrate not only... how to get extra plants into your 30 a week.
But also, if those plants are fermented, they have many more times more nutrients in them. And the fact that those bugs have been working on them means they've been, in a way, pre-digested before they get into your gut. And all these studies are showing these are super good for all aspects of your health and if you can have several portions of the day you really notice the difference so for people that are just listening on audio and can't see what have we got in front of you here so we've got a jar like a like a one liter jar of which is full of chopped veg from the bottom my fridge all of us would have fridges like this where you've got odds and ends left behind and the idea is that you should rather than throwing it away you can actually just chop it up and ferment it and stick it in a jar and there is i can see cabbage i can see a radish in there it's just like the the waste veg that most people would probably chuck in a bin Exactly.
So a few years ago, I'd have just thrown this in the bin, I wouldn't have thought about doing it. So you throw it out. People have heard about sauerkraut, which is basically just fermented cabbage. And you might have heard of kimchi, which is the Korean version, which has just got a few more things in it, like chilies and ginger and spices. Yeah. And this is a sort of mixture of all of them, but it's just to illustrate the fact that you can ferment virtually all plants and avoid the waste.
And that's what our ancestors did before fridges, because all you need to do is put them in a jar and squash them down and add 2% salt and a little bit of water to cover it, and that's all you do. And I can just demonstrate that now for you, if you like. So we've got all these in here, and... The idea is you add the salt. So we're adding 2% salt. This is really important to measure it. So that's the only thing really tricky is to make sure that you've got 2% salt and that gets poured in there and you would mix it around.
I would normally put it in a big bowl and do it, but you get the idea here. You put the salt in, you mix it around, and you scrunch it down really hard. So, you know, like really... getting rid of any space for air. Why? Because the microbes don't like air. The ones that ferment, they're called anaerobic, they don't like oxygen. And so they grow really well when you cut out the oxygen and they can just live off, start eating the sugars in these plants And the salt gives them a competitive advantage against nasty microbes.
So that means that they can out-compete the other guys because it's suddenly a different environment, and that's what we're doing. So you squash it down, and I'm going to add a little bit of water here. Sometimes you don't need to add hardly any water, and if you add more than a bit, just add a little bit of salt to that water, just enough to cover it because the microbes are naturally in all these plants. People don't realise that. They think, oh, it must be sterile.
I've got it from a nice supermarket and a plastic wrapper. It's full of microbes, and that's normal. And we know that even in garlic, for example, even when you cut it, there are perhaps 10, 20 different types of microbe living in that garlic. And once they sense the water and the salt, they will suddenly say, oh, it's good to come out. I can outcompete. I can grow. I can start munching the sugar. Yeah. And then to pack it down, you can use some stones, some clean stones.
What I like to do is use some leftover waste. So I get some outside cabbage leaves or something else from a plant and just put it down in there, squash it. And so you can see that it's now below the water line. And I close the lid. And that's basically it. And I would leave that for a minimum of three days, somewhere room temperature, out of the sun, and you'll start to see bubbles forming. And that's CO2. The microbes are producing that. They're fermenting it.
That's it. And you've got suddenly your own probiotic fermented food made from your scraps rather than throwing it out. And that's a great example of what you can do to really improve your health for something that costs nothing. apart from the price of salt and that's when you made earlier yeah this is a nicer looking one that's uh what i did earlier and i'm just gonna say you can see a few bubbles there uh it's it's just starting to to get going um and uh you can open it up uh every day or so to give it a smell and see what's happening making sure that it's packed down so that it's all below the water line once you've done this it once it's fermented after a week uh you can put it in the fridge for months Oh, really?
So you could put that in the fridge for months? Yeah, once it's fermented, it's become acidic, and the pH has dropped below 4.5, no other microbes can live there. Only the ones you've selected personally. These are your probiotic microbes that we know are good for your health. And the difference between this and your probiotic capsule is that you'll probably get 30 different microbes here. Whereas you take your capsule, you might get two or three.
So this is why fermented foods, I think, are a real answer to many of our problems. You know, the fact that we've got a rather Western-deprived microbiome, these could really help... people like you want to boost your gut microbiome and just introducing these fermented foods into your regular diet. And this is what the Koreans do, for example, you know, the Japanese do by using fermented soybeans in nearly all their foods. And so many of the healthiest populations have large amounts of fermented food in their diets.
When you look at the Japanese and the Koreans, do they have better gut microbiomes than the people in the UK and the US? Yes, they do. And importantly, they live much longer and have much less of our chronic diseases or they sort of delay those problems by at least 10 years. So I think we need to learn from the populations that are doing it right. And this is a really easy... thing to do. And I think it's a great exercise in teaching. Because if you think what's going on, this is mirroring what's going on inside your gut.
If you had that rich diversity of plants in there, you can get many microbes to... to proliferate. And once you start seeing the bubbles forming and the amazing change in taste and texture that you're getting, you've got to remember this is the difference between a grape and an amazing vintage red wine. It's just the effect of those microbes on that grape skin, just changing it over time, increasing that complexity and producing chemicals. It's basically a sort of chemistry lesson.
When I'm in the supermarket, there are lots of things that now have labels on them saying that they're great for gut health or they're low sugar or they're low fat. I brought everything that I could find in the supermarket that was making a claim that it was good for me. And I want you to take a look at it. These are some of the most popular things that people pick up in the supermarket that make these claims that they're low sugar, low fat, low...
high protein, great for gut health. So the first one I've got here is Actamol, which says it's got vitamin D, B6. It's great for immune support, zero added sugar, zero percent fat, rich in vitamin D. That, Tim Spector, is definitely healthy. Or not. So yeah, these claims, some of these claims they're allowed to put on the packet, there's very restricted what they can actually say in terms of health it can do, are date back 30 years and no longer really valid.
But they have to do it because they're on a packet, interestingly. So they're trying to attract you in with things that would resonate with the consumer. So they do these massive surveys to say, what's going to resonate with you, Steve, when you go in the shop? Oh, and you say, oh, what's going to make me buy this rather than one of the other ones? And so vitamin D... We've been flogging vitamin D for forever. You know, 10 minutes in the sun, we'll get you all the vitamin D you need.
And it's in most foods anyway. You don't really need it in addition in these things. 0% added sugar and 0% added fat mean that it's highly processed. So... The combination of health, what we call health halos, saying it's super healthy with rich in this vitamin, no sugar, no fat is very old fashioned science. No one believes that that zero fat is any good for you anymore. And there's some actual data showing that low fat foods actually make you overeat.
Really? Yes. What does the data say? So when they've compared identical meals to people in lab conditions, those eating the low-fat foods, the high-carb but high-processed foods like this, will actually overeat substantially over the next day or so. So it's actually making you overeat quite significantly. And there's no advantage to your body in terms of heart health by having this because to get zero fat and make it taste good, it's got to have lots of extra sugars and starches in there.
Otherwise, you just couldn't eat it. Fat is really important naturally to make you enjoy food. And so it takes a lot of careful chemistry to mimic that fat. Yeah. So I would always avoid anything that said, you know, zero sugar, zero fat, rich in vitamins, despite the fact that this probably has something good probiotics in it. So you're getting the good probiotics. It's only one lactobacillus, but that's counteracted by all this negative stuff, all these chemicals, which we know are bad for your gut microbiome.
So that's not going to be good for you or it's not going to be good for me either. So I would avoid that one. Always go for any yogurt that really has minimum contents, just milk and microbes. That's all you need. Can you bring me the bin? This is going in the bin. Can I just drop that in the bin? I did scan it on the Zoe app as well, and my relationship to it was about 35, which is not a health food. Which is not a health food. What about this?
This is definitely healthy, Dr. Tim Spector. Activia, deliciously good for your gut health. Okay, so I know this one's going to be good. What else does it say? We believe that a happy gut is a happy you. When you love your gut, it loves you back. It sounds like you wrote it. What else? What other claims does it make? We ferment our unique blend of five active strains for up to eight hours. So every little pot is packed with billions of live cultures.
Loving the planet to love our gut. Activia, great for the gut, healthy. Well, so far, everything looks good, doesn't it? But let's have a look and see what extra things they've added to it, which is always hard to find in packets. And you often need a microscope to see them. So for it to be good, it just needs microbes and milk. And that makes yogurt. You just change the temperature, that's what you get. So here we've got lots of ingredients. We've got flavorings, we've got concentrates, we've got a bit of carrot for some reason.
We've got lemon juice, we've got stabilizers, we've got tapioca starch. We've got sugars, and it claims to have strawberries, although when they last were picked from the earth, I'm not quite sure. So it's not as bad as the other one, but basically we're looking at a highly processed product that has many chemicals you don't really want in your gut because they will counteract the good effect of the gut microbes. Slightly better than the other one, but I would still not eat it myself.
§02Transcript — part 2
Okay. And the fact that it's processed, does the fact that it's processed alone make it a bad food? Or is it because the process of processing causes a loss in the good stuff and addition of a lot of bad stuff? When we say pro, because this word processed foods has become just like a blanket term. So in my brain I go, if it's processed, it has to be bad. But is that accurate? Well, we need to separate virtually all the food that we eat and I eat as well is processed.
Yeah. But we need to separate that from ultra-processed. So plain yogurt, nothing added, nothing changed, is processed because you're mixing... a basic ingredient, milk with microbes. You're actually creating something. That's processing. But it's when you take it to the next stage and you would make that same product from, say, milk powder, and then you would add various starches and stabilizers, emulsifiers, concentrates, artificial sweeteners, flavorings, that same yogurt becomes ultra-processed.
And it's that extra step that is the main problem. Nothing wrong with processed food. You know, cheese is processed. There's nothing wrong with that. Most of the foods we eat are some have had salt added or oil added or something like that. But it's when it's chemicals that you don't find in your kitchen being added to foods that have been processed. Stripped of all their goodness. So they wouldn't just use cow's milk. It would be dried extract of casein.
You wouldn't take wheat. It would be stripped out in a part of that wheat and then that's temperature treated to melt it and change its composition. And to put these things back together, you need all these glues like these emulsifiers, you need stabilizers, you need flavoring, sweeteners, colorants, all these extra things to make it look like food again. So I think we shouldn't be calling ultra-processed food, food, that's a misnomer. We should call them edible food-like substances that are industrially made.
And if we start to realize the difference between these, we can start to make smart food choices. We now know that many of these ingredients, there's been lots of even research since we last talked about, first of all, things like aspartame has come out, which is an artificial sweetener, has been linked to many health problems, including increased risk of cancers and heart disease. We've got emulsifiers have come out recently in a number of studies to show that they affect mental health.
And they also affect heart disease, even when you adjust for the whole diet and you take just that component of the food. So we know that ultra processed foods are probably the worst things we're doing for our diets. And then in the UK, the average person is saying about 60 percent of all their food is ultra processed without knowing about it. We're eating four times more. than healthy European countries who are often poorer than us. So it's not just a question of money.
It's just become this battle of... us poor consumers against these massive companies with billions of pounds to spend on marketing that have told us this stuff is healthy because of these fake health halos, vitamins, no sugar, no this, no fat, confusing the consumer and all the time giving us foods that not only give us disease, but importantly, make us overeat. So we pick that stuff. Doesn't matter. It says just whether even if it's just low fat or it's got lots of other chemicals, both make you overeat by a quarter.
So you'll be hungrier after eating that. than you would be if you had a completely plain yogurt with none of those extra chemicals in it. Okay. So I've got three different drink-like foods here. I've got my Oasis, Citrus Punch. On this one, it says natural flavorings and real fruit. So that must be healthy, real fruit. If it says real fruit on it, you should be very suspicious. Okay, that's the first thing to look at it. And natural flavors, that really means nothing.
And this is, natural is a great word, means nothing medically, scientifically, but it's been a buzzword for me, getting people to buy stuff. So basically this is a mixed blend of citrus fruits, which means the mixtures of all kinds of different fruit extracts. that's combined with sugar and artificial sweeteners. They're again, highly processed fruits. They're not fresh fruits. And it's got a mixture of those. It's got citric acid, it's got sugar, orange flavorings, it's got stabilizers, polyphosphates, glycerol esters, it's got Looks like wood resins, acidity regulators, preservatives.
It's got some potassium sorbate, potassium benzoate. It's got the sweeteners aspartame and Ace-K. Aspartame is what you're just talking about, right? Yes, that's the one that WHO have just put on their warning list. Yeah. um so yes it's it's packed with things that you wouldn't expect if you just squeezed a bit of juice uh in and thought it was healthy so this is a good example of a totally fake ultra processed food that makes it look like it's real fruit and it's going to be healthy for you and it is just a mix of chemicals that's just going to mess up your gut microbes and make you feel hungrier Okay, but this one here, this Philadelphia, says light.
So it says 100% of the taste, but 40% less fat. So Philadelphia light, surely that's good. Well, it's got cheese in it. We did do some tests on this a while ago. It does have microbes in it. If it's low in fat, they've generally added something else to increase the mouthfeel. And indeed, we see here it's got stabilizers, it's got emulsifiers, all these things that we know have effects on your gut microbes, make you hungrier and can affect your heart as well.
So, yeah, I would avoid that one. I've got a few last things for you there. What do we have to look out for on the packaging of these products? Because interestingly, the one you have in your hand, the bar there, the snack bar, on the back of it, they do admit that it's a little bit processed. They actually, there's a sentence on the back of it. I'll read out that. It says, I was reading it as you said it says, well, well, clearly it would be wrong for us to claim that everything in this bar is 100% natural and simply grows on trees.
Obviously, some ingredients need to be cleaned, dried and roasted too, and therefore to some extent processed. It's just that we believe the less we mess with it, the better it tastes. That's why we never add any artificial flavours or colours or any preservatives. Yeah, well... In the natural bar. Any ingredients... You know, that's a good thing to say. It's quite hard to produce some of these snack bars without having things to stick it together or gums.
Glucose syrup, soya protein... crispies isolate tapioca starch salt dates almonds salt salted caramel muscovido sugar buttermilk powder natural flavorings cream powder milk rice flour carboflour and salt Yeah, it doesn't, when you read it out like that, it doesn't sound quite as natural as the label suggests, does it? Because you've just got all these ingredients that are, you know, again, half of them you wouldn't find in your kitchen. And it's partly to, you know, protein packed ingredients.
And, you know, if you just need the nuts and the seeds, you wouldn't have to add in all this other stuff from soy and other beans and things, which are ultra-processed. They're just taking that bit of it, combining it together. So some of these are better than others. But, again, this is ultra-processed. And, you know, all these snacks, interestingly, are... Really often the downfall in places like the US and the UK where we're just eating so much of our energy is coming from these snacks, which wasn't the case 20 years ago.
So on that point of snacking, is snacking good or bad? And what impact does that have on the overall nutritional profile of an individual? Because a lot of people snack, right? Nearly everybody snacks. I think that's right. Over 90% of people snack. So it's become normal to snack. In this country, in the US, it is the norm. It's not the norm in other countries. So you can see much less snacking habits in Southern Europe than you do here and much less in many Asian countries as well.
A Zoe study found that 95% of people were snackers. Yes. And 25% of people are undoing the benefits of healthy meals by unhealthy snacking. Yeah, so 95% of people we found in that Zoe study are snackers and most of them are unhealthy. So just by reaching for a snack, unless you're really careful, you're going to be having... not only extra calories, but unhealthy calories that's going to undo many of the good things you're eating. So we found in the Zoe survey that people would be really focusing on their main meal, saying this is a really healthy meal.
I'm eating plenty of plants and vegetables, but oh, well, I've got to have my snack. And so they'd be undoing all that good by having something that would then couple of hours later really upset their metabolism and make them hungrier and so mess up the idea and make them hungrier. So in the UK and the US, it's around a quarter of our calories come from snacks. if we were able to even to reduce that a bit or just change that snack to a healthy one or ideally move that snacking time to the meal itself, most of these would be much less harmful if you had them at the end of your meal.
When your body is starting to do all this work, breaking down the food, is gearing up for this high activity, virtually all the snacks that people have late in the evening are bad for you. And that's because you're getting a sugar spike just before going to bed. Your body's not ready for it. Your gut microbes are not ready for it. It doesn't give them a rest. And so you actually end up hungrier the next day. So we're starting to realize that it's not just the food.
And we've seen that most of these snacks are very unhealthy, going to make you hungrier. But the timing of it also messes up your circadian rhythms. So you're not recovering. And the next day, you're going to feel hungrier than you were if you didn't snack. So it's like counterintuitive. You think, oh, if I have something before I go to bed, I'm not going to be as hungry tomorrow. And this is what many people get into this common mistake. So we need to start changing people's attitude in this snack epidemic about snacks and say, you don't need them.
And if you do, have healthy ones. And... you know, nuts and seeds and fruit are perfectly healthy ones. And we showed in our study, which we published recently, that people who do have those healthy snacks are really hardly any extra risk of health problems compared to those that people don't snack, as long as it's not late at night. So if you eat within that sort of normal eating window, and, you know, some people are natural snackers. I don't know if I'm not.
But I know many of my colleagues at Zoe can't go two or three hours without eating. They really find it hard. But just by thinking more about that snack and saying, well, I know I've got this tendency. I'm going to eat something that's healthy. Like nuts or something. Yeah, just a handful of mixed nuts, an apple, a pear, something that's not super sugary or super fat, but importantly, not ultra processed, not something that's got this health halo that says, eat me, I've got high in protein, I'm going to, you know.
eat me and you'll get bigger muscles. No, eat me and you'll get fatter. Those health halos then, what are, just so we've summarized them, low fat is a health halo, you're saying, no sugar, real fruit, trying to remember all the ones. Extra vitamins. Vitamin labeling on products. Natural flavorings, I think it said. Yes. Are those the main ones? Have I missed any there? I think we've covered, yeah. So claims about low fat, low sugar, nothing artificial.
High protein. Natural. Right. High protein. Some would be gut friendly. Generally, they're warning signs that this food is to be avoided. Find something that doesn't need that health claim. You never see a whole real food with a health claim. They don't need it. You've got an apple? It doesn't need a claim. It contains vitamins, contains fibre. Real foods don't need health labels. I've had a confused relationship with bread. I look at bread, all bread, I think, that's bad.
This is cheating on my gut microbiome. Is that the truth? Is bread bad? Most bread is bad. Most supermarket bread is ultra-processed sugar. and contains many other chemicals you don't really want in you, makes you hungrier, and the general perception of the public is it's a healthy food. I found this myself when I started doing my glucose levels. Even brown breads were all over the place. There are some breads that I can eat in small amounts that are still healthy, things like rye breads.
And if it's sourdough, that also improves it. But I think in general, we're eating far too much bread for most people. There might be some people who can support it. And that's why it's good to test your... glucose responses to it. But most bread has too much sugar, not enough fiber, too many chemicals in it. And we should be looking to other things for our nutrition. Have it as a rare treat. Have it just when you go to a restaurant or whatever.
But for most people... You know, it's a real red flag for me. The other red flag that shocked me was my relationship with white rice because I'd grown up eating white rice and I thought white rice was a great thing to have after I'd been to the gym with some chicken. So I used to, whenever I saw white rice, I thought it was great. And then I looked on Zoe and I had a 15 out of 100 relationship with white rice. And I think my girlfriend had a five out of 100 relationship with white rice.
So I no longer have white rice. I've swapped it out for, I think, quinoa is usually what we have in the house now. Nearly any grain is better than white rice. It's got more fiber. It's got more protein in it. It's got more nutrients in it. And rice is the most overrated food, I think, even more so than bread. Because, yeah, people think it's healthier than, you know, having potatoes or pasta. They associate it with healthy things. Because often, sometimes the rest of the meal is actually quite good.
and you know vegetable curries or whatever it is often quite healthy but the rice itself is really just sugar and there's there's no have it as a rare treat but so many other grains you can have instead quinoas barley oats um uh you know or even putting in lentils or legumes you know beans instead of that rice just makes it so much healthier when you talk about your habits being so important, i.e. when you're eating and what you're eating and making sure that you carve out time to have your meals.
Because I was telling you earlier, I think before we started recording that, I'm in a bit of a pattern at the moment of eating my first meal of the day at like 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. Because if I'm recording podcasts or I'm doing something in the media or on TV, I don't like to eat before then. What is an example of great food habits? I want to know what your food habits are. On a perfect day, Say, you know, this was your 10 out of 10 day. When would you eat?
How many meals would you eat? And what times would and wouldn't you eat? Okay, so like you, I have very busy days where sometimes it goes out the window. And I think we've got to realize that you've got to try in this sort of 80-20 ideal. You know, you're trying to stick to something 80% of the time, knowing that 20%, it's out of your control, don't worry about it. And if you do that, you can do that sustainably for decades, right? It's the people who are obsessed and say, I mustn't break it.
And if you've broken it one day, one day. Okay. End of my brilliant experiment. That's daft. So if I'm at home, for example, working at home, I'm in control of things. I will not eat anything before 11 o'clock. I will have a black coffee because I know... that wakes me up and I like it and it's also good for me. But I won't have anything else until 11 o'clock. I'll go down and I fix myself my bowl of full fat yogurt and I'd put my diversity jar sprinkled in there and I'd see what else is in the fridge.
So I might have some berries if they're around at the moment, plenty of seasonal berries. Might get some from the freezer if we're in March or something and there's no fresh berries. Or I might just chop up an apple and put it in there. I'm getting my protein. I'm getting fat. I'm not feeling hungry and having a dip in energy in the middle of the day that I would probably have if I hadn't eat anything. You said coffee. I have my coffee because I know it's good for me.
Last time we spoke, you were kind of on the fence about coffee. You were two trains of thought about whether it's good for us or not. You're now saying you think it's good for us. Yeah, well, I must have given the wrong impression to you, but coffee is definitely a health food. Interesting. Okay. There are some people who don't tolerate it very well. They don't tolerate caffeine. A few percent of people. But even if you have decaf coffee, it's decent quality because there's different ways of taking the caffeine out.
All the studies are now showing consistently that you will have less heart disease and you will live longer if you drink coffee and are having sort of between one and four cups of coffee a day. That seems to be the sweet spot. A bit more than that, you've probably got some problem, you know, that coffee is actually a fermented plant. So people don't think of it that way. They think, oh, it just comes in a jar. I don't need to worry about it. But actually, it comes off a tree.
You get this pod, this bean. You take it off, you break it up. It then gets fermented on the floor of usually wherever it is in Africa or Asia, where it is. It's humid. The microbes are working on it, breaking it down. Then you go and dry it and roast it. And that ends up being the coffee we have. So the microbes are playing a role in that. It's also a source of fiber. So three cups of coffee gives you around five grams of fiber, which is about a quarter of the average UK or US amount.
So... It's not the main source of fiber, but it all helps. And in the US, it's often the main source of fiber that they get. So polyphenols, the fiber, also for many people, it gets them awake and alert, has that effect of stopping tiredness. If you're careful with it, you don't overdose on it, and you know it doesn't give you heart fluctuations, it's going to be actually beneficial for you long term. So this is a great example of a food that we've totally changed our minds on over the years.
My first research paper I ever wrote was that coffee causes cancer. Okay, so when I was actually a medical student, I was very proud of my paper and this is great. And it was based on very poor studies done in the 1980s, and it was complete rubbish. So I'm very happy to go and correct that mistake and tell people that, you know, you should much better to drink coffee than say orange juice. And orange juice tends to be in the health section. And coffee, definitely in the recreational section.
And they really should be changed over. Most orange juice we have is ultra-processed, high sugar, very bad for most people. Coffee is good for the vast majority of people. What else have you been wrong about? What else have you changed your mind about over the last couple of years because of the research that you now have, the data you now have access to and the research that you've done? Well, I was keen to avoid fats for a long time. I cut back on cheese because I thought, that's high in saturated fats, that can't be good for you.
I would have bought low fat products before. And so most doctors were indoctrinated with that. Many doctors are still in that mindset that fat is bad and carbs and starch are good. Drinking lots of water was good for you. And I now, having researched it for the book, know there's no hard data. that you should be drinking eight glasses of water, for example, a day, which is what most of the recommended government sites tell you. And obviously the drinks industry is very keen to support that because the big companies, like the Cokes, the Pepsis, have moved into the water business and they're trying to sell everyone plastic bottled water, which is terrible for the planet.
The idea that we're all deprived of hydration and having all kinds of problems with it is really made up. There's no hard evidence at all. And if you look at doctors who work on marathons, they see that far more people die or have health problems from over-hydrating in the marathon race than dehydrating. So the human body is really good at some things. You know, you think about our ancestors, they kind of knew when you were thirsty, right? It's like, hang on, this is quite a, you know, and the idea that, oh, we've got no idea if we're thirsty or not.
We need to be eating, you know, have a stopwatch to tell us to drink every hour on the hour. It's obviously nonsense when you think about it. That's so true. For my birthday just gone, someone brought me this massive, like, what's the way to describe it? Barrel, water bottle. And it has like eight litres marked on the side of it. And they said to me when they gave it to me, you need to drink that every day. And so the idea was that I put it on my desk as a reminder that I need to drink that whole barrel before I finish work.
Oh, I mean, just think about it. Well, you know... we've been evolving for millions of years and, you know, you can't live long without water. So clearly we are a pretty good mechanism we've inherited to tell us when we need to drink water and when we don't. And I just think that's, again... marketing concept, all the soft drink, all this rehydration, these electrolytes, all this stuff, it's largely nonsense. And it's just, again, like the protein marketing idea.
And we're very susceptible to it because we'd like a quick fix or... And there'll be a few people that say, I feel better when I drink lots of water. Sure, but the idea that we're so out of control that, someone needs to bring us water every hour, is madness. And that there isn't this variation. We got up to your lunch. So we did your breakfast, sounded nice. Your lunch, what time do you typically eat lunch and what do you typically have on a 10 out of 10 day where everything's going to plan?
I mean, it all varies. And I think, I don't wanna give the idea I'm always having the same lunch because I do try and vary it. But if I'm on my own working, I'm not with friends or whatever. It would be a fairly quick affair and it would probably be a salad. And I would get a lettuce or a grated cabbage. I would throw... whatever I have in the fridge in there, and I would add some protein to it. So I would add some beans. I always keep cans of beans around.
They cost nothing. They're a huge source of fiber and protein. Tip those in. There might be lentils. They might be chickpeas, might be standard mixed beans. And I put them in. If I had some cheese, I might chop that up, might put a bit of mozzarella in there, olive oil, balsamic vinegar. That'd be it. And if I'd had some sauerkraut or something, I might have that on the side, a bit of ferment. And I've increasingly recently, since I've been doing more research on this, I might make my salad dressing actually with some fermented milk, some kefir.
And you just mix up the oil and vinegar and you just, at the last minute, add in your ferment. So you're actually getting probiotics added to that. If I'm on my own, and I'm in a hurry, that's probably what, Yeah, it's reasonable. But it would vary depending on what I was taking, what fruits, what vegetables. And yeah, I would have fruit afterwards. What kind of fruit do you like? I noticed on my Zoe app that bananas rank incredibly low for me. I think my ranking on a banana out of 100 is 50.
Now, I've been eating bananas like a monkey. I've always thought bananas were just fantastic. So I thought unlimited bananas were a great idea. until I saw the Zoe app and it said my score is 50 out of 100. Now I've used up on the bananas and I'm having much more berries because I do really well for red berries in particular. In fact, the order that the Zoe app had fruits in is raspberries were number one, cherries were number two, strawberries were third, then pears, then peaches, then apples, then kiwis, then blueberries, then grapes.
And then bananas were like 10th, 50 out of 100. Well, I scored even worse than you, you'd be pleased to know. Oh, really? I used to eat lots of bananas. And it was a thing you just put in your backpack, comes its own packaging, you know, you can have it when you want. I thought this is super healthy. So I've seen, you know, Roger Federer eat lots of bananas, you know, he seemed pretty fit. And that's why we associated with the marketing thing. Oh, lots of potassium, you know, must be good for us.
Really lots of sugar and they're not great for us. My score was about 30 or something. So I still have them occasionally because I enjoy them occasionally, but I don't have them every day like I used to. So I now have swapped them out for pairs. We have some great pairs in this country. They're always good. Apples. And again, I'll have my berries if I've got them. So, and kiwi fruits. I had to also give up grapes. I used to eat lots of grapes and I used to love them, but get huge sugar spike with grapes, which I know then, you know, would make me hungrier for the rest of the day.
So, and I have them as a treat, you know, might have some grapes once a month. That's still fine. So I think we shouldn't ever say, I'll never have those again. It's just like, what's your staple? Mm-hmm. what do you have most of the time? Should you be swapping that for something just as tasty or nice or a mixture of things? But get out of that rut just because someone told you that, you know, banana has potassium in it and it'll make you play tennis better.
You know, it's that kind of mindset that we really need to change. And I guess it depends what else is on the plate. I remember Frederico, who's the head of nutrition at Zoe, her telling me that, the plate itself has its overall score. So if I had, you know, maybe something that wasn't so good in isolation, but with a couple of other things that are really high ranking in terms of health and gut microbiome, then the overall score comes up. And it's really the average of the whole plate.
Yeah, it's exactly, I don't, The idea is we don't want to demonize one little thing. So you might be obsessed with mayonnaise, for example, you know, and I say to you, well, you've got a small amount of mayonnaise if it's going to make you eat a salad. And if that salad is high fiber, nutritious, it's got plenty of good things in it, herbs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Or, you know, a tiny bit of ketchup or whatever. You know, I'd still be saying, yeah, you can try something else instead of those, but don't get hung up about it.
And I think... It's absolutely true that nutrition has gone into this idea of this is wrong, this gives you cancer, this is bad. And meat is a great example of that. debate you know people ask me are you you know are you for me are you against meat um and i i've sort of changed i flipped on this as the evidence has changed i'm definitely against processed meats ultra processed meats which are low quality stuff put together in ready meals etc you know you'd be much better off just having mushrooms or beans instead of that mixed with it a vegetarian version nothing really wrong with it, as long as you have enough space on the rest of the plate to make up for it.
What about the carnivore diet? Well, I keep getting, probably like you, people can say, I heard you talking about, you know, not eating plants is bad, but I've been living for two years on the carnivore diet. I feel great, you know? And I say, fine, there might be one in 10,000 people that can exist with zero fiber and zero plants. And, you know, in the near the North Pole, et cetera, there are people who exist on high fat and high protein diets that have evolved for it.
But vast majority of people will suffer greatly by having denuded gut microbiome. And Just eating meat is not what our ancestors did anyway. I've lived with the Hadza tribe. for a week and they eat a lot of vegetables and and fruits and berries and nuts and seeds and they still meat is a treat and three months the other have no meat because it's hard to catch but they've got all this other stuff so the idea it's natural that's what we did is is really wrong and some You know, there's a difference between how people respond to fats particularly and carbs.
So you might lose a bit of weight. A lot of that's actually, they've done some studies showing people on high keto, high fat protein diets. They'd lose weight quicker, but a lot of it is water. Oh, okay. So they're sort of drying out. And in a way, sometimes bodybuilders do that to make them look more toned. But actually, long term, they don't lose that. And it comes back. And the main problem is their gut microbes are really crying out for food.
So you're starving your gut microbes if you're just on a meat only diet. So there's no evidence that it is healthy and lots of evidence that lack of fiber is really bad for you. So remember that statistic, we went back to just a five gram change in fiber. So if these people, you know, so if the average is 20 grams a day and the carnivore diet person is on five or less, then we're talking, you know, 50% increases in heart disease and reduced longevity.
So People do what they want, but the data absolutely doesn't support it. Another thing that I have every day is chewing gum. And I was in the car because it's in the center console of the car that I'm driven around in the Diary of a CEO car, we call it. And there's like seven different types of chewing gum. Now, when I eat this chewing gum, there's this explosion of sweetness in the first couple of bites. Yeah. And I was thinking the other day as I was driving, I was thinking, I think I'm becoming a little bit compulsive.
Like, I didn't need the chewing gum for any other reason. And I think there's this, it's doing something in my brain. I grab it, I put one in, I throw it in the bin. I grab another, I put it in the bin. And I think I'm just doing it for that sugar burst. My question is broadly about chewing gum, but are these artificial sweeteners that exist in the chewing gums that I'm probably eating worse than just normal sugar? They're better for your teeth.
§03Transcript — part 3
Okay. So you will get less tooth decay. Yeah. By having the artificial sweeteners. But most of them will be causing problems to your gut microbes. Okay. And your mouth microbes as well. So... Anything you mess with in your mouth and your saliva, things like mouthwashes as well, these artificial ones, they're all shown to reduce your natural gut microbes and actually cause more problems so that you're more prone to infections and actually more prone to get overgrowth of bad microbes giving you bad breath.
So... You have this initial hit, which often the mouthwashers are similar in a way to that sort of instant gratification of the chewing gum because it feels fresh and tangy in your mouth. but you're often killing off the good guys that are protecting your mouth. And the worry I have is about this sweetness is it's sensitizing you to want more sweet foods. So it probably make you hungrier for more carb foods later in the day. So I don't think there's any particularly bad about chewing gum per se, other than if people chew a lot of it, it's sugary, it will give you more dental decay.
But the artificial sweeteners are probably worse because they're having a negative effect on the gut micro, on all the microbes from your mouth down to your gut. Mouthwash. I'm a prolific mouthwash user. Oh, dear. I know. They've done actual studies on this to show that, you know, yes, consumers like it, you know. So, like, you probably like that feel of being fresh and doing something and having a tang in the mouth, a bit like a... you know, a tangy chewing gum as well, a mint or, you know, there's something nice in the brain that says this is good.
But if you do it too much, you start to destroy your natural defence mechanism. And microbes in your tongue and your saliva are there to fight off other bugs, and you're more likely to get overgrowth of the wrong ones, and you may actually end up having worse smelling breath long term than if you weren't using these chemicals. The topics I'm about to throw at you are very complicated and you're very good at simplifying things. So everything I'm about to throw at you typically has a whole industry of people behind it that have overcomplicated it and are selling courses about it and different hacks and tips and tricks.
If you could, I would ask you just to give me a simple solution to the things that I'm going to throw at you. The first one is weight loss. There's not a simple solution. You have to do something that's sustainable for long periods of time. So forget the idea that it's really important to lose weight over a few weeks. You want something that can maintain your weight at a good level for decades. And if you have a problem with weight really excess weight, you're extremely obese, morbidly obese, you need something radical.
Diets are not going to do it. You need one of these new drugs, the GLP-1s, these injections, these Mpix, the Wigovies, or you need bariatric surgery to get you down to that level, something dramatic for most people. What do you think of those new drugs, the Azempix? I think they're amazing. Really? For people that really need it. What about for reveals? Not for you. Well, I've got lots of friends that are in seemingly great shape that are taking these new weight loss drugs, the Azempix and all that stuff.
Well, they're mad. Why? There are lots of side effects that... Aren't worth the benefits. Not the benefits if you have any minor weight problems. The benefits outweigh the risks if you are so obese that your chance, you know, your 50-50 chance of having a heart attack in the next or a stroke in the next five years. So people with morbid obesity have a worse prognosis than people with cancer. So it's, you know, like I've got cancer. What do I do?
I'll take a drug. I'll accept that it's got some side effects, but, you know, I want to live. And they do work for the mass majority of people. For people who have only minor levels of obesity, just some love handles or whatever, to cut out all your appetite signals in your brain, we don't know what that does long term. And we do know that it can affect your pancreas, it can cause some rare cancers, it can do other stuff to your digestive system.
But we're still, you know, A long way away from knowing. So it's a drug for the extreme obese problems that we've created through our ultra-processed foods and people with terrible diabetes, etc. It is not something for the general population. So for those people... It's firstly, improving the quality of your diet is number one. So get down from an average of 60% ultra processed food to something less than 20%. Find a consistent way to... That's the first thing to do.
And then the next thing is to change your mindset about... things don't get obsessed with calories, start thinking about eating your 30 plants a week because that will naturally give you all the fiber and change your appetite signals as well. The fitness community were quite disgruntled last time. Probably disgruntled again. When you said what you said about calories, because a lot of people do rely on the calories in calories out system for weight loss.
Yeah, well, obesity experts don't. So it may be fine in gyms to talk about that. That's old science. We now know that this calorie model, from a practical point of view, is completely broken. Because we've been... not talking about the quality of food, the structure of food, all these different effects, these inter-individual effects that we're talking about, meaning that counting calories is, for the vast majority of people, impossible or meaningless.
So it's... And it's the marketing and the companies who are selling us these low-calorie products, this idea that it's really simple. All you've got to do is X, Y, and Z, you'll lose weight. That's what we're fighting here. And they may have influenced the gyms with their special drinks and programs and people wanting the crash course of come in here, you'll lose all this. You'll gain muscle, you'll lose weight. It's easy. The evidence is very clear that if you restrict calories, you will lose weight, but 80% of people regain it pretty quickly.
will actually go over the other end if they haven't changed their diet in terms of quality and taking care of what they're eating. And there's good evidence that people that follow a program where they are not focusing on calories, but they are focusing on food quality, they're looking at their sugar peaks, they're looking at their fat levels, they're looking at their gut microbes, they are looking at the time of day they're eating, they're looking at how to eat just thoughtfully and not talking about fat levels and, you know, avoiding all these foods that we've been talking about, they will consistently lose small amounts of weight.
Not large amounts, but small, consistent amounts that don't make them more hungry. And the key is, do things that don't make you hungrier. The reason calorie restriction doesn't work is our evolution tells us to ramp up the appetite, the hunger signal. obvious you know it's the same way if you do exercise it makes you hungrier we have this inbuilt mechanism that's why the only drugs that were methods of work are these drugs like a Zen pick we go V that act on the appetite they act on the brain they just from the gut sends a signal to the brain switches off the appetite signal otherwise you just reduce calories or you increase exercise, that appetite signal is just going right up there.
And you can carry on resisting it for a while. Most people have tried this. They know. And it gets harder and harder every week. And then suddenly you crack and then you say, oh, I've given up now. I'm back. And often you swing above it. Yo-yo. Yeah, and that yo-yoing is probably the worst thing you can do because it just makes your, you know, you've got no consistency. On that point of exercise, there was a lot of contention last time we spoke around the subject matter of exercise because a lot of people go out and do cardiovascular exercise.
They run on a running machine in order to try and lose weight. But you and many other people that I've spoken to have said that that's not a great strategy for weight loss. Yes, lots of studies have done and said... People are trying to lose weight by conventional means. We're not talking the Zoe method, but the old-fashioned ways of calorie restriction or changing to keto diets or whatever it is. If those people are put on exercise or no exercise at the same time, does it help them?
And generally it doesn't. Okay. So, and if you do exercise alone, then there's no evidence. As many people gain weight as lose weight. on exercise. So you think, why is that? Well, if you think it through, exercise is, I'm not knocking exercise every day. I love it. It's great for my brain and my heart and everything else and reduces lots of diseases. But people have got to separate that from weight loss if we're going to make any progress here.
And if you've got too much excess fat on your body, exercise alone is a terrible way to deal with it because you're like saying, I'm not going to deal with my diet, I'm just going to run it off in the gym and keep taking my supplements and do everything else. And what happens for most people is that their metabolism slows down, the signals of hunger increase, after exercise. And psychologically, people think, oh, well, I've done some exercise, I burnt off those calories, you know, I can have that donut or whatever.
And so subconsciously, they're also maybe snacking slightly more than they would be. And that's why for most people, it doesn't work. Now, I know people got upset last year, but some people it does work. And this is probably, there's a different response. We don't all respond to exercise with appetite signals exactly the same way. But for as many people it did work, there are people that made them actually put on weight. Do you see what I mean? That's why the studies show no difference.
So you always find someone who writes to you, say, Stephen, this guy's an idiot because I did this and I lost 10 kilos. But exactly someone else will say, I did this and I gained 10 kilos. And I thought I was doing the right thing. So the point is, you can't rely on it. And when there's something obviously modifiable like your diet, it's so easy. We've got so much choice now and what to eat. We're not forced to eat ultra processed foods or low fat this or whatever.
We can make those choices. We should be doing that, not trying to say, am I lucky? Am I that small percentage of person that can do this purely from working out more in the gym? Supplements, you mentioned there. That's the next thing I wanted to ask you about. Supplements, vitamins. My house used to be stacked with supplements. And then after our conversation last time round, I look at them, most of them, like they've lied to me. Like I've been a victim of marketing of sorts.
And I've got every bloody supplement. I've got your omega-3, vitamin D, electrolytes, calcium, you name it, it's still in my house. What is your view on these supplements? In general, my view hasn't changed at all that the vast majority of supplements are completely worthless. But there are some that are useful for some people, some of the time. Like? Like there are some people who have vitamin D deficiency. Black people? Yes, some black people, black dark skin people living in places with very low, if they're living in Scotland and they might have poor diets, they don't have much vitamin D in it.
Those people could probably do with some supplementation over winter. Because they produce less vitamin D than people with lighter skin? Yes, that's true. Lighter skin evolved as a mutation as humans came out of Africa in order to survive in lower sunlight areas. So naturally, whiter skin people have a... They're less protected against the sun, but they have a better vitamin D production system. So generally, darker skin have more problems. So I used to see many patients, and often they don't go in the sun either, because culturally, you know, they cover themselves up.
And so that's a problem. So there definitely are people who can take... benefit from taking some of these vitamins. I'm not saying that at all, but the idea that everybody should be taking them is just madness. There's no evidence that... in my field of osteoporosis, that taking vitamin D and calcium actually prevents osteoporosis or bone disease. Although for years and years and years we thought it did, but all the big studies now show that's not true.
If you take calcium, all the studies are suggesting that not only does it not have any benefit in terms of bone or muscle health, but it can adversely affect your heart. So because the calcium you get in capsules or supplements, you're taking one big lump of it at a time rather than getting it in your green vegetables, which would be slowly broken down and absorbed in your gut in ways that your body can deal with. So you're getting this, it's like someone injecting it into your vein is very different to being slowly given it throughout 24 hours as the way nature intended.
What supplements then could most of us benefit from taking? If you have a good diet, you won't need any supplements. But most of us don't have a good diet. So what do you do? Do you promote supplements and say, don't worry about your diet, which is what the marketing companies want and the vitamin companies want. They want us to forget the diet, keep the ultra processed food stuff coming. Keep it all coming, guys. This junk food, no real whole foods, no plants, no fruits.
That's fine. You guys are going to need some vitamins. And that may be true for people on very poor diets. You know, only eat beige food. Maybe they do need some supplements, but I think there's no evidence. However, there is very little evidence that people who do take supplements are any healthier than people who don't take supplements. So it's not so you could say people say, oh, it's like an insurance policy. I'm taking this insurance policy.
Therefore, that's a good reason to take multivitamins, et cetera. And I've heard that said even from some epidemiologists and doctors. to my mind, just as likely to do you harm as it is to do you any good. And it definitely is affecting your wallet. What about omega-3? I take that as well. The trials of that have shown it doesn't work for reducing heart disease or any other major disease unless you've just had a heart attack. Alcohol. I've just given up alcohol.
Not really told anybody this, but about two months ago now, I decided that I could see no net positive in my life. There wasn't any sort of social lubricant, which sometimes people cite as being the reason to drink alcohol. So I gave it up. entirely and it's been really an interesting experiment in giving up alcohol I was one of the people that sat right on the fence didn't think I had a bad relationship with it um didn't have a huge reason to drink it didn't drink it that often anyway and then I decided one day I'll run the experiment of just quitting and see what it's like and there's been multiple situations where just out and about wait waiters who are maybe a little bit poorly trained have literally tried to force me to drink alcohol like one particular waiter was like go on this is not alcohol this is art i'm just going to leave the bottle here right in front of you if you change your mind i remember that one particular waiter um and then all the other social contexts where you're just like it's just assumed that you drink what is your stance on alcohol well you certainly don't need it okay so um Most of the studies are pretty consistent, say that the more alcohol you drink, the more your chances of all kinds of diseases and problems.
There are some exceptions to that that comes down often to the Mediterranean effect. People who drink a glass or two of red wine do seem to have less heart disease. but they won't be protected from other conditions. So they won't be protected from cancers or some strokes, et cetera. And lifespan is sort of unclear in that particular group. So in general, alcohol is bad for you, no doubt. But, and so if you don't drink, I don't think I would say to you, Stephen, you're wrong.
You need to be start drinking red wine. But for those people who do drink, or drink occasionally small amounts, what I would say to you is, there are some drinks that are healthier than others. And red wine is one that's been shown to reduce by about 30% your risk of a heart disease in most studies. And it's not absolutely clear-cut. But if you drink too much, it actually goes bad again for you. So it's really quite a small window. And there might be some other drinks in the future that might be healthy.
And this comes back to plants because when you're drinking wine, you're drinking fermented grapes. So the alcohol is bad, fermented grapes are good. So in the future, I'd like to see us getting nearly zero alcohol wines, and they are coming. And I tasted some from Canada, et cetera, where you can get like a 1% wine that you can't, 1%, by the way, is what's in kombuchas. You can't metabolize it, you don't notice it. And if they have all those benefits, they could be that new era of actually healthy alcohols.
And there might be some ciders as well because they've got the skin of the apple. But virtually all the other alcohols have no real health benefit. What about sleep and the gut microbiome? I've wondered if there was a connection between how well I sleep. Sleep has become this obsession in my life. I feel like I'm a competitive sleeper now. I really enjoy the process. I've seen the variance in a well slept night and a poorly slept night on my mood, and how I perform, how I'm, how my brain works.
What does the research say about the role that sleep plays on our gut microbiome and on our nutrition? They're all interlinked. So a bad night's sleep means that the next day you're going to have a bigger sugar spike to the same bagel or breakfast that you had. Sorry, sorry. If I have a bad night's sleep, the same food will give me a bigger sugar spike? Yes. it upsets all of your metabolism, right? So as you were saying, I feel better after a good night's sleep.
Your body's metabolism is also different. So a disrupted night's sleep means that your body will overreact to sugar, You're more like to have a sugar dip after it and feel tired. And you're more like to feel hungry and crave more carbohydrates after a bad night. And I think most people listening will think of that. So, yeah, if I really rot in night's sleep, you sort of get up and your body craves something to help you through this, you know. Everything is out of sync, and people who are sleeping poorly will have less healthy gut microbes than those that don't.
We don't yet know which way around that relationship goes, whether sleep is driving the microbiome or the microbiome is affecting sleep, but we know they're interrelated. So the other thing we've shown is that Generally, as you found out, our body likes a consistent pattern of activity and rest. So going to sleep at the same time, waking up at the same time is really good for your body. You feel better and nourished. Now, if people are, say, changing by a couple of hours, hour and a half, two hours at the weekends – They're sleeping later and waking up later.
This affects also their sugar responses and their gut microbes. So we know that this consistency of approach is really important for everything in your body. Now, it doesn't mean I don't want to tell people they should never go out or party because, you know, social networking is very fun. But just think of that in mind, particularly if it's in your control and it's just, you know, watching another Netflix movie, you know, because it's the weekend, may not be the smartest thing to do if you want to feel really good long-term.
And this consistency is coming out, again, linking this idea of nutrition, how we respond to food, but also involving our gut microbes. So, yes, sleep is incredibly important. It's all part of this holistic message. Someone told me that the time when we eat is setting our circadian rhythm more than... many other things that we do. I used to think that light was the thing that was had the greatest influence over my circadian rhythm, my like internal body's clock, what time my body thinks it is.
But food has a big impact on that circadian rhythm. So I'm like, absolutely. Yeah, all the studies are pointing to that. So I used to think like you that, yeah, you know, when I was going to the US or whatever, the most important thing was to get out there and get in the sunlight and whatever, and not worry about my meals and just eat. Because when I'm jet lagged, I was always But now, you know, really focusing on fasting and trying to eat at the time of where the time zone you're trying to fit into is much more important than sunlight.
So, yeah, meal timings are increasingly important in science. And I think this is one of the really new, exciting areas. And it all fits in with this idea of. getting your rest periods really well worked out, your activity periods, not messing them up, not eating when you're supposed to be resting and not doing things out of sync. And so the people that do deal with time changes and jet lag, Generally, they're often fasting on planes now, not eating all the food that's offered, and thinking about how they want to kickstart their new clock when they get to their destination.
So this idea that I had of getting my assistant to schedule what time I work out every day and what time I eat every day is a good idea? Yes, as long as it doesn't become obsessional, I would say. There's no risk of that with me. LAUGHTER So, you know, people listening, I think these are often good ideas. But again, if you go over the 80-20 rule, because you can get obsessed about anything, whether it's exercise, it's training, it's sleeping, and then you get anxious about it if you don't do it every day.
So realize it's important, but realize some things are more important than your schedule. Okay. And things like friends and having fun and, you know, absolutely crucial. And this is all part of our, you know, philosophy we've been trying to build with Zoe is about you know, Food is about enjoyment and we mustn't break it down to mathematical formulas all the time. We've got to realise that life is important to do everything. And, you know, we can all have a day off.
My last question, I think, is maybe one that nobody's asked you before. I'm sure a lot of people have probably asked you it. I'm a dog owner. I've got a little French bulldog who's eight years old now called Pablo. When I was pouring his food out today, it dawned on me that his food is heavily, heavily, heavily processed. Do you have any advice on what we should be feeding our pets, our dogs, our cats? Before we started Zoe, I did think of doing a gut.
dog microbiome map my pet project. And I did look into this, but I'm not up to date on it, but there's lots of evidence that the pellets I used to give our dogs, which I thought were great, are the equivalent of ultra processed foods, just like you said. And that dogs who are given whole foods live longer and have less diabetes and, put on weight less and are much healthier. So I believe that the same thing that applies to humans applies to dogs.
The canned stuff that smelled horrible, they still use that, but we were told that the pellets were healthier and because they contained all these extra vitamins. And it was this concentrated source that was perfect for them. And if you look at it, it's exactly the same as ultra-processed food. And that's probably why our pets are getting as obese as we are. They're getting diabetes. They're getting chronic diseases. They're getting arthritis. I think there is some evidence, I'm not sure how good it is, that if you convert them to whole food diets, whole meats, just eating the same that we might be eating or eating our scraps, they will do better.
So maybe you should try that. I was thinking this when I saw the numbers. I heard that Zoe now has more than 100,000 members. And I thought, you know, getting to look at the data of 100,000 people, I'm not saying that you look at the data, but just having access to the patterns and the... insights that you get from such a huge amount of people, many of which, tens of thousands of which are inputting food diaries every day. You must have had so many like eureka moments or incredible insights from that bird's eye view.
That like, there must be some things that are just, you've grown in conviction and passion about because of that perspective. Well, we're seeing things that we've never seen before. We've discovered 4,000 new species of microbe just, you know, in the last few months. Each of these could be totally novel or useful for therapeutics or diagnostics. We found things like this parasite, the blastocystis. We're finding links with new foods that we could start to give people advice on about which foods to eat to improve which microbe.
And you know, as we go forward in the future, we'll be able to perhaps predict microbe combinations that look like they might prevent cancer and heart disease or interact with your medications to make antidepressants more effective or hormone replacement treatment more effective. So... I think it's all happened so fast and it's just incredible that the response that we've had, Zoe, and the people are all contributing their data to this community that, you know, very soon we're going to be a million people.
And it's such an exciting time for scientists like myself knowing that, you know, we're going to unravel all these secrets and who knows where it's going to lead. Last time I asked you a question, because when we share so much advice on food, I think it's nice to close on an overarching principle, a nice overarching philosophy for everybody to take away from this conversation and everything we've discussed. What, in your words, would that overarching principle or philosophy be towards our health and our nutrition and our diets?
You can't go wrong if you do things that are going to be good for your gut microbes. And so thinking on behalf of your gut microbes or your pets as you call them, think what would they want to eat? How would they want you to behave? And if you do that, you're gonna be eating all the right things and avoiding all the bad things. And all the rest generally follows. I think that's the simplest advice I can bear with. And realizing that when you eat food, you're not alone.
You've got these trillions of microbes there waiting for your every move and your choice. The closing tradition on this podcast is that the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. And I love this because it changes direction a little bit. The question that's been left for you is, what is a modern positive vision of masculinity? Did you save that one especially for me? Have you got sons? I've got a son, yes.
So I've got to think like him, have I? What's a positive vision for his masculinity and a modern one? it's probably someone who's prepared to go 50 50 on all the chores in the house at the moment. I think that's the, uh, uh, I think masculinity is going through a tough time at the moment. And, um, I think, uh, we can realize there is a revolution going on. So I think it's, It's definitely about being flexible and losing a lot of those stereotypes and going with the flow.
Well, I would advise him. It's quite too late for me. It's a confusing thing. That's what the guest was talking about, how young men are very confused in their masculinity, what it means, what it is to be a man, what it's not to be a man these days, and really trying to give... that guest was really trying to give men an answer for that question of masculinity because the data shows young men are suffering tremendously if you look at the suicide rates or if you look at the employment rates or the education rates or dating, all those in those areas.
So there's a bit of, as you say, a revolution going on in masculinity and what it means to be a man. Don't be ashamed to be male, but be flexible and try to adapt to the changing world. I think that's it. Tim, thank you so much. Thank you for your wisdom. You've definitely changed my life. And I know from all the feedback I got in our last conversation, you've changed the lives of many, many people through your work, but also more broadly through what Zoe's doing.
I can only speak for myself. Obviously, I have a relationship with Zoe. I'm an investor in a company and they sponsor the podcast. But in my life, the key, the significant changes that I've seen because of the insight and the... the fact that Zoe has turned the lights onto my nutrition, have been, for pretty much my whole life, I had gut problems and I didn't really know why. And I just accepted it. I was always bloated, had pains in my gut. And I just thought it was normal.
You know, I thought, as a lot of people probably think, I thought I was broken in some way. And this was just the way that my body was born. And then as I've done this podcast, I've realized to not accept this idea that I was born broken in any area of my life. And to look a little bit more about how there might be a misalignment between what my body wants and what the modern world is giving it. And through Zoe, I was able to completely remove that.
decade-long pain in my gut by focusing on foods that had a good relationship with me. So I thank Zoe for that, and I thank you for that, and the work that you do in spreading the message, because a lot of the things you say, you know... They ruffle feathers. And I think when things are positively disruptive, it's an inevitability that they ruffle feathers because there is an incumbent that has experienced cognitive dissonance. There's an incumbent that feels threatened or challenged in such a way.
But I think that's how innovation and positive change occurs. So thank you. Pleasure. Hope it works.