The Weight Loss Scientist: You've Been LIED To About Calories, Dieting & Losing Weight: Giles Yeo
Guests: Giles Yeo
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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Do we get fatter with age?
Yes. Between 20 and 50 years old, the average person will gain about 15 kilos in weight.
I don't want to be that guy. What can I do?
Dr. Giles Yeo is the world's leading expert on fat and how to burn it. His book is called *Why Calories Don’t Count*. What you eat does matter. Let’s talk about how we fix the obesity, how we burn fat, and how we all get into a healthy weight.
Everyone’s brain hates it when they lose weight. We’re talking even a few pounds. It goes, "This is reducing my chance of survival." The moment you stop the diet, the weight will come back on. Calories are not accurate.
What's the truth?
The calorie tells you absolutely nothing. Zero. So, if you actually look at a stick of celery raw, it’s got only six calories. If you cook the celery, that six calories becomes 30 calories. Understand the limitations and caveats of calorie counting.
Veganism. What are the general stereotypes that need addressing?
Veganism, plant-based in particular, is a diet for the privileged people who can choose to do so. We do not need everyone to be vegan.
Sustainable weight loss. What is the way that you would suggest to do that, the simple way?
It is the set of numbers that you can apply to whatever diet you like. The first is protein. Let’s talk about something else which I feel like I was lied to about, which is juice. Oh, yes.
Giles, hello. A pleasure to sit with you. I’ve been a big fan of your work for a very long time and I’ve consumed many of your YouTube videos, conversations you’ve had, interviews, and these fantastic books you’ve written. But I want to start by asking you to give me a bit of an overview of your academic journey as a researcher, as a graduate of Cambridge, and an overall flavor of the work you do, the experience you have, and the expertise you have.
So, I am from San Francisco. That’s where I did my high school and my undergraduate, where I studied genetics. That’s what I studied as an undergrad. Then I came to Cambridge to do my PhD, and I worked on the genetics of the Japanese pufferfish, *Fugu rubripes*. I know, I know. So, there’s a long reason why I did that, but I was looking at molecular evolution.
So, and I was well-trained as a geneticist, but then I realized that genetics of pufferfish was not going to pay my mortgage. It was at this point I needed a job. So I finished my PhD, and I went knocking on doors, actually. I didn’t look at any adverts or anything. I just went to the department and said, "You know what, I’m just going to see if anyone has a job." And the second door I knocked on was a guy named Steve O'Rahilly, and he had just identified the very first obesity gene in humans, which when mutated caused really severe obesity. This was 1998.
And I joined his lab. I was from a famous lab, I was a geneticist. He needed—he had just found the first obesity genetics gene—he needed a geneticist. That’s how I got into genetics of obesity. So that’s how I started. And then I started with the genetics of severe childhood obesity. So, kids who are three years old but a hundred pounds.
So this is not—we’re not talking just a little bit chubby, just drink too much Coca-Cola type of thing. I mean, these are mutations which cause really, really severe obesity. That’s where I started my career.
Where they can’t stop eating?
They can’t stop eating because, in particular, so because they lack the signal between fat and the brain. There is a signal, it's a hormone, which lets your brain know how much fat you’re carrying. That’s important because how much fat you’re carrying is how long you would last in the wild if there was no food. So if your food source stopped today. So it’s an important piece of information.
But if you lack that signal, like some of these children do—this is one of the hundred-pound kids I was telling you about—then what they have is a brain that thinks that they’re starving because now there’s no signal. So the brain thinks they have no fat. When don’t you have any fat? When you’re starving. And so these poor kids, who we think and we judge—"Look at that fat kid, what's that? Look, the parents don’t care about them," right?—because there is a mutation, the signal is broken, the child cannot control their diet. That’s what I started studying 25 years ago.
Fascinating. What happened next in terms of your academic journey?
I began to move away from extreme obesity to look at all body weight. Whether or not you were skinny, medium-sized, or large. And secondly, I also began to think I can’t just hide myself in a lab and do this, because otherwise there are going to be people thinking that this kid’s fault that he is a hundred pounds, or someone might be a BMI 30, someone might be ten pounds overweight and think it’s their fault as well.
And that was for me a big turning point, to change what I was doing, what I was studying, to make it more general, and to also begin to do things like podcasts, to speak to you and write books and so do things more broadly and speak to people outside the academic environment.
And you’ve done a number of shows on the BBC and documentaries, right? I found three at least: the first one in 2016 called *Why Are We Getting So Fat?*, in 2017 *Clean Eating: The Dirty Truth*, and in 2018 *Vitamin Pills: Miracle or Myth?*. And obviously, as well, you’ve written these two fantastic books called *Why Calories Don’t Count* and *Gene Eating*. So my question becomes: why? Why did you focus on food? Why did you care personally enough to pursue with such persistence the topic of food? Why is that personal to you? You could have done anything with your intelligence. Why food?
So, well, first of all, I love food. So there’s that. I do love food. But actually, no, we followed the biology. So we now understand more broadly that when we study the genetics of body weight, we are by its very definition studying the genetics of how our brain influences our feeding behavior. So there was an academic reason for this.
So, just as an example, why do some people respond to stress by eating, whereas other people respond to stress by not eating? It’s exactly the same hormone, but people literally respond in diametrically opposite fashions, okay? Why do people love food? Some people use food as fuel, etc., etc. And so on my academic side, I began to try and understand the mechanisms. I was interested in that.
But then it got me thinking about food. It got me thinking, "Well, hang on a second, when I travel, just as an example, particularly pre-COVID, and I end up in an airport somewhere international, O'Hare in Chicago or something like that, and I’m transferring planes, for whatever reason I have to eat—I find myself having to eat—I get stressed a little bit, I find myself having to eat a big bowl of carbs, particularly rice or noodles." And I was thinking about this. This became a habit. Whatever airport I’m in, particularly if I was transiting, I would try and find the closest place I could get a big bowl of noodles. In fact, just before I came here, what I had for lunch? I went to Bone Daddies to have ramen.
Very nice.
Exactly that. I wasn’t stressed, but I was trying to relax. Okay. And so that was what really got me into it. I said, "Well, hang on a second, what is it about food that makes me relax and calm and that I love? And then what is it about food that makes some people so angry?" You know, where it's almost religious, almost evangelical about it. And that is where I started thinking there is a link here between what I do in my day job in the lab and I teach and what have you, and what I think about from broadcasting, from writing. And that is when I said, "You know, if I’m going to do something, I want to enjoy it." I love food, I research food, I write about food. That’s the reason why. Because I love it and I thought that it was—I wanted to know more about myself and hence then more about other people as well.
You referenced your day job there. What is your day job as we sit here today?
So my day job is I’m a professor at the University of Cambridge and I teach and I research there. So that’s my day job. And I have a group and we study how the brain controls food intake through using cells, using molecules. So that’s the day job, I say that. I mean, this is obviously—I mean the writing is also a job, obviously, but it’s what I do in my spare time. And actually, what’s interesting is it’s what has made me, I think, a better scientist. I think too many scientists lose perspective.
And that’s fine, right? I mean, I’m not more brilliant than many more much more brilliant people than me. But I think people do lose perspective. And I think you need to go out, out of the lab, you need to speak to—you need to ask what people are interested in in a broader society, what they understand about what you do. And so that’s the reason why I do what I do and why I say the day job versus this, even though I merge it all together.
You’ve been studying food, genetics, these topics for almost three decades. Is that accurate?
Almost since 1998. 25 years.
Okay. Where are we in terms of culture as it relates to our opinion and perspective on food? Do you know what I mean by that? Like, if you started 25 years ago, when you observe how society views food, the relationship it has with it versus your perspective today, where are we today?
I think it depends—I think there is a polar response to food. We are in a polarized society we live in today and I think the same is true about food. I think I—I would like to think there are people who enjoy food, who love food. We watch MasterChef, we watch cooking programs, we love the food, you know, everyone loves Nigella, that kind of thing. But then equally, I don’t know if there's the same number of people, there are also people who fear food. Okay.
Now, I study obesity. I do study obesity, and I know that most of the non-infectious diseases we suffer from today is because of poor diet. Most of it. Obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, certain heart diseases, cancers, etc. Okay. This is true. And so undoubtedly we need to know more about our diet and we need to fix the diet that we actually do. But I don’t do it through fearing food. I do it about understanding food, about loving food, about learning how to cook food better, sourcing better food, that kind of thing, right?
Whereas there are a lot of people in society who are talking about restriction of food, removing entire food groups, saying that this is the only way to eat—if you don’t eat this way, it is the not right way. So I think we are in a polar situation where on the one hand we cannot consume enough food, tele, and cookbooks and everything, but yet there is a huge section of society that fears food so much that diet has become this toxic word whenever we talk about diets. So I think that’s where we are at the moment. We are in a polar situation.
I read this word over and over again in your work called "orthorexia." What does orthorexia mean?
So orthorexia is a type of eating disorder. People would have heard of anorexia, okay? People would have heard of bulimia. So anorexia clearly is a controlling thing where you don’t want to eat. Bulimia is there’s the binging and there’s the purging. Orthorexia is a fear of not eating properly. It is another—I think it’s—look, I’m not a psychologist and psychiatrist and I’m not an eating disorder expert, but I think it stems from the same root. There is an effort to wanting to control something that you feel like you need to control.
Some people try and control their diet. Other people pick something. It doesn’t have to be—I mean, you could say "I want to be vegan or plant-based" or "I want to be keto" or "I want to do carnivore," whatever it is you want to do, but then you become so hung up on it that if it’s not exactly perfect, if it’s not exactly right, you don’t eat it. So that is orthorexia, where suddenly you have to have the burger but it’s only cooked this way. It is a, for lack of a better term, it is analogous to obsessive-compulsive behavior, but specifically with regard to the way you prepare and are willing to eat that specific food.
I read something in your first book about orthorexia, *Gene Eating*. I believe it was this book, in chapter 10, where you cite a study of hundreds and hundreds of women that follow food eating accounts on Instagram. And I think the study concludes that about 49% of the women that follow food eating accounts or food accounts on Instagram have what you would describe as orthorexia, which is startling because that’s half the population that follow those Instagram accounts have this fear of messing up with their diet.
But if you look—I mean, Instagram I think is a very interesting thing. I mean, first of all, as far as I understand—someone may correct me if I’m wrong—the majority of Instagram users are female, and actually the biggest, I think probably what—what are the two biggest Instagram styles that are there? We talk about food or you talk about fitness. Those are the two big things. There’s many other things as well. And you’re absolutely right. When you actually look at—in fact, if I look at my Instagram followers, okay, just when you go to the little things, 89% are women. There’s no reason to follow—I don’t want to point out—there’s no reason to follow me other than the fact that I talk about diets all the time. 89%? Really? I mean, I think that—so if you consider me and I talk about food, okay, and suddenly I’m some Joe Schmo nobody from Cambridge who writes about food and 89% are women, then what happens if you actually begin to talk about diets?
It is true, and a huge number of them—it’s easy—you know, I look at Instagram too and clearly my pictures are going to be a little bit blah, but there’s some very, very well-curated Instagram pictures. The food is beautiful, the people are beautiful. But that’s the purpose, right? It’s sort of like a little advertisement campaign. But I think there are many, many people, even though they know—because people know I’m looking at a curated item—which I think deep down inside think that this could be real and this could be them. And I think when you take people who are susceptible to this obsessive-compulsive behavior, who are susceptible to eating disorders, and you suddenly put that in front of someone, then I think you—it can be triggering for some people.
For me, my sort of confusion with food and dieting and weight loss and all of these things stems from almost getting too much advice. And I think if you hung around on Instagram for long enough, if you hang around for just maybe a day or two, you would hear so much conflicting advice on what the right thing to do is. This diet, paleo, keto, you should eat these plants and not eat that, don’t eat meat. And eventually, you go, "F**k, I can’t eat anything." You know, if you listen to that much advice, you’ll go, "Well, I can’t eat anything," and that stifles you to a point where you’re like, you’re eating lettuce, but then you realize you’re not. And it’s just, what can I eat? The more food advice I’ve consumed, the less confident I’ve become in what I can eat, interestingly. I think when I was naive and ignorant, I was happier in terms of the orthorexia you described, that fear of messing up on my diet.
I think the real answer is this: the reason there is so much conflicting advice is because there is no one single right diet. I think there are some general principles we can probably agree on. Okay. We probably eat too much sugar. We probably need to not eat so much. We need to eat a little less meat and we need to eat more vegetables. Okay. So, look, if I say those three things, is anyone going to argue with me? No, because it’s a—and that’s probably some of the general rules.
But if you then begin to apply it to your own self, then the problem with eating, the problem with eating is everyone is an expert at eating. By its very definition, you’re an expert at eating, I’m an expert at eating long enough for us to be sat here having this conversation. And so when I eat a certain way and I look at someone else, and eating is a very visible thing, every—it’s an open event, and not only that, you then see what the person looks like, okay? Then in your head—and we are human beings, simple, we are nothing but mammals—we think "red berry poison, blue berry lion," whatever, right? And so you look—look at that fat person eating, he’s eating something. And so we begin to judge other people based on what we’re talking about.
And now the major issue is most people keep their mouths shut, mind their own business, and do what they’re doing. But then you get loud opinionated people who go onto Instagram and say that, "Look at that person, they’re eating the wrong way. The right way is the way I eat. Look at me, I have a six-pack," etc., etc. And I think that’s the problem. So the reason why the information is conflicting is because there is no one single right diet. So it is going to be conflicting. You have people have to find the right diet for themselves not only biologically, psychologically, but also lifestyle-wise. Because if you don’t find the right diet for you, you’re never ever going to be able to stick to it and thrive from it because you’re just not. So I think that is the major problem. That’s my biggest message, if anything, is there’s no right diet.
So on this point of there being no right diet, a lot of that I guess is because we have genetic differences.
That’s one element of it. There are genetic differences.
Let’s start there then. With my genetic makeup, how might there be differences in my genetic makeup that make my relationship with food and eating and weight loss different from yours?
Oh, okay. I probably don’t have as good an answer. Genetics does not have as good an answer about why different people eat differently aside from cultural differences at the moment, okay? So the genetics—the reason behind that is because it’s very difficult to accurately determine what someone has eaten in order to do genetics. What we do know, because we can actually observe, is how people of different ethnicities have are susceptible to different diseases.
So famously, East Asian people—people that look like me—South Asian people (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi) cannot get as large BMI-wise before becoming at risk of Type 2 diabetes, right? Compared to white people, Polynesians famously, okay, who can get pretty large before they actually end up getting diseases. So that’s a classic example where this is why South Asian people, East Asian people have a higher predisposition of diabetes even though obesity is not particularly a big thing in their cultures.
But then you then begin to look at body shape. That does matter as well. Where do you put your fat? Do you tend to put fat on your bum, on your tummy? You know, what is your—how tall are you? How short are you? And all of these things, which we can see visually, there are people who are then susceptible or not susceptible to specific diseases. Other things you can’t see, okay? Why are African Americans, for example, more likely to end up with heart disease, less likely with diabetes, whereas why are Indians more? And so you then begin to ask the question, and there we have genetics.
What about in terms of this "obese gene"? I read in chapter 2 of your book that there is a gene for obesity.
There are more than a thousand genes for body weight. The obese gene in chapter 2 which I talk about is this leptin gene. It's this gene which lets your brain know how much fat you have. So that’s the exact gene. Leptin is the gene that I talk about in chapter 2 with the obese—it’s called the obese gene because the mouse was called obese. There was a lack of imagination because the mouse was a naturally occurring mouse that had a mutation in the same gene. Scientists found out what that was and then found out that it was conserved in humans. And that’s where my boss Steve O’Rahilly then came in and found that that gene was also mutated in some humans. So that’s the obese gene. It's the fat gene, fat gene meaning gene from fat that lets your brain know how much fat you have.
And is that possible to be not just on or off but slightly defective? So some people can just get a little bit more hungry than others, or is it a binary thing where it can be on or off?
So leptin, for whatever odd reason, is pretty much binary. So if you have a little bit of it, you’re fine; if you have none of it, you’re not. However, there is obviously a pathway. Leptin signals to the brain, which signals to something else. And there is another gene that I looked at called MC4R. It’s part of the pathway, it's part of the same fat-sensing pathway. That is a rheostat, it's like a thermostat. And so, for example, we have found thousands of different mutations in this gene and you can imagine that depending on the severity of the dysfunction—some are completely dead, some are 70% functional—we can predict how much someone will eat in a test buffet meal scenario if they have a 50% functioning gene versus a zero-functioning gene.
And we now know that 0.3%, okay, in this country at least—so 200,000 people in the UK, a million people in the United States—will carry mutations in this MC4R gene, making them more likely to end up with obesity. So that at 18 years old, if you carry a mutation in this MC4R gene, you are on average 18 kilos heavier, 40 pounds heavier at 18 years old on average. And that’s 200,000 people in this country. So it’s not super common, right? It’s still 99.7% of the people’s body weight’s not determined by this, but there are a lot of people’s body weights who are dependent on this specific gene. But it is a tunable system. So it’s a little bit or a lot means that you’re either slightly heavier or a lot heavier.
Does our brain like us losing weight? I did the keto diet recently for about two months.
Why did you do it and why did you come off?
I did it because I wanted to—okay, this is interesting. It shows how much of a Neanderthal I am. I thought I was allergic to gluten. So I thought I’ll cut out all of the things that have gluten in them and I’ll try that. And so I then watched this video online and it talked about the keto diet. So I thought, "Oh, that sounds good," and this guy had lost so much weight doing it, so I gave it a try. Now I lost so much weight, more weight than I’ve ever lost in my life. Like, extreme. I did it for about eight weeks. I lost about a stone in weight. The reason I came off it was because it was hard. In a simple word, it was difficult. And I don't know, I felt like I was fighting against something.
How long ago did you come off it? And the crucial piece of information I’m interested in is: have you gained any weight back?
45 days ago. None of your business! I’m joking. No, I gained so much weight back. I gained—I didn’t just gain the stone I’d lost, I think I gained a little bit more back. I think I gained a stone and a bit back. I mean, I’m not in bad shape, but for me, I went from being absolutely lean, like I’m ready for *Men’s Health*, to being back to being like, you know, athletic now. But I gained back the weight I’d lost and more. So this is why I asked the question about the brain. My brain didn’t seem to be on board with me. It didn’t seem to want the best for us and it seemed to want to return me back to my default base state.
Your brain—everyone’s brain hates it when they lose weight. It doesn’t matter your starting point. You could start from a point where you are athletic versus someone who’s not athletic, couch potato type phenotype. The moment you lose a little bit of weight—we’re talking even a few pounds, I’m not even talking you’re talking about a stone—even if you lost five pounds, what happens in your brain is your brain is used to you carrying a certain amount of weight. The moment your weight starts to go down as an adult, it goes, "Hey, you know, this is a big flag comes up. This is reducing my chance of survival."
This is what the brain thinks. And so what it does is it begins to use strategies, not conscious, nothing to do in our brain, anything like that, to drag us back up, kicking and screaming to where we were before. First of all, it makes us hungry. Okay. So it makes us hungry. And second, it actually, very, very secretly, lowers your metabolism ever so slightly so that even without thinking, even eating exactly the same thing, you are now storing more than you’re burning, even eating exactly the same thing. Part of the strategy to get you back up to where you were before. So once you were on that keto diet, your weight goes off, you’re able to keep it, but you said, "Man, I can’t do this." And so you stop. And the moment you stop, your brain goes—comes back on and starts dragging you back up. This is going to be true for pretty much every single diet that is out there. The moment you stop the diet, the weight will come back on eventually.
Why does my brain hate me?
It’s what—look, this is the brain, you have to remember that that’s what’s kept us alive. I mean, we have lived aside from probably the last 40 years, we probably most of the time never had enough food. Now clearly over the past 100 years, we’ve had sufficient food compared to beyond that. But you know as well as I do, when you turn on the TV and watch *Only Fools and Horses* from the 70s or whatever, people are all skinny. They don’t look skinny, they look normal weight for the time that they’re there. Whereas we have clearly, over the past 40 years, now have too much food.
So this is now a different problem, that we have too much food. And so our brain is trying to respond to this environment, but it’s responding in a natural fashion because what used to happen was because there was not enough food, when there was food there, you made sure you ate it. Otherwise, why would you not do that, right? So we have a brain that’s wired for a feast-famine environment. Feast-famine, feast-famine. The problem is we live in a feast-feast environment at the moment. And that’s the issue. We have a maladapted brain for a feast-feast environment.
And this is because of how we’ve set up society? Because of supermarkets, fridges, preservatives that keep food lasting for longer, and food’s more available and cheaper than before, it’s more processed, etc., right?
So this is true. Now, without going all food Nazi, I mean you have to remember that all of whatever you just said—preservatives, pickling, cooking—you start with that. Then you say, "Oh, we’re going to do highly processed foods, we’re going to do pre-packaged foods, frozen foods, microwave foods, etc., etc." Supermarkets—it has kept us alive. Okay. We’re seven and a half billion people and counting. We need to feed all these people and this is fine. The problem is we’ve now got to the point where the efficiencies, the scales of efficiency in our food production is now so high, we can now get—calories have never been cheaper.
So this is the issue today. You can, in this country for example, in the UK, people have calculated that you can get about a thousand calories for 90p. Now, how good are those calories, what the quality of the food of those calories? We’re not talking, we’re just talking pure calories. Because of efficiencies of scale, calories have never been cheaper and we don’t have to go run after an antelope in order to get the calories. This has kept us alive until it is killing us, which is now. Over the past ten years, there has been an important inflection point in human history. Previously we never had enough food, whereas now, since the past ten years, more people are dying from over-nutrition than under-nutrition. And over-nutrition in a bad way because you can have loads of calories but still be malnourished because you’re eating the wrong kind of foods. And can you believe it, we are now in a world where there are more people dying because they eat too much than because they don’t eat enough.
Is the worldwide trend that we are getting skinnier or fatter?
We are getting fatter as a worldwide trend. And true, the problems are more obvious at the moment in higher-income countries because a) they’re studied more and b) the kind of food that’s available. But what is the goal of a country that is less developed than us, for example? They want to pull their people out of poverty. They want to make sure that their poor people don’t die of starvation. They want to make sure that fast food and good food, you know, and crap food are available to everybody there as well. Now the problem is the moment that happens, you then switch from being dying of under-nutrition and starvation to then now dying of over-nutrition. So we are at that inflection point where the whole world very soon will get into a severe obesity problem and we do need to fix the food environment in order to fix that.
Do you consider it to be an emergency?
It is definitely an emergency. Oh, it is definitely an emergency. And it’s an emergency because let’s ask the question: why is it a problem to have obesity? Why is it a problem to carry too much fat? Okay. So that is—so you might think, "Well, it’s obvious." Well, is it? Because there are issues with gravity when you’re too heavy: arthritis, mobility, sleep apnea (you can’t breathe at night). But that isn’t what kills us. Okay. What kills us is all the diseases that are associated with obesity: diabetes, high blood pressure, certain cancers, etc., etc. That is what kills us. Okay. Heart disease.
And so it is an emergency because with obesity at a population level as it goes up, then you have millions upon millions of people that end up with diseases. So the estimate is that direct cost to the NHS, direct cost for treating obesity-related illness is 6 to 7 billion a year, okay, pounds. That’s the direct. But the moment you take into account the broader economy—days sick, etc.—it’s estimated we are running at 27 billion a year just on economic effects on obesity. So it is an emergency because well, because many people are getting ill, many people are dying. And actually, it makes economically no sense. We have to fix the obesity because then we would save ourselves a lot, a lot of money.
So let's talk about how we fix the obesity, how we burn fat, and how we all get into a healthy weight. Now I know you think that BMIs are largely bullshit and unhelpful. Is that an accurate description of your opinion?
Okay, look, before I end up with my colleagues throwing shoes at me. So BMI, for those of you who don’t know, BMI is obviously your weight in kilograms divided by your height in meters squared. It’s a way of controlling for your height and your weight. Now on a population level, it is actually remarkably effective. Why? Because a) it’s free to measure, it doesn’t cost anything. And on average in a population, sadly, the higher your BMI, the more fat you carry. And we know that the more fat you carry, the more likely you are to be unhealthy. Okay. On a population level, all this is true. You might argue rugby players, different this, and that is true.
On an individual level, however, it is not particularly useful for your health, other than tracking your weight. It’s about as useful as that because each of us are different shapes, different sizes, can carry different amounts of fat safely. So that is the problem with obesity, right? It depends on who you are, how heavy is heavy before it actually begins to influence your health.
So let’s talk about food a little bit. I’m currently doing some kind of version of intermittent fasting, right?
Detail, detail. What some kind of version?
Well, I just don’t—let’s call it time-restricted eating. Basically, I don’t have breakfast. I actually don’t really get hungry at breakfast to be completely honest with you. I tend to get hungry a bit later in the day, so I haven’t eaten anything today and god forbid it’s 3:30 PM. I know, but I just don’t—I just don't seem to get hungry yet. And then I read your book, and in chapter 3 of *Gene Eating*, you talk about front-loading your food in the day. Now I was like, "F**k hell," you know, I’m trying my best here, Giles. And they told me to eat later in the day, to skip breakfast, we don’t need it, and then to time-restrict your eating. And then I read your book and it says front-load your food: have a big breakfast, medium lunch, small dinner. What’s the truth?
Okay, so that is the—I think most societies have a similar saying. The Chinese have a similar saying as this as well.
What saying?
"Eat like a king at breakfast, a prince at lunch, and a pauper at dinner time." And so the Chinese have a similar saying because I think people kind of worked this out. Now there is some truth to this, but then I’ll come back and explain what the truth—what the truth is. So the some truth is that actually, clearly we are metabolically—our metabolism is highest during the day because we have to avoid becoming food and we have to look for food. Okay. So that’s a thing. Whereas at night when we’re asleep, our metabolism drops.
So if you eat your biggest meal at night and then a couple of hours later you go to sleep, then clearly you are loading your calories and then going to sleep, which is in storage mode. Whereas if you eat your biggest meal during the day, you have the whole day left in order to burn it. Now homeostasis, it does balance itself out. So it’s not the driver of obesity, but undoubtedly it will make a little bit of a difference there, okay?
But then a friend of mine, Alex Johnston—Professor Alexandra Johnston up at the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen—just published the study, I think probably only three months ago, which was very interesting. So what she did was she got people—a cohort of people—and got them to eat exactly the same number of calories. They supplied the food, so they knew what they were going to do, okay? And they did it either by front-loading all the calories at breakfast or back-loading all the calories at dinner, but everyone ate exactly the same thing and then everyone then swapped. Okay. So everyone did the whole thing. And what she found was that there was no difference in body weight change whether or not you were eating most of your calories at breakfast or most of your calories at dinner. It was the total amount of energy during the day.
But the difference was if you ate more at breakfast, you felt less hungry during the day than if you ate more at dinner. So while if you ate exactly the same foods but at breakfast or dinner, dinner or lunch, it doesn’t actually matter, but for some people it may very well be easier to have the big breakfast because it means, particularly if they love food in particular, because it means they get less hungry throughout the day. So that is the truth, that is the nuance.
But does that mean—you know, I’ve got firsthand experience in this—that if I’m not hungry throughout the day, then when it gets to midnight, I’ll be thinking, "Hmm..."
No, but it doesn’t matter, right? Because it’s not like—well, it depends. Depends how much—if you suddenly ate 3,000 calories at dinner, then there may be there—
No, I’m not talking dinner. I’m talking midnight snack.
So I think the reality is you have to eat when you have to eat is the answer. Now if you were trying to lose—so if you were actively trying to lose weight because you were actively overweight, then you might begin to think about when you wanted to eat more. I would probably cut the calories from your dinner rather than the cut the calories from your breakfast. But if you are surviving during the day—and this is true about many people, right? Nurses, doctors who work shifts, firemen, police officers, whatever they do—you gotta eat when you gotta eat. So these a lot of these pieces of advice are fine until they smack into the reality of life, your job, and what you actually do.
But as general advice for the general person who isn’t constrained by night shifts or anything like that: eating late, closer to when you fall asleep, is bad—is not going to help you lose weight.
Correct.
Okay, that’s good to know. Everyone says this, you know, Tim Spector said this to me. I need people to keep saying it and then I will cancel the midnight buffet.
But I love my midnight buffet too! Every so often only, not every night.
Yeah, yeah, not all the time. You know, five nights a week. Keto. Your general stance on keto. You know, much of your feedback and much of your writing is more about how it’s unsustainable. Is that accurate?
Well, it depends. So the original keto diet, keto in its original form, was oddly enough it was designed for epilepsy. Okay. That was what it was originally designed to do. It’s only in its most—I would say the past ten years—that suddenly people have realized there was a weight-loss element to it, as you as you personally firsthand actually found. So I think the original versions of keto were actually very, very, very unsustainable because of the really super high levels of fat that were involved. They were unpalatable and with absolutely almost zero carbs, they were very unpalatable. They’re difficult to stick to.
If you have inflammation-related diseases, is keto often a diet that’s recommended?
Depends where the inflammation is. So if it’s inflammation in the gut, you need a different type of diet. So that there is no one for a given inflammation. So it then depends on the diet that you actually actually are on. But keto in its extreme form is difficult to stick to because, you know, because of the really, really high fat to protein ratio. So it was designed for epilepsy because I think there was some reason to say that when you force your brain to use ketones, which is rather than glucose, which is where the keto diet comes from, it reduces the incidence of epilepsy. So leave that aside.
But what then people found as well is that with the keto diet, you ended up feeling fuller and so more satiated and so therefore you lost weight because you ended up eating less food. But also because you were having less carbs, then it was easier to control your blood glucose. So keto, I think is probably good—a safe thing for some type 2 diabetics looking to try and a milder form of keto, because now there’s different types of keto, that you can stick to try and control your blood glucose if you’re type 2 diabetic. Just make sure you don’t eat as much of the fat as animal fat. Try and have more olive oil and fish fat and vegetable fat rather than animal fat. Then there probably is a case to be made for keto not as extreme. For a healthy individual such as yourself, you found how difficult it was to actually stick to it. I think there’s probably a case to be made for introducing a little bit of carbohydrates, but high-fiber carbohydrates in there so that it makes it more sustainable.
The issue is, and I think one needs to be careful is, certainly in its most extreme forms, there haven’t been many studies looking at the safety, say over 5, 10 years, if you stick to keto all the time. How healthy is it for you? And so that’s the only caveat that I want—that I want to point out. The studies need to be done. As it becomes more popular, the studies will be done because there are many people, millions of people who swear by keto. And inherently, as long as you don’t eat too much animal fat only, and so you have vegetable fat and fish fat and olive oil and things as well, then it can be relatively healthy.
You referenced there that the protein makes you feel fuller. That seems to be a really important point, that if you have a high-protein diet, you’re going to end up eating less, which will result in weight loss, right? In what order does protein, fats, and carbohydrates make you feel fullest?
So a calorie of protein makes you feel fuller than a calorie of fat than a calorie of carbohydrate, in that order. So and the reason behind that is because protein is chemically the most complex compared to fat and carbs. So it takes the longest to a) digest and b) metabolize. So and because it takes the longest, any food which travels further down the gut makes you feel fuller. That’s just a general—it’s a general thing of how our body works. So that’s the first thing. So protein takes longer to digest, travels further down the gut, you feel fuller.
But then not only that, protein gets digested into amino acids. Amino acids transfer across the gut wall into our blood and they then go to our cells and organs, where they're then metabolized. Now during the metabolism stage, it then takes a lot of energy to metabolize protein compared to fat and carbs. So for example, for every 100 calories of protein that you eat, we are only ever able to use 70 calories. So 30% of the protein calories we eat are spent dealing with protein. It takes money to make money, right? And so 30%. So protein calories everywhere—this is not reflected on the side of the package—protein calories everywhere are 30% wrong just off the bat because of the amount of energy it actually takes to sort out protein. That’s another reason why it makes you feel fuller.
Super interesting. That point about calories, obviously I talked to Tim Spector a lot about that and it really is a kind of narrative-buster that calories are not accurate.
So, look, I speak a lot about calories. I understand that 200 calories of chips is twice the portion of 100 calories of chips. But so is 200 grams of chips twice the portion of 100 grams of chips. And no one is trying to compare 200 grams of chips to 200 grams of carrots. Broadly speaking, that’s what it is. The calorie is a very useful tool to give you a general idea how much you are eating during the day. That is true, okay? How much you’re eating. But it tells us nothing, zero, about the quality of food you’re eating. About how much protein, how much fiber, what type of fat, how much sugar. The calorie tells you absolutely nothing. So it gives you a piece of information: how much food you’re eating. And that’s, yes, I can see how that could be important. But I would like to see a world we live in where we were more concerned about the quality of food we are feeding ourselves, our kids, other people, than necessarily just the pure caloric content.
Because I’ve got a friend that said to me—won’t name him—but he said to me that you can basically as long as you count the calories, you can eat whatever you like. So you can have the Domino’s pizza, you can have this, but you just gotta make sure the calories are under your sort of calorific allowance and then it’s all good.
So, now if your—depends what your calorific allowance is and it will clearly, if you stick to a purely calorie-counting diet of say 2,000 calories and you stuck to that religiously, you probably would lose weight because we probably burn more than that. But how healthy would you be? I think is probably the question. Whereas if you had a healthier diet, but eat 2,500 calories of a healthier diet, would you be healthier? And that’s the more important question I think you ask. Because there’s two things you’re trying to look at: you’re trying to look at the number in the scale, and that probably would work, or you’re trying to look at your health: your blood glucose levels, your blood pressure, your ability to be energetic during the day, how fast you want to run, whatever it is, whatever metric—can you lift your grandkids up? Whatever you want to do. And so I think it’s a—it is a measure, clearly it is. I’m not denying that it is not a measure, but it is a very blunt tool and I don’t think it is measuring what we need to measure, which is the quality of our food.
What is "calorific availability"? In fact, reading your work is the first time I’ve even heard that phrase before, but it seems to be incredibly important.
So calorific or caloric availability is the amount of calories that you can extract from a food versus the total number of calories in a food. So the example which I cite in both books actually is if you had 100 calories of sugar, just pure white sugar, you would probably end up getting 98, nearly 100 calories out of it, nearly 100%, okay? Because sugar is our base fuel, we chop once we absorb it, there’s no digestion that’s involved.
The one example which I give is imagine if you ate sweet corn, corn on the cob, and then you look in the loo the next day. It is quite clear you haven’t absorbed most of the sweet corn because you can see it, okay? But if you take sweet corn, desiccate it, convert it into a cornmeal, make cornbread or corn tortilla, do something else with it, suddenly exactly the same source of food gives you a different amount of calories. Okay, but yet it starts from corn. It’s exactly the same thing. So that’s caloric availability. You can start with a source food, but depending on what you do to that food, different calories are available. There is nothing wrong with corn tortilla, there’s nothing wrong with cornbread, and there’s nothing wrong with sweet corn. I’m just saying that the calorie counts make no sense because you will extract different amounts of calories from the food even though we’re working with exactly the same food.
That’s crazy. So if I had a corn on the cob, and then I had a corn tortilla, if both of them said on the package "this is 100 calories," the truth is my body might with the corn on the cob only have 50% of the calories available because of the nature of the food, versus if I ate the corn tortilla, which says 100 calories on the package as well, I might get 80 calories from it.
Yes. So let me give you another example. Celery is probably something that’s easy and we’ve actually measured this. So if you actually look at a typical medium-sized stick that you might get with some buffalo wings or something like that of celery, raw, okay? People say that celery has negative calories—not really, but it’s got only six calories. It’s nearly negative, okay? For that. If you cook the celery, chop it up and put it into a stew, whatever the hell you’re going to do with it, that six calories becomes 30 calories because you’ve cooked it. Exactly the same food, and this time I’m just cooking it, all right? Because the cooking, you can almost consider cooking as an extension of your stomach. It does some of the digestion for you, right? Because you’re cooking it, particularly if in a stew it’s an hour, two hours, and then you eat it. So then all that energy, the reason why we only extract six calories from a raw celery is, you know, it’s 99% fiber and water. And so whereas if you cook it, then what happens is some of the fiber breaks down, we’re able to do it. That’s a classic another classic example: exactly the same food, you cook it suddenly six times the number of calories you get from it.
That’s crazy! Exactly. Because I could go to a supermarket and I could get a six-calorie stick of celery. It could literally say on the package "six calories." I take it home, I think, "Great, I’ve got six calories left in my calorie deficit today." I pop it in the pan, I stew it, I eat it—30 calories out of nowhere.
Correct. That’s false advertising. Correct! I know I’m going to get myself into trouble. No, but it’s true. That is exactly, that is exactly true.
That’s crazy.
That’s why I don’t think—that’s why I don’t think calories are the most useful thing to be measuring, because they shift. They are a moving target, which is fine as long as we know what we expecting. But if you are a religious calorie counter, once again, you have to do you in order to—so some people do that and it’s and for them it is a useful strategy to keep the weight off and be healthier. I’m not going to bag on you, you do what you want. But you have to understand that religiously counting it means that depending on what type of calories you eat, no matter how religious you are, you’re going to be absorbing different amounts of calories anyway.
But again, as you’ve highlighted there, the positive upside to that is it gives people something to measure, which is relative, and that’s the benefit for them. That if they’re measuring it every day and it’s the same food they’re measuring, it’s all relative and some benefit to them because obviously people do are very passionate that they’ve had great results from calorie counting in their lives. It’s something to measure.
But most people who calorie count—many people who calorie count, just to be clear—means they stick to eating the same thing which they’ve done, roast chicken whatever it is, but eat fewer calories of the roast chicken dinner. Now that does work because what you’re doing is you’re now reducing the portion size of what you’re eating. Whereas if you’re saying that "wait a minute, I’m going to switch meals entirely and go from eating 2,000 calories of chicken, but I’m now going to have 1,600 calories of sugar"—that’s a stupid example, but imagine that was the case, okay? Then calorie counting is not going to work because chicken is better for you than sugar. And so that is an extreme example, but few people do that, but I highlight it only to make sure people understand it, understand the limitations and caveats of calorie counting.
I started to believe, I think as I said to you earlier, maybe 12 months ago, maybe a bit more, 24 months ago, that I was gluten-free. And I believed that because I’d eaten some things and then I had like a bad gut reaction, some pains, a bit of bloatedness. And then when I didn’t eat those things that had gluten in them, that kind of pain and bloatedness went away. So my genius brain assumed, self-diagnosed, that I am gluten intolerant. And then I marched through the world for the next two years being that kind of pretentious asshole that's asking if there’s gluten in everything and interrogating the ingredients of everything I put in my mouth to try and avoid this thing called gluten. Now from reading your work, I’ve started to consider that I’m not in fact a genius and that I’m in fact an idiot and that I’m probably not gluten intolerant. And that because you look at society and you look at packaging and you look at signage on and restaurants and on menus, they have gluten-free everywhere now. Everything is like gluten-free. You go in the supermarket aisles, it's gluten-free pasta, gluten-free this, which creates the impression that we humans are just not meant to eat gluten and we’re all gluten intolerant or 50% of us are. How much truth is there to that?
So 1% of the human species are Celiacs, okay? And they are completely allergic to gluten and you don’t want to stay away from gluten. Okay, like literally, that’s they get to the point where it’s so bad that their guts don’t work anymore and can’t absorb food carefully. And so it can kill you. So that’s no joke. And so gluten-free was originally designed to cater to people with Celiac disease. 1% of the human species. Now 3 to 4% of humans—and that’s slightly more difficult to measure—are probably genuinely gluten intolerant. And this could be maybe from a little bit farty till some severe gastrointestinal distress, and genuinely so. And probably is best for them to at least not have a big bolus of gluten. But the rest of us are not.
But yet 25% of us buy gluten-free at any one point. So it’s become profitable to sell gluten-free. They now label rice as gluten-free. Rice doesn’t have gluten, never had gluten, okay, from it. And so they label rice as gluten-free thinking that it’s some product, it’s not a product, it’s just rice. So I think the issue here is it’s been a boon for people with Celiacs. I’ve spoken to people with Celiac disease and they go, "We’ve never had it this good." Because before you’d have to go, you’d be really concerned. Now every place you go to, the moment you say gluten-free, you get a gluten-free meal and everything is fine. The only downside is some people look at them.
But so but that is a classic example of people thinking that it’s healthy. But can I just once again—I’ll stop asking you a question soon—but did you actually go and get yourself diagnosed about whether or not you are gluten intolerant? Because it doesn’t mean that you’re not, because you could be.
By the way, you can always ask me questions. And to answer your question, yes, I got diagnosed by Dr. Stephen Bartlett in the comfort of my own home. By my brain. My brain wrote out the slip and made the diagnosis.
Have you gone back to eating some gluten?
Yes.
And nothing has happened.
Do you know what’s really interesting? Something after I finished the keto diet, I then tried a little bit of gluten and everything was okay. It was—I had a little bit of gluten and I didn’t really notice any issue. So then I was wondering if keeping myself off gluten or keeping myself off something for those two months had almost restored my my gut in some respect, that I could have a little bit of gluten again. Was interesting, but—
The issue with gut is that many—so for example, I will have exactly the same symptoms of what you just said: bloated, blah, blah, blah, all these things, when I have lactose. I’m lactose intolerant. Because it is a food substance that influences the gut. So I think the issue is I wouldn’t put out of hand some thing which you’ve had with your gut. It could be actually real. Is it necessarily gluten? Was it lactose? Was it something else? So the problem is and the reason why people immediately think gluten is because that’s what’s in front of them. But it could be a number of other things which cause your gut just for a little bit. Or it could just be eating the wrong type of chilies, right? And that could also do it. But the moment it begins to influence your gut, it has broadly speaking the same phenotype, the same presentation, whether it’s gluten, lactose, or Mexican chilies.
So that’s interesting. So you’re saying 1 to 4% of people really do have an intolerance roughly.
Yes.
And then 25-ish percent of us buy gluten-free assuming we are either—you assume you are gluten intolerant or think it’s healthier.
Oh, think it’s healthier. Okay. We think gluten’s a bad thing.
Yeah. Is it a bad thing? If you can handle gluten, no. If you eat too much of it, that’s always a bad thing. But no. Let's put it this way: as I said, a gluten-free doughnut is still a doughnut whether or not it has gluten or not. So there are things which are inherently fried and have more calories, more caloric availability, and there are things which are inherently less, whether or not they have gluten.
What about—you said you’re lactose intolerant. And in your book, you say that 65% of adults are lactose intolerant. That’s correct. That’s crazy! That’s a huge majority.
That’s a huge majority because the mutation is lactose tolerance. So under normal circumstances, lactose is a sugar like glucose, like fructose. But mammals, obviously all mammals can drink milk as babies. We are mammals. All mammals can obviously drink milk and absorb lactose as babies. But then most mammals, including 65% of human beings, become lactose intolerant the moment they become adults.
I guess there’s a question of why and then how. Why? Probably because if university-age Johnny is clamped onto your boob and there’s limited space, there’s no room for baby Johnny. And so you need to encourage a rapidly growing mammal: "Get away, go eat solid food so that other babies can actually get on." I think that probably is the real reason to encourage animals to do the more difficult thing of finding solid food. So you make yourself lactose intolerant.
How? Lactase is the enzyme that breaks down lactose and this happens in your small intestine and it turns on when we’re babies. But then as we become older, something else comes and shuts off lactase, like in me, and so I can’t drink a lot of milk. But then around 7,500 years ago or so—people have actually worked this out—a mutation occurred near this gene, near lactase, which prevents the shutting off of the gene. Okay. And so 85% of white Northern European Caucasians, for example, can drink milk as adults. Every single one of them has exactly that same mutation that occurred 7,500 years ago. Now there are other populations throughout the world, certain pastoral populations in Africa and certain populations, particularly those who had goats and sheep and stuff, who then had their own independent way of dealing with drinking milk, because it was a rich source of food. So if it was available, you were able to drink it. But so that is the mutation. Whereas for the vast majority of us, Chinese people for example, we didn’t end up drinking milk as adults and so we never had that mutation. And so most of us are lactose intolerant as adults.
These things we can find out. How does one go about finding out about my genetic predispositions to certain foods and diets?
So you can—okay, not every single food has a prediction for genetics-wise, but if you take any of the direct-to-consumer genetic tests that are available, they will test all of the known—they’ll definitely test lactose intolerance, your ability to handle alcohol, okay, I know mine, your ability to metabolize caffeine. So these are all individual genes, so it’s predictable. So some people can drink a lot of coffee, other people can’t. Some people can drink a lot of alcohol, other people can’t. I’m probably in the middle for alcohol and I can’t drink any milk. So all of those are predictable and you can get from any of the genetic tests that are there.
The problem I guess with these genetic tests is they make predictions beyond the stuff that are predictable. They say that "Oh, we can predict that you’ll respond to a Mediterranean diet," for example. A Mediterranean diet is a whole diet. It’s got like whatever, 200 foods. How is it going to predict whether or not you’ll respond to it? And so I think some of the genetic tests overstep their mark in trying to predict what they can predict. But some things are predictable: milk, caffeine, alcohol.
Have you done any genetic tests?
I have. For a 23andMe, DNAFit, Circle, I’ve just done them for some for papers, newspapers in writing reviews for, others just for personal interest, just to find out what it is.
What was your favorite? Because I know people are going to be listening and they’re going to be going, "You know, I want to take action. So where’s step one?" And I have to be honest, my girlfriend texted me yesterday asking me this exact question. So the minute this conversation’s done, I’m going to say I’ve just spoken to this genius from Cambridge and for you, babe, and I’ve got you the answer. She texted me yesterday asking me for a good DNA genetic test that will help her understand diet. Yeah, like her tolerance to certain foods and predispositions.
Okay. So there are many different tests out there testing different things. So there is an advantage to going with size, like 23andMe obviously—I'm not paid by them. It has an advantage to size because they have tens, hundreds of millions even people’s data and so as with most things, the more data you have and people constantly interact with the app, the more you can improve your product, the more you can then improve your predictions. But 23andMe only tests a limited number of the genes in your cell. Okay. So in other words, we have three billion base pairs in our DNA, 23andMe probably tests about two million or so, okay, of the three billion. Whereas if you go to some other companies now that now in effect sequence your whole genome or at least all your genes, so you get a lot more information, then they get more information. The problem there, however, is a) it’s more expensive but b) fewer people have done it and so they haven’t yet had the time to begin to tweak their algorithms and their predictions to get a more optimized prediction. So that’s the problem, right?
Whereas 23andMe is cheap. So that’s probably a good place to start to ask certain questions. Look, I am happy to like literally, happy to give you a better prediction than 23andMe’s algorithms because I can for example, but they probably give a pretty helpful look about lactose, alcohol, you know, whether or not you may or may not be gluten intolerant. They give some pretty good predictions there.
Okay, I’m going to do that. We’ll have a chat off air. Yeah, I really need to—I've been thinking about it for a long time, so I’m going to pull the trigger. It’s quite remarkable that I haven’t yet. You did a documentary called *Clean Eating*, which is predominantly about plant-based eating?
It wasn’t predominantly—I did look at plant-based, I also looked at the alkaline diet, and I also looked at gluten-free.
So let's talk about those last two then. Plant-based diet. I heard that there was a lot of adverse reaction from some people in some communities regarding the plant-based component of that documentary. Is that true or false?
That is true. That is true. And the reason there was a problem was, look, I hope you think speaking to me that I’m a reasonable person. I speak with some nuance, I don’t think—so what we did was plant-based has taken on a different meaning today based on the supermarkets and what have you. But when I did the program, plant-based meant a far more restrictive version of veganism. Plant-based meant that you ate minimally processed foods, hardly any sugar, and you ate whole foods only. It’s fine. It’s a perfectly healthy diet as long as you take the right supplements.
The problem is the plant-based—people become vegan or plant-based for many different reasons: ethical reasons, environmental reasons, and health, okay? All three or a mix of the three. The one issue I took with the plant-based community in that program is that they believed that there was no safe dose of animal protein. Okay. Which meant that even eating a bit of egg white, the moment you started eating a bit of egg white, it begins to kill you slowly in you know, in—I said that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life and it doesn't support—the science doesn't support that. We eat too much meat. The science does support that, okay? But eggs, okay, you know, people—vegetarians are killing themselves because they’re eating eggs or something. That was what I took them up on and they thought that because I was challenging—I says there is a safe dose of animal protein, we do need to eat less meat—they went after me. They went after me. Oh my god, it was amazing. In fact, the program has probably gone around the world probably four or five times and the reason why I know is because every time it pops up in a new country, I wake up to my inbox or my social media and suddenly I get a rush of hate. "Ah, the Canadian vegans have seen it again." "Oh look, it’s in Australia." "Ooh, the Swedish vegans, hello," you know? And so and it’s just this really odd response—evangelical, evangelical, I want to point out. It’s the people that believe there is no safe dose of animal-based protein. Clearly there is a safe dose. There are different reasons for doing things but don’t say silly things. That’s what got me in trouble with the evangelical vegans.
Because I’ve watched some sort of plant-based vegan documentaries on Netflix and I come away from them thinking, "Christ, I should never eat any meat ever again," for a variety of reasons. Actually, the reasons that I think they tend to lead with are more about the impact upon your health and your diet. I think that’s a much more compelling sell for most people, especially for people in parts of the world where they have another set of problems they’re dealing with first, which is trying to feed themselves, period. But as it relates to health and veganism, plant-based diets, what are some of the stereotypes there that you’ve highlighted one, that there is a quantity of meat products that is healthy. What are the general stereotypes there that need addressing?
So a couple of things that—is it healthy to be on a plant-based diet? Let’s just deal with that first, okay? And I think as long as you do it carefully and think about it and take the right supplements, it is. You have to supplement when you’re on a plant-based diet. Okay. You have to supplement certain things: vitamin B12, iodine—iodine, pardon me—you got to watch your iron, you got to watch your calcium. But you can do it safely, okay?
But I just the biggest myth that I want to bust is that it’s a diet for everybody. It is not. Veganism, plant-based in particular, is a diet for the privileged people who can choose to do so. I can choose to do it, you can choose to do it. If you live in a developing country, okay, or no, no, no, let me stop that. Not even living in a developing country. If you are Mrs. Smith working two minimum-wage jobs, okay, in this country, trying to feed your kids. Are you really going to be concerned with your pulses and making sure the supplements are right to actually feed your kids so they can have a vegan diet? No, you want to feed your kids, all right? And so what annoys me about evangelical plant-based and vegan is not that people do it. People should do what they want to do. But what they do is they make other people feel bad by not having that diet, particularly when they don’t have the choice to do it. That is what—that is what annoys me.
I’ve seen some videos on social media, we’ve probably all seen them, of certain activist groups that want people to stop eating animal products going into supermarkets and taking the lid off the milk and just pouring it all over the floor in protest. If you were sat with one of those people that goes into supermarkets, pours milk on the floor, and goes into the meat section and does whatever, and they came to you and they said, "What should we be doing instead, in your perspective, to move people away from animal products for moral or environmental reasons, whatever it might be?" What would be a better strategy based on what you believe and what you’ve studied?
We do not need everyone to be—we need to move the curve. We do not need everyone to be vegan. We don’t. There are going to be people who are vegan and that’s perfectly fine. I want to stress, I am not anti-vegan in the slightest. But what we need as a world is for everyone to eat 10 to 20% less meat today. That is achievable. Don’t eat meat at lunch. Don’t eat meat on Fridays. Whatever it is, don’t eat meat once a week. We need to eat 10 to 20% less meat and meat products.
Why?
For two different reasons. The environmental impact would be enormous. Beyond anything, the environmental impact would be enormous and that would help the environment. That’s the first thing. It’s interesting. COP26, I think was just finished, and COP27 is—people were talking about sustainable farming, people were clearly talking about fossil fuels. All of these need to talk about. But the term "eat less meat," not "eat no meat," "eat less meat" did not even make it to the discussion. It was not even mentioned in the final thing because people are too afraid about the farm lobby, okay?
But that’s because we’re framing this in a slightly the wrong way. Because people think, "Oh, you want us to cut out meat entirely, you want us to destroy our farming industry." No, we need to just eat a little bit less meat, all of us, immediately for the environment. And actually, that will also turn to our health as well. So that, I think, is the framing we need to go for rather than saying that veganism and everyone needs to be vegan, because that puts people off. And that’s whereas if you don’t have meat one day a week, two days a week even, if you want to do it four days a week, whatever you want to do, most people can do that quite easily.
You know, on this discussion, on this debate, some people are very morally in touch and you know, they care a lot about the environment and the world, and I applaud those people. But then other people will think—and I’ve heard certain commentators who I shan’t name say, "You’re not taking my steak from me. I don’t care." And that’s a real problem. So there has to be something, it feels like, more systemic that we do in society to really affect change because people are, I think, quite naturally, often—not always, but often—quite selfish. And they don’t really think about the big picture. They think, "Well, I’m not going to be alive to observe the effects of those things anyway." So is there anything that we could do at a systemic level, whether it’s supermarkets, whether it’s—I don't know—tax, or whatever it is, to try and reduce the amount of meat that people are eating? Is that the right approach?
I thought—okay, I mean, the term "taxation" always scares people. It does, okay. And I guess actually punitive taxation is always—always does two things: it always disproportionately affects poor people and it always makes lawyers rich. Two things happen. I think a better way of doing it is to try and get people to choose the healthier choice. Whatever the healthier choice might be, make that the easier and cheaper choice. Now this could be subsidizing it, this could be putting it in different parts of the supermarket, this could be stopping subsidizing the meat industry. There are any number of different things you can put in place so that you sort of—you can’t make something more expensive without making something cheaper. That’s the bottom line. Otherwise, it will—it’s not equitable. So I think that’s what we need to do, but subtly.
Once again, I’m going to sound—on the one hand, I’m saying that there’s a safe dose of meat; on the other hand, I’m saying eat less meat. But that is the answer. It’s a nuanced answer where we eat too much meat. And for us the privileged, we at least have a responsibility to try and eat to try and eat less meat because we have the choice. We have the wherewithal in order to do it. And so I think that is what we need to do. We need to take a more nuanced view about it, less evangelical, understand that people’s socioeconomic place on the ladder is important about the choices which they have. We need to make healthier food—healthier for the planet, healthier for the environment—okay, we need to make it the cheaper, easier, and more convenient choice. That’s what we need to do.
That is the answer for a lot of environmental issues, isn’t it? You know, when you think about developing countries, if we make the alternative, that is the environmentally friendly alternative, cheaper, faster, easier, more accessible, people will naturally choose it. So it’s a call for innovation, I guess, versus provocation.
You let market forces lead because the moment you try and make people do something, a) most of us are selfish, we don’t like being told what to do. Whereas if we sort of think we made the choice because it’s the easiest choice, then there is no choice because then you just do it. And I think that is the way that we have to do it.
Interesting. Let’s talk about something else which I feel like I was lied to about.
Oh god!
Which is juice. Orange juice, apple juice. I was told when I was young that orange juice and apple juice and all these juices were healthy. So I spent 25 years waking up in the morning and drinking as much of this fruit juice as I possibly could. Now when I read your book, when I started speaking to other people, when I spoke to Tim Spector, I found some alarming things. One of the really alarming things you said was the comparison with Coca-Cola. Tell me about that.
So orange juice or apple juice, both of those juices in particular, have as much sugar concentration, exactly the same sugar concentration as Coca-Cola.
Is it not different sugar?
It’s not different sugar. So it is different in terms of in the juice because of its source, so it probably has more vitamin C, it probably has a couple more minerals. Okay, yes, those are true. But the actual bottom line is it still mostly sugar. I say mostly sugar—I think 12% concentration sugar in orange juice, same for Coca-Cola. The sugar is exactly the same sugar. But yet when you do sugar taxes, you tax the Coca-Colas of the world, Iron Brews of the world, but you don’t tax orange juice, okay?
Now, I make a huge distinction between orange juice, apple juice, and eating the damn orange. Because when you eat the orange, it’s exactly the same source of food, right? So you drink a glass of juice—what happens is there is nothing to digest because it’s sugar. So your body just absorbs it. Whereas if you eat exactly the source of food, like whole orange, first of all, you chew. And so because you’re chewing, your body then senses "uh oh, chewing happening, okay guys, guys, get in order, we’re about to receive energy." Okay, that’s the first thing. Second, because your body then has to work through the fiber—this is a caloric availability thing—to then extract the sugar. Instead of having all of the sugar absorbed into your blood all at once because there’s nothing to do, it takes a little while down the gut for the sugar to get in. So exactly the same amount of sugar and exactly the same amount of calories is delivered into your blood but over a longer period of time. Thirdly, because you’re eating fiber, it travels further down the gut, it makes you feel fuller, you eat less of something else during the day.
So that’s the problem with orange juice. Eat—I really think that orange juice in very many ways is worse than Coca-Cola. Not because of its—because when you are drinking a Coca-Cola, you know you’re drinking a Coca-Cola. "I’m drinking a Coca-Cola." When you’re drinking an orange juice, a lot of people think that this is the health version. "This is—I’m being healthy, this is what I should be drinking."
I feel attacked!
No, it is, but it’s true! You should eat an orange or drink water or something else, or drink it as a treat. Drink it like you would drink Coca-Cola.
You—the other thing you said was about the alkaline diet. Now, I read on Instagram that alkaline water is better for you. So there was a period of my life, about a month, where I just started guzzling—I said to my assistant, I said, "Please, it’s not alkaline water. I don’t think we should put it in the fridge. I just want alkaline water." And then I saw some other thing which said alkaline water is a total scam. You nodded your head when I said the scam thing. Is alkaline water a scam? Yes, no.
Scam. Capital S-C-A-M. Look, what is alkaline? Where did this alkaline thing come from? So our blood pH is 7.4, and above seven is alkaline, below seven is acidic, okay? So it is slightly alkaline. And so some guy—and I interviewed him, actually, just before he went to jail, we'll discuss why in a second—the guy who founded the alkaline diet, a guy called Robert Young, Dr. Robert Young, who said that well, if we have an alkaline blood in order to keep ourselves healthy—yes, and our alkaline blood is healthy blood—we need to eat alkaline foods.
This is his thesis. The problem is it completely ignores the presence of the stomach. Now the stomach, as far as a compartment in our body goes, is the most acidic compartment in our body. pH 1.5. It’s like battery acid. But then all the food we eat goes into our stomach, gets acidified, and then as it goes into our small intestine, it gets neutralized back to seven again. This is just biology. So nothing we eat—everything we eat is acidified and neutralized. Nothing we eat will change the pH of our blood. That’s the first thing. So if you drink the water, it becomes pH 1.5 and pH 7. By the time the water is absorbed into our body, it’s pH 7 whatever its starting pH was.
The second problem, however, is the taxonomy is what they consider alkaline and acidic. So I’ll just give one example. They consider citrus fruits, lemons, to be alkaline. Except lemons contain citric acid—it is a citrus fruit—and vitamin C, which is otherwise called ascorbic acid. It is an acidic fruit. So how can it be considered itself alkaline? I don’t even understand that. There’s a famous—I don’t want to get myself into trouble—but there’s a famous image of a certain actress who runs a certain website beginning with G and ending with P.
Gwyneth Paltrow.
Thank you! I’m not good at quizzes or crosswords or anything, but—so where she’s drinking her high pH water and squeezing in lemon juice. Now what happens when you put acid into a high pH water? The alkaline diet makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. The question is why do people stick to it? And people stick to it because the alkaline movement considers meat and dairy products acidic. Leave aside the fact that meat are full of blood and is alkaline, but leave that alone. But because they consider meat and dairy products acidic, in effect, you don’t eat meat and dairy. It is a vegan diet. It is a plant-based diet. So alkaline food is a restrictive plant-based diet, which is why people stick to it, which is why people lose weight.
On that point of losing weight, there’s this thing called Weight Watchers, which you talk about in one of the chapters of your book, chapter 11. Weight Watchers. Are these things good? These like groups of people that are like losing weight together?
So I think that really does depend on who you are and what you like. A lot of people swear by it because they enjoy the community spirit, the fact that there is a group motivation to try and help you do stuff. And we’ve seen this, right? We’ve seen it where it’s easier to go jogging or exercising when you’ve already made the appointment. At 8:00 AM on a Sunday, you are less likely to call your mate and go and say, "I’m bunking out." I’ll go because I’ve already—it’s a social pact.
That being said, there are public weigh-ins and there are people who are a bit shy, there are people who are mortified that they actually have to weigh themselves in front of other people and get so stressed out about this. So it suits people of a certain character who like that and I think they should keep to that because it’s a strategy it works. The people who really hate it with the passion of a thousand suns, I think they should stay away. I think they should find another—because then it could tilt some people into eating disorders if you take the wrong—if you force everyone to do it, okay, it could it could go the wrong way. So find the people who it works for and by all means they need to to stick to that, whereas other people need to find another way.
Is it true that—I think a lot of people believe now that there’s a sort of certain a default weight size based on our genetics that we have that we will keep returning to? We kind of touched on it a little bit earlier on. Regardless of what diet we do. So I’m thinking of some, you know, families often look quite similar in terms of body shape and size etc. I’m wondering how much like control they have against fighting against those genes to get a, you know, six-pack abs—not saying that's a sustainable or healthy place to get to—but is it significantly harder for certain people if their family is maybe a little bit more larger to get to to fight against that and get to a different state and then stay in that state?
Yes. Undoubtedly so. So there is certainly what we call—it used to be called the "set point hypothesis"—meaning that each of us has a weight we actually protect. It’s probably more nuanced than that, a "set range." There’s a range that you can actually range that we find easy to keep to that weight. So in other words, I’m not thinking about my body weight at the moment and this is the weight that I am, but I wish I was half a stone or a stone lighter. But if I lost that half a stone, I would then have to think about food all the time to keep that half a stone off, whereas I get half a stone more and I don’t raise my weight anymore. So that’s the idea where there’s a—there is a weight range is easy to protect and each of us is different. There are some people who are thin. There are some people who just find it more difficult to say no to food than others. That’s pretty much it. So some people’s thermostat in food is set a little higher than others. And you defend that thermostat: 25 degrees versus 20 degrees. And there’s really next to nothing you can do. You can shift from 25 to 24 and a half and maybe after Christmas you’re 25.5. Okay. And so you shift around there. But the likelihood of you getting down to 20 and staying there—you can get down to 20, okay, if you do some stupid diet, but the moment you ping, you ping back up again. So we do defend—there is very, very little choice in where we end up with the body weight over a lifetime. Any given meal we have a choice, you think: pizza or no pizza, pizza or no pizza. But over thousands of feeding events, there’s very little choice.
What then—you referenced age there. Do we get fatter with age? Because generally I look at, you know, younger people typically have a slightly leaner physique and then something seems to happen along the way. Is that just a false observation I have or is there some science that supports the the gaining of weight as we age?
There is science. The a) weight is inexorably up, okay, even though we’ve stopped growing when we’re we’re 18 years old. Actually there’s some later science. I used to—if you would have asked me the question five years ago, I would have said that by the time we hit 40 or 50 our metabolism starts to dip, that’s part of the reason. That’s not true. As it turns out, our metabolism doesn’t start to dip till we’re 60. Okay. But what happens as we get older are a number of different things. First of all, we tend to get richer, we tend to get more money. We tend to sit on our arse more, okay, just in terms of the type of jobs we do, okay? And because of both of those things, we tend to exercise less because we’re busier and so we lose muscle mass. Those are all three things. Metabolically the most active part of your body are the muscles. So when you’re younger and you’re doing things and you’ve more time to go to the gym, first of all, your metabolic rate is linked to the amount of muscle you have. And so as you get older, you’re sat on your arse, you eat a bit more, we don’t eat less, we eat more and we can buy richer food because we’ve got more money, and you begin to lose muscle mass. So all of those things put together means that you inexorably become larger. Then what happens at 60 years old, your metabolism then starts to drop as well and then you get even larger, middle-age spread etc.
So on that point about the more muscles you have, the higher your metabolism. That means if I’ve got big muscles, then I’m burning my food faster.
Yes. Fantastic news. I’m going to work out later, lift some weights.
Because I was really startled by that. I after I read it in your book about us gaining more and more weight as we age, I Googled it and the Healthcare Research and Quality Agency said that we naturally tend to gain weight as we age to the tune of 1 to 2 pounds per year according to their review. And that's from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which I found quite startling.
Yeah, but completely accurate. So the numbers—so what the numbers that we have is, yeah, I think that’s right actually. So between 20 and 50 years old, those 30 years intervening, the average person, average will gain about 15 kilos in weight which is 32. Yes, two pounds a year, one to two pounds a year. 15 kilos in weight is gained over 30 years on average. Some gain very little, others gain a hell of a lot more. We look at ourselves in a mirror—I look at myself in a mirror—but it’s true.
I don’t want to be that guy. Mate, I don't know how much choice you have! What can I do to try and stay—because for me it’s not really about the weight thing or how you look. It's more about like—I am—I don’t know how to say this—but there was this big set of stairs the other day. Really, really long set of stairs leading down to this lake. I was in Indonesia a couple of months ago. I remember thinking about those stairs and thinking, "God, if I wasn’t, you know, athletic and strong and didn’t have good knees and things like that, there’s no way I’d be able to get down this long winding hand-carved set of Indonesian stairs so that I could go on this boat trip that I was going to go on." And I just thought about how—it was a weird thing—I know this is a kind of a strange story to tell, but it crossed my mind. I got to the bottom of the stairs, I turned to the person I was with and was literally like, "That's why I’ve got to stay in shape as long as I can, because I want to do these boat trips and I want to go on this little rafting thing, but I won’t even be able to access it unless I can go down up and down those stairs." Like 200 meters of stairs down this cliff. So that’s what I care about. I care about being active and strong and fit for as long as I possibly can. And I from what you’ve said about gravity and weight, being overweight is going to inhibit my chances of being able to do those stairs.
So so there are I think two elements there. First of all, there is doing the things that we want to do, okay? Like that. Because you’re exactly right. These are the things which I can still do that. I can still walk up a mountain or down a mountain because I’m still fit enough to do that and I want to stay as fit as long as I can to do that. And weight will inhibit that. Undoubtedly. But then there’s a second element to actually consider. Now there’s health. Look, none of us are going to live longer, we hopefully—and anyway, if we left—lived longer but was unhealthy, would you want to live longer? So you want to live longer but healthier for longer, okay? And undoubtedly the thing that is closest related to health when you age is not your total weight—there’s a role to play there—the amount of muscle you have. It is your muscle mass as you age independent of how much fat you have, okay? That will determine how healthy you are as you age.
So as so now the moment now I’m talking about going into the 60s and into the 70s rather than when one is able to go down a 200 meter set of steps, okay? So now as you get older, the most crucial bit of information is to maintain resistance training, not lifting, that’s not what I’m talking about. Sitting on a wall, getting up and down a chair, because that the amount of muscle mass you have really, really, really marks the level of health that that you’re going to get. And then the the science is startling. It is so, so related, independent of independent of weight, you know, from from there. So muscle mass is the most important for healthy aging the moment you get 60, 70 plus.
Interesting. Okay. So I’ll keep I’ll keep doing resistance. Correct! Always keep resistance training. And lifting weights as long as I can. Lifting weights as long as you can at some point you won’t be able to lift weights just because—
Ha! Don’t don’t write me off. Don’t write me off, Giles.
The hubris of youth. Yeah.
That's the naivety of youth. Yeah, you just assume you’ll always be able to do what you can do now. I I yeah, it's something I think a lot about. And I think a lot of people will watch this podcast because probably, especially this time of year, we’re in January, they’ll probably be trying to find ways that they can cut fat. They want to be a bit skinnier. You said you I think you said half a stone you want to lose. I’m in the same place. I think most people want to lose a half a stone or something. What is the way that you would suggest to do that, the simple way? You know, not the like f**king complicated go buy this guy’s course and do three million sit-ups or whatever. The simple advice you would give someone that’s hoping to create sort of sustainable weight loss.
§02Transcript — part 2
Okay. So this is sort of like the last page of the *Why Calories Don’t Count* book, but it is a set of numbers—and I know I said not to count calories—but it's a set of numbers that is that you can apply to whatever diet you like. The first is the amount of protein you eat, and you need to try and focus on trying to keep to about 16% of the energy in your day, okay, from protein. 16%. And there’s a sweet spot. So if you eat too much and you’re not lifting, you’re stressing your kidneys because your kidneys have to get rid of the nitrogen from the protein, okay? 16% is a sweet spot. And it doesn’t mean steaks only. It can mean beans, tofu, any kind of protein from from anywhere. 16%.
Second is fiber. We need to eat as much fiber as physically possible, okay? 30 grams we want to aim for. Although we’re looking at the moment on average in this country, we’re probably only eating 15 grams. We need to double the amount of fiber we actually eat.
Third, we need to limit the amount of added sugars into our diet. Added sugars meaning sugars not tied up in fiber. Powdered stuff, maple syrup, agave nectar, all those are added sugars you put in. Keep it to 5% or less of the of the energy content in your day. And those are the three numbers that that I want you to think about. So 16% of protein, 30 grams of fiber, 5% or less of added sugars. Apply that to whatever you want, keto, whatever you want to do. Apply that, and I think that will be a sustainable healthy way to eat.
Now there’s been a lot said about exercise as a weight-loss strategy. A lot of people think, "You know what, I will just run every day and I’ll lose weight." In your books you said, "The problem with using exercise as a weight loss strategy is that doing exercise makes you feel hungry, you can't outrun a bad diet." Is exercise a good strategy for weight loss?
It is a good strategy for weight loss if you’re an Olympic athlete or a Tour de France rider.
What if you are a muggle like me?
A muggle like you, a muggle like me, then exercise—look, okay, exercise you can never replace the goodness and wonderfulness and health benefits of exercise. But is exercise a good weight loss strategy for a muggle like Steve? No. It’s a good weight maintenance tool though. So in other words, once you’ve lost the weight, which means you need to eat less somehow, exercise helps you keep the weight off. So once you’ve actually lost the weight that you that you’re aiming for, whatever whatever that might be, then do the exercise and that will help keep the weight off. But it’s not going to help me get the weight off in the first place. No.
That seems to sit in contradiction to what my old personal trainer—
Only because we don’t do it enough. So now if you had—okay, let’s put it this way. The way that it would work is if you had a personal trainer and a chef. Then what would happen is your personal trainer will make you work hard and your chef will make your meal, okay? Therefore what happens is it’s controlled on both sides. That is not typically what happens in in the real world. I go on my run, my cycle, whatever I do, I come back, I’m ravenously hungry, I open the fridge and I stuff my mouth full of carbs. That is that is my story, right? And so it is very difficult to control your diet after you’ve done long, hard exercise bouts because you get ravenously hungry. So professional sports teams—a) they exercise ridiculously, they they train three times a day. So that’s there’s that. But they still have chefs and dietitians and they eat what they what the, you know, the canteen puts out for them which is healthy food. So someone is looking after their diet for them. But they are burning so much they don’t have to worry too much about how much they eat. Whereas we do. It’s I know it’s counterintuitive in some sense but it’s purely because we don’t exercise enough.
And is that also ultimately because the brain is controlling our feeding behavior? So the brain is knows that we’ve just been for a run, so it’s adding to our appetite a surplus to make us return to that weight it’s trying to protect.
There’s that and there’s also our own internal psychology on it. Because now you feel a bit smug. You say, "Ah, I went for my run on Sunday morning, yoo-hoo," and then so I can eat what I want. And there’s that element too. So suddenly, when you normally would say "Oh, I better not eat so much today, I haven’t"—there are some internal controls that we sometimes have. Those internal controls are weakened once we’ve actually had our exercise because we feel that we have earned the food that’s in front of us.
Body positivity. That is one of the things you discuss in chapter 9 of *Why Calories Don’t Count*. Now body positivity, I think there’s a lot of pieces to it. One of the, I guess, the central idea is that there’s no such thing as an unhealthy weight. I don’t want to mischaracterize the movement, but what do you think about body positivity?
So I understand where body positivity comes from, okay? Because obviously there is a lot of weight stigma in society. Weight stigma, for whatever reason, is one of the last rubicons left to cross. If if you or I made any disparaging comment in public or or anything about someone’s gender, someone’s sexual orientation, skin color, whatever, we get fired! We do. But yet some people can make comments about people’s body size and and it's perfectly acceptable. How can that be acceptable? So I understand where body positivity comes from. But I think that body positivity doesn't—needs a little bit more nuance in their in their argument.
Why does it bad to be fat? We talked about this, carrying too much fat, because of the association with disease. But why, okay? And it’s because of the amount of fat we can store safely. So people misunderstand what happens when you gain weight and lose weight. They think that you gain fat cells and lose fat cells. Not true. Your fat cells are like balloons. They get bigger when you gain weight and they get smaller when you lose weight, but they stay the same number, okay?
So what happens is the safest place to store fat is in your fat cells, because they’re your fat. It’s when they’re not in the fat that they go to your muscle, your liver, they begin to cause trouble, okay? And that’s when you become ill. But the interesting thing is everybody’s fat cells can store different amounts of fat before the fat leaks out, shall we say, okay from from there. I mentioned earlier, East Asian, South Asian people, we don’t—we can’t store as much fat safely than white people, than Polynesians. So the moment you get past your safe fat-carrying capacity, you will become ill. Now for some people that is when they’re—there are skinny people with type 2 diabetes and there are larger people without type 2 that are healthy. That’s because there’s different amounts of safe fat-carrying capacity. But the moment you go past your own personal safe fat-carrying capacity, you will become ill. So in a big room, you can have health at many sizes. But there is no health at every size, because you will become ill if you become too big.
That’s the nuance. That doesn’t mean I blame the people suffering from obesity, please! But it doesn’t help anybody to not look at the health issues that are associated with carrying too much fat. We have to discuss it. In a non-stigmatizing and non-blaming language, but we do need to be honest about it.
Yeah, and I think we can both agree that just generally targeting anyone—which I’ve seen a lot of, like someone will be on the front cover of a magazine and then someone will like quote-retweet it and attack them and say that they’re not healthy and it’s promoting bad, you know, bad body standards or health standards or whatever. Like, whether scientifically that’s true or not, you are without a shadow of a doubt an asshole for doing that. You know what I mean? And counterproductive. It's counterproductive. It’s making someone feel awful. It’s not, you know, it’s making people have the stigma as you’ve said. And it’s if you think about it from a psychology standpoint, shaming people for how they feel is probably not going to help them be proactive in making changes. If you think about how motivation works with self-esteem and how we feel in wanting to feel positive and high self-esteem to make changes in our life, it's probably not an effective strategy to attack people for their body image regardless of whether—
Of whether or not it’s a dickhead move. I mean, exactly.
So I think we can both agree on that. And it’s super interesting. I I’m on my journey with eating and food, so it’s been a huge pleasure to speak to you about this because I feel now a lot closer to understanding and having clarity on on what I should be eating and what I shouldn’t. And what I really love about your message is that it is centered in away from restriction and towards positivity with food and to really like loving food as opposed to being, as you’ve said with that word, I think it’s asphyx—no what was it, that bloody word? Orthorexia. It’s not about fearing foods, which is an awful place to get into. And I think we’re getting closer and closer to that kind of being fearful of foods. It’s just about, I guess, making a little bit more informed choices, but also keeping the balance and the chocolate and the other things that are part of all of our lives. What what’s your mission? I’m assuming you have one when I ask the question, and I shouldn’t do that. Do you have a mission? And if so, what is it?
Oh, so my mission is to destigmatize obesity and try—because look, it is going to roll like a tidal wave into every single country across the world. So my mission is to destigmatize it, because destigmatizing, taking away the weight stigma, means that we can have an adult non-hysterical conversation with people treating the patient, the patient, the policy-makers. Because at the moment, government thinks that a lot of it is personal responsibility. Okay. There is obviously some personal responsibility—it’s my health, it’s my children’s health. That I understand. But until we put money in the right places, fix the environment, make sure that the treatment and support, making healthier food cheaper. That’s government responsibility. And so if we destigmatize obesity in the population, we can then have this conversation with policymakers and get them to put the resources in the right place. That is my mission. Because at the moment, the resources are being put in the wrong place, which is why we’re not solving obesity at the moment.
If I voted for you for Prime Minister, and there was a couple of simple things that you could do—I think you talked broadly there about some of them—what would be some of the policies you would introduce to target the systemic issues that are causing obesity in our population?
So day one, I would make healthier food cheaper. And this doesn’t only mean carrots. I mean that there are going to be healthy foods even within a chocolate bar. You there is going to be a way of actually putting more fiber in and protein in a chocolate bar or a frozen lasagna or vegetables, okay? I think we need to make healthier food cheaper all the way across the board. That’s the first thing we got to do. And that’s the first thing I would do the day I’m Prime Minister. Because then the default choice that you make even if you’re poor when you walk into the supermarket is going to be healthy, which is not true at the moment. The moment that happens, then I think we are one step forward in trying to solve the obesity and diet-related epidemic that’s actually around us today.
But just to be clear, you’re not going to cancel chocolate.
I’m not going to cancel chocolate. I’m going to try and make it healthier.
You got my vote. I love that. You’re going to make it healthier and cheaper.
Yeah.
You’ve got my vote. Giles, thank you so much. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest. Oh, this is a long one. Okay. What is the worst thing that has happened in the last year? It continues: What is the best thing that’s happened to you in the last year? From which have you learned the most? What is the worst thing that’s happened in the last year? What is the best thing that’s happened to you in the last year? From which have you learned the most?
The worst thing that has happened to me in the last year, I think we were smack-bang—I forgot—in the middle of Omicron, I think, of of that. And then my mom ended up with a stroke. So my mom—she’s fine now, she’s fine now. But my mom lives in California, which is where I’m from. And then life became very difficult. I was trying to find a way to get out there without getting stuck out there. Anyway, she she ended up being better, but there was a period of time there where I was really seriously stressed about the about the whole scenario. That probably was the worst, that probably was the worst thing over the past year. That would probably be it, because my own close family is fine.
Now what is the best thing that has happened to me over the past year? That’s an interesting question. I’m not sure I know what that—I’ve had a good year. I’ve had a good year and I think I can’t deny that, I’m privileged. I’ve had a good year, work has gone well, other things have gone well, my family are still with me, my son is at uni. So I think my family has been the best thing as with most—it's a very boring answer, but as with many things, has been the best thing that’s happened to me over the past year. Is that a that’s a cop-out answer but that’s the answer.
But there was a third part to that answer the question which was: From which have you learned the most?
From which I learned the most? I think that it’s always—I always think you learn the most when things go downhill. Because that’s the most—that’s because then you start to reassess priorities, you start to think. So undoubtedly—yeah, I should have got that the first time around. No, no, I think you learn a lot more about yourself when things go wrong rather than when things go well. You like it when things go well. It’s when things when proverbial stuff hits the fan, that’s when that’s when you learn more about yourself.
Did it make you reassess your priorities?
It did make me reassess my priorities, actually, because I began thinking, "Okay, all these things which I was planning on doing, should I—I'm going to cancel them now. I'm going to cancel them now, now, now, now." You know, and actually and actually head back. But but after a couple of days, my mom became a lot quicker and she told me, "Look, I have got people here supporting me now, I need you to come back a little bit later so that I—" My mom said to me, "I don’t need everyone here now. That’s not going to—I need someone here in a periodic place and time." And so that’s what I did. I went back later rather than immediately, although I did end up canceling a bunch of things, reassessing the importance of things to leave almost almost immediately. My mom stopped me.
And is there a broader point? I reflect on when I spoke to Tim Spector, who’s one of the quotes on the front of your book here. He talked about the the passing of his father and how that is part of the inspiration that sent Tim off to to think more about food, the food he was eating, how he was treating himself. And then I believe he had a stroke himself, which again was a bit of a sort of tectonic earthquake in one’s life. When we see the health of those we love and those that we are genetically related to have instances like that, tragic instances like strokes or other health issues or disease, is there something in the mind that goes—that kind of makes you look in the mirror and go, "Gosh, you know, how am I living my life? What can I do to to avoid having a similar diagnosis or ending up in the same place or those kinds of things?"
It is—that is an interesting—that is a very interesting point because genetic tests aside, the most—guaranteed way, not guaranteed way, the easiest way of telling the future of how where you’re going to end up is to look at your parents. It’s very depressing, I know. But what do your parents look like? If they’re still alive, what diseases do they have? If they’re not, what did they die of? This is very morbid, but it’s not, because you look at it—it's a picture in essence, not 100%, of your future you. It's certainly more accurate than any genetic test at the moment. And so exactly that. You look and says, "Oh god, what did my mom—what did I have? Now I’ve got to add strokes into my risk," you know? And then and then I look at my son—what is he going to do? Do I need him to exercise more? It does reassess to say that well, is there anything I could do to avoid just just ending up with a stroke? So it does make you think about things.
It also made me think about the fact that even though my mom was doing something else not about diet, she was in hospital, yet there were people—this insidious pseudo-science that we were talking about—was still able to seep into a hospital, into the person next to her, and people were talking about it when they were seriously ill and not even just talking about about food, they were talking about trying to make themselves better, but through pseudo-science. And that was the other thing which jumped out at me. I said, "Oh my god, this can’t—you know, it’s there," even in hospital even when people are seriously ill, people are still talking. Maybe because they’re seriously ill they’re talking about these pseudo-scientific approaches to to their health.
And that’s why your work is so important, Giles. These books are fantastic, they’re very accessible books, they’re based in evidence, not necessarily opinion or pseudo-science or anything like that. They’re based in scientific evidence and several decades of of work and research. So I thank you for writing them. They’ve been a pleasure for me to read. I recommend both of them. Sometimes when I have guests on this podcast, I’ll say, "Get—you know, tell my audience to get this one or the other," but I think they’re both absolutely fantastic and necessary and they’re very, very interlinked, you know? There's things in *Why Calories Don’t Count* building on a lot of the stuff that I read in *Gene Eating* as well. So there’s a relationship between them. And it’s been fantastic to talk to you. You’re a very animated speaker, which is what makes a a good podcast guest because people can stay engaged for longer. We we see that trend and that’s why I love your delivery and your articulation of all the points. Makes a big, big difference. So thank you for being such a brilliant guest on the podcast.
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
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