Spoon-Fed: Why almost everything we’ve been told about food is wrong

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Another problem with calorie counts is that we digest food very differently depending on how it is processed and cooked. Whilst there are reservations I have about the way Spector discusses his sources and his evidence (as opposed to someone like Ben Goldacre who almost goes as far as making it the primary focus of his writing), I understand the need to do it and his own honesty in disclosing conflict of interest and the transparency of his thought process and actions is reassuring. Moving away from misleading notions of calories or nutritional breakdowns, Food for Life empowers us to make our own food choices based on a deeper understanding of the true benefits and harms that come from our daily transactions with the foods around us. There is refreshing freedom in some of the advice given: regular small quantities of alcohol are not bad for you and are probably slightly good for you.

This is, however, where Spector is able to offer a glimmer of hope for the future, in the form of a project he’s working on with a commercial nutrition company to develop personalised products for the consumer market. In a similar vein, Spector spends a wonderful two chapters reeling off the evidence around food allergies (particularly of the gluten kind). Tim Spector has pioneered a new approach to nutrition, encouraging us to forget misleading calorie counts and nutritional breakdowns. He hopes to stop the food scare and remind us that nutrition isn’t a one-size-fits all and government food advice is often misinformed as you’re unlikely to be average. Moreover, a fat is not just one thing but “a vague umbrella term for anything made up of building blocks of three fatty acids joined together”.And the clear relevance to diet makes this a worthwhile thing to discuss in the context of dispelling diet myths. One of the elements of the UK government’s new obesity strategy is calorie labelling on the menus of restaurant and takeaway chains.

You’re eating hundreds of chemicals when you eat a carrot, it’s not just the orange colour – there’s all this other stuff that’s hidden,” he says. We don’t know enough of any of the studies he cites to understand the context for ourselves or to draw our own conclusions. Spector is great at explaining just why so much of what we believe about food and nutrition is at best debatable and at worst downright wrong, but he’s not able to offer much prospect of change. Nutrition scientists divide all foods into three simple categories: fats, proteins and carbohydrates. Instead, the book suffered from covering a huge range of topics not very well, dipping into just enough science to lose your concentration, but not enough to properly explain things - before coming to a hastily drawn conclusion in each chapter where the author finally makes up his mind what he was trying to say all along.The unanswered question is whether any UK government will ever be brave enough to enact the radical food policies that are needed, rather than simply slapping a calorie label on a menu and leaving consumers to their fate. I found this book to be quite disappointing - the science based evidence is interesting but I don't feel like I've learned anything new. Coffee contains high levels of the antioxidant chemicals, polyphenols, which are likely to be beneficial due to their role in feeding our microbes.

It is written by a professional under the guise of scientific support but the claims are sensationalist and have little evidence.He appears regularly on TV, radio and podcasts around the world, and is one of the top 100 most cited scientists in the world. Using identical twins, Tim Spector shows how even real-life “clones” with the same upbringing turn out to be very different. But in a book that presents itself as a squeeky-clean defender of the true against the corrupting, compromised food industry and their bought-and-paid-for government stooges, it is unfortunate that the author spends so much time highlighting a technology he may well financially benefit from. He describes how decades ago it was proven that our body produces most of the cholesterol in our bodies and cholesterol from food sources (e.

The ground-breaking exploration of food myths from what we should be eating for breakfast to whether we should really avoid ultra-processed foods.

He also tackles how the idea breakfast is the most important meal of the day was created by multi-billion-dollar industries like cereal manufacturing and encourages us to experiment with meal timing and skipping a meal (which benefits our gut microbiome by making it more efficient and healthier). This is clearly spurious: pregnant women may well want to eliminate their likelihood of ingesting listeria by cutting out cheese but are unlikely to be able to cease driving their cars entirely.