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

In this moment, world renowned gut heath expert, Tim Spector discusses how to navigate the modern food landscape and overcome the brainwashing of the food industry. It turns out that answering the seemingly simple question of, ‘what is quality food?’ is a lot more difficult that it first appears. Too often foods packaged as ‘healthy’, ‘low calorie’ or ‘low fat’ are in fact the opposite. Instead, Tim believes we need to go back to eating foods in their simplest, unpackaged original form as nature intended. Listen to the full episode here - Spotify- https://g2ul0.app.link//38if1OxLDMb Apple - https://g2ul0.app.link//fXv5HxALDMb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Tim: https://tim-spector.co.uk/ ZOE: exclusive 10% discount on their first order of Daily30+ with the code PODCAST10 when you order from zoe.com/daily30 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Steven Bartlett?

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• 0:45Steven Bartlett?

  For my listeners, Zoe is offering an exclusive 10% discount on your first order of Daily 30+ with the code PODCAST10. Just go to zoe.com/daily30 to get started. It's already sold out twice since launching in July. Join me and let me know what you think. Quality food. What is quality food in your definition of the phrase?

• 1:08Tim Spector?

  It's the opposite of ultra processed food, which is whole food, which is made with,

• 1:15Tim Spector?

  from the original ingredients of plants, mainly plant based, but it's not exclusively, that contains all the nutrients that those plants produce without it being stripped away or boiled up or highly pressurized, deformed. And so they have to add in back those nutrients. So, you know, it's things in their pure form. So it's nuts, it's seeds, it's grains that haven't been ground up super finely. It's all the amazing plants and fruits and vegetables that we've got. They're healthy foods, but you know.

• 1:55Tim Spector?

  It's it's not straightforward. Yes, I've got this list of ten superfoods. It's it's understanding that many foods that you know, are healthy for us, most of them are, in their in their original form. Berries, nuts, um virtually every vegetable is healthy for us if it's in that original form. It's only because we've we had to learn to preserve things, we had to do trickery to make, you know, margarine and things with chemistry that we've moved away from that. But, you know, going back, you know, olive oil, for example, is is a great example of something that be vilified often because it has lots of fats in it and

• 2:41Tim Spector?

  you know, certainly, I was told, oh, the Medtrains, they have they have olive oil on everything. It's horrible. It's all fatty. Turns out that's that's a perfect, you know, it comes from the olive. The good stuff, extra virgin olive oil, has very little done to it. And that is a a good, healthy, quality food. But it can be refined. You can take that and you can keep refining it. Um, you can take corn on a cob as an example, and then you, you know, and then you've got, I don't know, uh tortilla chips or something down the other end is which bears or cornflakes, which bears no resemblance to the original, and they're all versions on the spectrum.

• 3:23Steven Bartlett?

  God, it's so confusing, you know, because what you've said to me is, you know, based on research and studies, but then when I go to a supermarket, labeling, even I was just thinking in cornflakes, I think I grew up thinking cornflakes were healthy because it says corn in the title. You know what I mean? And it's and when you're trying to navigate, I was just thinking, if I'm going down an aisle now, hearing what you've just said, that that quality food is food that is not ultra-processed and kind of resembles its original form. When you walk down the aisle in the supermarket, everything is trying to pretend that it's good. So how do I know what is good? I mean, I can go to the vegetable aisle and I can say, okay, that looks like a cabbage. It looks like no one's messed with that. There's been no study done on that to, it hasn't been through a laboratory. But how do I, like, if I'm in an aisle tomorrow, how do I know what food is good and what is not?

• 4:08Tim Spector?

  Well, you've said the first thing, if it's not in a package, you're pretty sure it's good. Okay, so if it's concealed in some package that's got, you know, happy children and signals of vitamins in it, that should be a warning sign. You know, the more they have to advertise the food and say what its additives are and everything, the more you should be wary about it. The number of ingredients is another pretty good sign. So once you get over 10, particularly if there's lots you've never heard of, you wouldn't find in your kitchen, you should also be wary that that is ultra-processed food. Anything that says low calorie, that says, means they've had to add in lots of artificial sweetness

• 4:51Tim Spector?

  or protein extracts or something else is also a big danger sign. Low in fat means they've replaced the natural fat with something else that's cheaper. And these are all warning signs, you know. And, you know, you take breakfast cereals. I mean, I used to, I used to eat lots of breakfast cereals. I was brought up on them, highly sugary stuff. And then I thought I was being healthy when I moved to Moosley's and Posher, Posher stuff. But actually, when you still, you know, that appearance of healthiness, it's still got

• 5:29Tim Spector?

  lots of additives in it. It's still got lots of sugar in it. It's just, and those cereal packets have added vitamins in it, but they're often in a very poor form. I did the experiment once where I took some cornflakes or special K, I can't remember, that says had added iron. And if you mix it up, you can put a magnet on it, you can get off the iron filings. They're so cheap that they're just added to tick a box saying it has iron, but they don't get into your body or do anything. So anything that's got These things added with this in it, low in this, is a sign that they're obscuring

• 6:10Tim Spector?

  the quality of the product. So it's, you know, but there's a lot of brain, you know, we've been brainwashed for years and decades in this. And, you know, I was as well as a doctor, you know, I should know better. And yet, I've completely changed my, two of my meals completely. So I've gone from having muesli with low fat milk and an orange juice and a cup of tea. Because I did, you know, I started doing these tests for Zoe, I found out that gave me a massive sugar spike. And it was a terrible way to start the day. And I got these dips at eleven o'clock, to a high full fat yogurt, nuts, seeds, a

• 6:54Tim Spector?

  few berries. And I never have orange juice, that's on my, that's a really unhealthy drink for everybody. And I have lots of black coffee, which I now know is good for me. So that's totally different. I changed my lunch for at least ten, fifteen years. When I got in the, I was having a hospital lunch, which used to be in the canteen, then it was Marks and Spencer's. Got a healthy looking sandwich with brown bread, sweet corn, and tuna, and a smoothie, in a little bottle. And that gave me a massive sugar spike. And I wouldn't

• 7:35Tim Spector?

  have known that. And I was told that should have been a healthy thing to eat. So, you know, there's, there's general rules, but also there are specific rules. And this whole idea of individuality is coming in. So it could be that you could, you might be fine on that. Don't know. I was very annoyed because when I started, we were starting doing this testing for Zoe, I had all these spare kits and I gave my wife one as well. And we sit down and she's French Belgian and loves croissants. And so we'd have croissant each. Mine would shoot up. She had no change at all in her, her, her sugar, which was really annoying.

• 8:15Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 8:16Tim Spector?

  So, but it also brings, brings home the fact that, you know, Everyone loves simplistic rules, but you can only get so far with them. You have to start experimenting yourself and see what works for you and not just take everything for granted. And that's really the, that's the whole essence of really, you know, setting up this personalized nutrition research and Zoe and everything else. But on top of this general advice about changing our idea of food, I think, because I think they do go hand in hand, that if you realize there are these individual differences, you realize it's not as simple as you've been told.

• 8:57Tim Spector?

  It's not that fats are evil, it's not that calories are bad, you know, it's, it's much more nuanced.