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No fads, no nonsense, just practical, science-based advice on how to eat well. Daily Mail, *Books of the Year* Taking a wide-angle lens on everything from environmental impact and food fraud to allergies and deceptive labelling, Spector shows us the many wondrous and surprising properties of everyday foods, which scientists are only just beginning to understand. Would you automatically eat more healthily if you knew the calorie content of every meal you ate? Boris Johnson certainly seems to think so, and he is not alone. One of the elements of the UK government’s new obesity strategy is calorie labelling on the menus of restaurant and takeaway chains. According to Tim Spector, however, calorie counts on menus are flawed for a number of reasons. In his view “the calorie has been a disaster for the average consumer”. Why do so many people still fervently believe that margarine is healthier than butter? The great beneficiary of this belief has been not consumers but the margarine industry. Spector shows with great clarity that “the greatest obstacle of all” when it comes to getting accurate information about food has been the food industry. Like the pharmaceutical industry, the vast multi-national food companies have influenced nutritionists with gifts and sponsorship. Spector reveals that industry has also funded huge amounts of nutrition research, influencing the information that we receive on everything from the safety of artificial sweeteners to the question of whether we can eat large amounts of red meat with impunity. This stands well as a companion to Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them, which won the Wainwright Conservation Prize last year, 2022.
A couple of essential takeaways were (1) we need to be careful about making generalisations about food and the effect of what you consume will be very specific to each individual, and (2) that we should be cautious of the claims made about the foods we consume without any supporting evidence. No fads, no nonsense, just practical, science-based advice on how to eat well’ Daily Mail, Books of the Year Food is our greatest ally for good health, but the question of what to eat has never seemed so complicated. Easy to navigate: The book’s structure and organization make it user-friendly. Readers can easily navigate through different chapters and sections, finding the information they need without having to read the entire book from start to finish.The book’s main argument is that to find the best way of eating we need to ignore much of what we are told. Spector’s myths include the idea that fish is always a healthy option and the dogma that “sugar-free foods and drinks are a safe way to lose weight”. Spoon-Fed is a worthy successor to Spector’s earlier bestselling book, The Diet Myth, which focused on the powerful role that the microbes in our guts play in determining our health. This new book is broader, but he manages to distil a huge amount of research into a clear and practical summary that leaves you with knowledge that will actually help you decide what to add to your next grocery shop. He convincingly argues that coffee and salt are healthier for most people than general opinion decrees, while vitamin pills and the vast majority of commercial yoghurts are less so. He is in favour of vegetables – as diverse a range of them as possible – but does not rate vegan sausage rolls as any healthier than the meat equivalent. The greatest obstacle when it comes to getting accurate information about food has been the food industry
The big environmental impact is that we would replace the vast animal facilities of pigs and cattle with huge complexes of industrial bioreactors with wind turbines and solar panels. On a plus side we can manipulate the stem-cell meat to be healthier, by adding polyunsaturated fatty acids such as omega-3, for example, altering the culture medium to replicate the effects of grass, or lowering the fat content."
A brilliant deep-dive into how food affects our wellbeing – and more importantly, what we can do about it. Enlightening and empowering Liz Earle Food is our greatest ally for good health, but the question of what to eat has never seemed so complicated. In his new book, Tim Spector creates a unique, thorough, evidence-based guide to the real science of eating. 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 so much noise on social media about nutrition it is as if new cults have emerged; low carbers, carnivores, plant chompers. They all have one thing in common - an utter zealous devotion to their own cause and a barely concealed revulsion of the others.
Practical tips: Each chapter concludes with bullet-pointed tips, offering concise and practical advice for readers. These tips make it easier to apply the knowledge gained from the book to everyday life. The pandemic should have changed many attitudes towards understanding biology, and Food for Life is the newly scientifically semi-literate person's post-Covid go-to food book... I trust the author and his work. The Times, *Book of the Week*Food is our greatest ally for good health, but the question of what to eat in the age of ultra-processed food has never seemed so complicated. Bestselling author and scientist Tim Spector offers clear answers in this definitive, easy-to-follow guide to the new science of eating well. From the bestselling author of Spoon-Fed and The Diet Myth, a comprehensive guide to the new science of nutrition, drawing on Tim Spector's cutting-edge research. Only one thing to do - turn down the noise and listen to voices of reason. Tim Spector is one of them, a scientist with a forensic investigatory technique imbued with common-sense.
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