Tim Spector: ‘The food I was eating was making me sick’
Professor Tim Spector, geneticist, microbiome expert and co-founder of the personalised nutrition company Zoe, has become something of a household name among the health-conscious. With an impressive 652K followers on Instagram, an M&S gut shot, podcast appearances and various books (most recently Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well), the only obvious next step would be to publish a cookbook, shaped, of course, by Spector’s own experience of transforming the way he eats.
Like most families, Spector was brought up with the understanding that food is fuel, with dinner consisting of a lot of fried foods and meat and two veg. He taught himself to cook (although that usually consisted of a fry-up or heated tinned soup) – a far cry from his current fridge in London full of fermented foods. Since those childhood days, he's learnt that what we eat is so much more than just ‘fuel’ or just calories in versus calories out.
In the edited extract below, from the newly published The Food for Life Cookbook (Jonathan Cape, £28), Spector opens up about how his father died at the age of 57 of an unexpected heart attack, yet he remained somewhat complacent about his health until his stroke, aged 53....
Plenty of research now shows that our food environment and social context shapes our dietary habits. If we grow up seeing food as an enemy or as a reward, it can be tricky to untangle the feelings of shame, guilt or reward that are linked to those foods.
Many of us don’t realise that we desire or avoid certain foods because of the emotional association we have with them. That link can be a result of a fond childhood memory – as with the burnt crust of my mum’s lasagne – or it can be a result of clever advertising that helps pair a certain food with a desirable feeling or event. I was never taught any of this at medical school where food was only ever fuel and vitamins.
While I was a student, my father died of a sudden heart attack in his fifties. His death was totally unexpected: he had also been an academic doctor who had never smoked cigarettes and, although he hated exercise, he was relatively slim.
Though this was quite a shock, I never worried too much about my own health or mortality until 30 years later in 2011 when, just a few years younger than my father had been when he died, I had what is known as a mini-stroke (a vascular occlusion in the blood vessels to the eye) while ski trekking in Italy. My long recovery left me with high blood pressure that I couldn’t ignore, giving me the wake-up call I seriously needed.
During those three months off work, I had double vision and couldn’t do much, so I started thinking about how to prevent myself from getting a stroke or heart attack.
As I looked into the practical advice that patients get about food from government sites or on the internet, it became clear it was either out of date, unhelpful or unrealistic. The more I started digging, the angrier and more upset I became about how misleading this information was.
From my medicine and physiology background, I knew the advice didn’t stack up – like going on a low-fat diet, counting calories, exercise being fantastic for weight loss and many other bits of nonsense. Increasingly, some of the other things I thought were true came into question; not only were patients being misled, but the shortcomings of my medical training were becoming apparent. We simply hadn’t been taught about nutrition.
I thought I was a healthy, knowledgeable doctor, but I realised I’d got it wrong, and this was quite a shock for me. The food I was eating prior to 2011 was – without me knowing – slowly making me sick. But I came to learn that it was the food I was not eating that was the real problem. The lack of fibre and plant diversity and lack of traditional fermented foods, combined with a higher intake of ready-to-eat, ultra-processed foods in my diet, meant that my body was running on just a few unexciting, generally low-fat, low-flavour and low-nutrient foods.
These were foods that I had previously thought were good for me. Luckily my scientific knowledge and natural scepticism helped me to critically question the myths I had been taught and explore what food really does in our bodies...
Tim Spector’s recipes for a healthy gut
Easy dishes from the nutrition guru’s new cookbook, The Food For Life Cookbook (Jonathan Cape £28)
Roasted aubergine traybake
Traybakes are so simple to make, but the garnishes here make it look like a showstopper and bring the plant score up to 13, giving you plenty of polyphenols and a boost of fibre. The best entertaining recipes require very little active time in the kitchen, and this one fits the brief.
Prepare the tray for baking in advance and pop it in the oven for 40 minutes before you plan to serve.
Creamy kale pasta
A good pasta can be so satisfying, and this recipe improves the nutritional value by adding our beloved fibre-packed beans, which also make the sauce creamy and delicious.
Including extra seeds on top will bring a delightful crunch, plus added fibre, good fats and protein.
Roasted squash with toasted grains
Once you roast grains like this in the oven, you won’t look back – it’s the best topping to add texture to your meals.
The relish adds a bright freshness, contrasting well with the sweet, soft squash, and you can add any other seasonal veg to the recipe that you have to hand, like roasted beetroot or celeriac.
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