This is a book all the theories, ideas and messages we’ve been given about food and healthy eating. He covers things like if counting calories is effective, wheat is bad for you, low fat diets are best, fasting works, if we should eat meat, how to lose weight and if we need to lose weight, coffee, gluten etc. Any food idea of fad that you’ve come across or heard of from health officials he covers. It’s a refreshing and insightful review of all the current ideas about healthy eating. He unpicks how research about food currently happens and the problems it creates.
The author, Tim Spector is a professor of Genetic Epidemiology at Kings College London and honorary consultant Physician at Guys and St Thomas’ Hospitals. He started the famous UK Twin Registry in 1993 and is the lead researcher behind the world’s biggest citizen science health project – the Covid Symptom study app. His credentials gives the book credibility and helps me to trust the ideas he presents in the book.
I particularly liked the book because he’s a well know mainstream academic debunking a lot of government advice and main stream thinking on healthy eating.
I like the fact that he unpicked a lot of ideas using evidence and science to back up arguments that seem to make common sense to me. It helped me to understand how healthy eating research currently happens so I could see how a lot of theories and ideas had come about which in turns helps me to judge ideas for myself instead of just blindly accepting them.
If you’re thinking about making some changes to your diet then this is definitely worth a read so that you can make changes based on evidence and a thoroughly thought through process.
One change I will make is around healthy gut biota and I’ve added some kefir to my shopping list and decided to try sauerkraut, kimchi and kombucha
A lot of his ideas I’m already familiar with having already done a lot of reading about food and healthy eating. So while it was refreshing to read the book I did get a little bored after a while so it wasn’t a book I was completely absorbed in from start to finish.