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

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Empowering and practical, Food for Life is nothing less than a new approach to how to eat - for our health and the health of the planet. He believes that diversity is crucial to warding off infections, combating age-related diseases and maintaining a healthy weight.

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. Question the science (oftentimes its sponsored by 'interested parties'), the labels, and especially the marketing. But it is slightly more expensive, which is probably why the multinationals that increasingly control our water supply (Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle and Danone) seem reluctant to switch back to glass.

It was just a little thing: he wrote that pregnant women get weighed in the UK just once, at their booking appointment at 12-14 weeks. Spector's own work in the emerging field of the microbiome was a USP and some of that science could have been drawn out further, rather than endless references to various trendy studies and collaborations he is involved in. All evidence shows that regular eating of junk (aka ultra-processed) food leads to the greatest increase of weight and ill health compared to other foods.

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. In conclusion, Spector recommends eating diverse foods and mainly plants without added chemicals, to question the science and not believing quick-fix single solutions, to not be fooled by labels or marketing, to understand you are not average when it comes to food, experiment with meal timing and skipping meals, use real foods and not supplements, avoid ultra-processed foods with over 10 ingredients, eat foods to improve gut microbe diversity, reduce meat and fish consumption and check its sustainability and to educate yourself and the next generation in the importance of real foods.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. You and I can eat two identical muffins with the same calories in them, and you might have a mild sugar spike and no sugar dip, whereas I will have a big sugar spike and a sugar dip, and I will overeat by 200 calories in that day, and you won’t. But the blinkers really fell off when he and his colleagues measured twins’ and non-twins’ responses to identical meals, and discovered that they could vary hugely between individuals, influenced by both the microbiome and genetics. Occasionally, the myth-busting set-up of the book forces Spector to sound less nuanced on the subject of food than he actually is. He advises avoiding anything labelled as a “diet” food and especially anything containing artificial sweeteners which, he suggests, can trick our bodies into gaining weight.

These are urgent issues that matter not just for our health as individuals but for the future of the planet. If twins are given a meal of starchy carbohydrates such as pasta, one may metabolise the meal much more quickly than the other.Although he does eat breakfast himself, he notes that evidence is gathering for the benefits of time-restricted eating, where people skip breakfast and limit the time frame of their meals to six or eight hours in the day. He is a multi-award-winning expert in personalised medicine and the gut microbiome, and the author of four books, including the bestselling The Diet Myth. The groundbreaking new book from Tim Spector, bestselling author of The Diet Myth and creator of the COVID Symptom Study app. Spoon-Fed is a groundbreaking book that forces us to question every diet plan, official recommendation, miracle cure or food label we encounter, and encourages us to rethink our whole relationship with food. The concept is good - peel back the layers of confusion and misinformation that surround much of the food hype of today.