Tim Spector, epidemiologist and co-founder of the ZOE nutrition studio, wants to change the way people think about food. His 2015 book The Diet Myth popularized the idea that each of us has a unique and ever-changing gut microbiome that is crucial to our health. spoon fed, in 2020, exposed dietary misinformation. Food for Life, at over 500 pages, overlaps with these but offers more information than ever before. He intends to think about food for “our individual health, the health of our society and the health of our planet”. It’s complex, difficult to digest, and obviously good for us, like a huge serving of stringy vegetables, well balanced with spices.
Once you understand the microbes in our guts, they need a varied diet to process the foods that make them up. U.S healthy, much of it seems like common sense. Eating a wide range of plants keeps you well: 30 a week is ideal, including seeds, nuts, herbs, and spices. “Ultra-processed foods” (UPF), a “heady and addictive mix” that makes us “fatter but less nourished,” are bad. Anything that claims to be a “superfood” is probably a scam.
Other findings seem counterintuitive, but are often delightfully reassuring. Two cups of American coffee provide more fiber than a banana. You they can reheat the rice; unopened mussels No kill you; and eating meat No give you cancer (although “replacing 30% of traditional hamburger meat with mushrooms would be the equivalent of taking 2 million cars off the road”). Some sources of nutrition are more beneficial together, like corn and beans or “a glass of red wine a day with friends.” Replacing sugar, salt, fat, and gluten with foreign and untested chemicals is often useless and probably dangerous, and the 1980s advice to swap butter and cream for margarines and vegetable oils was “one of the biggest health scandals in history.
Enticingly, Spector writes like a food lover. He is comically interested in kimchi, kombucha, and sourdough bread; in fact, fermented foods are manna for our friendly microbes, including the cocoa beans in good-quality chocolate. But sometimes he’s frustratingly underrated when it comes to the politics and finances of food. Our choices are “a puzzle of availability, convenience, taste, and education,” he admits, as he gleefully recommends that cheap UPFs and sugary kids’ yogurts “should be avoided”; that people should “choose organic, grass-fed, whole milk” and “good honey from your local beekeeper”; and that “the price multiplied by ten” is the way to choose the right extra virgin olive oil.
However, his goal in this book is not to give advice. Our gut microbiomes are so different that, in human studies, there is “an eight- to ten-fold variation in individual insulin, blood sugar, and blood fat responses to the same meals,” so everyone’s ideal diet person is different and must be based on sensible choices from a position of knowledge.
Food for Life is a celebration of that knowledge. It contains so much information that it’s impossible to process from cover to cover, but the tips at the end of each chapter and an appendix with food charts make it a valuable reference book to have on a kitchen shelf.
