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Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well, by the #1 bestselling author of SPOON-FED

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I'm always interested in what Tim Spector has to say, he's evidence based, balanced and not afraid to say when we've been wrong about health assumptions. A brilliant deep-dive into how food affects our wellbeing – and more importantly, what we can do about it. Enlightening and empowering Liz Earle 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 book presents scientific information in a clear and understandable manner, and the writing style is easy to follow.

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.

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However, there is a not so positive aspect revealed as Spector looks into studies and reports health impacts of foods with his epidemiologist hat on. There are still so many don't knows! This man is an expert in his field! Surely we can have some certainty! When we say to each other, "You know what they've come up with now? Only lab grown salmon! Only a theory that certain mushrooms can cure Alzheimer's!" this is who I am picturing for the mysterious "they": a research scientist conducting clinical trials and referring to peer-reviewed papers in trustworthy publications. Instead, we learn that yoghurt trials were funded by Danone, and other trials are too small, or unrepeatable, or fail to rule out other factors influencing the results. And some journals are not that trustworthy! Spector writes as a food lover... Every person's ideal diet is different, and should be based on sensible choices from a position of knowledge. Food for Life is a feast of that knowledge... A valuable reference book to keep on a kitchen shelf. Guardian Tim Spector has pioneered a new approach to nutrition, encouraging us to forget misleading calorie counts and nutritional breakdowns. In Food for Life he draws on over a decade of cutting-edge scientific research, along with his own personal insights, to deliver a new and comprehensive approach to what we should all know about food today.

No fads, no nonsense, just practical, science-based advice on how to eat well’ Daily Mail, Books of the Year No fads, no nonsense, just practical, science-based advice on how to eat well' Daily Mail, Books of the YearThis 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.There are a couple of things I really like. At the end of the food chapters there are TLDR bullet points with some key takeaways on managing your intake of all the food groups. I also liked the debunking of many of the tabloid stories about superfoods and all the things that supposedly cause cancer (what Ben Goldacre used to refer to as the Daily Mail's "Oncological Ontology Project"). Tim Spector has been exploding the myths around food and heal for years... Here he continues the demolition job in a rigorously academic book that welcomes the layperson with open arms. The Times, *Books of the Year* The book describes our physiological relationship with food to dispel many prevalent myths and pseudo-science surrounding faddish diets. Tim explains that due to the way we change our attitudes to food over the last few decades, we are no longer exposed to the very microbes that are an essential part of our physiology. There are specific chapters on each food group you can dip into and out of as you need to without having to read the book from cover to cover. 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”.

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