The central thread I’ve been pulling through a raft of episodes with superstar scientists and doctors is there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to what to eat to live healthy for longer – no off-the-peg plan. Every esteemed expert I’ve brought you has reinforced this fact. 

There are few who can emphatically state “that’s true” more than Tim Spector. He’s a data explorer extraordinaire, a genetic epidemiologist who heads up his department and his ground-breaking Twins UK project at King’s College London. 

Tim is one of the most cited scientists around, with research papers numbering nearly 1,000. He’s working on his fifth book after his hot sellers The Diet Myth and Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong.

His work on the microbiome and identical twins has exploded current nutrition and energy models. It’s exposed the widespread fiction of the standardized dietary guidelines – the ones governments and nutrition practitioners foist on us, the unwitting public, under pressure from Big Food manufacturers. They have the resources of medium-sized countries and control research money.

We covered plenty but not all. Please see the show notes for more details about his research into gut health, genetic disease markers, epigenetics and COVID19 symptoms. Trust me, you’ll want to devour it all. It’s fascinating.

<< Please view the information in this episode as only that; it should not be construed as personal medical advice. Go to your GP or family doctor for that. >>

Links

• Tim on Wikipedia – meatiest bio I could find with links to specific research we didn’t manage to address
• That recent paper on sugar-dippers
• ZOE – the health science company Tim co-founded to measure individual food responses
• ZOE COVID Symptom Study app – a not-for-profit initiative launched end of March 2020 to support COVID-19 research.
• The PREDICT studies
• The Twins UK study
• Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong
• The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat
• That great Financial Times profile of Tim by Madhumita Murgia – July, 2021
• Tim on Twitter  I   Instagram

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