A 5 year follow-up study of 1600 women and their children found that small amounts of alcohol consumed occasionally (as opposed to regularly) during pregnancy probably isn’t harmful. If you’re sensible, the odd sip of wine or beer here and there isn’t likely to do your baby any harm The gluten chapter similarly describes much interesting work investigating the actual prevalence of gluten intolerance: a study in Italy of 392 self-reported sufferers revealed that 8 in 10 had no adverse reactions to gluten or wheat. As in the chapter on pregnancy, the aim of such discussion is to encourage scepticism in the reader, both in advice they receive but also in what they perceive about themselves. Spector encourages the reader to experiment. If you think you are gluten intolerant, perform an actual test: remove gluten for three weeks and then reintroduce it for three weeks to test its impact. And repeat the test in future. As so often in this book, the message is to try not to limit your diet unnecessarily - particularly not to more processed foods like those in the free-from isle - so testing whether your allergy may have disappeared (as can be the case for milk and egg allergies for instance, which often disappear after a few years) is crucial to ensuring your diet remains as varied and rich as possible. Drinking a moderate amount of red wine (1-2 glasses) is probably good for your gut microbes and could be a significant factor in explaining the health benefits The risk with this is that our actual understanding of the research is limited. We don’t know enough of any of the studies he cites to understand the context for ourselves or to draw our own conclusions. Also, I don’t have the time to review all his studies either. We are in his hands and trust his honesty and his own understanding of the research. Another central tenet is to explode the myth of the average person when it comes to food. We have our individual sensitivities and preferences and we'd be well advised often to simply just listen to our bodies and how they respond to our diet. Experimenting with meal times, fasting, and substituting out foods will do more for us as an individual than trying to find some miracle silver bullet answer on the internet to weight loss or other health concerns, because we will be engaging in what is going in to our body and thinking about it.

The number and variety of different plants is essential - the more plant species we eat in a week (ideally 20-30) the healthier and more diverse our gut microbes become which helps to keep our bodies in good shape The discovery, in 2014, that the composition of the microbes in people’s guts could influence their body weight, provided Spector’s first “Aha!” moment. 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. What this amounts to is very similar to a Mediterranean diet – one high in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and containing less meat and dairy products than a typical western diet. Spector says: “It doesn’t really matter if you have bits of meat and fish on top of that – I don’t believe they’re necessarily healthy, but as long as you’re getting enough plants on your plate, it’s fine.” To up the polyphenol content even further, Spector recommends lashings of green tea, extra virgin olive oil, brightly coloured fruit and vegetables, herbs and spices – plus a dusting of dark chocolate. And don’t forget the four Ks: kefir, kombucha, kimchi and kraut (sauer) – as well as cheese and yoghurt – which act as fertiliser for our resident gut bacteria. The trouble is, although identical twins have many similarities, they can often be quite different – despite sharing the same genes. “Trying to understand why one twin is sometimes overweight and the other skinny; one gets diabetes or cancer and the other doesn’t, has been a major theme for the past 20 years,” Spector says.Tim Spector v cca 200 stranách zhrnul svoj komplexný pohľad na stravovanie. Páčilo sa mi, že ako sľuboval, neponúka čitateľom žiadne univerzálne zázračné riešenia. The event that prompted this change was suffering a mini stroke at the top of a mountain in his early 50s, after an energetic day of skiing in the Alps. “I went from being a sporty, fitter than average middle-aged man, to a pill-popping, depressed stroke victim with high blood pressure,” he recalls. It was a wake-up call that prompted him to reassess everything he thought he knew about healthy eating, including much of what he’d learned at medical school. My main issue is with the tone of 'advocacy', and even the correct focus on the food companies, and their overreaching influence, can sometimes get in the way of the food science and nutritional essentials I suspect many will have been seeking. If you suspect a food intolerance, experiment with your diet by conducting an exclusion and re-challenge diet, but don’t be conned into using these bogus tests Because I am somewhat obsessed with the subject of nutrition, much of the material in this book was not a huge surprise to me - although still interesting to read about in detail and from the point of view of a scientist and medical researcher. The contents may be an absolute revelation to readers who are not so devoted to reading up on this subject. I have long resisted what I think of the ‘faddy’ belief systems and it turns out that if you eat moderately of a wide variety of minimally processed whole foods you are probably going to be okay. All of our modern research basically confirms that traditional eating habits were fine all along. Butter, lard, pasta, cow’s milk, coffee: all of them fine in moderation.

There is no one-size-fits-all dietary recommendation. Different people have different sensitivity to salt, sugar, fat, different gut bacteria compositions (microbiomes). We have different preferences for when in the day to eat (e.g. whether to skip breakfast [which is ok to do, btw]) This book gave me a serious case of 'stop the planet, I want to hop off'. Everything is ruined. By marketing, chemicals, plastic, globalisation, profits, selfishness and mostly: GREED. In general, I liked it, though I would: the basic principles are "ignore fads and alarmism, don't trust marketing, don't bother with supplements or fake-healthy food, have a varied diet with a lot of plants, be moderate with the treats". Which seems sensible but it's nice to read the science is on our side. Instead, the book suffered from covering a huge range of topics not very well, dipping into just enough science to lose your concentration, but not enough to properly explain things - before coming to a hastily drawn conclusion in each chapter where the author finally makes up his mind what he was trying to say all along. Gratingly, 'the food industry' is constantly referred to in the plural, as are countless individual companies - and just in general, the writing style does not flow.Common table salt is mainly composed of two minerals, sodium (40%) and chloride (60%) which both have important functions in the body for muscles, nerves and fluid balance Bottled vs tap water; for most people chances of getting ill from tap water in developing countries (including Italy and Spain) is much less than your chances of dying from a lightning strike or shark bite Coffee contains high levels of the antioxidant chemicals, polyphenols, which are likely to be beneficial due to their role in feeding our microbes. A mug of coffee also contains around 0.5g of fibre

Weight loss is one of the things exercise doesn’t help with and for most of us we have to eat less and choose our foods better to match our metabolism and gut microbes Vitamin supplements like Vitamin D and Omega 3 get treated like foods and not drugs even though they are proven not to work However, Spector takes this too far, inveigling us to discard calorie information entirely. I reject Spector's seeming conclusion that calorie data have zero informative content. I think his messages are right: take calorie numbers with a huge pinch of salt and do not be beholden to them because of their many limitations, focussing attentions on a good diet rather than targeting a potentially erroneous number of calories per day. But to disregard these numbers entirely is going too far, losing a potentially valuable tool (among many) in our ongoing fight to be healthy. To give just one example of a use case: you have decided to treat yourself to a burger from a fast food restaurant. I see nothing scientifically un-principled about opting for the burger with 200 fewer calories to be a little bit better to yourself. Most mental-illness develops in some form before the age of 14, so a good varied diet early in life is crucial for prevention. Mothers eating junk food in pregnancy appear to produce children with more behavioral problems, while children who eat poor diets are also at increased riskOverall this is a fascinating introduction to the topic and makes clear and interesting recommendations to us all in our diets and how we approach our eating habits. Whilst there are reservations I have about the way Spector discusses his sources and his evidence (as opposed to someone like Ben Goldacre who almost goes as far as making it the primary focus of his writing), I understand the need to do it and his own honesty in disclosing conflict of interest and the transparency of his thought process and actions is reassuring. Pregnancy; Western guidelines recommend limiting caffeine to 200mg per day which is equivalent to one cup of regular coffee, 2 instant coffees and double the amount of tea