Tim Spector > Quotes

“A very pleasant surprise was that items I thought were naughty but that I enjoyed immensely, like strong coffee, dark chocolate, nuts, high fat yoghurt, wine and cheese, are actually likely to be healthy for me and my microbes.”
― Tim Spector, The Diet Myth: Why the Secret to Health and Weight Loss is Already in Your Gut

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
― Tim Spector, Identically Different: Why You Can Change Your Genes

“diets that are high in sugar and processed foods are bad for our microbes, and by extension for our health, and diets that are high in vegetables and fruits are good for both.”
― Tim Spector, The Diet Myth: Why the Secret to Health and Weight Loss is Already in Your Gut

“Vitamin D isn’t actually a vitamin, since our body can make it naturally from chemicals in the skin on exposure to sunlight. It should be called ‘steroid hormone D’, although presumably this would make it much less popular. It is fat-soluble, meaning that like vitamins A, E and K, toxic levels can build up in the body as it is stored in fat tissue.”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“Not all plants are equal: some have much more polyphenols than others, and as a general rule bright or dark colours are a good sign, including a wide range of berries, beans, artichokes, grapes, prunes, red cabbage, spinach, peppers, chilli, beetroot and mushrooms.”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“we already know enough scientifically about our microbes and our bodies to enable us to alter our lifestyles, eating patterns and diets to suit our individual needs and improve our health. It is useful to think of your microbial community as your own garden that you are responsible for. We need to make sure the soil (your intestines) that the plants (your microbes) grow in is healthy, containing plenty of nutrients; and to stop weeds or poisonous plants (toxic or disease microbes) taking over we need to cultivate the widest variety of different plants and seeds possible. I will give you a clue how we do this. Diversity is the key.”
― Tim Spector, The Diet Myth: Why the Secret to Health and Weight Loss is Already in Your Gut

“While a gluten-free diet may help alleviate symptoms in some people, for others it can lead to nutritional problems. Gluten-free products are typically lacking in vitamin B12, folate, zinc, magnesium, selenium and calcium. Other studies found that gluten-free diets in Spain contained on average more fat and less fibre than comparable diets. It is clear that excluding an entire food group from your diet can reduce fibre and dietary diversity, which also affects our gut microbes, creating the possibility of long-term adverse effects.”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“The ingredient list on gluten-free foods is often much longer, with many added chemicals that together could be having unknown effects on our body and microbes.”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“Studies observing over half a million people taking these unregulated multivitamins have shown they are more likely to develop cancer or heart disease.2”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“Another completely useless procedure is hair follicle testing, as hair is not involved at all in immune-based allergic reactions.”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“Top five tips to support your immune system Eat fermented foods, which contain helpful probiotics. Eat foods rich in a variety of prebiotic fibres, such as leeks, onions, artichokes, cabbages. Eat foods rich in polyphenols, such as colourful blueberries, beetroot, blood oranges, and nuts and seeds. Eat foods that dampen any inflammation after meals such as green leafy vegetables. Reduce consumption of meat and non-fermented dairy to occasional meals.”
― Tim Spector, Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well

“In the mid-noughties some of these anecdotes, observational studies and marketing claims were finally tested in a number of properly randomised trials that looked at the trendiest antioxidant vitamins, especially carotene, selenium and vitamin E. They detected no benefit whatsoever for heart disease and in fact found a significantly increased cancer and heart failure risk in the groups taking them.”
― Tim Spector, The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat

“The famously pungent Limburger cheese is made from the same bacteria that many people have between their toes (Brevibacteria linens), the ones that cause smelly feet.”
― Tim Spector, The Diet Myth: Why the Secret to Health and Weight Loss is Already in Your Gut

“In theory, high levels of chlorine in tap water could be bad for your gut microbes, but negligible amounts reach the microbes – unless you regularly drink from a swimming pool. Chlorine is not the only problem. Unless you buy pricey carbon filters and reverse osmosis machines, your tap water will still contain traces of common pharmaceutical drugs like ibuprofen, oestrogens, antibiotics, and antidepressants.5 Although levels are low these could have potentially minor cumulative effects: for example, affecting the way our genes function (epigenetics).6 This might seem like a good reason to switch to bottled water, but a survey in 2013 showed it was no better, and thirteen out of twenty bottle brands also had detectable levels of similar chemicals, including endocrine disruptor chemicals such as bisphenol (BPA).7 This chemical can have subtle effects on your genes and sex hormones and is now banned in many countries. BPA has been linked to low birth-weight babies and hormone-associated cancers of the breast, prostate and ovary.8 Manufacturers are responding to public fears by switching to BPA-free plastic, but EU and US regulators say the data is still inconclusive.9”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“With the nutrition professionals constantly contradicting and criticising each other, it is no wonder that few large collaborative studies or projects get funded. I know from personal experience that many academics seeking funds for a project deliberately omit to mention an important diet component because they know that it will be heavily criticised by colleagues. Although there are a huge number of small studies performed and paid for each year, the standard of research compared to other fields is lagging far behind. Most studies are still cross-sectional and observational, full of possible biases and flaws; a few are superior observational studies followed over time, and only a tiny fraction are the gold-standard randomised trials in which subjects are randomly allocated to one foodstuff or diet and followed for long durations.”
― Tim Spector, The Diet Myth: Why the Secret to Health and Weight Loss is Already in Your Gut

“Probably the worst thing you can do is to be over-cautious and restrict your diet to a few ‘safe’ foods, as restrictive diets low in diversity and fibre can permanently harm your gut health, especially during pregnancy, potentially worsening your allergies and symptoms.9 This is a particular problem for children with atopic eczema, where avoidance diets are often harmful.10 Our obsessions with hygiene, food safety and restrictive diets may have caused many of our current problems, and if we are not careful, our current trends could cause even greater health problems in the future.”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“More high-quality clinical trials are required to confirm this, but current evidence suggests that telling diabetics to reduce their salt intake to low levels could actually be harming them.”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“Pesticides are an increasing potential problem for our microbes and they take many forms. The most popular is called glyphosate (or Roundup), which stops vegetables and fruit sprouting or going mouldy once developed. It was invented by Monsanto in the 1970s and is probably the most commonly used chemical for farming in the world. In 2013 over 1.7 million hectares of land in the UK was sprayed with it, and the majority of non-organic breads (especially wholemeal) tested contain glyphosate residues. Traces of it are found in the blood and urine of cattle and even in humans living in cities. Even at sub-toxic doses it could be adversely affecting human health and, like most chemicals, contains potential carcinogens.4 We know it affects soil microbes, and much less is known about its effects on our gut microbes – but early studies suggest it is not good.5 We may prefer to let our fruit and vegetables deteriorate and change colour after a few days, rather than keep them chemically in suspended animation with adverse effects on our microbes. While there is little solid research on whether eating organic foods is better for us and our microbes, there are studies showing levels of pesticides in our bodies can be dramatically reduced within a week by switching to organic produce.”
― Tim Spector, The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat

“In 2018, we took part in one of the largest ever population studies by combining the American Gut Project (run by Rob Knight) data from 8,000 people and our British Gut Project of 3,000 people, all of whom were self-paying citizen-scientists.12 We found the gut diversity of Americans to be slightly worse than the British, though both were bad compared to poorer countries. The main factor that predicted diversity was the number of different plant species you ate each week; diversity peaked when you ate at least thirty different types of plant. This may sound a lot but includes grains, nuts, seeds and herbs. The data showed that eating some meat was fine, as long as you also had a large diversity of plants, and showed no clear difference between vegans and vegetarians.”
― Tim Spector, The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat

“If bottled water is bad for the environment and isn’t healthier than tap water, does it at least taste better? Probably not, although it’s wholly subjective. Blind tastings have even shown that tap water scores higher than most mineral waters. The wine magazine Decanter ran a famous blinded taste comparison with twenty-four bottled waters in London in 2007 using wine-tasting experts. Good old London tap water came in at third, costing less than 0.1p per litre. The losers included New Zealand bottled water, which ranked a dismal eighteenth place despite coming from an extinct volcano and costing 50,000 times more than tap water.”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“the shorter the transit time the healthier the gut microbiome, and the longer, the worse.”
― Tim Spector, Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well

“When you next go to the toilet, spare a thought for your trillions of microbes. Nearly half the mass you are flushing away are microbes; so you become relatively more human afterwards.”
― Tim Spector, The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat

“Arguably, some of the biggest current fads are protein supplements and high-strength water-soluble vitamins, both of which when consumed above our nutritional requirements are excreted out of the body, meaning the extra doses generally end up in the toilet. Protein supplements are the heavyweight in the $16-billion sports nutrition world and they’re reportedly used by up to 40 per cent of Americans and 25 per cent of Brits in 2016. Far from being protein deficient, most healthy people in Western countries exceed the daily recommended protein requirements, yet marketing tells us otherwise. The food industry have jumped on the bandwagon, adding a few extra grams of protein to chocolate or granola bars in order to proclaim that their calorie-laden products that used to be high energy are now ‘high protein’ and the perfect snack to slip into your gym bag.”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“We need to make sure the soil (your intestines) that the plants (your microbes) grow in is healthy, containing plenty of nutrients; and to stop weeds or poisonous plants (toxic or disease microbes) taking over we need to cultivate the widest variety of different plants and seeds possible.”
― Tim Spector, The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat

“Our bodies can’t deal with a large dumping of a chemical supplement in our intestines in the way that they can process and absorb them from natural food sources.”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“Someone with little more than a simplistic weekend training course in acupuncture or kinesiology can set themselves up as an expert and convince a vulnerable person to part with their cash and take potentially harmful treatments or to follow restrictive diets.”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“change, they often rapidly succumb to diseases. The”
― Tim Spector, The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat

“was withdrawn immediately and every doctor informed by letter and email within a week.”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“In the US, unlike drugs, dietary supplements are poorly regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This means that the thousands of dietary supplements that fill US pharmacy shelves are not evaluated for safety or efficacy, or even their true contents. In 1991 an act was proposed to regulate this growing problem, but the industry successfully lobbied Congress to pass the controversial 1994 Diet Supplements Act using a series of adverts about personal freedom. This extraordinary act means the FDA cannot question any supplement company’s data, contents or claims without doing their own expensive research studies on the 85,000 different supplements on sale. This has created a ‘Wild West’ atmosphere where anything goes. Even in Europe and Australasia, no safety checks are needed, nor even warnings on the label, including on St John’s wort – a supplement that interferes with many common medicines.”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong

“Legally, Scottish fish can be sold if it contains up to eight lice per fish, but the reality is that Scottish salmon sold in supermarkets often contains up to twenty times the legal amount.”
― Tim Spector, Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong