Professor Tim Spector: They've worked out that you will be slowly filling up with these microparticles of plastic which comes from all the plastic waste, all those unnecessary water bottles and things that we throw into the sea and eventually get ground down to this this dust that never disappears. Someone's estimated that it's like eating if you ate mussels for a year, it's like eating a credit card every year or something.
Dr Rupy: Tim, great to have you on the show again. Really excited about your book and getting into it.
Professor Tim Spector: It's great to be back. Looking forward to our chat.
Dr Rupy: Good. It's weird because we've been chatting for about half an hour. to do that like presenter like, oh, good to see you.
Professor Tim Spector: We should have turned the mics on, yeah.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Look, we were talking a bit about obviously what you're doing with Zoe, the advent of these new sort of markers. Obviously Zoe uses microbiota testing and and continuous glucose monitors. I asked you a question a bit about, you know, what other things that you think we could be using maybe five, ten years in the future to further personalise our diets. And I think that'd be a nice sort of way to start our discussion, then we can dive into some of the research you've done with all these different foods, because the book is fab.
Professor Tim Spector: The reason Zoe came about was that ideas about the gut microbes coincided with the technology to measure it, you know, quickly and relatively cheaply, that was never possible before. And measuring the effects of food on the body came about because we had the technology of these glucose monitors. So we're able to look at fat levels at the moment with a skin prick test and a dry blood spot, which people can do at home. So this is all totally new technology combined with artificial intelligence, which again, wasn't around. So you've got to combine the ideas around how what we want to do in terms of measuring the body with what's available in the technology or try and push them in that direction. And there's huge interest in wearables at the moment. You know, everyone's measuring heart rate variability and so V2 max and you've got these other measures that are trying to get hold such as metabolism and continuous blood pressure monitors. And it's all evolving super fast, as well as, you know, we all we all think that Apple are going to come up with a, you know, a glucose watch that's going to tell you in in five years what's on it. I'd love to see somebody designing a a fat monitor. Um, by which I mean a lipid monitor. Rather than an alarm that goes off when your your weight's gone up. But the so at the moment, you know, it would be lovely to track triglyceride levels after a meal, see what that trace really looks like without having to stab yourself 10 times every day. And that would be revolutionary because it would also not only tell you how you respond to fats, how quickly you get them from your body, really in even more precision than we've got now, but it would also tell us about inflammation after meals. And I think this is where the sort of things start to meet, this this common idea that we're trying to get that inflammation down. And so if people could say, oh, I'm really controlling inflammation, it wouldn't matter how they do it. It could be things like meditation, it could be sleep, it could be all these things. To me, that would be the coolest test to have. So if anyone is out there and they want to invest a few million, apparently there are chemists out there who can put this stuff together relatively easy, you know, just a a triglyceride or a lipid marker or one of these markers of inflammation. So to me, they would be, yeah, that the next step. But I think people have seen that, you know, companies like Abbott have made billions out of their fairly simple invention that started off being a niche market and ended up everybody wanting one, shows the huge potential.
Dr Rupy: Totally. I definitely see that. And you know, fatty acids in the blood, uh, insulin responses after consumption of certain foods, and inflammation as well. Those are things that I think if everyone knew, we could really further personalise our diets and our lifestyles. There was something that went viral on Reddit the other day that I saw. It were, it was um, a couple and they were monitoring what improved and what worsened their sleep. And so they were both trying both the same thing. One was trying meditation, somebody was trying like the calm app, someone tried a supplement, some of them, I think they they both tried the same thing, magnesium, and they had near opposite effects for like some of the same interventions. So it just shows you how personalised you have to be to have the desired outcome.
Professor Tim Spector: Yeah. No, I think more and more people are getting to this this concept of agreeing we are different. You know, yes, humans have a certain blueprint that's similar, but in all these lifestyle changes to, you know, to our health and and diet, we have to take a personalised approach, which at the moment is trial and error. And that takes a long time, a lot of dedication. Many people are too busy to do it. And so we we need tricks and things to help us. Yes, so I think that that was a great example. And yeah, there are increasing apps now to help some of these things. You know, tracking sleep, for example, there's so many out there you can do it, but there aren't for all the other things we we want to do. And um, yeah, it's not just about how many steps you do and how much sleep you get, you know, there is there is more to it. And I I'm, you know, I think it's really exciting to look forward to the next few years as we hopefully start to integrate thing. And I think what we're planning in Zoe is to, you know, we've just raised some more money.
Dr Rupy: You raised some more money recently?
Professor Tim Spector: Oh, wow. Yeah, so we raised another 25 million from our original investors. So they they just think this thing's going great, so they want to all kinds of other ideas to keep scaling the whole thing, but also bring more personalization to to the actual product. And, you know, everything from giving some advice for people who've got, I don't know, IBS or high blood pressure or getting with sleep alarms, um, linking to other wearables as well. So we could start to get that information in, so we can start to see how your your food choices vary with how your body was the day before or, you know, these kind of real real-time things. So it's a it's a very exciting time that we are, you know, receptive to other ways to to keep improving. As well as, you know, making much more of what we've got. We've hardly touched our microbiome data for what it can really show and and help people. Now that we've got 50,000 people's metagenomes and their diet histories and their health histories, you know, we're at the stage where, yeah, we can go in all kinds of directions, but hopefully to improve the user experience and that people can get more out of it and really our aim is to do things that this isn't a test, this is a program that's sustainable for life. People just use these these tools to keep experimenting and keep finding out about food and um, making their own discoveries.
Dr Rupy: How do you think Zoe we'll talk about the book in a second. I just whilst I'm on this train of thought, how do you think Zoe fits in with the wider healthcare system in that do you think it could ever negate the need for primary care physicians to do preventive medicine in that the user is equipped with the knowledge and the motivation and the sort of virtual health coaches to sort of prevent them from from dealing from suffering with disease in in in the future or?
Professor Tim Spector: Well, I think currently general practitioners are not geared up for prevention. They do a few basic health checks like blood pressure and uh at certain times of life, but it's not very well followed up, it's not complete. And I think we've shown like with COVID that we totally replaced GPs at a time when we were told you can't see a GP with an app that people used and engaged with much more than they would have done with a GP. So I think if we expand what we're doing and we keep having the same success and it does become more of a holistic tool, and we're already including exercise and sleep and uh and diet, but you know, there are other things like stress and mental health and um linking in, you know, with how specific diseases and what you might want to do for that, I don't know, if you've got joint pain or uh going through the menopause, you know, we're increasingly getting more data. I think there is this potential for uh the Zoe tool in the future to be that, you know, digital GP. As well as a nutritionist, but a sort of lifestyle GP rather than a, you know, disease GP. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's the important distinction here. It's never going to replace when you're ill, you need to do something. Of course, yeah. But I think totally, um, people are buying it, you know, it'd be lovely to see a time when the NHS would buy into this kind of thing and allow it to be used by the people that probably need it most.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. You are seeing the NHS buying into some digital programs. I think some are available by prescription via certain primary care networks.
Professor Tim Spector: I think there are some weight loss programs and other things, but yeah, but generally the, you know, the quality of them hasn't, you know, isn't great and it's it's really just because they're generally fairly cheap and accessible. Um, but, you know, let's keep an open mind. Hopefully they're going to do more of that social prescribing, allow people to use it. But we're we're exploring ways of trying to give these uh Zoe programs to people who need it who haven't got the money, you know, by doing deals with GP practices and and um other charitable organizations and things because I think we do want to see this moving from the very health conscious group of people that always lead these these revolutions to the people that really need it and tailor it for them. So, but yeah, but I think it's a super exciting time. And COVID has totally changed people's views on phones and apps and yeah, I think and how they, you know, interact with healthcare. It's not going to change. It's not going to go back.
Dr Rupy: No, definitely not. I mean, most GPs, you know, use some form of AccuRx or virtual consults these days and I think the vast majority of my generation of GPs, I think find it really useful because it just increases the efficiency of those transactions that you have with your patients and the ability to communicate with them. And I think overall, most patients really enjoy it, bar some who, you know, want that physical contact, which I think is always going to be an important part of medicine regardless. Um, but certainly when, you know, we're facing the challenges of the current day and the the future issues that we're going to have, we're going to need a more sort of efficient system. And I think apps like Zoe and platforms where you can have that lifestyle advice and personalization to your nutrition, um, is going to be, yeah, absolutely game-changing and just the norm, I guess.
Professor Tim Spector: But I think yeah, and apps that also talk about sleep and also talk about exercise and also talk about your mood. Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't you do it in one space rather than having four or five apps you have to fill in every day? I mean, I think that's the other thing that's uh that's quite interesting. But yeah, no, it's it's an exciting time, isn't it? To be in prevention, especially, you know, I mean, with the health services around the world sort of crumbling, we've got to find new models.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, totally. Look, you've been doing the rounds with podcasts and uh YouTube videos and all that kind of stuff uh for Food for Life. Uh what what are some of the things that you wish people asked you about that you really want to chat about? Because you're probably asked everything from what are your views on fish, what are your views on nuts, what about saturated fats, you know, and I I just wonder, I'm sure you love talking about all those subjects, but what do you what do you really, really love talking about that perhaps most people don't ask you about?
Professor Tim Spector: Um, the bit I really liked researching and writing was actually the future of food.
Dr Rupy: Oh yeah.
Professor Tim Spector: Um, maybe it's the sort of geeky side of me that got into that, but you know, a lot of that book, you go through it, it can be depressing, right? Because, you know, it's like, oh gosh, we've got all these, you know, pesticides, herbicides. Yeah. We've got all these chemicals in food, ultra-processed food, we've got food waste, we've got, you know, it's like, ah, dear, we're all going to run out of of meat and land and uh, you know, floods and uh and dying of obesity and diabetes and getting cancer. So it was really nice to actually say, well, actually, there is a way out of this. And future foods are a potential way if we can link that amazing tech that's happening with cultural shifts in our in our ideas about say meat eating or fish rearing or dairy and come to something that, you know, we can embrace this stuff and probably have to break the whole of the farming system. Uh, you are potentially facing a very optimistic picture. Yeah. That it's not hard to do. And but, you know, it means we've got to break so much stuff about all the farm subsidies, you know, that come from the, you know, European Union that we're making taxpayers paying all this, these farmers to make unprofitable stuff that we don't really want for our health or our planet. Exactly. Um, and so we have to sort of shift a lot. But I was really excited because until I researched it, I really had no idea it was that far along. And it's changed just in the last, you know, a couple of years really. So first we've got eating insects. You know, these companies in South Africa with these these these fly larvae that, you know, get fed off scraps from restaurants and producing large amounts of protein that absolutely fine to eat. And a lot of the world do eat, you know, cricket protein, etc. So that's one area which most people can understand, might be a bit of a yuck factor, but you know, people are very happy to eat, you know, gourmet insects all the time such, you know, we call them lobsters, but you know, that that's they people used to think they were revolting.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. People used to to give lobsters and and oysters to poor people.
Professor Tim Spector: The servants or yes, that's right. Instead of wages, they just gave them those and but they had contracts they weren't able to have it more than six days a week. Uh, they had to be given real food. Oh, wow. So this is I think was in Maine, so this Maine lobsters, but that whole animal protein stuff which is going to continue and it'd be great to see that happening particularly in, you know, Africa and other countries that are nice and hot and naturally produce flies and insects to produce protein locally. But then there's this stem cell uh meat idea, which I thought was a bit flaky. Um, and I've been sort of following that from when I first wrote Diet Myth, you know, the the quarter of a million dollar burger. Yeah. is now a a $20 burger. Uh, you can go to uh a chicken shop in Singapore and try a chicken nugget that was has never been in a farm. Yeah. Um, just comes from a single cell.
Dr Rupy: That's amazing.
Professor Tim Spector: And so very rapidly the scale and the price has come right down on this so that it is uh a viable product that could be used as an alternative, particularly in processed meats and foods without really any cost. And and people I'm speaking to are saying, you know, within three to five years, it'll be at cost parity. So once it gets the key to changing apparently the whole everyone's opinion about meat alternatives comes from the US price of uh a beef burger slab that you just, you know, the patty. Yeah. That apparently is the that's the game changer. That price is what determines how much people will pay for things. And they don't if so at the moment, all the veggie, vegan alternatives are all twice the price of that. Yeah. And within a couple of years, they're going to be lower or and that will suddenly make people shift towards uh either getting 50/50 where they're mixed or totally um uh stem cell based or uh equivalent. So that really to me was interesting and the fact that they can now um grow up fat from plants. Um, so these and they've got a way of gluing the fat from plant fat to the meat to make something that looks like bacon. Yeah. So facon, you know, but it really is the. So that's fantastic. But they I I think the other thing that I've recently discovered is that back microbes are probably the biggest secret to future foods and that um you can get we're already growing lots of fungi and molds, uh tofu and these things in large industrial quantities, but you can actually genetically modify microbes to produce really high protein contents. And so these super high protein bacteria that you can then just uh when they're dead, you know, you can harvest into flour and uh rice that's incredibly high in um protein content and very good source of all the nutrients you need. And you can harness solar power to do that and you can do this on a vast scale. Yeah. So for 100th of the land use and climate impact of the current way of getting protein from um animals. So they and that technology is, you know, all of this stuff is in in a few years, it's not it's not decades or uh centuries. And but to do that, we've got to start preparing people for it and think about this cultural change that you go, you know, we have this idyllic, particularly in the UK, this idyllic view of the farm as, you know, a few cows, a few chickens, a few, you know, sheep wandering around and happy farmers, you know, um drinking cider and um you know, this is what we've been brought up with for centuries. I think, you know, it's converting that stuff back to woodlands, rewilding and, you know, behind some trees, there'll be these massive um metal containers driven by solar power that are fermenting tanks and our farmers would be basically farming microbes. Yeah. And producing these proteins and then those, you know, being made into the same foods and freeing up land to produce more plant sources of protein as well. So this stuff is like, you know, I don't know, several-fold more much more protein than soy, for example. Yeah, yeah. or pea protein or these other ones used. So I think put that together plus what I'm seeing about the second generation of um meat alternatives. I think it's really exciting. So the um
Dr Rupy: Because I saw something on your Instagram, I think recently where you visited, was it Neil Rankin's startup where they're combining plant proteins to create a very
Professor Tim Spector: Simplicity Foods in London. And um yeah, they invited me along to have a look at it and to see their fermenting and you know, I do a lot of fermenting at home on a small scale and you see it on a larger scale and and amazingly their mix doesn't include any of the sort of nasty things you get in the current veggie burgers. Yeah. where you've got, you know, glues to stick it together, you've got preservatives, um, you've got flavorings and colorants and a big list that you really don't want. Yeah. Uh, even if it doesn't have meat, you know, still, you know, it's not great. Um, to something that is really just tastes amazing based on the fermenting process. So again, microbes come into it. Yeah. And it's using just tomatoes and onions and mushrooms and some soy in mixtures that give you this really amazing umami savory taste they make into a patty and make fantastic um sausages, burgers and sort of pasta sauces that so suddenly for me that's, you know, meat alternative 2.0. And that, you know, that fermenting exercise and there's other bigger scale stuff in the US that I've seen as well.
Dr Rupy: Oh yeah.
Professor Tim Spector: Um, didn't taste as good to me, but they, you know, they're just using mainly pea, pea protein, fermented pea proteins. Um, but they're able to do this at large scale and it's that cleaner label. Yeah. that is going to make it much healthier. And so, yeah, it looks like microbes could be rescuing us again.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, because I've always wondered
Professor Tim Spector: or postponing our demise a bit quicker.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I've always wondered why like for for tempeh, you know, it's it's fermented soybean, you know, use the um, I think it's a type of rice yeast, I forget the name.
Professor Tim Spector: Koji.
Dr Rupy: Koji, that's it. Um, why don't we do the same for others like I mean you just mentioned pea protein there. So I'm assuming it's a similar sort of process for creating that product.
Professor Tim Spector: Yes, I mean, all of this fermenting can be, you know, it's you you use salt, you use sugar, uh, you combine it with, you know, milk products or you combine it with something that is the microbes can break down, use the sugar or salt as a fuel, break this down and produce acids which preserve the whole thing but also change the complexity and and taste and produce other chemicals. And that's essentially what you're doing. Adding koji, which is this, you know, mystical Japanese fungus is just another way of a starter. It's getting the whole thing catalyzed and and moving. So you can use a combination of all of these things. And I think this is what people needed is this idea that you can totally change the flavor and texture of vegetables um to resemble everything that, you know, culturally for the last 50 years we've taken as our, you know, top of the tree, meaty tastes, you know, which for many of us cultures identify with that and totally replace it. And you know, I've I've tried out these products on friends without knowing they didn't know it and they couldn't tell the difference. Um, especially if you, you know, most of us just now don't like don't have unseasoned meat anyway, you know, it's always spiced up or in something else or uh with additions. So, yeah, so latterly, you know, I went through this whole phase of depression with all the depressing bits in that book about everything we're doing wrong to that future food thing that is, you know, if enough people can link, you know, the campaign to, you know, help climate change with improving our our food and the common ground here is the microbes, not just, you know, in our gut but in the soil. So, yeah. Um, in the air, all around us and these same microbes can actually transform our our food into something that can completely replace, you know, the mass farming industry that is is past its sell by date and needs to be wrapped up fast that we're all paying masses of taxpayers money for. Yeah. And, you know, retrain farmers to be fermenters. And I think, yeah, at the moment, most farmers would probably not be happy with uh, you know, what I'm suggesting, but I think the idea is, you know, we've gone through many, you know, industrial revolutions, etc. and I think we, you know, we lots of, you know, supermarket cashiers no longer exist, you know, it's um many jobs, horses went out, you know, but we need to keep keep moving as a
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I mean we've had the green revolution, this could be the microbe revolution, I guess.
Professor Tim Spector: Yeah, I think harnessing that rather than trying to kill them all is really important. And and there's this whole parallel world about soil and um, you know, George Monbiot's book, Regenesis, which is fantastic about soil microbes and there's uh, really showing that that these basic principles of what how microbes are important, whether it's in a fermenting jar, in your gut or in the soil, the principles are really the same. And I think it's just, you know, I I start to get obsessed that they really are, you know, the center of everything and we should be worshiping them as our microbial gods.
Dr Rupy: You mentioned um two letters there that get people's back up quite a bit. GM uh and GE, I guess. Um, a lot of people have fears around messing with nature, which, you know, we do all the time in various ways, particularly when it comes to creating drugs and and other pharmaceuticals. Um, what are your thoughts on genetic engineering and where do you think our unknown unknowns are?
Professor Tim Spector: Firstly, my, I mean, yeah, we've moved from genetically modified foods to genetically uh engineered or edited foods because we've got much more precise with the genetic tools we need to snip off the genes. It's not that very crude sort of, you know, chisel and uh hammer idea. Basically, I I've never really been worried about GM foods. I think it's been a nonsense to worry about that. We've got so many much greater health and environmental crises to worry about that it really is a nonsense to be, we have these blanket bans on GM foods in Europe that are constantly being broken because all the animal feeds are not GM anyway. So it they're in our food chain. Yeah. And it's, you know, ridiculous to not use um the best products there are. And this is new technology and no one's ever shown it's not safe. So, um, for the way it's used at the moment, it's not it's not a problem. Of course, someone needs to keep an eye on it when you're, you know, doing things to fish or you're, you know, doing things to farm animals. But, you know, creating a different type of tomato is not a risk to the human race. And I think we really should be moving on to much more important things, herbicides, pesticides, you know, antibiotic use, um, all the all the stuff in slurry and fertilizers that comes from the farms and it we're in our drinking water and and our rivers and seas, you know, these are the things we should be worried about. So, you know, I just think we need to move on. That's that's the last century stuff.
Dr Rupy: I I agree. I think there are grander considerations like antibiotic resistance, I think, um, perpetuated by our overuse of antibiotics in the farming system, huge, huge issue. And I think we can negate that with some of the, you know, new technologies that you were just talking about. You mentioned um an example in the book where a particular crop was edited to make it uh resistant to certain pests. So you'd have to use less herbicide until evolution sort of caught up and then they've, you know, these pests have mutated, evolved and now they can, you know, consume these these crops again. Where do you think we run the risk of constantly running up against mother nature and having to keep up and keep up editing and stuff? Do you do you think that might be an issue?
Professor Tim Spector: Well, just to say, you know, for the record, I'm not a pro genetic editing all our food. I think we should be not trying to fight nature, we should be trying to work with it. And, you know, work out what the really sustainable ways of farming are. We need to, you know, stop destroying our soil. Um, it's it's a very holistic argument. It's very hard to take one bit of it and say, oh, I've got to do this or that. But, yeah, I mean, the fact that I'm happy with GM or GE foods doesn't mean that I like the practices of the companies that do it that give farmers, you know, no alternative but they have to buy that particular seed, that particular fertilizer, that chemical, only do monocultures, all this kind of stuff. You know, it needs to shift if we're going to, you know, um, have any soil left in 20 years time if, you know, the planet's still viable. So, I think a lot of the farming practices need to change. Uh, lots of evidence that we're overplowing fields that because of the current system that's very reliant on uh fertilizers and pesticides, etc. but that's that's killing all the microbes all the time. So there's less nutrients and it, you know, it's a very complicated story. So I think people have to sit back and take a bit of an overview and realizing there probably isn't one size fits all anyway. Yeah. We can't suddenly shift to um, you know, eco organic farms everywhere overnight, we would starve. because they do still produce less crop than, you know, the conventional
Dr Rupy: That's the uncomfortable truth though, isn't it? The fact that organic and biodiverse farms are
Professor Tim Spector: Yeah, and you know, depending on your calculations, you know, they may not always be better in terms of land use for what we want. So it, you know, endless examples in the book where what sounds a great idea ends up, once you start thinking, you know, because each of the foods I discussed, you know, you you look at the ethical side of it, you look at the health side of it, and you know, the planetary environment side. And it's quite hard to get them all lined up. Yeah. You know, and that and you know, when you get to chickens, you know, it's a great example of of where you you've got to decide, well, what what's more important for you, you know? Yeah, totally. Um, you can't tick all the boxes. Uh, all the time. And and I think that's why we, you know, having these sort of food eating rules, a bit like religious rules, you know, does go out the window in this new world. We just need to understand more and say, well, yeah, I'm not 100% perfect for any of these three things, but I'm aware of them. And, you know, if I'm not doing this, you know, if I am eating chickens, I'm going to try and, you know, do something else good to offset. It's a bit, yeah, this offsetting idea, I think is is a very interesting way. And, you know, it's a bit like all of us, you know, I'm sure you've been to meetings and someone said, well, these are the 10 things you need to do to save the planet, right? And the number one is, well, you know, you should never go on a plane again. And you say, well, hang on a minute, I've got my my holiday booked, you know, what am I going to do here? And but if you say, well, okay, but, you know, I'm not eating any meat, beef or lamb for the next uh month. I'll say, fine, that's, you know, that's worth um several airplane flights. Uh, you can justify that. You know, you've got a dog. Um, dog, what do they eat? Yeah. They eat, you know, meat, right? So you've got to offset that. Yeah. Um, you like a dog, they're good for your, you know, well-being and your mental state, but you're doing something that's actually wrong for the planet. So it's very hard to keep everybody happy. Yeah, it is. Um, so I think we have to assume we're not going to keep everyone happy, but in our own mind, keep a sort of mental check of of where we are, uh, you know, hoping we're always doing better than average in in all those areas and uh, just do some mental offsetting, you know. So, well, yeah, I'm not in London, don't need a car, so, you know, you walk a lot more and that maybe, you know, offsets some of the other your other your other guilty pleasures. Yeah, yeah. Um, which, you know, we all have. And I think if we're going to really shift people on this food and environment journey, I think we've got to start being more flexible, you know, keeping sort of rough guides of what you're doing without saying, well, if you, you know, gosh, if you you end up and you're tempted by one steak, you know, twice a year, you're out of the club, you know? Yeah, yeah, totally. Um, I really think that's important. And I think this is where we need to break these barriers of, you know, are you a real vegan? Are you a real vegetarian? You know, what's the definition, you know? Not worry about, you know, eating one snail and and worry about what group does that come in down, you know, is it a sea snail, is it a whatever. Um, but at the same time, you know, thinking about, you know, seafood, for example, which I talk a lot about in the book.
Dr Rupy: I was going to ask you about seafood, yeah, because again, that's I love seafood. You know, every time I go to Italy, my wife's Italian, one of our sort of favorite things to do is to get like a lovely piece of grilled sardine or another fish that's common over there, grouper, and uh, you know, eat it with like pasta and all the antipasti and all the rest of it. I was reading the section on fish. I was like, I don't want to give up fish. It's like one of my one of life's pleasures for me. But you you know, you you it's one of the things that you perhaps changed your mind on, isn't it, fish?
Professor Tim Spector: Absolutely, yes. So, I think when I was researching, you know, Diet Myth and Spoon Fed, I said, ah, fish, super healthy, you know, no one's ever going to argue against that, you know, it's got those omega-3s and all this sort of great stuff in it. And I said, but I'll have another look at it, you know, I'll dig a bit deeper because I'm always a bit suspicious if something, I couldn't think of a reason why it should be that healthy, right? You know, really? Is it healthier than chicken? You know, it's just underwater chicken is what I used to tell my my kids. Um, you know, this this why it's meat, you know, we call it a different word, but it is meat. And when I looked at the data, the epidemiology data that I thought was barn door that, you know, fish eaters had two or three times better survival and, you know, half the rates of cancer, heart disease. The difference when you sum them all up in meta-analysis comes to about 11% benefit. which and that's observational studies, which always includes a bit of bias because generally fish eaters tend to have other healthier lifestyles. So it could be zero. It's not harmful for you. I don't see any evidence really that unless you're pregnant and you're eating a lot of high mercury fish, possibly kids, you know, we are getting more and more mercury in some of these bigger fish is bad for you. But um, yeah, so that was depressing. So okay, it's not really that good for you. And then the other reason we were told to eat fish is because of omega-3. And I go into this in detail with these really big studies have just come out, massive 20,000 person randomized control trials, the gold standard, showing that unless you've just had a heart attack, um, there's really no benefit to having omega-3 as a supplement for years, which was the rationale for having fish. Yeah. So it doesn't make you brainy, I was told. Um, and it doesn't, you know, really increase your lifespan or do anything to your heart. So and if we ate two portions of fish every week as we're told to by the NHS, um, and around the world generally, most people support that view, uh, the oceans would be completely dry of fish within probably two years. So we can't it's it's totally non-sustainable. And what I didn't realize until I researched it was most of our fish comes from fish farms now. Yeah. That was a bit of a shock. I thought, oh, maybe, you know, 20, 30%, but wow, you know, majority, 70% plus and it's getting it's getting up to 90% very quickly as they're getting more and more skillful at doing this. And what feeds the fish in fish farms is the little fish, you know, the small sardines, the little anchovies that you were enjoying in in Italy. Uh, and they're using them up much fast. They have to use more kilos of them than to make the bigger fish that looks nice in restaurants. So that was very depressing because I love fish as well, right? So, oh no, what have you done? So, but I think fish is getting more expensive and it's rightly. You know, yes, you've got this cheap farmed salmon, which to me is become like boring chicken. It doesn't taste of anything. We should be avoiding it. It's not healthy. You know, it's just served at every official, certainly every doctor's conference you ever go to, it's all you get is this dull salmon. Um, we could do without it and it's we know it's got chemicals and, you know, it's it's like a highly processed food now. Uh, the only ray of light is I think shellfish. Uh-huh. Um, we can have as many um mussels, clams, oysters as we like. They are great for the oceans. They're totally sustainable. And according to most of the sources, they are non-sentient.
Dr Rupy: Okay, yeah.
Professor Tim Spector: So they won't mind if you eat them. Compared to the octopus or or fish in general.
Professor Tim Spector: Exactly. And so, yeah, the octopus is a great example. It's, you know, intelligent being that really does mind being stabbed by some spear fisherman. Um, these muscles, you know, they're just there and they're just filtering, you know, the oceans for us. So we need to be really cultivating our uh local muscle and clam industries, which are really good in this country and we we export most of it interestingly because we don't we're not very into it ourselves.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I mean, Keith Floyd back in the 70s was lamenting about how we send most of our incredible fish over to the Europeans because they know exactly how to to make it. Um, one thing that I think I noticed in that section was uh how mollusks and and um uh the the the shellfish, they filtrate the sea and so they concentrate a lot of the chemicals in their in their body. Is that correct? So we're actually ingesting a lot of micro plastics.
Professor Tim Spector: Yes, so microplastics are, yeah, that's the only downside. Sorry to bring it down again. No, I know. I've deliberately forgotten that bit. The yeah, if you have lots of muscles, muscle and chips like the Belgians, they've worked out that you will be slowly filling up with these microparticles of plastic which comes from all the plastic waste, all those unnecessary water bottles and things that we throw into the sea and eventually get ground down to this this dust that never disappears and is swallowed by all kinds of fish and it's also in the air, but particularly troubling is yeah, it's is in mollusks. But so far, no one knows of any real problems with it. But it's early days in this kind of research. But yeah, um, someone's estimated that, you know, it's like eating if you ate mussels for a year, it's like eating a credit card every year or something.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. They always use like really odd examples like that.
Professor Tim Spector: How anyone's worked that out, I'm not quite sure. But yeah, so um, that's that's the downside. But I so, yeah, I will always go for those things on the menu, but you know, to be honest, it hasn't stopped. There are still some fish that are more sustainable than others. The small ones you mentioned, small unattractive ones, we don't hardly eat at all in this country. They're the ones we should be eating.
Dr Rupy: They're delicious as well.
Professor Tim Spector: And they often get thrown away or used as fish food or dog food or whatever it is, cat food. Um, and we need to be moving away from those very large, fancy fish. Uh, there are hundreds of fish species, thousands, and we we tend to only eat about a dozen of of them. Uh, those that have nice attractive names and, you know, don't have some horrible teeth looking at you when you when you're in the fishmongers. Um, so I I've changed and I I don't really have much fish at home. I will have it as a special treat. I think we've got to start seeing it in the same way um as meat really. Yeah. And realizing there's a big difference between the different fish and some are really endangered and the bigger the fish in general, either the more mercury it's got, be the more endangered it is as well. And um, yeah, it would be sad if we completely destroyed our oceans just because someone said that fish are healthy for us.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. This word moderation comes up quite a bit, just in, you know, general practice and general and just in the eater. How do you explain moderation to people now that you've done all this research ongoing research for the last, you know, 10, 20 years in food, how do you approach this topic of moderation considering fish stocks, animal welfare, the impact on the environment? What what do you say to people? How do you explain that?
Professor Tim Spector: I think there's a difference between having things regularly and, you know, very happy to have actually all plants regularly. There's very little harm in doing that unless if you if you vary it. You know, if you only had oats or rye covered with herbicides, you know, it's you would get high levels of chemicals, but if you vary it and spread it out of the year, that's fine. Um, whereas, you know, meat and fish, I'm saying, you know, move them to one side, put them on a pedestal. They are an occasional treat to be really treasured. And, you know, I can remember when I was, you know, young, you know, 10 years old, a chicken was, you know, quite a treat for the family. Um, not saying we didn't eat meat, we had lots of pork or other meat the rest of the time, but something like a chicken was something you look forward to and you could afford and, you know, you used it, always used it the next day, the leftovers and, you know, beyond. Now, you know, the chicken costs less than a pint of beer. And we've got it wrong. Yeah. So it's it's trying to sort of re-establish in a way what what are staples and what are treats. That's the way I I view it. And um, and changing this mindset about what a healthy food is.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. It's going to be a difficult one though.
Professor Tim Spector: And it's going to vary for different people.
Dr Rupy: It it will because, you know, just leaning into human psychology, we're loss averse, right? So if you allow people to have something at a very cheap price and then take it away, you're going to have a revolution on your hands, you know, there're going to be people up in arms. And particularly when you compound that with the cost of living crisis and the, you know, price of everything going up, if you take people's ability to feed themselves with protein, let's say, um, or the protein that they have got used to consuming, it it's going to be a difficult pill to swallow.
Professor Tim Spector: Definitely, but, you know, you know, countries that do care about climate change can start um putting taxes on things that have a massive land use and that would, taxes we know change people's behavior fairly quickly. Um, and they have other other effects and not always good, but that's one way you can do it. But I think it's through this idea of educating and as I said, if, you know, if the family that just likes eating chicken because it's cheap, if they can buy a chicken Kiev made from microbes or made in a uh petri dish that tastes exactly the same and is 20% cheaper, they'll do it. So I think it the psychology is important, but you can see how this this idea of replacing that protein with something else. And and I was speaking to companies that are also making fish. Um, you can grow up fish in petri dishes. Um, and so you can have ethical um fish meat uh in exactly the same way. And particularly important for all if you think about all the things that prawns and shrimps are used for at the moment, where, you know, we don't think about they're, you know, often slave labor, there's horrendous environmental damage in, you know, in Asia, in Vietnam and Thailand where we get this the cheapest products from and they arrive frozen. You replace those with something that, you know, is ethically and environmentally much better and it's slightly cheaper. I think, you know, they may have to first dress it up and paint it red and, you know, so that um make it, you know, as they do at the moment, they use dyes and things and the same tricks to market it. Yeah, yeah. Um, but yeah, so so I think it on its own, you can't just tell people don't have cheap chicken because it's what I'm saying. You're absolutely right. You've got to give them alternatives. And uh and nudge people in these directions. But I think, you know, there are people, you know, that are thinking about these things already and I think it it will shift. Uh, but the first thing is to stop thinking A, that animal protein is absolutely essential for everything. and B that um, you know, there's something boring or bad about plants or plant substitutes or something weird about it. And you know, that's part of this process. And that's really where why, you know, writing this book was, you know, a bit of a journey and by the time I've written it, you know, there's bits it's things are changing so fast that there's bits at the beginning I'll probably have to keep rewriting but like Forth Road Bridge, you know.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, for sure.
Professor Tim Spector: Yeah, yeah.
Dr Rupy: I I'm really interested in this area. I think if there was the option to in addition to my regular diet, have a dehydrated uh berry, a dehydrated, I don't know, let's say kale, uh which is the equivalent of a portion each in a in a drink or in a powder that I can rehydrate or maybe added to um if it was flavorless, a type of passata that I would make, you know, from scratch just to boost sort of the polyphenol value of the meal. Uh, I think that could that could work and that could be an attractive option just to improve the diversity of the polyphenols that you're consuming and ergo having an effect hopefully on microbes. And it's probably an easy experiment that you could do to to test what the effect of that would be.
Professor Tim Spector: Yeah, I mean, you can certainly test the polyphenol counts on it. Um, but to do those clinical studies would be actually quite hard because you're what you're giving is quite a small amount on top of something else. Yeah, yeah. Um, so I think you'd have to do a lot of it based on what you thought those ingredients have been shown to work in other scenarios. Therefore, it's in addition to your your main meal. I think we don't want to go back to recreating Huel and and realizing this is, you know, people come up to me and said, oh, you know, I'm traveling a lot, you know, my 30 plants a week rule is really irritating, you know, at certain times on holiday or whatever. I'd love to be able to just, you know, sprinkle some magic um potion over things and and hit the target. Yeah, yeah. So I think we do realize that, you know, in this world, people are in different situations, environments, work, night shifts, whatever. I think we we ought to be more inclusive and without being too snobby to say, well, it's not real food. Yeah. And where does it because I think, you know, we've discussed lots of examples from, you know, dried porcini which costs a fortune. Yeah. Um, to, you know, really cheap, um, who knows, you know, dried milk powder or something that isn't it? They, well, you know, where does it, yeah, exactly. Where do you draw that line? So I think it's about how it's done, but my looking at freeze drying, it looks a pretty, you know, healthy way of um doing stuff. So I think we'll see more of that in the future. So maybe we should start a company.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, maybe. I reckon that would be pretty pretty interesting. You heard it here first. Uh, Tim, this has been great. Uh, I I love the book. I love what you're up to. Um, how's it been uh for you going on this journey? I mean, now you're you're focused on the book, the the Zoe company and all the other incredible opportunities. I mean, it's it's very different to the day-to-day maybe 10, 15 years ago, right? How how's the transition been?
Professor Tim Spector: Well, yeah, it it's um, well it's fitted my personality because, you know, I've been a number of different types of doctor in my time. So general physician, rheumatologist, epidemiologist, geneticist, epigeneticist, whatever. So I like to change, but what's really exciting at the moment is rather than fixating on writing another 50 papers, which are each read by, you know, 500 people, I can, you know, get talk to millions of people through this new medium and, you know, have a much bigger impact, I think on on health. And that's super exciting to me. And and also the discoveries we've been making in science, because of the company Zoe, we can translate that immediately either through their nutritional product or through the Zoe uh health app, the the Zoe health study, which we haven't discussed, but you know, we can do all the things we talk about about lifestyle, you got an idea about, you know, improving someone's lifestyle, you know, meditate standing on one foot for for five minutes, you know, we've got a study of half a million people that can do that and work out whether that works or not. And so the ability to take uh the science, choose what science is, do these projects, do it in like super fast time and then roll it out either as a a product or as an intervention. I think it's just so exciting. So, um, I'm just incredibly lucky and that's that's why, you know, I haven't given up and uh, just not just sitting on a beach. This is, you know, the most exciting period of my life.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. I can't think of anything worse sitting on a beach and not doing much. I I think I'm always going to be in the kitchen or doing something creative and I think uh I think you're the same.
Professor Tim Spector: Absolutely, yes. So, I'm sure we'll meet again.
Dr Rupy: Definitely, yeah. It's been a pleasure.
