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

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Other findings seem counterintuitive, but are often deliciously reassuring. Two cups of Americano coffee provide more fibre than a banana. You can reheat rice; unopened mussels won’t kill you; and eating meat doesn’t give you cancer (though “replacing 30% of traditional burger meat with mushrooms or fungi would be the equivalent of taking 2m cars off the road”). Some sources of nutrition are more beneficial together, like corn with beans, or “a glass of red wine daily with friends”. Replacing sugar, salt, fat and gluten with weird and untested chemicals is usually pointless and probably dangerous, and the 1980s advice to change butter and cream for margarines and vegetable oils was “one of the biggest health scandals ever”. No fads, no nonsense, just practical, science-based advice on how to eat well. Daily Mail, *Books of the Year*

Using identical twins, Tim Spector shows how even real-life “clones” with the same upbringing turn out to be very different. Empowering and practical, Food for Life is nothing less than a new approach to how to eat - for our health and the health of the planet. Both books are by their nature very comprehensive. Both seek out to discuss all types of food, though approaching them from different angles, Saladino with a view to our environment, and Spector with a view to health. Understandably there are quite a few areas of overlap.

In Food for Life Tim Spector draws on over a decade of cutting-edge scientific research, along with his own personal insights, to deliver a new and comprehensive guide to what we should all know about food today. Comprehensive knowledge: The book is filled with a wealth of information about food, covering a wide range of topics. It provides in-depth insights into various aspects of nutrition, cooking, and food choices. Investigating everything from environmental impact and food fraud to allergies, ultra-processed food and deceptive labelling, Spector also shows us the many wondrous and surprising properties of everyday foods, which scientists are only just beginning to understand. No fads, no nonsense, just practical, science-based advice on how to eat well’ Daily Mail, Books of the Year This book left me in such a state of paralysed misery. It seems as though everything that might be good for me comes with horrible environmental consequences or is wildly expensive. Or both. I had to keep putting it to one side, I felt crushed.

Food is our greatest ally for good health, but the question of what to eat in the age of ultra-processed food has never seemed so complicated.The book presents scientific information in a clear and understandable manner, and the writing style is easy to follow. Food is our greatest ally for good health, but the question of what to eat has never seemed so complicated. In this review, we will take a closer look at ‘Food for Life’ and figure out how different our organisms are when it comes to nutrition and why what works for one, can be useless or harmful to another. Food has shaped the way we have evolved over the last million years. When we started to cook our food, our digestive tracts slowly became shorter as a result of the more easily absorbed cooked foods. Our brains became larger thanks to this increased nutrient intake, with a major part dedicated to our senses, in particular those neuronal areas related to food."

The nutrition revolution is well underway and Tim Spector is one of the visionaries leading the way. His writing is illuminating and so incredibly timely. Yotam Ottolenghi - praise for SPOON-FED This isn’t by any means a book on dietary regimes, but it provides the latest evidence from respected academics on all areas of food that enable the reader to make informed choices. Investigating everything from environmental impact and food fraud to allergies and deceptive labelling, Spector also shows us the many wondrous and surprising properties of everyday foods, which scientists are only just beginning to understand. 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”.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. I'm finally finished with this book. It's very long, and with a lot of information about pretty much every food type out there. Treat this less like relaxed, casual reading, and more like a sort of reference for tips on how to make food choices. The author is really comprehensive about all the food types and covers and evaluates the research on these as well. I have to admit that this book has singlehandedly made me change my eating habits to include more plants. I find his repeated advice that the effects of food on the body differ for everyone to be one that makes a lot of sense, and wish that the average person had access to tools that could measure their own responses to food. New Fitbit idea, maybe? Anyway, the book is quite clearly structured and to summarize the sheer amount of information he puts in, he includes 5 bullet points at the end of each chapter that reiterate the key points.

From 1st July 2021, VAT will be applicable to those EU countries where VAT is applied to books - this additional charge will be collected by Fed Ex (or the Royal Mail) at the time of delivery. Shipments to the USA & Canada: 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. The big environmental impact is that we would replace the vast animal facilities of pigs and cattle with huge complexes of industrial bioreactors with wind turbines and solar panels. On a plus side we can manipulate the stem-cell meat to be healthier, by adding polyunsaturated fatty acids such as omega-3, for example, altering the culture medium to replicate the effects of grass, or lowering the fat content." He constantly mentions many people get different results and will occasionally give averaged results as well as his own. But the issue I have is some people might treat this as gospel (its in a book and if it works for him it must work for me!). Most people reading this book would not be able to access this kind of personalised data and some of these results suggest certain foods (whole, unprocessed, fresh- like certain fruits or vegetables) should be avoided or at least reduced to occasional treats. I just cannot get enthusiastic about that. If you love bananas, eat the damn banana! It is a better choice than many you could be making like donuts, chips or chocolate. Likewise his attitude toward the use of pesticides in farming. Ok, I agree pesticides are not ideal however "Organic" does not equal no pesticides - it just means certain pesticides are not used. And again, eating non-organic fresh veg that you can afford is better than stressing yourself trying to afford smaller amounts of organic veg and filling up with processed foods. If you can afford it, great! Go for your life, but there is already so much stress and guilt around food (especially for women) why add more? But the greatest hope for better diets, he suggests, is in education – something not covered by the government’s new policy paper. “We need to be teaching our children about real and fake foods with the same zeal that we teach them how to walk, read and write.” If Spector is right, then knowing how to recognise real nourishing food when you see it is a far more useful life skill than mindlessly counting calories. Spector concludes with a galvanising call for governments around the world to think differently about food, to ditch the pointless calorie counting on menus in favour of policies that could actually make it easier for people to eat a healthy diet. The unanswered question is whether any UK government will ever be brave enough to enact the radical food policies that are needed, rather than simply slapping a calorie label on a menu and leaving consumers to their fate.

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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. 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.