![]() He would prefer to see people having two to three meals a day and advocates the Mediterranean style of less snacking and taking twice as long as we generally do to eat a meal. It is a startling fact, Spector says, that “25 per cent of all our energy comes from snacking”. Not only does constant eating mean that we never give our gut microbes a well-earned rest, it also gets harder to monitor how much you are eating in a day. It’s a real fallacy that just restricting your calories is a long-term solution, because we’ve been trying that for the past 50 years and we’re getting fatter.” Myth: eat little and oftenĪnother fallacy is that grazing rather than gorging is a better way to maintain our blood glucose levels, and help us lose weight. So as soon as you stop restricted eating, the weight piles back on this is called the weight set-point theory. ![]() But with free-living people, that just doesn’t happen, because your body simply reacts as it’s supposed to to keep you alive and will change your metabolism.” “Yes, if you lock people in prison and give them no food, they will lose weight. “It goes against everything we should be teaching our children, which is that it’s the quality of food, and the difference between foods, that matters.” Key to this is that everyone is unique and differs in the way they respond to food. This is the diet myth that Spector says trivialises food as fuel. “Saying that exercise alone is a good way to reach a healthy weight in the long-term is complete rubbish,” Prof Spector says. Our body is programmed to keep our biology steady, known as homeostasis, so if our energy levels are drastically changed with lots more exercise and less food, our metabolism will respond by slowing the weight loss down and eventually put it back on very quickly when we go back to normal activity and food – which is what we see in yo-yo dieters who put all the weight they initially lose back on. ![]() So, what other diet myths are we swallowing, according to Professor Spector? Myth: exercise to lose weightĮxercise does require energy, but our metabolism adjusts to that loss by storing more energy as fat the next time we eat. “It’s why we support this multi-billion-pound diet industry of low-calorie shakes and Weight Watchers, and all that other stuff.” “If it was only 1,900, would that make a difference? No, it wouldn’t.”Īnd when people are told to avoid calorie-dense foods, Spector says that advice can be taken to be encouraging the consumption of low-calorie drinks and low-fat foods. So I ask him: what should we be aiming for? Even asking the question, he says, gives credence to the idea that there is a perfect figure. ![]() The daily allowances for men and women, Spector says, are not based on hard data. Not only are calorie estimates often less accurate than we might hope, Spector’s studies of twins have shown that humans vary hugely in how much energy they extract from a given food. Today, though, his number one myth target is that calories are a useful way to monitor our diet. Via the Zoe Project, the world’s largest nutrition study, he has encouraged us all to join up and analyse our unique guts, blood fats and blood sugar responses. Spector’s work has helped to put kefir in our fridges and kimchi in our jars. When The Diet Myth was published in 2015, few people had an inkling of the role that the estimated 100 trillion microbes in our gut play in our digestion. He has been working hard to change that thinking. “For the past 100 years, we’ve been obsessed with calories, and it has really stopped us thinking about anything else,” says the 63-year-old author of The Diet Myth and Spoon-fed. With that “believe me”, the Prime Minister hit a nerve for serial dieters: which parts of the vast smorgasbord of advice out there should we be following to ensure our health and happiness?Īlong with the recent introduction of calories onto restaurant menus, it can feel as if we’re being shamed into giving up food altogether.įor Professor Tim Spector, the King’s College London epidemiologist celebrated for his work with identical twins, as well as diet and the microbiome, all of the above represents a backward step in the public understanding of how humans respond to and process food. ‘The best way to lose weight, believe me, is to eat less,” said Boris Johnson as he defended the Government’s food strategy after proposals for a salt and sugar tax were ignored.
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