Spoon-Fed: Why almost everything we’ve been told about food is wrong

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That simple experiment, which we’ve now done on thousands of people, just blows out of the water the idea that it’s all about calories. He, too, has something to sell - although I would prefer to believe that it is primarily an interest in improving the nation’s health. Even if the numbers on the menu were accurate, they still do not reflect the ways in which humans obtain nutrients from food. Spector's own work in the emerging field of the microbiome was a USP and some of that science could have been drawn out further, rather than endless references to various trendy studies and collaborations he is involved in. Several chapters down the line he hesitatingly, cautiously, uses both to endorse his own line of thinking.

It was shocking to find out how little we really know about nutrition and how many things I tho He is a multi-award-winning expert in personalised medicine and the gut microbiome, and the author of four books, including the bestselling The Diet Myth.Spoon-Fed is a worthy successor to Spector’s earlier bestselling book, The Diet Myth, which focused on the powerful role that the microbes in our guts play in determining our health.

A testing kit consisting of three packets of standardised muffins (to test your biological responses and challenge your metabolism with high doses of fat and sugar), a continuous glucose monitor, plus stool and blood sampling kits; the idea is to test how people respond to various foods over a two-week period, and provide them with personalised scores for thousands of foods, and nutrition coaching, based on these results. Something important that he fails to discuss is that for a subsection of eaters, calories on a menu are actually a source of panic rather than of security. We generally aim to do it earlier so the results of the SCT and virology screens are back by 10 weeks at the latest.He opens his allergy chapter with a discussion of a study of Americans, showing that only half of those self-reporting as allergy sufferers had a demonstrable food allergy. Several healthy examples include tinned fruit and vegetables, baked beans, frozen fruit and vegetables, cheese and milk. Spector understands the importance of making good food options more attractive and accessible to those with limited resources, yet sentences like ‘I think heavy and binge drinking should be targeted, not those relaxing over a leisurely meal with a fine glass of wine’ risk coming across as both blinkered and entitled. Another issue is that Spector often helps the reader to develop a much more nuanced and fact-based understanding of something but then risks throwing out all our understanding with the proverbial bath water.

I think that what is stated in this book should be taken with a grain of salt, which could be said of a lot of nutritional advice. One of the great points about this book is the author's willingness to tell the reader about studies and describe their pros and cons. It aims to think about food for “our individual health, the health of our society and the health of our planet”. We are bombarded with healthy-eating advice, but as Tim Spector argues in Spoon-Fed, you can happily ignore most of it.He quotes a Russian paediatrician who snorts at the notion that women should cut down on cured meats during pregnancy: “You think they have the luxury to pick and choose what they eat. As a final note, this book will help you fine-tune your skills at interpreting the nutrition labels that are found on all packaged foods. In 1993, he founded the UK Twins Registry at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, one of the richest collections of data about identical and non-identical twins in the world. And, unusually, the author pays continuous attention to the effects of being cash and time poor on diets, and puts the blame firmly on food companies and inadequate governance rather than the individual.