Gene Eating: The Story of Human Appetite

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I really enjoy working with Giles - he makes so much sense, and cuts through the confusion about diet and health with refreshing directness. His excellent book Gene Eating busts myths and homes in on what you really need need to know. It's been a genuine help to me and I'm sure it will be to everyone who reads it.' HUGH FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL In one experiment he ate vegan for a month and lost about 4.5kg. His blood cholesterol levels also dropped and he says he found the diet manageable (unlike the popular 5:2 diet, where he often felt faint). Yeo tends to lecture without shoes on, which helps his undergraduates remember him, he suggests. “That barefoot guy with no hair, talking about diabetes.” He has the look of a guru, but resists the idea of gurus. He prefers to be directed by the complexities of the science. A bit of his experimentation is on himself. For a recent series of the BBC’s Trust Me, I’m a Doctor on which he is a presenter, he ate vegan for a month. A couple of things happened: he lost about 10lbs and his blood cholesterol levels dropped dramatically.

For example, for breakfast I often eat a slice of sprouted whole grain bread (higher protein and fiber), a tablespoon of spreadable butter with added olive oil (this does not really decrease the ratio of saturated vs unsaturated fat but it's easier to spread so it's more a convenience thing than anything else) and two slices of deli turkey (high protein). Genetically, there’s no difference between people who are poorer and those who are richer – it’s an accident of birth. But because of your socioeconomic situation, your risk of obesity can jump from 40% to 70%. It shows that if we manage to cure poverty, childhood poverty in particular, we can drop the heritable risk of obesity from 70% to 40% without even touching the biology of the system. A Cambridge obesity researcher upends everything we thought we knew about calories and calorie-counting. Drawing on the very latest science and his own genetic research at Cambridge University, Dr Giles Yeo has written the seminal 'anti-diet' diet book. Exploring the history of our food, debunking marketing nonsense and toxic diet advice, and confronting the advocates of 'clean eating', Dr Giles translates his pioneering

On the contrary, he endorses intermittent fasting and the Mediterranean diet, which is widely considered one of the healthiest in the world. The Mediterranean diet includes relatively high consumption of fruits and vegetables, olive oil, grains, legumes and nuts, moderate consumption of fish and poultry, as well as red wine, and low consumption of diary products and red and processed meat. It has been linked to reduced risk for cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancer, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, and increased longevity. The chapter explaining the biochemical aspects of digestion is long and intricate, potentially overwhelming some readers who may struggle with its complexity. So we need to consider the type of food we’re eating, rather than fixating purely on the calorie content. You could be aiming to eat 800 calories a day, but how much energy your body actually absorbs will depend on whether you’re eating sugar, celery, or steak. Exercise has been getting a bad rep for its weight loss powers. Is that really deserved? You run a lot: are you doing that to keep trim or for other reasons? That point is that we should care more about the food we eat and its composition/macros/healthiness than its caloric content, which, tbh, is nothing new. It's a good point, yes, but I didn't need to read this book to learn this, as I've been on a health/fitness journey for some years now.

That said, it is a very readable book, conversational tone and even well explained science. To my surprise, I even found myself enjoying his long winded digressions on some life anecdotes, which I usually hate. I barely had the time to read, I was most often sleep deprived when I did, but I breezed through it. First, put together a strategy to expose yourself less to foods that you have a particular weakness for, so is you love chocolate, maybe have less of that lying around your house,” he advises. There are a couple of chapters where he dives deeper into the science of metabolism than most nutrition content. Unfortunately these sections were very hard to follow in the audiobook version (it's really hard to describe the Krebs Cycle or chemical formulae in words without a diagram). He makes frequent references to the accompanying pdf, but my copy from the library didn't include it, and anyway it somewhat defeats the purpose of an audiobook if I have to read along. And worst of all, none of that biological detail really had anything to do with the remainder of the book.

A difficult first week

This can be making us feel more hungry or less full, why some people like sweet food or fatty food, or why some people respond to stress by eating while others stop eating.”

The book is further fluffed up with numerous lengthy personal anecdotes, that contribute almost nothing to the understanding of the subject matter. His overly amiable and chummy tone is grating after a while, I think he got lonely while writing the book and projected onto his readers. Keeping in mind that inherently genetics is a rather complex subject, Yeo does a great job of explaining it as simple as it can be for the lay man reading this book. However, the more important plus point is that latter topics related to the genetics of obesity have been explained such that they can be understood even without truly getting the basics of the obesity-related genetics. Explained rather systematically in the book are various fad diets and the pros and cons of each, allowing these to be looked at in a new light. It does appear at times that Yeo is attempting to banish all fad diets, but if carefully considered, Yeo is providing factful information to the reader to choose from a range of diets based on how they do or do not work scientifically.It’s a complex subject but I do like reading books that are not dumbed down, which challenge and make me grapple with important concepts. (Even if I end up skimming parts.) In and of itself, exercise is not effective for weight loss. It is in principle possible to lose weight through exercise – Tour de France cyclists eat at least 5,000 calories a day and still lose weight during the three-week race. The problem is most of us mere mortals don’t exercise anywhere near enough for this to be effective. It is, however, useful for weight maintenance after you have achieved weight loss. So I stay active on my bike and running, to stay fit, but also to maintain my weight. This is by far the best, most thorough book about nutrition that I've ever read, and unfortunately, I've read a lot of them. That said, the title is deceptive - calories do count, of course they do. Food is energy - you eat food for energy - you use energy when you do anything, including exist. But really, if you didn't want all the nitty gritty detail about exactly how digestion works, you could just read the last three chapters and you'd be good to go. Not everyone is going to look like a magazine cover model, whose smothered in makeup, likely heavily photoshopped, generally unhappy with sub 10% bodyfat, probably taking Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) (aka steroids), etc. Stop comparing yourself to "stars", social media, movie stars, and unrealistic body images. Do the best you can with what you got within reason. Enjoy life. Exercise. Eat right. Reduce body fat. I say again, enjoy life and not obsess about body image. PDF / EPUB File Name: Why_Calories_Dont_Count_-_Giles_Yeo.pdf, Why_Calories_Dont_Count_-_Giles_Yeo.epub

What affects cholesterol Being vegan a choice that some of us are privileged enough to be able to make. It isn’t, by any stretch, the only way to eat healthily. (Getty Images) He does his best not to advocate any specific diet, but I appreciated that he mentioned as well that some things work better for other people, and that even if it does come down to numbers it IS harder for some people to loss weight because of other conditions that make it harder for them to make good choices, or exercise, or their cravings are naturally stronger and harder to fight - whatever. There's nothing shameworthy about that because it's genetics.Mental health issues are rarely genetically inherited traits, but they are passed along via epigenetics; like weight, they are affected by both genetics and epigenetics without carrying any moral quality so that a person struggling with one or the other, or both, is not worse than those with better genes, intergenerational past and upbringing. For example, we know that one in 330 people in the UK have mutations in a particular pathway called the leptin-melanocortin pathway, which renders your brain slightly less sensitive to how much fat you’re carrying. I had been eagerly anticipating this book being published for some time, so was delighted to be able to read an advance copy. But you can make a better practical choice in those situations by considering how the body processes food. It takes a lot longer to digest food elements like protein and fibre, so you absorb less of those calories, so if you choose a chocolate bar that’s higher in nuts or dry fruits, that will make it a better chocolate bar.