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

Product Information

Spector writes as a food lover... Every person's ideal diet is different, and should be based on sensible choices from a position of knowledge. Food for Life is a feast of that knowledge... A valuable reference book to keep on a kitchen shelf. Guardian No fads, no nonsense, just practical, science-based advice on how to eat well’ Daily Mail, Books of the Year I like that he touched on more than just nutrition. He also talked about the food industry, the environmental impact of producing food, the history of a particular food and so on. Some of his food advice is just very hard to do. And not a lot of people will have the means to change to healthier arrangements like he suggests. His recommendations have to be taken with a pinch of salt. 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 Find out how food choices influence your health, wellbeing, and the environment in 'Food for Life'.

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. 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. Bestselling author and scientist Tim Spector offers clear answers in this definitive, easy-to-follow guide to the new science of eating well. This stands well as a companion to Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them, which won the Wainwright Conservation Prize last year, 2022.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”. Food for Life is a feast of that knowledge. It contains so much information that it’s impossible to process by reading it from start to finish, but bullet-pointed tips at the end of each chapter and an appendix of food tables make it a valuable reference book to keep on a kitchen shelf. 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”. Using identical twins, Tim Spector shows how even real-life “clones” with the same upbringing turn out to be very different. Food for Life’ by Tim Spector offers a refreshing and informative perspective on nutrition and its relationship with our health and the environment. With his expertise as a Professor of Genetic Epidemiology, Spector presents complex scientific concepts in a clear and accessible manner. The book covers a wide range of topics, including the gut microbiome, food choices, and the impact of food on the planet. Practical tips provided at the end of each chapter and a useful appendix of food tables enhance the book’s value as a reference guide.

Tim Spector has been exploding the myths around food and heal for years... Here he continues the demolition job in a rigorously academic book that welcomes the layperson with open arms. The Times, *Books of the Year* 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. Taking a wide-angle lens on everything from environmental impact and food fraud to allergies and deceptive labelling, Spector shows us the many wondrous and surprising properties of everyday foods, which scientists are only just beginning to understand. Easy to navigate: The book’s structure and organization make it user-friendly. Readers can easily navigate through different chapters and sections, finding the information they need without having to read the entire book from start to finish.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. The book describes our physiological relationship with food to dispel many prevalent myths and pseudo-science surrounding faddish diets. Tim explains that due to the way we change our attitudes to food over the last few decades, we are no longer exposed to the very microbes that are an essential part of our physiology.

I just read Chris Van Tulleken's book on UPF and he mentioned Tim's book here a few times so I thought I would give it a go. Why do so many people still fervently believe that margarine is healthier than butter? The great beneficiary of this belief has been not consumers but the margarine industry. Spector shows with great clarity that “the greatest obstacle of all” when it comes to getting accurate information about food has been the food industry. Like the pharmaceutical industry, the vast multi-national food companies have influenced nutritionists with gifts and sponsorship. Spector reveals that industry has also funded huge amounts of nutrition research, influencing the information that we receive on everything from the safety of artificial sweeteners to the question of whether we can eat large amounts of red meat with impunity. The pandemic should have changed many attitudes towards understanding biology, and Food for Life is the newly scientifically semi-literate person's post-Covid go-to food book... I trust the author and his work. The Times, *Book of the Week*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." No fads, no nonsense, just practical, science-based advice on how to eat well. Daily Mail, *Books of the Year*

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. Combining cutting-edge research with a personal insights, and taking a wide angle lens on everything from environmental impact and food fraud to allergies and deceptive labelling, Spector takes a deep dive into each food type. Food for Life also includes easy-to-implement action points and useful tables as practical tools in our everyday food decisions, presented in a novel and comprehensive format. Ultimately, this book encourages us to fall in love again with food and celebrate its many wondrous properties, which science is still only just beginning to understand. Tim Spector actually references Matthew Walker and his book. They’re apparently good friends and that’s hardly surprising given that their approach to their respective specialist fields is the same. Food For Life might be even more important than Why We Sleep. Fundamentally the latter tells us all what we really knew anyway; that we should all be sleeping more. But Food For Life sets out to fundamentally alter how we think about food, and it absolutely does that. Even half way through I was changing what I was buying and eating day to day in really significant ways.This book discusses how minor life events and the choices we make, as well as those made by our ancestors, fuse with our inherited genes to mould us into individuals. Contrary to recent scientific teaching – nothing is completely hard-wired or pre-ordained A well-researched and informative book ... Great to see academia catching up with the real world. Natural Products