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

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No fads, no nonsense, just practical, science-based advice on how to eat well' Daily Mail, Books of the Year No fads, no nonsense, just practical, science-based advice on how to eat well. Daily Mail, *Books of the Year*

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.

Christmas Gifts

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. 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. Spoon-Fed was written before the pandemic but it covers ground that is as relevant now as ever. For weeks, I had been reading alarming headlines on the link between low vitamin D levels and an elevated risk of dying from Covid-19. But Spector’s chapter on vitamins convinced me that vitamin D pills are not a panacea, despite the way they are currently being marketed. “Overuse of vitamin D supplements has been linked in several trials to weakened bone density, as well as increased falls and fractures,” Spector writes.

A brilliant deep-dive into how food affects our wellbeing – and more importantly, what we can do about it. Enlightening and empowering Liz Earle From the bestselling author of Spoon-Fed and The Diet Myth, a comprehensive guide to the new science of nutrition, drawing on Tim Spector's cutting-edge research. 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. The book’s main argument is that to find the best way of eating we need to ignore much of what we are told. Spector’s myths include the idea that fish is always a healthy option and the dogma that “sugar-free foods and drinks are a safe way to lose weight”. 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. This new book is broader, but he manages to distil a huge amount of research into a clear and practical summary that leaves you with knowledge that will actually help you decide what to add to your next grocery shop. He convincingly argues that coffee and salt are healthier for most people than general opinion decrees, while vitamin pills and the vast majority of commercial yoghurts are less so. He is in favour of vegetables – as diverse a range of them as possible – but does not rate vegan sausage rolls as any healthier than the meat equivalent. The greatest obstacle when it comes to getting accurate information about food has been the food industry Will actually help you decide what to add to your next grocery shop... This is one of the clearest and most accessible short nutrition books I have read: refreshingly open-minded, deeply informative and free of faddish diet rules. Bee Wilson, The Guardian - praise for SPOON-FED

Toys

Food is our greatest ally for good health, but the question of what to eat has never seemed so complicated. Bestselling author and top 100 most-cited scientist Tim Spector has the answers in this definitive, easy-to-follow guide to the new science of eating well. 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. 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”. Food is our greatest ally for good health, but the question of what to eat has never seemed so complicated. In his new book, Tim Spector creates a unique, thorough, evidence-based guide to the real science of eating. Moving away from misleading notions of calories or nutritional breakdowns, Food for Life empowers us to make our own food choices based on a deeper understanding of the true benefits and harms that come from our daily transactions with the foods around us.

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. The book presents scientific information in a clear and understandable manner, and the writing style is easy to follow. 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. 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.No fads, no nonsense, just practical, science-based advice on how to eat well’ Daily Mail, Books of the Year