Calorie counting is a useless way to determine food quality. Your best bet is to judge a food on the quality and variety of ingredients rather than calorie count or grams of fat from the label. The less ingredients, the less manipulated the product is likely to be TL;dr - eat a wide range of plants and seeds, though there's no need to avoid anything completely. Unless you've tried cutting it (where it = meat /milk /nuts / relatives' cooking) out and you feel better. The number and variety of different plants is essential - the more plant species we eat in a week (ideally 20-30) the healthier and more diverse our gut microbes become which helps to keep our bodies in good shape Pregnant women do not need to eat for two. At most they require an additional 200 calories a day, and that is in the last trimester. A lot of pregnancy weight gain could be due to this myth being perpetuated.

Regular bursts of activity raising our heart rate reduces heart disease, high blood pressure and levels of blood fat For years, Spector believed that genetics would explain much of why people are the way they are. And to some extent it does. For instance, Spector’s group was among the first to demonstrate that people’s weight distribution is largely influenced by their genes. Trying to understand why one twin is sometimes overweight and the other skinny, one gets diabetes or cancer and the other doesn’t, has been a major theme for the past 20 years

Spector describes the changes he’s made to his diet as “an evolving process”. He only eats meat about once a month, while concerns about sustainability means he only has fish occasionally, at restaurants: “I wouldn’t say I suddenly had the answer when I discovered the microbiome, but I’ve slowly been changing the habits I had when I was a smug doctor thinking that I knew everything.”As well as a desire to nurture his “inner garden”, his dietary choices are motivated by the insights he’s gained from monitoring his personal responses to different foods. This is why he eschews large amounts of pasta, rice and potatoes – not because they are inherently unhealthy, but because using a continuous glucose monitor has revealed that they produce worryingly high spikes in his blood sugar levels. Suffers from coeliac disease need to eat gluten regularly for six weeks prior to medical tests for accurate results The problem with the 10,000 steps a day guideline; the step count doesn’t necessarily correlate with increasing your heart rate, and is not affected by intense activities such as weight lifting or cycling, so this will miss short bursts of exercise or even just brisk walking, which are likely to be much better for your help

Positives of tap water; Flouride is naturally occuring in tap water and has been proven to be effective in reducing tooth decay The high-octane, polemical approach that has become popular amongst a certain set of evidence-driven, 'rationalist' authors — a symptom perhaps of their vying for limited attention in a social media landscape already overwhelmed with the misinformation they're combating — isn't one I'm fond of, and doesn't often have the effect, I suspect, they're after. I'd have preferred a subtler, analytical, less 'campaigney' lense - even at the risk of it making for a drier read. This also gives some practical and useful ideas and insights into how you can do the best you can for your own nutritional health, without going into complicated label readingThere is refreshing freedom in some of the advice given: regular small quantities of alcohol are not bad for you and are probably slightly good for you. Coffee is good for you. It doesn't matter at all whether you have breakfast or not and it is certainly not an absolute 'most important meal of the day' for everyone. This all comes at a caveat of individual medicine or individual microbiomes: Spector places great emphasis via observational studies that only 1% of people display 'average' responses to all of carbohydrate, fat and protein in their diet or display 'typical' trajectories in blood glucose, insulin and blood fat levels after meals. We are truly all unique when it comes to our diets and the way we metabolise them. The risk with this is that our actual understanding of the research is limited. We don’t know enough of any of the studies he cites to understand the context for ourselves or to draw our own conclusions. Also, I don’t have the time to review all his studies either. We are in his hands and trust his honesty and his own understanding of the research. This book had a lot of potential, but left it mostly unfulfilled. On the one hand Spector challenges the moneyed reach of the food industry over research and government policy. On the other, he 'debunks' popular 'myths' about food - mostly telling us why every health fad, from plant milks to vitamin supplements, is actually harmful (or, in the case of chocolate, red wine, and bacon, 'not that bad').