To think there's a growing amount of people who think food can fix everything?

To be fair most people in the UK have a poor diet. Lots of UPF and sugar. A healthier diet will likely increase your longevity but also your health in later years

You can do your best but it is often a lottery as to who gets cancer etc.

I completely agree that saying a healthy weight is a powerful way of reducing the risk of all kinds life reducing and limiting disease- things like arthritis, heart attack etc.

interestingly, you don’t have to eat “healthily” to be a normal weight, and people seem to forget that.

I don’t think it’s that it can fix everything but it can help and is within my control. I’m in my early 40’s and have hypertension caused by genetics and preeclampsia. I need meds but if I didn’t also exercise and watch what I eat it could be a lot worse.

My dad has developed a neurodegenerative disease in his 70’s despite always being healthy and exercising and keeping his brain active. I don’t think anything could have prevented him getting this disease but maybe the years of doing the right thing helped delay it? Or at least helped him not develop any co-morbidities. My mother has an extremely healthy diet and at almost 80 is in great health.

Ultimately cancer is just bad luck but there are some lifestyle choices that can increase that bad luck. As a breast cancer survivor I have actively reduced my weight but there is no guarantee that it will prevent recurrence.

I avoid telling some people that I’m a cancer survivor because they suddenly become experts in diet and healthy eating. Like a lot of women who are diagnosed with hormone dependent breast cancer it was diagnosed after using HRT. I was post menopausal and had regular mammograms that showed no evidence of cancer until the screening mammogram that did. For me, and my breast cancer surgeon I was one of the unlucky women who came a statistic.

The advice re diet from breast cancer team is to try and keep a healthy BMI which helps all areas of health but there is no magic diet that reduces your overall risk. I don’t drink alcohol, I gave up in my late 20s because I developed a reaction/allergy to sulphites.

Healthy eating may optimise life span, unhealthy eating may reduce lifespan. Genetics has a much bigger impact on longevity than diet. We know that cardiovascular disease and associated diseases are inherited so if you have a lot of family members who die early of cardiovascular disease or develop type 2 diabetes then it would be in your best interests to undergo regular early screening and follow advice.

Association does not equal causation.

The Adventist study follows mostly white, middle class people - the kind of people who live longer in any event. They don’t smoke, don’t drink and have strong social networks. The gap between vegetarian and non-vegetarian Adventists is narrower than the gap between similar people outside of the church, so there’s no real way to unpick the confounding factors associated with their relatively ascetic lifestyles.

Within the study, the actual effect on all cause mortality is modest - around 10%. At best you can say with certainty that a plant forward diet with limited red & processed meat shows some benefit.

Cardiovascular fitness still remains the only proven causal factor for decreased all cause mortality.

there IS well established research. Look at the longitudinal seventh day adventist study - this clearly shows links between meat and dairy consumption and heart disease and cancers adventisthealthstudy.org/studies .

The mere fact that you even talk about Mediterranean diets demonstrates that you do not have an understanding of this field of research as true researchers don't use it given there is no universal agreed definition on what a mediterranean diet actually is comprised of.

Dr Christopher Gardner (Stanford) and Dr Colin Campbell (Yale) have both irrefutably demonstrated the causal positive links between plant based diets and improved heart health. To a point where researching benefits of a carnivore diet would actually be unethical to do. Both are plant based off the back of their research,

Hmm, mixed feelings about this. Of course you are right that food can't fix everything. But:

• a lot of people are going to have a significantly shorter and/or significantly worse life because of the food they eat

I think it's inevitable that the sort of person who already eats pretty healthily is more likely to listen to the Zoe podcast than one who lives on poor quality food, so inevitably we end up with a small fraction of already-healthy people fretting about the relative merits of cabbage versus sprouts, while millions of people continue to eat shite.

I think the way Zoe positions itself is sometimes a bit questionable- half the time presenting sensible advice and half the time promoting a commercial product that most people don't need. But of all the companies who want to message us about food, they are very much on the side of the angels.

When I had acne it pissed me off no end when people would tell me it’s my fault because I eat badly and if I just cut out dairy/sugar/gluten/some unknown intolerance my acne would go away.

Tried all that, didn’t work. Took some tablets for a few months and fixed my face for good without worrying about eating a biscuit.

You do have a good point but on the other side of it not eating fruit and vegetables really drains you. Partly due to finances and partly due to laziness I don't have a very good diet. For dinner I'll have rice and soy sauce or buttered pasta.

Yogurts for lunch. I do try and make an effort with my breakfasts, having eggs with runny yolk, lots of spinach, and avocado. I actually crave fruit sometimes. But I do take iron and folic acid supplements, and a multivitamin. I do drink a lot of orange juice.

This is hardly a new thing. For centuries people have been using plants and animal products as medicine. I don't think anyone is saying it's a miracle cure, but in general if you eat low UPF you will be healthier than if you eat McDonalds. It's hardly mindblowing. And yes there will be the odd vegan marathon runner who dies of bowel cancer, but in general adopting healthy habits can only be a positive thing.

I think there is a lot of bollocks around about food. I agree with you that it won’t do “that much”- that a bad diet will often shorten your life but this isn’t the same as a good one significantly extending it.

I also think we are in an epidemic of othorexia and are frequently taking diet and exercise advice form people who has eating disorders and use a public profile to manage them. No one needs to learn anything about healthy eating someone with an eating disorder

Agreed. I can't really see the appeal of living well into my 90s. Even if I were to remain reasonably healthy, compos mentis and mobile in my early to mid 80s, the late 80s onward is the point when most people seem to go steeply downhill and become frail, with increasingly poor mobility, deafness and heightened risk of dementia, strokes, falls etc. I'd rather be carried off by something else before I get to that point.

I read the title as fixes stuff like.. makes you happy
I mean I’ve never been sad eating cake

Trouble is, even if eating a super healthy diet does get you a longer life, the ‘extra’ years aren’t in your 20s or 30s, they’d be in your 70s, 80s or 90s. Don’t fancy that much tbh.

When Tim Spector talks about 10 extra healthy years, he is not talking about you or any other individual, he is what happens, on average, when you look at a large group of people. So if you compare 1000 people who for many years eat the Zoe diet with another 1000 people who eat lots of UPFs, the Zoe group will on average have 10 extra years of good health.

Tim Spector’s work is amazing!

Agree @StructuredChaos

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jan/29/long-life-age-health-genetics-science-research

I think people underestimate the impact of stress and also your environment eg air pollutions impact on cognitive decline.

There isn’t really. There’s moderate evidence that a Mediterranean style diet is useful, but no conclusive evidence that one diet over another decreases all cause mortality.

There are however very strong and established links between cardiovascular fitness and longevity. This evidence is much clearer than for any specific type of diet.

I’m sure recent research said genes are more responsible than originally thought for longevity.

Completely agree with you OP and there is a narrative now that diseases & cancer are all lifestyle related, I often see it on here. You can be healthy and still get cancer or suffer high blood pressure, gestational diabetes etc.

unfortunately a large part of how long you live is down to how lucky you are with your health. My super healthy ex is not likely to live more than a few more years yet my dh just had a clean bill of health despite being told that he should shift 4 stone.