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

[StructuredChaos]

Was listening to some ZOE podcasts, and love eating healthy foods myself, so it isn't a criticism of nutrition awareness. I'm a bit of a cooking nerd so love all of this stuff and finding new recipes, but I am noticing more and more people who seem to believe that eating low upf and fresh fruit and veg can add 'decades' to a human lifespan.

It certainly won't shorten it!
Surely this is an oversimplification, though?

I have always eaten in a kind of 'ZOE' way, and whilst I don't have any metabolic disease, weight problems or other issues, I am not so confident that I am going to outlive my peers due to this. It's something I can control, yes, and that's great, but I think it's deceptive to think we won't ever get cancer, heart disease, dementia or auto immune diseases if we eat in a 'clean' or ideal way.

Not to mention the 'ideal' keeps bloody changing!

I don't think life is that simple at all, even though I do champion healthy, fresh diets.
I see people who claim their spots, headaches, IBS, brain fog, joint aches and other issues immediately cease when they start eating fresh fruit and veg, or low histamine, or low inflammatory diets...... What puzzles me, as someone who has always enjoyed high fibre and fresh foods, is how nebulous those symptoms are, and not very well understood by GP's.
It allows for all manner of snake oil claims online, since the placebo effect is strong.

Just saw a vid with Tim Spector claiming that eating the ZOE way will certainly add 10 extra healthy years to your life. So if we use myself as an example of this, it doesn't take into account my familial heart disease, stroke risk, potential genetic cancers, and a world of non food related risks, of which there are countless examples.

It reminds me of those people who think they will never get ill because they don't smoke. Neither did my parents, but they died before their time (sepsis and vascular dementia).

I thought that the Zoe program data were weakened by the fact that they are heavily skewed towards wealthy western populations?

I eat as well as I can and encourage family to do the same. But I am more of a believer in exercise as a promoter of healthy longevity, having witnessed a future without muscle in the form of my parents’ decline.

So many good posts on this thread! It’s so refreshing to see.

The truth is that food and diet claims are modern quackery. In social terms, as a pp said, attitudes to food are a new form of Puritanism: too often it’s cast as a moral issue.

Eat sensibly, have a varied diet. Drink moderately. Don’t smoke. There’s basically nothing else you can do.

The bowel is not the seat of all disease. Food is not medicine. There is no such thing as ‘unhealthy’ food.

Genes are by far the biggest determinant of life span and health.

I get my kefir in Lidl. No fancy foods required. As much goodness in a savoy cabbage as a cavalo nero. Eat lots of veg and fruit, frozen is fine and plenty of fibre. Add your protein- move towards beans and legumes and some meat/ fish . Move more and keep your muscles strong. It’s pretty simple really. I count myself as lucky as I love healthy foods and am not tempted by cake and sweets etc.

Thanks. I said there are extreme example but also that you can do some yourself. To be fair, Cavolo nero is cheaper than meat. We try to eat legumes (beans (not baked beans so much), lentils, peanuts) once to twice a week, fish once a week and more times a week for adults. I have finally found fish kids (5 and 7) like (they used to like fish until all the kids at nursery kept saying fish is stinky at which point they turned their noses). They will wolf down calamari and one will eat smoked salmon and prawns by the bucket but expanding their fish diet has been slow. I used to not like cake and sweets but after giving birth to my daughter I started liking chocolate (be gone Ritter dark chocolate!) and a bit of cake (not much). I must confess in the last 7 years, I have been careless and my weight has increased from 47kg to 56kg (am super short so that is a lot. Will be trying better. I like oats or oat bran in the morning, nuts throughout the day and dont mind nuts. As I said in my post Spector has done a lot of good promoting fibre and gut health. But one has to pick and choose what they can do from the podcasts - as I said in the first post

I do enjoy dark chocolate 70-85% but savour a square two and apparently it’s good for us! I like Zoe as they do update their advice if the find something new . For example they had thought sauerkraut in jars that had been pasteurised was not good but now have found that although not as good as fresh , the dead microbes do prime the immune system . They’re not afraid to say they were wrong. I listen to scientists and doctors with studies to back them up not self proclaimed nutritionists .

That’s not the only issue. I hate it when people throw out platitudes about their dirt cheap essence of life meals and actually, all I think is I am not spending all that time and effort making something that sounds so horrible. Now I know you think it’s the most delicious thing to ever exist, but I know I’d hate it.

however I’m happy with a tin of Heinz lentil soup, happy having read the ingredients list, it’s very cheap and takes a minute or two to heat up.

that doesn’t mean I am without knowledge or motivation, it means you want to make your soup and I don’t. There is nothing intrinsically valuable about you making your lentil soup. It’s just a preference.

I think there’s some confusion here between things that work at the individual level and at the population level. Of course for an individual there are so many factors at play that changing your diet may make no measurable difference to life expectancy or healthspan as genes and luck play a very large part- we all know people who’ve lived healthily and been unlucky to die young, or who’ve lived unhealthily and died at 100.

But at the population level, if large numbers of people change their diet then certainly life expectancy and healthspan can increase on average. It’s like any positive intervention- eg increasing breastfeeding rates doesn’t guarantee that every BF baby will thrive but increases good outcomes across the population.

That said, my experience is that healthy living inc diet and exercise simply makes me feel better, and when I slob about eating rubbish I feel worse. That in itself is a reason to do it, even if it doesn’t affect my likely life expectancy- but I suppose nobody needs a podcast to tell them that. Inevitably podcasts like Zoe are preaching to the choir, and the reasons that a lot of people don’t live healthily are not going to be fixed by a podcast.

If you've not tasted it how do you know it's horrible?
Like to come for lunch?

The point was you said eating healthily was expensive. It doesn't have to be.

If you don't want to make soup, crack on with Heinz. Your choice.

I agree.

Zoe is a business and although I think the advice is good, I don't agree with the commercialisation of the science.

However, the work of scientists including TS is happening worldwide. There is very serious science going on about the gut microbiome and even how cancer drugs can work more effectively when the microbiome is healthy (this has been shown in scientific trials internationally.)

What the public are getting through Zoe is the tip of the iceberg, dumbed down to a public level, because the science is extremely specialised.

If 40% of chronic illness is lifestyle related (mainly food, drink and lack of exercise) the more that can be done to prevent that, the better.

But no government is willing to really tackle the food companies who promote unhealthy choices.

I think healthy eating is important and I am appalled by the amount of crap some people eat. However, while having a good diet might make you healthier, it's not a guarantee of a long and/or healthy life. It just lessens your chances of getting certain conditions which might limit your life.

I've been a great proponent of eating healthily since my teen years ((I'm 70 now) but despite eating well I still went on to develop autoimmune disease and other food intolerances. My family is long-lived and there is an autoimmune streak running through it so I feel I was unable to prevent that happening (and not even sure what would have prevented it) and that's a big disappointment. There are so many additives now in foods, soils may be depleted of nutrients, added pesticides, you name it. Our bodies are robust but not invulnerable. All I can do now is try to be as healthy as possible but some of it is out of our control.

@NautilusLionfish 10 more healthy years doesn't mean adding 10 years to life expectancy. It means that you'd be healthy for 10 more years of your life instead of unhealthy with heart trouble or diabetes etc. So you'd be less likely to be a drag on the NHS rather than more.

Yes and I weirdly empathise with the mindset as I have coeliac so I am very hyper aware of how much of a difference food makes.

I obviously eat no gluten - and was diagnosed years ago. And for the last five (ish) years eat absolutely no ultra processed foods, lots of fibre, nuts, fruit, veg, incredibly healthily and exercise and socialise and sleep perfectly and do all the “right” things. But I was just diagnosed with another chronic illness. I did have an unreasonable moment where I thought “but I do everything right! That’s not fair!”

Eating well has changed my energy levels, my skin is great, my brain fog doesn’t exist anymore, etc, but it didn’t stop this new chronic autoimmune disease from happening. Food isn’t everything - but for a moment, without giving it conscious thought, I suppose I also (deep down) believed it was.

I said it sounds so horrible

You can't outrun your genes.
More and more discoveries are being made about how genes affect health outcomes.
We're all products of our parents and previous generations' genes.
There is now increasing evidence that parents' lifestyles and health pre-conception affects their children- fat people pass on 'fat gene DNA 'and ill health.

All we can do is maximise our chances of staving off chronic diseases and those related to lifestyle with our behaviour.

Not sure how when you like the Heinz version!

Carrots, red lentils, onion and ginger- do you not like any of those?

Agree wholeheartedly with this post. Again anecdotal but my DF could have been the poster boy for discouraging dementia. He ended up leaving this planet late 70's having suffered Parkinsons, then dementia and lastly pancreatic cancer. He was an intelligent, fit, slim healthy gentleman eating home cooked food daily and fruit and veg coming out of his ears. Only vice was biscuits. Genes have a huge role to play in lifespan, IMHO.

Carrots lentils onion and gingers boiled up with litres of water? Yum. Sounds flavourful and satisfying 😂😭

So tired of reading the acronym UPF on here… It’s just the latest fad. I get fed up with it and find it disordered and they’re also completely western/global north issues. Over the years meat has been terrible, then it’s been great. As have eggs, butter, margarine, low fat products, high fat products, protein, fish. Hard to keep up tbh. It’s usually linked to some sort of influencer.

To be fair the anecdotal ‘evidence’ I have is my Gran. French family, her siblings were all chain smokers and drinkers with the typical high fat French diet. I think she has 3 out of 4 sisters left but 2 are at least a decade younger, her 4 brothers and parents died young.

My Gran had never smoked or drank and eats pretty well- pescatarian with lots of fruit and veg. She’s 81 this year and in good health so unsure whether genetics have played a part there. She’s beat cancer twice- once in her 50s, once 6 years ago whereas her brothers died from it.

Just saw a vid with Tim Spector claiming that eating the ZOE way will certainly add 10 extra healthy years to your life.

I mean, it depends how you were eating before. If someone who was previously eating a very high UPF diet with no fresh fruit/ vegetables, completely overhauls their diet and starts eating in a Zoe way, I could well imagine that might add years to their life.

If you're taking yourself as an example, someone who has always eaten well, then making minor adjustments is unlikely to do much, and of course it's not some kind of magical cure for all ailments, potential genetic diseases etc.

That’s not really true though is it? Chances are good that if you stop smoking, or drug taking, or heavy drinking the last 40 years of your life that you could have a longer halathy life. Bad diet to good diet is very less certain.

I think the opposite.

I think many people, generally, still don't understand how important it is to fuel yourself with nutrient dense foods, free from additives and preservatives.

The food around the edges of the supermarket is where this can be found. Every aisle in the middle of the supermarket - ie, most of the space - is taken up by processed crap, because it's what the nation lives on. And it IS making people sick.

Sure, you can eat like a saint and die of cancer - luck still plays a huge part. But you can manage yourself into having statistically better health outcomes through how you eat.

Bad diet to good diet is very less certain.

How do you know that?

or is just an opinion?

nm