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Quality food. What is quality food in your definition of the phrase?

It's the opposite of ultra-processed food, which is whole food, which is made from the original ingredients of plants, mainly plant-based, but it's not exclusively, that contains all the nutrients that those plants produce without it being stripped away or boiled up or highly pressurized, deformed. And so they have to add in back those nutrients. So it's things in their pure form. So it's nuts, it's seeds, it's grains that haven't been ground up super-finely. It's all the amazing plants and fruits and vegetables that we've got. They're healthy foods, but it's not straightforward. Yes, I've got this list of 10 superfoods. It's I understand that many foods are healthy for us, most of them are in their original form. Berries, nuts. Virtually every vegetable is healthy for us if it's in that original form. It's only because we had to learn to preserve things, we had to do trickery to make margarines and things with chemistry that we moved away from that. But going back, olive oil, for example, is a great example of something that be vilified often because it has lots of fats in it. And certainly, I was told, the Mediterranean, they have olive oil on everything.

It's horrible. It's all fatty. Turns out it comes from the olive. The good stuff, extra virgin olive oil, has very little done to it, and that is a good, healthy, quality food. But it It can be refined. You can take that and you can keep refining it. You can take corn on the cob as an example, and then you've got, I don't know, tortilla chips or something down the other end, or cornflakes, which bears no resemblance to the original. They're all versions on the spectrum.

God, it's so confusing because what you've said to me is based on research and studies. But then when I go to a supermarket, labeling, even I was just thinking then cornflakes. I think I grew up thinking cornflakes were healthy because it says corn in the title. You know what I mean? When you're trying to navigate, I was just thinking, if I'm going down an aisle now, hearing what you've just said, that that quality food is food that is not ultra-processed and resembles its original form. When you walk down the aisle in the supermarket, everything is trying to pretend that it's good. So how do I know what is good? I can go to the vegetable aisle and I can say, Okay, that looks like a cabbage. It looks like no one's How do you mess with that? There's been no study done on that. It hasn't been through a laboratory. But if I'm in an aisle tomorrow, how do I know what food is good and what is not?

Well, you said the first thing, if it's not in a package, you're pretty sure it's good. If it's concealed in some package that's got happy children and signals of vitamins in it, that should be a warning sign. The more they have to advertise the food and say what its additives and everything, the more you should be wary about it. The number of ingredients is another pretty good sign. So once you get over 10, particularly if there's lots you've never heard of, you wouldn't find in your kitchen, you should also be wary that that is ultra-processed food. Anything that says low calorie means they've had to add in lots of artificial sweeteners or protein extracts or something else is also a big danger sign. Low in fat means they've I've placed the natural fat with something else that's cheaper. And these are all warning signs. And you take breakfast cereals. I used to eat lots of breakfast cereals pills, I was brought up on them, highly sugary stuff. And then I thought I was being healthy when I moved to Moseleys and posher stuff. But actually, that appearance of healthiness, it's still got It's still got lots of additives in it.

It's still got lots of sugar in it. And those cereal packets have added vitamins in it, but they're often in a very poor form. I did the experiment once where I took some cornflakes or Special Care, I can't remember, that says it has added iron. And if you mix it up, you can put a magnet on it, you can get off the iron filings. They're so cheap that they're just added to tick a box saying it has iron, but they don't get into your body or do anything. Anything that's got these things added with this in it, low in this, is a sign that they're obscuring the quality of the product. But there's a lot of brain... We've been brainwashed for years and decades in this. And I was as well as a doctor. I should know better. And yet I've completely changed my two of my meals completely. So I've gone from having muesli with low fat milk and an orange juice and a cup of tea because when I started doing these tests for Zoe. I found out that gave me a massive sugar spike. And it was a terrible way to start the day.

And I got these dips at 11:00 to a high full fat yogurt, nuts, seeds, a few berries, and never have orange juice. That's on That's a really unhealthy drink for everybody. I have lots of black coffee, which I now know is good for me. That's totally different. I changed my lunch for at least 10, 15 years when I got I was having a hospital lunch, which used to be in the canteen, then it was Marks & Spencers got a healthy-looking sandwich with brown bread, sweet corn, and tuna, a little bottle. And that gave me a massive sugar spike. And I wouldn't have known that. And I was told that should have been a healthy thing to eat. So there's general rules, but also There are specific rules. And this whole idea of individuality is coming in. So it could be that you might be fine on that. Don't know. I was very annoyed because when I started, we were starting doing this testing for Zoe. I had I had all these spare kits, and I gave my wife one as well. And we sit down and she's French-Belgian and loves croissants, and so we'd have croissant each.

Mine would shoot up. She had no change at all in her sugar, which is really annoying. But it also brings home the fact that everyone loves simplistic rules, but you can only get so far with them. You have to start experimenting yourself and see what works for you and not just take everything for granted. That's the whole essence of really setting up this personalized nutrition research and Zoe and everything else. But on top of this general advice about changing a whole idea of food, I think, because I think they do go hand in hand, that if you realize there are these individual differences, you realize it's not as simple as you've been told. It's not that fats are evil, it's not that calories are It's much more nuanced.