If his name’s familiar, it’s probably because you recall Professor Tim Spector from the pandemic when he co-led the ZOE COVID Symptom Study, a large-scale research initiative tracking COVID-19 symptoms through a smartphone app. His study — to which many of us contributed — significantly increased understanding the virus’s symptoms and hotspots.
 

The project had originally been set up (just before the pandemic) to track individual responses to food, and it was to this original purpose that he and co-founders, Jonathan Woolf and George Hadjigeorgiou reverted after their temporary pandemic pivot.

Spector’s fame (and his path to Zoe’s personalised nutrition programme) has also been connected to his work in genetics, microbiome research and very digestible books in nutrition He’s also penned a series of books on nutrition, the gut, microbiome and how different foods affect us. The most recent, Food For Life, set out how different foods affect us and has led to his most recent book, a collection of recipes — The Food For Life Cookbook — that helps us put his advice into practice.

As it turns out, he’s Jewish. He tells me his late father (eminent pathologist Walter Spector) was “not very practising” and mother, June, was “an Australian Christian who converted about five minutes before their wedding ceremony — just to please my father’s parents.”

Although Walter and June did not bring him up with any religious faith Spector did feel some connection to his father’s heritage: “there’s a lot of cultural identity — a lot of my friends are Jewish. We lived in north London, and I went to UCS.”

He didn’t see much of his paternal grandparents (“they were unhappy he’d married out”) but did enjoy some classic Jewish food at his grandmother’s — “they were big fans of bagels and smoked salmon”, and she also fed him “roast chicken dinners and the odd gefilte fish but no huge feasts”. He also confesses a fondness for smoked salmon bagels, even if they’re not in line with his healthy eating principles, which broadly focus on nutrient dense, plant-based foods and high-quality proteins in favour of refined carbohydrates — like bagels.

“I’d love to be able to make the healthy bagel, but I haven’t succeeded yet. I do miss a bagel with salmon and cream cheese. Occasionally I have one — I think I had one last year, just to see remind myself what it tasted like. If I could make a sourdough rye bagel then I’d be in business — make a fortune.”

The USP of his recently published cookbook is that each of the 100+ recipes have been written with the aim of maximising our intake of nutrient dense foods to improve our health without any ingredients that may be classed as Ultra Processed Foods (UPF’s) — those ‘foods’ filled with chemicals that he (and other health professionals like Dr Chris Van Tulleken) are warning us are taking over our supermarkets and kitchens.

Spector’s research into healthy eating was triggered by self-interest — as a way of trying to prevent him succumbing to a stroke or heart attack. Assuming himself to be a healthy 50-something he was shocked to suffer a mini stroke while on ski trekking in Italy in 2011. The episode left him with high blood pressure and “the wake-up call I seriously needed.” He started to investigate the practical advice patients like him were being given by the government or online. “It became clear that it was either out of date, unhelpful or unrealistic.” He writes in the book that he and his colleagues simply hadn’t been taught about nutrition. “I thought I was a healthy knowledgeable doctor, but I realised I’d got it wrong, and this was quite a shock for me.”

It was around then he started to become aware of the importance of our gut microbiome — the trillions of microorganisms that live in your gut. He’d learned about its existence at a conference (while working as a professor of genetic epidemiology) a couple of years earlier and says he “had a hunch” that the microbiome was important. In 2012, the pieces fell into place when it came to light that twins with identical genetics had different microbiomes which could explain why they developed different diseases despite being genetically identical.

After experiment results demonstrated that the gut microbiome plays a role in many diseases, including heart disease, obesity and food allergies he started to bring the insights from his clinic into his kitchen, changing his diet and seeing improvements in his own concentration and energy levels.

He also saw a shift in his weight — although is keen to impress upon me this is not a weight loss diet, telling me that what he is offering us is nothing is a far cry from the dietary advice we’ve been fed over the years: “There's abundant salt [in this book], there's lots of fat, lots of chocolate. There's no mention at all of calories or portion control. There is abundance generally — you can add in all these extra things. What’s different about this book to other ones that I've seen out there is that we're trying to bring in ferments and pickles into every possible opportunity — in sort of inventive ways” he says.

Many of the ideas were inspired by his experiments in the kitchen as well as his food history — aubergine schnitzels inspired by the veal version which takes him back to time spent in his youth working in an Austrian restaurant; and a vegan and pulse-packed version of the childhood favourite lasagne his mother used to make. However, as a medical professor he makes no claim to have done it all himself. “It was a team effort” he admits, telling me the recipes were developed together with a group of food professionals including nutritionist and Zoe social media specialist, Georgia Tyler, food writer Kathryn Bruton and Zoe’s head nutritionist, Dr Federica Amati. “I didn't realize how many people it takes to make a cookbook — it's enormous.”

Recipes include a range of fermented foods including kimchi and sauerkraut plus a wealth of colourful fruit, vegetable and pulse-filled salads, soups, pasta dishes and traybakes. Each one offers the grams of fibre per portion (he tells me we need to be aiming for 30g – 50g a day and that the average intake in the UK and US is 20g); and the number of plants included — his current advice is that we need to be aiming for 30 different plants a week. Forget the five or even ten-a-day mantra many of us have been following. Plants can include herbs, spices and even our daily coffee — albeit without added sugar syrup and gallon of milk.

There are also treats — including a (parev) chocolate mousse made with heart-healthy olive oil; carrot cake packed with no less than eight plants and beetroot brownies. He makes the point that it’s all about abundance and adding in extra (healthy) ingredients rather than denying ourselves — even if smoked salmon bagels become a rare treat.

He’s no martyr to his cause though, admitting that he sticks to his rules 80 percent of the time, giving himself freedom for the odd glass of wine, breakfast croissant — or even that bagel.

The key, he says is to be sustainable. “Aim to do that five, five days a week or 80% of the time. So you can let your hair down socializing someone else's house. In France I have the odd croissants and things which, I know don’t do me any good — but as a rare treat, they taste great.”

The Food For Life Cookbook (Jonathan Cape) is out now.