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Since launching in July, join me and let me know what you think. 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, you know, it's things in their pure form. So it's nuts, it seeds, it's grains that haven't been ground up super-finally. It's all the amazing plants and fruits and vegetables that we've got. They're healthy foods, but you know, it's not straightforward. Yes, I've got this list of 10 super foods. It's understanding that many foods that 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've moved away from that. But, you know, going back, you know, olive oil, for example, is a great example of something that's been vilified often because it has lots of fats in it.
And, you know, certainly, I was talking about the Mediterranean. They have olive oil and everything. It's horrible. It's all fatty. Turns out that's a perfect, you know, 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 can be refined. You can take that and you can keep refining it. You can take corn on a cob as an example.
And then you've got tortilla chips or something down the other end, which bears or cornflakes, which bears no resemblance to the original and their versions of the spectrum. God, it's so confusing, you know, because what you've said to me is, you know, based on research and studies, but then when I go to a supermarket labelling, even I just think in cornflakes, I think I grew up thinking cornflakes were healthy because it says corn in the title.
You know what I mean? And it's, and 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 kind of 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 mean, I can go to the vegetable aisle and I can say, OK, that looks like a cabbage. It looks like no one's messed with that. There's been no study done on that to it hasn't been through a laboratory. But how do I like, if I'm in an aisle tomorrow, how do I know what food is good and what is not?
Well, you've said the first thing, if it's not in a package, you're pretty sure it's good. OK, so if it's concealed in some package that's got, you know, happy children and signals of vitamins in it, that should be a warning sign.
You know, the more they have to advertise the food and say what its additives are 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 that says means they've had to add in lots of artificial sweetness or protein extracts or something else is also a big danger sign. Low in fat means they've replaced the natural fat with something else that's cheaper and these are all warning signs, you know, and you know, you take breakfast cereals.
I used to, I used to eat lots of breakfast cereals. I was brought up on them, highly sugary stuff. And then I thought I was being healthy when I moved to mouslies and posh, posh stuff. But actually, when you still, you know, that appearance of healthiness, it's still got lots of additives in it. It's still got lots of sugar in it. And there's 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, they said, I 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 just added to tick a box saying it has iron, but they don't get into your body or do anything. So 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.
So it's, you know, but it's a lot of brain, you know, we've been in brainwash for years and decades in this. And, you know, I was as well as a doctor, you know, I should know better. And yet I've completely changed my, two of my meals completely. So I've gone from having musely with low fat milk and orange juice and a cup of tea, because I did, you know, I started doing these tests for Zoe.
Zoe, I found out that gave me a massive sugar spike and was a terrible way to start the day and I got these dips at 11 o'clock to a high full fat yogurt, nuts, seeds, a few berries, and never have orange juice. That's on my, that's a really unhealthy drink for everybody. And I have lots of black coffee, which I now know is good for me. So that's totally different. I changed my lunch for at least 10, 15 years when I got in the hospital lunch, which used to be in the canteen.
And I was just, the marks and spencers got a healthy looking sandwich with brown bread, sweet corn, and tuna, and a smoothie, you know, 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, you know, there's general rules, but also there are specific rules. And I was told that this is how I do individuality is coming in. So it could be that you could, 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 out, 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 croissants each. Mine would shoot up. She had no change at all in her sugar, which is really annoying.
So, but it also brings brings home the fact that, you know, 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. And that's really the whole essence of really, you know, setting up this personalized nutrition research and Zoe and everything else. But on top of this general advice about changing our idea of food, I think.
Because I think they do go hand in hand. That if you realize, 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 bad. You know, it's much more nuanced.