A diverse Mediterranean-style diet with a range of fermented foods to keep your microbes happy is looking like the best present you can offer your brain

Overall this is a fascinating introduction to the topic and makes clear and interesting recommendations to us all in our diets and how we approach our eating habits. Whilst there are reservations I have about the way Spector discusses his sources and his evidence (as opposed to someone like Ben Goldacre who almost goes as far as making it the primary focus of his writing), I understand the need to do it and his own honesty in disclosing conflict of interest and the transparency of his thought process and actions is reassuring. Spoon-Fed is the gastro-science literature flavour of the month... We don't know our artichokes from our elbows when it comes to what constitutes a healthy meal. -- Niall Toner * Sunday Times * My main issue is with the tone of 'advocacy', and even the correct focus on the food companies, and their overreaching influence, can sometimes get in the way of the food science and nutritional essentials I suspect many will have been seeking.Pregnant women do not need to eat for two. At most they require an additional 200 calories a day, and that is in the last trimester. A lot of pregnancy weight gain could be due to this myth being perpetuated. This book had a lot of potential, but left it mostly unfulfilled. On the one hand Spector challenges the moneyed reach of the food industry over research and government policy. On the other, he 'debunks' popular 'myths' about food - mostly telling us why every health fad, from plant milks to vitamin supplements, is actually harmful (or, in the case of chocolate, red wine, and bacon, 'not that bad'). The risk with this is that our actual understanding of the research is limited. We don’t know enough of any of the studies he cites to understand the context for ourselves or to draw our own conclusions. Also, I don’t have the time to review all his studies either. We are in his hands and trust his honesty and his own understanding of the research. The event that prompted this change was suffering a mini stroke at the top of a mountain in his early 50s, after an energetic day of skiing in the Alps. “I went from being a sporty, fitter than average middle-aged man, to a pill-popping, depressed stroke victim with high blood pressure,” he recalls. It was a wake-up call that prompted him to reassess everything he thought he knew about healthy eating, including much of what he’d learned at medical school. Vitamin supplements like Vitamin D and Omega 3 get treated like foods and not drugs even though they are proven not to work

Weight loss is one of the things exercise doesn’t help with and for most of us we have to eat less and choose our foods better to match our metabolism and gut microbes Bottled vs tap water; for most people chances of getting ill from tap water in developing countries (including Italy and Spain) is much less than your chances of dying from a lightning strike or shark biteI think heavy and binge drinking should be targeted, not those relaxing over a leisurely meal with a fine glass of wine