Out of instinctive rebellion against his father’s wishes, as a teenager he resisted becoming a doctor, only giving in at the last moment by ‘scraping into medical school with grades you’d get laughed at today’, including a D in physics. That medical school was St Bartholomew’s in London, where he preferred the social side of things.
‘Sports, drinking, comedy… I took part in sketch comedy at cabaret nights, doing sketches and songs. It was started by Graham Chapman of Monty Python. Probably doesn’t exist anymore, it was all very non-PC.’ (He remains a keen fan of the arts, leaving our meeting to watch ‘a gay retelling of the Nutcracker’ at the Southbank Centre.)
Rote learning wasn’t for him, but he took to hands-on clinical work, and was taken with one early project looking at whether coffee is good for people. The answer, as he stresses often these days, was yes. ‘I liked that sort of thing, it was a bit like being a detective, I got a real buzz from it that I never got from rote learning biology essays.’
Once qualified, he took a junior doctor role with Barts in Hackney, east London, before rotating to Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc Belgium. Bluffing through the interview with bad French, he ended up with 14 cardiac patients and une très grande barrière linguistique between him and them.
Quite brave, really. ‘Yeah, but I was fluent after about three months. And I got a wife out of it.’ At the time, Veronique Bataille was a medical student who wooed Spector with a box of croissants, before ‘showing me the good restaurants’ in Brussels. ‘In the 1980s, even what they served in their hospital canteen was better than what I’d had in restaurants in London.’
After a year, Bataille moved to London to be with Spector, and went on to work her way up to consultant, specialising in melanomas. They married in Belgium in 1988, and have two children: Sophie, 34, an immigration lawyer, and Tom, 31, who works for a medical start-up.
As a genetic epidemiologist, Spector’s primary interest has involved researching what role our life choices and life events play compared to our genes. His TwinsUK registry allowed him to study two people with remarkably similar genes and ask why one may get diabetes or cancer, or one may be slimmer than the other, or how each reacts to certain foods.
By 2012, this work had revealed that of all the things different about twins, they are most distinct in their microbiomes: the collection of millions of microbes, fungi, viruses and other single-celled organisms that teem around inside our bodies, but particularly our guts. Spector likens it to a rainforest: it only blooms if it has the right diverse balance of organisms. Give it too much of one thing, or the wrong thing, and the balance will be off, potentially seeding long-term damage.
The real key to good nutrition, then, might lie as much in learning about our individual microbiomes as it does in adhering to blanket rules, such as religiously observing calories in and calories out. Spector was preparing to look further into this when he suffered a small stroke while skiing with his family in the Alps. His symptoms were relatively mild, but it left him determined to sort out his health.
‘With the retrospectoscope on, that was the turning point. One of the key human drivers is selfishness. We all like to think we’re altruistic, but if you really want to focus, it’s quite good to have an event. I had an unexplained real event, and high blood pressure, and wondered what I should do,’ he says.
‘I discovered we knew nothing about how to give advice about nutrition, and that most of the stuff out there, especially on government websites, was plain wrong. I thought we must be able to use this new science to think about food in a new way.’
So began a prolonged period of nutritional self-experimentation, including a brief flirtation with veganism, while he fundamentally reassessed his diet. As his research continued, he wrote a book, The Diet Myth, including in it research gathered from an experiment in which his own son, then a university student, ate solely McDonalds for 10 days.
He ended up feeling sick, in a low mood, lacking in appetite, looking jaundiced, feeling constipated and losing 1,400 bacterial species in his gut. Other than that, he had a terrific time. ‘I took advantage of a student, really,’ Spector says.
Today, the health of Tom’s microbiome is still well below average compared with his father, who is in the top five per cent according to Zoe’s scores. Do either of them regret the experiment? ‘Um, I think so, yes. I really want him to get back. He’s still young, he has time to improve it, so my goal is to get him into the top five per cent with me.’
For the previous 20 years, Spector would eat a banana and muesli with orange juice for breakfast, then a supermarket sandwich and crisps for lunch. He will now often have a black coffee first thing, some natural yoghurt with kefir, chopped nuts, fruit and seeds at around 11am, a lunch of perhaps a salad or avocado on toast, and a vegetarian curry for dinner – aiming to eat 30 plants per week (that includes herbs and spices).
‘It’s always different, but people are forever asking me to outline what I eat in a day. Part of the point is that you should always be varying it.’
I ask if I can show him what I ate for breakfast. Before he can answer, I put a berry-flavoured protein bar and a banana in front of him. He picks up the bar by the tips of his fingers, as if it is radioactive, or evidence at a crime scene.
‘Well, anything in a plastic wrapper with what we call “health halos” is generally bad. It says on it “high in fibre, high in protein”, which is an immediate issue. And the list of ingredients on the back is a paragraph long – that tells me all I need to know about it. It’s ultra-processed food.’
I am the typical profile of somebody Spector comes across a lot: young(ish), and thinks they’re health-conscious but really I just exercise lots, so feel I can eat anything. ‘You go to the gym, you eat this and think you’re done. That’s nonsense. You’re not protein deficient. And the banana is OK, but it causes a sugar spike in me, so I try to vary it with different fruits.’
Almost nobody is protein deficient, yet it dominates nutrition supplements, being easy to add to things and even easier to market to young vain fools like me, usually at a vast mark-up. Spector dispares at the rise of the protein supplement industry, especially as we have ‘a fibre crisis’ in this country. He is just as disparaging of meal replacement powders and almost all supplements.
I wonder aloud at what it’s like to have Spector at the feast. I pity the poor dinner party hosts who have to work out what to feed him. ‘Well, I don’t get invited to dinner parties nearly as much as I used to… It’s really upsetting. I’m not critical at all, but they think I won’t like lasagna,’ he says.
‘Actually, on special occasions, all bets are off, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t eat if it was going to make it socially awkward. It’s much more important to sit down for a meal with friends and be sociable than worrying about an occasional lapse.’
Ideally, a lunch table filled with different dishes, allowing people to choose what and how much they eat, and meals stretching over many hours, is the set-up he’d consider healthiest. Mediterranean and Middle Eastern nations do this well. One-pot meals, though convenient, are generally worse.
He isn’t strict in any way, he insists, and follows ‘about a 90/10’ rule when it comes to indulging – be it meals out, chocolate or alcohol (on the latter, it’s mainly red wine). After six years of not eating meat, he now does once a month or so, after realising how it can be beneficial in small amounts, so long as it is good quality.
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