Welcome to the Power Hour. I'm Adrienne Herbert, wellness coach, international speaker and author.

Each week I speak to a variety of guests from business founders to Olympic athletes, leading coaches,

change makers and innovators to find out their daily habits, their rules to live by and what motivates

them to get up out of bed each day. Personally, I am on a mission to encourage, motivate and

inspire, so I hope that the power hour will help you to achieve your personal and professional

goals. Welcome back to the podcast. Today I am joined by Professor Tim Spector,

Professor of Genetic Epidemiology. Tim is a specialist in twin studies, genetics, epigenetics,

microbiome and diet. His books, The Diet Myth and Spoonfed, teaches about the science of food and deconstruct

many common myths about diet, exercise and the food industry. Tim's latest book, Food for Life,

which is out very soon, looks at the new science of eating well. Tim, thank you so much for

joining us. It's a pleasure. Well, I'm very familiar with your books, your work. I've seen you speak at events in the past and online.

So I've got a lot of questions for you today. But firstly, I think a great place to start would be that you've said food is our greatest ally for good health.

So could we start by exploring this? You know,

we all have to make a choice each day about what we're going to eat, how much we're going to eat.

So why is this choice the most important when it comes to all of the other things we could consider

when it comes to our health outcomes? I think there are a number of reasons.

And there's the epidemiology reason, the sort of boring, old-fashioned reason that if you look at all the common chronic diseases and you work out the effect of moving everyone

from a bad quality diet to a good quality diet, most estimates say you could

reduce those by something between 50 and 80%. So we know that as one sort of public health act,

that would be the most significant for the population. And then of course we've got to think of the individual

of all the things that you can do in your life, probably the one you have most control over

is not your environment, whether you live in a city or whether you have a sedentary job or not

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