Gene Eating: The Story of Human Appetite

Product Information

Part of this, in very practical terms, is taking steps to keep away from the foods we know we cannot control. “To take a personal, very facetious, example,” Yeo says, “I am not allowed to bring chocolate into the house. I can buy it and have one square, but I will stop at that. If my wife knows there is chocolate around, however, she will eat it all. Now, if there are pork scratchings in the house, for me that is a different story…”

In one experiment he ate vegan for a month and lost about 4.5kg. His blood cholesterol levels also dropped and he says he found the diet manageable (unlike the popular 5:2 diet, where he often felt faint). I am, and always have been, an honest-to-god ‘meatatarian’. All manner of vertebrate species, roasted, BBQ’d, cured, tartared… you name it, I love it. So when the producers of BBC2’s Trust Me I’m A Doctor (where I am one of the presenters) asked me to go on a vegan diet for a month, it gave me pause for thought. But glancing down at my 45-year-old and slightly wobbly belly, I saw an opportunity and agreed. I thought his insights on Processed food vs. unprocessed or less processed food was really good. Because there's a matter of it seeming obvious that some calories are "better" than others... but why? While we don't even have definitive answers here, it was fascinating to learn that your body basically works harder to break down the unprocessed foods, so you're burning more calories when you consume those vegetables, etc. It feels obvious when you say it but it makes so much sense. He mentioned a study that was done where they gave basically identical meals to two groups of people with the same calories, but one group had highly processed bread/cheese and the other didn't. The less processed group burned more calories overall. Yeo was born in Singapore and grew up in San Francisco. When he came to Cambridge as a postgraduate, he found the food options “a bit embarrassing”. It’s got better now, he says, not least since this place, a confident neighbourhood French restaurant, opened a decade ago. Still he has been unable to find any decent Chinese food in the city – he has to go to London for that. My problem is I seriously love my food, so I have to have a strategy where I don’t overeat. It is difficult to overeat plant-based foods, because it is just so much bulkier than meat, meaning you have to eat a lot of plant-based food to match a steak”.This can be making us feel more hungry or less full, why some people like sweet food or fatty food, or why some people respond to stress by eating while others stop eating.” Genetically, there’s no difference between people who are poorer and those who are richer – it’s an accident of birth. But because of your socioeconomic situation, your risk of obesity can jump from 40% to 70%. It shows that if we manage to cure poverty, childhood poverty in particular, we can drop the heritable risk of obesity from 70% to 40% without even touching the biology of the system. What really annoys me is when weight loss gurus say things like: “Oh, just replace the chocolate bar with a banana.” Now that’s a dumb thing to say, because sometimes life demands a banana, and sometimes life demands a chocolate bar. He believes everyone should at least try it, if only to stop being afraid of eating vegan. With the help of his cycling, Yeo has managed to return to his “vegan weight”. But more importantly he now knows he can eat vegan and cook vegan when he wants. As a result he has reduced his meat intake by about half. As he and his fellow researchers began to understand more about how the brain failed to control food intake in extreme cases, they started to see how the disruption of those regular pathways was not unique to severely obese people. There was a spectrum. Yeo left pure genetics and became an accidental neuroscientist. His principal interest is now the genetics of how the brain controls food intake.

First, put together a strategy to expose yourself less to foods that you have a particular weakness for, so is you love chocolate, maybe have less of that lying around your house,” he advises. Dr Giles Yeo is the author of Gene Eating published by Hachette Australia and available in all good bookstores now.The content appeals to readers interested in transitioning to a healthier diet, offering a solid foundation provided by a reputable scientist. Genetics discussion; Authors stance = 70% of our body comp comes from genetics. Looking at my Dad, myself, siblings, and my children, this seems pretty accurate to me. I would define an obese person as someone who is carrying too much fat, so that it begins to influence their health. But then the question is, how much is too much fat? Your fat cells are like balloons, they get bigger when you gain weight, they shrink when you lose weight. But everyone’s fat cells expand and contract to different amounts, so everybody has a different safe, fat-carrying capacity. Famously, us east Asians cannot get too big BMI-wise before we increase our risk of diseases such as type 2 diabetes, because we have a lower safe fat-carrying capacity.

On the contrary, he endorses intermittent fasting and the Mediterranean diet, which is widely considered one of the healthiest in the world. The Mediterranean diet includes relatively high consumption of fruits and vegetables, olive oil, grains, legumes and nuts, moderate consumption of fish and poultry, as well as red wine, and low consumption of diary products and red and processed meat. It has been linked to reduced risk for cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancer, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, and increased longevity. Yeo is likeably ruthless in his book in demolishing some of the fad diets that have made their “inventors” rich. “The idea that you should eat alkaline – drink pH9 water or whatever – has absolutely no scientific truth,” he says. “The detox diet is the one that actually costs a lot of money though. I hear Gwyneth Paltrow is opening a store on Oxford Street. I’m amazed they allowed her in.” We now know that more than 1,000 genes are linked to obesity, and the vast majority of them influence pathways in three different parts of the brain that ultimately influence your feeding behaviour. One is the brain’s fuel sensor called the hypothalamus, then there’s the part of the brain that senses how full you get, and then there’s the hedonic part of the brain that makes eating feel good. All of these regions speak to one another, and some of these 1,000 genes influence these pathways. A mutation that causes a slight insensitivity in your brain to how full you are could influence how much you want to eat, making it more difficult to say no to temptations.Many observational studies have shown that risk of cardiovascular disease goes down with adherence to a Mediterranean diet. Crucially, there was a large randomised trial performed by Spanish scientists to test the effectiveness of two variations of the Mediterranean diets, one diets, supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil and another with nuts, as compared with a low-fat control diet combined with dietary advice.” If you don’t want to take the time to read the book, you basically get all the highlights from Dr Yeo’s Royal Institute lectures on YouTube; he’s an amazing presenter, very entertaining and informative at the same time. In 45 minutes you basically get the best parts of the book. He has presented three BBC Horizon documentaries: Why Are We Getting So Fat? (2016), [5] Clean Eating: The Dirty Truth (2017) [6] and Vitamin Pills: Miracle or Myth? (2018). [7] Giles was also a presenter on BBC Two's Trust Me, I'm A Doctor. [8] His first book, Gene Eating: The Story Of Human Appetite was published in December 2018. [9] His second book, Why Calories Don't Count, was published in June 2021. [10] Giles also presented Plant Based Promises, a three-part BBC Radio 4 programme in June–July 2022. [11] He also hosts the podcast Dr Giles Yeo Chews The Fat. [12] Academic positions [ edit ] Our innate attraction to food high in carbs and fat (i.e. milk) is probably to encourage us to consume energy-dense substances while growing. However we don't outgrow this speculative tendency, and so processed food high in sugar and fat tends to be overconsumed. In November 2019 Giles was the winner of the centenary year The Genetics Society JBS Haldane Lecture, which ‘recognises an individual for outstanding ability to communicate topical subjects in genetics research, widely interpreted, to an interested lay audience’. [14] His Haldane Lecture was entitled 'Is Obesity A Choice', and was given at The Royal Institution in London on November 27, 2019. [15] In October 2020 he was awarded an MBE in the Queen's 2020 Birthday Honours for services to 'Research, Communication and Engagement'. [16] In January 2021 he was a guest on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific. [17] He was awarded The Society for Endocrinology medal in 2022. [18]