The founder of ZOE Nutrition says eat one thing every meal – and make sure you ‘load your plate’
When it comes to food, usually we’re told to cut the crisps, hold off on the biscuits, reduce the cake and watch our portion sizes. It feels much rarer to be told to load our plates up with more of something. But that’s exactly what epidemiologist and gut health expert Tim Spector is trying to get us to do, specifically with fermented foods.
“It’s about eating more and putting more stuff on your plate,” says the 67-year-old, whose new book, Ferment, is a deep-dive on the super-good-for-you foods. “You like bangers and mash? Well, just add some sauerkraut to that and have a glass of kombucha with it. That will make it healthier.”
Co-founder of personalised nutrition website, ZOE, Spector has been banging on about gut health for a decade, but for the past six years he’s gone all in on tangy, sour, addictive fermented foods, like kefir, kombucha, krauts and kimchi. Foods that, when he wrote his first book, The Diet Myth, “no one had heard of” and now “you can find them on every aisle”, proving that food culture can change fast.
Spector aims to have something fermented with every meal, and says adding them to your diet is “far more important than any supplement you can buy”, as they support the immune system, help stop infection, reduce the speed of ageing, and even boost mental health. They’re also delicious. “We’ve evolved to have fermented foods and we’ve just forgotten,” says Spector, noting that being the country that started the industrial revolution is largely to blame – in many countries around the world, from Japan to much of Europe, fermented foods are still highly prized. “We just threw all the old traditional things out the window. We’re now back-pedalling,” he says, but it’s worth doing: “The most important thing we can do for our health is to make the right food choices.”
Spector finds ferments so thrilling because “you eat your own science”, and the research involved is gripping too. “Things are moving so fast in this field, it’s just really exciting to see these products, which were seen as really alternative medicine, fringe stuff, are now going mainstream.”
“People are doing proper clinical trials,” he continues. “Nobody calls you a nutter for even discussing it, which they would have done in the past.” One of the major new developments discussed in the book is the concept that healthy bugs in ferments “might work both alive and dead”. Which sounds alarming, but “means a lot of the products we thought were of no use actually could be of health benefit”.
But where to start with eating them? “A lot of it is getting used to sour flavours again, because with all the highly processed foods we eat, full of artificial sweeteners and sugar, we’ve lost that love of sourness we had a few generations ago,” says London-born Spector, who helped develop the Covid symptom study app. You probably already have more ferments in your cupboard than you think though. Marmite is fermented, as is soy sauce and some tabascos.
“You’ve got lots of things that were fermented in the process, like coffee and chocolate,” notes Spector. “Some yeasty beers pertain if they’ve got dregs at the bottom – they’re dead microbes you’re drinking that may be producing some mild benefits.” Yogurts that aren’t highly processed and Philadelphia cream cheese count too: “There are at least three different microbial species in that.” Cream cheese can also ease you into the more sour foods. Spector recommends mixing it with sauerkraut or kimchi so “you’re diluting that sharpness”, then move on to adding sauerkraut at the end of stews or soups, or “swap your stock cube for miso paste”.
A more cost-effective, and entertaining option is making your own ferments. “I remember, 10 years ago, looking at people who made their own sourdough as slightly crazy, and now, my fridge is full of it,” says Spector. In fact, it’s half given over to ferments. “It’s full of little pots and bottles, either of finished ferments or of what we call little ‘fermenting hotels’ where grains and mothers and blobs are kept waiting for their next job,” he says. “My wife complains it’s a bit smelly when she opens it.”
The idea of things bubbling away, having to check them and weigh them down, and the potential for explosions, often puts people off the idea. Admittedly, Spector has had the odd disaster himself, including a few kombuchas left too long, which, when opened, “the cork hit the roof, as did the liquid.” He also recommends “leaving off the turmeric until you’re really confident about doing this stuff”, unless you want to redecorate the kitchen yellow… There is an element of trial and error (Spector has only recently nailed fermented mushrooms), but the basics are straightforward to master, and the potential to learn and experiment, vast. You can’t get for simple the sauerkraut he promises, all it involves is cabbage, salt and time. “If you can learn to ferment something, you understand what happens to food inside your own body much more,” he says.
“Fermented food should be part of everyone’s life, and we all need to know more about it. And whether you just buy it from the store or you’re inclined to try fermenting yourself, it doesn’t matter,” he says passionately. “This is an incredible gift that nature and evolution have given us, as well as being good for you, it’s incredibly tasty, there’s a whole new dimension in flavours. Once you’ve started, you won’t look back.”
Ferment – The Life-Changing Power of Microbes by Tim Spector is published in hardback by Jonathan Cape, priced £25. Available now
