Felicity Cloake

The Mighty Microbe

The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat

By

Weidenfeld & Nicolson 318pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

It’s not often a book changes my life in a mere three chapters, but a quarter of the way through The Diet Myth I went out to buy some natural yoghurt for breakfast. A hundred pages or so later, on learning of the benefits of intermittent fasting, I decided to have it for lunch instead.

Given my usual reluctance to jump on any passing nutritional bandwagon, I reckon this makes Tim Spector’s work a rather compelling read – the more so since, unlike many of the current crop of shiny-haired and dewy-skinned ‘nutrition experts’, he is a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London and has over seven hundred academic papers to his name. Even more reassuringly

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'The 19th-century German sage is not my idea of a pleasant travel companion' goes hiking with Friedr… ,
    • If you want ideas about what to read next, sign up to our free email newsletter, and get book reviews, archive mate… ,
    • 'The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory', as Michelangelo’s 'David… ,
    • 'Munch’s later works show us a man liberated from the torments that gave rise to some of the best-known early works… ,
    • 'We read from left to right and from start to finish. Or do we?' Stuart Hannabus considers the merits of reading i… ,
    • Domestic scandal, sexual abuse and serial killers are on the menu in April's crime round-up. revie… ,
    • What did Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, James Boswell and Edmund Burke all have in common? Clare Bucknell reveal… ,
    Follow Us