Tim Spector admits he used to have a Pringles problem. The salty, melt-in-your-mouth snack was a weak spot for the professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London and gut health expert.
“I could taste the chemicals on them,” he tells Fortune, “but at the same time there was something that made me addicted to eating them.”
Now, Spector is well-versed in the world of ultra-processed foods as the co-founder of ZOE, a UK-based nutrition company known for its gut health testing, and the author of multiple books including The Diet Myth and Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well.
Spector optimizes his diet with nutrition, longevity, and gut health in mind.
4 foods he never eats
1. Ultra-processed salty snacks
While Spector used to love indulging in Pringles and Cheetos, those crunchy, salty snacks are no longer a part of his diet, and top the list of foods he avoids.
“It’s the food industry that’s pushed us into this snack culture,” Spector says. Many ultra-processed snack foods are “hyper-palatable,” he adds, which make them easy to overeat.
The mixture of fat, sugars, and salt combined with a texture that almost dissolves in your mouth can make it hard to stop eating, not to mention their overly processed nature that can potentially threaten your health. That rapidly dissolving texture also disperses something like a Pringle or a Cheeto into the bloodstream much quicker, avoiding the body’s mechanisms that make you feel full, Spector says.
2. Sugary breakfast cereals
Spector steers clear of sugar-packed cereals that are “totally artificially created…that have 20 to 30 ingredients,” and look nothing like the foods they’re made from.
“You sort of feel this chemical rush as you’re eating them,” he says.
Spector recalls being a kid and loving the sugar rush of a chocolatey cereal so much, that he’d eat it to the point of nausea.
“It’s not ever something you’d find in nature,” he says. While a nice, sweet banana might be tasty, he says, that doesn’t mean you’d want to eat five in a row.
“I now know what the food companies are trying to do,” Spector says. “They’ve got the right mix of the salt, the sugar, and the fat. They know how to light up that bit of my brain.”
One study found that foods high in fat and sugar—like many ultra-processed foods—can trigger a sense of reward and a dopamine response in the brain, making them harder to put down.
3. Low-fat yogurt
While the U.S. Dietary Guidelines recommend that Americans include low-fat dairy in their diets, Spector avoids low- or non-fat yogurt—and reaches for full-fat yogurt instead. Part of it is personal preference—he says he enjoys full-fat yogurt more—but it is also for health reasons.
“They’ve just substituted fat with cheaper starch from corn and added all sorts of flavorings and glues to make it feel like it’s still got that milk fat in it,” Spector says.
Additives aside, the processing of low-fat yogurt can also sometimes degrade the quality of the yogurt, he says, removing beneficial fat-soluble vitamins from the yogurt.
One study stated that fat-soluble vitamins like A and D are removed along with the fat during processing, but they are often added back in to restore the nutritional value—however, since those vitamins are fat-soluble, the body may have more difficulty absorbing them in the absence of fat.
4. Foods labeled ‘low-calorie, high-protein’
Whenever Spector sees a food that is advertised as “low-calorie, high-protein,” it immediately raises red flags. That includes foods like protein bars, powders, and other products infused with protein—which nowadays can include everything from cereals to ice cream.
“That just sends me a red alert that this product has been highly tampered with,” Spector says.
He explains that it’s cheap for companies to add protein to their products—even as they mark up the prices—as they play into the trend of people looking to eat high-protein, low-calorie diets.
Spector’s favorite sweet treat
Despite Spector’s frustration with the pervasiveness of ultra-processed foods in the American diet, he admits that there are some he’s happy to eat. His favorite is Lindt dark chocolate, which Spector considers ultra-processed because of the additive soy lecithin.
Many chocolate brands add the emulsifier soy lecithin, which gives it that velvety texture while binding the chocolate together. Soy lecithin is generally considered a safe additive. One study indicates it could have health benefits like lowering bad cholesterol, but there are concerns about the safety of genetically modified food and the process by which soy lecithin is extracted uses chemical solvents like hexane.
It’s hard to find a chocolate without soy lecithin, he says, “but overall that is a healthy product.”
Dark chocolate does have numerous benefits, as it is rich in flavonols, and important minerals, including iron, magnesium, zinc, copper and phosphorus which support immunity, bone health, and sleep quality.
And in a 2022 study, dark chocolate was found to boost mood due to the polyphenolic compounds in dark chocolate.
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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