8 ways to eat better in 2026 | Prof. Tim Spector and Prof. Sarah Berry

December 26, 2025·1 hr 10 min·4 clips

Change your diet at 40 and add 10 years of healthy life; even at 70 you can add 6 more years according to research.

The conversation begins with the year-end rush toward health goals. It quickly names the problem: nutrition advice has grown louder than ever, crowded with conflicting claims and often short on evidence. Tim Spector and Sarah Berry step in as the people trying to bring some order back. Both bring strong evidence-based credentials to the table, with Tim as a professor of epidemiology and Sarah as a leader in large-scale human nutritional studies. The discussion centers on new core principles for eating better in the year ahead. Those principles are framed as practical rather than ideological. The show keeps asking what actually matters when a listener is standing in front of real food. That shifts the talk toward everyday choices instead of abstract purity tests. A major theme is plant diversity. The episode points listeners toward 30 different plants a week as a simple target that can fit into ordinary meals. Another theme is processing. The scientists explain that foods can be considered at the brand level, not just by broad category. Peanut butter is used to show how two products with the same label can be very different in practice. They also describe a scale that considers processing-related features alongside energy intake rate. The point is to capture how structure and texture shape how quickly calories are eaten. Sarah Berry explains that the team has validated the scale against a large data set. That data includes information from 300,000 people. It connects what those people ate to gut microbiome data and other health outcomes. The result is a conversation about risk, evidence, and what the science can responsibly support. The episode closes by pushing the listener toward momentum, not perfection, and by making small, doable changes feel more useful than a dramatic reset.

As heard by us

A calm reset for a noisy new-year nutrition conversation.

On balance, the episode serves as a useful reset for the loud new-year nutrition cycle. Tim Spector and Sarah Berry push back on familiar certainty around meat, seed oils, protein, supplements, and processed food, then bring the discussion back to what the evidence can actually…

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Cut through nutrition noise with science you can actually use.

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