Expect lots of healthy ideas - and lentils - in the gut health guru’s first recipe collection. By Sophie Morris
Is there such a thing as too many lentils? Tim Spector doesn’t think so. I’m a bona fide lentil fan but my head, heart and stomach can’t cope with eating them every day.
Luckily, Spector’s first recipe book includes plenty of other ingredients. The Food For Life Cookbook is the first from the founder of Zoe, the personalised diet and nutrition programme that has turned droves of (mostly middle-class, mid-life, possibly menopausal) women on to scoring what they eat each day.
As you would expect, it is stuffed with super-healthy ideas for everyday eating.
The book is the practical companion to Spector’s best-selling Food for Life, which came out in 2022 and set out the 66-year-old celebrity scientist’s approach to eating well for overall good health.
Spector believes that nutrition and good gut health govern many of our other health outcomes, in particular chronic disease. The epidemiologist overhauled his own diet after having a stroke in 2011, a few years after he became interested in the role of the gut microbiome in genetics.
Before opening the book, I know I can expect plenty of fermented foods and liberal sprinkles of nuts and seeds; adding in foods rather than stripping meals back helps Spector’s followers get closer to his mantra of eating 30 plants a week, an approach shown to improve gut diversity.
But I hadn’t expected so many tasty-sounding sweet things, from beetroot brownies made with real sugar, chocolate and eggs (and a king’s ransom of olive oil), to chocolate spread and pecan chocolate cookies.
Dark chocolate is a health food, after all, so I do my bit and make the brownies straight away. They’re not fudgy as I think brownies should be, owing to the lack of butter, and I wish I’d used 70 per cent chocolate instead of the 100 per cent I had kicking around that no one wanted to eat on its own, but otherwise they’re a hit. I feel like I have to offer them round with a warning, but nobody complains or turns them down - although if you like very sweet things, it may take you a while to adapt to cakes with a lower sugar content.
Next I go for an easy recipe from the “Entertaining” chapter. Spector points out that in places such as Sardinia, Crete and Okinawa, where communal eating is a regular event, it is said to contribute to longevity, while in the UK social eating is supposed to make us feel happier and more satisfied with life.
Fine, but it’s a cold Monday evening and I can’t think of anyone who would feel happier or more satisfied from socialising with me, so I choose a very quick blackbean chilli recipe to eat by myself, throwing a can of beans, one of tomatoes and a few spices into a pot and serving it with avocado, although I’ll admit to cheating a little: I ate it with white rice instead of the recommended pearl barley and puy lentils, which are much higher in fibre and protein.
Eating more fibre is one of the six core principles that Spector lays out in his introduction. He thinks our current obsession with packing in protein has got out of hand, and instead, we should “pivot our protein” to plant-based sources that give us fibre at the same time. This means more lentils (the cookbook includes 10 lentil-based recipes), as well as nuts, edamame, yoghurt, cheese, kefir, beans, tofu and eggs.
As well as the lentil recipes, there are 25 that major on beans, from cannellini to borlotti: canned and jarred beans are high in protein and fibre and a sustainable food in agricultural terms. Eating “30 plants” and “the rainbow” are other principles, both of which encourage diversity into our diets, which will nourish our gut microbiome and, as a consequence, improve our overall health.
Spector also recommends eating fermented foods like kefir and kimchi, choosing quality over quantity (trying to avoid ultraprocessed food, for example) and experimenting with time-restricted eating (TRE) - fasting overnight a few days a week, for 12 to 14 hours - to give our guts a break.
According to the recipe, the black bean chilli contains 5g to 10g off ibre and 10 plants. In Zoe-speak, these are both decent ratings. It’s recommended that we eat 30g of fibre a day, but 90 per cent of people in the UK and US aren’t hitting this target.
I haven’t counted points since my desperate Slimming World days and I’m not about to start now; the idea makes me think of calorie counts on restaurant menus, which make me feel guilty. But I appreciate that if you want to ramp up your plant consumption, keeping a tally can be helpful.
I enjoy leftovers of the chilli on day two, and make the aubergine parmigiana from the “Satisfying Mains” chapter for dinner. It’s a standard parmigiana made with slices of aubergine rich with olive oil and a tomato sauce, with a “gut-health twist” of added lentils. On day three, after another leftovers lunch of this, my gut is definitely twisting and in need of a TRE break. I turn to the recipe for “Juno’s lasagne” named for Spector’s mother, but on discovering it is made with yet more tins of lentils, put it off until later in the week. I make kale and cashew soup instead.
This is the only recipe that disappoints me, as mine turns out thin and lacking in flavour. But the pomegranate tabbouleh I whipped up to go with it - bulgur wheat packed with herbs, lemon and olive oil - was delicious. I return to the lasagne later in the week: the sauce, made with fresh mushrooms, dried porcini, sundried tomatoes, lentils, passata, miso and basil is rich and deeply savoury. It comes in at 13 plants; I feel like throwing caution to the wind and adding oregano and paprika to up the total to 15.
If you’re new to the Spector style of eating, you’ll definitely need a cupboard restock - lentils and beans (of every kind) obviously, as well as seeds, nuts and fermented foods such as kimchi and miso appear regularly in the recipes.
But the good news is that there are plenty of quick, easy dishes in the “15-Minute Meals” and “Cupboard Raid” sections: think tahini-miso beans, sweetcorn and spinach dahl and coconut spinach lentils. And I feel pretty smug about making my “seed mix sprinkle” (five plants, 5g off ibre) at home, knowing that it will save me from splashing out on M&S’s Zoe gut shot or Waitrose’s Zoe Daily30+ supplement.
Much has been written about how expensive eating healthily can be, in particular the Zoe programme itself, which costs £300 for the initial test kit followed by a subscription starting at £24.99 a month. And it’s true that eating well does come at a premium. But the Food for Life diet is also surprisingly inexpensive - cheaper than buying convenience food.
Restocking your cupboard with expensive items like olive oil, nuts and seeds seems like a considerable outlay at the beginning, but when I go back to price up the brownies, I find that 200ml of olive oil, which seemed ruinously profligate, costs £2 to £2.50 - the same as a block of butter.
Switching to the Food for Life mindset could take some effort. But approach it like Meat Free Mondays and it’s easy to integrate: pick one of the Food for Life recipes once or twice a week and if you enjoy them, carry on. I plan to.
‘The Food for Life Cookbook’ by Tim Spector is published on 10 October, Jonathan Cape, £28
Tim Spector’s pecan chocolate cookies
MAKES 12 COOKIES 2tbsp ground flaxseed 3tbsp light brown sugar 4tbsp extra virgin olive oil 200g ground almonds 50g pecan nuts (these could be swapped for pumpkin or sunflower seeds), roughly chopped 80g dark chocolate (at least 70 per cent cocoa solids), chopped Pinch of salt
Preheat the oven to 180?C/160?C fan/350?F/gas 4 and line a baking tray with baking parchment. To make the flax egg, mix the ground flaxseed with 4tbsp of water and set aside for 15 minutes.
Mix the brown sugar, olive oil and flax egg together. Add the ground almonds, pecan nuts, chocolate and salt and mix again.
Shape into 12 tight balls and flatten slightly into cookies about 1cm thick (it helps if you do this with damp hands). Bake for 10 to 12 minutes until tinged golden brown at the edges, then leave to cool completely on the tray. Store in an airtight container.
Sweetcorn and spinach dhal
SERVES 4 2 x 195g tins sweetcorn and their liquid 4tbsp extra virgin olive oil 1 onion, finely chopped 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped 1tsp ground turmeric 1tsp ground coriander 1tsp garam masala 1½tsp chilli flakes 160g red split lentils 2 cubes of frozen spinach 1tbsp cumin seeds 1tbsp dried curry leaves (optional) Salt and black pepper Soft-boiled egg, for a top up Fresh chilli, for a top up Coriander, for a top up
Empty a tin of sweetcorn and its liquid into a blender, add 550ml water and blend until smooth.
Heat 2tbsp of the oil in a saucepan over a medium heat and sauté the onion for three minutes, until soft and translucent. Add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds more.
Add the ground spices and cook for 30 seconds, then stir in the lentils, frozen spinach, the blitzed sweetcorn stock and the remaining tin of sweetcorn and its liquid.
Bring to the boil then lower the heat and simmer gently for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the lentils are soft. Add a dash of water if the dhal becomes too thick. Season generously with salt and pepper.
Just before the dhal finishes cooking, heat the remaining olive oil in a small frying pan and add the cumin seeds and curry leaves (if using). Fry over a low-medium heat for about a minute, or until the seeds start to pop. Pour over the dhal, stir to combine and serve.
Aubergine parmigiana
SERVES 4 WITH LEFTOVERS 3 aubergines, sliced lengthways 2tbsp olive oil 1 onion, finely chopped 2 garlic cloves, roughly chopped 1 red chilli, thinly sliced 1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes 1 x 400g tin black or green lentils, drained 30g basil, leaves torn plus a few to garnish 125g ball of mozzarella, torn 20g grated Parmesan cheese Salt and black pepper Kimchi, for a top up
Preheat the oven to 200?C/180?C fan/400?F/gas 6.
Line a large baking tray with baking parchment and lay out the aubergines in a single layer. Season with salt and pepper and drizzle 1tbsp of the olive oil all over. Bake for 25 minutes until golden and soft.
Meanwhile, place a frying pan over a medium heat and sauté the onion in the remaining oil for three minutes. Add the garlic and chilli and cook for a minute more. Pour in the tomatoes and lentils, then half-fill the tomato tin with water and add this to the pan. Simmer for 10 minutes until slightly thickened. Add the basil and cook for five minutes, then season with salt and pepper.
Spoon a third of the ragu mixture into the base of a 20cm to 23cm square ovenproof dish (or similar) and top with a layer of aubergine. Repeat this twice more, then finish with the mozzarella and Parmesan.
Bake for 30 minutes until the cheese is bubbling and golden brown. Serve with some steamed greens.