The Food for Life Cookbook: 100+ Recipes Created with ZOE [A Gut Health Cookbook]

by Tim Spector

Overview

More than 100 "fantastic recipes and ideas” (Yotam Ottolenghi) for optimizing your gut health from the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Food for Life and co-founder of the nutrition science company ZOE.

In The Food For Life Cookbook, Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology, guides you through the new science of eating well with over 100 delicious and achievable vegetarian recipes created in collaboration with ZOE, a health science company dedicated to helping you understand your own biology and how that impacts your body's response to food.

Shaped by Tim’s own experience of transforming the way he eats, as well as common requests from readers and ZOE members, The Food for Life Cookbook includes fifteen-minute meals, ideas for creating nutritious meals when the fridge looks bare, and generous feasts and sweet treats for special moments with friends. Tim includes plant-based ingredient swaps throughout. Plus learn more about each ingredient with tips for increasing plant diversity and science-based explanations for the nutritional benefits of the ingredients and recipes included.

Recipes include:

• Raspberry Lemon Pancakes
• Sweetcorn Fritters
• Green Goddess Chickpea Sandwich
• Butter Bean Caesar
• Eggplant Schnitzel
• Lemon Pistachio Loaf
• Chocolate Olive Oil Mousse

Packed with plant-led inspiration for delicious meals to feed you, your family, and your microbiome, The Food for Life Cookbook is a must-have for every gut-loving home and kitchen and the perfect gift for anyone who wants to embrace a new way of eating.

Cook for life. Join the food revolution.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593838631
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	05/27/2025
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	7.73(w) x 9.96(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Tim Spector, MD, is professor of epidemiology at King’s College London. He is the bestselling author of The Diet Myth, Spoon-Fed, and Food for Life, and scientific co-founder of ZOE, the nutrition science company. With a focus on cutting-edge science and honored with an OBE for his impactful work in fighting the pandemic, Tim stands at the forefront of his field. The original pioneer of microbiome research, he is among the top 100 most cited scientists in the world.

Read an Excerpt

My Journey to Food for Life

Food for me is the perfect combination of science and pleasure; the more I learn, the better it tastes. When you discover the amazing complexity of what’s going on in your body every single time you take a bite—and all the trillions of microorganisms that depend on what you eat—it’s quite humbling. Your food choices are simply the most important ones you can make for your overall health and happiness.

While I can tap into this knowledge now, it’s still only relatively recently that we’ve been able to connect the dots between the science of food, the art of cooking, and their interactions with our health. With this cookbook, I want to share my knowledge with you and show you how simple it can be to eat for both pleasure and health. The recipes build from the six key principles for eating well that I set out in my book Food for Life. In those pages, I examined the latest science and made the case for changing the way we eat in theory; this book is all about turning that theory into practice. Working with brilliant chefs and nutritionists from ZOE, the science and nutrition company that I co-founded, we’ve created recipes that will help you adopt and live these six principles in your own life to help you make better food choices every day, whatever your starting point.

So, let’s start at the beginning. I was brought up with an appreciation of the pleasure of food, but as in most families, it was mainly considered as fuel, with just a few specific benefits: fish made you brainy, meat made you strong, and spinach gave you iron and muscles. It may come as a surprise, but I was not raised in a gourmet household. My mother, June, is a very down-to-earth Australian (Juno to her Aussie friends), and when my brother and I were kids, she had a fairly narrow culinary repertoire. We were lucky to have a lovely vegetable plot and apple trees, and everything was served simply, usually without any sauces or herbs and spices (except garlic). She could do the basics, so we had a lot of fried foods and meat and two vegetables, but fish was pretty rare. Because she was brought up in the war years, she would eat absolutely anything. When we traveled abroad, she would seek out the most weird and wonderful foods; I can remember being transfixed as I watched her eat whole baby squid, lungs, sweetbreads, and brains. In light of her culinary curiosity, my brother and I became accustomed to trying a diverse range of foods too.

Since my mum worked as a part-time physiotherapist, and the only thing my dad ever made was sandwiches on Sunday, I was taught to cook for myself from a young age, though that usually meant a fry-up or heating canned soup or ravioli—a far cry from my current fridge in London full of fermented delights, among other things. At the time, I was quite proud of my independence, and I was eating food that brought me pleasure.

Every year for my birthday, my mum would make me an enormous, extra-gooey pavlova with raspberries and strawberries. It wasn’t at all like the ones you buy in shops or fancy restaurants, where the meringue is really hard and dry: it was soft and delicious, it would melt on your tongue, and it was pure joy. She would also cook a delicious Australian version of lasagna. She’d spent a lot of her youth in the 1950s bravely riding a Vespa in Italy, so she really knew how to make a good one. I loved it, and you would usually find me the morning after, scraping the edges of the pan with the burned cheese crust. I still associate that smell with my happiest memories, and I’d be delighted for my last meal to be just that: a slightly overcooked cheesy lasagna.

What I didn’t know then is that these emotional and social associations with our favorite foods are critical. The food we eat as children—even the food we’re exposed to in our mother’s womb—shapes our food preferences for life. Trying new flavors, foods, and textures is something we have to experiment with as adults, keeping an open mind and a curious palate in the same way you listen to new music or try out the latest TV series. What we eat is so much more than just fuel and is certainly much more than an oversimplification of calories in versus calories out. Understanding that is the first crucial step toward having a better relationship with our food.

Plenty of research now shows that our food environment and social context shape our dietary habits. If we grow up seeing food as an enemy or as a reward, it can be tricky to untangle the feelings of shame, guilt, or reward that are linked to those foods. Many of us don’t realize that we desire or avoid certain foods because of the emotional association we have with them. That link can be a result of a fond childhood memory—as with the burned crust of my mum’s lasagna—or it can be a result of clever advertising that helps pair a certain food with a desirable feeling or event. I was never taught any of this at medical school, where food was only ever fuel and vitamins.

As I grew older, my food influences began to broaden. At 17, I took a gap year before starting to study medicine and got a job in a mountain hotel restaurant in Tyrol, Austria, armed with a smattering of German from school. My job as the kitchen porter was to do all the washing-up. This was my first experience of the intensity of the kitchen, not to mention the Austrian cuisine, and I loved it. I have memories of mountains of delicious Wiener schnitzel and of rolling enormous strudel prior to baking. These are still my much-loved comfort foods today, and you’ll find recipes for them later in the book, albeit now adapted to better suit my health needs.

As I returned to the real world, my relationship with food was deprioritized thanks to the demands of medical school, which took up pretty much all of my time and energy. My diet was terrible. As a junior doctor, most of my meals were in the hospital canteen, which specialized in egg and soggy fries, shepherd’s pie, and overcooked spaghetti. As my career progressed, I found myself eating quick meal deals of sandwiches and bags of chips. Breakfast was almost always a bowl of muesli with a bit of skimmed milk: tasteless but necessary fuel for the long shift ahead. It wasn’t obvious to me at the time that eating in this way was not great for my health—after all, sandwiches and muesli seemed like sensible choices when compared with fast-food burgers for lunch or doughnuts for breakfast.

I have many happy memories from that time, but while I was a student, my father died of a sudden heart attack in his fifties. His death was totally unexpected: he had also been an academic doctor who had never smoked cigarettes, and although he hated exercise, he was relatively slim. Though this was quite a shock, I never worried too much about my own health or mortality until 30 years later in 2011 when, just a few years younger than my father had been when he died, I had what is known as a ministroke (a vascular occlusion in the blood vessels to the eye) while backcountry skiing in Italy. My long recovery left me with high blood pressure that I couldn’t ignore, giving me the wake-up call I seriously needed.

During those three months off work, I had double vision and couldn’t do much, so I started thinking about how to prevent myself from getting a stroke or heart attack. As I looked into the practical advice that patients get about food from government sites or the internet, it became clear it was either out-of-date, unhelpful, or unrealistic. The more I started digging, the angrier and more upset I became about how misleading this information was. From my medicine and physiology background, I knew the advice didn’t stack up—like going on a low-fat diet, counting calories, and exercise being fantastic for weight loss, and many other bits of nonsense. Increasingly, some other things I thought were true came into question: not only were patients being misled, but the shortcomings of my medical training were becoming apparent. We simply hadn’t been taught about nutrition. I thought I was a healthy, knowledgeable doctor, but I realized I’d gotten it wrong, and this was quite a shock for me.

Two years earlier, in 2009, I’d first come across the potential role of the gut microbiome at a genetics conference, where an American colleague presented his work on the role of the bacterium H. pylori in disease. It would be a leap, but I wondered whether I could study the microbiome as an extension of my own genetics work. We use DNA to identify the microbes that live in our gut, so the same skills in genetics would be useful here. For the next couple of years, I tried to generate interest in the field in the UK, but my grants were rejected, either because the microbiome was wrongly viewed as a passing fad or because I wasn’t considered an expert in the field. So I went to the US to get funding, and worked with a great research group at Cornell; this is when the work really took off. I had a hunch the microbiome was important, but it wasn’t until 2012, when we got the first early results back from our twins study, that its role really came to light. We found that identical twins had different gut microbiomes, and that this could potentially explain why even these genetically identical clones, who often share their environment closely, develop very different diseases. I realized this could be the key in explaining some epidemiological questions I’d been trying to answer for the previous 20 years.