James Collier says he’s not an expert in nutrition. No one is. Nutrition is too big, too broad and, let’s face it, too overwhelming for any one person to be an expert in all aspects of it. But if he’s not an expert in nutrition, he’d have a good chance of winning a nutrition expert lookalike contest. The former NHS dietitian, registered nutritionist, co-founder of Huel and author of Well Fed: How Modern Diets Are Failing Us has a lot of well-thought-out opinions on how we eat. Speaking to MH, he gives us his take on food waste, ultra-processed foods and why he thinks baked beans deserve to remain a British staple.
James, we always start these interviews with the same question, so, what did you have for dinner last night?
Last night my wife and I had a curry made with lentils, potatoes and various other veg. As minimising food waste is a key focus, we use whatever veg is in the cupboard and fridge so no two recipes are the same. My wife lightly roasted the potato peel, so we had a side of potato peel chips, too. For dessert, we had sliced oranges, melon and mango.
I’m betting that five or six years ago, you’d hardly heard the term, but high-profile academics have gone on to high-profile podcasts and put the term out there. But people are confused, they don’t know what the term means. Take baked beans: a high-fibre British staple, but also an ultra-processed food, most brands anyway. Well, they’re good [for you]. We’ve got a fibre crisis. The British Nutrition Foundation in 2021 made the claim that only 9% of UK adults are meeting the recommended daily amount of fibre. The problem is people eat the wrong types of ultra-processed foods.
The high-fat, sugar, salt and low-fibre type?
The problem is people are buying these convenient, cheap foods. What we need to do is use the right types of ultra-processing to tackle the problems we’ve got with the food system and the issues with sustainability, because we’re going to need ultra-processing to help mitigate climate impacts. It’s all very well wanting to go back to traditional methods, but, to quote the environmentalist Mark Lynas, if we were to go back to traditional farming methods, circa 1960, we would need to plot the size of two South Americas in order to feed the planet.
So there is a place for ultra-processed foods?
I prefer the term junk food, because the term is nuanced. We know it’s something we shouldn’t really be eating. We know we can have healthy foods and we can have a bit of junk. Now your more astute readers are going to say, ‘James, you’re the co-founder of Huel, doesn’t that come under the category of ultra-processed food?’ Well, yes, but I didn’t make the rules and come up with this categorisation that fails. Also, it’s been shown to fail in peer-reviewed evidence as well. There was a November 2023 report in The Lancet that indicated the increased consumption of so-called ultra-processed wholemeal breads and alternative to meats was associated with lower risk of disease.
What’s one easy lesson people can take from nutritional science?
What impact am I having? And I don’t mean you’ve got to work out the carbon emissions of your food. But nutrition science isn’t rocket science. Eat more plants and fewer animal products. I’m no vegan, but we can reduce the mountain of animal products we have. I’m convinced we could cut our animal-derived ingredients intake by a third. In the west, it’s 28% to 30% of calories coming from animals – and that includes fish, milk and eggs, too. Maybe cut that down to 10%. What does that look like? Two or three days a week, maybe you have hardly any animal ingredients or you have smaller portions where you do.
With almost 18 years in the health and fitness space as a personal trainer, nutritionist, breath coach and writer, Andrew has spent nearly half of his life exploring how to help people improve their bodies and minds.
As our fitness editor he prides himself on keeping Men’s Health at the forefront of reliable, relatable and credible fitness information, whether that’s through writing and testing thousands of workouts each year, taking deep dives into the science behind muscle building and fat loss or exploring the psychology of performance and recovery.
Whilst constantly updating his knowledge base with seminars and courses, Andrew is a lover of the practical as much as the theory and regularly puts his training to the test tackling everything from Crossfit and strongman competitions, to ultra marathons, to multiple 24 hour workout stints and (extremely unofficial) world record attempts.
You can find Andrew on Instagram at @theandrew.tracey, or simply hold up a sign for ‘free pizza’ and wait for him to appear.
