Hello and welcome to the Food Medic podcast. I'm Dr. Hazel Wallace, founder of the Food Medic. I'm a qualified doctor,

personal trainer, blogger and bestselling author of the books of Food Medic and the Food Medic for life.

I'm passionate about maximising our health through how we live our lives, including the food that we eat,

physical activity and stress management.

We will hear from leading experts in their field who will be sharing evidence-based advice

on how we can live healthier lives, and we will cut through the confusing information that we find

online.

I like to think of myself as one of the first of a new generation of doctors.

Thank you. I like to think of myself as one of the first of a new generation of doctors.

Hi guys, it's Hazel and welcome back to the Food Medic podcast. Today I'm here with Dr. Giles Yo, who is a geneticist with nearly 20 years of experience studying obesity and the brain

control of food intake. His current research focuses on understanding how pathways in the brain

differ between lean and obese people and the influence of genes in our feeding behaviour.

Outside of the lab, you might have spotted Giles on TV, in particular the documentary series BBC Horizon, including one very famous episode, Clean Eating the Dirty Truth.

And also, as on BBC 2's, trust me, I'm a doctor.

Giles, welcome to the Food Medic podcast. Thank you very much for having me, Hazel. I'm very excited to

have you. I have heard you speak before and I really enjoyed it. So when I was writing out,

who I needed on here, put you down. Top of the list. Thank you so much. So I know lots about you, but I don't know how much everyone else does. I'm sure they've seen you on TV. But it would be great if you could just give us a little bit of information about yourself, how you got into genetics and why you got into obesity as your field of research. Oh, my goodness. Okay and be, I'll try and be brief. It's a complex story. I'm a geneticist by training, but how did I get here? My parents are Singaporean. Ethnically I'm Chinese, but my parents are Singaporean. So I was actually born in London. I followed my dad around and he was doing his training. And so I popped out when he was in London. Actually, I was born at King's College in Lambeth. But then that day when I was born in 1973, the nursery ran out of power. There was a power outage. So they had to put all the babies into like one big basket and kind of literally roll them across the road. And across the road from Lambeth King's College, there was a small hospital now closed called St. Giles Hospital. And so in lieu of calling me King Yo, which would have

caused me all kinds of problems, this is why I'm called Giles. Anyway, I've pinged around a bit

from Singapore to San Francisco and then finally ended up in Cambridge to do my PhD. And I did my

PhD in genetics, molecular genetics, with Sydney Brenner.

Now, Sydney Brenner, he won a Nobel Prize, actually, in 2002, after I left, I have to say.

But my PhD was on the evolution of complement-related genes, immune-related genes, in the Japanese puffer fish fugururipes. Wow. Which is very niche. You know. Slightly. Yeah, very niche. And when I finish, I didn't think that that was going to really help me pay whatever mortgage I was going to get. However, I was trained as a geneticist. Yeah. And so what I did was that I walked around the department, literally walked around the department. I decided to stay in the UK because my girlfriend at the time was going to stay in the UK. And then I bumped into this guy called Steve O'Ratley. And at the time, he had just discovered the leptin gene, which we'll talk about in a bit. And I asked, do you need a geneticist? He says, yes, and I joined him. So I'm trained as a

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