Michael Mosley’s top simple health tips

Most of us know what we should be doing to eat healthily – eating plenty of fruit and vegetables and cutting back on fatty and sugar-laden foods being the primary objectives.

But are there hidden health benefits in some foods?

Thanks to Dr Mosley, we learned it’s potentially better to cook tomatoes than eat them raw. Tomatoes contain a powerful antioxidant, called lycopine, which helps the body fight off damaging chemicals, and cooking the red fruit lets the good stuff out and into the body.

And when it comes to beetroot, he concluded it was best to buy it raw and bake it, or drink the juice to enjoy this nitrate-rich purple veg.

Mosley looked at the merits of fermented foods, such as yoghurt, kefir, kimchi and sauerkraut, and found they helped introduce live microbes into the gut and could improve the body’s immune system and reduce inflammation.

But he wasn’t against eating the odd bit of chocolate, particularly when it was dark – much healthier than the milky version, according to studies.

One unexpected discovery he made was that eating pasta cold is healthier than eating it hot.

When cold, it was found to act more like fibre and less like a starchy carbohydrate. In a small trial in hungry people, eating cold pasta led to a smaller spike in blood glucose and insulin than eating freshly boiled pasta.