Sarah Berry

At a glance

• Sarah Berry is a British nutrition scientist and professor of nutritional sciences at King’s College London. She is also chief scientist at the nutrition company ZOE.
• She specialises in what happens in the body after a meal: how blood sugar and blood fats rise and fall, and how food structure affects absorption.
• Her research showed, for example, that not all the fat in nuts such as almonds is absorbed, because it stays trapped in the cell walls.
• She led the PREDICT studies. In the first major paper (Nature Medicine, 2020), with more than a thousand participants including identical twins, people responded very differently to identical meals; genes explained only part of this.
• She is a regular voice on the ZOE podcast, explaining nutrition research in an accessible way.
• For longevity, her work matters because repeated large spikes in blood sugar and blood fats after meals are linked to metabolic health.
• Takeaway: eat a varied, plant-rich diet with fibre and whole foods; also look after sleep and movement, which affect how you respond to food.