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Episode Transcript:
Tim Spector: [00:00:00] I talk about five rules really, to improve your gut. First is try and get 30 different plants a week into your diet. The second rule is fermented foods, trying to get at least three different types of fermented food in every day. Third, I’d go for eating the rainbow and thinking about color. And the reason is that color tells you the chemicals in those plants that are helpful for your gut microbes. And the chemicals are called polyphenols, and they are like rocket fuel for your gut microbes. And number four would be giving your gut a rest. So again, this time restricted eating, increasing evidence that if you can leave. You don’t have to do massive fasting. But if 12 to 14 hours will give benefits to your metabolism for your gut microbes. And finally, it’s switch from eating ultra-processed food to real food. And that means quality, not calories. If you remember five things about gut health, do that because the food choices you make are the most important choices you can make for your health. And these are things we make multiple times a day. 60% of the US diet is is fake food, and we’re now getting the science to show why it’s bad for our gut microbes, why it makes us overeat by 25%, why it’s been making us so sick.
Jonathan Fields: [00:01:25] So what if I told you that the state of not just your physical health, your weight, your energy, your risk of disease, but also your mental health, including feelings of depression and anxiety and low mood just might be coming from the bacteria in your gut. Wait, what? That sounds a little bonkers, right? But that is what cutting edge science focused on the microbiome is starting to reveal. Which is why I wanted to sit down with Tim Spector, professor of epidemiology, leading microbiome biome researcher and co-founder of Zoe, the cutting edge science and nutrition research organisation. A true pioneer in microbiome research, Tim stands at the forefront of this field and is among the top 100 most cited scientists in the world. In our conversation, Tim takes us deep into the gut microbiome, that vast community of trillions of microbes that live within us. I’m pretty well read on the microbiome, but Tim revealed so much cutting edge science I had never heard about, and talks about the stunning relationship between the critters in your gut and everything from inflammation, immunity, cancer, heart disease and more to depression, anxiety, energy. He explains how these tiny organisms produce vital chemicals that impact nearly everything in our minds and bodies. We also do a bunch of myth busting, by the way, and talk about what the science doesn’t really say these days, even if maybe you’re hearing it does. We talk about where the science is heading from here, and then Tim shares his really straightforward five keys to building or rebuilding a vibrant microbiome that can literally transform your physical and mental health and along with that, potentially your life. So grab a pen and get ready to take notes, because this conversation could quite literally change your life from the inside out. Quick note here, by the way, Tim is also one of the lead scientists and co-founders of Zoe, a groundbreaking research and nutrition venture that he mentions. Zoe is also a sponsor of ours, and we’re big fans of the work that they’re doing. But I want to let you know that this conversation was arranged completely independently of that relationship, as a way to share deep wisdom from a leading scientist on a truly transformational and emerging field of human health. So excited to share this conversation with you. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
Jonathan Fields: [00:03:51] You know, really excited to dive in. I know you have done a lot of work really focusing deep on nutrition, the microbiome and its effect on health, on how we live, physical health, mental health. I think a lot of people have heard the phrase gut biome or microbiome these days, but maybe aren’t entirely sure what it actually is and why we care so much. So I think that’s probably a good starting point for us.
Tim Spector: [00:04:13] Sure. Yes, the gut microbiome is the general term we give for the community of all the little microscopic bugs that live in our gut, and we’re talking mainly about the lower part of our gut. Right. That’s the large intestine, the colon before the rectum, right at the bottom. So it takes a while to get there. And there are trillions of these guys there, as many as there are cells in our body. They’re a mix of bacteria. They’re viruses, they’re fungi, yeast, even some parasites we’ve found that are normally everybody. The way to think about them best is it’s like this collection of all these organisms that produce chemicals. So they’re like a big collection of your super pharmacies that can give you any vitamin or drug or neurochemical that you want. And we’re slowly discovering this is what they mainly do. They produce all the chemicals that our body can’t produce itself. And that’s why they’re so crucial to to us in terms of our brain function and our immune system and our metabolism and regulation of of pretty much everything surveillance of, you know, preventing aging and cancer, etc., etc.. So that’s the way to think about them in a very broad sense. And, and clearly we’re just learning about them in the last ten years. And we’re learning how to feed them. Right. And we can’t live without them. So they’re not an optional extra. I think that’s the that’s the key insight we’re getting now.
Jonathan Fields: [00:05:45] Yeah. That was one of my curiosities. You know, if you took literally had a way of stripping the microbiome outside of a human being. It sounds like life would not sustain for very long after that.
Tim Spector: [00:05:55] Now they’ve done it in mice to some extent, and they don’t develop a brain normally. They don’t have a normal immune system and they, you know, lack all the normal reflexes, etc. that we humans have. So they’re absolutely crucial for how we interact with our environment and how our immune system works. It turns out that our immune system is quite important for our brain now, and therefore they really are crucial. And, you know, obviously we can get by with less of them because we have less than our ancestors already. We have about 50% less than we used to have. So you can get by with a crucial, you know, with a sort of subgroup of them. But clearly it’s best if the more you’ve got the more diverse species you have. And we’ve done some studies now over the last few years with Zoe on this, that show that if you’ve got lots of different species, that means you’re getting different range of chemicals produced. And they’re actually very fussy, these guys. So you think, oh well, just give them anything to eat. It doesn’t matter. You know, just like the average American, you know.
Tim Spector: [00:07:00] But actually they’re real aficionados. They produced a paper showing that they there’s a microbe that only eats coffee. It’s so fussy that it waits around. Even if you’re handed a cup of coffee for five years, it just stays there in a sort of suspended animation, waiting for that coffee, and then it will go crazy and reproduce and produce all kinds of chemicals, etc. so that’s the way to think of our gut microbes is a bit like this jungle or a, you know, a fish tank, whichever way, whichever you find easier, or a garden that you’re trying to nourish to get all the different characters on board, big and small, all working together because they also feed off each other. You know, if one’s eating a say, I don’t know, a bit of cabbage or something, he’s one will start and there’ll be another microbe that will take the discarded bits from the first guy, and then another one who takes the discarded bits from the second guy. So nothing’s wasted there. A perfectly sustainable little environment there. And so they make their perfect garbage collection and recycling system.
Jonathan Fields: [00:08:01] So let’s dive in a little bit more here. You know, I think you’ve made it clear that this is absolutely critical for health. And you mentioned a couple of different things. And I’d love to see if I can get a clearer understanding. When we talk about the gut microbiome, then in the context of conditions that we might experience that we don’t want to experience diabetes, cancer, heart disease. How does the microbiome actually work in the context of these types of conditions?
Tim Spector: [00:08:25] It works in a number of different ways because obviously we’re dealing with trillions of organisms and thousands of different species that have different genetics and produce different chemicals. So in a way, if you think of them as a multiple pharmacy, each of those like drugs, they’re producing different effects on the body. So for example, for heart disease you can have microbes that will be important in reducing say blood cholesterol. Eliminating the fats from your body rapidly. And there’ll be other microbes that are telling the immune system to dampen down inflammation so that the vessels are calm and relaxed, and there’ll be other ones that are regulating your blood pressure control, also regulating your medications for, say, blood pressure. Even statins, we think, are regulated partly by your gut microbes. So they sort of work really across the board and in the brain. We know a little bit that they as well as also controlling inflammation, which may have a which is this sort of stimulation of the immune system. So it’s running a little bit hot when it should be off. So it’s like these burning embers that just keep going and irritating the system that could, you know, be involved in mental disorders. But specifically, we know that microbes produce neurochemicals that affect the brain, such as serotonin, which is a precursor to things like dopamine, which is important in emotions and is probably involved to some extent in depression and those kind of conditions. It also produces something called Gaba, which people might have heard of, because when you take a Valium or a benzodiazepine, that’s the neurochemical that’s altered in that state. So it works in a number of different ways, and we’re only just coming to grips with it really, because it’s it’s got such a broad reach. The microbiome chemicals, many of which we still don’t understand what they are or exactly what they do. So that’s why, you know, there isn’t a single mechanism that you can say are microbes do this or microbes do that, which is what we thought perhaps ten years ago. Yeah. I mean.
Jonathan Fields: [00:10:32] So it’s interesting. Right. Then we’re at a point now, it sounds like in the science where we can draw a line between microbes and a particular outcome, but in order to actually sort of like fill in that line between. The bacteria or the existence or lack of existence of a particular bacteria in your microbiome, and a particular effect in your physical health or your mental health. We’re not there yet, it sounds like, but we see that there’s an outcome, but we’re not entirely we can’t trace the mechanism with a lot of accuracy. Is that right?
Tim Spector: [00:10:59] That’s right. I think we’re just scraping the surface of that. We know from big studies like we’ve done at Zoe, where we have over 200,000 people now in a database to see there’s correlations between what your microbes look like and all these medical conditions. And we also know from small animal type studies that you can induce things like anxiety or depression in mice and transfer it from one mouse to another by transferring their microbes. And then you’ve got other test tube experiments giving you little teasers about what’s going on. But I think we’re going to have to wait a few years to to really see exactly what the causal mechanism is at the moment, we’re just guessing that this is the main one, and we can talk in generalities. But what’s pretty clear to me is that if you think that the immune system is key to most diseases, so we’re talking heart disease. We’re talking cancer, you know, surveillance, we’re talking allergies, autoimmune disease, and to some extent, mental health. Then if you’re getting a stable immune system that’s working really well, we know that most of your immune system is 70% of it is in your gut talking to your gut microbes. So for me, that’s where the answers lie.
Tim Spector: [00:12:13] It’s the communication. So it’s an extension really of our immune system. And it’s the way the immune system talks to or, you know, our environment through the foods and through our gut. That’s to me is, you know, was a bit of an aha moment when there’s a rather vague term, this brain gut connection and this immune, it’s the brain gut immune connection that’s actually really important. That sort of makes sense, really, because the immune system is also so much part of aging and making sure that it’s perfectly tuned to our environment. Not overreacting, not underreacting, not chasing red herrings, you know, going around putting out fires that aren’t really there. And it’s really focusing on cleaning up the body, making sure it repairs itself. It’s fighting cancer when it’s really early, before it’s seen, it’s helping drugs to work all these things and stopping, you know, allergies and autoimmune disease. And you can see how just the epidemic of like food allergy in the last 50 years, which we can’t explain by genetics, there’s got to be due to something like the gut microbiome changing so radically. That’s a reflection of things like our poor diet.
Jonathan Fields: [00:13:19] I want to make sure that I got something that you said right, though it sounded like you said there have been mice studies that induced a particular type of bacteria in the mice. And then when you transplant those, that balance is correlated with mental health challenges with depression or anxiety, and you can literally transplant that bacteria into another. I’m assuming, mouse, because I’m assuming you wouldn’t be doing this in people now and see the same psychological manifestations just by taking the bacteria and putting it in another mouse. Is that right?
Tim Spector: [00:13:49] This is the lovely thing about the gut microbiome, that you take these very big human experiments where you’re just looking at epidemiology, just taking, you know, it was hundreds then thousands, and now we’re doing hundreds of thousands of people. And you see these correlations, but you don’t know which way it’s going. Is it cause or effect. And then you look at mice and you can take these sterile mice and you can put human microbes in them from, say, anxious or depressed people. And you can induce anxiety and depression in those mice. And that’s a pretty good evidence that that’s a causal relationship. And then once that mouse has become anxious or depressed, you can then induce that in other mice. And they’ve done other experiments where not in sterile mice, but just by inducing a series of really stressful experiments in mice. They take their microbes, and then they can then transplant those from the anxious mouse into a calm mouse and make it anxious. So in a way that’s sort of suggesting that mental health is to some extent infectious, which is a is a is a sort of amazing thought. But and they’ve done these other experiments with things like diabetes and obesity as well, hasn’t been quite as marked as, as with mental health, but and also in protection against cancer, things like this. So we’re able to show, you know what, give us an idea of what’s going on in humans by these really clever mouse experiments that they’ve been developing.
Jonathan Fields: [00:15:19] Yeah, I mean that that is wild. I mean, to be able to to take a human being who is experiencing depression or anxiety or mental health challenges transplant some of their microbiome into a mouse, and then have that mouse exhibit similar things, and then transplant from that mouse to another mouse that really does speak not just to correlation here, but to causation. And then if you start to expand that out. I mean, just the notion that I think for a lot of people, if they think about, well, you know, I’ve been struggling with depression, with mental health, with anxiety and the notion that it might in some way, shape or form have to do not just with what’s happening in the brain, but actually in the balance of bacteria in their gut is kind of mind blowing. Um, you know, I wonder what the state of research is in terms of looking at that more expansively with humans right now? Well, obviously.
Tim Spector: [00:16:15] It’s you know, it’s a very fast growing area of, of research because, you know, we’ve had these certainly in psychiatry, there have been these different models of mental health. You know, initially you used to blame your your mother or your parents for giving you the wrong personality that there was this thing about the refrigerator mother and, you know, Freudian sort of idea that in a way, it was your environment that caused everything. Then we had this, the genetic revolution and said it was this genetic susceptibility. And then it was all rather inevitable, whether you had a mental health disease. And suddenly the last ten years, it’s all shifted and said, well, actually, you know, the gut, gut and your gut could be this link between both your genes and your environment, particularly your diet that’s causing this. And you can, you know, change a lot of that through this gut brain connection. That is another way of, in a way, drugs getting to your brain and altering your mind. So I think it’s, you know, it’s going to really revolutionize psychiatry because at the moment, because we separate the mind and the body, no one talks about diet.
Tim Spector: [00:17:19] You wouldn’t go to see a psychiatrist and he’d say, tell me, what’s your diet like? Whereas probably I’d say if I saw someone suffering from, say, depression or anxiety. That’s probably the first thing I’d now say before discussing antidepressant medication. And and there are human trials now of people with mild depression showing that if you give a gut friendly diet, you get about 30%, you know, completely in remission and doing better than, than many trials of of the drugs themselves. So I think it is an exciting time. But it’s, you know, it’s really breaking tradition and changing people’s whole idea of what mental illness is, as well as other areas of medicine where people have had a rather closed view of it for so long and think, oh well, it’s just drugs. There’s only one way to deal with this. It’s genetics, it’s drugs. It’s things that, you know, doctors understand suddenly moving into these new areas that doctors haven’t been trained in, like gut microbes and diet. You know, it’s it’s often tricky. And the patient may often know more than the doctor in many instances. Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:18:21] I mean, it also makes me where my brain is going with this. Also, I’m wondering now, you know, and I would imagine there will be some research on this at some point. You know, if you point to the major pharmaceutical interventions for mental health, often some form of SSRI snri, it now is making me wonder whether the method of action is really directly on the brain, or is it potentially on the bacteria in the gut, which then actually is the thing that changes the sort of like the state of neurotransmitters in the brain. It’s when you really start to map it out. It’s kind of fascinating. There have been.
Tim Spector: [00:18:55] Some studies showing that at least 50% of all the common pharmaceuticals are interacting with microbes in the gut for their action, and that was pretty wild because that’s just what we can show. It could actually be yeah, it could be 90%. We’re not absolutely sure. But in mental health we know that antidepressants the SSRIs these are serotonin reuptake inhibitors. The microbes break down the drug and can actually inactivate it. And so because we know all of us have very unique gut microbes, some people who take these drugs can be completely ineffective, not because they’re not taking it properly, which they often get blamed for, or they’re not taking the right dose, just they have the wrong set of gut microbes that are inactivating them. And that’s why about a third of people who take them really have no benefit from them. So that’s just one example. But there’s if you take Tylenol, for example, then you get a similar reaction. Some people never get any pain relief from Tylenol. So I’ve got to take aspirin. You know, it doesn’t work for me or I’ve got to take ibuprofen whereas others find it works. And again, it’s the microbes that are interfering this process and inactivating one.
Tim Spector: [00:20:11] And in cancer treatment, you know, more importantly, more and more people are having immunotherapy. If you’ve got melanoma or kidney cancer or increasing prostate cancer, increasing range of cancers. We did a study in Europe, which I was leading, and showing that the most important factor about whether you were still alive at 12 months with your end stage melanoma, was the state of your gut microbes. So if they’re not in the right state, you know, they will either inactivate the drug or the drug doesn’t work. And so this is suddenly one of the most important things that, you know, everyone needs to know as they get older and they get exposed to these kind of illnesses that no one has really been thinking about, and there isn’t aren’t really enough specialists out there to actually spread the word. So it’s all coming from researchers like myself because they’re just, you know, there’s no medical specialty behind this yet. It’s too new. But yeah, things are moving so fast that it’s really important. People know how important this is because it also comes back to this message how important diet is. Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:21:13] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. I want to dive into a bit of the do’s and don’ts here in terms of how do we actually build a healthy microbiome and avoid the things that might actually make it less healthy. But there’s one other question that I wanted to ask you before we move on. We’ve talked about the impact and the potential links to things like cancer, heart disease, autoimmune conditions, mental health. Now, I’m curious about the whether there is a clear link between the microbiome and weight. It’s something that so many people struggle with on so many different levels. What’s what’s the state of of science on that?
Tim Spector: [00:21:51] Well, there are different correlations in all our studies. So people who have the greatest weight tend to have less of diverse microbes than people who who are thinner. And the mouse studies, again, if you take the microbes from someone who’s skinny and put them into a mouse, they won’t put on weight as fast. And if you take, say, from their identical twin sister, which is what we did, which is my background in twins. You’ll show that actually they will put on weight when they’re overfed, so we’re sure they have a role. How big it is, we don’t know. And we were quite excited ten years ago because in a way, a lot of this microbiome stuff kicked off, and that maybe just by transplanting microbes from a skinny person to an overweight person, you know, you could completely change everything. And it turns out that didn’t work. So lots of private clinics, you know, were trying it and people were trying it at home and with their own magimix and all sorts of things you shouldn’t do at home. And generally they failed, or occasionally they went wrong and people actually gained weight because the microbes were the wrong ones. So we think it has a role. I don’t think we know enough about it yet to be able to manipulate it properly and clearly. As always, you know, science is perhaps more complicated than we thought. And because, you know, we haven’t worked out yet what the microbes, key microbes are that affect the key processes of weight gain. And of course, with a pig and manjaro, we’ve realized that it’s not so much metabolism in the gut that’s important, but it’s its appetite levels in the brain.
Tim Spector: [00:23:33] People are now looking for what are the key microbes that affect appetite and maybe targeting them with pre or probiotics. And there’s some evidence that microbes do produce GLP one themselves, which is this appetite suppressant. But fair to say I don’t think we’ve found the magic bullet yet. So but it sounds like it’s going to be a more targeted therapy than just taking everything from another person and sticking it in you. So I think we’ll have to chat about this in a few more years and see if there’s a, you know, a microbiome equivalent of, of ozempic that’s going to come along. But I think someone will find it. And, you know, again, it just shows that within us, we’ve all got this amazing pharmacy and we’ve just got to know how to feed it right, or how to program it in order to bring it out. But I would say that the science isn’t there yet to offer the exact recipe for for weight reduction, other than to say that generally people who improve their gut health do slowly improve their weight, but it’s not dramatic, and it’s a general correlation. And it could be related indirectly to things like inflammation and the fact that if your body is well balanced in control, you’re less likely to to be putting on weight, but maybe also less likely to be craving some of these foods that upset that balance.
Jonathan Fields: [00:24:56] Yeah, I mean, it’ll be fascinating to see that research, especially in the context of cravings and appetite, you know, because if you can affect it on the level of, of the brain and, and the actual the initial impulse, that would be really fascinating.
Tim Spector: [00:25:10] Just as an example, when we put, we put, you know, hundreds of thousands of people now on the Zoe program, which is the idea that you can give people a gut friendly diet, cut out sugar spikes, reduce the fat levels, move them towards a higher fiber diet. The first thing we see is an improvement in mood and energy. So way before anything else. So we don’t understand why that is. But clearly the brain is is the first thing that’s being triggered by these changes in our gut microbes. And we we do see significant changes in the gut microbes when you measure it. But, you know, people feel better first. And we you know, we didn’t even think to ask them initially because it’s not something that in medicine we tend to ask about energy levels. But that’s what we found. And we think it’s due to what’s going on in in the microbes and perhaps the chemicals they’re producing.
Jonathan Fields: [00:26:02] So I want to dive into some of the way that we would change our nutrition in our lifestyle. But I’m also curious about the impact of a couple of other things before we get there. One is, I think, some, you know, something that I’ve experienced this year, which is I have been on antibiotics multiple times this year from a health procedure or medical procedure where it’s just it’s kind of prescribed by rote because this is what you do. I think we’ve probably all heard on some level that this is not a good thing for your gut microbiome, but talk to me a little bit more about what actually happens here when you take a sort of like a systemic oral antibiotic. And also what can we do about this if we’re in a situation where it is recommended to do that?
Tim Spector: [00:26:44] Yeah. Great point. Well, I think the average American, by the time they get to 18, has already had about 20 courses of antibiotics, and it carries on about one a year on average. It’s just crazy. And this is like 3 or 4 times more than you’d get in a Scandinavian countries. So there’s massive overprescription, probably due to the litigious nature of American medicine. Everyone’s worried about something going wrong and somebody being sued. And so when in doubt, take this stuff, which we used to think was pretty harmless, and that’s probably still true taught in medical school that, you know, the risks are minor, maybe get a bit of, you know, stomach ache, occasional rash, but, you know, these are good drugs and they yeah, they definitely saved millions of people’s lives. So I’m not saying don’t use them, but we now know that they radically affect everyone’s gut microbiome when you take them. And what differs is depending on your individual makeup and the individual microbiome microbiome individual antibiotic, it can vary between about a month to years before your microbiome comes back to where it was. And in that time, it’s disordered, it’s not working properly, and your immune system is impacted so that it won’t be working as normal as it’s supposed to work. And you may end up getting more infections in that time. Studies in epidemiology, following kids who had a lot of antibiotics show that they actually have more food allergies than kids without antibiotics, and their potentially other consequences as well.
Tim Spector: [00:28:21] Maybe more obesity as well in children, because that’s that’s one reason why they give chickens and animals antibiotics in low levels is to feed them up, make them more obese. So, you know, obviously we ought to be thinking differently about antibiotics and say, well, actually it’s a balance. It isn’t all good. You’ve got to weigh up the chances of having another infection. You know, I had a tooth implant and the dentist said, oh, I recommend you take an antibiotic. And you didn’t know I was interested in the gut. And he was a bit surprised when I said I would rather not. Is that a problem? He said no. Well, some dentists say, you know, you don’t have to. So it’s not universal. It’s just, you know, we generally recommend it because it reduces the risk of an infection. Yeah. Do you tell your patients that there’s a risk of, you know, getting more flu next year or more Covid or, you know, having other problems? No, of course not. Why would I do that? Um, so, you know, generally you take medical advice, but if they do offer you a choice, then I think you’ve got to weigh it up, you know, individually and ask them, what are my risks of infection.
Tim Spector: [00:29:28] Is it usually they’re sort of 1 in 5000 or something like that. And you say, well, if I get infected, you know, am I going to die or just come back and, you know, it just takes longer to to sort me out. So I think we just need to think about all medicines a bit more carefully rather than just taking them routinely, because we already have a pretty weak gut microbiome in the US. It’s, you know, we’ve lost half our species. It’s probably the worst microbiome in the world because of all the bad things we’ve been doing to it. So we don’t want to keep harming it. And some people, once they’ve taken antibiotics, just, you know, if they’re having them every year, They never recover. They’ve always got a very damaged system, which means their immune system is not working properly. And that really worries me that we’re doing this, and particularly for children, and particularly unnecessarily so. Yes, they save lives. And I’m saying I’m not saying don’t take them ever. But I think really be more mindful about when you do take them and take for a short period of time. And I always tell people to, you know, really up your game on your diet and what else you can do for your gut microbes. Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:30:35] So that’s antibiotics. I’m curious also about the potential impact of stress, if any. I don’t think I’ve seen research on this. Is there a research on sort of chronic stress on the microbiome?
Tim Spector: [00:30:50] Well, there’s psychiatrists do recognise there’s a mixture of anxiety and depression is a diagnosis certainly in Europe where you get a mix of the two and they see a very disordered microbiome in people who have that, who are anxious. They’ve they’ve done a few small studies in humans in stress. They’re not particularly convincing, but they’ve done some things exam students and things like this showing a potential effect of the microbiome. But the best studies are again in mice where they can. It’s very easy to induce stress in mice, and they can rapidly change their gut microbiome to, you know, what looks like a very stressful microbiome signature, producing stressful chemicals, making the whole thing worse. And they can again transplant it from more stressed mice to an unstressed mice. And that new mouse would become rather stressed and show stressful patterns. So I think we have to assume that that again, it’s the gut microbiome is both reflecting its environment. You know, what’s going on outside as well as some causing it as well. So I think we react to stress, you know, just like people I think they’ve done, you know, with poor sleep and other problems you can induce problems in your gut microbes.
Jonathan Fields: [00:32:02] So and you just mentioned sleep. I’m curious whether it seems like all these different things. There’s almost like a circular relationship, like one triggers this, which then makes the actual symptom worse, which then actually makes the microbiome worse. It’s like it creates this. You can either create a beneficial spike or cycle or a destructive cycle. In all of these, I would imagine there’s some relationship with sleep in here as well. Yeah.
Tim Spector: [00:32:26] You know, when we talk about gut microbes, we generally talk about diet. But sleep and exercise are also important. And once everything gets out of out of whack, then a poor night’s sleep is followed by changes in your gut microbes, which we think induce changes in what you want to eat. And then if, if any of the listeners, you know, after a poor night’s sleep, when you sleep for four hours. We’ve done lots of studies now on thousands of people showing that poor night’s sleep is correlated with a different choice of food in the morning. Right. So your brain is telling you, gosh, I haven’t slept. I’m going to have some really unhealthy food this morning, right? To get me through this. So I’m just going to go for massive amounts of carbs and get a real sugar spike. And I’m not going to worry about the consequences. And you feel really hungry and that’s what you crave. It’s very hard to have a healthy breakfast after you’ve had a really poor night’s sleep, and we think this is all linked to the gut microbes being out of sync, maybe sending chemicals to the brain saying, give me sugar. And so then you get into this cycle of of a sugar spike, and then you get a dip, and then you get more energy loss and increased hunger, and that you go on through the day until you either keep going like that or you manage to get rid of it with a decent night’s sleep, and you can get back on a flat sea again because you’re in this storm.
Tim Spector: [00:33:45] So more and more, we see this connection between the different balances of the body. It sounds a bit crazy, but I think medical science is catching up with this alternative medicine has been saying this for years, but without any science behind it, just with anecdote. And we know that the gut microbes, just like humans, do need a regular cycle. They, you know, they get jet lagged if you start, you know, it’s a bit like the science behind time restricted eating, having regular eating patterns, not eating late at night, giving them a good rest is really crucial for their normal functioning. Otherwise they produce abnormal chemicals. And so in a way, they’re just like us. They need sleep and they need, you know, regular habits. And this is this is what it’s showing that the body is a finely tuned machine that works best when you know it’s in a clear pattern. That just carries on to doing the same thing all the time, not messing around with it. Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:34:43] And we’ll be right back. After a word from our sponsors. Let’s dip into the nutrition side of this then, because it sounds like that is a lot of where the work is. I mean, more broadly, lifestyle. It sounds like sleep is really important. It sounds like you’re sort of referencing exercise, which is probably important as well. But when we talk about what we’re taking into our bodies, you know, the big levers really lie there. Before we talk specifics, what is the sort of, you know, when we think about, okay, so whether we’re looking to build the healthiest microbiome possible or maybe we had a round of antibiotics and we kind of know that we need to recover from that. We need to rebuild from that. Whatever the reason is, you know, whatever, you know, if there’s some underlying level of dysfunction or the gut microbiome, what is sort of like the big picture aspiration of what we want to accomplish before we get to the actual, like how we might, you know, choose our nutritional choices.
Tim Spector: [00:35:36] There are two things to your gut microbiome. One is to improve the diversity of species. So give all the guys there a chance to thrive and reproduce. So we talked about the coffee microbe which is called loss of the bacter. There’s just one example, but there’s lots thousands of other guys waiting for you to give them that bit of Chinese cabbage or some Iranian carrot or whatever it is. So giving them a diversity to to get them to flourish means you’re going to get more species in general. That’s been the sort of golden rule up to now about how to feed your gut microbes, but increasingly that just having lots of species isn’t the whole picture. And the other thing that we’ve discovered, again from the Zoe database, which is now probably the largest in the world with, you know, food, microbes and health data shows that you want to increase the number of good bugs and reduce the number of bad bugs. And we’ve worked out there’s about 100 of these key microbes in in every body in the, in the US and the rest of the world that we can compare. So you want to get more of the good guys, less the bad bug guys, a bit like, you know how we describe your blood lipids or your your blood cholesterol levels. Good cholesterol, bad cholesterol. Get that ratio high. So that’s what we’re trying to achieve. And we know we’re getting much better at knowing how to do that. And it’s essentially through throwing a diversity of plants. So I talk about five rules really for that to improve your gut. First is try and get 30 different plants a week into your diet.
Tim Spector: [00:37:16] Now that sounds crazy. If you get nervous about how many plants you can eat, it’s not all kale. It’s nuts. It’s seeds, it’s herbs, it’s spices, and it’s even different colors of the same species. And each of them is a little niche for another little animal down there, a little microbe. And we did studies showing that that’s key. And we’ve just got a paper coming out any day now comparing vegans, vegetarians and omnivores. And it doesn’t really matter if you have the occasional bit of meat or fish. As long as you’re getting those rich variety of plants, you’re still going to have one of the healthiest gut microbiomes. Um, no. It’s the number one thing is to get those plants on your plate, and once you’ve got that, you’re automatically getting all the fiber you need. So we’re not. So it’s very hard for people to start measuring fiber and all this stuff. But if you have some of these more simple back of the envelope rules, it makes life a lot easier to say. I’m going to keep thinking about plants. I’ve only eaten five today. Let’s put some more nuts or seeds on my salad. Or, you know, let’s pick something I haven’t eaten before so that that works really well in practice. So we’ve been doing this in the UK now and it’s really taken off this, this concept of 30 plants a week rather than the government, you know, five a day. It’s always the same, always the same juices and things that are really bad for you. So.
Jonathan Fields: [00:38:41] Right.
Tim Spector: [00:38:42] That’s that’s a concept. Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:38:44] I would imagine also, you know, because some people are like, oh, how do I do this? I have to have 30 individual things. But then so many of us have sauces like tomato sauce. I mean, how many different plants are probably in tomato sauce? Yeah. You know, so there are probably ways that we can get them without sort of like having them individually also. Exactly.
Tim Spector: [00:39:00] I mean, I just to give people an example, I mean, my breakfast is a full fat yogurt with fermented milk kefir, and I have a jar where I mix up nuts and seeds pre-mixed. And I’ve got about ten plants in there. And so if I add some frozen berries, which gives me about another three plants, I’ve got over a dozen plants just in a done in my breakfast. Right. So it’s not as hard as it seems. Yeah. Okay. So that’s that’s the whole point here. You can you can sort of slightly fix the system if you, if you just thinking in that in that way and you know you’re prepared. Right. So that’s, that’s the first rule. And it’s probably the most important one because the average American we think has, you know, some between 8 and 10 plants a week, if they’re lucky, and many, a lot more. Less. And you know, the French fry doesn’t really count as a plant. So that’s the sad fact. But coffee does. Coffee does count as a plant.
Jonathan Fields: [00:39:56] Well, I love that. So. And does chocolate count also not Hershey’s.
Tim Spector: [00:40:01] But if you get, um, like a good.
Jonathan Fields: [00:40:03] Bean to bar, bean to.
Tim Spector: [00:40:04] Bar, you know, 75% chocolate, it definitely counts. Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:40:09] All right. I love that too.
Tim Spector: [00:40:10] Exactly. So because you’ve got to remember, you know, people forget where, you know, what are these things come from. And they forget that chocolate and coffee come from fermented beans. Right. And so really important to get back to our roots. Yeah. The second coming back to my, my five. So the second the rule is fermented foods. And this would have been good advice for you on your antibiotics and trying to get at least three different types of fermented food in every day, even in very small amounts, can be a little shot. Doesn’t have to be a huge portion at all. You know as well as your yogurt. Never go for a low fat, low sugar yogurts. They’re terrible. You’ve got to go for the natural ones. Nothing else in it. Or you get the fermented milks, the kefirs, or you go for proper cheese. It’s not in a plastic wrapper. Or you go for, um, you know, the four K’s. You’re so you’ve got kraut, kombucha and kimchi, which is Korean sauerkraut, and there’s kefir. So it’s a good way of remembering those things to to eat as well. And you can use miso paste. A lot of Japanese food is very high on these fermented soy products. So there’s lots of ways as well as some Russian pickles and things like this that don’t have vinegar. And you’re making things in brine. And kombucha is everywhere in the US.
Tim Spector: [00:41:28] So, you know, that’s that’s something that’s pretty easy to pick up. Yeah. Third, I’d go for eating the rainbow and thinking about colour. And the reason is that colour tells you the chemicals in those plants that are helpful for your gut microbes and the chemicals that are called polyphenols. And they are like rocket fuel for your gut microbes. And we used to call them antioxidants before we really knew that they worked via our gut microbes. And that comes back to the question you asked earlier. So that’s a way of spotting them. Really brightly colored ones have the most polyphenols, as do ones that have a bitter taste. So if it’s bitter, if it’s like tannin astringency on the tongue. So things like extra virgin olive oil, many nuts you’ve got. Again, back to your black coffee, some green teas and dark chocolate. Even red wine has has these characteristics. And number four would be giving your gut a rest. So again this time restricted eating increasing evidence that if you can leave you don’t have to do massive fasting. But if 12 to 14 hours will give benefits to your metabolism from your gut microbes. And finally, it’s switch from eating ultra processed food to real food. And that means quality, not calories. And I think this is an important thing. Many people still believe that calories are the answer to everything, and we and my colleagues at Zoe are absolutely convinced that that era is gone.
Tim Spector: [00:42:57] And in a way, Ozempic has shown all those companies have gone bust now, as people have given up trying to calorie count on bad food, and you only have to look around and see, you know, that’s been prevailing wind for the last 30 years and it’s failed miserably. But if people started selecting a base of quality, you know, without worrying about the quantities, then actually you can lose weight that way as well because you’re, you’re feeling fuller. Your, your, your gut microbes are sending off the right signals, etc.. So if you remember five things about gut health, do that because the food choices you make are the most important choices you can make for your health. And these are things we make multiple times a day. And very few people tell us, you know how to do them properly, and you’ve got to stop looking at packets and labeling and advertising. It’s all advertising. No such thing as a health claim on a packet. It’s just fake advertising. So people need to get wise and, you know, reduce from this. You know, 60% of the US diet is is fake food. And we’re now getting the science to show why it’s bad for our gut microbes, why it makes us overeat by 25%, why it’s been making it so sick.
Jonathan Fields: [00:44:12] So I love those five. It just really lays out, it gives it gives you a simple, straightforward roadmap for anyone. The one thing that’s still an open question in my mind probiotics. Where are we with that?
Tim Spector: [00:44:23] Well, people always think of probiotics as what you get in the pharmacy or the health food shop in a capsule or magic liquid, but you know, they’re in yogurt, they’re in all these fermented foods and In often much bigger quantities than you get in these capsules. And you know they’re alive because, you know you can see them. Whereas a lot of the probiotics you buy in the pharmacies may contain nothing but sawdust. You know, there’s no controls on them at all. So the evidence is that probiotics do generally work in the trials, but that this highly variable response in humans, because we all got very different gut microbes to begin with. So it’s like getting a transplant with someone else’s blood, and you’re not quite sure what blood group anyone is. It may work. It may not. And there don’t seem to work preventively for much. They seem to help people with gut problems to some extent. Particularly they seem to work in children, old people. But you know. Well, but I’m not a big fan of them because I think fermented foods offer the advantage that they’re often cheaper and they give you a wider range of microbes. So if you get a you take a homemade kombucha or a kimchi. You’re going to get at least 30 different species of microbe. You don’t have to pick the one or 2 or 3 that you’d get, you know, from CVS. You know, it’s like night and day and you don’t know those ones are alive or going to do anything for you. So I think until that science improves and the standards improve, I think you’re better off with fermented foods than probiotics. But I’m not ruling it out. And there are studies. There have been other ones on on mild depression showing that probiotics can help people and there’s other ones in IBS, irritable bowel syndrome showing they can be beneficial. So definitely they can work. But it’s it’s still quite a crude business at the moment.
Jonathan Fields: [00:46:17] Mhm. It sounds like I mean it’s fascinating. It sounds like the last decade or so has ushered in almost like it’s a new era of focus and research and resources in this area. And we’ve learned so much. And what you shared also is that there’s still a long way to go in terms of the knowledge base, and it sounds like there is a lot of work now realizing that this actually matters on a level that probably none of us realized, you know, ten, 20 years ago. So I’m super excited, and you must be incredibly excited to be involved in sort of like progressing that science forward to see what we actually discover in the next five, ten, 15 years.
Tim Spector: [00:46:54] Yeah, it’s one of the most exciting areas in science I can possibly imagine. And, you know, switching in a way from academia to working with a, you know, a company like Zoe that’s going directly to customers means that we can get hundreds of thousands of people doing identical studies. And this gives us massive studies that we couldn’t possibly afford to fund just out of universities and academia, and allows us to make these changes, see these real effects in real time. So, you know, I I’m the luckiest scientist around because I get to play with all this stuff and, you know, imagine you’re 200,000 people and they’re all taking the same meal on the same day, and you’re watching their blood sugars change, their blood fats change. You’re seeing how their gut microbes influence that. And allowing us to define things like the coffee microbe and all these specific ones. You know what microbes are going to be important when you eat nuts or seeds, which ones grow, which ones? You know, over good and bad, you know, it’s in each of them has some effect, like, you know, like an ozempic, if you like. So, you know, I think it’s it’s an incredibly exciting field to be in.
Tim Spector: [00:48:08] And, you know, we’re just scratching the surface, really, of what our gut microbes can do. So I think it’s yeah, amazing. And people will start testing them just like they test blood pressure. I’m pretty sure that now the gut tests are reliable. This will be something that people will be monitoring. So you know when you get to your next course of antibiotics, hopefully you’ll have had a gut microbiome test and you were saying, okay, can I get an antibiotic that doesn’t affect these guys? And you know what’s what’s my what’s the doctor going to give me to make my microbes recover quickly? All this kind of stuff. It’ll be linked up rather than oh, well, that’s nothing to do with me. You know, you just take this short term, we’ll be thinking much more holistically because the microbes join everything together. You know, everything from our brain to our body to our energy. Um, and so everyone needs to know about them. I think that’s that’s what’s exciting. And one needs to know how to treat them properly and look after them. They’re our friends.
Jonathan Fields: [00:49:09] Love that. And super excited to see where this all leads as well. So it feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation. I always wrap these conversations with the same question, which is in the context in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up for me?
Tim Spector: [00:49:26] I’d love to live to 85, doing all the things that I want to do, all the sports, all the, you know, intellectual bits. Seeing my friends socially that that’s for me is a is a good life and, you know, living life to its full potential and, um, following my dreams.
Jonathan Fields: [00:49:44] Mm. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode, safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had with Frank Lipman about the pillars of health. You’ll find a link to Frank’s episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help By Alejandro Ramirez. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle Bliss for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did, since you’re still listening here, would you do me a personal favor? A seven-second favor and share it? Maybe on social or by text or by email? Even just with one person? Just copy the link from the app you’re using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you’ve both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.