Host: Studies showed that if you are flossing, you can reduce your risk of dementia by nearly half, which is quite impressive. So I started to research the brain much more and it made me realize this link with the brain and the gut is absolutely crucial and how that influences many things in our brain. For example, things like depression, mood changes, fatigue and energy. But for 40 years, we've been going down the wrong path. We've got so distracted by treating the brain as something so different to the rest of the body. So, what do we do about it if we want to have optimally healthy brains? So, Professor Tim Spectre is one of the top 100 most cited scientists worldwide, and he's back to reveal the critical role our gut plays with our physical and mental health,

Professor Tim Spectre: our cognition, and the prevention of chronic disease. We can dramatically improve our lives and our health just by making the right food choices. And I've got eight rules for gut health which work for all health. So, first thing, pivot your protein. Then there's quality, not calories. The whole idea of assessing food by calories is wrong. Calorie restricted diets have been shown for the vast majority of people not to work. Your hunger signals go up. And hunger is the main driver of obesity. And we'll get into the other rules.

Host: And what about coffee?

Professor Tim Spectre: So drinking between two and five cups of coffee reduces your risk of heart disease by about 25%.

Host: And then what do you think of almonds?

Professor Tim Spectre: So there's lots of studies showing that they're good for your cognition and mood.

Host: And what about your views on GLP1s like Zen?

Professor Tim Spectre: I think from a public health perspective, they're going to transform medicine and we ought to be taking it much more seriously. But I've got two real worries about them. My first worry is that

Host: Professor Tim Spectre. Who is um who's this lovely lady and how does she tie into the work you're focused on right now?

Professor Tim Spectre: That's my lovely mom, June, who is still with us, age 93. Wow. but for the last seven years has been in a in a home in London after suffering a stroke and uh then developing dementia and so um yeah that's um changed some of my views on life and uh she was really pro- uh euthanasia and signed every paper possible that if this ever happened to her you know she would be able to end her life but Unfortunately, that didn't come true and under UK law, it's not possible to to help her in that because she lost capability and mobility very early. So, she's still there, but she doesn't no longer recognizes me. And um it's it's a reminder of you know our potential future life and uh how so many so many people in the are going to end up with dementia that wasn't the case 50 years ago. If I can do something to reverse this epidemic of dementia, then that's really motivating for me and in a way one reason why I've started to research the brain much more than I I've done in the past.

Host: So, is dementia increasing or is it that we know of it more now? So, we're better at diagnosing it.

Professor Tim Spectre: It's increasing for a number of reasons. So some of it is the age demographic. So we're living longer, but we're not living healthier. So our health span hasn't really increased, but our lifespan has. We're good at keeping elderly people alive longer. That's definitely true, but there's also stats to show that it is increasing even when you take that into account. So that more people are developing uh dementia than ever before, even when you account for the demographics. and those other changes. So, it is a major worry and I think it's one of the the major fears that all of us have. You know, obviously you've got cancer is one fear, but I think the other really bad one is ending up with dementia because nearly everyone knows somebody with dementia.

Host: Did this inspire you to go get your own brain scanned?

Professor Tim Spectre: Yes, I'd had, as you know, problems with my brain before. I'd had a mini stroke back in 2011 and never really worked out the causes of that. I knew I had some white spots in my brain. I wanted to see if they were still there, if there were any signs of that. And at the same time, I wanted to get a checkup to see was I likely to end up like my mother or not. And did I have the genetic form of the disease? Was it a straightforward Alzheimer's or was it more the vascular type that my mother had or probably has? And so yeah, partly it was motivated out of my cur my medical curiosity and partly for self-interest.

Host: And what did you find?

Professor Tim Spectre: I went to this specialized clinic in London that does these dementia screens, so I know if I had the risk genes for Alzheimer's, which luckily I don't. Um, but I do have bad genes for diabetes and heart disease, which predispose you to the vascular side of things.

Host: What's vascular dementia?

Professor Tim Spectre: There's several types of dementia, but the two main ones are Alzheimer's, where you get these protein folds in the brain. you get local inflammation, these protein tangles, and that then causes these damage to the bits of the brain. That's a very specific type of dementia. Then you get more generalized dementia, which is usually called vascular dementia, where you're just getting clogging up of the arteries supplying the brain just like you do in the heart. And that knocks off other bits of the brain uh in a slightly more random way than happens uh with Alzheimer's. Slightly less predictable, but that accounts for about a third of all dementia is this vascular time. I'm predisposed to it because after my this weird episode in 2011, my blood pressure went up. So anyone with high blood pressure generally has slightly stiffer arteries than most people and that impacts the arteries in your brain. So, you are slightly more at risk. And with these diabetes genes that I've got, thanks to my grandmother, I am more at risk of vascular dementia. And so, what I wanted to do was learn about that in order to optimize all the things I could do to postpone it or prevent it as much as possible.

Host: Over the last 5 years or so, your interest in the brain has increased. What what is the the the variance in your views of the brain now versus five years ago before you started doing research and getting interested in it?

Professor Tim Spectre: I think I saw the brain as a rather distinct organ that uh was the domain of psychiatry and you know perhaps gerontologists who look at dementia that wasn't really part of the major picture and certainly wasn't within my domain of expertise. I think I still believe in this the Cartesian view of the difference between the mind and the brain the mind and the body that these two separate entities and you've got this barrier between them this blood brain barrier that was really like an iron curtain. So I I was interested in it but I didn't realize this huge connection I've now discovered really that um has really excited me and I think the thing that triggered it was some of our own experiments which happened a bit by chance. So when we started Zoey, we did a number of trials and we gave our participants apps so they could report how they felt. In every study we did, we started getting back these incredible results of people saying when they were when they started the Zoey diet, for example, the first thing they noticed was their mood and energy improved and their hunger uh got less. And that was before any blood changes, before any gut changes. And so initially we slightly discounted it, but it happened in every study we did. We'd looked at the menopause. And again, the most dramatic change when people were improving their gut health through food with menopausal symptoms was was on mood and energy. Because originally I'm a rheatologist uh and was really interested in inflammation. I'd never put that connection between what was inflammation in the body and in your joints with what was going on in your brain. And suddenly the latest science when I'm going away you doing my reading is making it all so so much clearer. It's it's really become, you know, this this new idea of things like depression, things like mood changes, things like fatigue and energy, which I hadn't really thought about as in a way a malfunction of the brain, responding the wrong way to signals from the rest of the body. But it it suddenly all comes into focus about how holistic the whole system is and how really the brain is just another organ. And this link with the gut is absolutely crucial because that's where it gets most of its information from. You know, we have this vagus nerve that goes from our gut to our brain, the longest nerve in the body. And 80% of the signals go gut to brain. Only 20% go brain to gut. So all these things together have just made me realize how important what going into our gut is, our diet is, and how that influences many things in our brain that I didn't put together before. And I don't think most most of the medical world have put together before. And it we've all got the brain on a pedestal, I should say. You know, we we think it's this some this unique thing that's driving our bodies, but actually it's not. It's just responding to them just like any other organ.

Host: It made me reflect on the days that I've had like good and bad moods and how how much it's linked to my diet in the preceding couple of days like how I feel. If I sleep is such a big exacerbating factor in how I feel, but if I'm slept and I still don't feel good, it's typically linked I think to something I've been eating or something I've eaten very recently maybe in the last 24 hours. So when you talk about how there's this holistic picture and how my brain might be I think I can't remember the words you used but but it sounded like you said my brain is receiving signals from other parts of my body and it's kind of malfunctioning based on those signals which is causing depression, anxiety, bad moods, whatever. That I think is really interesting because people think of mood as a separate thing. We don't think of mood connected to my gut.

Professor Tim Spectre: No, it's it's your own fault. You're in a bad mood. Why are you in a bad mood?

Host: Something happened.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yeah.

Host: Externally. So someone cut you off in traffic or whatever it might be.

Professor Tim Spectre: all these studies, you know, we've got four studies now where we're changing people's diets and they're going, they've been on generally bad diets, we've moved them to good diets that mood and particularly energy levels, the first thing they noticed, they're improving. And they never linked, just like you, their mood and energy levels with things like diet. It was just inherent. They thought, "Oh, it's just cuz I'm, you know, my life's or whatever it is." An extreme example is some families we've been working with doing a Channel 4 series at the moment called What Not to Eat and we visit four families and they're terrible diets and we transform them, give them a gut friendly makeover diet. Look at them after 6 weeks. The first thing they all notice is their mood and energy is dramatically increased. They were napping all the time. They were asleep all the time during the day.

Host: What were they eating?

Professor Tim Spectre: Crap food. Highly processed crap food and snacking late at night. Bars of chocolate, you know, sodas, chicken nuggets, pot noodles, rubbish food, right? So, these were more worse than your average, but still there's millions of people like that doing this. And they had no clue that it was linked to them feeling terrible and tired all the time. And again the first thing that improved was what was going on in their brains and they suddenly felt alert again. And once people realize there's connection then in a way you'd have this feedback loop to say okay I'm not going to eat this food you know because I know it's making me feel so sick. But until you make that connection you're not going to know. you'll just be in this constant state saying, well, you know, I'm just overweight, that's why I'm tired. Uh, or I'm not exercising, that's why I'm tired. There's a bit of a vicious cycle here with eating something bad, then being low energy and sleeping all day, not feeling good. So, you eat something bad and the cycle continues. Cuz if I don't feel good, I probably want to eat a chocolate bar. In our Zoe studies, we found that people who had a bad night's sleep desperately craved some sugary crap in the morning. Right? It's the first you don't go for a healthy breakfast. It's like there's some little evil thing in your brain saying, "Um, okay, I need a quick fix. I don't care about the rest of the day. Just get me through the next hour."

Host: Do you know Do you know what that I had someone posit on my podcast that um that was because your body's basically under a form of stress. So from an evolutionary perspective, if if you're waking up in the middle of the night for some reason or you weren't sleeping properly, it might be because you were under threat. So your brain wants energy. So there a lot of studies now that stress, which we thought of as a sort of external psychological event, is actually a physiological one and is actually driving inflammation. It's directly affecting your immune system, which is then sending these signals to your brain to change your behavior. And this I think is very much the heart of what seems to be happening, you know, in depression.

Professor Tim Spectre: What I've been finding out is that it's detecting a change in the immune system. It's switching on to the stress mode. And the stress mode then triggers these different behaviors in your brain. And very often it's not, you know, real stress. I mean most of the stresses we get it every day are not like our ancestors had. Uh we're not being chased by wild animals or um being burnt out of our village, you know. So the and what really interested me was this whole link between what happens when uh you have a vaccination. During Zoe, we looked at a million people's responses to the if you remember the the FISA and uh vaccine and the SK vaccine. And what was really interesting was that uh people were actually depressed during that time. So you had about 24 hours of depression which was mimicking um a more constant threat. And this suddenly brought home this idea that you can trigger depression through a little shift in your immune system. There's a really growing theory about people who have long-term depression is that these their immune changes are switched on so that they're getting the equivalent of this constant tickling of the immune system by a vaccine. So that to me is was was a really important thing because I I have vaccines. I have regular vaccines. I'm big believer in vaccines, but they do make you feel a little bit down. That makes sense cuz your blood tests will show a spike in your proteins for inflammation. Your immune system's kicking in. That sends signals to your brain. Your brain says, "Okay, I looks like I've got an illness coming here." That illness behavior in some people then gets carried on for months or years. And this is now developing this whole new theory of of why uh people are depressed which isn't the old theory of it's just due to a chemical imbalance. It's actually your body responding abnormally to a you know a normal response. It's it thinks it's under attack. Your brain thinks it's under attack. It should then shut down and protect you. This I find fascinating that we're now linking so much to the immune system and it's the immune basis of things of mental and brain diseases is becoming incredibly important. I'm sure you've talked on the podcast a lot about inflamming and the role of controlling the immune system because if your immune system is out of control you inflammation levels are high your body can't repair itself. So aging happens faster in the brain. All of these things are pointing to inflammation being crucial to everything, but particularly in all aspects of brain health. And when I went and looked, you can really find that the immune system has a role in every brain disease they've ever looked at. And yet we've missed it because we've been so obsessed with new, you know, the way that Prozac works by it just being about serotonin uh or dopamine. And for 40 years, we've been going down the wrong path and missing this holistic view that actually it's it's about inflammation paired with metabolism. Because the other big player here is and the reason a lot of people get dementia is blood sugar is not well controlled and the the energy supply to the brain is not well controlled. So those two things for me have transformed my view of of brain health. And I used to study genetics as you know and it was always interesting that in um when we looked at twins which were usually very similar for most things when we looked at at um brain diseases there was very little similarity in the twins. So the genetic component was always quite small apart from a few diseases. Most of them were really low-level uh what we call heritability. And there was a massive study in um Sweden. They looked at several million sibling pairs and s looked at all their mental health or brain diseases I prefer to call them. And there was no gene that really came out even in several million people that explained these disease other than a general tendency to get any type of brain disease. So they called you know this like factor P. Um, if you had this general susceptibility, you could get any disease, but that could be mania, depression, bipolar, ADHD, it could be Alzheimer's, it could be schizophrenia, which which suddenly changes your whole view of these these diseases. We've said these are individual um diseases that should always be looked at separately. And if you start thinking of this as the brain as a an organ just like anything else like it was the liver, you'd say, okay, we talk about liver disease, you know, how do you prevent liver disease? We never talk about that in brain disease. We just say, okay, you got to talk about manic depression differently to uh ADHD or personality disorder or epilepsy or whatever it is. But it turns out that not only have the similar genes, but really similar risk factors as well.

Host: I've heard you say that you think Parkinson's disease starts in the gut as inflammation in the gut.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yeah, that's a great um example of how my view of these diseases changing. There's really good epidemiology data now. Um

Host: epidemiology data.

Professor Tim Spectre: Epidemiology data is data in large populations. Um so you study the cause of disease by studying populations. That's essentially what epidemiology is. And what these studies have shown is that if you follow susceptible people uh and find out who at the end ended up with Parkinson's disease, you will see that about 90% of people who end up with Parkinson disease had some gut problems 10 years before. And you might say, okay, well, might not be related, might be two separate things, but they've actually found the same protein changes in the brains in people with Parkinson's disease, this particular protein that gets misfolded. It's a bit equivalent to Alzheimer's but it's it's separate a separate type of protein alpha sinuclean and it gets folded and you get this characteristic thing you can see postmortem called a a louisi body but it's the protein folding that's important and if you look in the gut not only do these people have constipation and bloating and problems 10 years before a really sluggish uh intestine but they have the same proteins that are misfolded that you can find in their gut And they think that it takes 10 years for these proteins to go slowly up the vagus nerve into the brain and then it causes the problem there. So this is the the latest theory behind Parkinson's disease that it actually starts in the gut and it's related to inflammation in the gut. So these proteins start folding when the gut is not happy which means that you could potentially prevent Parkinson's disease by a gut friendly diet. It looks like it's the evidence is building that you know that's going to be pretty concrete soon. If that's true then you may think what other diseases might have that origin there that we um really don't understand. What about multiple scerosis that might happen there first? And it really starts to bring, you know, this obscure of these brain disease back into the domain of the rest of the body and what's going on there and these metabolic problems. You know, diabetes is the number one risk factor for so many of these conditions as well. So like if you got type two diabetes, you're like four times as more likely to have a brain disease. not only depression but also you know bipolar, schizophrenia, epilepsy, all of these ones. So clearly they're linked. They're this what goes on in your body, what you're eating, what what your immune system is doing has this amazing knock-on effect.

Host: So what do we do about it? What does the average person do about it? You know, because the average you know what the average diet looks like in the western world. Um, if we want to have optimally healthy brains and avoid dementia, Parkinson's, and some of these other disorders that are linked to the gut, what is what is the most important thing the listener right now should be thinking about and doing?

Professor Tim Spectre: Well, I like to think we got I've got a list that's getting longer, but it I've got now eight rules for gut health, which pretty much work for all health because we you to treat the brain. It's no really different to treating the rest of your body. If you treat that well, you're going to be fine. So, the first thing is to be mindful of what you're eating. Don't just put any old in your mouth, you know? I mean, stop for a bit and saying, "Is this what's in it? Is it any good for me? How's it going to make me feel?"

Host: You mean checking labels and stuff?

Professor Tim Spectre: Checking labels or even just taking a second to think, you know, gosh, don't just blindly eat in front of the TV without thinking what you're eating as we most of us do. Second, and probably the key thing is, I think, is to eat a diversity of plants. 30 plants a week. These 30 plants give you the diversity of chemicals to act as fertilizers for getting as many good bugs as you can into your system.

Host: How can you explain that to someone that doesn't know much about the gut?

Professor Tim Spectre: When I'm talking about your gut, I'm talking about gut microbes. And there are 40 to 100 trillion of these guys in your mainly in your large intestine that are many pharmacies. And there we have thousands of different species, all of which highly selected to eat only certain foods. There's one that only likes coffee, for example, called Lorenabacta.

Host: A bug that only likes coffee in my belly. It's

Professor Tim Spectre: just waiting for you to drink coffee.

Host: And when I drink coffee, what happens?

Professor Tim Spectre: It uh has a party, has sex, has babies, multiplies, and then produces certain chemicals in response by breaking down that coffee into other ingredients which might then help your immune system and um in some way explain why coffee is good for your heart. So, you got to imagine that you've got lots of bugs like that that are highly specific waiting for you to have uh not only coffee, but you know, maybe it's seaweed or maybe uh it's baobob or maybe it's things you don't often have uh so that we can expand our list of good bugs.

Host: So, if I stop eating a particular food like coffee, if I stop having coffee, will that bug die?

Professor Tim Spectre: It probably goes down to very low levels because actually what's interesting is even if you stop drinking coffee, you're surrounded by coffee drinkers and they they're droplets of saliva and kisses and uh greetings mean that you'll be getting uh some of that either those bugs themselves or you'll be getting um some bits of coffee in the air, a coffee aroma. Okay. So, the bugs go up and down in population.

Host: Yes. So, even in non- coffee drinkers, we do see tiny amounts of this uh this Lorsonacta.

Professor Tim Spectre: Um but in countries that don't drink coffee at all, there are a few African countries for example where it doesn't ex um so it that's but I think it's important to imagine your it's a bit like having a rare animal. You know, you've got to feed in your zoo. You don't want to give them all the same food. You've got to give them this diversity so that all the rare animals can get out there. And we know that the more good bugs you've got, the better your immune system, the more you dampen inflammation, the more you can prevent all these problems that we're seeing. So our our aim is to build up the good bugs. And the more you build them up, they squash out the bad bugs, the ones that like eating the burgers and the the the bad food and the and the terrible quality fats and the artificial substances. So you're squashing them out by starving them and you do that by feeding them properly. That's the that's the concept if that makes sense.

Host: And on that point of coffee, doesn't it restrict blood flow to your brain?

Professor Tim Spectre: No, not as far as I know.

Host: Oh, really? Um I'm talking I know about coffee at the epidemiological level. So there have been multiple studies like I was saying between coffee drinkers, non- coffee drinkers, seeing what happens to them 20 30 years later and drinking between two and five cups of coffee reduces your risk of heart disease by about 25%.

Professor Tim Spectre: So there may be other studies showing it does something to your brain, but generally everything I've seen is beneficial. I've not seen anything negative. Although there are some people who react to caffeine badly, so there's always a a personalized element to it.

Host: Sleep disruption and stuff.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yes. So you you might be a a metabolizer. It doesn't metabolize quickly in you. So that caffeine is hanging around longer. So they're the only downsides to it for some people.

Host: Can it make you more anxious?

Professor Tim Spectre: Um I think it can make some people more anxious. Yes. Um, and that's that's why things like matcha are better than coffee because they have a an extra chemical in there that can calm you down. So, like anything, it any food, it's all personalized. And so, when we talk about epidemiology, we're talking about the average person. Um, doesn't mean there aren't aren't exceptions. So, I'm not saying that everybody in the world needs to have coffee, but coffee used to be demonized as something that would give you heart attacks and arrhythmias. And in fact the opposite is true epidemologically speak you can actually you get less heart abnormalities arrhythmias when you drink coffee for reasons we still don't understand.

Host: So the first point of the eight was mind being mindful about what you eat. Second was uh eat uh 30 different plants. And that's that was the basis of our our Zoey product, the daily 30, which has 34 uh mainly freeze-dried whole plants in it. And we've recently added some more. So, we added some seaweed, some algae, and uh some kombucha in there. So, they're rare ingredients. We got seven different types of mushroom that you wouldn't normally have.

Host: It's worth me saying that I'm an investor in Zoe. Um, and let me take that back.

Professor Tim Spectre: So, you just you take this out and you sprinkle it on top of your food typically.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yes. You add it to food. Um, and it's so it's it's different to most of the other sort of supplements you might see. Uh, it's not instead of food. It looks more like food than most uh of the of the common supplements out there that look like green powders. We we did a big trial of this with about 340 people comparing it to a probiotic and a um a dummy one and over 6 weeks you get really quite dramatic improvements in your gut uh microbes with with eating this. So the you really push up the good bugs and squash out the bad bugs about several times more than you would get just by having a traditional probiotic. So this fertilizer approach uh does seem to work and this is this is the study where we also showed the improvements in mood after a few days which um you know surprised me because I wasn't even thinking about that when we we we planned the study. So the key reported findings in that study were a gut microbiome improvement, an average increase of five points in their Zo gut microbiome score, digestive system, 70% of people reported improvements in overall digestive systems symptoms. Um, and it increased fullness by 41.5%. Satisfaction by 21.6% 6% and energy by 43.3% and reduced hunger and desire to eat versus the meal alone. About half reported increased energy and 45% reported improved happiness in the main study.

Host: So we weren't expecting that. That that was my my point really on these because we thought it would just be gut it like okay do I get do I go to the toilet more often? Is it improving my gut microbes? And so it was a real bonus to see these these brain effects.

Host: And did you do stool tests on those people to see yes the change in the bugs in their stomach over that period? Was it six weeks?

Professor Tim Spectre: It was around six weeks. Yes.

Host: Yeah. And what did you see change in their their gut bugs?

Professor Tim Spectre: So we've got a new scoring method for gut bugs which we published last month in in in nature. And so we used to talk about diversity and on previous podcasts I think we've talked about diversity which is the number of different species but we've got a better way of looking at that now which is to take um 100 most important bugs that change with diet that everybody's got because we're all different. It's very hard to compare your your bugs with my bugs because we only share 20%. So this looks at 100 common bugs that we've both got, 50 good and 50 bad. And what we want in an intervention is to see the the good bugs are associated with good diet and good health outcomes, good blood tests are going up and the bad bugs associated with inflammation, uh, poor diets and bad health outcomes going down. And that's exactly what we saw. We saw an a change in roughly 40 of these microbes with the prebiotic the daily 30 whereas with the probiotic which we know works from other studies we saw only a change in about four or five of the bugs.

Host: Okay.

Professor Tim Spectre: So was it so they both worked but the the prebiotic was working better than the probiotic which has sort of changed my mind about what's more powerful.

Host: So prebiotic being what and probiotic being what? Prebiotic is like a fertilizer for gut microbes. It's there. It's giving them food.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yeah.

Host: So that and in an indiscriminate way because we're giving a a wide variety of foods. In these 34 plants, each of them has hundreds of chemicals. So there's thousands of different things for them to feed on. Whereas a probiotic, we used Lactobacillus ramnosis, which is a well-known one that's been studied, you know, hundred of time in hundreds of trials. It's a live microbe that lives generally in in foods like yogurt and things like this in a concentrated form in a capsule. You give that and it improved uh the gut microb but much less than the

Professor Tim Spectre: so prebiotic gives them food. Probiotic actually just puts bugs in there.

Host: It puts bugs in there and we used to think it was like a seed.

Professor Tim Spectre: Uh so the it was the you know so fertilizers and maybe seeds but we now know that that bug will never really seed in your in your gut microbiome. And so the science is and our thinking has changed. We think the probiotic is is really tickling your immune system as it's going down.

Host: Okay.

Professor Tim Spectre: So it's probably working higher up in the the small intestine which is um further up in the gut.

Host: Where where is where is the gut?

Professor Tim Spectre: Yes. So most people if you ask people to point to the gut they always think of their stomach.

Host: Yeah.

Professor Tim Spectre: Uh that's not your stomach. You see that's that's your there the intestines. So your your stomach is up here. U take away your your liver. If you imagine we've got a body here, you got a mouth. Food goes in there through the esophagus, which is a tube that leads to the stomach. And this is the stomach here, which is highly acidic. And that leads into the geodenum through a a little valve. And that is where food starts getting mushed around into little balls. It goes into the small intestine here, which is badly named because the small intestine is really the largest bit of the gut. And it's endless coils as of u guts there. Lots of crypts. There's little nooks and crannies everywhere. And so the surface area is really huge. It's it's several tennis courts if you laid it out just one um in one human. And that's because that's where most of the nutrients get absorbed. They get extracted from the food and absorbed that way. So that all the trace elements and things we're recycling. We're like a recycling factory. And then from the small intestine, it then goes into the large intestine, which is also called the colon. And that's where most of the gut microbes are. So, so 99% of the gut microbes are in that final part, the large intestine, which uh is a a couple of meters long and varies widely between people. And this is the spot where fiber uh goes, things that hasn't been digested in the early part of the the gut uh is and that's because the microbes mainly feed off fiber. And so that's where they do the good. They convert that fiber into products such as short- chain fatty acids, which are the really beneficial chemicals that are good for our immune system. And it's important to realize that across both the small and the large intestine, you've got ner huge amounts of nerves. You've got what's called the interic nervous system, which is our second brain and is it was actually the first brain to be formed. So when we were little embryos uh we started as a little tube and the nervous system that formed around our intestine was actually the first bit first brain of our body and in a way we developed the second one on our head as a oh bit of an afterthought. Uh which is quite fun way of thinking about it but just shows how important the nerves are in our in our gut to our the way we function. And as we were talking earlier about this this connection between the two and there's also immune cells. So 70% of our immune cells are uh in the gut. Most of them in in the large intestine but also in the small intestine. So our immune system is here and a huge amount of our nervous system is here.

Host: Why? Presumably the the bugs are all through the body.

Professor Tim Spectre: They're everywhere. So they're also in your Yes. So I should point out we're covered in bugs. So every bit of the human body uh has uh some bugs in it. The second biggest place where we have them is in our mouth. So the oral microbiome in our in our saliva and in our teeth and uh our gums. And that's why poor uh hygiene if you're not flossing properly, you double the risk of getting dementia as well. Interestingly, because there's a a real link between microbes here that if they're eating plaque and other stuff that you're leaving around in your gums gets inflamed, that creates an environment where nasty microbes that love inflammation live. And for reasons we don't know, they seem to pass into from from your mouth into your brain and trigger inflammation in the brain, which then uh increase your risk of dementia. if you're not flossing.

Host: Yes, this is really new science showing that just how important these getting the right bugs in the right place and avoiding the ones who are in the wrong place really is.

Host: Why do we need these bugs? Why didn't evolution design us so that we could just do all this stuff without the need of these little workers, these little bugs in our bodies? It it seems super weird to me that you know you think of the human body as being this one organism but actually it's appears to be many millions and millions and millions of organisms.

Professor Tim Spectre: Well, you've got a sort of humanentric view of the world. So um we we evolve from microbes.

Host: We are one. We we used to be one.

Professor Tim Spectre: We used to be one and um it it turns out that most of our body is are remnants of microbes. microbes obviously fused to cause to cause uh human cells. So that was the whole origin of of how multisellular creatures came together. These single-sellled microbes, some of them fused to to do that, others stayed as single cells. There was always this link between the single-sellled guys and their multisellular ancestors, if you like. And so as we co-evolved into more complicated beings, the the two were always together. And it turned out that again as like as we're formed as embryos, the gut is the first thing that you know this this cylind this tube is the first thing that comes out um of the design system. And it's designed to have microbes in it that serve a crucial purpose in training our immune system to recognize what's out what's harmful and what's beneficial. And it's also shown to be crucial for our brain development. But it it is fascinating when we start think about our origins and think of it that you know we essentially start as microbes because also we don't think of our body you know we've always historically thought of you know God's creation this body had nothing to do with anything else we were the masters of the universe and I think it's quite humbling to realize that so much of us comes from microbes and I learned something recently that was that also blew me away is that all ourselves have these powerhouses in them called mitochondria. And it turns out they do much more than just supply batteries for the cell. They they fighting inflammation. They're important for gene expression. They're good for metabolism. And it turns out the origin of these things is little microbes that got trapped in our bodies. They are essentially uh microbes that were good at making creating energy. And um at some point in our distant past, we fused um our multisellular um microbes that were were going around doing stuff. They said, "Oh, we could do with some more energy." And so by chance they fused with these energy microbes and slowly and slowly became incorporated into our bodies so that we now have these mitochondria all of our bodies which whose ancestors are also uh microbes

Host: and we have them in every cell of our body.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yes, we do. And they're turning out to be quite crucial as well in in brain health.

Host: Do you do you do you spend much time wondering or have there been periods in your life where you've wondered about the meaning of all of this and why there's living organisms? Because it doesn't appear to be a great need for living organisms. You know, you could just have rocks and water on these planets. I don't know why you need humans necessarily in as it relates to the contribution we make to the um the environment.

Professor Tim Spectre: Well, I think as soon as you had life, whether it was plant life, I mean, you're you're thinking perhaps of animal life, but you know, things like lyken on rocks were one of the first forms of life and something that was needed to get, you know, energy, nutrients from the rock and then they for some reason just wanted to survive, you know, and I think that's the the point that life is about getting enough nutrients so you can uh keep living or pass you know your genes on to someone else. It's this uh that concept once that was started maybe it was lyken everything else came from that and that could have just been a chance event. So I but I you know it is always humbling humbling to think that you know we've probably come back from some lowly point like this uh as we emerge from emerge from rocks and and water but um uh yeah I philosophy is not my strong suit but I I just get so much pleasure from finding new facts uh that are all around us and I think it's fascinating that we've spent so long as humans looking up at the stars whereas looking inside us at things like microbes and their origin is to me far more exciting

Host: and maybe explanatory

Professor Tim Spectre: as to like you know we're looking at the stars in France.

Host: Yeah, we look at the stars oh where do we come from? You know where what about the big bang all this kind of stuff whereas actually studying what's in ourselves and where do they come from we could learn a hell of a lot more about ourselves.

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Professor Tim Spectre: every day.

Host: Every day.

Professor Tim Spectre: And I wouldn't have said this three years ago because the science wasn't really strong enough to support this, but a study three years ago by a group in Stanford of 28 people showed the giving. They gave them five portions a day for about a month and showed that you can get a reduction in blood inflammation levels about 25% in that time compared to a fiber diet. And that, you know, blew me away because this this was the first really good study in this because there have been lots of studies but they're not good quality. Suddenly someone doing daily bloods, you know, they would looked at 20 odd proteins in the blood and suddenly you've got this link between a a food and directly affecting inflammation in the blood, which as we've been talking about has big knock-on effects on the brain and the rest of the body.

Host: That's like kimchi and stuff like that.

Professor Tim Spectre: Fermented food is any food that's been transformed by microbes into something better, which means it it tastes better. It's more complex. It lasts longer, so you don't need a fridge. That's why our ancestors did it. And it it's been chemically transformed and is generally more nutritious.

Host: Give me some examples.

Professor Tim Spectre: So, um, yogurt from milk. All you're doing is adding

Host: uh

Professor Tim Spectre: zero fat. Zero fat Greek yogurt.

Host: Oh, I'd never have zero fat Greek yogurt. Why do you want to drink that?

Professor Tim Spectre: I don't know. I just I was just

Host: No. Uh no,

Professor Tim Spectre: that that means it be Yeah. heavily processed. You don't want that. But there's still good microbes in it. And um you know, all you're doing is transforming something rather average like milk, which adults don't really need. It's not particularly beneficial milk. And just by adding the microbes to it, you make it something healthy for the for the body. And that's now been shown by uh by these these kind of studies.

Host: Which what do you mean by what's what's wrong with this zero fat Greek yogurt? It says zero fat. So that's sounds like it's

Professor Tim Spectre: there's nothing. Well, we we need fats to live. So fat is good. And in fact, the just a few days ago, the USDA have changed their all their guidelines, which used to be about saying don't have fat and and have lowfat products to saying actually fat is good. All that advice we said in the past is wrong.

Host: So why do they label things zero zero fat still?

Professor Tim Spectre: Because public still believe they're healthy and the companies that make them save money by calling it by having zero fat. they replace the fat with starchy artificially made um fillers basically. So it's usually more sugary uh by having zero fat in it. But if it says zero fat, it's a sign it's unhealthy. You should avoid it.

Host: So what are those fermented foods then? You were going to say you said

Professor Tim Spectre: well I should I just give you a quick list of all them so people know what I'm talking about. So we've got yogurt, we've got cheese, and virtually every cheese has live microbes except American cheeses. The more artisan the bigger the number. Uh milk keir which is like a super yogurt often has 10 to 20 types of micro in it. The krauts. So I think of the 4ks. So we got we've done keier. The kraut is like a sauerkraut. So we got fermented cabbage. Cabbage is pretty boring on its own. You ferment it. The tastes are amazing and it has these health benefits. Then you've got kimchi, which is a a spicy uh kraut and the staple diet of Korea. And they're pretty healthy. And even though it's got salt in it, people who have kimchi have lower blood pressure than people that don't have kimchi, and I love kimchi. Now, I hated it at first, but I'm now a real addict. Then you've got kombuchas. Um you see those in in most supermarkets and stores. Uh that's fermented tea and the good ones can have 30 or 40 of these. There's other another type water kefir which isn't as popular but I think we're going to see more of it. Tibikos is the other name for it. It's grains with lots of microbes in it. A bit like milk keir but with fruit added. And then you got miso all the misos you get in Japan. miso soup, uh, miso paste, tempes, all the all these, uh, fermentss around the world. There's hundreds of different fermentss in nearly every continent has their own type of ferment. In Africa, there's all kinds of fermented beers and porrides. And of course, we got the these are the live ones, but they've also got lots of dead ferments. Obviously, bread is a dead ferment. Everybody makes sourdough. Then you've got wines and beers. And interestingly, um, again, very new science, dead fermentss actually have some health benefits. So, I used to be very dismissive of uh products like kombuchas that you would see in in stores in America that say lightly pasteurized. And I'd say, well, that's a load of rubbish. Be nothing good about that. But it turns out that even dead microbes when you do a randomized trial have some benefit for the host.

Host: You're looking a bit skeptical. But I these against placebo uh studies and enough of them now that you uh definitely believe I know some of the researchers that they they were surprised but it's it's genuine.

Professor Tim Spectre: Why is that? What's going on? We think again if you go back to the vaccine um discussion we we were having it looks like although it's not alive the micro still has a cell wall and it has proteins in the cell wall. So it's like the debris of these dead bodies that you're ingesting. We think they're tickling your immune cells as they go through the uh small intestine.

Host: Okay. And it it's it's giving a signal to your immune system to calm down, reduce inflammation.

Professor Tim Spectre: That's our best understanding of what this phenomenon is about. So live microbes are best, but it looks like dead microbes, which are called postbiotics or zombie biotics, are probably also good for you. So, I think all fermented foods, even those that, you know, I I would have dismissed 3 years ago, are probably good for us. And that's really the best way to reduce your inflammation levels. We did a big study in Zoey of we asked 9,000 people who are Zoey members who weren't taking fermentss to try and see how they get on taking three fermentss a day. How do they feel?

Professor Tim Spectre: I think about 3,000 dropped out. Didn't didn't fancy it, but nearly 6,000 continued and did the the two weeks taking it after a oneweek run-in period. And around half of them noticed improvements in mood, energy, and had less hunger. So, anyone out there who hasn't tried this, I think it's a great simple way to u see what you can improve just by changing what you're eating and and going for some of these fermentss that you might not have thought about.

Host: What's number four?

Professor Tim Spectre: Number four is pivot your protein. At the moment, proteins all in the news. Everyone wants to have more protein. Big controversy about whether you need more. Uh most studies showed 90% of us are getting enough protein. Probably doesn't do too much harm other than it's really hard to get lots of protein in your diet. And most people are focusing on eggs and meat when they think about protein. So what I think people should focus on is there many other sources of good quality protein like beans, like legumes, like mushrooms, uh like whole grains, like quinoa and pole barley instead of rice. That if you're thinking about it, you can get your protein and get your fiber because 90% of us are deficient in fiber. And if you want to look after your gut microbes, you really need to uh be giving them the fiber. Otherwise, you're starving them just by having a a protein drink. Next one. Which one are we on?

Host: Number five.

Professor Tim Spectre: Number five is think quality, not calories. The whole idea of assessing food by calories is wrong. We've discussed this in the past. You should never really go for low calorie products. you should go for ones that are whole foods that are have their initial structure in them that uh have all those original nutrients. So, it's all focusing really on high quality foods that haven't been tampered with. And

Host: why why not calories?

Professor Tim Spectre: Because it's not a good way to assess food. Uh calorie restricted diets have been shown for the vast majority of people not to work. And we know particularly through GLP-1 drugs that as you restrict your your diet and calories, your hunger signals go up. And hunger is the main driver of obesity. So all you're doing is losing some weight shortterm. Longterm it will bounce back as your as your body does that. So um calories should be ignored on any labels really. You should be looking to get high quality food that supports your gut. And that's an important change in mindset for many people. But the next point is is is the crucial one which links to that which is avoiding high-risisk processed foods because they damage your your gut and your body in in a number of ways. The first obvious one is that they have lots of additives and chemicals to transform them into something edible. And those ones um things like emulsifiers, preservatives, uh gums, uh colorants, flavorings, artificial sweeteners are all things made by the food companies to trick your body into thinking these are tasty. and they often are, but they will damage your gut microbes who in their billions of years of evolution have never come across these products because they don't exist in nature in that form.

Host: So like the cereal bar I have here.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yes. So, this has got um flavored fillings, whatever that means, glucose syrup, glycerin, uh wheat, fruit juice concentrate, vegetable fiber, natural flavorings, oatmeal, and soya. Well, this one doesn't look too bad. Whatever. I'm not quite sure how flavored filling is, though. Flavored filling anything.

Host: Was that corn flakes or something?

Professor Tim Spectre: Corn flakes. Yes. So they would be uh something I would regard as uh highly processed and uh probably a moderate risk. At Zoey we've created a new scale because in the past we'd have grouped all of these together as the same but I think we now need to think of these as zero mild moderate high risk depending on whether they have them.

Host: What about this?

Professor Tim Spectre: That that would be high risk. Okay. because this is designed by uh the people that make them. It's got preservatives in it that so this will be the same in a week's time, right? We can still be playing with it. It's not going to change or get moldy. Um it's got uh emulsifiers to keep it together. It's got extra sugar in it. It'll have a really amount of salt in there probably and and sugar and got some fat in here. Um, so it'll be hyper palatable. And

Host: what does that mean?

Professor Tim Spectre: That means that you can eat a lot of it before you get full. So it makes you overeat.

Host: For anyone that can't see, we're talking about white bread. Just normal white bread that you'd probably get in the supermarket.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yeah. And it's it's got a special structure that's different. That also means that it it it takes very little chewing. All right. So you put this in your mouth, you don't really have to chew it. It's like baby food. Whereas, you know, a real bread made with high fiber, you you know, it takes several chews to get it down you. So, there's lots of features of these foods that um alert you to them being uh unhealthy. So, not only ingredients which are bad for your gut microbes and disrupt them, the additives. U you've got the fact that it makes you overeat. So, a lot of those potato snacks and things you get, they just dissolve in your mouth. They're designed so you can eat them so fast.

Host: Is there a good bread or a preferable bread?

Professor Tim Spectre: Yeah, there are. There's not many things like rye breads and spelt breads, ideally sourdoughs, um the German style breads that, you know, the Scandinavian breads, they're pretty good for you because they still have the whole grain intact and that means it's got the nutrients. also means it's harder to eat them quickly and they fill you up. These if you eat this bread, it just doesn't makes you hungrier. I used to have this all the time when I was a a junior doctor. Every ward had toasters and uh cheap bread courtesy of the NHS and you you eat them, they give you a little kick, but you just feel just as hungry an hour later having eaten, you know, four of them. And I think this is the problem. Many people don't realize that this food is is not only making them sick, making their gut microbes sick, but it it's actually making them overeat. And studies show it makes you overeat by about 25%, which you know really adds up every day of your life. A lot of people, including me, have gone through their life thinking that because when they eat this stuff, they get stomach pains and sometimes they have gas or they'll have like, I don't know, toilet related issues. um that they are gluten free, like they are gluten intolerant or whatever.

Host: I was one of those people. I thought because if I eat this, if I was to eat this piece of bread, I'd feel it for the next two days.

Professor Tim Spectre: So, I assumed I was gluten-free. But when I think we spoke last time, you told me that almost nobody is is gluten intolerant to has a gluten what's the term?

Host: Well, there's Yes.

Professor Tim Spectre: Gluten intolerance.

Host: Gluten intolerant.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yeah. But that that's not

Host: when you test them. Yes. Directly. I mean there are some u but most people who think they are are not and that's because generally when you eat a sandwich in the US or the UK uh you're getting crap bread terrible filling uh all kinds of other additives and chemicals which are probably disagreeing with you. So when you give up eating sandwiches you might feel better. So roughly up to 30% of people believe gluten is a problem for them but only 1% actually need to strictly avoid it.

Professor Tim Spectre: I think it's a great example of we love to have a simple solution. So gluten came in said right everyone can think about gluten. Let's just get rid of that and all our problems are solved. rather than thinking what are all the other things in a in a cheap bread sandwich that you might be reacting to. It also could be the emulsifier that is uh gluing that bread together or is in the mayonnaise that you're having. Uh it could be some of these colorants that are, you know, making the bread white or ch making that sauce bright yellow that you might be intolerant of. The more things that they these manufacturers add to these foods, the more likely there is one that is disagreeing you with you and your favorite sandwich suddenly, you know, becomes your worst enemy because, you know, they're just created by brilliant scientists to all they care about is you find it irresistible and keep eating it. If you eat the healthy stuff, you don't have these problems.

Host: What about these these almonds?

Professor Tim Spectre: Um, some walnuts in there as well. What do you think of almonds? I love almonds. Um they're they're good for you and lots of studies showing they're good for your cognition, even some mild effects on other aspects of brain health and uh and and mood. These are uh good for gut health. They've got all kinds of really good fats in them. These omega-3s and etc. are are in nuts. So, they're a fantastic snack that um do fill you up and generally recommend them. Probably more data about walnuts than almonds for brain health that that I've read about. So, there are, you know, studies of people take a lot of walnuts, they help, but I I think the idea shouldn't be there's only one type of nut that you should eat that's going to help your brain. We should again go back to this concept of diversity. And so mix nuts really are your best way of um helping your your brain health by eating these things. And we used to demonize nuts because they had fat in it. Certainly when I was uh you know 20 years ago, oh you can't have peanuts and nuts. They're really bad for your heart. Now we've totally reversed this. And I just think it it just shows how much has changed in this field in in a in a relatively short time.

Host: What's number seven? So that number six was avoid high-risk processed foods.

Professor Tim Spectre: Important when you're picking food to try and get as many colors on your plate as possible because that's a sign that they contain these chemicals called polyphenols.

Host: Natural colors.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Not the uh the blue colors you get that we really want to avoid which are bad for you. So natural colors are a sign that they these foods are good for you. So, we're talking bright berries, we're talking raspberries, blackberries, uh, strawberries, we're talking um, rosolo lettuce, we're talking about uh, cabbages that are purple. Uh, we're talking really all those bright colors because they contain chemicals that are from this family broadly called the polyphenols which act as fuel for your gut microbes. and that allows them to then in turn uh produce things like short- chain fatty acids and and keeps them healthy. So, it's a sign from nature that we're eating these these foods and it's a signal probably your ancestors knew. And the other sign which we can't tell from looking at it, but you we get to know is bitterness. So, bitter uh plants tend to be much healthier than uh bland ones. That's the broccoli story. That's um why extra virgin olive oil is so good for us. Why uh coffee is also good. Why uh red wine and and uh dark chocolate. It's those polyphenols in there that are really giving us our microbes a boost.

Host: And the eighth one, last but not least,

Professor Tim Spectre: last but not least, give your gut a rest.

Host: Fast.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yes. So timerestricted eating, this has been shown to help your uh gut recover in a proper circadian rhythm. It's a bit like getting a good night's sleep for your gut. So we can we all know the benefits of sleep for us, but we often disregard our gut. Many people have a late night snack, uh a kebab going home from the pub or whatever it is. It's completely the wrong thing to do for your gut health. 12 to 14 hour uh overnight fast trying to restrict your eating time to 10 hours really has been shown to have metabolic advantages for you uh and improves your gut lining. So it it's less likely to to leak and cause inflammation and allows the cleaning team and your microbes to come out and and clean up your gut. the number of studies now um showing that it it does have these metabolic advantages, but I'm not pushing it so hard these days because we did do a mass another massive uh citizen science study with Zoe with over 100,000 people doing this. Um we asked them to do 14-hour timerestricted eating. A third gave up. They said, "I can't do this. I feel hung too hungry all the time. I need to be snacking something like almonds."

Professor Tim Spectre: A third loved it and they're still doing it two years later. And a third was sort of, yeah, I'll do this sometimes. I feel better on it. So, I think there's a personalized element to it. But, uh, if you can do it, it is really important. And I would urge even the people that find it tough, if you can avoid that unhealthy late night snack, that can have a really big impact on your gut and your brain.

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Host: You've become more open to keto in recent years.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yes.

Host: Um, and I'm ke I would say I'm keto curious.

Professor Tim Spectre: You're keto curious. What's made you keto curious? cuz I don't think you I don't think you were very um keen on keto before for

Host: No, I think when we discussed it, I was I was pretty anti it, you know, but reading about the brain, how important metabolism of the brain, brain energy is and doing more research has slightly changed my mind because what we discovered is how amazing it is for childhood epilepsy.

Professor Tim Spectre: Mhm. It it is still used as the main treatment for uh drugresistant childhood epilepsy.

Host: The keto diet.

Professor Tim Spectre: The keto diet. So what for people who don't know what what we're talking about here is you're changing the the energy supply of the brain from glucose to ketone bodies, which is a switch that we've always had ever in evolutionary terms when we couldn't get food. So after about 2 days of not having food, we've used up our glucose reserves. We used it up from our our muscles and you switch to this other form uh of energy. And it's a survival mechanism, but what it tends to do is reset the brain. And so in epilepsy, that's what they think. It's a bit of a like rebooting your computer. Epilepsy is rather strange because and it used to be thought of as a mental illness as as I said because you can get hallucinations, delusions um it's associated with depression all all the same you can have all the same symptoms you get in all mental illnesses interestingly and it can be cured by the by keto. So that made me curious as to what else is going on. So in theory, some of the other mental health issues could be improved by keto. At the moment, there isn't sufficient good evidence. There's lots of anecdotal stories, studies of seven patients, open label, not convincing enough for me to say let's do it. But I think definitely worth doing some real studies. but also suggesting that even if you don't go as far as keto, just by improving the metabolism and what how the brain is getting its energy could be really important.

Host: I think um the interesting thing about the ketogenic diet um as someone that kind of cycles in and out of it, I actually I showed you earlier I have this ketone monitor on my arm which is monitoring my uh ketone levels at all times and connected to my phone. Um, I think the interesting thing is in in the world we live in where there's a lot of food noise as they call it. Everywhere you go, there's temptation to eat something bad. You're going down the high street, there's takeaways and junk food stores and stuff like that. What I think keto does, which you're probably never going to see in a study, I don't know if you would, is it helps the craving. It like dampens the food noise. So, this is part of why I think cycling in and out of it is quite useful for me because it means I have several moments in the year where my cravings for like this junk food, some of which we have on this table, just appear to vanish for a while, even if it's just for a week or two weeks or 3 weeks or four weeks. And that allows me to kind of reset and kind of take back control of the steering wheel. Whereas it's very easy, especially in modern life when you're working really hard or you're traveling, you've got sleep disruption to get into that exact spiral we talked about where you get like cravings for sugar and then you eat sugar so you feel a bit more tired and you lay down a bit more and then you're not you miss the gym and then you kind of you have the same like downward spiral. Um keto continually snaps me out of the probabil the chance of that.

Professor Tim Spectre: How long for though?

Host: H probably the longest I've done it is maybe six weeks or eight weeks. But even get even doing it for let's say one week for me will then mean the preceding four 8 weeks are much healthier in every regard. So even when I come off it, I'm much healthier when I you know what I'm saying?

Professor Tim Spectre: That's why what's interested me because I think being on a long-term keto diet is never going to work, right? is just too brutal and it's incompatible with keeping your gut happy.

Host: Mhm.

Professor Tim Spectre: So to me that's I mean very few people can tolerate it anyway as you know it's tough.

Host: Yeah. If we can come up with a regime that every three or every six months, you had a few days of going into keto, just enough to reset your body and your brain, and at the same time, you protected your gut, say by, you know, taking daily 30 or other things that weren't going to get you out of keto, but could keep your your gut in a in a in the right place, then I think we could potentially be have a uh something of practical use for brain health issues.

Professor Tim Spectre: And I' I'd love to, you know, do more of that. I'm I'm planning at some point later in this year to do to test myself to see if I can uh do a week of keto whilst keeping my gut microbes happy.

Host: Have you ever done keto?

Professor Tim Spectre: Uh not properly. No. You know, if you've done a 24-hour fast, you for a colonoscopy, you are just about getting into keto at the time you're doing it, but you're not you've got other things to worry about going to the toilet to distract you.

Host: I think this is really it because we talked about how holistic that the whole picture of the body is and how it's so interconnected and how the brain is so connected to the gut and all these things and there's something about doing the ketogenic diet which just it feels like I get control back

Professor Tim Spectre: in a in a way that then has this bigger holistic effect on my life my ability everything in my life like my ability to articulate myself as a podcaster I heard actually Joe Rogan say the same thing he had him say that words to the effect of the fact that when he's in ketosis, it's so profound his ability to articulate himself and think as someone that does 4hour podcasts that he would almost stay in it forever just for that particular cognitive benefit of like mental clarity. And I always say to my team that when I'm in the keto diet, I feel like I'm looking at the world like this, like everything's high definition and my mouth and brain are like I always say my mouth and brain are connected suddenly.

Host: Yeah. I've had other people say this that they do get this sort of clarity which which could be you know more exaggerated way of feeling that benefit of a long overnight fast um when you come in after 14 hours without eating and you're doing a podcast like this. Yeah, I definitely do feel better than if I'd had a big English breakfast

Professor Tim Spectre: just before. But I think the danger is that, you know, if people disregard their gut microbiome and do this, the the any advantage be wiped out so quickly by the the problems of what's happening to your immune cells and everything else in your body. So if we can find this intermittent middle way while you can still look after your gut, then I agree that would be cool. But I couldn't find any good data on on this apart from anecdotes of you know fanatics who will obviously um say it's great for their patients but without any control group because must be a big placebo effect as well. Um it's very you very hard to not have a placebo effect when you're doing that when you're when you're struggling so hard to do things that as they say you know people get keto headaches and they get all you know as you go into it people say it's can be quite rough so you can't double blind yourself but I think it is fascinating that in the same way that reversing type 2 diabetes you know improves your mental health it makes sense that if you're switching energy levels in the brain you could also do things. And let's not forget things like ECT still an effective treatment. That's that's a brain reset. Sometimes, you know, we may end up going back to the the old era of um psychiatry where, you know, before we got into this obsession with neurochemicals to have this holistic view, which I think is is really fascinating. And when you did that brain scan, you found that you're in the highest 20% for levels of environmental microplastics

Host: in your blood.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yeah, that was a bit scary. They divide the microplastics into into two groups. The sort of depending the dimensions of them. I was concerned, am I eat was I eating a lot of microplastics? So it turned out that the higher levels I had were actually the the smaller ones that you get through your lungs which probably means a life having lived a life in London um you know six decades in London probably wasn't very good for getting all this dust and and and uh things in there. That was a bit of a worry. That's probably because I cycle around London a lot in the last 30 years.

Host: Have you changed anything in that regard?

Professor Tim Spectre: I still cycle. I don't like wearing a mask. I know I sort of probably should. And I've put a new water filter in my home uh to take out some of these chemicals and and at least some of those plastics. I'm still not totally convinced on how bad they are. And the science, I don't think really we've resolved that issue yet. But it's it's something I'm I'm looking at closely. And I think if there's something easy you can do, I try and avoid plastic containers. I try and avoid plastic bottles and I think that's good for the planet as well.

Host: Is there a way to take these microplastics out of our body once they're in there?

Professor Tim Spectre: They anecdotally they say things like plasma feresis um you know you can go into a spa in LA and and get your uh plasma taken out and filtered and put back into your body. This is from your blood. But uh I don't think there's any real clinical trials that satisfy me that would be worth and they cost I think they're sort of $10,000 ago. So it's not not a cheap process to have that done. So wait and see but at the moment yeah it's it's it's a worry but I I think there are other things in the environment probably worse. you know, dust, pesticides. Is it better to have organic food rather than worry about plastics? Um, we don't know the answer to these these problems. How is your views on GLP1s like a Zmpeek and WGO or whatever it's called, these these um injections and I think now tablets people are taking for weight loss. How is your views on those evolved? Are they good, bad, and different?

Professor Tim Spectre: They're going to be a part of our life anyway. So they're going to transform medicine and uh obesity in a way we can't imagine at the moment especially now this year that the pills are available and it's coming off patent in many countries so it'd be much cheaper. I think for people who really need them they're an incredible drug. The only problem is you can't really come off them. So they're pretty much for life. My first worry is that a lot of people take them without supervision and they are not told to change their diet. I'd love people to go take the drugs, their hunger signal gets switched off. They can then be mindful about their food. They could do something like, you know, have the Zoey app or some other educational program to change their food habits forever in that in that window of opportunity. And that I think is where we should be doing. And that's been completely ignored at the moment. Virtually nobody's getting that lifestyle advice as well as the drug. And so they're failing. They're going back in it. you know, yo-yoing and they're getting the worst of the worlds. The other the other slight worry we need to keep an eye on is the long-term effects on the brain. So far, the data suggests that it does reduce your chances of getting dementia even beyond, you know, reversing diabetes. So, it looks like it's brain protective probably because it might have anti-inflammatory effects. It reduces things like gambling and uh addictions. So we don't really know how it does that. But if it takes away some of your drives, those basic drives to say I like to take risks, you know, I I like to take drugs. I like to smoke. I like to gamble on horses. Is it in some way changing you as a a person long term in that you might be less good as an entrepreneur for example?

Host: Mhm.

Professor Tim Spectre: So that is something I think that's really interesting to follow. But in general, I think from a public health perspective, this could save uh you know, health systems hundreds of billions long term and we ought to be taking it much more seriously and integrating it into holistic and educational advice.

Host: And as it relates to brain health, you also have a sauna routine as part of your brain health regime.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yeah, I've been impressed by some of the science uh coming out of this and the fact that I quite enjoy just actually enjoy it from a hedonistic uh point of view. So I try and have a sauna twice a week if I can if I can do that ideally with a cold plunge afterwards, but the science isn't sure whether that makes a big difference. It's like just a workout for your your blood vessels in your body and your brain. So um I think that the science is quite compelling and yeah it makes me feel good which um is always should be part of anyone's health routine. Something you enjoy doing is always easy

Host: and regular socializing is part of your brain routine.

Professor Tim Spectre: Yeah. If you look at the happiest longived populations on the planet, they've all got really good social lives. They are always dining with friends, going out. often that does involve a little bit of alcohol in most of these societies, but that doesn't seem to adversely affect them. The idea of having a a a key group of core friends you see regularly, I think, is really good for your mental and brain health, and loneliness has got to be one of the the worst things uh for your brain health. So, really important to maintain your uh your good friends. What is uh what is the most important thing as it relates to brain health or overall health that we haven't talked about that we should have talked about?

Professor Tim Spectre: I think we haven't talked about early life experiences and stress but trauma.

Host: Yeah. So one thing um and we haven't talked about talk therapies and um you know conventional treatments. So if you look at all all these brain diseases, virtually all of them, if you go back in time, if you've had uh emotional, physical, sexual trauma in in early life, you're much more likely to have brain diseases later in life.

Professor Tim Spectre: And this is across all of them. Again, coming up with the idea that they're all related in some way. And so, you know, we've moved on from the Freudian idea that, you know, the mind is different and from the brain. If you take this holistic idea, how does this fit into this inflammatory metabolic um theory of brain health? I think it it now does because they've done studies showing that uh following trauma or stress, you can trigger your immune system to be permanently raised. So again, you get this uh consistent uh stress that the thermostat doesn't go down to baseline. So you have a period of a year, a terrible period as a kid. They do tests later in life. You'll they'll find your inflammation levels in your blood are raised from people who had a nice gentle quiet childhood. And I think this is starts to link all these different components together. And these cross all these early life traumas. You see the same thing in people with chronic pain, um chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, um irritable bowel syndrome, epilepsy, schizophrenia, it it everything. But it doesn't really matter where the source of the stress was. It's caused some physiological problem. So I think that that is really interesting so that we could pick up people who if we had better tests of that stress and inflammation we could start to help those people earlier on before the brain started to uh struggle and I think that that's really interesting and of course we want to do most to reduce the problem in the first place. They've also done studies on talk therapies. So obviously psychiatry is compartmentalized into the talk therapists and the and the drug therapists and there's quite a lot of evidence that talk therapy does reduce inflammation levels and help your immune system. So just in the same way possibly that talking to friends has that effect. So uh talking to your therapist long term uh will reduce your stress and you can see that in blood markers as well. the whole thing is starting to come together that uh all these different ways of treating it can be working through similar pathways that looked so different through our you know the fact that we've got so distracted by Dickart um Freud um treating the brain as something so different to the rest of the body.

Host: We have a closing tradition on this podcast with the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question for you is, what are you uncontainably excited about?

Professor Tim Spectre: I'm uncontainably excited about the idea that we can dramatically improve our lives and our health just by making the right food choices. This is really driving me to talk about it so much to do the studies to do the science to spread the word because you know we're seeing all the time the dramatic effects and I was talking about the TV program was doing with these you know these these families that are really suffering. It just shows you what you can do if you start treating food like you would treat medicine. you know, taking it really seriously and experimenting with it and noticing those those differences and um you know, I get the feedback all the time because I because the books and the media, people telling me how their lives have been transformed and so that feedback keeps me excited on this topic. And so, um I've never had that in my career before and it's super exciting. It's um it's really hard though, isn't it? And this is I guess the part we don't talk about much, which is the psychological part of you know what some might call discipline in a world we live in where you go into like I don't know a gas station or a petrol station or whatever you call it in different parts of the world and the options are very ultrarocessed. Um and you you live a stressful life. You're on your phone all day. You're getting your dopamine fried by watching short form videos back to back to back to back to back. you may be, you know, people are lonier than ever before. So, making the right choices when we're controlled by our neurology and our hormones and how we feel is is often easier said than done. So, even in the case of that family that you met, do you think much about the psychology part of like discipline when it comes to making the right choice? And is there any advice there on how to be more disciplined with our food choices? Or do you just think that knowledge is power in this regard?

Professor Tim Spectre: Well, knowledge is power, but it's not the only thing. You you need tricks. Um, we're fighting a food environment. You know, multi-billion dollar industry wants us to eat this crap food. your gas station, they're being bribed to fill their everything around you with the worst foods. The worse the food, the more they pay the supermarkets to have it in a point where you're going to buy it. So, you need to have tricks to counteract that. And not going to a supermarket is is often one way to avoid doing that. If my house was filled with crap food, I would probably be snacking in it. I find it really hard to throw stuff away. You know, you you go to workplaces and you see people with piles of biscuits and uh M&M's uh there. You know, they should be banned. Um so there are certain things you say we need to fight back by changing the rules a bit. Um just like you wouldn't have, you know, glasses of vodka in an office uh for people just have a swig if they fancy, you shouldn't have candies and sweets and these things. um in the current environment where you know we're fighting a battle like you know they used to have cigarettes that were free everywhere we forget um and they change that environment and the cigarettes are now really hard to get at that makes it easier for people to fight the habit

Host: and we we often beat ourselves up because we think of ourselves as being weak because of this we think ourselves being like illd disciplined because we end up reaching for the wrong things but it is really really hard and it's really really hard even you know I sit here all day every day speaking to people that are experts on these subjects. And you'd think that would mean that I made perfect decisions because I've probably interviewed, you know, more people than the average 99.99% of the population on this subject. But I'm a human with emotions and hormones and life to deal with. And and so even I have to um regardless of how much I know about this stuff now, I still have to like give myself the best possible chance by thinking proactively about my environment at home and even like in the cart and even at the office. like I have to think really proactively, put systems in place to avoid the possibility that I get really really hungry really really late at night and my only options are for example, you know, um which has been a bit the big change

Professor Tim Spectre: and it's forming habits and that's the other thing. So it's yeah you got knowledge then you got these tricks tricks to avoid often the the worst offenders and then you've got to come up with these these new habits that you you make that are going to break the old ones. So, you know, rather than reaching for your breakfast cereal in the morning, you've got a different one ready to go. And often we've found that if you can change that first meal of the day, it it becomes a lot easier because that's the one you're mainly in control of and realize when the other risky events are.

Host: Tim, you've written many, many books. I'm going to link them all below. This is the the newest one. I know you're working on one specifically about the brain, but I'm very excited for that one. But this is the newest one called Ferment. um unsurprisingly a number one bestseller yet again. Um but there's a whole stack of books here. The diet myth, the real science behind what we eat. Um Spoonfed, why almost everything we've been told about food is wrong. And this book, which has been extremely successful, um the Food for Life cookbook with 100 recipes created by Zoe. I'm going to link all of them below for anyone that wants to check them out. And uh thank you so much once again.

Professor Tim Spectre: Been a pleasure as always. you've kept my audience very very healthy and they're very appreciative of that. I I I remember um just the amount of people that come up to all over the world and site the conversations we've had in the past and how that's had been the thing for them that has helped them to change their life. And it's pretty remarkable. It's really remarkable how many people you must have fundamentally caused to create different food and dietary decisions through the work you've done yourself, through the books, through Zoe. Um and that's a really special thing. So, thank you on behalf of all of them. Well, hopefully we can do millions more. I hope so.

Host: If there's anything we need, it is connection. Especially in the world we're living in today. And that is exactly why we created these conversation cards Because on this show, when I sit here with my guests and have those deep, intimate conversations, this remarkable thing happens time and time again. We feel deeply connected to each other. At the end of every episode, the guest I'm interviewing leaves a question for the next guest, and we've turned them into these conversation cards. And we've added these twist cards to make your conversations even more interesting. And there are so many more twists along the way with the conversation cards. This is the brand new edition. And for the first time ever, I've added to the pack this gold card, which is an exclusive question from me. But I'm only putting the gold cards in the first run of conversation cards. So get yours now before the limited edition gold cards are all gone. Head to the link in the description below.

Professor Tim Spectre: You take a healthy person's poop and you transfer it into the person who's sick. So this is a great example to show how important our gut microbiome is because 60% of the weight of your stool is your microbiome. And so I've identified four things missing in our diet. And when you do these, you will thrive and you will live longer and you will have less disease. And I'm going to take you through all of these steps right