Just As Well, The Women's Health Podcast - Tim Spector: Gut Health is the Key to Better Sleep, Energy & Mood

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

In this episode of Just As Well, Gemma Atkinson and Claire Sanderson sit down with Professor Tim Spector — one of the world’s leading experts on gut health, co-founder of Zoe, and author of the new book Ferment.We talk about:The two-week gut reset and how fast your microbiome can improveThe surprising links between gut health, mood, energy, and sleepWhy fermented foods are powerful (and how to start with simple recipes)The truth about calorie counting, ultra-processed foods, and the 80/20 ruleWhy even checking your poo can give you clues about your healthTim also shares his personal health scare, the research that changed his career, and why looking after your microbes might be the most important thing you can do for your long-term wellbeing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's time to be great. Hi, I'm Gemma Atkinson. And I'm Claire Sanderson and I'm the editor-in-chief of Women's Health UK. Welcome to another episode of Just As Well. Today we spoke to Professor Tim Specter, who's an expert, well, one of the best experts worldwide in gut health. I genuinely learn, I mean, I knew your gut played a role in your body and your functioning in your mental health. I knew that. But he dived so much deeper into the why, to the how, to the what.

it was fascinating. But he also reassured me that it's really quite quick and simple to improve your gut microbiome. So he did say that it depends at what point you start. So if you're someone who is a terribly processed diet and maybe drinks too much alcohol

and has a lot of stress in your life, you may be starting at a lower point than say myself and you, Gemma, but he said the average person can make dramatic improvement that will make them feel better holistically in two weeks. Two weeks. And he spoke about the whole, the brain gut connection as well,

how sometimes when you feel a bit anxious or nervous, you physically throw up because of the connection. I'm thinking about now, I'm a bit embarrassed. I actually asked him about poo. You did. I did. I asked Tim, Spector, should I be checking my poo to him? I had my daughter's poo.

But he said yes. Absolutely. He said it's a good indication of what's going on inside your body. Of course it is. Well, the Zoe app, which he has launched, you have to do that. You have to send over a sample of... You send you sample off? You do.

And you and I are both going to give it a bash. I wish I never agreed to that. I've signed up for it now. So we're going to give it a bash. Because I'm really keen to improve my gut health. I think I'm quite healthy. I know that yourself, we live wellness lifestyles. But we're also stressed, aren't we?

You know, we juggle a lot. Oh, plays a role, doesn't it? Yeah. And we, you know, we take primary responsibility for making sure our children get out of the door, fed, clean, watered and at the school gate in time, etc. And that all impacts your gut health. So I was really, really keen to learn some of the practical tips. For instance, Fermenting. So his new book is called Ferment.

It's out in September. So it's out now. And it will be a bestseller because all his other books have been the bestsellers. And he told us. quite how simple homemade fermenting recipes are that can dramatically improve your gut health. It's well worth a listen, isn't it? I hope you enjoy it.

So today's guest on Just as Well, we're very excited about this. It's Professor Tim Specter. He's one of the world's most trusted voices in gut health. He's a leading epidemiologist, co-founder of the Zoe app, an author of multiple bestsellers. actually got a brand new book, his sixth book, which is out now. It's called Fement, so we're going to talk about that later on. You may have seen Tim as well talking about fiber, fermented food,

and why calorie counting is out, which is music to our ears here at women's health. Behind the science, though, there's also a personal story for Tim. There's been a health scare and a major rethink, and a mission, really, to help all of us feel better through food. So, Tim, welcome to the podcast, thank you for joining us. In layman's terms, Tim, because we're not as very science here, we're not as sciencey as you. What is it that you do as a whole

and why is gut health so important to you? My career has been very varied. I started life as a rheumatologist, then a geneticist, then I did something called epigenetics, and I was doing medicine and science, and then the last, I guess, some of the 12, 14 years of my life have been dedicated towards nutrition and gut health. And so that was primarily, firstly, academic, writing papers, research, and I wrote hundreds of papers.

But I realized that if I wanted to make a really big impact, rather just a few hundred scientists around the world, knowing who I was, you know, I wanted to get my, those messages out to potentially millions of people. So in a way, that's why the last eight years have been dedicated to that. And co-founding a company, Zoe, that really could get this important message about the importance of gut health, about personalised nutrition, about really rethinking everything we know about food in new ways that people can understand. and then giving people, you know, the means to actually change by understanding it a bit more than, you know, the tired old ways we've been talking about, you know,

as you mentioned in the introduction, you know, the dreary old calorie story and the fat story and all this stuff, which made nutrition the most boring subject in the world, I think. But now with the latest science, it's the sexiest, hottest subject in the world. and I think everyone needs to know about it. But you went under your own personal reset some 12 years ago, which inspired you to make changes to your own health and well-being and an approach to nutrition, which ultimately led to your work in the gut health field.

So two things happened back there in about 2011, which was, you know, first there was this scientific discovery. So we've done these studies in twins, and we've done the first big twin study of the gut microbiome, which is all these bugs that live in a lower part of our intestines. And realized that, you know, I've been studying twins for 20 old years by that stage. I'd never seen anything different about identical twins. They were always very similar. And I was looking for why identical twins get different diseases.

They die at different times. you know, one gets cancer, the other one doesn't, one gets depression, the other one doesn't. No one can really pinpoint that. You know, you've got the same genes, your clones. You have the same mother, the same family, the same school. What's different? So this is a real aha moment for me. I found they were different.

There were hardly any more similar than, you know, unrelated individuals. So they shared about 20, 25% of their microbes. That was one thing. And at the same time, within a few months, of that I was up doing ski touring in Italy at high altitude and ended up with a mini stroke that affected my eye and left me with double vision and really quite tired and unwelled for three months. My blood pressure shot up and although everything else cleared up, you know, it was a real shock to the system. There was in my early 50s, you know,

And I suddenly didn't feel quite as invincible as most middle-aged men do. I realized that, you know, I'd been putting weight on steadily. I thought it was muscle, but sadly it wasn't. It would have been 10 kilos of muscle I'd put on. And I was determined to do something about it and realized that Lifestar was the thing for it. It wasn't just taking more tablets. There was a lot I could do myself. I was incredibly disappointed of what I saw on websites like the NHS website or anything out there that was official,

was just seemed me to be nonsense, not evidence-based. And so I determined to do something about it. And so it was my own personal, selfish journey, wanting to live longer than my father, who died at 57 of a heart attack. also on the same side me sort of switching over mentally from genetics being the most important thing about determining how whether you get ill or not to possibility that our gut health and microbes

could be replacing genetics as the most important thing we should all worry about with a really important message that you can't change your parents, you're stuck with them but you can change your gut microbes and that potentially for me was a real game changer. So that was the period of time that everything changed for me and it just, you know, the good news and the bad news

both stuck. There's nothing quite like a scientific discovery and then a real personal mission there at the same time to really drive you. And so that's where I've sort of pretty much given up my genetics career switched into really onto nutrition and microbiome. And yeah, it's been a super fun journey and, you know, absolutely no regrets. It's, you know, one of the best things I've done. I think what's great, Tim, is with that message is you'll be giving so many people hope

because obviously a lot of people, it's not that they use it as an excuse, but they kind of use it as a reason for not being active about their situation or everyone in my family is, obese. Everyone in my family is, the user term, big-boned. And it's like, no, you're giving them hope that they can make the change. They can actively break the cycle of what they think has just been born into them. And they can make positive changes. I mean, I was reading, I think it was what yourself you said, there's actually links between gut health and depression. Is that true? Everything you've said is absolutely true. You know, genetics still has some role. I'm not saying, you know, there's no role in genetics.

I'm not saying that, you know, I work for 25 years for nothing. It was definitely, you know, things, susceptibility does run in families, but it just means some people have to try harder than others, but there is a solution for everybody. And everybody, regards to their genetics, can improve their gut health and they can do that in a few weeks. You don't have to wait years. So I think that's a really important message.

you mentioned mental health depression that only has a weak genetic basis you know something between 25 to 30 percent genetic most of it environment and we now believe that diet has a really big fact role to play that lots of studies have shown that if you take a group of depressed patients and controls you see a disrupted gut microbes in the sick people. And some of that is cause, some of it is effect. So being depressed can actually alter your gut. So what happens in your brain is very connected to your gut through an extensive nervous network.

We call the gut the second brain. There's as many nerve endings there as in a cat's brain. And it's interacting all the time with our gut microbes, sending chemicals, to those nerves, they send signals back to the brain. There's a giant nerve you might have heard of the vagus nerve. And that's like a super highway. It just goes straight to the brain, tells the brain what's going on. And if the brain's not happy, it tells the gut what's going on. You know, that's what happens when you're about to give some stressful speech or do an exam or something else. You know, you feel your gut, gut feelings. That's what it's all about. And so evolution's given us this really

tight link between our brain and our gut and our gut microbes that also secrete chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, which are really important for depression. They also secrete things like Gabba, which you might have heard of from drugs like Valium, a relaxance. So it can do all kinds of things that we had no idea what was going on. And it turns out that, you know, when you eat rubbish food, that alters your gut microbes. Then they produce inflammatory chemicals, which interfere with your immune system, which tells your brain, you know, there's something going wrong here and in a way exacerbates this idea that it's like you're unwell, you're just slightly unwell. And the same thing happens when you have a vaccine just for those few hours

after having vaccinated. Your immune system is triggered. Your brain goes into a little shutdown. So this is what's happening to people on bad diets with mild depression. It's purely the diet that's causing these problems in the brain. The brain has been tricked into thinking the body's unwell and it does what it, a normal defense mechanism is to shut itself off from society, calm down, not go out, you know, not have, find pleasure in things and just go under the duvet and, you know, binge watch Netflix. That's sort of what happens. And we know this is a sort of causal pathway because they've taken gut microbiome samples or to use the scientific term poo samples from depressed people and they've implanted them into mice and comparing

normal and depressed people they can have very different effects on the mice so you can make a mouse anxious and depressed from just having the in a way infectious poo sample from a patient with depression. So it just shows that it's the chemicals these microbes are producing have this dramatic effect on other animals that affects their immune system and then affects their brain. So this is all really new science, but it's all starting to make sense about why you know, we're in this current epidemic of nervous mental health problem, minor, mild to moderate mental health problems that didn't exist 30 years ago, that I think in countries like the UK, which have the worst diet in Europe, it starts to make sense because those psychiatrists

has ever said, oh, you've got to completely change your diet. They just put you on antidepressant, which in people with mild disease usually don't work. It's only a minority that work. and they should be doing these, you know, giving people real diets. And there are some clinical trials now. There's one in Australia a couple of years ago called the Smiles trial that took a group of people who were on, a lot of them were on antidepressants or had been on them. And they gave them a gut-friendly diet versus normal dietary advice. and they got an improvement rate in the depressed patients that was greater than you'd see with antidepressant medication.

And there's similar studies with probiotics as well. So, yeah, there's growing evidence that depression, at least the mild to moderate form, is largely malleable with things like diet and our gut microbes. So that's a super exciting scientific field at the moment, this gut brain axis. And of course, it's not just depression, it's also anxiety, it's probably also ADHD, some spectrum disorders. Some people even believe schizophrenia, the more severe forms of psychosis, can be treated, at least some cases, treated with diet. I'm not advocating giving up all tablets, but I think at the very least there should be real important dietary steps taken at the same time because that's what the science

is now supporting. And for everybody, all the studies we're doing, we didn't use to measure, doctors never told to measure things like energy or mood. If you go to see a doctor, they rarely say, oh, you know, what's your energy level like on a score or not out of 10? They say, well, you know, what's your blood pressure or, you know, what's something you measure? But we started doing this at Zoe and we found amazingly that people who change their diet say that the Zoe way by going on to a gut-friendly diet, one of the first things they notice is an improvement in mood and energy.

That's just after a few days. And we've repeated this with our clinical trials. where we use a prebiotic fiber. Again, within three or four days, the active arm, you know, they get these sort of over 50% of people report these improvements. And then we've also done a study with fermented foods. And again, the first thing you notice before the gut changes, actually what's happening mentally is some of the things people notice.

So, yeah, as you can see, it gets me very excited. asking you those questions. So yeah, I think, you know, and everyone, whether you have, you know, a diagnose mental illness or not, everybody has mood fluctuations, bad days, good days. You know, we've all been depressed or anxious at some time and all the data is showing that you can really improve this with, by looking after our diet and reducing this, particularly inflammation. This seems to be this. Peloton. A new era of fitness is here. Introducing the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ, built for breakthroughs with personalized workout plans, real-time insights,

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and have some highly processed, risky food, full of synthetic chemicals, you know, you're knocking that back and making that inflammation much more likely. I'm someone who does have a history of depression, back, way back, serious depression, but not for many years and I'm not medicated, but I manage it through fitness and nutrition.

So if I eat, you know, crap food, ultra-processed food, it immediately affects my mood. But also if I don't exercise, I have to exercise, they have to go hand in hand. Is it only food that can influence your microbiome? Does exercise and fitness have any impact on it at all? It does have some impact, but the studies have been sort of underwhelming

in terms of the changes compared to food. And most of the same, studies that have showed effects have been in mice and rats, so the difference in sedentary and making them run. And so there's definitely a link between exercise and gut health, but the effect sizes don't seem to be as strong. And there's some evidence that elite athletes can be doing too much and they actually can harm their gut microbes at some point.

So there might be, well, be a sweet spot somewhere that you can sort of overstress your body. And, you know, you're poor a microphone saying, oh, my God, when's this guy going to have a rest, you know. I need to sleep too or, you know, whatever. We don't know. But it's, yeah, so I think exercise has a role. But it might be highly personalized as well. Because in you, it might be something that reduces, for example, stress. and we know that stress is something that affects the gut microbes.

So it might be an indirect mechanism. Like a knock on effect. And that might be why exercise doesn't benefit everyone as much. And I wanted to ask you, Tim, about, you know, the food myths, because there'll be some people listening to this thinking, oh my gosh, I can never have a pizza again. I can never have a glass of wine again. But you've got a great approach with the 80-20, I believe,

in that, you know, you do allow yourself the occasional what you want, but primarily 80% is what our bodies need. Can you tell us about that and also the fermented food because a lot of people won't have a clue what a fermented food is? So 80-20, yes. So this is this idea that it's all very well to say, okay, do as I do and you'll live to be 120 and still running marathons. and you know and if you fail one day well you're a loser that's it you know you've fallen off the wagon

and I think a lot of previous dietary advice has been a bit rigid like this it's saying you know follow this very strict regime and if you don't it's because you have failed your work you've lacked willpower you know it's your fault and people will you you know, for self-loathing and, you know, a lot of these calorie restriction diets and things like this were based on that idea. And so they wouldn't blame the diet guru or the company or the Weight Watchers plan or whatever. They'd blame themselves for failing. So I think it's really important to realize that, you know, for things like weight loss or, you know, general gut health, it's the long run that's important. It's not what you can do.

do over the next six weeks is it's a habit that you can last a lifetime rather than just a few weeks and so that's where you realize that if you're going to have a normal life you're not a and you're not an obsessional person um then you've got to have a flexible way of way of doing anything whether it's you know eating uh your 30 you know my rules are you know eat 30 plants eat the rainbow have your fermented foods, avoid ultra-processed risky foods, and try and avoid snacking and leave a good gap overnight. Do that five days out of seven, but don't pass up a friend's party,

your best friends having a party and they've got some crap food and you know, you're going to be snacking late. and it's not going to be perfect. It's really important that you don't feel the next day that you've got to start from scratch. This is just part of your journey and you just get back on it, you don't feel guilty about it,

you just say, well, that's life. You know, I've, you know, life's for having fun and enjoying stuff and there's, you know, there's some foods you have that might be a bit naughty, but, you know, it's a celebration, and that's fine. So I think it's that mentality of saying,

I'm into this for the long run. Don't mind a couple of days a week if it doesn't go to plan because I'm getting something else out of it. I'm having fun. I'm socialising, which we all know is related to longevity as well. So I think it's, I have a very pragmatic attitude. And this is how I really live my life. And it's important because now I'm getting better known.

You know, people will probably take a picture of me, you know, having some fish and chips or a pint of beer. or whatever it is, you know, that I'm not supposed to be doing. So it's good to have a rule like that up your sleeve. You can stick to it long term like that, can't you? It's a lot easier to maintain, yeah. Because everything, you know, everything in the past has been very short term, you know. Lose this weight, six weeks, you'll feel, you know, you'll be new again, get ready for summer,

do this. But they've all failed and they've actually been worse by yo-yoing up and down long-term and suffered real psychological problems. are feeling unworthy and, you know, and that causes then anxiety and depression and makes it hard to do it the next time. So I just think people just need to say, do as much as you can. And we also know that if you can improve your gut microbiome so that it's got a reasonable diversity of different species in there, which means it's got some flexibility by which chemicals it can produce, because the gut microbiome, you know, you can either think of it as a zoo,

a jungle or a garden, but it's also a chemical factory of pharmaceuticals being pumped out from all these different microbes. And the more different ones you have, the more you can adapt to different scenarios and control your immune system better. So we find that if you've got a good microbiome and you go off the wagon and you have too many drinks and you end up in a cabab shop at one in the morning, it's not a disaster. You'll bounce back, you know what I mean? Or if you have to take antibiotics or anything else like that, you're much more resilient if you've already got that base.

And so that's what I think the message needs to be. This is a long-term idea. Even if you can't do everything that I say you should do, immediately you just slowly build it up. And the point is to be of doing it. this for decades and changing the way you eat, but still having fun and enjoying food and drink and not treating it, you know, as something toxic. If we can get into the simple steps people can take to improve their microbiome, but before

we do so, how long does it take a person to build a diverse, healthy microbiome that can benefit them holistically, their health holistically? It all depends where you start from, because we're all unique. we've all got completely different microbes just the three of us whereas we share 99.9% of our DNA so we're all fifth cousins so yes hello cousins but we're very unrelated

microbiome wise so they wouldn't know each other at all and I think that that means that it it's hard to know exactly what the perfect microbiome is. We've done, we've now done a quarter of a million gut tests now, Zoe. So we get a pretty good idea of what normal is and what is and what the healthy ones are. And it's,

it's when you've got a really good ratio of good, healthy bugs and you've got hardly any bad bugs. That's when you've got a healthy garden. And the analogy is a bit like if you've got a, you know, your perfect English country garden, you know you don't have to do too much weeding when you've got all the right plants in there. There's not much space for the weeds to come out

and the soil is really good. So you filled the spaces with the good guys and there really isn't lots of areas for the bad weeds to come. And the same is true if you mentally think of that picture in your gut. So you want to be in that place where you've got a stable gut microbiome with hardly any bad guys, then you're in a much more stable place. How long does it take?

It really depends, A, what your starting point is, and how radically you adapt and how quickly you adapt to this regime. But they have done some clinical studies so that you can do this within two weeks, dramatically change your gut microbiome. Others, it might be, you know, closer to two months. But it's something in that order. It's not years. And what foods could, like with the fermented foods, what are the top, I don't know, top five,

if people were to go to the supermarket now and look for fermented foods to help you go, what would be the top of your list? There are lots of fermented foods and people forget what they are. So it's worthwhile, perhaps listing, some of them people forgot what a fermented food is. So it's anything with a live

microbe in it and that that has a chance of being healthy for you. So we call that it's a probiotic in food. It's people know about probiotics because you can buy them in the health food shop or whatever. But these are naturally occurring bugs that live in your food that have helped make it tasty. So a good example is cheese. They convert you add bugs to milk and they basically create cheese. You also got yogurt just by heating and

cooling yogurt at a certain temperature, I mean milk at a certain temperature, you get, and putting, you add in three microbes into that, you've got a probiotic drink. Then you've got kefir, which is fermented milk, which is actually like a super yogurt, usually has at least 10 and up to 30 microbes in it. So many more than just plain yogurt. Then you've got things like

you've got kimchi which is Korean sourcrow really which is this red spicy mix of ginger and garlic and

lots of onions and garlic and carrots and Japanese radish. And that has up to about 50, 60 microbes in it. And then you've got things like kombucha. You've got, which is a drink made of fermented tea. Again, the artisan versions will have lots of microbes, perhaps 40 or 50.

and you've got something called water cafe called Tibikos, which people haven't heard of, little grains, and they can have 60, 70 microbes in them. And then you've got all the Japanese foods, miso paste, which is made of fermented soybeans. Every time you have anything like a miso soup, that's made from fermented bean paste. And you can add the paste, you can buy it,

and it's still in its raw probiotic form and you can just mix it onto food and you get the microbes that way. So lots of ways to get your ferment. I think it's about people trying which one suits them because some people don't like dairy. And so that reduces their choice. Although you can get coconut yogurts and you can get coconut kaffirs. So there are fermentes for vegans or people who are lactose intolerant. Yeah, so I think some of these easy ones to go for are, you know, kombucha drinks. They are a nice alternative to alcohol.

They're usually got an interesting flavor, this fermented tea. Just pick ones without too much sugar in and without too many artificial sweeteners. Um, coffee is milk milk keffir added to yogurt is an easy way to start, um, introducing that sour taste for you and perhaps your kids, you know,

um, and if you find things like sauerkra or kimchi too much for you, um, got a tip in the book about combining it with something like, um, cream cheese or, you know, things like a Philadelphia spread.

You just mix the two up and it really, softens it so you don't have those sharp taste and you can slowly get used to these flavors because most people in the UK aren't used to these flavors anymore. You know, half of Europe still haven't, didn't give them up so they still know about all these pickles and ferments. We need to relearn it. So I think that's, it's just going out there and okay, I'm going to try and do this. And the idea is to have a small amount of these little and often, rather than some big bucket once a week. You just introduce a little bit when you're having a little bit of cheese with your

cheese and biscuits, just have a little bit of saucrat or kimchi with it. You can add a cafe to the end of meals instead of cream fresh on the top of a soup. You just add a bit of your cafe. You can put it in curries, all kinds of little tips and things like this. I've discovered writing the book. So yeah, there's something for everybody, but it's a slow process. I don't think you'll suddenly love it

if you've not had fermented foods. But the studies show that if you can have three portions a day of, and it can be a half a cup of this or a shot of kombucha or a little bit of sauerkra at the end of the day, Within two weeks, you can really improve your immune system. And we did a big study with Zoe of 10,000 people who hardly had any fernments. And they were trying them for the first time.

We got them to have three portions. And within a week, over 50% had, you know, improved mood, energy. They felt less hungry and they had less bloating and reflux. Wow. So this is really interesting. And these are people who hadn't really had many fernments before. So that's the idea. Little amounts and slowly build it up.

But you would have to surely make other changes to your diet if you are eating an almost exclusively UPF diet, for instance, which I think there's some stats that in the UK, some people are 80% up. There's no point in having that diet and adding ferments in. Surely you need to make other changes. changes to your diet? Could a ferment override the damage

UPF to do to your microbiome? In the worst case scenario, you've got someone, you know, say you've got a kid who's addicted to junk food. If you gave them these ferment, I suspect it would counteract some of the most harmful effects. I mean, obviously you'd stop eating the poisonous food first, but it certainly you can add it,

and it looks like in mice, and things like this, it does to some extent counteract that diet, but never totally. So it's not a substitute for changing the diet. But in the studies we did, we didn't, you know, when we selected these 10,000 people from the general population, they weren't on the best optimum diets. They were taken as a general cross-section of the public. But, yeah, so it's part of the approach. It's obviously, I think the one part, you know, we talk about fibre, we talk about plant diversity,

but fermented foods just don't get much discussion in this country just because it's not really part of our culture. And people find it rather strange to have these strange fermenting microbes, you know. And forget that, you know, the reason we're there is it was before the days of fridges. you could conserve food for months by just having these specialised selective microbes that produced acid that kept all the other bugs, nasty bugs away. And we've just forgotten how beneficial they were and how they've evolved with us.

So we've evolved to eat them as well. And so it's just the last 50 years we've stopped eating them. We've become more lazy, aren't we? Because we're surrounded in media, in advertising, like the quick, easy, cheap, option to feed a family. And when you mentioned earlier about 30 years ago how things have changed, I was thinking the main thing that has changed from not myself personally, but my generation to my great-grandma's generation is the diet and the environment. You know, we're still

the same mechanical being. It's just environmental and diet. That's the only thing that's changed. And so many people are walking around feeling depressed, feeling unhappy, not in the best of health. Your latest book, Foment, is that literally, I mean, I know you're hoping you are flipping the switch with everything that you're doing. What's different with this book to your previous books? Because they've all been very successful.

They've all been really, really good. What's different about this book? Well, I hope nothing will be different about the success of this book. I think in a way, I had to wait a bit to, to discuss this topic, you know, in a way, 10 years ago, or it was longer, when I wrote my first book on diet, which was called the Diet Myth, there were bits in it was on fermented food, and people hadn't got a clue what I was talking about. Never heard of kaffir, kombuts. They were just so foreign, and you couldn't buy them anywhere.

Now, you go to any supermarket, you can buy all this stuff. It is accessible, but people don't really know the science. and I think what I want to do is to get people up to speed, get them excited about the science, and realize this is something that, you know, it's a medicine really that you can use yourself for you and your family just by changing, you know, your idea of what's good and bad. And nature has given to this amazing stuff that you can either buy or you can make yourself.

So the book is all about the latest science and there is a lot of it, which actually it wasn't 10 years ago, to back it up. And so I'm hoping I can, you know, kickstart a real surge of interest in fermentation, not just in, you know, niche areas of North London where I live, but much more broadly to people who haven't really heard of these things before. And I think the time really is now. And people realise, especially when you see, you know, all these clinical trials that we're doing showing these amazing effects, not only

on physical health, you know, reducing hunger, but, you know, improving mood, energy, mental health, you think, well, why wouldn't you try it? Why wouldn't you just add it to your food in ways that are so easy, adding it to salads, to soups, you know, all this stuff that we have normally. And instead of just adding the ketchup and the brown sauce, you've just got, you know, actually fermented goodness in there. And you can counteract what the big food companies are doing, which is just selling us more and more shit,

you know, that is poisoning us. And with fake labels and fake food, you know, calories, low fat, high protein, you know, extra vitamins. But it's just with an ingredients list that looks like it should be in an atomic factory. So yeah, I think it is the right time. And I get the feeling now people are ready for this message that they weren't 10 years ago.

And the supermarkets, which respond to people's interests, are showing that the time is right. Every time I go in there, there's more stuff available. It doesn't seem so foreign. And I think people are ready to try it. So in the book, there are also recipes. If you want to save money, you can make it yourself. And it is really cheap to make it yourself.

And there are some, you know, there are some fermenting recipes that take about 30 seconds. You know, I mean, they really are so easy. Take us through one. What's the one way I can go? What's the easiest one? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. It's called fermented garlic in honey. Oh, nice. So you get some raw honey. Yeah. and that's the hardest thing to do is to get some raw honey that's unpasteurised. And you basically put that in a jar and you fill a third of the jar with just some peeled garlic. And you turn it, shake it around a bit and you leave it for a week.

And you use that on toast or how would you then eat that? Um, however you like, I mean, I use it as, uh, on salads and things like this. Particularly, I like that sort of slight sour, um, taste of the garlic mixing it with, uh, to make my salads more interesting. But you could people put it in soups and stocks. Um, uh, and some people, yeah, some people really like garlic. We'll have it on their, on their toast. Um, you know, that's, it just shows you how some of these things are really the so easy. Um, you, what, once you've learned this. You know,

another one is you can just get some broccoli and you buy miso paste at a posh supermarket. You won't get them in all the supermarkets, but posh ones and you just cover your broccoli in the miso and you leave it in your fridge for a week. And you've got fermented, you know, miso broccoli. So, you know, it doesn't have to be really fancy and complicated.

I'm obviously, some of the ones are complicated. You know, there's a recipe in there for making your own miso paste yourself. Wow. Which,

it sounds tough, but it's just, you just got to buy, you can buy everything online. You just, you know, you just buy some, you buy your fungus online.

You add it to your soybeans. And you add it in and you add it to salt. And it's just about mixing those things together. So, you know, I didn't know anything about this

until a few years ago. And it's quite easy to become an expert. And generally it's about the percentage of salt or sugar you add. That's the only key amount, just enough to make sure that you stimulate the good bugs to grow and you kill off the bad ones and that you keep it acidic. So you're not going to get contamination with microbes that you don't want there. And once you realise that, it's actually, you know, it takes the fear out of it. And I'm not made myself ill at all, you know, even since experimenting, so with anyone,

people always ask me. You mentioned products in supermatics. So I go to the posh of supermarkets and buy my kimchi and sauerkraut because I don't have the time or the inclination to make it myself at home. But I've noticed there are a dramatic increase in products claiming to be gut-friendly. it reminds me of four or five years ago when protein seemed to be added to everything there was added protein in chocolate bars

and in cereals because the whole buzzword in wellness is we all needed more protein and now that seems to be moving into the to the gut space as well is there anything that we need to be aware of watch out for bogus claims that we need

to be aware of before we spend what can actually be quite a lot of money on these products because products that make extra claims also tend to charge more money as well. Yeah, the more claims on the packet, the more you should be worried. That's the first rule. Gut friendly is interesting because the UK has these really strange labelling rules that means that if something's a probiotic or a pre-bortic, you know, experts will say it's good for you. You can't call it gut friendly. But if it, if it can take it. something like a small amount of calcium under UK law you can call it gut friendly.

And that makes a difference. Because some ancient studies showed that people who are calcium deficient in Africa or somewhere, in some famine, develop gut problems. So that's, it's so outdated that manufacturers now add things like calcium or manganese just to get a health claim so it doesn't mean anything and we found this in our in our one of our products we've got a pre what I call a prebiotic fiber I'm not allowed to call it that but as if I'm saying it as a scientist I can call it pre-bartic because that's what we write about in

journals which did a clinical trial it you know in pre-bartic you know in pre-bartic the gut microbiome really rapidly significantly. I can't call it a pre-botic. I can't call it gut-friendly. But, you know, it so happens, you know, there's some seaweed in there, and the seaweed contains some calcium. And so we found a loophole that we can call it gut-friendly for the wrong reasons. But, you know, that's the, the whole field is just really.

with nonsense like this, that the big companies get around and the small guys either hope that no one brings them down or they, you know, will play the game. But it's, you've got to look and say, have they done a trial on it? You know, is there any evidence for this product that actually improves the gut microbiome? None of the big companies ever test their products on human gut samples. And you can make a fiber claim just by having an amount of fiber, you know, above five grams, five percent. And that allows you, you know, all high in fiber, but it could be terrible fiber,

it could be really good fiber, or the rest of it could be horrendous for you. So it's really, really hard for the consumer to work out what's going on at the most. moment, they're certainly given no protection at all by the Department of Health who control health, these sort of health claims at the moment. They really need to be updated. And there could be, you know, since we left the EU, there's no reason they have to follow these old rules at all. But yeah. So, but for fermented foods, one rule I do want to, it's really easy. It's really easy. Not like this complicated business of, you know, what the claim is, but if it's in the,

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That should be really a clear, you know, it might be the occasional one I'm missing, but 99% that's true. It shouldn't be sold ambient. Otherwise, it's been killed has no live microbes in it. So often you might get some really cheap kimchi. They're these Chinese kimchees which are cheap. They're shipped around the world. They last for about two years. But there's nothing live about them.

The live ones you'll find in the fridge. When you open them, they'll bubble and fizz, you know, show real activity. That's what you're looking for in real fermented foods. Some sauerkrauts are just made in vinegar. The most popular German ones are actually made in vinegar. So there's no bugs in there. They're just using the acid from cheap vinegar. So you don't get all the benefits of the sauerkraut that way.

But it's not all, it's a gradient because it doesn't mean that the dead ones necessarily have no values. It's just they're less value than the live ones. as I write in the book, there's some new science that showed even dead microbes can help you. We call them zombie microbes. So even beyond death, they still have an effect on your body, which is kind of weird. But there's real scientific evidence that they still affect our immune system in a positive way, even if they've been pasteurized or heat killed. in many trials now.

Is it true as well, Tim? I've got two children. My daughter, she's five, and her bowel movements are fine now, but she went through a phase like I think all kids do. When she was around three, she used to struggle going to the toilet, and she went through that beige phase

of only wanting pasta, bread. Just now she's got a fantastic diet, a dad's Spanish. But would that be a good indicator of someone's gut health, what their toilet looks like after they've been. A lot of people, they just relate it to something they've eaten the night before, maybe. But is that a good indication as well for anyone who wanted to know what was going on but couldn't get the test done?

Obviously, the idea is to get a gut microbiome test, and hopefully the price of those is coming down. And that's something at Zoe, we're trying to get a cheaper priced microbiome test. for the future. But until then, yes, there's something called transit time, which is the time it takes from when you eat something until it appears in the toilet. Right. We did a big study of about 50,000 people with a sort of citizen science thing around the world.

And there was a clear correlation between gut health and transit time. So the slower the transit time, the less diverse your gut microbes were the worse the ratio of good to bad bugs. So unfortunately it is. And that, yeah, so if it's really slow, for some reason, that's not good for your gut health. And it also, you're bloating. And some people get intermittent diarrhea and constipation as well. They're also signs of poor gut health, as is some reflux as well. So heartburn is another sign. So if you've got, those signs, the chances are you're going to have below average gut microbiome. It's not infallible, but that's generally a general rule.

So hopefully how microbes are better now. Yeah, they seem to be. But that's why, yeah, you know, knowing how you can improve that, things you can add to the foods in a way that's one of the reasons we introduce, I want to tell people about fermented foods which you can start giving to kids early so they get that taste. They're not frightened of sour taste

because the food companies just want to sell them sweet things. And particularly artificial sweet things. But if you get them used to sour taste, they're much more like to have a wider range later in life and choose more diversity. And then pick fermented foods. But then if not, then you can give them some extra fibre

through pre-bortic fibres, just nuts and seeds on things or all kinds of other approaches. So hopefully she's better. Yeah, for real. Well, thank you for joining us, Tim. I mean, I've learned a lot. I thought I knew bits about gut, but I genuinely have learned a lot more. Before you go, where can people get your book and where can they find you on Instagram? What's your handle and where can we get your book for those who want it?

Yeah, so you can get ferment. Yeah. All good bookstores, of course, and online at the big company that begins with A. But my Instagram channel is Tim Specter. You can also follow Zoe, have their own Instagram with, mine's more science-based. There's more recipe-based. And we have a free nutrition podcast called, Zoe Science and Nutrition, which is the number one nutrition podcast in the English-speaking

world, which is all absolutely free for everybody. And yeah, there's lots of ways to stay in touch with us. Or you can, you know, join up for Zoe and become a member and use our app, which is another healthy tool. You know, it's all part of this toolkit to try and manage this really difficult area of nutrition, which, you know, even for me. is still difficult and you know I've been studying it for many years so we're just trying to give people the power to actually make the best decisions for their health and it is the number one thing

you can do for your health is to make the right decisions every day for your what you eat you eat every day thanks Tim so yeah we are going to sign up for Zoe and I've also got your daily 30 supplement as well which is it's a seed and herbs mixture that I'm adding to my my yoghobes and my yon etc so hopefully I'm gonna 34 plants there are it's freeze dried plants so yeah including like seven different fungi and mushrooms yeah and it tastes delicious

very varied yeah so that's why these things are difficult and our microbes are fussy so maybe there's one in there that's just waiting for that rare bit of Beirab or you know rare mushroom to eat we've just got a few four quick fire questions

short answers to end the podcast I feel like I know the answers to some of them now after chatting you for the best part of an hour. But what's the one gut-friendly thing we should all start doing this week? I feel like I know what you're going to say here, but go on. Oh, what about fermented foods? Yes, what's not? Femented food.

So try some fermented foods today and keep going with it. I also feel like I know the answer to this next one. What do you always keep in your fridge? Femented food. Too much is what my wife would say. It's starting to smell. says. But yes, too many fermented foods. But I've always got some, yeah, always got some kimchi now and I've always got some milk

kaffia. And what's the one food you personally avoid? I've got a sort of horror of energy drinks. I think they are no use. And you get a better workout after a black coffee. Well, I do. A coffee for me is more energy than one of, I had one of those drinks. I was very shing. is a health drink. Yeah. We often be putting in the health hour. And all this other stuff should be in the, you know,

dangerous section. Because coffee is a fermented food, isn't it? If you want artificial sweeteners and sugar and rubbish. But coffee, yeah, coffee and have iced coffee. It's actually a really good drink. And really good for your heart health. And then one final question.

What do you think or hope the nation's gut health will be like in 10 years? Do you think that the message is getting through and this will be common practice for everyone, not just the types of us who are very engaged in wellness at the moment. Well, I'm hoping we've hit rock bottom, being the worst in Europe,

and we can only go up. So I think I'm hopeful that the message is getting out there. We've now got the tools, we've now got the foods, the drinks, are available for everybody, not expensive, and so, yes, we can have a bet on it, but in 10 years,

we're doing it. another survey, we'll be doing slightly better. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Don Jess, as well today. Thank you, Tim. Yeah, and good luck with the new book. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.