The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Doctor Tim Spector: The Shocking New Truth About Weight Loss, Calories & Diets!

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

What if everything that you knew about health was wrong, if calories didn’t count and food labels lied? That is exactly what Tim Spector OBE says in his multiple books, innumerable articles and TV appearances. Following the ancient greek belief that food is medicine, Tim has made it his mission to let people know how central gut health is to overall health, affecting your immune system, energy and even mental health. In this essential conversation, Tim discusses everything you need to know for your health, from eating the rainbow to fasting, this episode will change the way that you look at food and diets forever. You can purchase Tim’s most recent book, ‘Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well’, here: https://amzn.to/3ZLrpsX Follow Tim: Instagram: https://bit.ly/46vt340 Twitter: https://bit.ly/3VG0zil Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. Exercise doesn't help weight loss. No. The reason exercise doesn't work is because... Professor Tim Spector. He's an award-winning scientist. Best-selling author and medical professor. And he is ranked in the top 100 of the world's most cited scientists. And then we talk about the future of personalized nutrition. Many consider you to be the leading expert on gut health and diet.

What's your view on the ketogenic diet? Virtually impossible. What about vitamins? Waste of money. What on the ketogenic diet? Virtually impossible. What about vitamins? Waste of money. What are the facts around fasting? Oh dear. Oh shit, what do you mean, oh dear? The food industry wants you to focus on calorie,

fat content, sugar, so you don't have to think about the quality of the food. There's never been any long-term study showing that calorie counting is an effective way to lose weight and maintain weight loss. This is why I want people to think about food very differently than we have done in the past. So what is the cost? Depression and anxiety is intricately linked to the quality of your gut microbes.

These are microscopic bugs in our intestines. All of them are able to pump out chemicals that are vital for our body when they're fed the right foods. The reason we're in this state is we've killed off a lot of our good bugs. I think people don't think of all the positive elements that don't think that you need to build them up.

God, it's so confusing. You know, when you walk down the aisle in the supermarket, everything is trying to pretend that it's good. So how do I know what is good? You have to... Tim, many consider you to be the leading expert on topics relating to gut health and diet and food etc but how would you describe your own professional academic bio what is that bio in your own words it's complicated so i've changed form over the years quite a lot and i'm quite unusual in in terms of academic medics who usually stick very strictly to one speciality all their career and fear to go anywhere else so i was at medical school

did the usual stuff then wanted to be a physician then did rheumatology what's rheumatology. What's rheumatology? Bones and joints. Okay. So that was my subspecialty, if you like. But I got interested in epidemiology, which is the study of risk factors in populations where you just look at thousands of people rather than one patient. Really, I switched again to study because I got really interested in the idea that identical twins should be the same. They're clones, they lived all their life together, all their genes are identical. What makes them different? Counter to what everyone thought, identical twins often die at

different times, they get different diseases. One gets depression. One's fine. All these differences. So that was my sort of conundrum. What makes identical twins different when they've lived the same lives? It was only through this sort of search to find this out that I looked at the gut microbes in in twins and found they were different and that really scientifically took me onto this whole new path from there i

made this sort of leap into nutrition to say well now we've discovered this whole new science all this stuff we got wrong about nutrition suddenly makes sense so now i would say i'm you know an epidemiologist who's really specializing in in nutrition and gut health and trying to change the way people think about food that was a brilliant summary of your career and an academic background um as a muggle like me that's really you know new to many of these topics what i understand is the study of epidemiology is the study of the like genetic root causes of disease not just genetic so it's any any root cause of disease right so the people studying covid yeah we're all epidemiologists tracking a disease trying to

work out who's getting it when it's coming back how common it is right all these basic things in populations at a at a sort of big population level right great you've also written 800 articles more than 800 articles on this subject matter in 2014 you set up the british gut microbi Project, and you've written five books on these subject matters. I mean, I've read two of them that are sat in front of me here. I'm really intrigued by the personal story as well, because writing these books and doing all the work you've done is a lot. It's a lot of work. It requires a lot of drive. I mean, this particular book, you said it took almost six years to finish. What is the personal drive behind that?

What is driving you to pursue this subject matter? You know, I just love getting into a new area, finding out that something that everyone's been quoting for decades is total BS and was based on some tiny study of nine people. It's like I'm a detective and so I've always had this this quest to sort of be this obsessional detective I think going into these areas and at the same time it's that's coincided with you know various events in my life as well that have probably pushed me in

certain directions more love you know that I wouldn't have gone otherwise. What were those events in your life? I guess I was a pretty lazy student at school. It might surprise some people. We always assume if you're a professor and you've made it, you were a swat at school, but I did the absolute minimum. So I scraped into medical school, scraped through the first few years of medical school I'd spent one year proving you didn't have to go to any lectures and could still pass which was a lot of work actually at the end I

realized it was harder then of course age 21 my father died suddenly overnight with a heart attack. No warning at all. I was off on a skiing holiday with some friends. And I think in retrospect, that event changed me and perhaps gave me a bit more direction and drive than I would have had. I'm not quite sure how it would have turned out if he hadn't died, but to me, him dying at 57, suddenly like that, made me think I need to make more of my life. I could die early too.

This was something that I think spurred me on to do all this kind of stuff that I didn't need to do, but I felt perhaps more compulsion to do and maybe also got me interested in this whole idea of genetics to say, well, did he have rotten genes? Have I got the same genes? Am I going to die in my 50s? So I think that, looking back now,

I think that's, it's hard to be absolutely sure, but that seems a reasonable scenario. I've read and I've heard from members of your team that that left you with a feeling, as you've kind of said there, that you might also die young if it is a genetic thing. Definitely, yes. No, I was always telling my kids you know this is this is it you know many how many i was sort of half joking but saying well you know my time's you know i've only got seven years to go now you know whatever it is um you were saying that to your kids yes you know

that uh to try and prepare them i guess so but it was my way of, you know, I did it in a jokey way. It wasn't like I was writing my will and saying, you know, the candlesticks are here and everything else. But it was, yeah, I used to make light of it. But, you know, underneath it, yes, I felt, well, you know, I could go early, so I need to get on with it, I think. And I was also, at that time, probably sped up by another personal incident I had at that time. Which was a mini-stroke. Yes, we call it a mini-stroke.

It's a vascular occlusion, but I couldn't work for three months. I couldn't read, And I got a bit depressed about that. So those three months where you can't read, I read that you were, the quote, I went from being a sporty, fitter than average middle-aged man to a pill-popping, depressed stroke victim with high blood pressure. They said you were floored by this experience and for three months you couldn't work from having a pretty fast-paced frenetic life to being bed bound and in those three months you your focus on the microbiome increases right yes i was i was just finishing up the very last bits of the previous book identically different which is about why twins were different. Right.

And as a sort of afterthought, I added one page about, well, actually the microbiome could be the key to this. What is the microbiome? It's the word we use for the community of gut microbes. These are microscopic bugs in our intestines. And it's a biome because it's like this jungle community. It's lots of different species altogether, thousands of them, that coexist in our lower intestine, our colon.

And it's like we've discovered in the last 10 years a new organ in our bodies if you put them all together they weigh about the same as our brain okay so that's mind-boggling really to think about all these bugs which individually are tiny putting together they actually you know they weigh several pounds so you can either think of them as a microbial garden but increasingly i'm shifting that towards thinking as a an incredible pharmacy so all of them are able to pump out chemicals all the time that are vital for our body so thousands of different chemicals are pumped out every minute by these gut microbes when they're fed the right foods. And these chemicals are key for our immune system.

Most of our immune system is actually in our gut. Most people don't know that. We think it's, under our armpits or somewhere. But actually, all the immune cells are actually talking all the time to our gut microbes through these chemicals and that our immune system obviously is crucial for our whole body and fighting aging and cancer covid infections allergies all these kind of things so then you've also got the microbes can produce chemicals that affect the brain and will make the difference between you being happy or sad or we know that they're vital in depression. Important for regulating how much you eat, your appetite, when you feel full. They also provide key vitamins for you, all the B vitamins and many other components, neurochemicals like serotonin that's key for the happiness and how antidepressants work are all produced by your gut microbes. So

we're slowly learning that these guys are absolutely crucial to how our body responds to anything coming into it, whether it's painkillers, whether it's antidepressants, whether it's chemicals in the form of food. And this is why I want people to think about food very differently than we have done in the past. The old idea that food is just calories, macros, but it's fats and carbs and proteins. Those four things you know that's 100 years old mentality but key to it is this this core of our gut health which we've ignored

totally and this was this big aha moment for me after research for 10 years what why would identical twins twins be different what could it be and it turns out their gut microbes are different that's the only thing i've ever found in 30 years that's really different about identical twins and that explains why one gets cancer the other one doesn't why one gets an autoimmune disease or one's depressed and one's happy. So for me, the twins were a perfect, obvious way to show how important these microbes are for all of us. What are some of the biggest myths you encountered as you started researching the microbiome that most people currently believe,

that I probably sat here now believe about how to keep my um my gut healthy what are some of those key myths because i know you like myth busting well i think most people believe that probiotics in yogurt get killed by your stomach acid so they don't work because your everything gets off. That's a common one I hear. But they don't? No. Some get killed, but you're ingesting billions, so always enough get through to have an effect. And we know that probiotics do work,

although the best probiotics are in food rather than in capsules. And there's plenty of fermented foods, which is the same. I think most people know very little about microbes. They think that most of them are harmful. So, oh, you know, they cultured this microbe, or they found a parasite. 50,000 people have now looked at their gut microbes in the US and the UK. In the UK, 24% have a parasite. And that parasite

is actually beneficial. It's called blastocystis, and it's associated with good health, being thinner, having less internal fat, lower blood pressure. And, you know, in the past, we're trying to kill it off. And actually, the reason we're in this state is we've killed off all of our good bugs. So I think people need to realize that most of the bugs in our system are trying to help us. And we've actually lost half of the good ones compared to if you go to hunter gatherers or you know i spent some time with the hadza tribe in africa and you know they have twice the number of species that we have because they don't pop antibiotics they don't have sterile foods they have a very wide range of diverse plants etc so i think people think that, you know,

their gut microbes are really only there to hurt them when they have a bad kebab or something. They don't think of all the positive benefits. They don't think that you need to build them up and that actually, you know, the more you've got, the better it is. How do I build them up? How do I become more like that tribe you have to have a

more diverse range of plants so we did a study a few years ago with british and american guts that showed that if you can get up to 30 different types of plant a week you maximize your diversity of species in your gut and that's that diversity that we want remember 30 plants you look a bit shocked but that's um it's a plant is a nut a seed it's not just kale um it's a herb it's a spice and things like coffee are a plant to me because it comes from a fermented bean. So it's that diversity. It's having more fermented foods. It's having a range of colors.

It's cutting out the ultra-processed chemicals as well, which all the groups in the population that have the best gut microbes, they don't eat ultra-processed chemicals as well which all that all the groups in the population that have the best gut microbes they don't eat ultra-processed foods they don't have antibiotics they don't have this this modern western lifestyle you mentioned calories there as well um when you were talking about the microbiome one of my friends is a prolific calorie counter and you know he eats a lot of Domino's pizzas. He listens to this podcast. He's going to know exactly. He's going to know that I'm atting him. He eats Domino's pizzas all the time. He eats like a real, you know, processed food diet, but then says to me, it's all about calorie counting. Now, with all due respect, friend, he's never managed to, I shouldn't say that, but it's not necessarily worked for him in terms of the goal that he's set himself.

So when I was reading about your view on calorie counting in your book, Spoonfed, I screenshotted it this morning and sent it to him. And I said, you are a bullshitter. That's what I i said in the message and we had a good laugh about it this morning but what is your view on calorie counting and this idea that we can you know weight loss or being healthy is just about having a calorie deficit it's complete nonsense thank you i will clip that and send it to him there's never been any long-term study showing that calorie counting is an effective way to lose weight and maintain weight loss after you know the first few weeks so yes very strict calorie counting if you deprive yourself for a few weeks you will lose some weight but even if you're successful your body's evolutionary mechanisms will make you hungry and hungry every week you go by where you're

depriving yourself of energy your body will go into sort of shutdown mode your metabolism slows down so you're not expending those calories and inevitably i'd say more than 95 percent of people will go back to their baseline and many go above it. There's a rebound back if they're doing this style of calorie restriction. Now, calorie counting is a part of that. So people try and say, okay, I'm not going on a dramatic diet, but I'm going to just try and reduce by 10% my calories in the day, which in the old theory was supposed to make you lose weight. Well, it's virtually impossible, even professionals, to count calories. And because they're not very

accurate for a start, everything on the packet, you have to weigh everything. And in restaurants now, we're supposed to have these calorie counts. They're plus or minus about 30 percent, because portion size makes such a huge difference to it that it's it and it's been shown in the u.s to be a worthless exercise anyway so you can't count them going in you can't really count your metabolism going out either we're all incredibly different you know your friend's probably been told 2,500 calories is what he's allowed. Well, that's an average, but it doesn't mean it relates to him. My average is much lower when I tested it. So everyone is an individual. And this is another thing we need to move away from this one size fits all guidelines. But I think more importantly is that the whole calorie counting

assumption means that it doesn't matter what form that calorie is. It has the same effect on your body. Therefore, whether you're cutting out fat calories or carb calories or low calorie sodas or whatever it is, it's going to be fine. But we now know that's not true. And there's several science experiments which now absolutely nail that one was in america where they gave people identical meals for two weeks in a sort of enclosed semi-prison and one was homemade and one was ultra processed both identical calories macros the same the group with the ultra processed foods over at by about 200 calories every day they kept coming

back to the buffet for more okay so yes the same calories but the effect on the body meant they were hungrier why is that we don't know for sure it could be that those chemicals in the ultra versus foods affect the gut microbes and they then send signals to the brain saying eat more this isn't a natural you know this is a really weird chemical it's doing something weird to me i'm producing something weird in exchange it could be they get absorbed much quicker so you get a big sugar rush and you know the nutrients get in to your body in a way faster than they should do in nature and so your brain doesn't have time to say i'm full it normally takes 20 minutes or so to to get that fullness um or you know it so it could be the matrix of the food. It could be the chemicals in the food.

It could be its effect on the gut microbes. But it also could be things like your sugar spikes. So in the Zoe Predict studies, where basically we've given now 50,000 people in the US and the UK the same foods at the same time same time of day everyone's got these muffins we show that people um one in four people who have these muffins and are wearing it we wear glucose monitors which tells you for two weeks of what's happening your glucose one in four people get a real sugar dip three hours later so this is where you rise in sugar which is normal and then as it comes down it goes below baseline but only in one in four people and when that happens those people end up overeating the next meal and during the day they feel more tired more hungry that's this

the sort of 11 o'clock slump if you you like, if you've had a carby breakfast. Some people feel that, others don't. And what's really interesting is that, so one in four people eating an identical muffin of identical calories will then overeat by this, you know, another 10% that day. So you can see how that just blows the calorie idea out, that the calories in equals calories out. Everything's the same.

And the third thing is that ultra-processed food says it has the calories that's equal to the whole foods, but often they don't account for the fact that it's ground up, it's highly refined. And so if you take like almonds or something like this, they might use ground almonds and you compare ground almonds to whole almonds there's perhaps 30 percent less available calories in the whole almonds than there is in the other one so the whole thing is a

complete nonsense and it's there because the food industry wants you to focus on the calorie, the fat content, sugar, so you don't have to think about the quality of the food. And it's something that they can control very easily, get their profits higher, keep adding stuff to the product that's synthetic. When we know that a lot of things they're adding are harmful for our gut microbes so that the artificial sweeteners are harmful the the glues they stick the foods together the emulsifiers some people react quite a lot to those and they cause problems so the whole thing is like this giant camouflage and that's that's really one thing i'm you know it might probably my number one bugbear is to

get people to see the light stop obsessing about calories and start thinking about food much more as quality and what it does to your body quality food what is quality food in your definition of the phrase it's the opposite of ultra processed food which is whole food which is made with from the original ingredients of plants mainly plant-based but it's not exclusively that contains all the nutrients that those those plants produce without it being stripped away or boiled up or highly pressurized, deformed. And so they have to add in back those nutrients. So, you know, it's things in their pure form.

So it's nuts, it's seeds, it's grains that haven't been ground up super finely. It's all the amazing plants and fruits and vegetables that we've got. They're healthy foods, but it's not straightforward. Yes, I've got this list of 10 superfoods. It's understanding that many foods are healthy for us. Most of them are in their original form. Berries, nuts, virtually every vegetable is healthy for us if it's in that original form it's only because we've we had to learn to preserve things we had to do trickery to

make you know margarines and things that with chemistry that we've moved away from that. But going back, olive oil, for example, is a great example of something that would be vilified often because it has lots of fats in it. And certainly, I was told, oh, the Mediterranean, they have olive oil in everything. It's horrible. It's all fatty. Turns out it comes from the olive.

The good stuff, extra virgin olive oil oil has very little done to it and that is a a good healthy quality food but it can be refined you can take that and you can keep refining it um you can take corn on the cob as an example and then you you know and then you've got i don't know uh tortilla chips or something down the other end is which bears or cornflakes which bears no resemblance to the original and they're all versions on the spectrum god it's so confusing you know because what you've said to me is you know based on research and studies but then when i go to a supermarket labeling even i was just thinking then cornflakes i think i grew up thinking cornflakes were healthy because it says corn in the title you know what i mean and it's and when

you're trying to navigate i was just thinking if i'm going down an aisle now hearing what you've just said that that quality food is food that is not ultra processed and kind of resembles its original form when you walk down the aisle in the supermarket, everything is trying to pretend that it's good. So how do I know what is good? I mean, I can go to the vegetable aisle and I can say, okay, that looks like a cabbage. It looks like no one's messed with that. There's been no study done on that to, it hasn't been through a laboratory, but how do I like, if I'm in an aisle tomorrow, how do I know what food is good and what is not well you've said the first thing if it's not in a package um you're pretty sure it's good okay so um if it's concealed in some package that's got you know happy children and signals of vitamins in it that should be a warning sign

you know the more they have to advertise the food and say what its additives are and everything the more you should be wary about it the number of ingredients is another pretty good sign so once you get over 10 particularly if there's lots you've never heard of you wouldn't find in your kitchen you should also be wary that that is ultra processed food anything that says low calorie that says means they've had to add in lots of artificial sweeteners or protein extracts or something else is also a big danger sign low in fat means they've replaced the natural fat with something else that's cheaper and these are all warning signs you know and you know you take breakfast cereals i mean i used to i you know, you take breakfast cereals.

I mean, I used to eat lots of breakfast cereals. I was brought up on them, highly sugary stuff, and then I thought I was being healthy when I moved to mueslis and posher stuff. But actually when you still, you know, that appearance of healthiness, it's still got lots of additives in it. It's still got lots of sugar in it. It's just, and those cereal packets have added vitamins in it,

but they're often in a very poor form. I did the experiment once where I took some cornflakes or special care, I can't remember, that says it has added iron. And if you mix it up, you can put a magnet on it, you can get off the iron filings. They're so cheap that they're just added to tick a box saying it has iron, but they don't get into your body or do anything. So anything that's got these things added with this in it, low in this,

is a sign that they're obscuring the quality of the product so it's you know but there's a lot of brain you know we've been brainwashed for years and decades in this and you know i was as well as a doctor you know i should know better and yet i've completely changed my seven two of my meals completely. So I've gone from having muesli with low-fat milk and an orange juice and a cup of tea, because when I started doing these tests for Zoe, I found out that gave me a massive sugar spike.

And it was a terrible way to start the day, and I got these dips at 11 o'clock, to a high full-fat yogurt, nuts, seeds, a few berries and never have orange juice. That's a really unhealthy drink for everybody. And I have lots of black coffee, which I now know is good for me. So that's totally different. I changed my lunch for at least 10 15

years um when i got in the hospital i was having a hospital lunch which used to be in the canteen then it was marks and spencers got a healthy looking sandwich with brown bread sweet corn and tuna and a smoothie in a little bottle and that gave me a massive sugar spike and i wouldn't have known that and i was told that should have been a healthy thing to eat so you know there's there's general rules but also there are specific rules and this whole idea of individuality is coming in so it could be that you could you might be fine on that don't know um i was very annoyed because when i started we were starting doing this testing for zoe i had all these spare kits and i gave my wife one as well

and we sit down and she's um french belgian and loves croissants and so we'd have croissant each mine would shoot up. She had no change at all in her sugar, which was really annoying. Yeah. But it also brings home the fact that, you know, everyone loves simplistic rules, but you can only get so far with them.

You have to start experimenting yourself and see what works for you and not just take everything for granted and that's really the that's the whole essence of really you know setting up this personalized nutrition research and zoe and everything else but on top of this general advice about changing a whole idea food, I think, because I think they do go hand in hand, that if you realize there are these individual differences, you realize it's not as simple as you've been told. It's not that fats are evil. It's not that calories are bad. You know,

it's much more nuanced. You mentioned breakfast there. I heard that you do some intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting fasting i think i pronounced that correctly intermittent fasting yes we'll just uh use ai to swap that for my voice what is it intermittent let's just call it fasting just for people at home that can't say it um fasting has become a really popular thing over the last three or four years a lot of my friends talk about it again it's it's almost feels like it's going into fad territory again but what is the what are the facts around fasting intermittently okay it's i guess it's been quite hot topic for about 10 years now but it's intermittent fasting is an umbrella term for all kinds of different fasting and you might remember the 5-2 style of intermittent

fasting was quite big about 10 years ago and there were also these extended fasts often used in america people doing two or three day fasts and detoxifying oh gosh yeah that sort of stuff so you've got to realize you have to specify what time, what we're talking about. But I think the most interesting type of fasting now is what's called time restricted eating. Time restricted eating, I can say that. TRE. Okay. So the idea is you don't change what you eat, you just change how you eat and you change your eating window. So most people in the UK and US, they'll be eating for 14 or 16 hours a day. That's me.

Right? Lots of snacks and extending late night. And what time-restricted eating is, we're trying to reduce that to something like 10 hours on average. Okay, it varies. There are some more extreme ones, some milder ones, but that seems to be about the sweet spot that most people can manage 10 hours which means uh you start eating at 11 and you finish at 9 for example or you might want to go from 8 in the morning until 6 at night or 7 i can't do my maths um now there's actually science behind this now so there's plenty of

studies showing that not only in mice and rats this helps them their metabolism their energy management but there's some evidence it helps with weight loss to a small extent but it's it improves your inflammation levels and a lot of people report energy and mood improvements we've just done a big study with the zoe health study which is the free app where we had 130 000 people sign up to do this trial if you like where they would do this for two weeks and amazingly most people managed it and we did see improvements in mood and energy just in that two-week period and actually hunger went down weirdly but a lot of this we found is people were actually snacking less so they weren't we won't tell them to do less you just you can do whatever you like in that time

but people were just paying more attention and not grabbing something to eat just before they went to bed now the science behind it is really interesting because your body needs time to recover so your cells we're programmed on the circadian rhythm that is very much in in line with the sun from you know when we were all in east africa and it was um everything was quite programmed so that our body is in the state of work during the day. We eat, do all our stuff, and then at night it recovers. As the stress hormones go down, then your repair stuff comes out. So it cleans up all the muck in our cells.

But we now know that it's the same happening in our guts. So if you rest your gut for 14 hours, you give time for all the other microbes to come out and act as a repair team, like a cleaning force that hoover up all the mess you've left behind. They clean up nicely your gut wall. And so it's not leaky, get rid of inflammation. And this change, giving them a break really seems to have these great benefits. So'm i was a real skeptic about about this and i did lots of fasting and things for experimenting the books but i think the last two years i've really been convinced that this is something that that does work and is right for some people but importantly it's not right for everybody. And there is an individuality.

You may be a snacker that finds it very hard to go long periods of time without eating. Okay, I do know we've got several people at Zoe who say, oh, this is terrible. But for me, I suddenly realized when I wake up in the morning, I'm not starving. It's not the first thing I think in my head. And it's very easy to wait till 11 o'clock to have something to eat and it's not a big deprivation that's something you could carry on the whole of your life which i think is what we're we're into here so i think there's a lot to be said for this but i think people need to personalize it again you know people love a single

single black and white solution to all their problems but i'd say to everyoneize it again you know people love a single single black and white solution to all their problems but i'd say to everyone try it you may want to you know do a sort of american style eating really early and finishing early um you might be that kind of person who's a morning person or you might be someone that prefers the social life of eating in the evening and um skipping the morning it's going to be it's going to be take quite a lot of discipline for me to stop having chocolate at 2 a.m so could you just summarize again time restricted eating the the key benefits of it are my microbiome will be healthier gives my microbiome more time to clean up which will

have an impact potentially on weight loss and overall energy levels etc etc mood okay cool that's enough for me i think that's a convincing enough reason and i imagine there's also an impact on sleep there because you know me having chocolate at 2 a.m is probably not going to give um help me have quality sleep at night absolutely yes no i think there is a link we're studying that we don't have any results from from that trial but we are logging sleep quality as well but personally i've when i've started to do it i do sleep better i did start to get some reflux as well so a lot of people suffer from heartburn right and and that's again because you're eating and drinking alcohol quite late

they're not leaving enough time to go to bed that causes some stress on your body when it's supposed to be relaxing so i think yeah everyone give that you know give that a try and you know it could be right for you and it just makes you think also just thinking about more what you're eating you know to say okay let's give my body a rest just like you would what you're eating, you know, to say, okay, let's give my body a rest. Just like you would if you're doing an exercise regime, whatever. It's just thinking about eating in a different way other than just fuel. What about vitamins? You know, I've got all these vitamins by my bedside.

Not by my bedside, by my bathroom sink in my bedroom. Because, you know, I went to some market and the lady there told me that all these vitamins are important and then i don't know i might have seen an ad on facebook or something and i ended up buying more vitamins and i'm like a collector of vitamins we're not alone i think 50 of the british population have a regular vitamin or supplement every day and it's massive industry i read chapter five of your book so i'm a bit rude about vitamins in there please please be so i know and i it's the thing that upsets people most um people say i don't i believe everything else you say but i don't believe your chapter on

vitamins and i again it's it's a bit like a religion you know popping a pill and hoping that it's doing some good all the evidence shows that when you do a randomized controlled trial these vitamins don't work unless you've got some really weird disease or deficiency or for some reason you can't eat a normal diet but it's a last resort for people who have terrible diets. If you have a decent varied diet with plenty of plants in it, you don't need vitamins at all. And I used to take them and I don't take any now except the occasional B12 because I've always been low in B12 and I have hardly any meat.

But apart from B12, all the evidence points to these things being a complete waste of money. You're telling me all those vitamins I've swallowed over the last 10 years have been the result of me being duped by the vitamin industry and have no material impact on my health? Yes. Well, they might have had some harmful effects like people taking calcium and things like this are shown if you take regular calcium tablets more likely to get heart disease you're joking i've literally got a tub of calcium tablets by my by my kitchen sink as we speak yeah well there's calcium in nearly every plant and things that we normally break down and absorb in small amounts regularly.

You take something like a calcium supplement, you might be taking half a gram of it. Our body isn't designed to break down that huge slab of chemical. And so it doesn't get distributed well. And studies show that it gets deposited in your arteries and can harden them up. So there's no evidence that calcium helps people, doesn't help broken bones, it doesn't help osteoporosis. All the things that we were told it did do, so all the evidence was out there, and you've got all these companies pushing it.

So many of these things can be counterproductive but my main worry about them is if people think they can pop a pill they don't have to think about proper food yeah and therefore everything can comes in a bottle or a pill they can go you know just have a junk food diet and be healthy and that's so wrong because um diet i think is the most as i said the most important food choice we make for our health and to take stuff that doesn't work that could be counterproductive and sometimes harmful is is a daft delusion i have been under a daft delusion i've got so many supplements upstairs they could have a placebo effect you might feel better because you've taken them you know you say i feel like a healthy person because i take them i don't know whether i am a healthy person but i feel like one when i do it i do and it's really

uncomfortable because i'm taking sometimes i'm taking like eight different pills like calcium and potassium and whatever else um and when i'm doing it even though it's hard to swallow them and it tastes rancid i feel like like I'm doing future Steve a favour. Yeah, well, there you go. But clearly I haven't been. Get someone to make you some dummy ones so there's got nothing harmful in it and you can still feel good. A lot cheaper.

I'll give that a shot. What about sugar? So I was keto for roughly the last two months. I tried the diet because I had a lot of good things about the ketogenic diet as it relates to an inflammation. And I have to be honest, I lost about a stone in weight fairly quickly. First time I've really seen a huge dip in my weight, but also not just that, my, the gut issues that I'd had seemed to, to, to go. So I'd almost lived for the last couple of years, specifically like after the age of

25 for some reason suddenly foods that I thought had gluten in them like white breads and pastas and even like soy sauce and things like that were making me live in this permanent state of like being bloated and I'd go to the toilet I didn't feel great it was kind of this pain throughout the day a couple of hours after eating one of those foods and then i tried the ketogenic diet so i cut out pretty much all of those things like i didn't have any bread most of the sort of processed bad carb i don't even know what i'm talking about here so correct me but i cut out what i thought were the bad carbs that were having a bad reaction on me and then i cut out a lot of sugar like refined sugars basically cut it completely out and i ate meat vegetables um berries and

things like that felt fantastic lost a stone in weight very very very lean body fat dropped completely slept well high energy um what's your view on the ketogenic diet well your story i mean you can take two ways one you could say you really improved your diet because you had it sounds like you had a pretty shitty diet before that right so um so you know i mean so anything could have been a an improvement if someone says if you're eating real foods right so yeah it sounds like the keto you weren't having keto out of a bottle or a plastic and i was having meals yeah i had someone come and prepare them for me proper home-cooked meals rather than takeaways and exactly so so you're making the shift from perhaps you know the average uk diet which is high in refined carbs which is you know probably had

a fair bit of ultra processed foods in there as well to this other diet so i would expect you to feel better um to be a keto diet you've got to get to set about 70 percent um fat right which yeah which is really really hard for anyone to to sustain it's virtually impossible that's why i said for the last two months i'm no longer on the keto diet so you know you've you've gone you so so you have probably done a mild keto diet right that didn't put you into ketosis right but got you off these high refined carbs yeah so but going back to the basic question um keto diets do seem to work for people with diabetes who are overweight as a way of getting them off their medications and sort of kick-starting them into a better health pattern. And there are some people I think it can work for.

I think as a sustainable diet, I don't think it makes any sense. I don't think many people can still be on it a year later if it's a true ketogenic diet because no studies have really shown that people can sustain eating that level of fat and protein and virtually uh no carbs that's all i ate for about eight weeks yeah but you were eating a lot you were eating plants as well um so i'd have like some plants wasn't just steak was that it was i mean at one point it felt like that it was there was some plants in there there was like lettuce

and broccolis and stuff like that but i was Googling everything to check if it was keto-friendly before I put it in my mouth. So I think what's interesting is if you went from that to a more mixed, healthy, gut-friendly diet, which includes fermented foods, small amounts of breads, grains, etc., I think you'd still find the same benefits because you're shifting from ultra, you know, because I would suspect that if you did the Zoe test, for example,

you would have quite a big reaction to sugars and your fat control would be quite good. So it sounds like you tolerate quite large amounts of fat without too much problem. Whereas the sugars would spike like me. You get a reaction. You get hunger. You get these feelings of tiredness, et cetera.

So just by upping your fat levels, lowering your refined carb levels, you might have produced the same without doing that extreme idea. Because my problem with the keto diets is ultimately it's restrictive. You're reducing the number of foods you're thinking about. You're ultimately then harming your gut microbes long term because you're not giving them the variety of different plants if you're not careful. And that happens to a lot of people. They go down any of these slightly fatty diets

and they end up with a much more restrictive, you know, intakes than they would have done, which long-term will cause some problems for their immune health and long-term health. So that's why I'm generally against these extreme diets of any kind, other than if you are, you know, seriously ill, diabetic, and you're overweight,

for three months, it could be a really good way to get you off your meds. Interesting. Yeah, because I'm trying to find... So I went from the keto diet to the New York diet. Basically, we went to New York for two weeks and I really fucked up. But now I'm back. I'm trying to find the nice middle ground, the sustainable middle ground. That word sustainability in my diet and also my fitness has been key to me.

Because if I can't sustain it, there's no point doing it because you end up yo-yoing afterwards. So I went from the keto diet, as I said, to the New York diet. And now I'm back in the UK. Go on the gut-friendly diet. Which is, please detail the gut-friendly diet. It's, you know know 30 different plants a week um lots of fermented foods that's your yogurts your keffirs your kombuchas and if you like kimchi kraut miso koji japanese food eating the rainbow so you've got plenty of colors on your plate

everything's got because that means they've you've got plenty of colours on your plate, everything's got, because that means you've got plants there that have got these defence chemicals. And we haven't talked about these, but these are the polyphenols that are in plants that give them their bitter taste, but also the bright colours that you get in berries and you get in bright-coloured lettuce and cabbages. And they are rocket fuel for your gut microbes so the more you've got of those the healthier your gut the more you dampen down inflammation so really important

as well as diversity lots of color and lots of high polyphenol foods things you wouldn't have thought are healthy so dark chocolate i know you like doctor yeah was it well i'm not sure is it milk chocolate you have it yeah it's milk chocolate well you need to change like dark chocolate. Well, I'm not sure. Is it milk chocolate you have at two in the morning? Yeah, it's milk chocolate. Well, you need to change to dark chocolate. My girlfriend says that she's obsessed with dark chocolate. Well. And she always tells me it's healthy. Take her lead. Slowly wean yourself off the milk and get onto real chocolate, okay,

which actually tastes of something really good rather than sugar. Isn't white chocolate the worst? Yes. Do you know how I know that? That's the only thing I know about food. I went and did a chocolate-making class, and at the start of the class the instructor says pour the sugar into we have these big tubes and she said pour the sugar into the tube so i'd like poured a bit and she was like no no no no fill that tube with 60 sugar i was like what she was like fill the

tube with i was like why she goes that's white chocolate it's 60 sugar so i pour this this sugar into this tube and it fills it 60 and then i put this little like oily liquid in and she goes mix it and she goes that's white chocolate 60 sugar there's people right now that are sat there eating it they'd realize that they're giving themselves early onset diabetes but so dark chocolate's a good example coffee we already mentioned and if do you like coffee i do i well i don't for me coffee is more of a utility i use it before i have these conversations so i don't fall asleep because i'm very you know i've never been good at a boring guest well sometimes but it's more so just to try and keep my mind sharp and to keep focused but um i've read chapter

13 of your book about coffee and i've always been a bit of a coffee skeptic because I tend to have a belief that everything in life comes with a cost. And no one I've sat here with has ever been able to tell me the cost of an artificial boost in my focus, attention, energy. I feel like nothing's for free in life, you know? So what is the cost of coffee? Well, I think there's a variability. Some people, there is a big cost. They get the shakes, they can't sleep, and it has other neurotoxic effects if you have too much. So I think it's all about dose. And this is, it is a drug that if you get the dose right, is very beneficial for you if you get it wrong or you've got some genetic problem

you can't process it right um it it's a real it's it's a problem but some of the benefits i was talking about um are also there in decaffeinated coffee so it also has these because again it's a great example of how we always think of coffee as caffeine. And yet, if you do these epidemiology studies, you know, these big population ones, people who are having regular decaf coffee also have similar heart benefits. So it's other things in this fermented bean that are helping us. And I think this is just, you know, it's a great lesson moving away from our reductionism.

We always like to think of, you know, one food is one vitamin or one chemical, and that's an easy way to think about it. We can't comprehend they've got a thousand different ingredients. So decaf coffee, but yeah, you've got green tea is also pretty good. You know, there's many other fermented foods but um polyphenols are really good and important to realize in the book food for life i go into exactly that it's a practical guide to when you go into the supermarket you go to the aisle so gosh i'm in the vegetable aisle do i get my usual iceberg lettuce that 90 of us do uh because it lasts for two weeks or you know longer than our prime

ministers or do we go for a slightly more expensive loose leaf rosalolo with purple leaves that has a thousand times more polyphenols and so you really shop on color yes now i do i had no idea about this until doing it but but also the fact it's loose-leaved means that those those plants have had to survive in more difficult conditions to fight off predators and wind and everything else so they're tougher that's why herbs and spices are also tough because they're the growing tips of the plant that's where you get all the good bits and so it's a rethinking all this idea about what's good about food in this when you start thinking about your gut and you know the sugars that it releases etc so um for you yeah i mean if i think as a general rule if everybody had to keep their gut microbes happy,

they'd be on a pretty healthy diet, even before you get into personalization. Now, chapter 13 of your book, we talked about coffee there, is called Coffee Can Save Your Life. You mean that quite literally, don't you? Yes. As an epidemiologist, if you drink three cups of coffee a day you are less likely to die 10 years later jesus christ but there's also a link between um

coffee depression and suicide right well there are lots of links because i was reading that in studies, people were less suicidal if they'd been drinking coffee. I think that I'm sure there is a study on that. In general, what I do when I look at these is I don't take any one study on its own. I will try to look at all the literature and say how many studies there are in that and is there a confirmatory one that would make it real or not so i've tried not to over claim yeah because if you look at you know you look at the daily mail or you know the general press in the uk they will pick up on any one story and say coffee gives you cancer coffee does this coffee gives you dementia next year you know it saves your life it does this so you can switch but what i think people need to do is you know

especially after covid has been much more sort of selective about how they see a study it's epidemiology you know that it has to have confirmatory data um so i think yeah coffee we know it improves sports performance by one percent right so for most people that doesn't really matter right you know one percent am i going to run faster on my treadmill at the gym by one percent no but it it does give you a little bit of focus and uh for most people it's it you know it's a good drug that's found in food and i like coffee because also it helps it's allowed in a fast so time restricted eating you allow black coffee and black tea and it um because it doesn't cause a sugar spike or anything else but it's you have to cut out the

sugar i feel like more and more people are becoming gluten intolerant. I consider myself one of them. I am a self-diagnosed gluten intolerant. I read chapter 16 of your book and you think most of that is made up. Yes, most people think they're gluten intolerant aren't when you test them. Okay, so that's the fact. It doesn't mean that everyone's making it up that some of those will be real but i think gluten got this bad rap about 10 years ago and there's we know that yes one percent of the population really do have a gluten problem it's called celiac disease and they'll be vomiting and have terrible diarrhea with the smallest bit of gluten then there's a whole other group of people that believe they have gluten intolerance and they'll be vomiting and have terrible diarrhea with the smallest bit of gluten.

Then there's a whole other group of people that believe they have gluten intolerance, of which studies show about three quarters, when they're tested with gluten, are fine in a blinded way. If someone slips you a biscuit or something, or pasta is often the way to trick people. And I think many people have probably a more general irritable bowel syndrome that are blaming gluten because they're taking that one protein that they know about from foods that have thousands of them

and saying, this is the problem. Again, this reductionism and then they cut everything out but they might be cutting out things that were like the sandwich for example that was causing me glucose spikes so they might feel better when they cut that out and they then say okay i've cut out bread therefore um i'm not getting sugar spikes and tiredness that must have been the gluten but actually it was nothing to do with that it's just um cheap bread uh that has nothing to do with it so i think often people are taking gluten as an excuse and sometimes they do feel better when they cut out all those foods because they're eating less processed foods as

a result of it not always but it's something else in the bread or the pasta that that they were eating too much or they were eating too fast or these things that i think are important so i would urge everyone to you know look again at whether it is gluten or it is something else about their food habits before that was bad and re-evaluate it and you know build up your plant diversity and your gut microbes instead because the worry is that all these people on gluten most of them have a rather restrictive diet they get very worried about new foods and that's like the worst scenario because you end up on a vicious circle where you get more and more nervous so you have a smaller and smaller

group of foods you're happy with yeah your microbes get um diminished and you have much less flexibility to deal with any new food that hits you one of the um we've got a fitness group amongst some of my friends it's about 10 of us in it and um we've been tracking how often we work out and how frequently we work out in the workouts that we do and one of the things i have to say is pretty much no one in the group has lost any weight we've been doing this for a year and uh that kind of bucks what you would think so the only time that i lost weight was actually when i went on the keto keto diet i went from 14 stone eight to 13 stone eight in roughly in several weeks but exercise and exercising for almost religiously for the last two and a half years doesn't really seem to impact my weight at all in a you know in the way that the fitness experts might tell me on instagram what's your

stance on the role that exercise play plays in? It has very little role in weight loss. All the studies, such long-term studies show it doesn't help weight loss. And it's been grossly exaggerated as an easy fix for our obesity problem. Exercise doesn't help weight loss? No. All the studies show that. The only caveat to that is if you have changed your diet improved your diet and you've lost some weight at maintaining some exercise

does help prevent it going back up again but as on its own if you don't change your diet it's of no use and that's well known now by all the obesity experts and all the studies. Does sugar make us fat? Is that the culprit? Is that one of the main things that's contributing to... No, again, that's reductionism. You know, we...

But the reason exercise doesn't work, it's important to realise this, is because we all know this, that, you know, you go for a walk, build up hunger before a meal. That's what your parents told you, you know. And everything about exercise is after it, your body slows down, your metabolism slows down, and it tries to regain the energy that you've lost.

That's just what our evolution and so that's why it's a you're not gonna it's great for your health i exercise fantastic for your mood um it's great for your heart anti-cancer all kinds of things we should all do it but absolutely not if your goal is weight loss you have to do something about changing your diet. And I think that's the big, huge myth, particularly perpetuated by gyms and fitness apps and everything else. And it is complete nonsense. I read that when you looked at studies over 30 years

and you looked at how many studies had been done on the relationship of exercise and weight versus things like sugar and weight, there was 12 times more studies done on the relationship of exercise and weight versus things like sugar and weight there was 12 more 12 times more studies done on the relationship of exercise and weight versus sugar and weight and why why is that why is there less research done on the latter um i think that's the influence of governments and the food companies and the drink companies so a lot of the exercise research done in the last 20 years was sponsored by large corporations who wanted to make this

link between exercise and weight loss so that they could continue to sell sugary ultra processed foods and drinks and just say it's the childhood obesity is because we've we don't have playgrounds and we don't encourage this and that's why the cokes and the pepsis are always there at the olympic sponsoring olympic events and associating themselves with sport. And they gave hundreds of millions to various physiology departments, sports departments, nutrition departments to do research in this area. Basically, it was really hard to get anyone to do research into how sugary drinks make you gain weight or cause problems because the amount of money for nutrition

has been abysmally poor you know in from from governments and that's why you know we only the first ever study of ultra processed food in a controlled trial was only about three years ago and it's been around for you know 30 40 years so such is the power of that lobby that it it doesn't necessarily distort the research in a sort of you know evil way but they point it to make sure that the researchers are working in an area that they want uh people to work in and distracting them keeping away from talking about sugars or even artificial sweeteners, which in my view are nearly as bad because they're sort of hidden, and deflecting us from the idea that, yes,

giving kids sugary drinks or even artificial sweet drinks is going to be bad for them and cause obesity. Wait, so I cut out sugary drinks about a year ago. I still have the same brands, but I have the no sugar version. Oh, dear. Oh, shit. What do you mean, oh, dear? Well, the summary of the trials shows that if you take young adults and kids and they would stay on two cans of full sugar sodas and you change them to the diet version,

there's no real difference in weight or metabolic changes in their blood. You will go to the dentist less, so you don't get as many fillings. And yet, you know, you should be gaining 300 calories right if you were doing two cans a day so it doesn't work out as it should do and that's because of the extra these chemicals are not inert so the sweeteners in kids they change their their brains to give them they want more sweetness in their food. Okay, so it could reflect your wish for your late night milk chocolate, who knows. And it makes it very difficult to train kids

to have more bitter foods or sour foods if they've got these artificial sweeteners in their diet all the time. But they've now shown that all these sweeteners actually affect your gut microbes. So even stevia, you know, these so-called healthy ones, have an effect on your gut microbes, and they're not inert. So we know that saccharin and sucralose also cause spikes in your blood sugar.

When I did it, you know, I have a trace. They're not supposed to, but they actually do things they're not supposed to. So we know very little about these products. And my view is that they are harmful, probably not as bad as having the sugar, but they are absolutely not a health drink. And we should be encouraging people to have you know teas and kombuchas and more bitter tasting interesting flavors and foods than just this ultra sweet chemical concoctions it's this sugar conglomerate that have been funding much of the research that points towards um some of the things you're talking about there there that's also the conglomerate that wants us to believe the calories in calories out approach because if i just view every all foods as kind of equal and

on this sort of calorie number then i can drink some of the sugary fizzy fizzy drinks and some of the processed foods as long as i keep it within that sort of calorie deficit i'll be fine and so are they is that sugar conglomerate is the processed food conglomerate for the calorie model? Absolutely. They need that, right? Absolutely. It's vital, you know, zero calories or one calorie, you know, on the can, that's what you see. And, you know, you're fooling people into thinking this is a healthy drink. And, oh, you know, if I used to have full Coke or Pepsi and now having the diet version i'm getting 300 calories less a day i should lose weight it's exactly what they've been doing and they're also desperate to show that artificial sweeteners are really healthy and they come down

on anyone who tries to say that they're you know could be in any way dangerous and yet they're not obliged to test them so none of it none of the chemicals added really go through rigorous testing on how they affect our gut microbes and this is this you know their testing mechanisms haven't changed in 50 years the gut microbiome um the microbiome as an organ one of the things you talked about earlier was the impact it has on mood. And, you know, this podcast was started as kind of a business podcast. We have a lot of people that are interested in, you know, being more productive, being more successful, reaching for their goals. How significant and how pertinent is the microbiome on my performance as an entrepreneur, as a business person? What do I need to know about the relationship as it relates to my mood my performance my mind well we know more about mood than than anything else um and so we do know that depression anxiety is intricately linked to the quality of your gut microbes we know this from mouse studies where they've transplanted poo from anxious mice into sterile mice, and those new mice then become anxious and depressed.

Really? So it's a transmissible condition. And if you go back to me telling you that one of the chemicals that our microbes produce is serotonin, okay, some sort of cuddle, you know, love, friendly, warm chemical that affects our brain, that, you know, is the key to dopamine and everything else that goes on in our head. So the levels of that are really important for us having the right neurochemical balance in our head that stops us getting very depressed or very anxious so we know that you can transmit it between animals so when they say they take the poo out of one mouse they put it inside its gut inside its stomach to give it the same microbiome makeup inside its stomach yes and then that mouse will

become depressed and anxious yes so a lot of the science behind microbiome is based on large-scale human studies where you've just got um cross-sectional data or this is associated with this but you don't know if it's cause or effect and so there's this whole other group that's been going off of of projects for 30 years where they have these sterile mice who have no microbes and you create in a lab these other microbes that would make them anxious or they're genetically anxious. You look at their microbes and you take their microbes and you put them into the sterile mice and you can change their mood and their attention span and everything else.

So that shows that these have a direct effect rather than just being secondary. And that links to the human data that shows if you take groups of depressed or anxious people, virtually all of them will have deranged microbiomes and be producing abnormal chemicals. And there have been now some recent studies showing that compared to traditional antidepressant medication,

probiotics do as well in many of these studies if you give a course of probiotic medication. But even more impressive is if you give them a Mediterranean gut-friendly diet. You get actually better results with more remission than you do with antidepressant medication. So it's one of the best examples of how feeding your gut can actually improve your mood. And it's particularly important because we're seeing an epidemic of anxiety and depression. That's partly because of not having many good gut microbes to start with lots of junk food diets which make it

worse and of course once you go into that cycle once you're depressed you're not thinking about food the last thing you want to go out and is you know oh i've got to go and get my kimchi today you know you just what it's just fuel so once you once you understand that you realize if you want to help someone with depression you know the first thing is to not to put them straight onto an antidepressant which in many cases doesn't work because of this individuality as we're talking about which probably again related to the microbes because they break down the the tablet into its active chemicals but is to make sure they've actually got gut friendly diet and so this is a really exciting area of research

you mentioned um attention the impact that the microbiome can have on attention that's really interesting to me because adhd has become a very um widely discussed topic do you think there's a link between adhd and the microbiome highly likely yes i mean there's less data in it than there is in depression anxiety the studies are smaller but those that i've seen all show again a an abnormality in the gut microbiome of ADHD kids. And there have been a few studies showing that you can reverse it with poo transplants, which is another area that was quite big a few years ago. It's not showing the same potential as it as it did but certainly

affecting attention and mood with gut microbes is definitely on the cards these studies need to be bigger but there's certainly preliminary evidence that what's true for depression anxiety is also true for this whole spectrum of other conditions also you know that have been linked in the past to diet and you know over sugar and e-numbers and all these kind of things so we've sort of known vaguely there's an association but i think people haven't really pinpointed the gut microbiome which i think they should and so absolutely sure that if you improve the diet of many many of these kids with adhd you you would improve their symptoms and i know there are some ongoing trials at the moment

it's really been startling over the last couple of years how um mental health has really taken center stage in conversations even conversations on this podcast most of them we discuss mental health issues and things like anxiety and depression and as we look around the world the stats around people that are being prescribed antidepressant pills like they're called ssris i believe um is rising and i think it's doubled over the last decade or so with the kind of leading the way and then other countries like china and japan at the bottom of the pack what's your overall view on these these disorders depression mental health anxiety um do you think it stems predominantly from the microbiome is that your perspective now from what you've learned no i think they're multifactorial so i think we can't we can't just blame the gut microbiome because you do get

these conditions in people who are you know otherwise healthy um genetics plays a role you know i'm going back to my old my old career um a lot of evidence of strong genetics in things like depression anxiety but you can have the tendency to it but you need to be triggered into it uh you need some environmental event and it could be that once your gut microbes get in such a bad you know gut health is such a poor state your diet is so bad that triggers this and you just lack those chemicals that tip you over into it so that's why i think if you if you link these epidemics which we're going through at the moment whether it's dementia you know depression obesity diabetes

what are they all linked for increasing amounts of ultra processed foods in our diet you know we're the number one country in europe for this rates areates are still going up. Kids have over 70% of their food is ultra processed now. Horrendous. Adults, it's nearly, you know, between 50 and 60% of our meals. So I think that effect on the gut microbes probably just tips this threshold in people who are susceptible. So it could be that I think that threshold is going to vary genetically some people are very resilient some people are actually uh quite susceptible and that's my that's my view of it um which probably isn't popular because it's again i make things more complicated than people like but you know i think as as a as a scientist i think most of these diseases are

built up of a different number of risks but unlike your genetics you know your gut health is something you can do something about and that's what you're doing with zoe exactly that's the whole idea behind zoe is to empower people to change their health by individualizing what they eat that suits their own metabolism what is zoe if someone hasn't heard of zoe before zoe is a personalized nutrition company that i founded nearly six years ago with two of my co-founders who came to one of my talks. I was talking about the diet myth and the microbiome, and they came up to me and said,

we think what you're doing is really exciting. We'd love to talk about getting a company together to personalize this. And I do get people asking me to do startup companies, and I said, I'm not really interested unless we can spend several million on doing research first. I'm not interested in the usual lifestyle company based on marketing. And I thought I'd never see them again. But they came back two weeks later and said, yes, we've got several million.

We're up and running. So I was stuck then. I couldn't say no. And basically we got together this massive study called the PREDICT study, which looked at 1,000 people, mainly twins, gave them these identical meals, gave them these really fancy tech glucose monitors, measuring blood spots with fat, looking at their microbes, logging foods, seeing how they got on for two weeks, and use that data as algorithms to then predict how people respond to any food.

And then we developed a home test and launched that initially in the US and in the last year, the UK. And we've now got 50, 000 people doing this identical home test which is now a program that they then once you've got your scores personalized to you you can look up any food and it gives you a score from naught to 100 on what that uh how that food is for you based on your sugar your glucose blood sugar profile, your fat profile, and your microbiome. So it's pushing everyone to have less sugar peaks,

less fat peaks, and better gut health. And so it's changed. So in a way, my muesli would give me a terrible score. My orange juice would, you know, a score of zero. But it's also made subtle changes. So, you know, I used to eat bananas and now they scored badly. So now I have pears instead or apples. Little minor shifts often pushing people.

And then you have a virtual nutritionist who helps you plan your menus to get overall scores that are pushing you more and more in this healthy direction so you just start to understand how what's best for your body and in a sustainable way and we don't talk about calories it's like a taboo word and we're not after crash dieting or anything else it's like improving yourself from the inside out. And most people get dramatic improvements in their energy levels, which we hadn't even thought about was the reason. But people started telling us, I feel much better because maybe we're cutting out all these fat and sugar peaks that until the technology came along, no one knew about that were causing these problems.

So it's going super well. We've got still a quarter of a million people waiting for the product in the UK on the waiting list. And what's really nice is because we've got this commercial arm, it allows us to do these other – we have the Zoe Health Study, which is a free app, which now we're sort of moving that towards lifestyle, like these fasting aids and things like this. We've got a neat podcast, the Zoe Nutrition Podcast, which is getting the word out about our science, plus blogs and things. So, you know, it's part of a whole package of things that we're doing to sort of educate people differently.

And as I said, make people think about food in a very different way. And I think it's super exciting because we're, you know, we've just raised some more money. We've done some crowdfunding as well, which has gone amazingly well. I saw it this morning. Yeah. It's a big valuation for a company. Yes, it is. And, you know, I think... 200 million. It's a big valuation for a company. Yes, it is. And, you know, I think...

200 million? That's a big number. It is. And it's... But, you know, I think we've just got people's attention at exactly the right time. I agree. And the technology has just been exactly right.

So often it's about timing. Yeah, I agree. I mean, as I said to you before we start recording, I've had two of my guests come here and tell me about Zoe individually. So I think it was Davina McCall and Gabby Logan, who both mentioned it. And then I had this email in my inbox from a friend of mine who connected me to George. And then I started reading about some of the work that you'd done and saw some of your videos. And that's why I was compelled to reach out and have you on this podcast. But the idea of personalized health kind of debunks the long-standing narrative and myth that there's this one perfect diet for all of us there's this one set of foods

that we should all be eating to be healthy and this personalized approach makes a lot more sense um so i think that's the kind of the moment in time that you've arrived perfectly in from a zoe perspective is this awakening to the perspective that personalized individual diets are the way forward. Yeah. And yeah, and of course, COVID didn't, you know, COVID was an amazing time for apps. Yeah. And people wanting to take control when they feel they had no control. So I think the idea that you give people an app and they suddenly are empowered to do things

is a very new idea, particularly in the UK. People said, no one over 60 is ever going to do that. They told us it's going to fail. And it was an incredible success because if you give people that interaction, that feeling that they are talking to someone and they're getting information back and it's a two-way process it's a completely different idea to the old way of communicating with people so i think it is a super exciting time for

for science and you know we've just scratched the surface of what we can do with this personalization because once we get to a million people, the less detail we can provide back about whether you should be eating in the mornings and the evening, how hungry does this food make you feel? How do you stop, you individually, stop getting those sugar dips? What combination of foods should you have? How do you react to protein? What do you do to best sleep well?

All these things which people want to know are going to be possible once we get these huge numbers. This is all quite, you know, it's all quite... I'm going to have this conversation with you then I'm going to tell on the TV or go on the internet, go on Instagram. And all of the influences there are going to be telling me a bunch of stuff.

A bunch of fatty diets because they've all got their own incentives and their own ways of making money. If there was like one principle I could take away from all of your work, which I know is almost an impossible task to do, but if there was one thing just to focus on as I try and navigate the bombardment of social media

and advertising posts that I'm going to be on the receiving end of as I leave this conversation. What would that kind of guiding principle be for me not to forget? Pick changes that are going to last for life, not as a quick fix. I think that's what we're after. And that's what we want to try and instill is this sustainable, healthy way of eating. So that means not feeling like I'm not depriving myself. No. Okay.

I think absolutely. The philosophy we have at Zoe is that nothing is off the table. There's no, nothing's banned. White chocolate? Even white chocolate. You can be the Milky Bar kid, you know, you can have it. But realize that, you know, can you can have it but realize that you know it's that rare treat okay and the more you just and so it doesn't break everything and

you have to you know start again uh it's about making sure that the rest of your week is full of good foods that give you a high score that can make up for it so we're all gonna you know you know the christmas season everyone goes crazy and uh overeats and stuff as long as you know you've got this long-term plan that your gut is healthy and you're working and you're overall these you're not going to get these peaks over time for years that's that's the goal so absolutely it's about enjoying food realizing that it's incredibly important social event it's why the mediterranean countries probably do so much better because it's so much part of family life and social life in even in the elderly whether it's

the glass of wine it's just taking more time enjoying the novelty of foods and increasing our range of foods so it's really broadening it so i really want everyone to love food again and and not have all these hang-ups about i can't have that i can't have this if you've got enough plants on your plate basically you know you can eat anything tim thank you i feel like it's a good place to end and i'm really going to go upstairs and reconsider that vitamin stack that I have and also throw out all those zero calorie sugar-free drinks that I thought were good for me. You've given me a lot to think about and I'm incredibly honoured to have met you at this time in my life because as I said it's very relevant to me but also to have been given the chance to read your books. You've got

so many amazing books, five of them in total I believe, you're working on a new one um my favorite was these two so the the spoon-fed book and also your most recent book which is food for life which is basically like a glossary of food is that an accurate statement it goes through all the key main foods and talks about the role they play in our health yes i mean it's been called a food bible, but it's a practical guide to pretty much all the common they're asking it for. So the question that's been left for you is, you seem nervous. I am very nervous. Why do people get, people always seem to get nervous when I ask this question versus all of my questions. Ask me any science question, I don't mind. Well it's, you know, the question that's been left for you is, if you could say one thing to a family member you've lost,

who would it be, what would you say, and why? Well, it's got to be to my dad. I guess I'd probably say I'm really sad we never got to talk properly. And I think he'd be proud of me now. And because, as I've explained, he died when i was 21 it's just the time you're sort of coming out of studentship you're becoming more mature at the time you could start to talk to your parents but you don't so i feel that's my um missing part of my life if you like that um i never got to discuss anything meaningful with my father why was that? I have that problem too now

I have that problem where I struggle to talk to my my father I don't know I think in hindsight it's a much easier thing to say, I should have done this. Yeah, that's what I'm scared about. And I think it could be that it's built into us that, you know,

we have a very different relationship with our fathers that makes it hard to actually talk to them at the same level or, you know, not feel some sort of competition or critique. So I think you're absolutely right that if I was sat down here with my father, it would be quite different to wishing I had done all those years ago. And I think it's part of that grieving process, process probably that having lost someone you always feel somehow responsible you should have done something before i think that's that's part of it and many people have recurrent dreams also about

um because my father you know i never saw him he just i was just told he's dead, came back from holiday, that was it, go to the funeral. And it was a slight unreal series of events for me. And so for years I used to have these dreams. He'd been in South America and suddenly appeared again. So I had to disappear and I've come back. So that was an interesting idea going on in my brain that in some ways he wasn't really dead and um you know I'd get a chance to talk to him again so it must have been you know a key part in those subconscious bits of my brain that communication goes both ways

though doesn't it because they have to also be. Yeah, in retrospect, he was very much a 1960s dad who wasn't really supposed to deal with children or anything else. He went to work and stayed in his study because he wasn't sporty he never did anything with with me so absolutely yeah it's um but as i think you've talked about before on this podcast you know children have a very different perception

of that relationship they feel it's um uh it's their fault in a way. But yeah, he was not a, by modern stands, he wouldn't have been seen as a great dad. Tim, thank you. What a wonderful conversation. Really, really appreciate your time and thank you for coming and sharing your wisdom with me. Absolute pleasure.