The Wellness Scoop - Anxiety, Gut Health and How to Improve Your Microbiome

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

This week we’re answering your questions with Professor Tim Spector, diving into the connection between gut health and anxiety, and how to strengthen your microbiome for better overall wellbeing. We unpack what gut health actually means, how ultra-processed foods impact your microbiome, and the simple habits that make the biggest difference. Tim explains how quickly you can see change, shares his top tips for long-term gut health, and clears up common myths about what really helps your gut thrive. A practical, science-led episode that shows how small, consistent changes to your gut health can have a powerful impact on how you feel every day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Wellness Scoop, your weekly dose of health and wellness inspiration. And as always, we're here as your host. I'm Ella Mills. And I'm Rihanna Lambert. And today we have been overwhelmed with questions on gut health. So for today's episode, we have the most incredible Tim Spector, of course, is the Professor of Epidemiology at King's College London and the co-founder of Zoe. Exactly. We've got one of the world's most cited scientists here to unpack all of your questions, as always, and as he said today, it is a deep dive on gut health, from mental health to UPFs, emulsifies what he's got wrong in his career. There is a little bit of everything

coming up for you. Well, Tim, welcome to the show. We're so thrilled to have you here. And essentially, we and I were just inundated with questions from our community about their health, about wellness, about all the myths and trends. And we have had, as you can imagine, an influx of those questions focused on gut health, the microbiome, and all things that is your absolute area of expertise. So we thought, what better to get you on the show and put some of these listeners questions to you. Squeeze my brain and get something out. That's what we intend to do. That's what we're hoping, Tim. And our first question today is from Joanna from Portugal. So we're getting questions from all around the globe for you today, no pressure.

We started with a good all-rounder. How do I have or no, I've got. good gut health. I know that the main indicator, she said, is our stool. Is that correct? So different levels of this. At the sort of optimum level, you get a gut microbiome test, which, for example, you know, there are lots of companies around the world. Zoe offers it in the US and the UK. Generally it costs between 150 and 250 pounds. That's the sort of gold standard. And then if you can't afford that, then the other thing is to look at your, just Just listen to your body, really. So am I constipated?

I'm having intermittent constipation, diarrhea? Am I having bloating gastric pains and upsets? And that really is a sign that you're likely to have poor gut health, as well as a whole range of mild common diseases. So if you've got all the food allergies, you're more likely to, if you're overweight metabolically, not particularly healthy, you're also likely to have poor gut health. anything that causes inflammation, so autoimmune diseases, allergies, etc.

And even nowadays, mental health issues will be reflected in your gut as well as we'll probably get into. But if you're not going regularly to the toilet and you're not producing a soft stool or it's always runny and, you know, you're going several times a day, then you've definitely got some abnormality going on in your gut microbes. And in those tests, Tim, what is the main thing that you're looking at? We've actually just got a paper accepted in nature changing the scores for the gut tests. So in the past, we used to look at what was called diversity, which is just the number of different species that you have, which was a crude indicator of health, but it lumped good and bad together.

And so often vegans did rather badly because they might have had less bad microbes, but a meat eater It would do better because they would have bad microbes which contributed to the diversity. So this new score, which is based, we're now got 300,000 people in our database, is pretty good. It now cuts across all types of food eating and countries, et cetera, and it compares good and bad bugs. So we've selected the 50 top bugs that are related to health and good diet and the 50 bad bugs that relates to bad health outcomes and bad diets. And what we're seeing is the ratio that of those two is the best overall indicator of health. And it also changes over time. So if you go on a good diet or you take high fiber supplements or probiotics, then you're going to see some changes in that gut test, which wasn't the case with the old diversity score.

You often got some disappointing results because it was slightly confusing. you know, your microbes, you might have one microbe that is really good and takes over and therefore squashes some of the other ones. So I think this is a real breakthrough and hopefully it's going to help the whole field move on and not have these negative trials that we had before, often, you know, which we couldn't really explain. So I think people will be doing this like a blood test now, getting an annual gut health checkup and the price as more people do it will keep coming down.

And Tim, you said you had 300,000 people in your own. your database there and you're looking at the different diets and the effect on the microbiome. There are any kind of really obvious trends or indicators because I'm sure people are listening thinking, well, what does that mean? What diet should I be following? What should I take from there? Yes. So we looked at dietary patterns and the one that came up top of all the ones we've looked at so far, what's called the Healthy Foods with a Healthy Plant Diversity Index, H.P. It's a bit of a technical term. Essentially what that means is a healthy diet where you've got a rich diversity of plants.

And that trumps everything else, you know, better than low fat diets or high fat diets or worrying about proteins or anything else. And we combined that with another study where we compared vegans, vegetarians and omnivores in about 20,000 people. So these are really big studies for once, you know. So we're pretty sure what's going on. And we found that the average vegan had a healthier gut than the average vegetarian who had a healthier gut than the average omnivore. But the very top 5% of all the best gut health people were often meat eaters who had a very small amount of meat and dairy but had huge amounts of different plants.

So if you combine those two sort of studies, then it's coming out that plant diversity is the number one factor, a healthy plant diversity. So real plants, not highly processed plants, but that's the overall finding, I think, that allows you to then eat that in a variety of different ways, depending on which part of the world you're in or what else you want to eat or what you don't want to eat. So that's something that's really come solidified in the last year or so. It's really fascinating. I was actually in a conference in France at Danon. And was it the person that discovered Acomencia? The specific strain was speaking about the fact that we just don't know yet. There are so many more to be discovered in the gut itself.

You know, these amazing bacteria that are providing benefits. And of course, eating plants, what you're saying is helping that bacteria. to flourish and, you know, the good ones, to do the job they need to do. And we actually had a really good question come in, which I think is quite fascinating on people are a bit confused on what's more important about the gut microbiome. So is it the byproducts of the bacteria itself or the number overall? And you said at the beginning, you used to classify, of course, all of them grouped together. So I'm assuming you're going to say it's discovering the new strains.

It's a tough question, actually, that one, because in this new group of 100, most hundred important microbes to know about in your gut. Of the good ones, most of them don't you have a name, newly discovered. So we know very little about them at all. We have to start from here now. So what we knew in the past doesn't really transfer over to what the best ones to look at are now. They're just as examples. In general, I think we believe that microbes act through the chemicals they produce predominantly. There are exceptions. There are some predators that eat each other and things.

And like phages can eat some microbes and that helps and parasites and things. But in general, they're like little mini-pharmacies producing lots of thousands of chemicals that interact with your immune system either in a good way or a bad way. So that's the way, I think, to think about them. But we also know the lining of the microbe itself, the dead microbe can have an effect on our immune system, and we know this from the latest work on probiotics, which shows that even dead microbes have a role. So I don't think it's all or nothing, but I would say, yeah, it's the chemicals they produce,

and that's why the other thing we've done in our testing at Zoe is to combine the microbes into clusters because we believe they work in groups to sort of be anti-inflammatory, for example, which is calming down the immune system, and so you have a group of them in a cluster that you can follow now, or there's a group that are responsible for how you deal with fat, how you break down fat in your body and where it's deposited in your body are the ones that are controlling your blood sugar metabolism. And so we're trying to put the ones that are working together into these groups so that we're not obsessed with just one microbe, which some people might have and others not, because you've got to remember we're all very different. We only share about a

quarter of our gut microbes. So generally, we've got lots of unique ones. So if we can put them into these larger groups, it starts to make a bit more sense. And you can start, hopefully, what people would do is be tracking, say, their immune cluster of microbes over time. if they're worried about allergy or autoimmune disease or whatever it is. And I'll also be more interested in tracking there the fat-busting sort of group of microbes and see how they're doing. So I think it's a great question. It's driven mainly by these chemicals, but there might be like hundreds of different

microbes that produce the same chemical. So although we're different, we're not so different that we can't produce these chemicals just because we don't have this identical microbes. That makes so much sense. And obviously, we were talking about diet and what the effect of diet is, you've been so focal in the conversation around ultra-process foods and their effect on us. Unsurprisingly, we've had a lot of questions on the link between UPFs and gut health. This question in particular came from Natalia, who said,

I'm constantly wondering and would love if someone could shed some light. We know ultra-process foods negatively impact your gut health, but is it just down to the lack of good nutrition for your microbiome, or is there something specific that UPFs do to down? damage it. In other words, if I eat a generally healthy probiotic diet but stuff myself with pringles and cake on top, am I okay or am I consuming ingredients, emulsifies, etc, that themselves are actively bad for the good bugs? Great question. I think this is when everyone wants to know this. Can they cheat, scoff, whatever they like and be immune and like Superman or they

don't have to worry? Let's go back to the definition of UPFs. Because that's quite controversial. The sort of standard definition now is an epidemiological one used in research, not used commercially, but it incorporates about nearly 60% of the foods in the UK and the US. And it's too broad. So it includes additives, like someone's added vitamin C to a product. It gets labeled as UPF. I mean, Ella, you know this because you've got food products and know how on a tightrope it is, we recognize that perhaps half of these UPF products are not really that harmful.

The additives, you know, maybe a bit of color just because it comes from carrot juice or something. I mean, it's generally a sign that, you know, less care has been taken with that product compared to something else, but they're not all bad. There's no harm in having a bit of extra vitamin C. So we've re-categorized UPFs at Zoe,

and that's, you can get that in our new app. It's a gradient from zero risk, low risk, medium, and high, are the additives harmful? Are they proven to be harmful, not just an additive that we know is fine? Is there evidence that they've been designed to make you overeat, so-called hyper-palatability, by mixing the sugar, the fat and the salt, like in your pringles? Are they supercalorie dense? And so they're packing lots of stuff into very little, so you don't notice you're eating it. and are they designed really to not be swallowed?

So you just instantly disintegrates into your mouth and therefore before you know it, you finish the whole pack. All of these are really increasing your intake of those foods. So all of those are important. The main ones have effect on the gut health are the fact that they virtually contain no fibre. Most of these, what we call them in our high-risk processed foods rather than ultra-processed foods,

which in nutrition science doesn't really have. it's not a defined meaning for it as an individual level. So these high-risk ones are the ones really to be avoiding because they're associated with poor gut health. So we talked about emulsifiers. So Pringles is the perfect example that just about does everything. It's got about 30 ingredients additives. It's got artificial colourings, flavourings.

Potato is not the number one part of the product either. It's a sort of mash of rice and other. grade, whatever's cheap. And they've got emulsifiers in there. They were glues. They've got gums. All of these things. Plus, they've probably thrown a few other things that will mess up your gut microbes. So, yes, they have an effect on your gut microbes. At the same time, you're eating foods that have actually no fibre. So you're starving your microbes in the lower part of your gut at the same time. And they're triggering partly through your microbes to your brain to keep eating more and more and override the fullness signals that normal food would give.

So it's a sort of broader idea, this is what we need to be frightened of, and that's why these new scores are actually very good at combating what big food is trying to feed us. And I think that's really important that people, by learning, you know, how to score food, you can actually see what the companies are desperately trying to get you to do. And so we need to be fighting back. And the way to do this is to understand much more about these foods. But essentially, once you do that, only about half of the foods that are label as UPF are really high-risk foods that we should be avoiding. The rest are not really we should be worrying about at the moment.

So helpful. I think what you've done with the, well, trying to reclassify, you know, and educate and not fearmonger is a really wonderful thing. Because I think the subject of UPF foods can be so emotive for people. people, you know, can instill a lot of shame if, you know, Pringles are something, perhaps somebody bought every week and didn't know, you know, that it can stem down on a multitude of levels. And based on what you've just said about us, we know 96% of us are fiber deficient in the UK. Our diets are not up to scratch, are they? And we have to face that head on, I think, because that obviously plays a huge role. But does it link back to mental health? We know the

Smiles trials showed diet can be effective, but a question we've got from Amy for you, Tim, I think stems on to the fact that diets help our gut flourish, essentially. And she said, if I increase the number of types of bacteria in my gut, can that help reduce anxiety and depression? Yes is the answer. And the evidence so far, which is still evolving, is that we know that people with anxiety and depression have poorer gut health than people that don't. So they have what we call dysbiosis, which means a slightly dysfunctional gut microbiome. And you'd find that you'd have a greater range or those bad microbes producing pro-inflammatory chemicals, so irritating the immune system and also perhaps changing some of the neurochemicals

that would eventually go from the gut to the brain via various mechanisms. So we know that, but that's correlation. Then we know from a number of studies, you state the Smiles trial, which was basically giving people a gut-friendly diet for a couple of months in Australia for people with mild depression. That worked very well compared to placebo and even on people on medication. There have been a number of probiotic studies that have shown benefits for anxiety. Lots of studies, probatic studies on people with stress, reducing stress, and they even got some volunteers. volunteers to go into icy water and see how they felt with and without these probiotics. Lots of these studies are quite small, but the overwhelming evidence is that they are moving all in the

same direction. And we've just did a big study at Zoe of, we've done two studies, really, that both improved the gut microbiome. One was with our prebiotic, which is like a fertilizer for the gut microbiome called Daily 30, where you're getting 30 freeze-dried plants and you make a big improvement in your good microbes that way if you're tracking the gut health. And those people got big improvements in mood and energy, which I think are a key that it is affecting the brain. And that happened really in the first week often. And another study we did, which is a fermenting study where we took 9,000 people who weren't into fermented foods, asked them to go to three a day.

And of the 5,000 that did manage the three a day, over half of them noticed improvements in mood and energy and reductions in hunger, all going through the brain after about a week. So I think this clearly shows that there's enough evidence both cross-sectionally and with these gut-friendly interventions that you can impact. anxiety and depression. And it's probably through the immune system. There's a whole new neuroscience going on saying we have to rethink all about mental health and probably it's inflammation in our gut that is being sensed wrongly by the brain, sending signals to the brain to go into lockdown the same way we would do when we're ill, either causing anxiety or

depression, depending on perhaps genetics or some other factor. But you can effectively reverse that or reduce it if we really paid much more attention to the gut, where it's actually coming from in the first place and stop thinking that it's the brain that's controlling the body, actually the gut in this instance is controlling the brain. Tim, when it comes to fermented foods, what are your favourites? What do you enjoy? Having had to make nearly every fermented food possible for the book. I've got a few weird ones that I wouldn't necessarily expect everyone to make, which is like a fermented mushroom patte with a hint of garlic in it is one of my favorites.

It's a bit of a rare one. It took me a long time to get it right because my mushrooms turned off a bit gooey most of the time. So I sort of felt I've done my time on that one. but I mean my regular ones milk kaffir I really like water kephyr a because it's super fast you can make it in a less than 48 hours and you can add any flavor you like to it and make it fizzy or whatever so it's totally flexible and until I did the study I thought it would be less powerful than kombucha but actually when we sequenced it the results are in the book

the top brand came up with about 80 different species in there. Wow. And we know a lot of people don't like dairy products. So I think that's something that really should take off in the future. I think there aren't enough people making really good water kaffirs. What is the best brand if anyone wants to buy it? Agua de Madrid is one, but they've just converted to cans.

And I'm a bit wary about cans. Okay. So if you can still get the bottles, then go for it. But this is the problem in this whole field is if you can get the local one, doing great near where you live support them you know whatever it's kombucha kefir kraut they'll always be good it's when they have to try and scale up globally they've got to make compromises this could be the cure to my sparkling water addiction oh my goodness this is the new drink we've got to start making it it's so easy to make yourself though you just you know

get these little crystals and um all they need is water and sugar and that's it you know very easy very simple folk. Where do you buy the crystals, Tim? I just get them online and it doesn't seem to matter, you know, they all seem to work. So I'm going to give it a go. This episode of the Wellness Scoop is sponsored by Stripe and Stair. I have been wearing their pants and their PJs since the start of the year and it is honestly the only brand in my draw now. Me too. And I don't think you really think about underwear until you try these and then you realize how good it can actually feel because they're genuinely the most comfortable knickers I have ever worn. By a million miles, 10 out of 10, honestly.

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As I said, I've been wearing their PJs all year. And it's made from that same buttery soft fabric too. It feels like sleeping in a cloud. I love that. So give the gift of comfort, everybody, 365 days a year at stripe and stare.com. And you can use the code, wellness, all in capitals, W-E-L-L-N-E-S-S for 20% off. And trust us, once you try them, you will not want to wear anything else. Can I ask you very quickly, Tim, because I know that all our listeners will want to hear this as well.

Controversial subject, but I feel like we just have to bring it up. GLP1's Marina wants to know, and of course this is a very new area, very, very new happening as we speak, but how they affect the microbiome. Well, we have very little data. So interestingly, all the trials that were done, ignored gut health. completely because generally pharmaceutical companies want to avoid it because if they find a problem, they have to, you know, do something about it and the regulators don't ask them to do it. So, you know, they're business people. They just want to get their drug out

on the market. So until people start making a fuss about gut health, this is going to keep happening. The studies out there have been tiny and shown some improvements in gut health. we're just analyzing our data now because obviously with 300,000 people we've got a few thousand that have taken GLP ones but it's quite hard to know because most people would be obese therefore they would have worse gut microbiomes

and especially if they've got diabetes as well than the average person so what we need is longitudinal data so I'd say I don't know but there's nothing to suggest that it's very dramatic and so it's certainly not a reason to not take them you know, I'm generally pro these drugs for anyone who needs them. I think they're an amazing breakthrough.

You know, some of their big impact could be nothing to do with weight. It could be to do they reduce inflammation, for example, and help the immune system. Yeah, so it's not a reason to not take it, but we desperately need more research to look at the subtle changes. And there might be reasons to take probiotics or fermented foods as well. But, you know, I think in general we should assume we need all this stuff. and we assume we should always look after our gut microbes, whatever drug we're on. That's not something that we're doctors and GPs talk about. No, although it's exciting to see obviously how much space gut health is now taking up

in terms of the conversation in health and wellness. I really liked this question from Steph, which was she wondered what surprising things affect your microbiome, the things you might not expect in both a positive way and a negative one. Well, yeah, people take antacid tablets, things like a metaprozole, kind of called PPI drugs, one of the most commonly prescribed drugs, I think, over 60, I think about a quarter of people are taking them. They change the acidity slightly of your gut microbes, although they help, you know, reflux and acidity, they will mess up your gut microbes and make it more likely you get infections

and things. So that's a sort of a downside. Obviously, sharing, if you share a house with a coffee drinker and you're a tea drinker, you will get their coffee microbes inside you. Wow. That is unexpected. There's one microbe called Lorsenobacter that only drinks coffee. And if you've got it, you've got 10 times the levels of a non-coffee drinker. But you get some intermediate levels if you happen to your partner or

whatever is a coffee drinker because we do exchange bodily liquids, you know, with these microbes. Do you have to be a daily coffee drinker to have high levels? Or can you be like the occasional coffee drinker? Occasional, I think. Yeah, you may not have as higher level as that. But, you know, we're getting microbes from everywhere. We get them, share them with dogs as well. Interestingly, some studies show we don't share them with cats. So I have a cat. I have a beautiful cat. So you need a smelly dog is what you really need. Ella's got loads of dogs. I've got three.

So your dog will have some of your microbes and you'll have some of your dog's microbes. And what about sleep, Tim? All they've shown is that the microbiome is disrupted in people who have poor sleep or are doing shift work. And we believe that gut microbes have their own internal circadian rhythm as well. And so they'll be thrown off. track and then we'll be producing random chemicals and things like that if they're not looked after. So they like everything to be at the same time.

And that's why, in a way, things like intermittent fasting affect them because they want to know when to rest and they don't want you randomly, you know, at 11 o'clock at night, suddenly having your packet of Jaffa cakes. if, you know, they thought they were settled down or they could start cleaning up, you know, and suddenly you're sending more stuff down. So very much, sleep is very much part of the body's homeostasis and keeping things regular. So that is important, but there's nothing specific that we're found yet about sleep. Tim, goodness me.

I think everyone's minds are a bit blown with particularly the sharing of microbes. Just to sort of, because we're getting to the end, and there's too much to ask you. It's such a shame that we have to only select a few. When we say we had hundreds of listener questions, we literally did. Well, this can be part one, really, so we can do it part two. Thank you. I appreciate that so much because I had to give one of the questions we had to your colleague, Sarah, who dropped in my DMs and wanted to ask you a question, Tim.

So Sarah Berry. Oh, no. Don't like her questions. she said, what's the biggest thing in nutrition that you've changed your mind on in the past 10 years and in brackets since working with the talented Sarah Berry? Well, I should ask her that question the other way around. But lots of little things. I'm trying to think what the big things are.

Yeah, subtle changes on fat, I think. So she's convinced me that I was too strong on butter versus my. margarine. But, you know, butter is definitely better than the old margarines. But she's convinced me that the latest ones are actually probably healthier than butter. I still think we need a bit more work there, but certainly she's twisting my arm on that one. And certainly I've changed my mind on fasting. How so? Well, I just thought it was, you know, for quacks, no offense, to anyone listening that has always done it

and now the science is catching up so this idea of what happens when you go on say an intermittent fast or you're doing a 48-hour fast or you might be doing intermittent keto we now understand much more about how the body is reacting and there are some good studies there

so I think I've just got to make sure that I don't dismiss some of these things as I did in the past and look at real the cutting-edge science that says, actually, you know, what happens to your energy levels in the brain, you know, could be resetting things. Your microbiome really does need a rest. We know that now. But if someone had asked me that, you know, 10 years ago, we had all these clinics where

you just went and starved for a week and you were supposed to regenerated. Because they used different language, they were talking about getting rid of toxins and all this stuff, which is generally nonsense. so they were doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. And so I think that's what's really interesting about nutrition at the moment is that we are discovering so much after so many decades of dogma. And the gut microbiome is playing a huge role in unraveling a lot of this stuff. So there you go.

Probably butter and fasting would be, I'll give her two of the things that I got wrong. It's just emerging, isn't it? And I think with the margarines, because a lot of listeners will be going, oh my goodness, this is huge because the noise on the internet is very much, as Ella said before, eat sticks of butter. It's good for you. There's a lot of crazy pseudoscientific diets out there, as we know. But we're talking about those plant stanels, aren't we? The beneficial components that are now put into margarines and how different they can be for people with, you know, looking at cholesterol levels and all sorts of things.

So it's not black and white, is it? That it's just all ultra-processed foods are bad. I think And that's why part of the conversation is so fascinating. And then when you mentioned fasting, sometimes it literally for some people can be they just don't snack after dinner and they give themselves, they give their gutter breaks. Is that correct? They just need to, we need to give ourselves a few hours just to rest and digest. And different microbes come out. So you were talking about acomancia earlier.

That's one of the key ones that comes out when we stop eating. And that then tidies, nibbles the gut lining, cleans up the mess that we've been making. that we've been making. It's like gives us a little haircut every night. And, you know, you just can imagine it like this team of cleaners going through you. And we need that. And so, but you don't want it excessive. You don't want the cleaners in going 24 hours a day or, you know, seven days a week.

You'd run out of carpet, you know, or whatever. So that's essentially what we do. So it's just by working out how we get things right without doing it excessively. but all these little tweaks are proving that they can be very helpful for many people but also realizing that we're all different so it doesn't suit everybody and that's why I love about these Oe studies where we do hundreds of thousands of people and you see that one size still doesn't fit all and we asked we did 140,000 people asked them to do intermittent fasting which this is time-restricted eating

and a third of them gave up immediately they couldn't do it and that's real life not like in a trial where you're paying some male volunteers to do it they can vote so a third of them gave up a third of them absolutely loved it and a third was sort of prepared to try it for a bit longer and that sort of sums up I think where a lot of our advice should go is say well these are the tools

you've got to pick which one works for you and your lifestyle and your age and everything else and not be too dogmatic. And yeah, and learn from our mistakes, you know, and move on when the science changes. I think that's the sign of, you know, progress really and that you should never trust someone who never changes their opinion, I think.

I think that's exceptionally sage advice. And Tim, to close, talking about those tools. What on this question came from Laura, your top three rules or kind of gentle rules, I think it's referring back to that tools, that you think people should look to possibly experiment with or implement for good long-term health. Okay, well, I've got a number of principles

that now run through my books, the list gets a bit longer, but every time. Hit us with all of it. Okay, all right. So number one, have 30 different plants a week, okay? And a plant is a nut, a seed, a herb of spice. It's not just kale. Second is eat regular fermented foods.

get three different ones in your diet every day. That's going to be really good for your health. Number three, try and eat the rainbow because you get the polyphenols, those defense chemicals. Look for brightly colored plants. Look for bitter flavors. You know, get the rest of your family into these different types of things away from sugar. Number four would be pivot your protein. You know, the country's eating too much meat, not eating enough beans. We need more fiber. Things like beans give you protein and fiber. forget about calories think about quality of your food so that is get rid of not all ultra-processed foods but high-risk processed foods the 25% that we're worried about and focus on eating real foods in your diet yeah try and give you a gut a rest at night 12 to 14 hours is what you should be aiming at where it does have a proper rest a proper sleep and finally yeah if you if you can personalize your diet so that you can reduce inflammation levels

because you may be responding to blood sugars, you might be some of response to carbs or a response to fats very differently. And so you might want to work out what suits you. So that's seven now, you gave me three. The top three are probably the main ones to go for. If you do that, your gut health would definitely improve. Tim, as ever, just a huge thank you.

I think we're going to have to hold you to a part two perhaps in the new year for sure because there's too much and I'm sure you're busy writing and working more research behind the scenes. It's so insightful to hear. I mean, first of all, what an amazing data pool you have with Zoe, what you've created and the amount that you're able to contribute to science. So a big thank you for sharing so much knowledge with us today. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for listening everybody today and tuning in. Exactly. I hope it was really.

helpful and you know obviously we've been going for just I think it's like eight weeks or so now with our Q&A episodes we're learning so much but we'd love to hear your feedback on this one as I said at the top we had so many questions on gut health and we've noticed a few pockets where there's a particular number of questions on certain topics and do you think it's helpful to get in particular experts on these particular topics let us know as always in our DMs in Spotify and We love hearing from you and otherwise have a great day and I'm definitely going to give a try to water kaffir. Me too Ella. This is going to be my new sparkling water alternative. So have a great day everyone and don't forget to tune in on Monday.