The Wellness Scoop - Food As Medicine

Episode Date: May 18, 2021

Tim Spector, a world expert on gut health, reveals the at-home blue muffin test that’ll help you understand how healthy your gut is, why food is medicine and how to improve our health. To get involved, visit www.bluepoopchallenge.com/deliciouslyella See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast with me, Ella Mills. Our podcast, Delicious Ways to Feel Better, is a weekly show that is focused on absolutely everything that matters to us at Delicious Cielo. And we really, really believe that feeling good is about a holistic 360 degree approach to our lifestyles and that wellness is about so much more than just what we eat or how we exercise. It's our gut health, it's our relationships, it's our mindset, our stress levels, our sleep patterns and just generally how we look after ourselves both mentally and physically on a day-to-day basis. So each week we're going to be breaking down all these different topics looking at absolutely everything that impacts on our mental and our physical health

and sharing the small simple changes that will hopefully inspire you to feel that little bit better. So I'm sure you've picked up on the podcast before in different episodes, both on here and on other podcasts, that gut health is such a huge topic in the world of wellbeing. It's actually really quite a new topic and it's just emerging all the science around it about quite how important our gut microbiome is for both our mental and our physical health. And the scientist that's really, really leading the way on this research is Tim Spector at King's College. We've spoken to him before on here and absolute nerd when it comes to this kind of stuff. I've read all his books. He is absolutely brilliant. His work is completely fascinating, particularly in regards to individuality and the fact that we

all respond to foods very differently. But also he's shown the importance of plant-based foods as well in relation to our wellbeing and our gut health, most specifically that we should be eating at least 30 different plant-based foods every single week for optimum gut health. So on here, as you know, we take questions every week. Any questions you have, podcast at deliciousyellow.com. And one of the ones that I see time and time and time again is how do I know if I've got good gut health? How do I know if my digestive system is working properly? And so today we're going to be answering that question for you with Tim. And so Tim recently published a peer-reviewed study in the medical journal Gut

showing that gut transit times, which is the time it takes for your food to travel from your mouth to the other end, is a really, really important informative marker of gut health. And so he's going to be with us today explaining a little bit more about why it's so important, how we can test this at home so that we can get the answer to our question of how we know how our gut health is doing and find out a little bit more about what's going on for you. So before we answer all the questions that you guys have sent in about gut health and your digestive health, I just wanted to give you a little bit of an update of what we've been up to at Delicious Cielo. So we've been really working on all the renovations

at our cafe. We're going to be opening in just about three weeks time in June. So we have completely redone our kitchen. We've got the most incredible new kitchen in there. We've got an outdoor seating license. We're going to be doing proper table service. So it won't be quite so informal. It'll be a full plant-based experience showing how you can get those 30 different plant-based foods in your diet in the most innovative, delicious, abundant, colorful way. So we cannot wait to welcome you in a couple of weeks' time. That's the big thing that we've got going on at Delicious Cielo. So now I will welcome Tim to the show. Tim, thank you so much for joining us.

We really appreciate you taking the time to answer all of our questions today. It's great to be here. So look, before we get into more specifics, obviously gut health is something that we hear about all the time at the moment. And I wondered if we could just start with a kind of basic 101 on what we really mean by gut health and why it's so important. Gut health is really the term for understanding how our gut microbes are working, as well as the function of our intestines. And so it's become to mean much more than it used to.

And really, gut health is now understanding a whole new organ of our bodies, how that's functioning and working. And it's going to vary a lot between us and vary in our lives. So we need to try and find ways to understand how it is working in a simple way everyone can understand. And in the past, it was really just based down to, I don't know, do you have stomach pains? Do you have bloating? Are you constipated? And now I think it's a much more nuanced idea that we need to start to get to terms with. We need to get people engaged now to really understand, to try and think more about their bodies every day, like they might look in the mirror themselves, see how their muscles are,

how they're feeling exercise wise, just get a sort of rain check on how your gut is doing every day so that you can start to treat it right and build it up, exercise it, give it the right nutrients, etc. And to do that, you need to get a rough idea of what sort of state you're in. And so this is the new campaign that you're launching with the blue stool test, right? That's exactly right. So we've just published this paper, which is based on a blue dye, or we call it the blue poop test, where you eat something with this blue dye in it and you time how long it takes for that blue color appears in the toilet hours or days later. And we did this on several thousand people and worked out a clear correlation between

the time it took and the general health of your gut that was better than anything else we have in our medical armory to really look at that without looking at the in great detail at the stores in the laboratory. So I think this is going to become the standard test that everyone does. And hopefully we'll make it part of their normal behavior. You know, I think these kind of tests are going to be the future as as people try and work out what is a healthy way to live and how do you balance your body correctly and how do you know if compared to other people how your gut is doing without having to spend lots of money on tests etc so you literally are just buying a blue dye

at any supermarket and you're dying a muffin or something like that and then seeing how it comes out. That's essentially it, yeah. This whole campaign is to get as many millions of people involved doing this test. We're providing some recipes, et cetera, but people can do it their own way. They can bake a cake. They can put in a smoothie. It doesn't matter too much as long as you can eat it all in one go and then record the hour you do it you can download this app which will record your times and then put that into the database

so you get your result back and then you can compare it to all the other people doing that test see how average or non-average you are and based on your, we'll be able to give you a rough idea of the sort of gut microbes you might expect for someone who had that kind of transit time. Because in the thousands of people so far, we've seen everything from a few hours, so super rapid, speedy Gonzales types that is just going straight through the gut to others that can take up to a week to get through them. So huge variation between people. And we found that when we looked in great detail at the gut microbes, there was a clear correlation between the ratio of good and bad bugs you had in your gut that were good for your health and the speed at which this dye was going through your bowels. So this is something that gives you an idea of where you are at the moment,

but it's also something you could repeat once, for example, you've decided to improve your diet, have more plants, have more fibre, have more variety, have perhaps more fermented foods, et cetera. And so what counts as optimum? At the moment, something around the 10 to 20 hours is around the time we're seeing. It obviously depends on a number of factors and age and gender have placed subtle differences between here. But something's too fast probably means you've got some really bad infection or you've had a very strong curry or something the night before. But it's somewhere around that

sweet spot that is less than 24 hours. We found the average was actually about 28 hours. That's a median, but there seemed to be groups of people, there was a sort of what we call a bimerdle curve. This group were in this 10 to 20 hours, and then there was this 20 to 30 hours, and then there's 30 hours plus and in a way that was sort of good medium and poor is roughly how we would describe those groups and so you really do want to try and see if you can shift this earlier and this is just a fun tool to be able to do this for yourself and the family can be done on kids as well and get people talking about their gut health. And so for kids, is it a similar time that you're looking at for optimum gut health? We think so, but we haven't got data on kids. So this is a great chance for us to do this

really large experiment where people would perhaps log their family as well. We know that babies certainly a lot quicker, you notice things in the nappy very rapidly. But I think once it gets to a certain age, we know the gut microbes, for example, take about four years until they get into their more stable adult form. So I expect children will be on average much faster. But I think we also know that they can get constipated very easily as well. And so I expect to see a variation. So wait to see. I mean, this is one big science experiment as well as everyone hopefully participates. Yes, it's very exciting. We'll definitely all be doing it in this house. And so once you get your results and you see which category you're falling into,

why is it that you want to move from the poor to the optimum? What is it that improving your gut microbiome is going to do for your well-being? Well, we've shown in a study we published in January in Nature Medicine that there was a clear correlation between this group of 30 microbes as a representative of your community of gut microbes. So just to go back a step, your gut microbiome is this community of microbes that are essentially chemical factories. And they're all pumping out useful vitamins and chemicals, and also immune boosting chemicals that prevent you having allergies and also prevent infections or reduce things like the severity of COVID. So it's really

important you have a wide variety of gut microbes in there to help you as much as possible. And they're producing tens of thousands of different chemicals, as well as these key vitamins and chemicals that keep you from getting depressed or anxious, and also digest your food. So they have a huge range of roles, and you need to have as many diverse ones as you can. So the idea is you feed them a diverse range of plants, particularly in fermented foods, that will allow lots of different species to grow. And that is the essence of it. And we showed that in the first thousand people, we found 30 bugs that were seen to be similar to everybody.

Everyone is unique, but there is a core that are quite similar. These 30, 15 good and 15 bad, we found the ratio of those told us pretty much what your general health was going to be like. So we measured things like total body fat, your internal abdominal fat. We measured things like your propensity to diabetes or to heart disease with high cholesterol, lipids, etc., high blood pressure. All these things were related to this ratio of these microbes. And we also showed that that ratio was linked to certain foods. So we could start to change that ratio by altering the balance of the foods that you're eating and so the point is we want people to firstly recognize how important it is that they need to look after

their gut for the rest of their general health put up some sort of averages in place and then start to think of the foods that you might be able to do to shift your balance of good to bad microbes. And I think that's the main reason. Obviously, the best way to do it is to get tested and have this genetic metagenome test where you can look at every gene and every bug and pick them all up. But given that most people can't do that at the moment, this is like a cheap and easy way that everyone can get a rough idea of what's going on in their bug so that if their transit time is improving, they're pretty sure that this ratio of good to bad bugs is also improving and they're going to be improving their

health. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com. So what are the key things that you do to change that ratio? Key thing is to, in general, have a greater diversity of plants in your diet. And we're talking ideally trying to get 30 different plants a week. And remember that a plant is not just kale. It is also a nut and a seed, and it's herbs and spices. So often you can get a lot of these by having mixed seeds and spices and herbs on your meals.

Variety is important. And picking foods that are also high in polyphenols. These are defensive chemicals that gives them their color and bitter tastes. Things like berries, nuts, dark chocolate, red wine, extra virgin olive oil, and brightly colored vegetables, things like purple carrots or lettuces or cabbages that have lots of color in them. So you do that and you have fermented foods on a regular basis, a small shot every day, that's also good for your microbes. And finally, reducing snacking and reducing ultra processed foods, which have a negative effect and tend to boost the bad bugs.

So if you do that, then basically, you're going to get that balance back in the right direction. That's interesting. So you've seen it's better to eat bigger meals three times a day than it is to graze throughout the day. Yeah, I discuss this in my book, Spoonfed, but this is, again, a myth that we were taught is that we should be grazing rather than gorging. That's what I was brought up on, the idea that we wanted to cut out these nasty peaks of metabolism. And so we'd just be like cows eating all day rather than like lions. But it turns out that more and more, we need to give our gut microbes a rest, particularly overnight, long periods of time.

Ideally, a 14-hour rest is what they like. So compressing your eating times is important. And what we're showing with these ZOE studies is that we want to have less meal events, but also at the same time, reduce the sugar peaks that you get from say refined foods or sugar, orange juice, et cetera. You want to combine those with your general meals. So you're getting a balance of the fats and the carbohydrates and you're not stressing one part of the system. All this means that you shouldn't really be having six or seven snacks a day, which might be triggering this sugar insulin spike or also

leading to large buildups of fat in the blood. Everything is about de-stressing the system whilst maintaining diversity and variety of plants and encouraging people to have a really healthy, wide, balanced diet. How we eat is just as important as what we eat, I think, is the increasing message. That's very interesting. And you said just then about ultra-processed food. What is it that's the problem there for the microbiome? We think it's a combination of factors. One is that generally ultra-processed food has very little fiber in it. It's all been skimmed off in the processing. They take out the outer husks of all these grains and they were the things that the microbes tend to feed off. So when you have

ultra processed food, very little of it actually reaches your gut microbes. Most is absorbed in the upper part of your gut and that causes these big sugar spikes. And we now know that also increases your appetite. So it's really important to stop that processing so you keep more of the whole food there so that it can then go to the microbes who can then process it the way nature intended. I think that's one reason. The other is it also often contains chemicals in there

that can upset the microbes themselves. So things like emulsifiers, which make food sticky, can make microbes stick together and function less well. Then there's preservatives and also artificial sweeteners, nearly in most processed foods now to some extent. And we think the microbes react against those sweeteners and produce other abnormal chemical signals to your brain to make you hungrier or change other signals that are really bad. So it's a combination of all these things that is building up the evidence that ultra-processed foods are probably the worst things in our diet, not the amount of fat in it or the amount of

sugar in it. Everyone pointing out one enemy. It's actually the whole process together that particularly in the UK and the US has become so bad. It's now over 50% of our calories come from these kinds of foods. So all of us, it's quite easy to reduce that given how much of that it is in our food system. Gosh, there's potentially a big change for people to move from one end of the spectrum to the other. Are there other things that you look at as well in terms of lifestyle factors when it comes to moving from the kind of poor end of the transit time to the optimum? Things like stress, your sleep patterns. Does that affect it as well? Or is diet a huge proponent? Diet is the major one. But as in all our studies, we see a more holistic picture in that how you respond to food also depends on how much sleep you've had the night before.

Are you getting enough sleep? Certainly, when you're not eating well, you don't metabolize your food well, and you will have more sluggish transit time. Exercise is also important. We found there was a correlation between people who exercised more and also had shorter transit times. And we didn't measure in this study, but there's other evidence that we know that stress interferes with your gut and stops that nice regularity, which the body likes. That's why people who travel a lot in the days when we could travel,

going through time zones often ended up having sluggish transit times and worse microbes. So I think it is a big picture, but there's no doubt that the nutritional side of it, how and what you eat are really important. And I think I'd like people to also start experimenting. I think that's the other thing we realized with the Zoe Predict studies is that everyone is so different. We're all unique and different ways of eating, different patterns of eating may suit you better than someone else. So we don't want to say to everyone, you must do this. Some people will do well with a big breakfast, others by skipping breakfast. And I think we

mustn't be constrained just by what we were taught as kids. I think we need to learn for ourselves and also realize that it can change with age. What suited you in your 20s may be quite different in your 40s. And definitely our metabolism changes so that we tend to metabolize things better when we're younger early in the day. And our data has shown that that shift goes actually the other way and might be better off skipping breakfast as we get older. And we seem to be better able to metabolize food later in the day. But again, there's always exceptions.

So I think you need to start getting more in tune with our bodies to try and work out what it's telling us and how we can try and experiment, just not take everything for granted and get into ruts, which is what we so often do with food, which is a pity because it's perhaps the one aspect of our life that we've got really amazing control over that can change our health and how we feel and our energy levels, etc. So would you encourage people with this to do it semi-regularly and experiment with different things? So as you said, experiment with that 14-hour fast, experiment with bigger meals at different times in the day with different types of foods and start to understand how that impacts. Yeah, exactly. I think obviously the research we've been doing is there is now commercial products that people can actually

test themselves and the Zoe product is available in the US and it's coming in a few months to the UK. But many people won't be able to do that. So we do need to learn how to experiment, how to listen to our bodies. And I think we're not very good at that. We've had another paper out recently on sugar dips. I don't know if you're one of these people that gets this feeling when they have a hypo or feels unwell, generally about one in four people do complain of this. And we found that those people who had a sugar dip, for example, after having a standard meal like a muffin, three hours after that had the muffin had on a glucose measure, the sugar dip. And it turned out those people were more tired and at

20% more throughout that day than people who didn't have a sugar dip. So if you can mentally detect which foods are giving you that response and you avoid them, actually that can make a huge difference to what happens over a year in terms of how much you eat. And I don't think we do that nearly enough because we just assume that all foods are the same. We assume that what it says in terms of calories on the pack actually is the same for everybody. And it turns out it's actually not true at all. So the Blue Poo campaign really is just one part of an idea of us finding ways to get more in tune with our bodies, listen to it. And, you know, yes, we've got the technology on one side, but I think there's a lot more we can do once we start to think of the possibilities.

And realize that before, you know, we were probably much more attuned to it, our ancestors were anyway, than we are now. Yeah, it feels like people are too busy to notice. So we semi-eat and make our meals on autopilot, I think, perhaps more than we should do. Tim, you mentioned at the beginning, I just had to ask you before we wrapped up about COVID and the microbiome. Have you seen an interesting link there between people's microbiome and the way they're impacted by COVID? Well, we've seen hints of it. So during lockdown, we run the Zoe COVID symptom study app, which has 4 million people, and we got about a million people's diet data. And so about a third of people actually improved after COVID in lockdown, their diets actually got better, about a third got worse. So it's really interesting how people responded to a crisis.

But we've got a paper coming out in a few weeks time that showed that the quality of your diet had a 20% effect on your severity of COVID. So even when you took into account all the other factors like diabetes or being overweight or other illnesses, your diet quality had a huge effect on whether you're going to go to hospital or not. And I think that has to act through the gut microbiome because clearly it's got to have that immune impact. And the way that food has an immune impact is undoubtedly through your gut microbes. So I think COVID is opening people's eyes to the power of

food and how it can really influence everyone's everyday immunity, not just through COVID, but through immune effects on cancer, autoimmune disease, allergies, many common diseases. And hopefully it's going to be a wake-up call for many people to just say it's not about calories it's not about fat it's not about sugars it's about the quality of food it's about getting that balance right about how to eat well for your own body listening to your body and trying to get the best food you can for your microbes and and i think if we start combining that with tests like the Zoe program, where people can actually do a home testing kit themselves with this modern technology,

then this is just the start of the future of how we're going to be dealing with food in a very different way. We won't be dependent on supermarkets, labels, the occasional food guru saying we must do this or that. We'll be able to work out much more for ourselves and experiment and go back to some of the basics that I think we've forgotten. We've got 30,000 edible plants on this planet. We ought to be embracing them all and working out what's the best combination for us. It's an interesting one because the debate of whether or not food is medicine feels like it can be quite controversial and people stand on such different sides of it. Do you feel that food really can be a sort of medicine in the body in terms of the impact that it has?

Absolutely. But I think you've got to realise that food is both a good and a bad medicine. And so, you know, like processed food is bad medicine. It has a negative effect for reasons we're only just discovering. And so I think we've got to take food much more seriously, realise it's much more complicated than we'd be led to believe. It does need proper science. It needs computer algorithms. The combinations of foods and chemicals are nearly infinite. And so we all have to be our impersonal pharmacists in a way so that we can get our concoctions together in the right way that suits us. We have to stop this dumbing down of food as just being meat versus veg or calories versus no calories, high fat versus low fat.

These debates really are so old fashioned now when you look at the cutting edge science and combine that with the uniqueness of us individuals. And it must be a reason why we've all got such unique microbes. It's so we can all adapt differently to all these different foods and places where humans live. And so in a way, everyone has got an optimum way to interact with their environment. And I think that's an exciting thing.

So, you know, I'm an optimist, although, you know, we've never been eating more junk food than ever before. I still think that the science now now and I think there's enough movement as well and global warming realizing that you know all these things together that if we pick the right foods it's also not only good for us it's good for our microbes it's also good for the planet I think this is a good time yeah I know I feel that too I feel there's an interest in this area that perhaps hasn't been there before which is very exciting. So, Tim, if people want to do this test, is there a website that they come to where they put in all these details and start to get the information?

Yes. If they go to the joinzoe.com website, they can sign up for the Blue Poo campaign and get all the instructions, how to cook your muffins and get those recipes. And then you can go on this website and put in your results and you get your own poop personality as well. So that's the other thing. So we're making it a bit of fun and creating these personalities that people can share. So we give people a range of different results depending on their age and their transit times. So we're going to make a bit of fun competition just get general awareness out there and people talking about their guts much more so that's the way to go and if at the same time people also want to sign up for get on the waiting lists of some of these the more detailed studies to test themselves they can also do that on the same websites fantastic tim well thank you so much for your time today i'm really excited about

doing the test and and seeing what comes out for our family but thank you so so much for taking the time to share that with us and good luck with it and good luck with your transit time thank you very much i got my fingers crossed that it's good yeah thanks so much again for listening everyone please do share the episodes rate it review it if it was helpful and we will be back again next week on tuesday thanks so much bye you're a podcast listener and this is a podcast ad heard only in canada reach great canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from libsyn ads choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a Thank you.