ZOE Science & Nutrition - ZOE's best health tips of 2024 - Part 2

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

In the second part of our 2024 recap, we take another look back at more of the best nuggets of wisdom from ZOE Science & Nutrition this year. In this jam-packed episode, we’ll hear how your second brain affects your mood, why fasting doesn’t actually have to be difficult, and how to prevent the disease you probably don’t know much about - but can lead to hospital time.  As you consider your New Year’s Resolutions and new habits, this episode will ready you with some great ideas. Why not share with a friend whose also trying to make positive change? 🥑 Make smarter food choices. Become a member at zoe.com - 10% off with code PODCAST 🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily 30+ Follow ZOE on Instagram. Timecodes 00:00 Introduction 01:08 Should you try fasting? 10:30 Eat more mushrooms 15:40 The power of spices 27:10 Your second brain 35:10 How to prevent osteoporosis 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks  Enjoy the full episodes here 👇 Intermittent fasting | Spotify or Apple Mushrooms | Spotify or Apple Spices | Spotify or Apple Gut health | Spotify or Apple Osteoporosis | Spotify or Apple Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here. Episode transcripts are available here.

Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. Welcome back to our two-part recap of 2024. Taking a look back at all the best nuggets of wisdom from ZOE episodes this year. In this jam-packed episode, we'll hear how your second brain affects your mood, why fasting doesn't actually have to be difficult, and how to prevent the disease you probably don't know much about but can lead to hospital time. Let's get into it. If you're anything like me, you've probably heard a lot about intermittent fasting, but

maybe you aren't completely sold on the idea. Well, this first episode might just change your mind. Intermittent fasting can spark some serious health benefits. But how to get started? In this episode, I talk with my Zoe co-founder, Professor Tim Spector, and Gin Stevens, an intermittent fasting advocate and bestselling author. It was the first time that I tried intermittent fasting and transparently, I absolutely hated it, Gin. And so I did follow, I did the required week

and I could not wait the day I stopped, I was so happy. But before we get into that, I'd like to just start at the very beginning naturally with you, Gin. What is intermittent fasting? The word sounds so scary. The word fasting makes you think that you're going to like 40 days and 40 nights wandering in the desert. But intermittent fasting, the word intermittent is key.

You are having periods of fasting and periods of eating, which every single person who is listening or watching already does that. It's just changing the balance of that. You go to bed, you sleep, you wake up in the fasted state. Probably everyone listening has had fasted blood work before. So our bodies are already fasted every single day. If you live an intermittent fasting lifestyle, the difference is you just extend that period. Instead of most people having this much for your feeding time and this much for fasting,

we just switch it. And so you're fasting for a longer period of the day, intentionally. And this is obviously on a 24-hour cycle, so very much focused on this idea there's a time of day when you should do things and a time of day when you shouldn't. And it seems like that's played in quite a lot into this idea of thinking about eating in particular parts of the day on a sort of regular 24-hour rhythm? Well, I would just like to point out that y'all know from your research with Zoe, bioindividuality is a big component of what you're doing.

It's the whole thing that y'all are doing. And I think that also applies to circadian rhythm. You know, I work with intermittent fasters from all around the world who live intermittent fasting as a lifestyle. You know, I've worked with hundreds of thousands of members of my communities over the years and you figure out what works for you over time. There are people who tend to have an earlier eating window or a midday eating window, but most of us tend to gravitate towards afternoon, evening, just as a practical way of living our lives, but we're not all the

same. That said, within that, there's that variation, but I think what you're getting at is the fact that all humans have a circadian rhythm, which means their body has to do stuff, active stuff in a certain time, and then rest stuff in another time, and all our cells are geared up for that. So it's become clear that this eating needs to be done at the same time as your body is in sort of activity mode and not in total rest mode.

And I think this is also being linked to the circadian rhythms of our gut microbes that are having to deal with the food you're eating if it's at weird times. And this also goes to this idea that shift workers and people who are doing stuff out of sync you're eating if it's at weird times. And this also goes to this idea that shift workers and people who are doing stuff out of sync have poorer health because of it. So I think it's more and more we're realizing

we have to go back to our sort of origins and this means eating in times when we would normally be active rather than very late at night particularly. Exactly, yeah. But everybody figures that out over time. You find out where your body prefers, what just feels natural to you. I'd like to share something exciting. Back in March 2022, we started this podcast to uncover how the latest research can help

us live longer and healthier lives. We've spoken to leading scientists around the world doing amazing research. And across hundreds of hours of conversations, they've revealed key insights that can help you to improve your health. If you don't have hundreds of hours to spare, no need to worry. At the request of many of you, our team has created a guide that contains 10 of the most impactful discoveries from the podcast that you can apply to your life and you can get it for free. Simply go to zoe.com slash free guide or click the link in the show notes and do let me know what

you think of it. Okay, back to the show. And in this episode, we also revealed a world exclusive. Our brilliant team of zoe scientists completed the world's largest study of intermittent fasting. Could you tell us firstly about the study? what happened, and then what have we found? Yeah, the big if, it's not a question mark, it's IF, study of intermittent fasting. And it came out of a big health study we were running in the UK called the ZOE Health Study. And there were 246,000 people that were sort of eligible for this. We told them what it entailed, which was just monitoring what you eat for a week, so we

actually could document what the normal eating windows were. And then the idea was to eat within a 10-hour eating window, 14 hours of overnight fasting and 10 hours of eating, which isn't a very strict one, but it is one that has been shown across a range of animals and humans to be effective. 37,000 of them completed the study. And how long did they have to do the fasting for? They did for two weeks. 27,000 were highly engaged and continued it for many more weeks after that. Some of them up to about 16 weeks. A proportion was still going, so we got people hooked on it.

At baseline, they weren't too bad. Their eating window was about 11 hours. For many people, they only shifted it by about one hour. The people that did complete it, they lost on average about 1.1 kilo-grams, that's just over a couple of pounds in weight. But importantly, we saw that people who reduced that eating window most, changed most.

And we got increases in energy levels of 22%, mood improved by 11%, and interesting hunger, which most people thought would have gone up, actually slightly dropped. So hang on, you just want to make sure I got that right. You're saying that for the people who did this, even though they were eating in a shorter time than before, they were actually less hungry than they were before they restricted their eating. That's what they were reporting, yes.

Which sounds like... Counterintuitive. Very counterintuitive. When we looked at the people who weren't doing this consistently, so they were sort of having one day of doing it, another day not, we found that actually things reversed. Those people were more hungry and they had less energy.

So clearly do need some sort of stability to this to get these benefits. And we also saw the people that benefited most had an eating window that was largest at the beginning. Those people that maybe were eating over a 14-hour window, they benefited the most from this. And the people that were, you know, marginally near it when they started. It's been a bit of a shock to me because I was definitely brought up with this assumption that you have to have breakfast, it's really important before you go and do something else. I think also the other misconception we were brought up with is you've got to have food inside you before you undertake any activity. Otherwise, you know, whether it's walking to school or

going for a jog or going on your bike, you've got to have carbs up there, you know, to be ready for it. And now we know that's not true. In fact, doing exercise when fasting can be beneficial for your health. So get out of bed and go for it. Tim also shared some of the science around time-restricted eating. That's the one thing that stood out of all the studies is on average you're getting reduced inflammation from giving your gut a rest and you are improving your gut microbes. And this has this effect all across our body

and this is why it's important for energy and mood and our immune system in general. And small amounts of weight loss are a bit of a side effect for some people. They're not the main reason for doing this modest time restricted eating because it is very modest. We're only shifting people, they're not the main reason for doing this modest time restricted eating, because it is very modest. You know, we're only shifting people, a lot of them just by one or two hours in a day.

It's not a huge difference compared to these trials, which have often combined this with calorie restriction. This study was quite short term, right? So it was two weeks. And I think one of the things we talk about all the time on Zowie is like, you know, the only thing that really matters is like a long-term sustained change of life. So this is clearly like a test of something that scientists often do, right, this sort of short-term to then learn about something long-term.

So if people had stuck to this shorter-term eating window based upon all the other sciences out there, what health benefits might they expect? And you mentioned something about inflammation. Could could you help us understand that and elsewhere? What would that actually mean for some of the things? Listen, I want to make this as a permanent change to my life. If we see this reduction in inflammation, and we assume that's going to continue, no reason to think any otherwise, then you would see small changes across a wide area of health. So that means that your immune system is working better,

that it's reacting better, that your gut microbes are in a better state, they're producing better chemicals. It means your mood is going to be heightened, you'll get less depression, less anxiety, you will feel more general energy, less tiredness, and you will have some small changes in perhaps your response to sugars, minor changes in your fat levels, reducing your risk of heart disease, etc., etc.

So you won't suddenly change your risk in a few weeks from being, you know, high risk to low risk. It's not like the silver bullet that cures all ills and you're going to live for another decade healthy life just because of the time restricted eating. Absolutely not. But if you multiply that small difference in inflammation over years. Right. That's when it adds up. Which is what we want people to do. There's no point doing this for three weeks and then stop it. No. You've got to find something that suits you and then do it for a long time.

Realize how important it is to give your gut and your body a rest. And if you can just prune that, you know, there's inflammation levels down, that'll have huge effects on your risk of virtually every disease. One of the main takeaways of this episode that did really surprise me was that you can and should tailor intermittent fasting to your own lifestyle and body. Now I've always been a fan of mushrooms. Mushroom stroganoff is a go-to weeknight meal for me. But I had no idea just how brilliant mushrooms are when it comes to our health.

Turns out they could be a promising treatment for depression and their chemicals might be protecting us from other diseases. For this mushroom tour, we chatted to Dr. Merlin Sheldrake, a biologist and the author of the bestselling book, Entangled Life, How Fungi Make Our World. If there were no fungi, would we be alive today?

No. Do plants rely on fungi as much as we rely on gut bacteria? At least as much. Brilliant. Well, we're going to go into that in a bit more detail. Now Tim, do all mushrooms have the same health benefits? No, but they're all good. Are dried mushrooms as good for our health as fresh mushrooms?

Usually and sometimes more. And finally, do psychedelic mushrooms have the potential to revolutionize medicine? Absolutely. It came as a surprise to me that mushrooms aren't plants. So what exactly are they? Fungi are a kingdom of life. So that's as broad a category as animals or plants. So there's lots of ways to be a fungus, just like there's lots of ways to be an animal, there's lots of ways to be a plant. But they're not plants and they're not animals. Mushrooms are the reproductive structures of a small group of, well, a large group,

but a proportionally small group of fungi. So mushrooms are the places where fungi produce spores which help them disperse themselves over potentially large distances. So when we think of mushrooms, we're just thinking of a small part of the overall life of a fungus, which is usually in the form of a network. Most fungi live most of their lives as networks of branching, fusing cells called mycelial networks. So that means I should think about mushrooms a bit like a fruit.

So it's like a tomato or a pear within this thing that isn't a plant. It's analogous to the fruit of a plant, except that the tree, say the apple tree that produced the apples is underground, and the mushrooms you see usually are sticking up through the ground, and you're not able to see the rest of the tree. Why aren't they a plant? Because it feels like they're not an animal and they're not a bacteria. So my very simple view of the world, they're a plant, aren't they? I think perhaps the most important difference is that plants, on the whole, photosynthesize. So they

produce energy from the light coming from the sun and from carbon dioxide in the air. It's a really fundamental process on the planet, photosynthesis. It's like they're eating air and eating light to produce the energy they need to grow and do the things they do. Fungi don't photosynthesize. Like us, as animals, we have to find food in the world, ready-made, as it were, and put it inside us.

Fungi have to find food in the world, ready-made, as it were, and put it inside us. Fungi have to find food in the world and consume it. They can't make their own energy containing carbon compounds like plants do. For an ingredient that seems so unassuming, there are some really cutting-edge discoveries being made. Tim and Merlin shared how the humble mushroom can fight disease and protect our bodies. In Japan, there's a chemical from shiitake mushrooms, which is used very widely for treating cancer alongside more conventional cancer treatments, and also a compound from turkey tail, which is used very widely in quite conventional medical contexts.

The research, the science is unequally distributed. Some of the reasons why those are not used so widely here is because it's not totally clear how they're working, although it seems to be very clear that they work. So psychedelic mushrooms have these amazing potential effects from mental health and cancer. But what about the edible kind? What might they be doing for our health? As well as being super tasty, there's a lot of water in them. So once you've got rid of the water, they have huge amounts of protein, about 25% protein,

pretty good amounts of fiber as well. All these chemicals we've been talking about that have a whole variety of these effects. They're a source of selenium, they're actually a source of vitamin D, and they sunbathe like humans and they convert- You mentioned this before, is it really true that if you leave them out in the sun before eating, they have more vitamin D? It is. I mean, it depends slightly on the variety, but some of them are really good at converting natural steroids in them to vitamin D, which is a steroid. And basically you can get half of your vitamin D amounts from eating portions of mushrooms.

I think there's lots of things that fungi can do for us chemically that plants can't, because they're so chemically ingenious, because they produce all these different compounds that do all these different things. In fact, lots of the chemicals that you'll get by eating a plant have originally been concentrated or even made by a fungus. So whether magical or not, mushrooms of all kinds really do seem to have these fantastic

benefits for our bodies. Merlin and Tim left us with the key tip to eat mushrooms at least three times a week. When I want to liven up my cooking, I tend to reach for the cumin, or maybe the sumac, or if I'm really honest, probably someone else does who's actually doing the cooking in my house. Spices are a staple in most kitchens, but spices are about more than just flavour. They're a form of medicine too. My guest for this episode was Kanchan Koya, a molecular biologist turned food scientist. The formal definition of a spice is that it's the root,

the bark, the bud, the fruit and the leaf, although that can get a little tricky sometimes because leaves are more herbs than spices, usually dried, those parts of the plant, once dried, constitute a spice. They're often used in small amounts for flavoring in food and hopefully as will inspire people today also to boost the health properties of food.

But yeah, that's traditionally sort of the formal definition of a spice. And this obviously started something that just tasted really nice in our food, right? But I think now, and this is where your own research sort of started, we understand they're high in these things called polyphenols. Can you explain what those are? Yeah, so I would actually say that thousands of years ago when spices were first discovered,

people did love how they made food taste. But actually, our ancestors also recognized that spices had additional properties, like the ability to preserve food in the absence of refrigeration thousands of years ago. So I think there was an understanding as evidenced by the fact that people waged wars and conquests were undertaken for the spice trade, that there was more to it than just flavor alone. But now we obviously have science catching up to some of that ancient kind of intuitive wisdom. So polyphenols are essentially a group of naturally occurring compounds that are highly prevalent in the plant kingdom and for reasons that we'll hopefully discuss, really enriched in herbs and spices, highly concentrated. Phenols are just a type of chemical structure and

polyphenols just means that a lot of these compounds have multiple phenolic kind of units. But if you want to just simplify it, they're essentially chemicals, phytochemicals found in the plant kingdom that happen to play a role in plants but also have some beneficial effects in our bodies. And Kanchan, I always think that all of the chemicals that are in plants have magical functions because they're there to preserve the plant itself. So if we take seed oils, for example, they're enriched with so much vitamin E because it's a natural antioxidant, so it kind of protects the plant.

And this is the same with polyphenols in plants. They're there as a natural defense for the plant itself. So we know that spices are fantastic flavor enhancers and they contain these brilliant polyphenols. But how exactly do they work on our bodies to support our well-being? So I'm going to approach that question in two ways. One is I'm going to talk about the specific antioxidant potential of a lot of these polyphenols. So going back to this idea of oxidative stress, every time your cell divides, every time you undergo any cellular process,

there is a production of free radicals. These are just radicals that have like a free oxygen on them that can then interact with proteins or DNA and sometimes cause damage. This is just a normal part of cellular metabolism. And polyphenols and spices can neutralize these free radicals. So they have this antioxidant capacity. So that's one way in which they help us when we ingest them.

And the second way is actually something that we call hormesis in biology, which is a little bit of stress is good for you. So the exercise is a great example. When you look at the effects of exercise on the human body in the short term, you actually see a lot of things go up in the short term that seem like they wouldn't be a good idea. Like blood pressure goes up, a little bit of inflammation goes up, and you think, well, that can't be good. But then what happens is once the stressor has been removed,

you actually have greater cellular resilience. Now you have lower inflammation and lower blood pressure. So spice polyphenols. This is like what my trainer tells me all the time. Like during the training session, it feels really painful and it hurts, but in the long run, you know, it's good for me, which is what I always tell myself as I'm in the middle of the session wondering why I've done this to myself.

And you're saying there's something sort of similar with... Yes, so fasting is an example. In the short term, it can feel a little stressful and intense, but then long term we know it can build some cellular resilience, help metabolic health, blood sugar control, that sort of thing. So, spice polyphenols can be thought of as this short term stressor, which is why they work as this defense compound against predators. And in our bodies, they also act in this way. They actually act as a little bit of a stressor,

which then activates our own cellular antioxidant pathways. So a great example would be, and I don't want to get too technical, but there's a pathway that is sort of the master regulator of antioxidant status called the NRF2 pathway. And a lot of these polyphenols will activate our own cellular repair pathways because they are creating a little bit of stress through this mechanism of hormesis, just like exercise or fasting.

And I think the polyphenol research that's coming out now is fascinating. It's quite an exploding area of research, Jonathan, in the nutrition field. We know that people having high polyphenol diets, whether it's from herbs or spices or other foods. So, for example, polyphenols are found in very heavily pigmented kind of berries and vegetables. It's polyphenols often give their color to fruits and vegetables. This is that like sort of eat the rainbow. Yes. You know, the dark green leafy veg, the berries, you know, etc. There's so much research, isn't there, Kanchan, coming out now showing that polyphenols are

linked to all sorts of improvements in health, whether it be cancer, whether it be type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, you know, any inflammatory related disease. And I think this is because there's evidence emerging around polyphenols beyond oxidative stress around inflammation, about blood sugar control. And we got creative in this episode. Kanchan actually brought in a spice box to show us. The spice box in India is really an integral part of our pharmacy, F-A-R-M Pharmacy, and it's rooted in the ancient Indian medical system

of Ayurveda, which growing up, I sort of rolled my eyes at and thought it was't serious science. And then only when I became a PhD student and my lab began to study curcumin and turmeric for breast cancer was I reminded that maybe some of this ancient wisdom is actually proving to be correct. I just want to be really clear here, right?

So you are not saying, hey, any of these spices are a replacement for like modern drugs. You're saying, however however there are some real properties in them and we can learn something from that and I guess that in a lot of modern drugs are sort of refined versions of compounds that are available sort of in the natural world aren't they? I think about aspirin is the thing that I remember learning about you know when I was a kid. Yeah absolutely so shikimic acid which is the starting point in the synthesis of Tamiflu, which is one of our most successful antiviral drugs,

actually comes from star anise, which is in my spice box. Amazing. So, Kanchan, you just sort of pulled out a metal tin with, I think, what is that, sort of six or so compartments that look beautiful with different colors and things like that, sort of a bit looks like the bits of plant. Could you just talk us through what you've got in front of us? So I have two different varieties of cinnamon, star anise, cloves, ginger and ground turmeric. Cloves are really interesting because they are thought to have some of the highest antioxidant potential amongst all spices. They're also thought to have some antiseptic and

analgesic properties, which means that they can relieve topical pain. So if you've ever been to the dentist and they put clove oil on a painful tooth, that's because clove has some topical pain relieving properties. So there's actually science behind that. Yes. It's not a myth. No, it's not a myth. And when I have a sore throat, I just pop a whole clove in my mouth and just kind of keep it there like a lozenge almost. It's not a myth. No, it's not a myth. And when I have a sore throat, I just pop a whole clove in my mouth and just kind of

keep it there like a lozenge almost. It's not the most lozenge or sweet taste. It's a little bit potent, but it really does seem to help. Does it alleviate the sore throat? Yes, I think so because of its topical pain relieving properties, at least at my end of one experiment. I don't know that there's been a trial looking at a whole clove popped in the mouth for a sore throat.

But it works for you. Yes, there have been some trial looking at a whole clove popped in the mouth for a sore throat. But it works for you. Yes, there have been some studies looking at clove oil for sure. Spices easy in a sore throat or toothache? I was completely sold. But I was left wondering exactly how to integrate more spices into my everyday meals. So my biggest recommendation is to take the foods that you're already eating, that you already enjoy, that your kids already enjoy and start to challenge yourself to add at least one spice to that dish. So if we just take some examples, you know, people might typically eat like avocado toast,

you mentioned sumac, you could add some chili peppers if you like heat, you could add a little bit of cumin and coriander. What about snacks? I was going to go exactly the same place, exactly. What about? Snacks account for 25% of our energy intake in the UK and the US. So I think that would be a great way

if we could get some spices into our snacks. Would be fabulous. Yeah. Any ideas? Yeah, so I would suggest a yogurt-based snack because we know yogurt is a fermented food. It's great for microbiome diversity, inflammation. So two options with yogurt. You could go in a sweet direction where you take some Greek yogurt, you throw in a bunch of different berries for those wonderful polyphenols. You throw in some nuts like walnuts, pistachios, almonds, and you sprinkle on some cinnamon, a little bit of grated

nutmeg and cardamom. And you almost have a pudding of sorts because it has all these luxurious flavor profiles from the spices. You get the benefit of potential blood sugar balance with the cinnamon and these additional polyphenols. Really easy way to spice up sort of a sweeter yogurt snack. And then you could go in a more savory direction and prepare a yogurt dip for a plate of cut vegetables. So you can have your carrots, cucumbers, radishes, tomatoes and your Greek yogurt with a little drizzle of olive oil, some crushed garlic for that allicin, which is another great bioactive found in garlic.

And to that I would again add salt, a little bit of sumac, chili, cumin, coriander, mix it up, and it's almost like a Middle Eastern type of dip for your cut veggies. Great. And any ideas for snacks on the go? Yeah, I actually love home-popped popcorn. So just get some corn kernels, do this with your kids, it's super fun. A little bit of avocado or olive oil in a pot, throw the kernels in, let them pop. It's really fun to hear them popping.

The kids can get involved. And then just toss it with a spice blend that you love. It can be garam masala, which is an Indian spice blend. It can be the baharat blend or a curry blend, you know, with a little bit of olive oil and salt. And now you have a spiced up polyphenol rich popcorn snack. Great. That I have never tried. So it's like curried popcorn.

Exactly. I'm going to be trying that one. You know, there's so many ways to take existing dishes that you already make, you already know how to do and just add spices to that instead of sort of starting from scratch, which can be way more intimidating for people. One of our most popular episodes this year took a deep dive into our second brain. That's right, our second brain. It stretches from your mouth to your bum. It has more than a hundred million nerve cells and it impacts your cravings and mood. That second brain is of course your gut. I was thrilled to speak with Dr. Karan Rajan on such an exciting area

of emerging science. He's an NHS surgeon, senior lecturer at Imperial College London, and hugely successful health and science communicator with over 10 million followers across social media. When we talk about the gut, we're not just referring to the stomach, are we? No, and in fact, if you're thinking about the gut, you think about digestion. And if you think about digestion, it would also be wrong to think about the stomach because no digestion actually really takes place in the stomach. There's some mechanical and maybe some chemical digestion. It also happens in the mouth.

But actually digestion begins in the brain. Hi, I have a small favour to ask. We want this podcast to reach as many people as possible as we continue our mission to improve the health of millions. And watching this show grow is what motivates the whole team at Zoë to keep up the really hard work of creating new episodes each week. So right now, if you could share a link to the show with one friend who would benefit from today's information, it would mean a great deal to me. Thank you.

So when you're even thinking about an ice cream, a plate of food, the brain actually triggers that whole cascade of digestion. You know, the signals get sent to the gut, to the salivary glands in your head, and all these juices are beginning to be secreted. And that's all linked with also your circadian rhythm, that biological clock. You see, I like to think of the gut as this orchestra. And that orchestra, the maestro of that orchestra is the brain, the circadian rhythm, because it determines when you feel

hungry, when you want to go to the toilet. So it really all starts in the brain. And then the bulk of the digestion, the kind of real mechanical digestion and the chemical stuff that we think about, then occurs in the small intestine. That's where the bulk of it happens. So really the stomach is such a small player in the grand scheme of things of gut health and digestion. And even beyond the small intestine where I've just said digestion occurs, it's really, if you want to dig down into the granular detail, the colon where the bulk of the ecosystem of our digestive activities takes place and that's where the microbiome live.

I'll be a bit biased when I'm talking about gut health and if you ask any general surgeon or colorectal surgeon or any GI surgeon, they'll tell you that the guts are the most important system of organs there is. And if you speak to a cardiologist, they'll say it's the heart, naturally. And really when it comes to it, it's the foundation of everything. And actually, when the microbiome research went from fringe hippie science into mainstream science, and that's probably the most popular health topic right now, that's opened our eyes into actually how powerful it is because we know, your first question, is our gut just there for digestion? We know it's far more than that because we know the gut has its own nervous system, the

enteric nervous system. The immune system is also very highly active in the gut as well. It has a role in building our immunity and it's interacting with the outside world. Can you help us to understand what are the most common ways in which we are irritating our gut? Yeah, I think it's worth bearing in mind that whilst for specific things like gallstones or cancers, there's a significant genetic component there we need to be mindful of. There's also with any number of gut issues, there are lifestyle factors at play which

people can modify, which doesn't make them immune to these things, but can lower their risk of certain things. So for example, there are a number of irritants in our lifestyle that has a role to play unquestionably in our guts, some of which we can't change. Environmentally, we cannot change. We know that air pollution can have an impact on our microbes. And if you're living in a polluted city beyond moving from that city somewhere else, there's not really so much you can do about that. Other things, we know that antibiotics, especially broad spectrum antibiotics and chronic use of those antibiotics can have a role to play. I think there was a recent study on about 14 and a half thousand NHS nurses, so the National Healthcare System in the UK, the healthcare system, they looked

at 14 and a half thousand of those nurses and they found there was a clear correlation and association between chronic antibiotic use of over two months and lower scores on memory tests, cognitive tests, focus, reflex, etc. And is it because of its impact on the microbiome or something else? We don't know, but clearly, you know, it has some sort of detrimental effect there. And especially when the microbiome is evolving and growing in the early stages of life in the first few months and first few years, that's particularly when antibiotic use can have a role to play at impacting the good and bad bacteria. Other things like even the food we eat, a lot of them are enriched with antibiotics

and pesticides. A lot of, there's a lot of talk about ultra processed foods. Again, the science is growing on that. I don't think it's right to say that ultra processed food directly and causally affects your health directly. We don't have enough consistent strong evidence to say that. There may be a role to play for sure because that's the change in the last few hundred years, one of the changes. NSAIDs, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, things like ibuprofen, that can also have an impact on the gut.

For example, I quite often operate on people who have got ulcers, burst ulcers, because of chronic ibuprofen use, for example. A lot of the medication, other medications we can take can have an impact on the gut as well. Alcohol, that's another potent irritant for the guts. And we also need to bear in mind that all of these things can influence the microbiome in a way, especially in early stages, that influences the immune system. And we know a bulk of GI conditions are autoimmune in nature, things like Crohn's, ulcerative

colitis and beyond. So there's a number of irritants, some in our control, some out of our control. And one of those things in our control could be things like smoking habits, alcohol, the diet, the fiber. As we mentioned, we know that has a role beyond just roughage, as you suggested was the kind of dogma a few years back. So yeah, there's a number of things, modifiable and non-modifiable. So what changes can we make to keep our guts happy?

Yeah, I think it does start with the food, a lot of the, at least easy options that someone can make a change from right now, listening to this podcast from tomorrow, from today, even making that change. And we know the gut microbiome is quite adaptable. It bounces back relatively well and it's very responsive to change. So even within 24 hours of eating a certain food, you can begin to see some changes in the microbiome.

So if you look at most of the literature that's out there, the meta-analysis and the systematic reviews, when it comes to eating for better gut health, it's nothing very complicated. If you break it down into, you know, we talk about fiber and prebiotics, they're essentially the fertilizer for the bacteria allowing them to thrive. So you know, plant-based foods. Now, it doesn't mean you need to have a plant-based diet full stop and cut out every single piece of meat or fish. That's not the case.

You can have a perfectly thriving microbiome with meat. But the majority of the diet, if it is plant-based, that's good. I can tell you're definitely not very keen on people going down to the local grocery store and popping a probiotic. I wouldn't be. I think I'm optimistic in that we will get to that point in science where actually that's a viable option, where we have tailored probiotics and we have, or even generic probiotics which actually do work but I don't think with there in the science where we can actually say just like we recommend

vitamin D in winter months, actually yeah we recommend probiotics for general health. I think we could get there in the next few years maybe but right now I don't think it's worth it because there are so many other low-hanging fruits. There's one disease that leaves millions of people to spend time in hospital each year, but most people aren't aware of it until it's too late. That disease is osteoporosis, which causes fragile bones. One in five men over 50 will break a bone because of osteoporosis. And for women over the age of 45, it means more hospital time than breast cancer, heart attack or diabetes. But here's the thing, osteoporosis is both preventable and treatable. And for this episode, we spoke to two leading experts on osteoporosis, Professor Cyrus Cooper and

our own Professor Tim Spector. Osteoporosis is the commonest bone disorder worldwide and it's associated with reduced bone density, a disruption of the microarchitectural content of bone and an increased risk of fracture. The fractures that typically arise from osteoporosis are fractures of the hip, the spine, and the distal forearm or wrist.

Those three fracture sites account for about half of all fractures in older people, and the other half are from all the other sites combined around the skeleton. The places you're talking about feel to me like not the most common places that people tend to break their bones when they're children or in their 20s or 30s, is that? So that's exactly correct. In their 20s and 30s, trauma plays a much bigger role than bone density.

So this is like falling out of a tree or... Having a road traffic accident. Breaking your nose. Yeah. Whereas as you get to later life, particularly for women above the age of 50, up to the average age of menopause, and men more so after age 70, low trauma or in fact, absent trauma is associated with many of the fractures and those truly are ones due to bone fragility. So what does it mean to break a bone without trauma? I think of it always being like you...

No, it means just rolling over in bed, for example. You can actually trigger a vertebral fracture just by doing that or twisting in a certain way. Most of our vertebral fractures present on an incidental finding on a radiograph. And a vertebral fracture, where is my vertebra? And typically the bones that break in your spine. The spine contains small vertebral bodies all the way down. The mid-thoracic, which is the middle part of the back, and the lower lumbar, which is down towards the pelvis, those are the main sites at which osteoporotic vertebral fractures

occur. If you're listening to this and you're worrying about yourself or maybe you're worrying about a loved one, is there a way to find out if you have this osteoporosis? Because you're saying it's like hidden away inside the bones inside my body. Absolutely. So that the assessment of future fracture risk has become a very topical area in the last 15 years. Before, we understood that age and a previous fracture were definite markers of a future risk of fracture. And those people, particularly those with a past fracture,

needed to be evaluated even before 15 years ago. In 2008, we developed a global tool that mixed risk factors for osteoporosis just from a questionnaire, height and weight, and a DEXA scan to derive for an individual patient the 10-year risk of a hip or any osteoporotic fracture. And that 10-year risk is now incorporated in multiple rules, which are often dependent on

different healthcare systems in different countries. But the principle of which is to target treatments according to people's fracture risk. And if you were a woman listening to this, at what point would you start to... Because I think I'm hearing almost no one in their 30s would this make sense. When do you start to worry about this? A person who had a 20% chance of having a major osteoporotic fracture or a 3% chance of having a hip fracture meet the criteria for the cost effectiveness of drugs that retard their future risk of fracture.

So it's a bit like the statin story. So in a way, what the osteoporosis world has done is come up with a sort of table of risks, proportional to your age and sex, to say at this point it's worth worrying about it and each country's got its own levels, but it really varies a lot with age. So exactly the same risk factors but just ten years older, you're much more likely to have a fracture, it's much more important to get some intervention. And so if you're a man or a woman listening to this, I guess my question is at what age would you say, I think I should have a conversation with my doctor to discuss this because it sounds like this is something that is changed a lot with age.

Absolutely. Ever since the development of DEXA scanning, there has been discussion about when we should use that bone density measurement. And early on, the most discussion was directed to at the time of the menopause at age 50, say, in women. Of course, that's actually an inappropriate time to undertake mass screening. It's much better when age has caught up the fracture rates to around 70 to 80 years for individuals on a large scale to benefit from knowing what their bone density is.

So what can be done about osteoporosis and what are the treatments? So the first line of treatment would be a drug class called the bisphosphonates. And examples of bisphosphonates are alendronate or resedronate. Those are taken in tablet form once per week with adjunctive, as I've mentioned before, calcium and vitamin D as part of the trial regimen. And those drugs will reduce over a three to five year period and indeed longer with follow-ups of the trials by 50% the number of fractures. Oh wow, so you can just take a tablet once a week and you can actually 50% the number of fractures. Oh wow, so you can just take a tablet once a week

and you can actually halve the number of fractures. But only while you're taking it. You've got to keep taking it. So that's the caveat. We used to think, oh, if you treat people for five years, you know, you've got everything, you've pushed everything five years away. It doesn't seem to be true.

It's only while you're taking it are you protected. And that's sort of the problem because you're actually slowing the bone down while you're on it. So that's why we have these drug holidays you go on and so every five years you have a little break for a year, let your bone recover and then you go back on it. Indeed, that's the regimen that would be the first line. Then you can use intravenous of the same type of drug, zoledronic acid it's called, but it's a bisphosphonate given once a year. And that allows the bone resorption to be reduced in a much more marked manner than

the oral bisphosphonates. Then the next line would be the last of the anti-resorptive agents, which is called de-nozumab, and that is given once every six months with a subcutaneous injection. Those will reduce by 50 or 60 percent. I feel like if you're listening to this and you're concerned, you would definitely want to know your state. And perhaps I should also mention HRT, which we mustn't forget about, which was the first one before. So this is hormone replacement therapy. Or estrogen replacement therapy in the US. What does that do? Above the age of 60, 65, there's been a sort of discussion that perhaps the risks of heart disease become

prohibitive on general use of HRT, but in someone who's had a fracture, they are going to be benefiting from their bone densities point of view. Now I think one question a lot of people will be saying is, is there anything specifically however that I should be thinking about adjusting? So imagine that maybe I'm going through perimenopause, I've been through menopause. Is there anything that we know about sort of way that I might want to think about changing my diet? Or is this just like overall I need to have a care more about the quality of my diet perhaps than when I was younger?

I think the number one message is care more about the quality of your diet, try and get more plants now because they are all these sources of other minerals. As you said there are a hundred thousand different chemicals in food so the more diversity we get the more we are going to get a balance of these things and so that's why a rich balance of particularly plants is going to give you all these, whether it's zinc or magnesium or phosphate, in exactly the right amounts that your body needs because we're evolved to take it up and absorb it in those ways. That's more important than any saying, okay, I'm going to forget all that.

I'm just going to take some vitamin D capsules and drink a pint of milk. So I think in a way, that's where we've got it wrong in the past. We've said, well, there's one quick fix here. Where actually it's going back to, there isn't a quick fix. It's this holistic idea. Again, it comes back to food quality.

Thank you so much for listening to our roundup of Zoe's best episodes this year. We're committed to bringing you actionable tips from the cutting-edge world of nutrition science and we heard some fantastic insights throughout 2024. We hope you'll leave today feeling empowered to take a personalized approach to your own nutrition. Like figuring out what intermittent fasting schedule makes sense for you, understanding your own gut health, spicing up your life, literally we hope, and strengthening your bones are all within your control.