EAT THIS TO HEAL: What To Eat & When To Eat For LONGEVITY! | Tim Spector

we're not really in an obesity crisis we're in a food crisis it's going to affect how long you live how many chronic diseases you get whether you get allergies whether your immune system is going to fight off covid and your mood your sleep and we should absolutely stop talking about calories [Music] i think a lot of people hear information about food and guts health and inflammation and the immune system and often they get confused so you are renowned as a global expert on these topics and so i thought maybe we could start with the question why is gutsel so important because it's a crucial organ in our bodies and it is one of the few things that we can really control so there's a huge range of gut health across the population we know that we've lost half of our gut microbes compared to perhaps even 50 or 100 years ago and that's affecting us in many ways and yet it's not like genetics that you can't change it's something that all of us can improve and all of us needs to understand more about gut health so that we can improve many things in our life very simply just by altering our food choices so it's it's becoming apparent that it's something that the public can change you don't need doctors you don't need specialists to do it it's all within our power to really nurture and improve our our gut microbes which in turn are key for our gut health so influences you know all everything to do with our body our mood our brain and our metabolism our weight etc yeah a lot of people think about guts health and digestion and they think yeah the guts if i can get my gut functioning better my gut is going to feel better but as you say that it's not just about your gut is it it's about many different things in the future yeah it's not i mean as you said i think in the past people have said gut health oh that just means you know to avoid heartburn or bloating or constipation or whatever it is and now we know it's nothing like that even if you feel perfectly normal you can have poor gut health which is going to affect how long you live how many chronic diseases you get whether you get allergies whether your immune system is going to fight off covid all kinds of things in your mood the next day your sleep all things we hadn't even thought were related so we have to think much more widely when we talk about gut health i think it's nearly a sort of uh it's like talking about holistic holistic view of your body uh that comes back to the you know ancient indian teachings that says it all comes from there which if you said it that way sounds a bit pseudo-science but if you just instead of that you call it the gut microbiome then it's starting to make uh sense again yeah you mentioned that what's really great about the science of gut's health is this idea that we don't need to go and see a doctor or a specialist we can manipulate it we can change it for ourselves now as a fellow medical doctor that's something i'm incredibly passionate about how can we disseminate information to people that means they can be i guess the architects of their own health rather than need to rely on other people what have you found since you started spreading that through your books through your podcast you know through all these mediums that you use what sort of feedback have you had well amazing feedback really of of people writing me letters sending me presents um all kinds of messages saying that just reading my my book um the dartmouth or spoon fed and saying it changed the way they thought about food and actually they taught the rest of their family and suddenly they're feeling healthier they're feeling better and there's nothing quite like that as a doctor yeah to feel that you've made not just a change to someone for a few weeks but actually change something probably for the rest of their life and that's incredibly empowering for me to to know that you know just by writing some books and and talking on podcasts you can actually change people's attitudes long term and so that really is a major motivating factor for me rather than the hundreds of papers i've written that you know only a few academics read i think getting these messages out and doing doctors out of a job is really what um is it spurs me on and probably you too yeah for sure and tim you know i've been really thinking long and hard over the past years what does it mean to be a medical doctor for me at least in 2022 because when i was at medical school i always imagined it would be you know i would make impacts by seeing people and helping them change their lives and you know one-on-one do some tests make some changes and of course that has incredible value but i've realized more and more if we do our jobs right through spreading this information through the media through podcasts and books i kind of feel we're still doing our job as a doctor just in a very different way well reaching many more people and being much more efficient about it and not trying to just sort out the short-term problems which i think is what modern medicine's still unfortunately dealing with and predominantly dealing with pharmaceutical solutions to those problems and that's just the way it's set up at the moment so i but i think we are seeing more and more well i am things optimistic is is uh you know doctors like you and many others who are suddenly uh having a voice and speaking well because it was very hard to find any any doctors 10 years ago that would be you know prepared to do this without feeling they were going to be ridiculed or told off by their peers or you know would simply not have the right language to appeal to the general public so i think we're certainly i mean it was a bit more advanced in the us i think yeah but certainly in the uk we've been very behind with doctors really scared to to talk out and and say what they think yeah in terms of practical things we mentioned that improving our gut health can improve all kinds of things in the body and you mentioned food as a powerful driver um it's a powerful tool to use for our guts health what are some of the things that people should think about bringing into their diets to improve their gut health well the first thing i think is to to realize that we're not really in an obesity crisis we're in a food crisis and that's because we've lost an idea what good food is and the first thing to do is to realize you know the difference between good and bad food and forget a lot of what we've been told about calories and fats and sugars and the fact that you can really tell a product by its calorie count or its percentage fat on a stick on a label and most people don't really realize you know the difference between ultra-processed foods and whole foods because they're the same category you know a bread is a bread for most people and so i think the first thing is to just realize that actually virtually all the population don't fully understand what food is so i think educating more about what food is is really important realize that quality is something we should be talking about and we should absolutely stop talking about calories so in a way that's the first mindset shift i would like people to to do and everything we're doing now and and doing with the company zoe is to completely ignore the c word what i want to get to zoe in personalized nutrition shortly because i think that it's really revolutionizing the way we are all going to think about our diets in the future you mentioned you want people to forget thinking about calories now to a lot of people that's a very controversial statement i happen to agree with you on that but could you elaborate why is the idea of focusing on calories or even calorie counting in your view potentially problematic well there's several reasons the first is that if you judge a food or choose a food based on its calories you're ignoring the quality and manufacturers of foods use calories to disguise the poor quality of the ingredients all the other chemicals there affect the highly high effect is highly processed that's going to have lots of other negative effects on your body second is it's the estimates of how many calories are wrong um even in manufactured processes they're sort of plus or minus 10 and in restaurants they're plus or minus about 200 percent so you can't judge what's going in you also can't work out what how many calories you actually burn in a day either huge differences the idea that you know all men have two and a half thousand calories is at all ages is complete nonsense and you know different times of year and all kinds of factors made it impossible that you can work out what the right amount of calories is so even if you could accurately measure the amount of calories going into your body it wouldn't be personalized for you it wouldn't be worthwhile and even if you do go on calorie restriction diets over time your body adapts and so it changes its metabolic rate therefore equalizing so that's why calorie restricted diets simply don't work and also in this country and the u.s people are the more they go down those routes the more they tend to go down low-fat low-cal uh processed foods and so they're often swapping calories for quality and this we know that these other products of food understanding what's in ultra-processed foods is actually will drive your hunger drive your cravings make you more tired all kinds of things that they're not supposed to do because we're just supposed to think about calories and fat content and so it's driving people down the wrong direction and that's why we've got it so wrong over the last 50 years that's why obesity rates are going up diabetes rates are going up and ultra processed food rates are still going up in the u.s and the uk which are the two top countries in the world so that's the first thing so it's it's about firstly understanding you know the differences between foods there's a huge difference between a cooking oil that's made in a highly processed way or olive oil there's a huge difference between a bread that's bought in a supermarket that's been hanging around for a year frozen and reheated in front of you and a a sort of artisanally made rice sourdough massive difference and yet they're all called the same and in most guidelines oh well you know that they'd be equivalent so it's understanding those differences between ready meals and something you do yourself it's yeah all those nuances that we need to start thinking about much more than this ridiculous uh concept of calorie counting yeah i mean i always say that look if someone's listening or watching this and they have found calorie counting helpful for them i'm like hey go for your life you know i'm not certainly i'm not trying to change what anyone does if they're finding it useful i've just never ever found it useful with any of my patients at all well one percent might like might like it so let's yeah that's yeah so yeah if it's working great a couple of things to respond there um a few days ago because when did it come in in the uk mandatory calorie labeling came in what a few months ago and i was in a cafe down the road from here a few days ago and i can't remember what i chose but it had some avocados and had some nuts in it and i think maybe some salmon i can't remember what it was then when i looked at the um ingredients or something i was looking at the menu then the calorie thing popped up and it was i wasn't used to it cause i'm not used to seeing calories on the food that i look at and the calorie count was pretty high actually so now i happen to i think know a reasonable amount about nutrition and what foods are nourishing me and i thought wow if you don't know you may look at that calorie count and go no i'm not going to eat this because there's a lot of calories i'm going to get something else instead which may have lower calories but maybe ultra process and have detrimental effects on multiple aspects of our body that's one thing i wanted to mention the second thing is this reductionist way in which we often look at food now and constitute parts of that food it's become so reductionist that particularly the focus on calories that i think we're missing that big picture on what food is and what quality food is it's information isn't it it's it sends the body signals it can influence our inflammation our guts health our moods uh hormones uh genetic expression all kinds of things are influenced by food and i think we forget that and it goes back of mind when we simply look at just the calorie number yeah absolutely so we we're agreed we should burn it and get it get it or in a font so small you can't see it on the on the label which is what they do to the other interesting stuff that you do want to know about but the restaurant stuff is interesting because new york introduced this over 10 years ago and have been doing stuff they've been lots of publications on it and show that it works for a few weeks and then ultimately fails and then ultimately has a sort of reverse effect that people will choose the lower calorie options and eat much more of it than they would have done otherwise so it's uh and if you talk to the also the people preparing the meals they're just guessing what's in those in those meals they've got no real idea and it's totally depend on portion size and so which can change so easily so it's not only misleading but it's also likely to be unhealthy for us and it's just a tick box for governments to say oh i've done something that you know the food industry won't worry about and they'll be quite happy to go along with it and you know it ticks a box we're doing something for people's health but it is absolutely of no use and totally agree it it's obscuring all the other good things that are in that food that people should be picking it on so that's yeah we're agreeing when you go to restaurant you know look at the ingredients not the calories in terms of the good things people should be focusing on then so we know the importance of guts health in terms of those foods or the types of foods that you would love people to be focusing on more what are they well gut gut-friendly foods so you know i'm hoping one day we'll have a a nice label on the food that gives it a like a calorie score a gut friendly score and you're seeing some of the some of the companies starting to you know have these labels on it but they're it's the wild west they can anyone can put anything on at the moment you don't trust it so what you've got to think of is what do your microbes want to eat when you're when you're when you're picking them out and generally if you pick foods that your microbes are going to be happy eating they're going to be good for you and they're also going to be good for the planet so as a very general rule that's a pretty good one and what microbes like to eat is they like to eat predominantly plants they like to eat uh high fiber plants that are a complex and they are like a variety so there's no point only eating one type of salad every day even if you love it do mix it up because we've done studies showing that the sort of sweet spot for the number of plants you should eat in a week is around 30 and you know that's not a precise number but you should be aiming for at least 30 plants different plants a week so bear in mind that's so all you generating as many species of microbes that can feed off all the chemicals in each of those plants so it's like the perfect nourishment for them is to get that variety across the week so if someone let's say loves broccoli and thinks you know i've got to eat more vegetables because i know it's good for me i love broccoli okay i'm gonna have broccoli five six seven times a week compared to not having that i guess that would have an improvement but are you saying that for that person because i think there'll be people listening to this right now like broccoli broccoli or whatever green beans or kale yeah got their favorite one and they have that all the time can you just sort of expand on that for that person that actually that's great but you might want to think about expanding it more yes i mean so you've got to think of it as yes you love broccoli and broccoli has lots of fabulous nutrients in it but it's going to generate certain microbes that like eating the broccoli and the broccoli side of side products but if you just changed it slightly to okay i'm going to have a bit of cauliflower to the same family but it's got different chemicals different nutrients you'll introduce different microbes to your to your gut and eating both together would actually create different chemicals that would be made by your microbes and have even better results but if you are a big fan of broccoli you you know occasionally go for purple broccoli which also has slightly different um nutrients in it yeah to to straightforward once so it's it's about thinking uh about how you can just subtly change you know you can still eat your broccoli but mix it in with other things that are similar and try other ones there's so many uh crucifers that are uh fantastic to eat so i think that's that's the idea it's about mixing it up it's about trying new stuff and it's about enjoyment in food as well so we all get into ruts you know however interested you are in nutrition you know even myself i get into food ruts and i sometimes have to go to a restaurant and say i'm going to pick something new i've never heard of oh i don't know what that is i'll have that one um or you go to foreign country and you know there's some vegetable you don't know what it is pick it and i think that's what we've got it we've got to change our attitude that uh we have our comfort zone of of particularly vegetables that i think you know whether it's avoiding the ones from school or it's actually wanting the ones from school but realize that even within certain varieties like lettuces or cabbages they're a huge range uh you can now buy you know carrots with three different colors yeah and they're all nutritionally different so the way they're bred and and and the chemicals in them are different so for your microbes they're seeing them as different you might call them all carrots but they'll be different similarly you know different range of sweet potatoes and and baked potatoes and there can be purples and all these other things so it's that variety that's important but don't get obsessed that we're only talking about different varieties of kale here because the 30 includes um nuts and seeds and herbs we don't know exactly how much but increasing studies are showing that just adding uh spices spice mixes to your uh your diet every at least you know a couple of times a week can enhance your gut microbes so increasingly the evidence is is building it's this the people who have the more diverse diets uh do better so um snap yourself out of your routines uh whether it's for your salad or your breakfast and and try and work this in so you mentioned out of those 30 that you recommend there's a ballpark figure fruits vegetables nuts seeds herbs spices lentils and things like beans as well black beans chickpeas all those sort of things yes i mean because suddenly the 30 when you include all that it doesn't sound quite as daunting as when it just what 30 vegetables no exactly you think of a plate and i've got to get 30 different vegetables on my plate every day no um i mean i you know i cheat and for my you know my breakfast which i start now with a you know a full fat yogurt with kefir you know i will have a mixed bowl full of mixed nuts and seeds and it gives me eight straight away he's not on the day with eights yeah i'm you know and then i'll if i've got something in the fruit bowl i chop up whatever's in the fruit bowl a pear or an apple and so i might have you know start with ten so if that's monday morning i've only got a you know find another 20 um and that's just one meal so as long as you start thinking how you can introduce things what meals are you know good to sprinkle stuff on and you keep an open mind and you you know i i think it's not only it's it's a practical tip but it's actually it's a way for people to really enjoy food and get excited about food again and and and not have this uh this problem that you know in the us and the uk we food is a sort of punishment because of you know it's something it's a fuel and it's a problem because you know we eat too much of it we've got to start getting back to enjoying it and enjoying seeking out those foods and not just eating for the sake of it you know on the run so you know that's that's the other side of it but lot you know so i think there's 30 rules some people say immediately oh that's terrible it feels like a burden but it can be so easy and you know just by preparing big jars of stuff and buying berries when you see them and freezing them or you know a new seed or not you just add it to your mix it's incredibly easy for someone who may be on zero or five at the moment and they hear 30 what does the research show in terms of yeah look from wherever you are even if you go from five to ten a week you're gonna get an improvement aren't you you're gonna improve the quality and the diversity of your microbiome 30 may be the ultimate target but for some people who can't achieve that i guess we don't want to feeling bad about that it's a case of look start where you're at and just see what you can do absolutely yes the 30 was just where we saw on the curve in the population the people sort of reached the maximum diversity so going to 40 didn't really give them much more diversity on average not average i mean of course you know as you know we've talked about before it's all individual so there's lots of individuality here so you know some people might be fine on 20 others might need 40. we don't know yet so we're setting a a rough rough yeah so don't knock yourself out if you're only on 28 one week and you feel like you're a total failure um you know it's fine i think it's it's an aspirational goal the more more important is to just keep it in mind your mentality you're looking for that everyone has weeks where it's hard they're working you know they're having to travel they're not prepared or you're someone's house and they're serving you boring food you can't say oh is this all you've got you know this is terrible um you know we live in a practical world yeah and yeah just on average have that as an aspiration and see how you get on but but as he you said for your breakfast which i find fascinating you'll get eight to ten which almost insulates you from some of the issues that may arise with working late or traveling and you know if you've got eight to ten on a monday morning you're in pretty good shape going into that week so just talk me through that breakfast again we'll be back to the conversation in just a moment now many of us struggle to find time to eat all of these incredible whole foods that's why i'm a big fan of good quality whole food supplements like this one that's been in my own life for over three years now it contains over 75 whole food source ingredients vitamins minerals pre and probiotics and can help us support our energy focus digestion and our immune system athletic greens are giving my audience a fantastic offer one year's free supply of vitamin d and five free travel packs with your first order you can see all the details at athletic queens dot com forward slash live more or simply click on the link below now back to the conversation what i know is that people really enjoy the conversations i have with you they feel really inspired to change and i think hearing that you get eight to ten plants and a breakfast i think may be super helpful for people so would you mind just sharing that again exactly what do you do for breakfast when you have it in my usual breakfast which doesn't mean i have it every day and i do vary it depending on where i am it's it's now become a full fat yogurt a 50 50 with kefir which is fermented milk kefir as it's pronounced in the us and which has even more so there's like two probiotics in that wow with perhaps uh we think about 15 microbial 15 to 20 microbial species between them if you're lucky so that's also i've got a probiotic start as well and then i will go to my my jar where i keep um generally dried nuts and seeds which i sort of collect as i go around supermarkets and other places or markets and see trying to find new ones wow and it was almost like a hobby a pursuit for you to see these things and pop them in this jar it is yes and uh it varies sometimes it gets a bit low and down the bottom of scraping the barrel and it's a bit grainy and things uh and other times it's it's it's over over bulging but i i i am aiming to get uh you know because it's quite easy at the common ones but the idea is you know you can buy easily you know chia seeds and uh these ones but you wouldn't want to eat just those um so the idea is to is to mix them up with common ones and there's nothing it's not particularly the ones that are expensive or not it's just this variety uh you you can put in there and i add also to that you know i got for example the moment some pomegranate seeds yeah um and i just stick those in um and um whatever's around i i will use and whatever's in the fruit bowl i generally chop up i've i used to eat a lot of bananas but since i did my zoe test and realized that they are really bad for my blood sugar i've swapped them around and i use chop up pears pears and apples are particularly fine for me and they will often go in but anything i've got lying around will go in that mix and i have that with a double expresso which is also um people should know of a very good source of polyphenols and fiber and is very good for your gut and coffee drinkers are healthier and live longer and have less heart disease so that's a great study to reverse if we like coffee isn't it yes if you don't like coffee it's a bit tough for you are you a coffee drinker i am very much so but most people don't realize that there's more fiber in the average cup of coffee than in a glass of orange juice and we all know what orange juice does to your blood sugar so i think it's changing our idea of what's healthy yeah and what's unhealthy because just for context 10 years ago i was eating a you know a bowl of muesli with some low-fat milk a cup of tea and often a bit of a tropicana orange juice and that's terrible for me because this gives me a very large sugar peak which is uh my blood sugar goes up from its normal level overnight to over two or three times what it is into a pre-diabetic range so i stress my insulin levels and as it comes down i get a sugar dip and that makes me more tired and more hungry several hours later and increasingly if i do that every single day as i did do it causes stress on the body increased inflammation and alters my metabolism so i will put on weight very gradually and not feel as good as i would if i wasn't having those peaks so and this is you know only new science and new technologies teaching us that because based on those macronutrients i was having with my muesli and my tea and my my low-fat milk it was a very low-fat breakfast which ticked all the boxes in you know usda guidelines or whatever they are and most gps would say that's a oh pretty good breakfast though you know you're healthy you're not having eggs and bacon or whatever uh and it turns out for me you know it was processed mostly and you could buy expensive ones but they're still pretty much ultra processed there might be one or if you're lucky one or two nuts in there but far outweighed by the negative effects of the sugar yeah so i think that's the that's the big shift i've made so i think breakfast is probably the most crucial meal of the day for a number of reasons you know we can discuss some of the other ones but for people who do like breakfast do like eating it's the one we can all change ourselves generally in our home we're in control of the situation and we've got into a rut because we most of us have a very similar breakfast every day and it's the one that's easiest to change and change all our habits and if you change that i think it sort of sets you up your mentality for the rest of the day the rest of the month the rest of the year you've just got that in your mind that first thing i'm going to get my microbes off to a good start one way or another and for me it works and i know the difference when i'm staying at someone else's house and though i'm offered you know toast and marmalade and uh well i was in france in paris recently and i couldn't resist uh a croissant and you know if you didn't like croissants where you got pano chocolate baguette you know that was the that was the choice so you know you realize it can be hard but it's changing what you think is normal and i think that's really important what happens in paris because you're very in tune now with your body you measure blood sugar regularly you measure my microbiome regularly you're in tune with how you feel after certain foods so i get it you're in paris you get tempted by the smell you look at it go yeah you know what i'm gonna have that so number one were you measuring your blood sugar at the time when you had that croissant and number two what did you feel like could you tell madam like were you hungrier was your mood off were you you know what were some of those things that now that you are in touch with this that you were quite aware of in a way that you may not have been in the past so yes i i was tempted and who who can go to paris and resist a croissant i get it and uh i think we've all got to realize that you know there's nothing wrong with that either there's absolutely no problem with it and as long as you enjoy it and it's a good one and but if you you know if you do feel it's stodgy and you feel it's just been reheated don't eat it but if it's a good one absolutely eat it and enjoy it um you may want to try and have a yogurt afterwards but i couldn't get one um yes so i had i had the croissant and uh i was my sugar went up to uh ten and a half ten and a half yeah can we just give some guidelines to people who are not familiar with those terms i know what 10 and a half is um what should it be for people what should they be looking for the range well so my resting one is about five and a half um when i wake up in the morning 5 millimoles and you'll have to do the calculation in the u.s um yeah milligrams of that five yeah which yeah and so it um normally well i say normally uh we know from the the zoe predicts studies there's about a tenfold difference in how people respond to the same croissant so there's no out but the average of if you took 100 people they would go from maybe four and a half to about uh six and a half okay so you get a small increase in your blood sugar when you have something uh like a a croissant or a baguette or a bit of white bread and so that that's a normal response we all go up a little bit but there are some people that go up less and there's some people go up more there's about a tenfold variation that we saw tenfold from what the the lowest rise to the top right yes wow yeah so and you went up to ten and a half yes and i mean i've been higher than that you know yeah if i had my orange juice it would have you know taken over eleven the same as with i have a bagel which i used to think was fairly healthy but for concepts of people i know it's possibly not quite the same thing because it's you know blood it's a continuous monitor as opposed to uh you know let's say an hba1c a three-month average but you know on that 6.5 or above is type 2 diabetic if that's your average right 6 to 6.5 in the uk well 66.4 i guess is pre-diabetic in the uk i think it's 5.7 to 6.4 in in america um so 10 and a half is clearly very very high you certainly wouldn't want that to be happening day in day out no exactly and after it you know i i do feel more tired and i i sort of regret my croissant after that doesn't feel full of guilt you know especially when you see the result in your blood you get this instant sort of um oh dear why did i do that um it wasn't that good you know but um i'll try and find a better one next time uh but yeah and you do i find that three hours later i am feeling hungrier than i would have done if i had my high fat breakfast which suits me um but i do realize i'm i'm different and my wife is quite happy to have lot lots of croissants and uh doesn't have any uh it doesn't go up to sugar in the same way no not at all wow and so there's a few terms that have come up so far tim like fermented foods polyphenols ultra processed foods um breakfast potentially being the most important meal and i don't want to come to those four points specifically because i think there's a lot to say on each one but we we are talking a lot about this personalized nutrition uh your company zoe these continuous blood sugar monitors let's take an overview we're understanding more and more now with science with research that we all respond differently to foods the truth is i've just seen people thrive on a whole variety of different diets we know humans have always been opportunistic omnivores right our diets can wildly vary depending on where we live on the planet geography climate all these kind of things so personalized nutrition potentially is going to help us explain this why are some people crushing it on a low carb diet why is some people crushing it on a whole food plant-based diet do you think personalized nutrition potentially is the missing piece here i think personalization is a key missing piece of the puzzle that we really haven't paid attention to and it could help a lot of people in deciding which food to eat and to do that we've got to do away with the fact that one size fits all advice works and that it's all about the simple reductionist ideas we are all omnivores but we're all different we're all unique we've all got totally unique gut microbes and i think we need to um both think of foods that are going to help our gut microbes which are all going to be individual but also to get to the other that other half of perfecting our nutrition it absolutely has to be personalized yeah you mentioned about improving our gut microbes have you got evidence at the moment that let's say let's say someone has currently got quite a barren gut microbiome they've not been nourishing it let's say their diet hasn't been good and there's all kinds of other lifestyle factors like stress and sleep deprivation that can impact the gut of course which we can maybe touch on later the gut microbiome is not in a good place so certain foods at the moment may have a certain response certain foods may spike their blood sugar do we know yet if they then spend a few months working on their gut microbiome aiming to increase the amount of plant foods the amount of diversity and they improve the health of it it's more robust it's more diverse do we think then at that point the same food might generate a different response because their microbiome is different we believe that's potentially likely but we haven't been able to prove it there aren't enough longitudinal studies so the evidence base is that that makes sense that that's what we see cross-sectionally so if you just take people at one point in time and you compare them to lots of other people another point in time we see that you know there's a correlation but we don't know it's causation and it's slightly difficult because we know that there's a two-way process if you're sort of unhealthy and you're giving off inflammation from having too much sugar peaks it's going to affect your gut microbes in that direction so make them worse and attract sort of unhealthy microbes and at the same time we know that if you can dampen down those unhealthy microbes you can actually improve things so certainly in rodents it works like that what we don't know is yet in humans but we're going to have the answers pretty soon as people for example doing the zoe test get retested and we can see the people who really change their gut microbes you know can they change their um their responses my my guess is that it's it's not gonna be quite as easy as that and it's not going to happen overnight i think it's a very slow process that could take you know months and years as you change your physiology but we do know cross-sectionally that people have got robust gut microbes do react less to say ultra processed foods and we've got some data now uh again from about 20 000 of the zoe participants that that snack snacking is also um you can tolerate snacking better if you've got a good set of gut microbes so there's a sort of interaction going on cross-sectionally that we're seeing that i'm hopeful you know we'll see in real life so i think that's the aspiration that that's what i tell people is that the idea is to build up this really robust community of microbes which are i think best thought of as like your own personal pharmacy so you want to have a pharmacy that's well stocked you don't just want to only have paracetamol and cow pot you know that's you know and a band-aid you want the hot you want to have everything at your disposal to do that you got to give everything to your pharmacy you have it supplied with everything it needs so microbes are pumping out these healthy chemicals and if they do that your body's in better balance it can then deal with these stresses yeah and it's not just stress the food it's stress of everything it's the stresses of life it's you know dealing with poor sleep it's dealing with um everyday problems as well yeah what i found in practice tim this is without any uh of this kind of high-tech testing i remember certain patients who were quite reactive they they felt they were reacting to quite a few different foods in sort of an intolerance and as i helped them improve various aspects of their health you know reduce stress physical activity better sleep yes and gradual changes to their diet which no doubt would have increa would have improved the health of their gut microbiome over a period of time sometimes maybe two years later they would report back and i've experienced this myself actually that certain foods that i used to find problematic i no longer find problematic or those patients no longer would find them problematic they would no longer in many ways feel that they were intolerant to those foods now i find that fascinating because i don't have any data to prove this what was going on there but i suspect that working on these four pillars food movement sleep and relaxation with them helping them improve the health of their guts it made them more resilient it gave them more of a buffer so that a couple years later they they just have got more as you say more resilience i guess like a garden isn't it where if the garden is well-stocked it's got diverse plants you know it's less likely that one species or one foreign species or a weed is going to be able to overtake it all and overgrow it because you've got that resilience is that is that a fair analogy it is i think the thing we've forgotten is that the way the mic a lot of the way the microbiome works the chemicals that they produce is through the immune system and so most of the things we're talking about is having also a really well-balanced immune system that isn't overacting you know and a lot of people's currently these modern food allergies etc are caused by an immune system that's just out of kilter it's either overreacting or underreacting and i think that's also the key to this that the chemicals your microbes produce are going to keep all the the lining of your the gut where most of your immune system is all those cells in the perfect condition the right tune so that they're not going to overdo it and if you get that system right then you're in this better balanced state you know it's like you're generally fitter it's like an athlete who can do all kinds of things but i think it does take time yeah and i think what your point is is that you know in the modern world we're looking for a quick fix yeah and everyone says oh i've got you know my tummy hurts when i eat this you know i think i'm set getting sensitive to this i want a quick fix so i've got to cut it all out and people just we need to really educate people that it's a journey it's not like there's a three-week course and you cut this out your diet and you're done it's you know you need to we've got such a long way to go back to the guts of our ancestors that didn't have these problems you can't do that in six weeks you know this is months this is years and but it's worth doing and it's not a hard thing to do and it can be a a pleasurable thing to do and i think that's what it's changing that mindset that everything's got to be fixed quickly yeah a quick diet a quick uh healthy snack bar or whatever you know some pills to saying okay this is a journey i'm going to change my idea about food and once i do that i'm going to build up this slowly build up this resistance like you you know you if you were an athlete training and you wouldn't expect to be super fit and run a marathon in in in four weeks so that's the real difference and i think i think we're in agreement here and it's and it they all connect with each other so they all do and the microbes you know we talked we didn't know when we started these studies how important things like sleep would be on your blood sugar responses and speak to that a little bit yeah so we the this crucial study the zoe predict study was a thousand people all eating foods at the same time in precisely the same manner we've replicated this now thousands of times and it turns out that if you got poor sleep the night before you had like a 30 percent greater uh sugar spike eating identical meal that's incredible the same food but the way your body handles it the yeah the potential damage or the inflammatory consequences of that food are completely different depending on your sleep that that's huge isn't it so yeah and also you know the way you reacted uh you know there was obviously a link also people did a lot of exercise had had lower peaks than those who didn't so that was another factor when do you last do your exercise and you know whether you what sort of meal you had the night before also influenced the next day so and how much gap you had in that that time so things that you wouldn't even have thought about um are all coming together and they all interact a lot through the uh gut microbes as well so it's not like they're all in independent they're sort of working together with each other so we know that shift workers for example who get poor sleep have poorer gut microbes and higher sugar responses so we also we've just done a study on um what we call social jet lag of people whose big party people at weekends there might be some people listening who who can uh say that you know very good during the week and then they get um go to bed at completely different times and they change their clocks at weekends and they have you know on the monday morning bigger sugar spikes and their microbes are also um [Music] suffering as a consequence so everything's about getting this balance right between all parts of the body and because of the technology we've got now in measuring microbes and measuring these sugar responses you know we as you said we can suddenly start to see see it and not just guess it how tricky does a scat as a scientist because it's not just looking at that food is it and saying how does that food affect me with my current gut microbiome you know should i eat more of them should i eat less of them depending on my sugar response because as you've just mentioned there's other inputs going in how stressed you are how sleep-deprived you are what time you had your previous meal the night before so how easy is it or how difficult is it to actually make a to draw a conclusion what this food does for me or you or for anyone else because of all the other inputs that are there as well when we do the zoe scores for example once you've done the test it is a holistic test so we are accounting for your sleep your exercise and your meals and your age your weight all these things together so and and we've talked about sugar peaks but we haven't talked about the fat peaks which is the other part of the the test is that we're looking at how fast the fat uh is dispersed from your body which we know in some people is very slow so if you've still got lots of fat molecules hanging around in your blood at six hours after a fatty meal that irritates the blood vessels causes inflammation and is going to cause the same sort of metabolic problems so it's combining all those things together gives you a holistic score about which foods are better or which are worse for you and so you can make those choices and at the same time you know we do give people lifestyle advice advice realize you know if you're sleeping terribly you're doing shift work and you're only getting four hours sleep a night it's going to be really hard to whatever you're eating to be healthy so i think increasingly the advice on exercise and and food and sleep and stress are all uh related yeah um so absolutely and that you know i know that's that's your your core uh teaching well i've always found you know i've for me personally tim i've always found that i can't limit it to one thing it's it's everything it's like i've always been drawn to looking at the whole picture and an individual and you know i've always been like this but even doing you know the doctor in the house series on bbc one in 2015 and 2017 where i'd spend four to six weeks with different families with a whole variety of different health outcomes i got so much time with him i got to see everything how you know the way a husband and wife would talk to each other in the evening before you know how that would impact their health and you know like i would see how they were eating are people eating together in a relaxed way or people you know eating separate parts of the house whilst also scrolling instagram and facebook you know i i i guess one of the reasons that show was such a good fit for me is because i i literally would see oh man i'm missing a big picture here in just 10 minutes or even 20 minutes with the patient it's all of these factors play a role and i think the science now one lifestyle but even on the microbiome has shown that actually yeah all these factors actually play into the health of our guts yeah no and uh and it's realizing that all these things have a role and that many of them or most of them you can you can you can change you know we all go periods of time when it's tough you've got young kids or you've got some work things you know some things you can't work on at that particular time but you can generally work on some of them yeah all the time and i think that's that's also the approach to food and and we talked about people who can't get their 30 plants every single week you know don't worry about it there's other things you can do and it's it's changing the idea so if i can't do that i'll do something else or um i'll you know it's not all lost if you didn't do it that week and i think that's the big problem you mentioned zoe a few times right so this personalized test let's go through what is it and i know it's in there'll be many people listening thinking can i do it can i have access to it so if you could just walk me walk us all through what you're measuring and then also who is it available to and how can anyone listen to this show or watching on youtube how are they going to be able to access this or when might they be able to in the future so zoe is the greek word for life and it's a company that myself and two entrepreneurs founded five years ago really to develop personalized nutrition and based on science so we did the science projects first which these predict studies which we published in in nature medicine and in many other journals so deciding to do this actually do the science first before launching the product rather than the other way around which is often the case and it's a kit that you basically reproduce what we did in the science projects at home so you sign up you go online on joinzoe.com in the us or the uk and you get sent a kit which it contains three main elements to it it contains a continuous glucose monitor it contains a skin prick test for your blood fat which you do six hours after a fatty meal and it contains a gut microbiome test where we use high density sequencing metagenome sequencing not the single gene one to measure your gut microbes and at the same time in that pack you've got some standardized meals in the form of muffins which everyone has taken the same muffins the same day so you've now got i think it's 25 000 people's results to compare with uh you get you download the app which allows you to log food you log your energy levels you log your hunger levels for those two weeks and you can do a number of little experiments yourself in a standardized way logging your results as you go so that first two weeks is just to get your baseline results compared to everyone else and then a couple of weeks after that you get your results which are a as we discussed a holistic score but mainly focusing on the three components your blood sugar response your fat response and your microbiome and so all the foods that you can think of or scan in a supermarket or restaurant or at home are given a score from naught to 100 and you'll then given the chance to sign up for a program for between 1 and 12 months that gives you access to an online nutritionist who goes through your scores and then works out meal plans for you uh to maximize all those three components and that's the basic idea with uh it's combining foods you know and you can still have a food you don't like if you combine it with something that i mean that isn't good for you with something that is good for you so your score um can match up so the idea is to very much personalize your meals at the same time making it fun make it interesting and never once talking about calories and trying to change the way people think about eating as well and trying to reduce maybe unnecessary snacking trying to make your your meals fun and substantive and uh as you said giving yourself time to eat and prepare uh and actually enjoying the food and trying new ones that's the whole idea so you know you get this app and this amazing list of different foods and things you can eat some of you never thought of trying but um you know that's the whole idea is we make it fun and exciting and you've got an online nutritionist uh which is proving extremely popular and yeah we've done a we're doing a randomized control trial to see exactly how it works in a scientific way but of the few hundred people that we've looked at in a sub-study you know most are losing eight to nine pounds in weight uh and over 85 percent report less uh less hunger and importantly more energy we didn't expect that but energy is a we didn't we hardly we was an afterthought we thought we'd record it in the app yeah um and it turns out it's highly correlated to uh keeping your sugar peaks down and your uh fat peaks down i think energy is a big one it's in some ways the currency of life isn't it it's we all know what it feels like when we've got low energy we don't want to do anything our food choices are affected we don't want to cook something fresh we take the quick and easy option you know energy is everything i think and i would argue that if there's one thing we want to improve certainly in my experience more than anything else it's energy because all our decision making all our behaviors i find so much better when we've got energy but as you know so many people are struggling with that given that it's personalized um and i know you've sent me a zodika and i still haven't done it week on monday i will be doing it so when you come on the podcast next time when your next book is out which i'm really excited about um we'll definitely talk about how i found it and what results i got given that it's personalized are there some general trends that are applicable to people who haven't done it yet who are like okay i get it it's personalized but is there anything i can learn from what you have learned so far yeah i mean i think if i tried to say well what have i learned without knowing what my results were just look at other people's results is that many you know there's a proportion of people that are really sensitive to carbohydrates and there's a proportion that aren't and it's hard to tell obviously if you've got a lot of perhaps diabetes in the family you might suspect that's that's that's true is that refined carbohydrates and whole food carbohydrates yes yeah it is i mean the more of the more refined the worse but it's a spectrum there isn't a an absolute cut off no i just as you expand there just to share my own experience because i have used the cgm and continuous glucose monitor a couple of times i don't use one regularly um but i did early one in the year and i've got one on at the moment and last week over dinner it was pretty healthy mail and i think the carb with it was sweet potato mash that my wife had made oh man i can't what it went up to but it was a big rise up with my blood sugar about an hour maybe an hour and a half after the meal which really surprised me and i found with other things like if it's a few boiled potatoes or a small amount of white rice actually it doesn't anywhere near to the same degree now there's a few other things i need to tweak and i need to replicate with different foods just to see which one it was but sweet potatoes are considered you know a healthy carb a whole food cup sure it was mashed so that was you know that's changed it somewhat but that was really interesting for me because i may have continued eating that but that will definitely make me think again about how much do i want to have this if it's going to push my sugar that high so that i guess speaks to what you're saying and what you're finding with people some people are exquisitely sensitive to carbs even whole food ones and yeah and there's and different carbs so you know there will be some things that you know there's a difference in pasta and rice and and bread for some people and and and i understand there's a huge difference you know within those ranges and i mean uh people will say okay well porridge is healthy isn't it most people tell me oats that's healthy but you know for me they're not but you know i tried three or four different types of um oat porridge and what that tells you is the more refined the more ground up the more it's been factory made and the quicker it is to make the higher my sugar peaks go yeah so as a general rule if you pick things that are less refined less processed and take longer to cook it's because you know their outer coating is you know that those that energy is stored much much and it's harder to get out so so steel cut oats things you have to you know cook overnight don't have half the sugar peak of the identical um you know quaker oats uh instant meal which for me is just like pure sugar so i think it's just hearing porridges healthy doesn't mean anything for who sorry interrupts if you are enjoying this content there's loads more just like it on my channel so please do take a moment to press subscribe hit the notification bell and now back to the conversation and it's the structure of food because you've broken down that oat it can be in its whole form you can have it you know cut you can have it rolled uh you know or you can have it so finely powdered and dry air dried that that sugar just you know rushes out and you haven't got any fiber so understanding the differences between foods i think is is a really important lesson so that we mustn't over categorize again reduce everything to saying this is good this is bad within each category there are good and bad foods that we all need to learn about it's like hummus and chickpeas or almonds and ground almonds you know they have totally different amounts of things in them when the structure changes given how much data we can learn about ourselves through continuous sugar monitors are we not getting to the point where it's almost in every single person's best interest to at least do a two-week trial with one of them to at least say oh man i'm having that every day maybe i shouldn't be having that obviously you've got to be careful with people's relationships with food and food is so much more than just the blood sugar response isn't it but i don't know have you got any comments on those things i think um people can get obsessed with yeah blood sugar monitors and there are people you know get obsessed about all kinds of things about food and reducing it to purely a sugar peak uh is not the right answer because you can go down completely the wrong direction and just by adding double cream to everything you can dampen down the sugar response that doesn't mean that eating a bucket full of double cream every day is good for you so um i think you've got to see it in the in that holistic light of all the things we talked about and your fat response some people can cope with a lot of fat other people can't and there are good fats and bad fats as well so it's just part of the equation but i think it does give people like an insight into you know the fact that something we shouldn't necessarily need the orange juice actually is not a health food and it's uh you know it should be in the alcohol category or something like that that you take um it's not good for anybody really um which if everyone did have a glucose monitor on every time they they had a glass of orange juice they would see it's uh you know the same as a coca-cola and it would just be put them in the same sort of category and say you say well okay um that should go in the sense so it would it would change people's ideas of things and i think you know i i there will be a watch soon that i i think probably within five years that does the same as a yeah a glucose monitor and once that happens everyone like counting steps and things they'll probably want it but i think we have to be very careful we don't don't then over you know make the same mistakes of reductionism that we've made up to now because humans love to make it simple and nutritional food is anything but yeah i mean i was playing devil's advocate a bit asking should everyone have one because my concern with trackers in general which is why i've used this twice so i have two weeks at the start of the year i'm in a two-week cycle now i it's i've said this before on the show but i always notice this with blood pressure monitors with patients people say should i get one should get a home blood blood pressure monitor and you know it would depend on some patients would and then it was pretty much a 50 50 split for some people it was awesome they check it once a week or twice a week they wouldn't stress about it they'd use it as a way of keeping them on track with their lifestyle changes the other 50 would check three four times a day any time it was slightly up they'd recheck it they'd get anxious they'd come back in that would drive their blood pressure up even more and i thought wow the same tool can be helpful or problematic depending in some ways on the personality type depending on who that person was and i and i suspect you know because there's tracking everything now there's sleep trackers there's step trackers there's blood sugar trackers and i think we've just got to be careful as you say i think a blood sugar tracker for two weeks for anyone is you bring stuff that you don't know about that's hidden inside you you bring it into the light like if you suddenly see your glass of orange juice that you think because of all the packaging it's got vitamin c and all the things the packet says is helpful for you and you see yourself going to 10 or 11 on you know way over the diabetic range you might think twice about having that you know several times a week and if all that does for you is help you realize or maybe somebody who has porridge every day and they realize wait a minute porridge is spiking my blood sugar massively it's gonna you know do this for five years i'm gonna end up type 2 diabetic then that has value because they can then use that and they don't have to check it all year they can just they can move on and maybe they do it i don't know maybe it's the sort of thing in the future they'll do once a year or once every six months ago oh this is what's happening at the moment okay i'm gonna make some changes i'm not gonna look i'm going to work in my gut microbiome and then six months later i'm going to put it back on again just to see i think that's how i'm going to be using this um just because i think i could also potentially because of my personality type i think i could run the risk of getting obsessed which is why i'm very cautious about trackers yeah no i totally agree and i i i don't see this as a permanent feature on the human body i think it'd be real mistake uh we'd be creating super neuroses and you can artificially you know you can cheat you can cheat the system yeah and and again forget the point of it which is getting quality food into your gut microbes um so i you know i think doing it once in a programmed way it's not actually that easy to do it yourself and i think oh that's interesting that i mean we've found you know i i've done several times i've told people for radio programs you know do it and we'll discuss it if unless you've got clear guidance on what to do what to look at what the peaks are when to measure it uh it's you get the wrong impression about things yeah and which can be even more problematic yeah you measure the wrong time after eating your bread you miss the peak you know you don't know what's going on you can't compare it to anyone else you get the wrong impression so i think in a standardized way um doing it but i wouldn't do it more than once a year i don't think yeah and i've found that even though i've used maybe 20 times or so you know i'm not obsessional about these things and i do often forget i've got it on i sort of know how i'm going to respond to things now yeah and so you have the early lesson which is really good gives you a real sort of jolt about gosh i was wrong about food you know i was wrong about my breakfast oh you know this is i'm going to educate myself more that's what i think we should be aiming for which comes back to this you know yeah the idea we were you know what is good food how do we how do we tell and for people without a glucose monitor yeah one in four people do feel uh energy levels and i think uh what they feel them going down down yes uh but some people don't you know and um you mean when their blood sugar spikes and crashes some people get a low energy but other others don't at that time well or they're not particularly observant enough to notice it unless they're being prompted you know and so i think but i think this is perhaps one thing we should be promoting is that you know if you're doing self experiments and you you know you haven't got the money to to pay for these things which is still not in everyone's reach how to listen to your body more to say well am i hungry what's my energy level like and just sort of make a note or you know keep a diary of things is the other way to do this and yeah there's a certain portion of people who can judge pretty well what foods are but the nice thing about our study was people were blind to it yeah they didn't know their results and so when we saw these peaks and troughs which one in four people had really big ones you know we'd and they were on they didn't know why they were feeling tired they just reported they were tired on the app and i think that's really interesting yeah you mentioned breakfast a few times um you often appear in the media with some mr breakfast yes some pretty crazy headlines now i've i've been around immediate enough to know not to trust the headline but skipping breakfast potentially being good for us is something that's often attributed to you now can you expand what is your view on breakfast um and i guess the the the kind of context here is that for many years people have said breakfast is the most important meal of the day they have and that that's the way that where i came into it and really writing the diet myth my idea was to look at the data and challenge some of these myths which i thought was it was a long-standing one and strangely it's still there if you go to the nhs eight to eight healthy eating tips it's still there um despite all the evidence saying that there is no evidence that uh skipping breakfast is bad for you so that's the first well the countless studies now show it is not bad for you it doesn't cause metabolic problems it doesn't cause diabetes or you to gain weight which is or even it doesn't cause kids to perform badly at school which was the other worry that was planted by the food companies in people's minds some studies have shown that it actually can induce some weight loss now that's not totally consistent but it is certainly going in that direction the matter when you combine all the studies together that's what you show but increasingly the idea that this might be true is supported by science showing that it may not be the the breakfast itself but just the gap you're leaving overnight and this whole question of not just what we eat but how we eat is becoming more and more important and everyone's heard about intermittent fasting but uh the the new thing that all the nutritional scientists talk about is restricted time eating yeah which i'm i'm sure you've talked about many times but the finding about skipping breakfast was was in a way a pointer to that actually we've been missing this whole idea that the idea of we should be eating little and often uh throughout the day has actually been the wrong advice and that we should be uh compressing our meal times yeah perhaps doesn't matter whether it's um two or three meals but they should be in a shorter time frame and so the sweet point seems to be somewhere between you know in about 10 hours of eating and and 14 hours of um not eating and that's that might be the reason that skipping breakfast for most people not everybody and again i think there's quite a bit of individuality here there are some people who generally feel hungry when they wake up and feel tired if they don't have some breakfast but i would say the majority of people don't and it's just a cultural or a sort of lifestyle reason to get some food in you when you're in your your home comfy environment but increasingly i you know i've started myself to either skip breakfast or have it at 11 o'clock yeah and particularly postcovid people are working at home now they are in much more control of their meal times yeah and it's a great time to to start so that that's a bit of practical advice that everyone can do either try skipping it and see how you feel uh and if uh that doesn't feel right or you still enjoy breakfast with you know its ability to have your your yogurt and your or your nuts and seeds which would be you know if i missed out on that would be problematic um have it later and uh have it or either as a brunch or just a couple of hours before you you have your other meal yeah i think it's super helpful and as you say the problem with these cultural fixed ideas are that often people are not paying attention they're not feeling hungry but they think i should have breakfast because i keep hearing that and the scientists say it's important to have it and the problem is it's very hard to say breakfast good or bad because it depends number one what do you mean by breakfast right what time is it is it at 6 00 a.m is it at 11 a.m you know um it also depends on the rest of your life do you enjoy a big meal with your family at 9pm right maybe people are working late and actually that's the way that they connect at that point or whatever in which case you know at 7am you may not be hungry whereas if you eat like i try and eat with my kids at you know when i can around work about five half five like i genuinely feel at my best when i'm doing something like um i'd say an 8 a.m till 6 p.m or a 9 a.m till 6 p.m eating window even sometimes a ten tour dates like an eight hour eating window i feel great i don't feel hungry before i don't feel hungry afterwards i sleep like a baby and it works for me my job and my lifestyle at this point in time at this point it's um exactly so therefore these studies and and i i say with all this public health advice i'd encourage people to you know think a little bit you know become take a bit of agency over themselves use what you're saying or what i'm saying or what they hear but also try and filter and apply it in the context of your own life i think that's important isn't it yeah and it's very different if you've got young kids you're going to have a different time scale than if you're you know uh grandparents and yeah and you've got you know the time is is in your retired and you've got you know you can plan everything yourself so because there's a social aspect of food of course yeah and we mustn't forget that really important that people don't obsess about yeah i i do worry that um and certainly um looking at some of the zoe customers in the u.s it's about 30 percent are already on restrictive time meeting when they're coming into the program so it's huge in the u.s compared to the uk but some people might get so obsessed about their eating times that they forget uh the healthy aspect of the food they have to eat and the enjoyment and the social aspect and i think again for people who are a bit you know obsessional on it uh it have to make it not so extreme and i think that's the danger of people trying to outdo each other and say oh i can i can only need to eat in four hour window and i'm fine and it's just not you wouldn't get people in in italy or spain or france uh who enjoy the long meals and the you know and the socializing doing that and they're the ones who live longest and you know are healthier so we have to remember that some of those countries of course are having later breakfasts aren't they or they're sort of technically skipping the breakfast that we might have in the uk certainly at that time yeah well i i work in spain a lot and you know years you don't finish eating till 10 p.m uh sometimes 11 but you rarely see anybody having breakfast before 11 uh if they do or they don't bother with this it's just a it's just a coffee yeah so i think there's different ways to it we've just assumed that everyone has you know the same habits in different countries but you know there's a north-south divide in in times of people eating in europe um but in the south it's not like they're at 7am eating breakfast yeah um and i think the ones who tend to eat earlier tend to have more earlier breakfast but i think it's it's very personal and it is and but most people i speak to when you say well the first thing you wake up you know and you've had a cup of tea or coffee most people don't feel really hungry you know it's not like that's the first thing on your mind if you had a choice of things to do you know yeah just to finish off this conversation tim uh we've mentioned polyphenols and fermented foods we didn't go into that much detail on either one could we just briefly go through what are polyphenols why should people think about getting more of them in how can they do that and they're potentially the same for fermented foods as well so polyphenols used to be called antioxidants and they are a group of well over a thousand different chemicals that are in plants in all plants to different levels and their defense chemicals that plants use to defend themselves against sun or predators and they are often when you eat them have a slightly bitter taste uh can cause a string seed just like if you have a a really old red wine it gives that that taste on the tongue that's because the skin of the grape has a lot of these polyphenols in it and they are in brightly colored foods they're in slightly bitter foods and they're in complex foods and so they're in things like coffee dark chocolate red wine extra virgin olive oil nuts seeds berries particularly so these are all health foods and these polyphenols we now know are useful for us because they feed our microbes and those microbes then convert them into other healthy chemicals we can't really use them ourselves so it's quite interesting it's they really are like specific fish food that we're eating that that provides us then you know the name these chemicals then get back into our bloodstream and dampen down inflammation and keep us healthy so that's really important and there's big differences between foods like the choice of a cooking oil between you know a highly refined vegetable oil and an extra virgin olive oil is massive um can you see that in zoe as well um well it's reflected in the scores yeah so we would give a different score to vegetable oil than we would for uh extra virgin olive oil both depending on the quality of the fats but also its effect on your your gut microbes so all of the scores do reflect uh polyphenols and um for the fermentation which is the next thing we're talking about which also affects the gut so polyphenols really important and but it's you've got to understand more about the food so chocolate for example all chocolate has some polyphenols in it but it's only in the cocoa part of it not the um the artificial bits and not the sugar and not the milk which is why the dark chocolate is dark chocolate is packed with it milk chocolate is is has very little and is overridden by the sugar so again it's it's all about the quality and looking at the labels and seeing what's on the field and you know difference between picking a really brightly colored lettuce or a an iceberg lettuce is massive um in terms of the difference of the polyphenol so the color of the leaves and the way the lettuce is gives you a different indication of how many polyphenols so what are we looking for when we're picking our lettuce um you're looking for one with loose leaves that is brightly colored often different colors reds uh and that's true for a lot of food so generally it's a bit like the berry the bright the colored berries have more of these things than the other ones do so this is a you know we're just understanding this this sort of science so some some of the things we thought were good for us aren't and uh this is another thing to look out for so polyphenol is really good fermented foods are anything that has live microbes in it so it's like probiotics naturally occurring in food so by the time you're eating it it's actually got live microbes that can still replicate and produce chemicals and so everyone knows yogurt has that but kefir has several times more microbes than yoghurt and it's a thinner version of it and then you've got you've got kombucha which is fermented tea which is becoming more popular which has even more than kefir in it and has different fungi and yeasts so often up to 30 different microbes you can find in a in a proper kombucha and you've got then sauerkraut used you know in central and eastern europe which is fermented cabbage and of course getting one level above that you've got kimchi one level above that and says the number of microbes number of microbes and diversity because you've also got as well as cabbage you've got uh you've got garlic you've got chilies uh you've got uh onions and other peppers and things so the more complex it is often the the greater the richness of that that's super helpful because sauerkraut is known to be a for people who are you know who read about gut health they know that sauerkraut is one of those fermented foods that's really helpful but this idea that you can upgrade to kimchi because it's not just cabbage it's like going back to the very start of this conversation the diversity it's got more plant foods in it therefore um it's gonna you know feed more and more microbes that's super helpful i think yeah and there's and then you move on to the if you like japanese food of course anything with miso in it is uh is is really important because miso is fermented soy and so there's plenty of um fermented soy dishes that you can get as well but tempeh and other other ones like this so fermented food is really big uh be careful you don't buy ones with vinegar in it killed and you know try and smell that when you open open it check it hasn't got vinegar in it and you can usually tell with the smell if it's if it's live or not and having a small amount every day is what i try and do and there's no point in having a a feast once a week we know that these things die out so for practical reasons try and have a small shot of one or two of these every day and that's why if you have it at home in your fridge you're near the for breakfast or your first meal you've got it uh or you have it you know at night when you come back i love that that reminds me of what i talk about a lot which is like i you know a lot of people who listen to show know that i do a five minute strength workout every morning whilst my coffee's brewing it's a habit i've stacked onto that so i never miss it because i never miss my coffee so i never miss that little five minute workout every morning i always say that i i found that little regularly actually has a very powerful effect on the body no matter what habit it is no matter what behavior we're trying to bring in and i guess bringing that into gut's health as well a little bit every day with a fermented food is better than binging on the whole jar maybe on a sunday when you have more time something like that yeah and i've changed you know cheese is the other thing of course which we forget is is fermented if it's real cheese but um you know we're not talking about craft slices we're talking um that you know your cheese that doesn't have to be unpasteurized although that helps because you do get extra microbes if it's raw milk cheese uh but most cheeses are good the ones with uh blue lines and fungus on them or have even more microbes and just having a small amount of that every day is absolutely healthy there's a myth that cheese is bad for your heart and things absolutely no evidence that's true a small regular amount of that had you know and instead of a pickle that might be high in sugars and salt a traditional english pickle you know trying sauerkraut or kimchi with it yeah and i think increasingly you can just build this into your your daily diet so you are having these things regularly and you just have something in the fridge you just pop on your plate as an extra you know and i think that that's what i found is having the ingredients ready around you so you can just add them whether it's you know the original seed mix or it's the the kimchi party you just grab it and you stick it in and you you know like like your or just after your coffee you have a you know if you're in a hurry just have a quick a shot glass of your your kefir or your kombucha and uh you're sorted so that's fermented foods and i think everyone you know needs to learn about them yeah uh other countries have been doing it for centuries and we we've just lost out just before we finish off tim i think it's an important point to make that something i'm observing a lot is that a lot of people or certainly you know that there's a significant amount of people who struggle to increase the amount of plants to their diet they get symptoms they get bloating they don't feel good and you will have seen this online as i have that there is a growing movement towards more and more severe diets more and more restricted diets now a lot of people follow these days at what what has been called a carnivore diet which is you know all meat or predominantly uh meats with very few other things in it and i know people i know patients actually and and i know people who are thriving on these diets compared to how they felt before a lot of people say my joint pain is gone um i've got more energy my skin's better so therefore you can see from their perspective that they're feeling better compared to where they were before yet they're now hearing someone as respected as yourself talk about all the the benefits of plant foods for the gut microbiome and i think a lot of these people feel stuck between a rock and a hard place they they want to apply what they're learning but they also know that they feel better on quite a wildly different diet um have you come across this and do you have any kind of thoughts on that yeah i've had people write to me saying i've been on a carnival diet for two years and i feel great you know i don't understand what you're on about you know um and i say well everyone is different you could have a unique set of gut microbes that seem to cope with this but my worry is that although initially changing from say a high carb diet or an ultra processed food diet a carnivore diet you you will get you will feel better in a number of ways long term i worry that you know we are omnivores and our gut microbe diversity does depend on giving enough to feed if you're only eating meat you're going to very limited range of gut microbes to produce all these chemicals and vitamins for you so i would just urge those people you know not to give up meat but to start introducing small amounts of regular different plants it doesn't have to be huge quantities but uh you know it doesn't have to be starchy ones either it could just be you know the leafy green ones which there is a variety you know certainly nuts and seeds and mushrooms uh you know also good you know we haven't talked about mushrooms but i've the last few years i've become a real big fan you know of this is an amazing source of protein and uh nutrition that um i think is you know probably gonna say end up saving the planet as uh as we move forward but you know there are lots of um nuances but there isn't one size fits all and there may be people out there who don't need 30 plants a week i'm not saying is absolute rule i'd love to do some studies on these people so it'd be fantastic if some carnivore dieters did the zoe study and we could look at their gut microbes well i have someone who i'm gonna someone just for you actually someone who is literally thriving and has tried vegan diets before has tried low carbs and literally finds that going full carnivore and i know this lady is super well and she is thriving high energy high cognition can work all day can can run marathons i'm like there's something going on here where she is thriving on this diet and so i'm going to i'd love to know so i'm actually going to talk to her and put her in touch well you know because that'll be interesting what's actually going on in the microbiome well i mean you know hopefully in five years we'll be looking back at this and say well we didn't know much did we you know because sure we will science is uh exciting and it's always changing and you know our views you know we found a year ago this this microblastocystis which is in one in four british people have this parasite it's not a micro it's a parasite that a few years ago you'd have had to go the tropical medicine place and that have given you powerful antibiotics to get rid of it because they said oh you that will give you traveller's diarrhea now we know that it's to say with good health and lower fat levels it's associated with lower autoimmune risk as well potentially yes it dampens down inflammation visceral fat and one in four britons have it we've discovered only one in five one in twenty americans have it but it's in a hundred percent of all hundred hunter gatherers hundred percent of all uh indians that have been studied of all developing countries this is our normal state to have this parasite so we still know so little yeah about what's going on that who knows there could be hidden fungi or other other parasites inside body that love meat and can produce sorts of chemicals i'm not ruling it out yeah i'm just saying on average you know do be careful because you might get great short-term benefits but don't wipe out your microbes because it's really hard to get them back yeah so that's super fascinating that it's in hundred percent of hunter gatherers that is so so it looks like it's tracking with the amount of ultra processed food we eat uh yeah as in the more we countries the less we get yes yes wow it could also be antibiotic use as well you know yeah who knows tim it's always a delight to chat to you you're a wealth of information wealth and knowledge you're doing incredible work at helping improve the health of the uk and many people many hundreds of thousands around the world thank you for that just to finish off um podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of our lives you've covered a lot today but if we were just going to simplify it right down at the end of this conversation what are some things that people can think about bringing into their lives to improve the way that they feel hopefully they will think about food in a completely different way think about food as the quality of the food both for taste enjoyment and for your gut microbes they'll go for a diversity of foods they can eat plants particularly getting those 30 plants a week getting picking ones high in polyphenols getting a regular shot of some fermented food in your diet and reducing as much as possible ultra processed foods and thinking about experimenting with the way they eat the timings of their meals skipping breakfast maybe tying trying some mild restricted time eating just to see how you cope with it and getting some personalized nutrition testing done which you can get done in the us or the uk to really find out much more about yourself and about how you can start this journey to find the best foods that suit your own body tim thank you very much i look forward to part four in a few months when the new books out but thanks for joining us today i really appreciate it pleasure if that conversation resonated with you here is another incredibly powerful one sleeping meals is not only good for you but will make you live longer the problem is we built a world that's very comfortable we did not evolve in these conditions we are meant to be typically cold and hungry

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 204,411

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: J5lYGNCv7bM

Length: 93min 58sec (5638 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2022