And we now know that food is made up of say 30
000 chemicals. It's too much for anyone to you know work out themselves. It means a whole
new mindset on how we think about food and how we think of our guts. It's much bigger than
we've ever realized and it's much more complex. Welcome everybody back to the ZOE podcast. I'm
your host Jonathan Wolf, co-founder and CEO of ZOE. Our mission is for you to understand how
your body responds to food because we each respond differently. As many of you know for the past four
years we've been carrying out the world's largest study of the microbiome and metabolic health so
we have an amazing podcast for you. First off I want to remind you that you can get 10% off of the
ZOE membership if you go to joinzoe.com/podcast. Just go to joinzoe.com/podcast to check out how
you can take back control of your health and weight today. That's joinzoe.com/podcast. Our
topic for today's podcast is the microbiome. In the last few years, scientists have been
discovering that our gut microbiome plays a key role in our health, our energy levels,
and even our mental health. This has led to a transformation in how we think about what we
should eat to keep ourselves healthy and manage our weight. My own diet has been transformed since
we started ZOE four years ago and the same is true for my family. In fact my children all know
that what they eat is not just for themselves but it also feeds those little microbes in
their guts that helps keep them healthy. I'm therefore incredibly excited to be joined
by two of the world's experts on the microbiome: Professor Tim and Dr Will to help explain
what the microbiome is and also discuss some of the changes that you can make to improve
your health your energy and your weight. I actually first learned about the microbiome when
I was lucky enough to hear Professor Tim Spector give a public lecture about his amazing research.
I was so fascinated I hunted Tim down and after a bit of work I eventually convinced him to create
ZOE with myself and my long-term friend George so we could bring this science to the world. Tim
is one of the top 100 most cited scientists in the world he's a Professor in genetic epidemiology
at King's College London and a world expert in the microbiome and nutrition. My second guest is
Dr Will. Dr Will is a member of ZOE's scientific advisory board a practicing gastroenterologist
an internationally recognized gut health expert and the New York Times best-selling author of
the book Fiber Fueled so I think we're gonna have a fun time together. Let's just start at
the very beginning with really an overview of the microbiome. What is this microbiome thing and
indeed what is the difference between microbes and the microbiome? Maybe we can start with you
Tim. Well microbes are any small bug you need a microscope to see and there is a whole range of
them from bacteria to viruses to phages fungi and other parasites that are larger. So that's the
general term but more and often we're generally talking about bacteria when most of things we
talk about and when you put them all together in a community, it's that community of trillions
of these microbes that we call the microbiome a bit like an environment like a sort of
ecosystem. So that's that's what they are that's what the terminology means when we talk about
microbiome it's the whole group of these guys. Say most of us have a thousand species roughly
and there's lots of different types of them and there are literally you know trillions
of them. The same number as there are cells in our body actually. So we we're
part uh we're part 50 microbe 50 human. And why does it matter? Well because
these guys essentially are crucial for our health we really can't live without
them and they're like chemical factories so all of them produce thousands of chemicals that
get into our bloodstream and absolutely vital for all sorts of processes from digesting our food
to controlling our immune system and preventing us getting covid to sending brain signals to our
brain to change our mood to switch us from being hungry to being full and all kinds of other
effects we're only beginning to understand. Effects on cancer, effects on all kinds of
diseases, dampening inflammation etc. So it's like we've discovered a whole new exciting organ
in our bodies we didn't know existed 10 years ago. Will does that all make sense to you?
Yeah it does. I think it's it's quite fascinating to consider that we could be
discovering a new organ in the 21st century you know in the United States literally millions
of cat scans are done per year and all of a sudden you know the cat scans we're looking at the
actual body we're seeing everything that's there and now here we go and we find something
that ways we believe as much as the brain does and one could make an argument that the
gut microbiome is the most important part of human health. In fact I think that's a
lot of what we're going to talk about today the connections that exist between these gut
microbes and really you know if you kind of take a step back and think about this the really
critical important parts of human health digestion which basically means access to nutrients like
what is more life-giving than that we need that our immune system our metabolism which
we're going to talk about in more detail the balance of our hormones our moo, our
brain health, even the expression of our genetics every single one of these things is
connected back to these gut microbes and so it's almost like the centerpiece of human health is
the gut microbiome and yet they're not human and so that's it's quite overwhelming in some
ways to think about but it's also very exciting in so many different ways. So Will and Tim, I've
had this conversation with you a few times but I never learned anything about this microbiome
when I was at school and okay that was 30 years ago, but what I learned about microbes was quite
the reverse right? I learned that microbes are dangerous that we need to use disinfectants to
kill them and that's actually one of the great advances of the last 100 you know 150 years ago
when we discovered public health and antibiotics is like the greatest medical discovery of the
20th century and that's about killing microbes. So you know help me out to understand how and when
did we discover about this microbiome? Like was it with one of these CAT scans you're talking
about Will and sort of more broadly why has got health suddenly become so trend. You know
20 years ago I never heard anything about it? Tim if it's okay I'd like to go first
then you can jump in and fill in. So it's it's quite fascinating to think about
because Jonathan antibiotics were the greatest breakthrough in human health history there is no
intervention that has added more years to our life than that and i think that really what this
is is we have to go back in time in a way and look at the really short term history of our
understanding of microbes specifically bacteria which is that going back just 160 170 years
ago you get to a period of time where we really didn't know what was causing disease you
know the plague was ripping through Europe and people didn't know what that was they didn't know
that it was a bacteria they actually thought it was something called miasma m-i-a-s-m-a miasma
and if you look at pictures on the internet of miasma they're quite terrifying, terrifying! It
looks like something from Halloween, like this is like toxic fumes right Will? That somehow like
we had to cover our you know mouth with it you see all this thing like the pictures of the Middle
Ages with people covering their mouths right it's like it's like you walk by a swamp at night
and it looks really creepy and it smells kind of funny and you go oh my gosh that must be where
the plague is coming from right there. It's just that has to be it, so it shows you how poor our
understanding of the way that the world worked and these things that were affecting us was just going
back to the time of the civil war. We eventually have the discovery that it's these microbes
that are behind these diseases and by the way, at the turn of the 20th century the top causes of
death were not heart disease and cancer. They were all infections and so this is what was costing
people's lives this was shortening life expectancy dramatically. Suddenly we have this discovery
oh my gosh this is the problem right so let's line them up and let's say this is the problem and
this is going to be ultimately the solution that's going to allow us to live in perpetuity like you
know to 300 years old and so sort of classic human being response this is the problem and the answer
is we should kill them all that that's sort of. It really is Jonathan. You know it's kind of an
interesting point we always tend to have this idea that killing them all is the best idea so and we
swing the pendulum too far and we start creating all these different systems some of which are
very very good to try to get rid of these microbes right? So like we're sterilizing our water well
that's a great thing in terms of preventing dysentery um but when you start sterilizing
everything you start sterilizing all of our food, when you over sterilize the home, when you
over sterilize your own body, we end up in a scenario where we've taken it too far. And when
we have liberal use of antibiotics to the point of giving antibiotics without even knowing that
the person actually needs to take an antibiotic we're taking it too far and now here we are
and we're seeing the downstream effect of these choices where we've taken this you know sort of
um confrontation with bacteria or with microbes. We've taken this confrontation to an extreme in
trying to destroy them and we've been successful. We have destroyed them and now we're suffering the
consequences of an inadequate microbiome because we need them we need them for human health. And
so, Will, how did maybe Tim you can jump in here. So this is a story about it was great to discover
antibiotics you know we're not saying any of that is a bad thing in this journey when did we first
discover that there was this thing called the microbiome and that not all microbes were these
sort of harmful pathogens that we needed to kill well i guess you know when i was a junior
doctor that you know we always knew that when you did blood cultures or urine
cultures you had these other guys there which the microbiome doctor microbiology doctors were
not interested in how they're just commencing commensal means these are normal inhabitants
you know they're like the indigenous population uh that we're just an annoyance in medicine
and uh got in the way of a good test and so that's basically all we learned
I would guess about two lines in my textbooks well as well as all these bugs and you
look you learned all the deadly ones there you know there are also these things called commensals
which you can ignore and that was basically uh you know in every every Medical School in the
world that was about it and I think it was any really. I guess there was a guy called Jeff
Gordon who started this whole thing off uh most people never heard of him you know 20
years ago when he started doing a few experiments to say well actually keeping some of these guys
they might have a role actually in health. But only really about 10 years ago did that
become a tour mainstream and people started looking at this and then comparing say
populations of the average American against Middle East African tribe and worked out these African
Tribes who hadn't taken ant hadn't taken the 20 doses of antibiotics before they were
21, you know, the average American has um they had doubled the number of species that
the average American has. And suddenly you realize well maybe that's why or one of the main reasons
they don't get heart disease cancer diabetes obesity because they've got all this extra
protection onboard that is helping them because they haven't been wiped out by processed
food diets and antibiotics. And Tim tell me a bit about, because you mentioned
Jeff Gordon I remember one of my first, I think Will doesn't know this but in in the
first sort of six months of ZOE's existence Tim took me out to St Louis, Missouri, which was
my first time there. And we got to meet Jeff, which was you know for me really sort of amazing.
And he showed us all the mice and everything. Tim do you want to just explain briefly what
jeff did and why that was so important for the story of the microbiome has been? Yeah he's
the sort of father of microbiome research really and he retrained all the current experts
around the globe particularly in the US. He basically set up a facility where you had sterile
mice, so they were they were brought up in a very artificial scenario like in spaceships where
there were no microbes and vacuums and things and then they were used as experimental tools
to see how when you added in normal microbes from another mouse into them how you could make
them big differences in their physiology. That really made us understand the function of these
things. In one of my experiments took microbes from overweight or obese people and put them into
these sterile mice and you can make them fatter or the opposite and skinny person or give them
probiotics and make them skinnier so it really that made it really obvious that these weren't
just random associations who could actually manipulate them and get an effect. Can I just stop
you there for a second because you know for you that's very matter of fact but I think again this
was part of what for me was amazing when I first experienced and maybe you know work and
what you're saying is you take these mice, you put these microbes inside them right? It's not
part of it's not food it's actually these living microbes and actually the microbes that came from
people who were really overweight actually made these mice overweight so somehow you transferred
over this thing that wasn't a decision about you know I'm eating too many calories you know, I have
no self-control. It was actually like something physical and living and you actually transferred
this weight is that is that correct that's exactly right and so what this is the key point actually
you can now say that you know obesity is an infectious disease because it actually follows if
you can you know take it from some person's gut and put in someone else's gut and have that
result it suddenly changes your whole idea about overweight and obesity and just gives you
a different mindse. Thanks Will, you know if it's infectious also you must be able to prevent it
and so they also did the same from skinny people and put skinny people's microbes into these mice
and then over fed them and that protected them and they also we did this as well with with a group at
Cornell with our twins. Ee we just found a group of microbes with funny names like Christensenella
etc and that we found only in skinny people put them into the mice over fed them and they didn't
get fat. So suddenly this really is you know a bit of an aha moment! It ways well, if we can really
understand what's going on in those gut microbes this is a really neat way to help us all
get slimmer and healthier and Jeff Gordon basically invented this system and got it on an
industrial scale which is what you needed to do and he's still going. Yeah and he's doing amazing
stuff now looking at the opposite in young in kids in famine countries and working out what
microbes there you know lacking because of poor nutrition. Brilliant and they've they've
reproduced these studies you know so many times that it's very clear that this is the way that
it works that you know when you transfer these microbes into the mice you can actually control
the weight balance of the mouse based upon the microbes. And they've done studies you know Tim
was alluding to this a little bit where they take identical humans, identical human twins but
one is obese and one is skinny and take the microbes from these identical human twins
and put them into the mice and give them the same number of calories which I think is very
important to point out is that in these mice it's not a calories in issue. They're getting the
exact same number of calories but the mouse that gets the obese microbiome becomes obese the mouse
that gets the skinny microbiome becomes skinny and you know just to pick up where Tim was in the
conversation of understanding the microbiome so you know we became intrigued with this idea but
we did have some limitations about 15 years ago or up until about 15 years ago that we're really
restricting our ability. And I think Tim could speak to this even more than I can because he's
been a part of these research studies but you know to me there were really two major limitations
one is we really didn't have the computing power to be able to handle the data the
amount of information that exists within like literally a sample of poop
is completely absurd and it overwhelms you know even modern computers so we didn't have
the computing power until very recently to be able to handle the amount of data that was coming from
these gut microbes and the second part of this is that Tim was alluding to the culture
plate. The culture plate is the traditional way of growing microbes that's what we all
were raised on. Well what do you do if the microbes don't grow on a culture plate most of
the microbes that exist within the gut microbiome do not exist well in an environment where there is
oxygen. And as a result, they will not grow on a culture plate and so we needed a different way to
get access to the information about these specific microbes and understand who they are what they're
about. So we needed a different way to do it because the culture plate was never going to work
and so we invented new technologies initially 16s RNA testing and more recently shotgun
metagenomics. These are nerdy terms that guys like Tim and I like to talk about but really
what you just need to know is we had a laboratory breakthrough and that made this possible. And I
think maybe if I listen as a way to understand is these are different ways of reading the DNA
of our microbes right? So just as we're used to the idea of reading our own DNA or you know in
these days of COVID right we're used to reading the DNA of a virus this means we now have this
technology that allows us to read all the DNA and all the different microbes inside our gut
and I think in a follow-on podcast iId love to go really deep in that but for now maybe you know
we can move on to this question around like how deep is this relationship between microbes and
humans? So we've just said wow these microbes really have this extraordinary effect right? It
is every time I hear this I'm still amazed I'm hearing it again and it's extraordinary right?
This idea the microbes that go inside us can actually change our metabolism outcome but like
how recent is this is this something that has just happened between human beings and microbes
over the last few hundred years as we're now in this you know strange new world where you know
i get my food you know delivered pre-made and uh you know i get my grocery uh delivered or is
this something that's been around for a long time how sort of how far back do we guess or do we
know this goes? Millions, billions of years ago because we actually evolved from
microbes and so they're our ancestors. So basically a couple of these microbes fused
together and that in a way became the sort of cel, the multi-cell that is human life and so
we've basically spent all of our existence in a way surrounded by microbes and they
became part of us as they are part of every animal and every plant and so in a way
our evolution was formed around these guys. An integral part of us so in a way what we were
saying about you know how they are core to us and we've been trying to wipe them out that our
evolution has been totally dependent on them being around to perform the functions that we couldn't
do to produce the vitamins that we can't produce ourselves for example to break down the foods
that we can't break down. And every animal has their own tricks and that's why we've got our
own set of microbes really to do this for us. So you can't separate us from our microbes. We
are exact exactly you know symbiotic with you know every single person through human history
going all the way back to the very first human this relationship was a part of the story
these microbes have predated humans by a mile. We humans have been around we believe for about
3 million years which sounds like a lot however if you look at archaea they've discovered archaea
in an archaeologic dig in Greenland that they believe are 4 billion years old archaea are a part
of the human microbiome archaea are also found inside of volcanoes and at the bottom of rift
vents inside the ocean these microbes are hardy they are resilient they will continue to be around
in perpetuity and really they're just sort of they are what this planet is made up of microbes
it's brilliant. It's a brilliant you know new way to think about the world and the world
um around you I think for today you know. Let's narrow down now and talk really
about the gut microbiome because I think scientists have now discovered, I know that there
are microbiomes for our skin and for our mouth and obviously there are all of these microbes that
are out there in the environment around us and I think we can come and talk about those also in
a future day. But today let's talk about the gut microbiome I think that's because the general
view is that this is the the biggest and most important. Can you talk a bit maybe let's start
with like what's the gut is. So again going back to like when I was at school, I was told like
you know you get to the gut and it's sort of like this big sack at the end you've sort of
absorbed everything important by then and then it basically food sits around for a day
or something you suck water out of it and then that's done and fiber was like this
thing that just helped you to like pass a bowel movement like that was a story that I was
told when I was at school and to be honest. I think it was still the story that I was being
told um you know 15 years ago what of that you know what of that story you know is wrong or
what's missing based upon what we now know. Well you know, I guess I'll go first. There's
like you can say it's all wrong right. Go tell us what's right. Yeah you know I think we
have dismissed human digestion as being you know less appealing or sexy you know. I guess because
it involves the passage of excrement or stool. And so as a result of that it's easy to make jokes
about it and pretend like it's not very important when in fact I would make an argument that
this is key to life, this is really where human health begins is with digestion and access
to nutrients so you know. Just to kind of speak to this Jonathan you mentioned that there's microbes
in our mouth there's microbes on our skin, there's microbes inside a woman's vagina, basically
all external surfaces have microbes our inside meaning our intestine is actually believe it or
not this is kind of weird but I'm going to say it. It's outside our body because it's a tube that
starts at the top and ends at the bottom and that tube is completely intact all the way through. And
so these microbes that are in the depths of our bowels inside our colon are actually outside our
body. Food that we put into our mouth and swallow down is outside of our body we are interacting
with the outside world in this location and digestion the gu. When we speak of the gut
by the way sometimes we're casual and we're talking about the gut microbiome when we should
really say the gut microbiome but the gut itself is our digestive apparatus and it takes these
things from the outside world and it breaks them down into their constituent parts and it prepares
them to be absorbed and integrated into the human body and the parts that are unnecessary are passed
on and they are eliminated. And that is not just the human process, in fact these gut microbes
are incredibly important to this entire process. And the reason why these gut microbes have become
so critically important to human digestion going back to evolution. Just for a quick moment is that
humans started in Africa and then we radiated out across this planet into different ecosystems with
different food supplies and we needed a digest a digestive capacity that was adaptable to all of
these different ecosystems and food supplies. Microbes are very adaptable, humans are not and so
we basically allowed these microbes to take over a critical part of our digestion breaking down
our food giving us access to nutrients because no matter what ecosystem you go into you can
get the microbes that you need to be able to digest and process the food that exists within
that ecosystem. I'll let Tim any thoughts that you have. Well that's right and a great example
is people who like sushi. The Japanese didn't have the microbes to break down seaweed but if
you eat enough fish, the fish eat algae that have these microbes and you can actually
gain these microbes that allow you then to digest and get all the nutrients from the seaweed
and sushi. So we can go around picking up these little microbes and add to our menu if you like of
all the things that we can get nutrition from so that's just a great example of why we want a
diverse healthy microbiome. And the more microbes we've got as a toolkit the better we can survive
in any environment and the more we can maximize in a way that the nutrition that's available to us
and so that that's going to be a general problem. And Tim one of the things i think I remember
Jeff Gordon saying you know to me was you could sort of think of you the way he thinks about your
gut actually is basically it's this big storage space where you can store all of these different
bacteria and it's like this amazing tool kit with thousands of different microbes each of one
is like a specialist tool for breaking down something. Therefore instead of needing to have
all that capability built into your DNA you have all of these microbes which he said how many
more times DNA do the microbes have than us well the number keeps changing. It's at least 300 times
more genes than we have. But you only have to look in the gut you know there's 20 odd sort of human
gut hormones and thousands of microbial ones so it orders a magnitude bigger much more subtlety. So
we rely on this whole system really to now enable us to eat properly maximally wherever we are and
we can pick up new tools on the way. So unlike our genes we can pick up these new guys and uh you
pick them up for the environment then as long as you keep feeding them like you know like a plant
you can nurture them and have them ready when you need them. I think there's something quite magical
about this right because I think I certainly grew up with this idea that you know your genes are
completely deterministic. Like you got given your genes by your parents there's nothing you can do
about it the only other thing that might shape you is like your upbringing and if you grew up
with your parents well they shake that as well so like you're done you have no control it's
like it's very uh disempowering I think there's something really magical for me. So this idea
that actually you've got all of these microbes they offer you all of this capability so it's not
like you're totally locked into this restriction of what you feel but also and I think maybe
we could talk about that um now these microbes aren't completely fixed either right? So there's
not like you've got the microbes today and there's nothing you can do to change the microbes could
we talk about that for for a minute and that's very important for us to think about like to what
extent can we you've told us how important this is we're sold like is there anything we can do to
change our microbiome if maybe you know we are like some of the examples we've talked about that
maybe we suspect our microbiome is not you know as good, as diverse as we would have liked it to
be. Yeah I'll just start and then maybe Will can add some more detail but our microbiome is made up
of a fixed portion that is like our fingerprint. Okay, so there's perhaps a third of it that
wherever we go in the world people know where we've been right? So in the future have these
devices that can just pick it off you know our clothing or whatever they'll know it's
you know what where Will or Tim is or Jonathan because we all have a unique set of
gut microbes that no one else has. So that stays relatively fixed then you put some
day-to-day ones that will vary you know very much all the time then you've got perhaps another
third that vary with what you're eating and we're still understanding which ones
are which and how you change it but lots of these studies now show within a few days
you can change very rapidly the microbes. If you change your diet and just as an example
when i was visiting the Hadza tribe in Tanzania within four days I'd increased my
diversity of my microbes by 40 percent. And Tim what is diversity what is that? What is diversity?
It means the number of different species. It's the richness but yeah basically the quantity of
different types of microbes I had. So suddenly you've picked up a huge number of new microbes in
just a few days by the time i got on the plane on airplane food back to London you know I started to
lose them all. But it just shows you how quickly you can change it because you know they live
fast and die young, microbes. They, you know, they can reproduce and die in half an hour and
I think that's where they realize that it's you know much faster life
than even Will has I think. First of all Tim I think that you need
to publish that as a case report. That would be a good publication
for people to check out. You know just picking up where Tim left off, these
microbes turning over every 20 to 30 minutes it's quite fascinating to imagine that like literally
within an hour it could be as many generations as you have living in your family right now right and
if you were to take this and look at this each one as a generation and like make it similar to human
years one day 24 hours would be the equivalent in human evolution of us going all the way back
to the pyramids. That's how far these microbes can go in 24 hours in terms of their ability
to procreate and so basically every single one of our choices starts to be amplified through
their ability to rapidly procreate immediately. And they've actually shown and this is coming from
one of my favorite studies from a few years ago one of the first microbiome studies that
got me really excited was Lawrence David published in Nature in 2014 where they tested the
microbiome every single day and they made radical dietary changes and they saw in just 24 hours
there were already appreciable differences that existed within these microbes now i do think it's
important for people to understand that that's not to say that in 24 hours you can heal your gut
and transform it from something that's unwell to something that's perfectly well in just 24
hours. What really I'm saying is that in 24 hours you can change your gut and get things moving in
the right direction and ultimately what we want is we want the functional capacity of the
gut, so these enzymes and the things that these gut microbes are capable of producing,
we want to maximize that functional capacity that type of change takes longer than 24 hours but
you can get the ball in motion in just 24 hours. And so it's a beautiful thing your gut microbes
forgive you whatever you've done they forgive you you can have them back that's very exciting. So
let's I think we've touched on a little bit and let's sort of go fully into it this question about
how these microbes are actually connected to our health. So we talked now about this background
we've been living with them for forever. In fact I think we evolved from them apparently um how
do they affect our um our health and what are all the different aspects of health that they
um that they do affect? Let me start with Tim. Well it's pretty hard it really is hard to find
anything they don't affect. I mean I think in a way because all this all the sort of clinical
epidemiological studies that have looked at all the common chronic diseases uh or
disorders so everything from you know alzheimer's, dementia strokes heart
disease, overweight, obesity, diabetes, depression, anxiety, inflammatory disease,
autoimmune diseases, generalized aging and you know obviously gut infections and
even things like skin infections. When they test the gut microbes of people who affect it
they are unanimously lower in diversity and sicker than healthy control. So you feel that they
are playing a role in virtually all the conditions and diseases that we know about or all we've
tested. Now some of that might be a consequence of the condition but it's also likely to also be
a cause. So it's a two-way process but microbes are involved and so. Tim can you talk for
a minute just to help us understand how so we've got these microbes they're sitting in our
gut foods coming in but I think you know I think we're missing the logical linkage can you help
us understand how these can affect our health. We don't entirely know how. Let's be honest about
this and a lot of the ideas we have are theories and Will may have a lot of his own theories
but in general a lot of these microbes involved in sickness might be ones that are
that like living in an inflammatory scenario so they love feeding off stress and changes in say
the acidity of the gut or these kind of things when people are unwell. And so they sort of sense
someone's weak and that there's a victim there and they come in and they take over and they they kick
out the beneficial guys and so that means that you have more of these microbes that are producing
some stress stress-like substances for the body, speeding up you know all kinds of these stress
molecules inflammation molecules making everything a bit on edge and because they're there, they're
stopping the beneficial guys producing their nice relaxing yoga type chemicals on the rest of
the system. So it's changing the balance of the community is the way I see this for most.
It's not about one microbe causing the disease it's very much about how the community
is shifting just like you would see a shift in a healthy rainforest or in soil suddenly
that balance has shifted. And we can we see this with medications for example you just
have to take you know a tablet for gastric reflux like a proton pump inhibitor
and you see a tiny change in the acidity of the gut and then suddenly other microbes
come in and they will lead you more likely to have infections. So if they're very
subtle changes that end up having sort of bigger and bigger effects is how I see it but i'd
love to hear what will's idea is because i think you know we don't was just starting to understand
this and realizing that it's how these guys work together and suddenly for some reason
they start to produce chemicals that are like more likely to be harmful to the body than
to be beneficial. And it's that is that I, Will maybe talk because I think Tim it was a good
explanation maybe about how this can all go wrong. Let's maybe go on to the positive side here
and talk about like what's the positive thing. So I didn't have any microbes
now I have some microbes. Like how can they do anything good? How does it work at
all? I think maybe just again not to jump over but like you just said that actually, my insides are
on the outside right? So my microbes are inside me but actually, they're not yet inside me they're
still inside the tube. So how does these things that are still inside the tube affect the rest
of my body. Yeah so I think to play off of what Tim was saying first of all Tim is alluding to
the fact that this is an ecosystem. This is an ecosystem in the same way that Tim was describing
the Amazon rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef, the soil, all right? Ecosystems thrive on
harmony and balance, your body thrives on harmony and balance. Harmony and balance within the
community of microbes, harmony and balance in the interactions between you your microbes and your
environment, which includes your dietary choice. And you know with regard to some of what Tim's
alluding to just to unpack a little bit more, Tim's alluding to a loss of balance, a loss of
harmony, less good guys, more bad guys disruption of the gut barrier the release of things into the
bloodstream this is what we call dysbiosis. This is the opposite of what we're trying to achieve.
Now a quick point this is a side note that I think is kind of interesting. Tim was describing how
stress has these effects on the gut right? Some of this has evolved because it was good for us at
a different time when we are in times of stress. For example deprivation of a food source it
would be advantageous for us to trap calories that would extend our life expectancy, it would
be advantageous for us to raise our blood sugar because we need that to support our big brain. So
many of these things we evolved but the problem is you put them into the context of the 21st century
and now the things that we evolved to protect us when we were cavemen are actually harming us in
the 21st century world that we live in. And so now how do we restore balance? How do we restore
harmony we're looking at? This is an ecosystem we want that balance in harmony, and balance
and harmony what we find in all ecosystems comes from biodiversity. Biodiversity means
that all the different parties are represented and they work together as a team the good guys
and the bad guys they all bring different skills into the equation and those skills contribute
to the greater good of the ecosystem. So how do we achieve biodiversity? There's a number of
different ways it's not just exclusively food but we're going to tend to focus on food because we
believe that is the most powerful way that you can affect and alter the gut microbiome. Biodiversity
comes from recognizing that these microbes they are unique individuals they have
their own personalities they have their own skill sets and they have their own dietary
preferences, they are picky eaters, they all don't love the same food they all don't want kale
but many of them the best microbes in many cases they love fiber. Fiber is the preferred fuel
source of these microbes. Not all fiber is created the same that's a bit of a fallacy
that we've been taught each plant has fiber. Each fiber each plant has its own unique types
of fiber. When we eat a wide variety of plants we are consuming a wide variety of different types
of fiber those different types of fiber will feed a wide variety different types of microbes the
end result is that biodiversity on the plate translates into biodiversity within the gut
microbiome and this is a principle that many of us believe to be one of the critical pieces in
terms of enhancing the health of these microbes and I think the follow-on piece. As I understand
it from some of the other scientists we talk about is that this diversity of microbes also lead to
the output of this really you know huge diversity of chemicals that come out of these microbes
and cross the gut wall and go through the rest of our body is that the sort of the final sort
of missing piece? That sort of helps to explain like how they you know we don't understand
exactly what all of these do but could you just, you know I don't want to skip over that. Yeah
I think coming back to my description of the microbes as chemical factories I think it brings
this broad full circle back to that idea that that's the best way I think of thinking of them
because in the future we're probably going to be measuring all the chemicals to work out
what the functions are doing because often you have you know maybe 20 microbes all working
together to produce one key chemical that you know lights up your brain and stops you getting
depression and that we don't you understand. And we now know that food is made up of say 30
000 chemicals, not just fats, proteins, sugars and so knowing that we've got all these
circulating chemicals from the microbes, thousands and thousands of them combining with the
thousands of chemicals in food to produce these new ones that interact with our genes, interact
with our bodies, integrate our immune system, suddenly we've got this amazing ecosystem that's
incredibly complicated. And that comes back to this whole idea why you know we can only do this
now because we've got this amazing technology to put it all together but it's too much
for anyone to you know work out themselves we need to be using this big data approach to
understand, it means a whole new mindset on how we think about food and how we think of our guts.
It's much bigger than we've ever realized and it's much more complex opportunity. This is great, this
is the way that we need to move with our science which is to accept and acknowledge that every
single person there are eight billion people on this planet, no two of them are the
same in terms of their gut microbiome. There is a unique bio-individuality that every
single person has and we need to accept and acknowledge that creating broad strokes in terms
of our recommendations is never going to be as good as the granular detail that we have the
ability to potentially provide by examining the gut microbiome in the context of everything else
that's happening throughout the body and that's by the way a big part of what we're looking to
do with ZOE, is to introduce this using science introduce this new generation of being able to
not just understand how to eat but to understand how to eat for your unique biology. And I think
that's obviously incredibly important and exciting I think one of the things, just sort of following
on from Tim's description of like did you say 30 000 different chemicals in our food is, you know,
Isuddenly came from this little while ago thinking about oh there's a small number of vitamins
right that you need to make sure that you eat and there's some specific things like example you
need to eat a banana because it's got potassium in it okay so like there's like 10 things you need
to worry about and then there's 15. I think what you know I've taken away from these conversations
with you and others is that there's this immense number of chemicals out there in the foods that we
naturally would eat but more importantly they're just like the input into your factories right?
Which then output all these other chemicals that we can't get naturally and which we at this point
still are just starting to scratch the surface on but it seems as though like a big part of why the
microbiome seems to have this impact and I think there are specific papers right Tim? And we're
looking at particular outputs from these microbes which we can see across the gut barrier go into
our bloodstream, get distributed everywhere and suddenly you start to see much better why
you know the food we eat really does have this impact on our health, which I think is very hard
to understand if it's just calories but starts to make a lot more sense if you think about this huge
breadth. It's almost like we are taking medicine in some sense right these microbes are creating
specific chemicals which are then acting on us yeah and it's realizing that food is you know is
medicine because it's all chemistry you know and it's just a question of definition and so you
know we all need to become our own pharmacists and understand much more about food we put into
our mouth because it has a key effect on our gut microbes and I guess that's part of this
educational mission is if you understand your gut microbes you have to understand more about
the food that you're eating in order to look after just like any park keeper or zoo keeper
or you know anyone is in charge of tropical fish you've got to know exactly uh what the species
are and what you know what you're trying to do to to maximize their health and so that's what we
all need to become really we can't be reliant on one-size-fits-all guidelines or supermarket labels
or this kind of stuff we need to really get in in deep educate people about personalization
and so one say for this audience let's say for this audience we they said like this is all
great. I'd like to take away something practical today like that's super interesting but like what
can I actually do if I want to improve my health? I want to improve my energy you know I want to
improve my weight, let's say they want to start that journey today, what are the practical things
that they can do based upon all this stuff? Four rules people can follow, one: trying to eat 30
different plants a week and that includes nuts, seeds and herbs. Second is to pick foods
that are high in these chemicals that are defense chemicals called polyphenols that give
them their bright colors and this includes nuts, seeds, berries, dark chocolate, coffee,
even red wine. A third is try some fermented foods every day. A small amount of one of the fermented
foods really important just to boost your gut microbes. And fourth avoid ultra processed foods.
And if you do that you are halfway there to having a really good gut microbiome. And I guess Will
can talk about other things and personalization. Yeah I feel so a couple
things to play off of there one thing the polyphenols that you just
mentioned polyphenols increasingly there is a body of evidence that polyphenols are not active
without coming into contact with our gut microbes and having the gut microbes to activate them is
actually a part of what makes the polyphenols beneficial to our health. So that's just a
tangible example of why they're so important so you mentioned many of the dietary approaches
that can be taken and you know at the end of the day no matter who you are no matter what dietary
pattern you follow what Tim just said, those are simple rules that anyone can apply. There
are many different versions of a healthy diet but those rules can be applied to virtually
all of them to enhance your health and to enhance the health of your microbiome.
From my perspective what I would add you don't need to only change your diet to
enhance the health of your gut microbiome, there are ways to improve the health of
your microbiome without even lifting a fork. You can get a good night's rest, you can go to bed
earlier, you can time with your circadian biology which means not eating dinner at 10 o'clock at
night, eating an earlier dinner, earlier bedtime, fasting before dinner and extending the fast
into the next day. So fasting is an example of something you can do without eating food
that can be beneficial to the gut microbes. Exercise is important, the people that you
surround yourself with, there's evidence that the people that live in your home you share
microbes together, there's evidence that when you're in a loving relationship it's good for
your gut microbiome, there's evidence that when you have a pet it's good for your gut microbiome,
so spend time outdoors, exercise, tell the people that you love that you love them, have a strategy
for maintaining your stress, get some sleep, have an early dinner and an early bedtime and I
guess something that's been hard in these covered times which is don't wash your hands as carefully
as you might have done before when you're in the outside is that what you're both saying with
your pet story yeah you may wash your hands in the supermarket but make sure that when you're out
in the woods playing you know or playing with the pets you perhaps don't wash as much as you would
have been expected to so it's a story that the the bugs that other people are carrying may be quite
dangerous for you and the bugs in the environment in general are quite safe this is sort of
one of the the takeaways from this isn't it? I think I think it's about balance I think
it's about balance that at the end of the day we don't need to swing the pendulum back
and forth and drive ourselves crazy out this is too much sterilization. This is not enough
sterilization I think it's it's more so that um you know there are common sense moments
in time where you should be washing your hands you probably don't need me to define what
those are and then there are moments where we're taking it too far, where we're using the um the
antiseptic hand you know hand rubs and whatnot and using that repeatedly and it's too much
sterilization. It's not necessarily a good thing that makes it a discussion i have a lot with my
wife with um particularly our youngest one about clearly we're in coverage you want to be
very conscious of that but actually we're brought up now with this idea
you want to sterilize everything that you know a small you know baby is
in contact with and actually I think um clearly that's this is part of this natural
process where they're exposed to the environment. And uh you know coming back to that early
point uh there are a lot of these uh these bugs that that we need to have so there's something
about finding that middle ground that's that's fascinating and one final question on this before
we move on you know what about probiotics so this all sounds like a lot of hard work right you're
saying that people should go to sleep early that's boring you know at least tim allows us to have a
glass of wine that's nice um we've got to really worry about our food what about if we just skip
all of that and we go to the grocery store and we buy one of these bottle of probiotic pills
that say they have microbes inside them couldn't we just do that and skip the rest of this and head
over to mcdonald's afterwards um you could do that but i think will and i are both big believers in
real real food first and there are plenty of foods that have probiotics in them so and if you do that
you're going to get a wider range of microbes that is going to be more likely to suit you and so
that's what i would always try first uh you've got yogurt which has usually two or three microbes
then you can move to things like some blue cheeses which are four or five or six then you've got
uh kefirs which are fermented milks which have um at least 10 to 15 different types of microbe
and then you've got kombucha's and kimchi and kraut which have even more so i think it's trying
those first and then uh only really going for probiotics if you are sick or have a particular
problem that's where the evidence is strongest there's not much evidence that probiotics bought
at a store will prevent uh illnesses at the moment but there is increasing evidence that they do
work for a number of uh mild complaints and so there's definitely evidence they work what we
don't know is which ones work in which people because as will said we're totally unique in our
gut microbes so matching the particular microbe to our own thousand species is going to be a bit of
luck and that's why this is an area for a lot of interest for us obviously because you know yeah
so if we know so in the future we're probably going to end up once you've had your microbiome
sequence with individualized advice about which probiotics are likely to work for you and
that's definitely the future of this area yeah i think speaking as a
gastroenterologist i i would say that there there is a role for probiotics um i use
them routinely routinely in my clinic with benefit but the fallacy or the mistake that people will
make is when they lean into the probiotic without thinking that anything else needs to change diet
and lifestyle is the great opportunity you know tim said that when he changed his diet when he
was in east africa he saw his microbiome diversity radically change in just four days and you're not
going to get that kind of results from a probiotic by itself but a probiotic is a supplement that can
be used in addition to diet and lifestyle changes particularly for people that have digestive issues
and and certainly provide benefit for many people and you know the one thing i just want to
add on real quick to what tim said that i i find to be fascinating is the idea of living food
we have sterilized our food supply and there is increasing concern that this sterile food supply
is problematic for our gut microbiome and there's now a call among some scientists to focus on
getting more living food into our diet now tim speaks to the different types of fermented foods
when you ferment you are creating an ecosystem and then you consume from that ecosystem and
transfer it into yours and they come into contact and we have actually multiple studies showing that
the microbes that are in your ferment will show up in your stool and so that means that
they are surviving and getting through but in addition to that it's not just
fermented food it's also real food whole food food that is still alive tim mentioned very early
in the episode that these microbes are everywhere that a plant has its own microbiome they've
studied this in some plants if you take an apple an apple has a hundred million microbes in
its microbiome more than a thousand species you don't need to ferment the apple the apple already
has microbes and so eating real food in some cases some raw food can also potentially bring
some of those microbes into our into our diet and don't smash it up too much before
you eat it if you want to get the full benefit for your microbes so so we've had
a wonderful tour of the microbiome here and i think so much opportunity to
dig in more in future episodes now let's talk about the role of zoe in all of
this maybe just to sort of wrap up so for the last four years uh we've been carrying out the world's
largest study of microbiome and metabolic health maybe will you joined our scientific advisory
board earlier this year do you want to explain you know why sure so uh i started as a
fan i was a fan of zoe uh in june of 2020 i saw at a meeting a international nutrition
conference new research being published by zoe by the scientists who were affiliated with zoe
and then shortly thereafter there was a paper that was published in literally the most prestigious
medical journal on the planet nature medicine and i saw this and i was like okay whoa this is
how it was this is how it is supposed to be done we are introducing the era of personalized
nutrition but we're not winging it we're not just making stuff up this is this is about doubling
down on research and using those tools the science to guide us in the choices and our ability to
understand how we are unique as an individual and how those unique elements connect to our
food choices and how our body interprets those food choices so what i love about zoe uh what
got me really excited is that not to um uh be too glowing with you guys right here in front
of us but uh i'm loving it you can keep going well i well i just i just i just really loved i have
to be totally honest we live in a society okay so if i am if i am jonathan wolfe
and i am the ceo of a new company it is a sure thing if i spend my money on a
marketing budget and it is a massive risk to spend my money on a research budget because the
research slows me down i don't get my product to market i don't have money coming in and what
if the research says that my product is trash that would all be problematic and so what i love
is the audacity of zoe to go out there and you started in what jonathan 2017 yep conducting
research doing the studies and actually showing that what you have is real before you ever
opened it up and made it publicly available and that to me shows a level of integrity that's
missing in today's world and i i think we all like should appreciate the fact that a company would
be willing to do something like that to make sure that the product actually works instead of just
rolling out a product marketing it to you hyping it up making you believe that it's real but not
actually having the data to back it up and so that's what i love about what we're doing with zoe
we are building something that i think is really special i think that it is going to introduce
the era of personalized nutrition in a way that's grounded in actual science and i also love that
each individual person you can participate in zoe and you yourself will receive the benefit i myself
have received the benefit of participating in zoe i i wrote the new york times bestselling book
i've changed my diet since i took the zoe kit all right but you yourself can receive
the benefit and on the flip side there's this concept that is so cool called
citizen science where by participating in the zoe project you are contributing to something
that's going to help other people and when thousands and tens of thousands and potentially
100 000 different people all contribute to the science the science gets better and better and
better and we advance it and then we can help even more people and that's a beautiful thing i
love that well tim was very active tim was very persuasive that the science was going to work
so uh it seemed like a good a good bet and i think we were convinced we could then do the data
science on top of this to sort of decouple this and give people the personalized results if the
underlying science was real and i think uh i was a little nervous before we got the first results
and it was fantastic that it worked out as well as as well as it did well thank you for your kind
words well maybe because you did do the um did the program yourself maybe you just talked from it
about like what you get with the zoe program so we talked a lot about the microbiome um in abstract
like could you just help people understand sort of for real where that is today um yeah the the the
thing about personalized nutrition is that and this is true of so many things in the body tim and
i have been talking about this for the last hour it's not just one thing in isolation it's not
just one microbe it's not just one metabolite it's this entire system that's complicated
and there's different layers and facets to it so the beauty of the of the zoe kit is that it
has the state-of-the-art microbiome testing there is no one with better microbiome testing than
what we have okay state-of-the-art there but it's not just the microbiome it's also your blood
glucose it's also your blood lipids it's being able to accurately record your dietary choices
it's being able to administer a standardized test so that you can compare my results to
jonathan's results or to your results at home all right so when you bring all of these things
together the microbiome the blood glucose monitor which by the way is like continuously measuring
when you do it the blood lipids the standardized food testing the food app you are creating the
complete experience having the complete data so that you can look at all of these things
and the interactions that exist between them which by the way we know very clearly there are
powerful interactions that exist there and so so to be a little more tangible with this
jonathan i did my zoe kit i paid for it myself back in october of 2020 when i became interested
in zoe and what was going on this is shortly after it was made available in the united states for
the very first time and what you do is basically you spend about one week the instructions are
pretty straightforward and clear it's not that it's not that complicated you eat a couple muffins
on certain days you wear this glucose monitor that it's like shockingly easy to apply and you enter
in your information into the food data and then you send in this a stool specimen which by the
way is like the easiest thing in the world to do and by doing that it integrates all this data it
has machine learning which are these complicated computer algorithms to basically dissect
this and look at the connections that exist that are personalized to you so like it did it for
me and then you receive basically this information back and when i open up the app it gives me my
personalized data and so as an example there are gut boosters and there are the gut detractors
or like the ones that they got suppressors all right so gut boosters are the foods that
i should preferentially be gravitating towards and i can tell that it's personalized to me
because they each one of these gut boosters has a certain score but then when i open the
app the score rapidly recalibrates itself to me and i can see how that score changes
real quick so anyway what happened with me is that look i eat a plant-based diet i
eat plants in variety that's my big thing all right but at the end of the day like you're
not gonna eat equal portions of every single plant on the planet that doesn't that's not feasible
at the end of the day you're going to gravitate towards certain dietary choices what i discovered
specific to me is that tofu wasn't as healthy for me personally as perhaps i thought it was it's
not that i avoid tofu i eat it all the time but what i did find is that there were specific
foods asparagus lentils and avocado that were my sort of supercharged gut boosters okay specific to
me so what do i do now i'm eating tons of avocados tons of asparagus tons of lentils and times in
the past well this is because you're a competitive man right and you know you're gonna retest and
you want to have made progress and you need to beat tim's um health score this is this is really
the driving factor isn't it let's let's be honest i mean i am a type a personality i
can't change that that's that's who i am i can't help that that's brilliant and tim where
do we um you know where does the science go because you know this is ongoing so we're talking
about the gut boosters and things we're going like because there's actually a lot of work going
on right at the moment where is that going and stuff that we hope to release this year
well the zoe predicts today's really the first of of the series you know and they were the
largest studies of their kind in the world but we now have five times as much data than we when
we we first did and so we're consistently updating the algorithms as we get more data in from people
and so that's why our precision and our ability to pick um complex foods and and and different
people's diets apart is going to get better and better and better and so our advice we give
back to people is just going to keep growing so when people go back to this in six months or 12
months time they'll see that you know okay their microbiome will change but also the the advice
will have altered slightly because this isn't static you know um science doesn't stop it
just keeps evolving and we're gonna make some changes to what we said uh just six months
ago so i think that's for the exciting area we're here and the more people that participate
just the better more accurate information everybody gets and that's what's really
cool and i and the more people do this the better everyone's getting educated about the
power of food and the power of the microbiome don't take avocados away from me though i i don't
care how far the science goes don't be taking avocados away from me well we'll we'll definitely
bear that in mind and you know i think one of the most exciting things for me is you know we have
these ongoing clinical um trials looking at the results coming out of people following the
device and and the results that we've seen are are really exciting in terms of impact on energy
sort of reducing dietary inflammation no weight for a lot of people as well so i think we are
we're very excited about what it's doing so i think we're at time so let's wrap it up and i and
maybe we can wrap it up with just one final thing from each of you so if there was just one single
thing that the listeners can do to improve their gut microbiome beyond doing the zoe program what
would you have them do let's start with you tim i stick to my thir go for 30 plants
a week and uh have that as your your goal even if you don't reach it just keep
a little notepad on the fridge uh and uh you know see how you get on and you
know and mix it up and try new things well oh man tim you took it from me that's my
favorite one i literally wrote a book about that. So all right Will, I think that tim's absolutely
right in the sense that no matter who you are no matter what your dietary pattern is this is a
simple thing that you can start to do today which is to incorporate more varieties of different
plants and so if it's okay Jonathan I'm happy to say other things but i would just double down on
that no matter who you are no matter what dietary pattern you follow it does not matter what it
is the optimal diet for your gut microbiome is a diverse abundant diet it is not about restriction
it is about abundance and variety in your diet enjoy all the flavors all the colors you will
be very happy and still your gut microbes fantastic well look on that note i just like to
remind everybody if they'd like to learn more about the microbiome or ZOE then do come to the
website which is joinzoe.com that's joinzoe.com. And if you would like to get 10% off your zoe
membership then just go to joinzoe.com/podcast. I would like to thank our
fantastic guests Tim, Will, I hope you've enjoyed that as much as me
and we look forward in future episodes of digging deeper into different areas we've
covered today. Thank you very much bye-bye.
