Introduction
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
What is the microbiome and why does it matter?
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
How and when did we discover the microbiome?
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
When did we come to realize that microbes can be beneficial to our health?
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
Limitations of early microbiome research
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
How far back does the relationship between microbes and humans go?
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
How our understanding of human digestion and the role of gut microbes has evolved over time
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
The changeable nature of your gut microbiome
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
How quickly can your gut microbiome change?
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
How do gut microbes impact your health?
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
Why dietary diversity and balance are key to a healthy gut microbiome.
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?
Practical tips for improving your gut 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
What about probiotics?
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
Why Will joined ZOE’s scientific advisory board
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.