Calorie counting just doesn't work.
that calories were the thing. When you look at the actual date of all the studies done,
the 80% or 90% have returned to their baseline weight and then they tend to overshoot. Dr. Tim Spectre is the founder of the UK's largest twin study and the co-founder of Zoe, a personalized nutrition company. This episode deep dives on how gut microbiome determines our individual
“response to food and why shifting focus from calorie counting to food quality is the real key”
to long-term health. 70% to 80% of people believe that if they see high protein in a product, it's healthy. Any 10% of people need more protein whereas 95% of people need more fiber. If something is labeled organic, is that something that we should take seriously or is
that just hype? The certification of organic in the US is clean poor and you might be end up paying
twice as much for something that says organic. There are lots of exceptions, but food companies deliberately make food softer and faster to eat. They want you to absorb it without noticing in front of the TV. We all know that feeling where it's big bag of Doritos or Pringles or whatever it is, they've got exactly that formula. We're reading the back of a package and looking at the ingredients and what are some red flags to show? Okay, this is ultra-processed. If you had to look at one thing
“on there, even if it says low fat on the front, that's a pretty good red flag because”
Tim, welcome to Young Improveding Podcast. Great to be here. I am very excited for this interview. I can't wait to learn all about gut health and types of foods we should be eating. And when I was studying you, one of the things that I found really interesting is that you've done an extensive amount of studies on twins. You actually started something called twins UK. And based on that, you realize that genetics aren't the major factor when it comes to
what we eat and how it impacts us and that different foods can actually impact people with the same genetics differently, which I just thought was so mind-blowing. Can you explain to us some of the studies and research that you've uncovered via twins that helped you understand how food really impacts our bodies? It's taken me 30 years to get to this point. So it didn't wasn't overnight and I was very, I was very keen geneticist, thinking that everything was genetic. And so a big proponent of that.
And it took really one experiment to change my mind, which was looking identical twins who were raised together and really lived together until they were in their 20s and looking at their gut microbes. And seeing that when you looked in detail in your sequence, they got microbes, the species they had were really very different. They only shared a small fraction of all those
species and even less of the subspecies. And that was the first time in about 20 odd years that I'd
seen anything really different in identical twins, generally they matched because they either had the same environment or they had the same genes. There wasn't this rather randomness of finding these microbes. So for me that was a big turning point in my career as a researcher and got me moving away from genetics, which I thought was the magic bullet for everything into this new field. This is about 15 years ago of the microbiome and gut health because for me it was perhaps this missing link
between, you know, what we've misunderstood about food thinking that everyone who eats the same food reacts the same way and suddenly you realize, well, if identical twins have different microbes than they in a way react with food differently, that could explain why they die of different conditions, why one gets ill, the other one doesn't, et cetera, et cetera. So that really fascinating to me is this extra bit of individuality we've all got that you can see clearly in these identical
twins that's quite difficult to see in the general population. I don't think our listeners truly understand what microbiome means. Like this is a really trendy word that we're hearing. I just had Naveen Jane on the show and he was talking about gut health and microbiome. And I'm curious to understand, like, what is the job of the microbiome? Like, what does it actually do? I know it. It transforms simple food into more complex food and I don't think people quite understand
like, what is the job of a microbiome? But we use them as chemical factories that like general, whole grouping of communities of many pharmacies that are converting the components
“of the food we eat into amazingly helpful chemicals for our body. And so I think that's the best”
way of thinking of them is this really rich diverse community of, you know, maybe everyone has
Maybe a thousand different species and subspecies inside them, all of which a...
chemicals. And they do that depending on what if you feed them right, you get the biggest diversity
“of chemicals. And those chemicals go on and help us in three key ways. They help our metabolism”
to stop us, you may be overeating and putting on too much fat and sorting out our heat heat and gently, you know, the general mechanics. They also are important for our nervous system. So things travel up from our gut to our brain and they will determine things like our mood and influence whether inflammation your gut is going to cause depression, things like this. And they're also really important for our immune system. And this we're realizing more and more how important the immune
system is for every aspect of our health because it stops us aging, it stops us getting cancer, it stops us getting allergies, you know, you name it, the immune system now is involved. So that's what they're there for as far as we're concerned, they're just trying to survive. But we, in a way,
“we give them a nice home in our gut and a place to live. We feed them every day and in return,”
with evolution has worked out, they provide us with a lot of these chemicals. Some of them are things like vitamins and all the B vitamins, for example, they produce as well as lots of gut hormones of breaking down food. So it's a, it's a really close relationship. We've got with them that, you know, we've evolved in millions of years, really, to have. Can you give us a concrete example like what happens when we eat like a piece of fruit versus when we eat something ultra processed in terms of
how our microbiome utilizes that food? Yeah, a piece of fruit, that won't be absorbed in the upper part of the gut. It goes right down to the lower part, the lower intestine. So it takes longer to get there. And the skin, particularly, we have lots of fiber in it and also have these polyphenols, which are the defense chemicals you find in natural fruits that protect the plant, but also our microbes extract from that fruit. So they're extracting the fibers, they break it down,
in our gut. They use the fibers for energy and to produce other chemicals. They like the building blocks of the of these chemicals we're talking about. And the polyphenols, these defense chemicals that give the color to the fruit or the bitterness, saying olive oil, they're used by the microbes as fuel. So their extra source of fuel, again, to make them grow better and produce more goodness.
“Now, that's what should happen. And that's what happened to their ancestors when we have ultra”
processed food, UPS. What happens is that most of that, it's eaten very fast. It gets mostly absorbed in the upper part of our intestine. So our microbes generally don't get to see it and it has very
little fiber in it. So they're basically being starved of off food and the sugars and the fats
are getting absorbed quite quickly with any modest interaction with our gut microbes. There's also none of these natural defense chemicals, these polyphenols. And then you've got these unnatural chemicals like artificial sweeteners, emulsifiers, preservatives, et cetera, which some of them are absorbed. But others do go into the gut where they can cause problems for our gut microbes, make them stick together, make them produce chemicals that might lead to diabetes, and
have various different effects that we haven't really thought about 10 years ago. It sounds like we really should not be eating a lot of ultra processed foods. And I definitely want to talk about how we can tell the difference between a processed food that might be okay for
us versus an ultra processed food. But first I want to understand, like, how do we have a healthy
microbiome? Like, what are your tips in order for us to have diversity and what should we be eating to have a healthy microbiome? Well, we get our first microbiome from our mothers, so we need to thank our mothers for that. And birthing is a messy business, and that's designed that way. So a bit of your mother's microbiome gets into all our mouths during birth. And then over the first next four years, we slowly build up this microbiome through breast milk, and that allows us to digest breast milk,
and then increasingly through the diversity of foods which start to then feed different microbes
That we're experiencing in our surroundings when we're picking up, you get lo...
on food itself. You get it from surfaces, you get it from soil, from trees, you get it from your the rest of your family, you get it from your playmates in nursery school. So there's microbes all over the place, and they eventually have settled down and the way to then nourish them is essentially to work out what they want to eat. We come up with a few basic principles of what they microbes really want. And we do this in conjunction with the company, our co-founded Zoe,
and these principles which we're trying to sort of educate everyone with other microbes like to eat diversity of plants. So eating the same kale salad every day isn't going to work, isn't going to work, because each plant has different fibers, and therefore it has a very different chemical
“composition and our microbes are fussy. And that's why we've come up with eating 30 different plants”
a week as a goal to try to hit that target and exceed it. And if you do that, that's the best way to get a diverse growth of all these microbes, because the more you have the healthier you'll be.
Second would be to eat the rainbow so that you're getting these defense chemicals, these polyphenols,
so you pick brightly colored plants, also bitter ones, so things like dark chocolate, olive oil, coffee, even red wine, have some benefits because of the polyphenols. Then you've got eating fermented foods. So studies have shown that if you have at least three portions of fermented food, you can really enhance your immune system and get your gut going in ways that are different to the diversity. So in a way that's a complementary system and fermented foods are contained live microbes
in food, so they're like probiotic tablets, but actually living and they're in food and they're much more diverse. And then you've got other other little tricks such as trying to eat more legumes as a source of protein rather than just raw, you know, big chunks of meat, giving you a gut arrest after, so it's time restricted eating. We know that you've got microbiome and the gut lining improve when you have at least 12 hours overnight when you're not eating. So cutting out late night,
snacking, then you've got a crucial one is to cut out ultra-processed foods as much as possible.
We can talk about which ones because they're not all the same. They're not all bad. And then
“finally, I think the key is to think of food and there's a quality, not calories.”
Because the food companies want us to think about food solely in terms of macronutrients and calories and that helps them, but it doesn't help your gut microbes. They want quality, they want real food and we should be thinking about the quality of the food reading and ignore calories because calorie counting just doesn't work in its nobody. Nobody in my field in
nutrition now believes in them. Yeah, this gives us so much kind of dig-on. So first with the
30 different plants in a week, that can sound really overwhelming, but that also includes things like spices, correct? A teaspoon of spices, counts as a plant. You're talking about every different type of nut and seed and there's many of those you can put them in a jar which I do every morning. So herbs, spices, nuts, seeds, even different colored vegetables, you know, you can get carrots, you can get like Persian carrots which are purple, different orange ones.
They have different chemical compositions. So as far as the microbes are concerned,
“it's a different treat for them. And yeah, it's really important. I think this goes against like”
what is viral on social media because everything is about meal prepping and making one meal and then eating it all week. That is like a big thing that a lot of health conscious people do. They're trying to eat healthy. So they're meal prepping the same meal that eating it every day. So to your point, if you're eating like different nuts or like other ways to kind of get different food into your system if you're meal prepping like that's ideal. Yeah, I mean, nothing wrong with meal
prepping. If it's a healthy meal and you wouldn't otherwise be having healthy food. But I think finding ways to enhance the plant count and vary it a little bit is really important. That's so, you know, this whole concept is really important because people have got used. They get into a
Rut.
and it seems healthy. But if you've got microbes, you know, they get bored and only those guys will survive. You know, we know from some of our studies that there's a microbes inside you that only
eats coffee. And so if you never drink coffee, this guy is never going to grow. And so there might
well be one for avocados or blueberries or bayobab, you know, and so being more adventurous is part of this and the fact that some people find it hard, they see, oh, it's too hard I can't do that. So we did actually come up at Zoe with a solution of prebiotic mix of 34 plants, most of them freeze dried. People could add to their food. So if they were meal prepping, you just add these 30 odd extra, you know, dried plants. And that gives you the diversity and we did a study
on it. It's called daily 30. And it actually beat but it had more effect on your gut microbes than
“say a standard probiotic. I think it's a different mindset of of what you need to do to eat well.”
It's to really be adventurous in what you're adding and just think what I haven't had this week.
And I know we want to discuss the difference between ultra-processed food and just process food because a lot of guidance out there is like don't eat anything in a box, don't eat anything in a can, but that's not necessarily true and that's also not practical for a lot of people. Cams are generally pretty healthy. So lots are a lot of stuff out of cans and often they're minimally processed and very nutritious. So you buy a can of beans and
if there's not too much of a sweet source on it or no source, it is ideal and there's you can get 20 different types of beans just about in the United States. Very cheap, very nutritious, good source of protein, but also it's a lot of different interesting fibers. And then you've got you know, you buy cans of tomatoes. They're actually better in a can often than buying them from a store. They've actually have they've done tests on it and so they're nutrients like lycopene,
which is preventive for some cancers like prostate cancer, there's more of it in the in the can variety than not. So cans are great, frozen, the frozen art is also really good, interestingly. So if you buy the pure stuff, I'm not talking about the ready meals, but if you're buying just some chopped vegetables, beans, peas or frozen berries, actually they're often
at least as nutritious as the fresh ones. So and that's something you can always keep in your
freezer and pull out when you need it. It doesn't have to be seasonal and they're very cheap.
“So I think the idea that cheap means processed isn't always correct and I think that's a big”
misconception. And I also think people get confused like yogurt is technically processed. Right sour dough is technically processed. So these are actually pretty healthy foods if you're getting, you know, if it has like pure ingredients and doesn't have like any funny ingredients in it, those are technically processed foods, but still very good for you, right? Virtually everything is processed to some degree. As you said, yogurt, cheese, all the dairy products,
and we know that things like yogurt have been shown to be healthy for us. So I think we need to stop worrying about that and start thinking more sensibly, has that processing lead to something unhealthy about it? And the current definitions of UPF are really far too broad, because the current definition is not a health score. It's a processing score. So it's saying how much according to these Brazilian researchers, this food has been processed in very broad categories.
They're only like four categories of them. And something can have very minimal amounts of processing that aren't harmful for your health. And yet it's included in the top category. So I think they were fine for research at population level, the sort of stuff. I do epidemiology,
“but not for an individual. And that's why we've come up with a new way of scoring this, that”
instead of 60% of all your food being UPF or you have to avoid, we've cut it down to about 25% of the real ones. And it's not just processing score. It's actually accounting for all the things in ultra-process food that are bad for you, which it's quite interesting, really, because up until recently, we had no clue what they were. We thought it was just the additives. People focused on these diet, these red dyes or something else. But that's just one part of the story. So
We took really separate categories.
But the only included additives we worried about that were having associated with some health problem, because some additives are like vitamin C, right? So you're not going to say I'm not going to eat that because it's got vitamin C in it, or iron or something else made that. So that was one category. The second was something called hyperpulitability, whether it's, as it's been designed by the food
companies to make you keep eating it and never get full. This is this so-called bliss point in the
brain that the scientists in these companies are really brilliant at. And you know, we all know that feeling where it's big bag of Doritos or Pringles or whatever it is, they've got that exactly that formula that is that combination of the sugar, the soul, the fat that just makes you keep eating and overrides those signals. So you just stuff your face. You're not really getting the normal signals
“that you should be. So hyperpulitability is the second thing that we measure and about 70% of these”
foods have that particular quality and it's good to have that warning about it. Then you've got
things like the texture of the food. So we know that food companies deliberately make food
softer and faster to eat. And so there's been some recent studies showing giving people two identical diets. And one was textured really softly. The other one, the original texture. So one was processed same basic ingredients, calories, et cetera. And those people that's about nearly 400 calories more a day just because the food was softer. And we know now that generally when you're having these these particular high risk foods, you will overeat by about 500 calories a day, which is over 20%
of your intake without knowing it. And you could have the identical food made from scratch,
the identical food made of it. Now we're starting to understand the mechanisms. And so this is why
we've come up with an app that gives you this new ultra-processed risk score. So you can scan stuff in a store and work it out. Because it's not easy in your head to work at all these different combinations. And this is what the manufacturers really rely on. It's so hard to tell because they've all got health claims on the front and they all look fantastic. And lots of healthy farmers and happy people and volunteers of vitamins dancing around. So it's understanding the basic
science of what they're trying to do allows us to then combat it and realize, okay, this is the
“anti-dote. These are the ones you have to avoid. That's really fascinating. So is the app? Is it like”
the Zoe app and is it available in the US as well? Yes, so, and it's currently free to download. So it's a finished listening, you know, it's a fantastic way and it aid to understand this whole thing. And you just use AIs, you snap a food or you're going to store and snap the the barcode and you can learn a lot from it. So yeah, download it while it's still free. So what is some quick ways, like for reading the back of a package and looking at the ingredients,
like what are some red flags to show? Okay, this is ultra-processed. And then secondly, like what are some examples of some foods that they're making softer that we should be aware of? I assume you don't have the app, you know, in a hurry, you're looking at the back.
“General, as a broad rule, the number of ingredients,”
things you don't understand if there's several, you know, you can't, you don't know what that means. That's the sign that there's lots of processing in there. If you go lots of emulsifiers in there, which of these things these clues that stick the food together, that's generally a red flag. And of course, the more they've tried to color it or add taste flavors to it, it's a sign that more they've distorted the actual original structure
of the of that food and are making it in the way that you shouldn't. It also generally they're low in fiber. So trying to look at the fiber count, if you had to look at one thing on there, generally it might say low fat on the front, that's a that's a pretty good red flag because they're generally it's cheaper for them to add in other texture products like starches that are slightly sweet and remove the fat which saves them money and so you end up having more sugar and less fat
and helping their profits. So yeah, generally look at the back, total number of ingredients,
I don't understand any of these.
some subtle ones that are quite hard. The texture of the food is really important. Food companies want you to don't want you to chew, they want you to just sort of absorb it without noticing in front of the TV and they're doing their job. So I think they've really changed most meals.
So most ready meals you buy that you just stick in the microwave, they're extremely soft. You never
get, you know, you know, it pastors never, I'll then take when you've got it in a microwave meal in the same way that it might take you time to chew. There's hardly any examples of a really tough
“product that takes time to chew and that I think is really important because it doesn't”
contain the whole food, they're too expensive or they don't store very well so you won't get the the whole grains, the nuts. You're getting the soft inner parts of the of the product rather than the whole thing and that's really the giveaway across the whole area. Everything is softer,
everything is easier to eat. Nothing really requires much in the way of chewing. So when I'm online
and I'm following all these fitness influencers, the nutritionists that are influencers, a lot of them are telling you to track your calories, track your macros, and they're really obsessed with that. I know that you have been opposing view that like calories are probably like, you know, unnecessary, you're tracking and we really need to think about the quality of our foods.
“Can you help us understand like what we actually need to be looking for and why calories is not”
the right way to look at things? Yeah well we've been brainwashed for the last 40 years into thinking that calories were the thing to eat and this was really led by the food companies but also the diet industry, the classic weight watches and all the others that came off of that because it's it's really easy to give people goals and say right success or failure, you know, you've failed it's your fault, it's not our fault. Therefore, they keep coming back and paying them more money.
But, you know, I'm a scientist foremost and when you look at the actual data of all the studies
done, even in trials where people are given amazing amount of support to do calorie-restricted
diets, you know, the most they can go is about two years and the vast majority, 80 or 90 percent have returned to their baseline weight by that time and then they tend to overshoot. So they often do worse having gone through this. So everyone, you know, most of these people are getting paid to get people into these programs, there's plenty of them, short-term programs, easy to track your food, AI now does it for you. But, you know, it works for six weeks, you lose some weight,
but then you get incredibly hungry, your body senses, you're not getting enough energy, your fullness signals are not, you're not being filled up and you will revert and those hunger signals just get dialed up and becomes unbearable, all you're thinking about is food and that's
“how we've evolved as humans. So that's why, you know, this isn't true and and as I was saying”
there's experiments which we did with ultra-pressors food, we're using identical meals in terms of calories. So if you think about it, if you only talking about calories, you could be out by 500 calories a day because you're eating the junk food with low calorie rather than the real low calorie made from scratch and you'll be having 20% more food in that day just because you're picking the junk and you're counting, you can be counting it calories.
So clearly, you know, the summings wrong with this equation, it isn't a one-size-fits-all that everybody's the same, you know, and why should you only have 2000 calories? How does that work down? We've all got different exercise levels, but it all comes this, there's a big industry around calories, diet foods, you know, short-term goals, people love a single number. We humans are suckers for the quick solution and oh well, I just need this, this is a fantastic low-calorie thing.
I can take it, it's like the magic pill, but it doesn't work like that, it's all about the hunger levels and that's why as Zoe, you know, we're trying to we say, you know, we don't mention
The sea word, right?
have more to add more to your plate, you know, which means more, you know, bring enjoyment back into
food, but going back to those whole foods that have lots of fiber in it, lots of diversity, lots of plants, but you know, still having your meat if you like it, nothing's off the table, even the occasional donut, it doesn't matter as long as you've got a long-term goal that 80% of the time you're doing the right thing and that's really our ideas to really make people think about food in a different way because it's not about a few weeks and I can lose a few pounds, it's, you know, how do I shift
everything about my body and my gut microbes in that right direction that's going to last me for
decades and help my immune system and everything else. Once you start to feel better, then it becomes
obviously and our studies have also shown that if you do this and you disregard calories, you will lose weight and you actually get that hunger. So all of the trials we do, whether it's with our pre-botic or fermented food or, you know, following the app, hunger signals go down and this is because when you're eating things like plants and in premium gut microbes, it's sending different
“signals to your brain than if you're just having low calorie junk food and I think that's really”
important, you know, we've got to get back to quality of food and not about calories and quantity.
Speaking of quality of food, you talk about something called the food matrix. Can you
help us understand like what the food matrix is? When I heard of it, I thought of like the food pyramid but I'm not sure that's the way that I should be thinking about it. No, the food matrix is really another way to amount food structure. So and it's another example of how, you know, calorie counting is way off because it will treat a bank of our whole almonds, the same as a bag of almond flour and yet we know from careful experiments that if you give people almond flour, they'll
be getting like 20% more calories from that than the raw almonds and at the energy because if you break it down as the in industrial food places do into its tiniest components, you're breaking apart the cells of the plant and when you do that, releasing sugars or fats that are stored inside there whereas if you have a whole nuts for example, one of those fats and sugars in those are not going to be absorbed until really low down or they might actually pass out in
“the toilet. So that's what we're talking about when we're structure and there's lots of examples”
whether it's nuts or chickpeas, there's another one, you know, if you have whole chickpeas rather you mash it up as hummus, there's a slight difference in that in how you absorb it and it's effect on the body. So it all comes back to the quality and the more whole foods you're eating, the better it is for your body and your metabolism, it's going to make sense from an evolutionary point of view because it also takes more time to eat gives your body time to react normally in
the way we were evolved to do and also makes fills you up as it's supposed to do is everything about industrial processes is to speed it up and if it can get you that food down, say, you know, you've finished a meal in 15 minutes or 10 minutes or whatever then your hunger centers won't have kicked in in your brain as well. So it's all part of the same idea. So structure is very important. Again it goes with texture and softness and all these things. I want to spend a moment on
your story. So I found out that your father actually passed away quite young around 50 years old of a heart condition and it was kind of unexpected and it was a turning point for you maybe not immediately but at some point when you had your own health scare. Talk to us about the things that have happened in your life that made you realize that things really need to be different and that even though you thought you were operating in a healthy way, you needed
to change your own health. Yeah well there's nothing quite like, you know, personal experience or tragedy to wake you up and, you know, for much of my 30s and 40s, you know, I was an arrogant
“cocky MD, you know, who are particularly arrogant, you know, confident because that's what we're”
trained to do. Thinking that I had the answers and that, you know, we didn't learn much about food or nutrition or medical school but no one had no one did but I still had the answers because,
The pills were the answer and everything else and you think you're incredibly...
you don't worry that long-term health. When I was 54, I had a, there's many stroke as I was,
I was on a top of a mountain in Italy and had some high blood pressure. I got better in three months but it was a bit of a shock to the system because I suddenly realized I was so close to when my father had died and it sort of got rid of that complacency in me so I, so you had a bit of a reality check and said, gosh, I'm out, you know, this 20 pounds I put on in the last 20 years, maybe it's not all muscle, you know. A lot of men just say, hey, I'm bulk enough, this is great,
you know. I didn't, I didn't look that but there was certainly been slowly accumulating and I suddenly realized my diet was pretty terrible, you know, once I started researching this, and I was writing a book on the microbiome at the time called the diet myth and I really started breaking all the part and saying, realizing that, you know, my, my breakfast was wrong, my lunch and the hospital, the sandwich and orange juice and the bag of chips was wrong.
You know, me just having lots of low fat foods and lots of pasta and bread really wasn't very good for me and so yeah, I suddenly realized that I had to change if I was going to avoid the fate of my, my father and, you know, it really drove me not only to look after myself but also to, so rewrite a lot of these nutritional guides because a lot of those, the nutritional
guidance haven't caught up with the latest science and they're, you know, always lagging at least 10 years
“behind. So that was really important to me but it was, it was, it was a bit of a journey.”
Yeah, and, and you actually basically pivoted your career at that point and you started putting yourself in conversations and, and was it hard to gain that credibility initially with other thought leaders because they're like, who's this guy? Game out of, came out of nowhere. Yeah, no, it was and yeah, you get treated like shit. Who is this guy? He hasn't, he hasn't done 10, 20 years in the field like we have but I was sort of used to it because I've changed careers a few
time. I started as a rheumatologist. I was, you know, like a board certified rheumatologist and then I got into epidemiology so I went back to school, did my thesis on that and then I got to teach myself genetics. So I got a few, you know, cold shoulders doing that as well as you can imagine. So by this time I've got over that initial thing and it's, it's probably the reason most doctors don't change specialty is doctors don't like change and they feel like
I've done, I've spent the hard yards doing all this, you know, you know, all my certificates on the
“wall, you know, why am I going to listen to this new guy? But I think it's, it's been great really”
because it gives you much broader view of everything and medicine really needs a holistic view nowadays, rather than these minute, you know, these people have these tiny specialties that miss the point and I think this is what it's unrealizing more and more. Totally and I'm sure your work with genetics really helped you understand nutrition even more and in a different way than everybody else did. Yeah, I think that's right and we realized
we only cracked genetics when we got really big numbers. So for 10 years I was writing lots of papers, you know, I've written nearly a thousand papers, it's crazy, but although I'm a rubbish, you know, they were just in the early days, you thought this was a set, this gene was a sazer with this and this is where we found the obesity gene, we found the, you know, depression gene, it was all nonsense until we got really big numbers, we're talking, you know, 100,000 people,
then we started to see some real answers and the same has been true in nutrition and that's
“driven me both, you know, nutrition and gut health. That's why we're doing studies now with”
300,000 people, which, you know, through all these members of Zoe now, though, we can really separate the wood from the trees in ways that we couldn't do before. And that's been a huge lesson for me, which, you know, the nutrition field was quite happy to look at 20 people at a time, generally, you know, US students, usually male, usually, you know, under 25, so not very generalizable. So, I think it is, yeah, experiencing other fields really important and I think
more people should definitely do it and take the plunge, although, you know, the first time you
do it's not easy. And I think more people should get involved in this food revolution that's going on,
Because it is so needed, like, it's, it's absolutely mind-blowing to me when ...
with scientists and doctors, like, you, when we just realize that so much of what we're eating is
“basically food that is not really food, but just edible and kind of mimics what food should be”
and that these scientists that work at these food companies are modifying food in a way that makes us eat more, that makes us, like, hungry all the time, that's not actually giving us nutrition, that's ruining our microbiome, like, it just seems so immoral. It is when it, it is when you put that away, but it's like, we haven't been educated and we don't get taught in school about nutrition. We've had very little way of fighting back, and, you know, as I said, we're, we're susceptible
to the, the easy solution, aren't we? You know, we, we like, we're proposed something, oh, this is the cure, you just have to take these pills. You can tap the crappy diet, but as long as you got these supplements, which make huge amounts of money for those companies, you'll be fine. And then you get these influence, there's a pay by the supplement companies to tell you exactly that. And again, people want a simple black and white solution, and, of course, it's very complex,
you know, nutrition is, is, is moving from being the most boring science subject to probably the most complex and interesting, in, in my view. So, you know, no met, no doctors went into nutrition,
“because it was too dull. That's that's the honest, that's why there are no real MD nutrition”
experts or very few of them. It was, it was incredibly dull, because, you know, after the second war war, it was all about vitamin deficiency, you know, dealing with modern food and the food
industry. So, it's sort of understandable why we're in this, but I think given that we have incredible
power over what food choices we make, at least most of us do, not everybody, you know, but those with with any sort of income, you know, we're making hundreds of food choices a week. And it's not like exercise where you have to give up, you know, several hours of every day, it's just a simple choice. You can put this in my mouth, or I can, I know, I can pick something else. And with that's what we're not, we're not realizing that we've got this incredible
power to change ourselves and to change our our destinies and live another, you know, 10 years of healthy life, just by making better food choices, not by, you know, spending lots more time in the gym. Well, this is such a great segue, because like you just said, we have agency, but we need to understand how to kind of understand the marketing that's getting pushed at us and what is real versus what is BS? So I thought we could play a little bit of a game where we talk about the grocery
“store label lies. So what do these labels actually mean and what do we need to look out for, okay?”
So the first one is when we're in the grocery store and we see something that says low calorie, a lot of people will pick that up, think that's healthy for us. Why is low calorie not necessarily healthy? Well, it's tick that and they're trash because it means that they've reduced the sugar in some way, generally it's the sugar they go for and they've replaced it with something else and that could be low quality fats like palm oil or they've added artificial sweetness and mix of those.
Or they've just given you a very small portion size, that's the other way around it. So, you know,
baby portions, but generally for me, it's a red flag, but I would never buy anything that says
low calorie on it because, you know, an S maybe, you know, you want to switch from regular coke to diet coke, which is probably slightly better for you. You know, if you got diabetes or something, yes, in those instances might be worth it, but generally it's a red flag. To me, soda and general, like, don't put it in your grocery car, right? I just avoid at all cars. Yes, it's a whole area is a massive red flag and if you're not having lots of sugar,
you're having lots of chemical sweeteners and we still don't know the long-term effects of those. Okay, if something is labeled organic, is that something that we should take seriously or does organic not really matter, such as hype? Well, it sort of depends on what product you're looking at. In general, the certification of organic in the U.S. is pre-poor, so there's lots of misclassification and misselling and you might be end up paying twice as much for something that says organic.
If it's a product, for example, that has high pesticide or herbicide use,
Buying an organic one is likely to give you less of that chemical, so a good ...
if you have oats for breakfast every day, then you'll be getting, you know, only 20% of the
“spray chemical on it, the glyphosator on your oats, if you chose the organic one and it was true.”
But for many products, it's it's it's probably not worth it. I'd rather people spend their money buying, you know, better quality fruit and veg than only getting organic. I mean, in general, they wish, you know, we should support farmers that try and do things organic because it means they are taking more care over those products. And so there are lots of exceptions, but something that's not worth, you know, if you're worried about the spraying chemicals and you're
buying an orange while you just peel the orange, you know, it's got a thick skin so you're not going
to get it anyway. Things you're having a lot of, then you might want to reduce your, those particular risks like berries and strawberries get sprayed a lot. So again, if you're having those regularly,
“might be worth it. But as a general rule, I think it's slightly overhyped. There's no big evidence”
of people shifting makes a massive difference. If you've got the money, go for it if you haven't worried about it. Now, this is a really popular one. Now, everything says the amount of protein on the front, high protein, high protein, is that becoming like the new low calorie and low fat?
Yeah, for a year or two now, there's been protein mania and food companies love it because it's
there's lots of chick protein out there. They can add in powders to anything. I've seen surveys in the US showing that 70 to 80% of people believe that if they see high protein in a product, it's healthy and they don't look beyond the protein. So it's definitely going to replace the low calorie and, you know, you see this turning up in all kinds of terrible snack bars that look, are incredibly unhealthy and they're just added with a soy protein or milk protein on the top
and it's like protein bars that we all get. Yeah, they're generally to absolutely terrible. So yeah,
“I think that's a real red flag. If you want protein, get the high quality stuff. If you want,”
you know, dairy and red, lean meat and things like this and legumes. Don't buy in a chemical form because the average American is already getting more than enough protein. There are, you know, a few people are protein deficient but the vast majority of people are necessarily sick, elderly or, you know, bodybuilding and not really going to be needing any extra. There's getting plenty. Yeah, you say there's a fiber crisis, not a protein crisis. We've got it backwards.
Yeah, that's right. You know, any 10% of people need more protein, whereas 95% of people need more fiber. It's, it's, we're really deficient in the Western world on fiber and yeah, the USA is really leading the world on that. Yeah, it's something we don't want to be number one for for sure. What about the word natural? Uh, pretty meaningless. Um, you know, opium is natural, isn't it? And, you know, it's sort of necessarily good for you. Um, so yeah, lots of natural things. Yeah,
it's a meaningless term. It doesn't have a clear definition. It's used on marketing. Again, it doesn't mean it's necessarily bad, but it is just a sign that someone's got to they're trying a bit hard to market this at you by using a meaningless term. Not full of natural goodness. And of course, you know, natural, there's this definition of natural and synthetic. So people are using flavorings and colorings, which my no, it might
say are natural in those products. Really, uh, whereas in the past, they didn't worry about that. So they realize the consumer doesn't want artificial dyes, but they would have to if there's something called a natural die made from carrots or beetroot, you know, they feel a bit happier with that. Uh, but in general, yeah, it's, it's a pretty meaningless term. When something says made with real fruit, what do you think they're typically hiding? Uh, either there's actually none in it,
or um, they're using, uh, some pulp of the, of the fruit, and they're mixing it with other things. So a lot of yogates and, uh, breakfast cereals have, say, made with real fruit. Uh, they don't have to say how much what percentage is actually real fruit. And, uh, generally, you know, you shouldn't
Have to tell a consumer.
you can't. And certainly, uh, things like children's yogates and, and breakfast cereals have these
reconstituted flavored berry flavored, um, bits of starch and, uh, crumbs that they, they pass off as fruit. And you might have had a few puree, um, at some point, so they can claim it. It's somewhere in that product is some real fruit. But, um, uh, generally, yeah, that's, that's another red flag. Is there anything we didn't talk about that we should be aware of when we're grocery shopping? There are some really difficult items when you're shopping. Um, I find bread really tough.
Getting it getting a good bread because they all claim to be the same. And it's often the ratio of the, how much sugar there is in that bread compared to them out of fibres in that bread. And that's
quite a hard calculation to do in your head. Um, so again, really carefully, uh, think because people
have a lot of bread, you know, they have it regularly. So it's, it's the items that you buy all the
“time are really important to, to scrutinize and try to get the best one. So you should be looking”
at the highest fibre content and the rest we lower, um, sugar, sugar amount. And you don't want a big list of chemicals as well. So, um, that's one I find difficult. Yogurt could be like really good or really bad too, right? Yeah, exactly. It's really hard in some parts of the U.S. I found to, to get a yogurt that has nothing in it at all, apart from the milk and the microbes. Um, you know, that vanilla's added to standard, um, you get a sweetness in there, you get, uh,
bits of fruit and whatever. So you just got to try and get the least amount of ingredients that's simplest it is, uh, that, you know, it's going to be good. And particularly children's yogurt is even worse. If you've got kids, uh, or, you know, then really important, you don't get them those brightly colored ones, which probably have got no like microbes in the mature and, uh, you know, neutralize any, any of the goodness in that in that yogurt as well. So I think, yes, the two aisles where I think,
you know, things like the children's aisle, the yogurt aisle, um, the bread aisle. That's
“really why you should become an expert. But some of these ones, you know, it may be obvious. You”
can work it out if they're so full of cartoons and messages that it's obvious. Otherwise, you may have to, you know, barcode scan it, you know, uh, with an app like Zoe's, it can be really
tough. But I think work out what you're having regularly and then always get the better version
of it, I think is, is what we should be aiming at. I learned that you had a high microplastic count in your blood at some point. How do you feel about food packaging, like, do you, are you concerned with that? I know you were talking about canned foods being okay, but I think there's a aluminum in canned foods and that could be really bad for us as well. So I looked into this and, um, I'm fairly relaxed about canned foods, you know, they've done lots of studies that've been around
for, you know, hundreds of years. Um, but I'm more concerned now about having too much plastic and obviously clear dangers of buying, uh, say bottled water in plastic, you leave them in your car, it gets a bit hot. All those chemicals leak out into the water and then if you, you know, that's probably your regular drink. That's not good. So, um, I'm trying to cut down on my plastic containers, um, as much as I can. And making sure also when you, you might microwave a heat
summing up, you take it out of the original plastic container and put it in some, uh, glass or ceramic.
“I think we just, we've got a bit complacent around plastic. Um, it's very cheap. It's, you know,”
a byproduct of the petrol industry. Um, it's, you know, it's freshly forced on us. It's very hard to avoid it. And yeah, nobody wants to be think this, you know, their brains are slowly filling up with microplastics. Um, even if we don't know exactly what they do. Again, if there's a simple choice going back to my idea of, you know, constantly making these little food choices, you know, am I going to bother putting into another bowl? Yes, you know, do I want my water bottle to be
plastic or I want it to be metal or make it something else? These are very easy choices for us to make without, you know, ruining your life and getting super stressed about it because you kind of void plastic. And I think we don't want to be so plastic phobia, um, we go the other way, which would make, uh, would probably have negative effects on your mental health. Yeah, I feel like for me, one of the biggest health changes I could make is to start to just avoid plastic more often
and avoid plastic water bottles. Like, how do you drink your water? Like, what do you use for your
Water at home?
tastes better and it's, you get the, any of those micro plastics, uh, filter out, um, so I'm quite happy to have my, my filtered water. Or if I do buy specialty waters, you know, I like, and I say Italian or, um, Spanish, uh, mineral water are buying a glass bottle. Um, and so that works for me. And yeah, and I, uh, I carry a metal, um, water bottle with me. So, yeah, I could do more, but I reckon that, you know, there's a sort of very easy way of doing this. Um, and no one really
knows, you know, I had a bar of average microplastic levels, but nobody knows what's, what's critical,
you know, hopefully I'll die before, you know, I have any problems due to them, but, um, you know,
“it's very early science. I think it's pretty many other things in our food that are worse for us than”
those, although they, they sound scary, but, you know, we're surrounded by a lot of these, you know, just starving our microbes, I think is a, is a worse crime than having a little bit of plastic every time we have a drink. So I want to close out today's interviews talking about fermented foods, you just mentioned, starving our microbes, and I know fermented foods is something our microbes, really like, you actually change your mind on this, you thought fermented foods was for, like,
hippies, and then, uh, you change your mind. So, what made you change your mind about fermented foods and what should we know about them? So, what really changed my mind was understanding a mechanism of how they might work, because the field, as a certain nutrition is, it's not well-funded,
“the studies are small, you know, some of the funded by dairy companies and et cetera, um, which,”
you know, can be biased. So I thought, well, they might have some advantages, but the evidence isn't very strong, and there's no evidence that these microbes, when you drink them, say in a, a yogurt or a kef milk kiff here, they stay in your garden, they take over, you know, so
that was always a bit odd. So how do they work if they're hanging around very long? You've got to
keep drinking them and they have this effect and how they're working, because they'd be really outnumbered in your gut, you know, because there are billions of them when you drink them, but there's trillions, hundreds of trillions of of the other guys, right? So, to be like, you're going into a football stadium and, uh, and, you know, waving a hands-around, hoping everyone's going to notice, you know, is like, that, that scale. So it was a study about three or four years ago by a colleague of
Minecraft of a gardener and, uh, and Justin Sonneberg in Stamford, where they gave, uh, 28 volunteers, really large amounts of fermented food, five portions a day, they took blood every day on these guys, and they noticed that after two weeks, they'd reduce the inflammation levels in their blood by about 25%. And that was the first time anyone had really shown in a proper, really high-level experiment that microbes have this effect, and they would think that we didn't, didn't expect, I didn't
anyway, that it would be directly on the immune system, not by just inhabiting our gut microbes. So they're tickling something in our gut that is sending signals to the rest of the body to say, calm down, relax, it's like having low dose of steroids really. And to me, that was a game change, I said, wow, suddenly we've got a mechanism here, we know how it works, and then I went
and I did it, because it was only 28 people usually, you know, young males, as, as always,
new studies. So we did a real-life study was Zoe, we got, um, we asked 9,000 Zoe members to do a citizen science study and take, um, fermented foods. They weren't fermented food people, and we asked them to take three portions a day for two weeks, and six and a half thousand did it, a thousand more dropped out, they didn't like it, but those that did go to the end and take it, over 50% of them fell better in terms of mood, energy, and hunger. And they can all be
related to inflammation and brain effects. And to me, those, those two studies are plus, you know,
“all this old literature that are around there convinced me that these have a really important”
effect on our immune system, var, I got microbes, and we should be having much more of it in our, in our diets, and, you know, they're not. And until recently, you know, they haven't been recommended, although the latest US guidelines, they've now put them back in, really, as a, uh, and they got
My krabimus for the first time this year, suddenly, I got a place.
like kombucha, yogurt, kiffer, um, any other big ones that you think we should be aware of? I remember by the four caves, so I get kombucha, kiffer, or kefir, which is fermented milk, you've got kimchi, which, uh, the national dish of Korea, which is one of the best ones, 'cause it's got so many microbes in it, uh, and then you've got crouts, so that's things like sour crab, but also could be beetroot, crout, or any vegetable you can make into a crout.
Then you've got, um, all the Japanese dishes, so anything based on soy fermented soybeans. So that includes um, um, miso, um, miso soup, miso paste, um, which I now use instead of a stock cube,
like my own miso, and, you know, suddenly it's in everything, and it tastes amazing. And then you
got other things, cool, there's a, a cycle, tibia casso, water kefir, which I think is going to get more attention, um, against a bit like kombucha, but you add fruits to it, and it's, it's really exciting, and, you know, every country has got its own fermented food, you know, apart from, um, the English-speaking countries that seem to have got rid of them, uh, pretty quickly. If you travel around, you'll get, go to Africa, you get various porigures, and, um, uh, other ferments, you
go to India. They've got, uh, lots of ferments there and laces and things like this that, um, made, made with ferments. So, uh, there are hundreds of, hundreds, if not thousands of different
ferments around the world. And, uh, yeah, you can either buy them in a store, make them yourself,
“you know, that's why I wrote my book Ferment, which is really trying to stand the science of this,”
and, uh, try to get more people, uh, having ferments, because I think the goal should be to get trying it three ferments a day. And, um, if you also think that, some of the things you don't think of as fermented, you've got cheese, of course. And, just going to make sure it's real cheese, it doesn't come in a plastic wrapper, but, uh, and I've, I've had a cheese on my shelf that, uh, from that famous, uh, brand craft that's lasted five years, uh, still nice and orange and shiny.
There's not only microbes there, but interestingly, we'd, I did do an experiment on Philadelphia cream cheese, one of America's favorite. That's got some life microbes in it. So that pre-means it's also good for you. So there's lots of stuff out there.
“Meas got to, again, think about food in a different way. You know, what can I add?”
And you can add these things to your meals. You can, you know, start using your good or cafe or instead of cream. Um, you can, um, put all these, these mixes, you can put your crowds to soups or curries, um, lots, lots of things you can, you can do that, get ferments in your diet and start slowly. You don't have to go hardcore as the other thing. Now for the listener who's an entrepreneur and they're obsessed with hustling, working hard,
productivity, performance, thinking clearly, and maybe their motivation for eating right isn't necessarily, like, longevity. But it's more about how do I, like, decrease my brain fog, have a better mood and be more productive. What do you want to say to them? All the experiments we've done at Zoe have shown that the first effects have been proving your diet from a gut point of view are in the brain. And if you value your brain, um, and you want to improve your
mood and your energy, your tiredness, then a gut-friendly diet is the way to go in it. It doesn't matter whether you're just shifting yourself a little bit towards more fiber and more diversity, give yourself fermented foods, or you're actually taking, you know, our pre-botic supplement on top of your food, they all work. And, you know, my mood has really improved since I started doing this
“in, and it's something people don't associate with food. I think that's the other important thing”
good. We're never told, you know, oh, what you have for breakfast could influence how you feel
three hours later, but it does. And you only notice it when you start to record it. And that's what we're trying to do is to get people to make this link between the food they choose or what they at last night, you know, how much gap they left overnight. But, you know, by me, if I went back to my old way of braving breakfast, which was, you know, a granola, an orange juice, a bit of low fat, milk and tea, or maybe a bagel or a croissant, you know, compared to what I have now, which is, you know,
A yoga, a kefir, nuts seeds, my daily 30 and some berries.
you know, I don't need, you know, a double coffee and chocolate biscuit or a snack at 11 o'clock in the morning. I just, you know, I'm full and I'm mentally focused. So, I'd say to anyone listening, give it a go and you'll notice the difference in two weeks. If you think about, you know, if you're recording what your energy and mood levels are before and after, and you're focused on it, hopefully in the app, we haven't got it there yet, but we're going to start having a way of
“people contract their mood and energy, which I think will be a real step forward in this because”
doctors never ask it. It's just not something that we don't talk about, really. You know,
we always assume it's other factors. It's the fact that we're going to busy life and sleep well, you don't actually make that link with food, but it is. I've learned it's really crucial. So, to recap, 30 different plans a week, three different fermented foods a day, any other big ones that you want to call out. Yeah, lots of bright color on your plate. So, you're eating the rainbow. You've got leave a gap, so no late night snacking, so you're going
at least 12 hours overnight, switch, you know, protein source, get lots of legumes in there, beans, lentils, chickpeas, all those things are really good for you. Cut out your UPS as much as you
can. Maybe, you know, use our appetite, you know, if that's helpful for you. And forget about
“calories, and I think do all those things, and you'll be a new person. Amazing. Well, Tim,”
thank you so much for joining us on Young Improveding Podcasts. Where can everybody learn about what you do, and where can they find you? Follow me on Instagram and all the things I mean, talking about, there's research studies at Zoe.com. Our website there has got all our research papers, we've got over 70 research papers from the team there, as well as the products that are available. And yeah, so, and we also have a podcast, Zoe, nutrition and science podcast is also
another free to listen to for anyone who's out, but wants to know dive deeper into this area. The Zoe podcast and YouTube channels actually like huge, so we'll stick all those links in the show notes, I found it really entertaining and educational. So, Dr. Tim, thank you so much for joining us on Young Improveding Podcasts. Be a little pleasure. Yeah, fam, this conversation with Tim challenged one of the biggest assumptions we've been taught about nutrition. That if we eat healthy
foods, we all get the same healthy results. Tim's research showed that even identical twins with identical genetics can have dramatically different gut microbiomes. That helps explain why some meals can leave one person energized while the other person feels depleted and hungry. It's a great lesson to stop chasing generic advice from social media and start paying attention
to your own body signals. When it comes to nutrition, personalized data will always be trendy
one-size-fits-all solutions, and that's really the future of health care and nutrition. Tim also encouraged us to stop obsessing over calorie counting and start focusing on food quality. As he said, think of foods in terms of quality, not calories. Calories don't tell you how a food impacts your microbiome, your hunger, your immune system, or what long-term health benefits they have. Instead, focus on feeding the trillions of microbes that help power your body.
Aim for roughly 30 different plant foods each week. This can seem overwhelming, but it also includes herbs, spices, nuts, and seeds. Add fermented foods like Kefir, Kimchi, Sour Crout, or Yogurt into your routine, and rather than avoiding all processed foods, which some processed foods, like frozen foods and canned beans, are actually good for you. Learn to recognize and limit ultra-process foods that are engineered to keep you eating more and hungry.
For entrepreneurs, this isn't just a health conversation. It's a performance conversation. Your focus, energy, resilience, and decision making all depend on the fuel that you give yourself. As Tim told us, we make hundreds of food choices every week. Those choices add up so the next time you're standing in the grocery store, don't just ask how many calories are in this. Ask yourself,
“what is this doing for the person I'm trying to become, and is this healthy for my microbiome?”
Thank you for joining me on this episode of Young and Profiting. Every week, you're investing in your growth, your future, and the impact you want to make in the world. So if this episode changed the way that you think about what's on your plate, share it with a friend, family member, or anyone who needs a more freeing way to think about food. Until next time, it's your host, Halataha aka the podcast princess signing off.
