← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Weight Loss Myths: Doctor Explains Why Everything You Have Been Told About Diet & Exercise is Wrong! | Tim Spector
02:03:27
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- [00:01]
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Tim Spector
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- [00:44]
Tom Bilyeu
talk about Tim Spector, an award winning scientist and professor of genetics who joined me today to expose the weight loss lies we've been holding onto as truth for way too long. Tim is the co founder of zoe, the weight loss program and nutrition study designed to take all of you, your gut, your diet, blood sugar response and more into account to help you reach a healthy weight. Today, Tim is explaining why you don't want to rely on counting calories for weight loss and or better health. The healthy foods you and millions of Americans are choosing are some of the worst foods you could possibly choose. In fact, they're making you more unhealthy and even more overweight. Tim takes it even further and says that exercise is not a great way to lose weight or start a weight loss journey for most people. So how do you break the trap of not losing weight, making poor choices you think are healthy, and finally start having more energy and long term success with sustainable weight loss. We cover all of that and more in this episode. And if conversations like this are making a difference in your life, make sure you're following the show so you never miss an episode and are the first to know when new episodes are released. It really is the best way to support the podcast so that we can find other people just like you and help them live healthier lives and become legendary. I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory. Tim Spector, welcome to the show.
- [02:05]
Tim Spector
It's great to be here.
- [02:06]
Tom Bilyeu
Excited to have you. So I think if people want to lose weight, the odds are that they are barking up the wrong tree. So I want to ask you a few questions to help people understand what matters and what doesn't. So if somebody's trying to lose weight, do they need to be counting calories?
- [02:23]
Tim Spector
No, it's one of the worst things they can do.
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Tom Bilyeu
Okay, I Think that's going to surprise people. What about exercise?
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Tim Spector
Very unlikely to help most people lose weight, maybe help you keep it off, but as a starting point, it's a bad way to do.
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Tom Bilyeu
Again, very shocking. And in terms of are there things that have been billed as healthy that people would be surprised to find out are actually moving them backwards?
- [02:49]
Tim Spector
Yeah, there are a number of foods that people regard as healthy. Things like juices, orange juice, things like oatmeal porridge, things like brown whole meal breads, lots potentially other fruits in large amounts. And whole range of foods that are told are low calorie, low fat, low fat dairy, low fat yogurts. The yogurts that children get given are all super unhealthy. And most people be surprised by that.
- [03:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I think people will be very shocked to hear that, especially the calories part. So why, how is it possible, given what we know about thermodynamics, which say that if you're taking that energy in, it can't be created or destroyed, so something has to happen to it. So how is it possible that if I'm trying to lose weight, that calories isn't the place that I start? And if exercise is burning calories, how is it that I'm not going to be able to leverage that to get lean? What is it that people are getting wrong?
- [04:02]
Tim Spector
They're treating the body as a simple furnace, like a tube where you just burn stuff in it and it comes out and you measure everything. Whereas it's a much more complex machine that is adapting to what's going in. And evolution has given us this really fine control mechanism over our bodies that we haven't really reckoned with. So that the, even if the inputs stay the same or change our outputs, the amount of food we're burning is altering. And it's been very hard to measure. But we do know that our bodies are always trying to get us to stop losing energy, losing weight, and they're trying to maintain us in our current state. And that's been the big mistake we've made. So we've assumed that just by some simple averages or calculations, we can guess how many calories the average person burns a day and then simply work out, okay, we just have 500 calories less than that and you'll lose weight. And a, those calculations are wild guesses because most people are not average. And also there's a fallacy that your body doesn't change. So once you reduce your calories, your body is fighting to get those calories back, so it slows down your metabolism and it ramps up all the signals to your brain, making you hungrier and make you much more likely to overeat at your next meals. And so this happens without you knowing about it. And that's why people struggle if they're only reducing calories to make any inroads long term in their health. Everyone will lose some weight the first few weeks the, that whatever diet you tried. But long term, the vast majority of people return to where they were because the hunger levels just build up to a level you cannot sustainably ignore. And your metabolism means that you need less and less food. So if you're going to continue losing weight, you've got to keep eating less and less because your body's fighting it. And the same thing happens more or less with exercise. We know that it gets harder and harder to lose weight and that people who, you know, the trajectories of weight loss are really quite rapid initially. And then you maintain exactly the same intake in very strict conditions and, and you just tails off. So your body's just fighting the whole, the whole thing. All the cellular processes are, everything's geared to minimizing any energy expenditure and it's all done without you knowing about it. And that's pretty universal. There might be some, some range, but as a, as a response to that calorie restriction, that's what happens. So it's why you can't just carry on losing weight. Your, your, your body is bringing you back up to the level it wants to be. And that's evolutionary wise, we are. Our survival was dependent on us going through a few days without eating and then getting our strength back and retaining that. So through most of our history.
- [07:24]
Tom Bilyeu
So it's what's controlling that.
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Tim Spector
It's our evolutionary genes driving it. And hunger is the primary mechanism we've got as well. So there's. So you've got two things. You've got the metabolism and you've got the hunger signals to the brain. And the metabolism is being slowed right down. And it's definitely a brain mechanism primarily, but it's probably being fed by signals from the gut, the microbiome signals as well. Definitely a key role in that. But we know, you know, these appetite signals are crucial and we can see this with the new Ozempic drugs. They're blocking those, that hunger drive. And as soon as you block that, then you know you can lose weight. But if you don't block it, it's sort of virtually impossible for most people to just fight that continually because it just gets ramped up and ramped up and ramped up. So you're just thinking about food all the time. And your body is designed to get back to where it was. And so the idea of relying just on calories as a weight loss tool has been shown to be flawed in numerous controlled trials because eventually your body wins. And let me ask if you don't change other aspects of eating and you're just obsessed with the calories and that, and that's if you can count the calories anyway. Because most of these trials are not real life. They're done in highly controlled scenarios with nurses ring you up and, you know, confirming what you're eating and, you know, it's the best possible scenario. And even in those scenarios, 80% of people have failed at two years.
- [09:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Meaning they put the weight back on.
- [09:27]
Tim Spector
Yes.
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Tom Bilyeu
Can you lose fat without being in a caloric deficit?
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Tim Spector
Yes, you can obviously do that by increasing your muscle to fat ratios. But I mean, ultimately calories are still important. But I don't think we understand the, the subtle balance and the fact that food also has other mechanisms triggering hunger that aren't related just to calories. So the nature of the food, the quality of the food is something that we're uncovering which we never have in the past talked about. So we've been so obsessed with the calorie, you know, there's all kinds of problems with the calorie. It's not very accurate to measure, you know, and it ignores the structure of food. So the way we've been counting them is wrong. A great example is a study we did in the, in the Zoe Predict studies where we gave, and in these studies we gave everyone, a thousand odd people identical meals at the same time, muffins. And everyone responded very differently to these muffins. But some people responded with a sugar dip at three hours. I don't know if you had any sugar dips, but when you were using CGMs. But one in four males, one in three females get a marked sugar dip below baseline after they've had a carb meal three hours before I do.
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Tom Bilyeu
Not much to my dismay.
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Tim Spector
Well, no, it's good. You don't want to dip because those people, they were blinded, they didn't know they were dipping, but they reported greater hunger, lower mood, less energy, and they overate by about 15% that day. So identical calories. A different response. Just because the nature of the food, and we were giving people the equivalent of ultra processed food, which is what the average American diet is in its highly refined form. It Had a very different effect. And you could give identical calories in a different format, different structure, you would get a different result. And so there's another famous study from the NIH where they gave people two weeks of whole foods and two weeks of ultra processed foods and identical calories and macronutrients and the ultra processed food group over at. So they were overeating by equivalent 300 calories a day. And so if you only had calories as your objective and you go back to this, you know, it's the law of physics and all this kind of stuff, you miss the point about food being so much more complex. And it's about the structure of the food and we're not accurately measuring the calories because you get very different responses to the theoretical identical calories.
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Tom Bilyeu
I don't think people know what you mean by structure. I have a guess, but I'm not sure that I'm right. But before we get into the structure of the food one, I want to plant a flag to say that the people are having a different response to the exact same food. So even if the structure of the food is the same, different people are going to have different responses.
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Tim Spector
Yes.
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Tom Bilyeu
I've also heard you say that the genes that we've identified so far that have to do with weight loss or actually in the brain, which I thought was utterly fascinating, but I want to make this really human for a second. So there are people in my life who I love very much, and I know they are good people, they are smart people, but they absolutely cannot lose fat. Do you have people like that in your life? And what do you think is the problem? Because I have a hypothesis as to why they can't lose fat. And if they would just do what I tell them, they would lose it. But I'm curious, do you have people like that in your life, seriously, who
- [13:23]
Tim Spector
can't lose weight or.
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Tom Bilyeu
Well, I use the word fat on purpose because of course, losing muscle is going to be a very different experience than losing fat. But yeah, for the average person, they just think of it as losing weight. But I am talking about adipose tissue.
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Tim Spector
Well, there are definitely some people who find it harder to lose weight than others. There's no doubt.
- [13:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you have people in your life that struggle with this?
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Tim Spector
Yes, I've got.
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Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so now imagine those people. You don't have to out them, obviously, but what's the problem? Is the problem, do they lack discipline? Are they not smart enough to pull this off? Like, what is the, the trap that they're caught in? Because they know you. So the odds of this being that they just don't know what to eat is effectively zero. But they're still not doing the things they need to do to lose weight. So what's the trap?
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Tim Spector
For many people, I think it's they have a drive that is making them hungry and they're getting increased hunger signals compared to other people say, like me. So their brain is always telling them to eat more. And although that's often not mentioned, I think that's one of the big drivers that once they've got into a state, they are regularly eating more and their brain is saying eat carbs rather than other things.
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Tom Bilyeu
For example, does it really just come down to there's something, it's compelling them to eat more, but this is still a calorie problem, or is it compelling them to eat carbohydrates and that's our problem?
- [15:03]
Tim Spector
I think it's the latter. So I think it's that they're pointed towards foods that are likely be fattening for them. They could have arugula, but it's not going to fill them up. Therefore, you know, their brain is saying, you've got to have something else, have some bread with it or whatever it is. And they're not satiated in the same way that other people would be. Not don't get that sensation of fullness. Those hormones are not kicking in. And, you know, it's a bit of a vicious circle because these people are, because they're getting these sudden impulses to eat. They're not able to plan all their eating as well as other people. They have these huge drives of their body to do this. And we see this all the time in everyday life. If you've ever lost, had a really poor night's sleep for some reason, your brain tells you, and we've done this in the Zoe predict studies, that it, it tells you to overeat. And we've seen it, people eat carbs much more after a poor night's sleep than if I had a good night's sleep.
- [16:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Why?
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Tim Spector
Well, our brain is, is doing something that we, we don't understand why, but it's because it's stressed. And I think it's just a hypothesis that the stress, you know, related to not sleeping. Perhaps your body say, oh, you need energy. You know, it's like some evolutionary idea you might need to run or, you know, you get quick energy, go for these kind of foods. And it's also a comfort food. If you had a really bad night, you know, you like A bit of comfort. You know, you feel terrible and so it's a way of pleasing your brain. So, so we're hardwired on all these things that we don't realize are really, are really happening. And no one's really studied these things between, you know, exercise and sleep and food and on our mood and all these because we've been so obsessed with this blind alley of calories.
- [17:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so when you were talking about they've got this drive, they want to eat carbohydrates, you get comfort out of doing it. My question would be, from an evolutionary standpoint, nature only has pleasure and pain as sticks to prod you to do what it wants. So it wants you to eat these things. What is, is the reason? Just quick energy because you might be in danger, or is there something else going? Because I'm trying to figure out why after a bad night's sleep. So one after a bad night's sleep, it's something like you have the insulin sensitivity of a diabetic. So your body's basically saying, I don't want the fat in my cells, I want to leave it in my bloodstream and I want you to go eat. It is the exact metabolic state you would be in if you were about to hibernate. So my question is, do you have a guess? I'm sure there's not a study on this yet, but do you have a guess like why if you get bad sleep or you're stressed or whatever, does your body go, oh, I'm going to treat this like we're about to hibernate. I'm going to get you to eat the most glucose spiking things. I can make you insulin insensitive, so it's not going to go into the fat. Why that seems so cruel. But obviously there was an evolutionary advantage to this at some point.
- [18:26]
Tim Spector
Well, your guess is as good as mine. I just think it's the body's just picking up a stress. It's, it's saying this guy's, you know, anxious, stressed, has not slept. Maybe there's some threat. Maybe they're in a war situation. Maybe they have to leave the cave and go walk for three days, you know, without eating. And you know, we weren't programmed to be living in the modern world. We're programmed, you know, thousands of thousands of years ago. Our genes haven't really changed. So it's fight and flight idea, I guess it's getting the wrong signal and that's. But everyone's experienced it, I think, you know, in and similar with perhaps with hangovers and things like this that, you know, this is some shock to the body and it behaves out then out of character and then this actually makes the whole thing worse. But it, it wasn't designed perhaps to do that. But, so, so I, but I think we're at very early stages of working out the links between sleep and eating and mood. We just haven't studied it in detail. And that's why we're getting this amazing data in real time, you know, from wearables and other gadgets that just allow us to collect this incredible stuff. So I think in the future, you know, we're gonna, at Zoe, we're thinking about, you know, linking the sleep data to warnings about your breakfast and saying you'll, you know, give you a little warning, say, hey, your brain's about to tell you this. You should be, you know, doing the opposite quickly get. Because you know, some yogurt inside you,
- [20:05]
Tom Bilyeu
you know, because what, what triggers that warning? What do you know? What data are you collecting?
- [20:10]
Tim Spector
Well, it would be say, sleep duration or sleep quality.
- [20:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, oh, oh. So you recognize you had a bad night's sleep. Here's what your body's gonna give you the impulse to do. Very interesting. Is that part of the Zoe predict?
- [20:23]
Tim Spector
Well, we collected the data as part of the Zoe predict study, but these are just future ideas to go into the Zoe product. It's not there yet. But these are all. As we're collecting more and more data and we've now got over 50,000 people's information and it's growing rapidly, we're being able to dissect these things and start to personalize that information even more. Not just based on your diet and your age and hormone level, menopause, et cetera, but, you know, day to day differences in exercise level or sleep levels. So that we can just start to give people those, those heads up about. Hang on, your brain's trying to tell you to do one thing, but you know, we know that's not good. And you know, if you are just carb loading after a bad night's sleep, you'll eat you. You tend to all these people in our study after a bad night's sleep over at. So you can see how people get into these vicious cycles very easily. And they're overeating on carb heavy stuff. So you're getting, as you said, more, more, more sugar spikes, more insulin. And, and maybe that also means you might eat late and therefore you don't sleep as well. The whole thing keeps going. So it's it's trying little tricks to get people out of these, these bad habits.
- [21:44]
Tom Bilyeu
It's very interesting. So I want to give people a quick breakdown of what I see as your sort of general thesis, because you've brought up Zoe a couple times, which is your company. But the idea of Zoe is that, hey, boys and girls, the reason that you're having such a hard time is the one size fits all notion of eat less calories. One ignores variance in food, but two, maybe more importantly, it ignores variance in your individual metabolic risk reality. I'm calling it that. But I really mean your genes, I mean your microbiome. Probably most importantly, because you've done some fascinating work on twins. And even twins have different outcomes and different responses to eating the same thing. They're clones. You wouldn't expect that, but in fact, you do because our microbiomes end up becoming very divergent. And if there's anybody listening to this that's never heard of a microbiome, inside of your guts are just a bazillion bugs, microbes, a whole bunch of different things that help you process food. And depending on what you eat and what bacteria you have and fungi and viruses, like all kinds of things, will determine metabolites, which then signal your body. It's a whole cascade of things that happen that's highly individualized. Okay, so setting that stage, I want to go and finish the loop on this idea of what response your body is having to a stressor. So a year ago, I was going through the most stressful period of my life. It was insanity. And I found myself walking across a room, opening a cupboard and grabbing food before I realized that I had gotten up and I was like, whoa, this is a very powerful impulse. And so I started thinking of that as the, the metabolic anxiety response. So if anxiety from an evolutionary perspective is valuable because it makes you take a potential threat seriously, that, oh, I should plan in this way, and the anxiety makes you really do something about it, keeps you from being lazy in the face of a real existential problem. That's my gut instinct about why you find yourself in what, what I'll call foraging behavior, that you just sort of click over almost like a zombie, and you're just going to go do the things that you would need to do to get that food. Because the body's like, yo, we might have a problem. There's already some sort of stressor in this case from lack of sleep. That makes a lot of sense to me and gets at some of the complexity that I think that you're trying to lay out. Now, I want to bring that into this discussion of, okay, we both know these people, amazing people, smart. These are not problems of necessarily even willpower. And I, look, I will say if they can stop themselves from eating enough calories on a long enough time period, they are going to lose weight. But it is a very different battle than just like do, don't do it. As you said, it ratchets up and ratchets up and ratchets up. And it can be very, very difficult. So the, the punchline I think to all this is that this becomes so highly individualized that if you don't take control of your situation, if you don't start running n of 1 experiments on yourself and see what works for you, what doesn't work for you, you're never going to be able to get a hold of it. And I may over index here and I'll be curious to get your feedback. So to the people that I love, I'm talking to you now, that are struggling with your weight, this is a microbiome question. And you now have to start thinking about eating to alter your microbiome. Because your microbiome is going to signal to your brain to say, I got in here because you eat McDonald's french fries. And so you'll crave McDonald's french fries. And so until you force yourself to eat for an extended period of time, the things you quote unquote, ought to eat, the things that will give you the body composition that you want, you'll never win the war.
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Tim Spector
Yeah, you're never going to win the war if you've got an unhealthy set of gut microbes that are fighting against you. I think that's the, that's the key here. And I think it's the other way of thinking about nutrition is rather than, you know, just worrying about the inputs, it's just saying, well, you should be nourishing these guys who are these magical pharmacies that can help you pump out all the right chemicals to send you the signals of fullness, to dampen down inflammation, stop the stress messages going around your body and you know, allow you to deal with all these situations and improve your immune system and your, those brain commands. And I think that's a really important message. And if you are, you know, you've lost the battle for a few years, you're eating junk food, you, you are going to have a gut that's really low in diversity of gut microbes. You won't have many of the good Guys left that have been wiped out, been taken over by the, the bad guys. Who are these microbes that love inflammation. They love actually these stress chemicals. They love the fats and saturated fats that are coming from your fast food.
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Tom Bilyeu
So sorry, before you move on, I need to understand that better. So when you say that they love the stress chemicals, what does it mean? Can they metabolize the chemicals? Like what, how is it?
- [27:13]
Tim Spector
Well, we don't know exactly, but when they've done all kinds of experiments, both in mice and humans, where you say give people junk food from, you change dramatically their diet from healthy to unhealthy, you get an increase in these microbes which are always associated with inflammation. So when you look in the blood levels, you see these markers of blood inflammation, which is this like low level stress in the body, like little mini fires going around throughout the body and they take over. So it's like we think it, there's a subtle change in maybe the acidity of the gut in tiny amounts. And it takes a tiny tweak for one, one group of microbes to outcompete the others. So these guys are the pro inflammatory microbes and the anti inflammatory ones who are normally, they're dampening down. These fires are really, they've got nothing to eat.
- [28:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so that hypothesis makes a prediction. Let me see if this is accurate. So if I were to not change the diet at all, but I were to dial up or down the inflammatory response of the body, if I dial it down, would those microbes start dying off without changing the diet, just changing through medication or whatever the inflammation?
- [28:32]
Tim Spector
Probably, I don't think we know absolutely, but we think it's working in both directions. So it's partly a response to the inflammation and partly a cause. So when you look at someone who's got a chronic inflammatory condition, whether it's ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, some autoimmune condition, and all their blood markers of, you know, these stress are high. You see more and more of these, these microbes appearing. And if you transplant them from say one mouse to another, you can make that mouse's gut more inflamed. So it's both a cause and a consequence of it. So it's not as clear cut, but it's a bit of both. But if you can like you give people steroids, you reduce that inflammation, they won't be doing as well because they, they're thriving in that particular environment. You know, it's a bit like when you do fermented Foods and you tweak the environment. You get a bit of acid, lactic acid produced yogurt. That tiny change in ph means one group out competes another. And I think, we think this is what's happening in the human gut, that there's some stress chemicals in there we can't yet measure. But these microbes are super sensitive to. That means that one group suddenly out meets another. These guys take over. These are the guys that want more McDonald's and are sending the wrong messages to the immune system and the gut and altering your metabolism, making it harder to lose that weight, make you hungrier doing all these things. So going back to your initial idea, yes, in order to start to lose weight properly, you've got to deal with your gut microbiome. You've got to redress this good, good guy, bad guy balance that we, we see. You know, in all 50,000 people, we see this quite clearly. There are these good guys, bad guys, and it's absolutely correlated with not only weight but also health, all the health outcomes. So if you can get people to eat more healthily, then once you've reestablished the gut microbiome, then you can start to much better control your weight. But you can't just do it just like that with the crummy microbes.
- [30:59]
Tom Bilyeu
How changeable is our microbiome?
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Tim Spector
Studies have shown that if you go for a dramatic change, say from total meaty to American starter vegan, you can see a change within a week. And others, other studies have shown you can change it quite several weeks if you make a big enough change. Things like fermented foods can have quite a big impact within just a couple of weeks on your diet. And it has a bigger impact the worse you are. So the worse your starting point, the easier it is to change. It's quite hard to improve someone who's really good to get them better is quite tough. But if you've got a really sparse set of microbes, they're quite easy to change. And we see that with fecal transplants. We put poo transplants in people. They work best in people who've really got hardly any decent microbes. They've got terrible infectious diseases, works really well, doesn't work very well when it's high complex saturation. But it overall, it's an optimistic message. Most people can within a few days improve their gut microbes just by feeding them the right things and reduce them, the bad guys, very quickly.
- [32:21]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so is from a, a fecal transplant standpoint, does that last? Because I had heard that maybe it works for a couple weeks, and then you start reverting back to your baseline. And my wife went through a very dramatic microbiome issue, and we have found it brutally difficult to rehabilitate her. It took us years. And it got so bad at one point I was considering a fecal microbial transplant. I was just a little worried that we don't yet know enough about what you're transferring over. So we didn't. But. And I am perfectly willing to accept that we just didn't do it well. But our experience was that it's. Even though. Because she got tested and she had like. They were like, whoa. Your variety is, is just atrocious. It's so low. And we just found building back up has been really, really hard.
- [33:19]
Tim Spector
Yeah, well, it can be. And I, I've got an example of my son who I got to volunteer to do the McDonald's diet for 10 days. And because he was a student and he liked McDonald's and he was happy for me to pay for him and he thought it was all quite fun, as I did. And he, he did this at all his meals at McDonald's for 10 days
- [33:49]
Tom Bilyeu
straight with any effort to be healthy or literally just give me a number one with a large Coke.
- [33:54]
Tim Spector
Yes. He didn't supersize, and so he just did the regular. And he found he couldn't eat more than twice a day. Initially, the idea was to go for all three meals, but he, he started to feel a bit nauseated. So he. But yeah, it was. I get just, just the, the Big Mac and the nuggets with the odd McFlurry and Cokes. And he didn't feel well at all. But he'd lost 40% of his gut microbes. Whoa. In that, in that time amount, like
- [34:28]
Tom Bilyeu
by volume or by diversity?
- [34:30]
Tim Spector
By diversity. Okay, so we, we. This is a while ago, we measured it with a 16s test, which is a fairly crude measure, and it was an N of one study. So, you know, there's some give and take on those results. But that was quite shocking that, you know, I'd done this to my son and tried to feed him up, and it's proven remarkably difficult in him too. So I'm right at the top 5% of outs my diversity in microbiome. He's still in the bottom 10%. And it's been a struggle in it. But I think it was interesting that some people, you know, may have susceptible microbes, particularly that, you know, going through a time like a student, when you eat terribly, you've Got no budget, you know, you just eat whatever you can. May go such a long time without fiber and nutrients for the microbes that they, many of the good guys just, just die off and find it hard to get going again. So there are these, these scenarios. But coming back to the fecal transplant question, it is highly effective for some infectious diseases. So 90% are cured with a single transfusion. If you've got something called recurrent clostridium difficile and it's an official treatment now across, across the US for that, is
- [35:54]
Tom Bilyeu
that done orally or did they go in rectally and deposit at very specific places in the.
- [36:00]
Tim Spector
It doesn't seem to matter. There's three different way giving it. You can have it through an endoscope, through, in a nasal. You pass down through your nose into your, into your stomach and then put down just below the stomach. You can have colonoscopy or you have it by mouth with these dried capsules which have acid resistant coats. They go through the stomach which. Affectionately known as crapsules.
- [36:28]
Tom Bilyeu
So gnarly the idea of eating that's yeah, absolutely brutal.
- [36:33]
Tim Spector
Well if you're that ill and you're going to the toilet 30 times a day, you believe me, you'll do anything. So. And it's a 90% success rate with a single go. But when they've looked at other diseases it's been much more difficult to get an improvement. And the initial idea that you could cure things like obesity with these is shown to be a false dawn really hasn't happened. And so it's only other, the only other one that works really well is another inflammatory condition of the bowel called ulcerative colitis. And there you do get absolute remission. So it's a cure in about one in five people and can be dramatic. But other conditions, as you said it, some people get remission, but others do need multiple top ups and things like. So it's proven much more difficult than I think we thought it was going to be maybe 10 years ago when the first results came out. So it could be because we're also different and we're not matching the donor and the recipient to colonize. It's a bit like a, you know, doing blood, blood transfusions or marrow transfusions. If you've got different immune cells, you know, they might be fighting it off. So that's one reason they, they probably don't work. So I think it's still an evolving science and it could still be potentially beneficial if you find what the key say 10 microbes are, then you could create them in probiotic pills and, and give them. So people, a lot of companies still working on it and it is proving to be very useful in cancer treatment as well. So that's, that's one area that's really big and so, you know, that's big source of optimism. And the cancer successes really underscore how important the microbiome is for your immune system. And all the new successes in cancer are due to us invigorating the immune system. And people with poor gut microbiomes and poor diets do very badly on these immunotherapy drugs. And there are. Whereas if you've got good microbes, good healthy diet, good plant based diet, you're twice as likely to survive.
- [38:48]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you have a quick way to describe what a good microbiome looks like?
- [38:52]
Tim Spector
It's one that has a lot a wide range of different species. So that's what we call diversity. And it's also one that has a high risk ratio of good healthy bugs compared to unhealthy bugs. And we.
- [39:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Is that a fair breakdown or is it context specific? So this bug is good if you have, you know, this much diversity and you're eating apples, but that bug is bad if you have low diversity and you're eating McDonald's fries. But it's the same bug but in a different setup or. No, there are just some, if you get them, these are problematic.
- [39:31]
Tim Spector
Well, what you said is true for some bugs. There are some bugs that if, if you live in Africa are very healthy and they're very unhealthy. If you live in America because of
- [39:43]
Tom Bilyeu
the food you're intaking or something.
- [39:44]
Tim Spector
We don't know the environment, the air, animals, the soil or that, you know, it's just different the environment they're living in. So they're, they can't cope with that environment and they, it's abnormal. So we've known that. But within the Zoe study, we've now got these 50,000 gut microbiomes, it's the biggest study in the world. And we've got their diet data and we've got the health data. And so we've now worked out whole series of microbes that are associated with healthy foods and healthy health outcomes and a whole series of microbes that are associated with junk foods, bad, you know, bad unhealthy foods and unhealthy outcomes. And we know that these are common in most people. So we're excluding the rare ones that, you know, we've all got the unique ones to us, but these are the common ones. And so using that score, that's by far the best predictor of what we think is a healthy gut microbiome. And it's an evolving science. So we've got bats based on 50,000, but when we get to 500,000, it might change. And it's quite different between just Americans and Brits. Be a subtle difference in some of these. We are seeing quite big differences in a few species, just even in what you think would be similar diets in similar countries. I'm Kiana, and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business, but Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like, I can't stop. I'm addicted. Start your free trial@shopify.com when you manage
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- [42:07]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, so let's go back to what you need to eat in order to alter your microbiome. And one thing I want to say very quickly, reading your book, you said that kids, their microbiome is actually more. You didn't say plastic, but I'll say plastic. More changeable than adults. I'd be very curious as to why. And then I want to get into the. What are the specific things that the. I totally understand there's no one size fits all, but I'd love to get a general sense of eat like this.
- [42:41]
Tim Spector
Okay, so kids, the reason they're flexible is we're not. We're not born with a complete gut microbiome. So we're born pretty much sterile. And we acquire our set of microbes, our colony. We sort of put it together like a jigsaw puzzle in different ways after the birth process. So. And this happens to all male. All mammals. And so the fact that the birth process is so messy and you got blood and vaginal fluid and poo and Everything. And it. And the baby's face is actually smeared in. It is actually for a reason. It was messy for a reason. And that's the way the microbes get into the, into the infant gut and they start to colonize it. And that's a crucial part of our evolution because you need those bugs in there, you know, to break down the complex sugars in breast milk and break them down so you can get the nutrients from them. So we've all had to do that as babies acquire these microbes from this rather messy process that you think would have been better done by evolution. And that's the first thing that happens. And then once you get the breast milk, then you start to get other microbes coming in from the skin of your mother and the environment and you slowly build up this more complex set of gut microbes that become your adult one and you acquire them. But it's. It's a bit of a random process and varies a lot depending on your environment. And if you're born by cesarean section, you might have a completely different early set of microbes. They end up being quite similar, but the first year or two they'd be quite different.
- [44:30]
Tom Bilyeu
I've heard there's a link between cesarean births and autism that may be tied to microbiome. Is that something you've heard, something that makes sense?
- [44:40]
Tim Spector
I've heard it. I think the evidence is fairly weak. The evidence is stronger for increased rate of allergies and increased rate of childhood obesity in cesarean birth kids. And that's even when you adjust for breastfeeding. So the worst case scenario for your gut microbiome is to have a cesarean birth and then you're bottle fed. You're not getting anything like the natural microbes into your system. You don't have the complexity that probably has an effect on your, your growing immune system and is leading. One reason why we have this epidemic of food allergy etc, because very high rates of cesarean section now and over sterilization of the whole birth process so that the baby is not getting the same microbes they would be that our ancestor babies got surrounded by animals in dirt. And the way that, you know, we probably formed a microbiome much quicker than sort of western babies. So I think it's evolution. We've just become a bit too smart, bit too clean, but too sterile. And of course other problems. A lot of babies are given antibiotics and the mother is given antibiotics. Mothers generally get antibiotics at the time of cesarean section that those antibiotics go into the baby Another reason that, you know, they have a bad start to life. So those first few years are really quite flexible. And every time a baby gets a virus or an infection, it can really change totally the microbiome composition. Because you remember the first few years, the baby is protected by the mother's immune system, so it doesn't need a fully functioning one. So it's got a time to get its own act together. And so by the age of four, then it's more stable. And that's more or less what you take into adult life. It doesn't tend to change dramatically. You sort of, you've got that formative years, but clearly if those years are, you're being pumped with antibiotics, you're having all kinds of sterilization problems. You know, you're kept in a nice urban bubble. It's not going to be good for you because you're not going to have the same range of microbes that a healthy kid might have in a developing country where, you know, they're much more exposed to things.
- [47:18]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, so if I had a baby and at like day one, I was like, tim, I gotta bounce for just like a year. I'll be right back. If you could, what would you do with my kid to make sure that when I got back they had a nice robust immune system? Well, I guess specifically through the microbiome.
- [47:37]
Tim Spector
So you're going to donate your baby to me, let you borrow it for
- [47:40]
Tom Bilyeu
a year just because, you know, I, I need it, I need it to be tip top shape when I get back.
- [47:45]
Tim Spector
Okay. Well, I'd be putting all kinds of things in their mouth.
- [47:49]
Tom Bilyeu
So when kids grab in the dirt in the grocery store or whatever and then put their little fist in their mouth, that's a good thing. Let them do it.
- [47:55]
Tim Spector
Yeah. So when they've done some studies and when kids drop a, what's it called?
- [48:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Pacifier.
- [48:06]
Tim Spector
Pacifier, yes. Dummy. Yeah, spit the dummy. But they're the pacifier and they drop it on the floor. They did some studies that parents who put the, put it straight back into the mouth of the baby had better gut microbes than those that instantly sterilized. Oh, yeah.
- [48:24]
Tom Bilyeu
It triggers every like, sterilizing desire I have.
- [48:28]
Tim Spector
So basically I would, I would have a, an approach by, you know, I'd keep things clean. Yeah, you wash it, but you don't sterilize it all.
- [48:36]
Tom Bilyeu
Why wash it then?
- [48:39]
Tim Spector
Well, because you don't want to be giving them infections necessarily.
- [48:43]
Tom Bilyeu
How do we.
- [48:43]
Tim Spector
You don't mind small amounts of bacteria,
- [48:45]
Tom Bilyeu
so it's just Quantity.
- [48:46]
Tim Spector
It's just the quantity. Yes.
- [48:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Got it.
- [48:48]
Tim Spector
I don't want to deliberately give food poisoning to your baby. Right. You might be angry. Thank you.
- [48:52]
Tom Bilyeu
Right.
- [48:53]
Tim Spector
If they didn't survive. So.
- [48:54]
Tom Bilyeu
But what I'm trying to figure out is. So my reaction, I wash stuff, but
- [48:57]
Tim Spector
I wouldn't be putting every single bottle, every single pacifier into a sterile container. I wouldn't be using liquids. I wouldn't be sterilizing. But how do you know if it's
- [49:06]
Tom Bilyeu
the time when the dummy falls on the floor? It didn't hit the bad food poisoning bacteria. That's why I'm just like, like, even with myself, I'm just gonna sanitize. I don't know. And maybe I would pick up good bacteria, but maybe not. So I don't understand how a parent is supposed to know that it's okay to pick it up and put it back in their mouth, but at some point you need to wash it because it could have picked up bad bacteria.
- [49:36]
Tim Spector
Well, I think you don't know for sure you can ever be. There's no such thing as 100%, but you're just saying, listen, this is how our ancestors, even people born before me, were brought up. And we have a more robust immune system than the people who are brought up in this sterile sort of nanny state where, you know, everything's swabbed and cleaned and scrubbed.
- [49:58]
Tom Bilyeu
Kids also died a lot more.
- [50:02]
Tim Spector
Yes, but not. But they had much more robust immune system. So there wasn't allergy. And all these food allergies are completely new. In the last 50 years, when I went to school, no kid had a food allergy in my school.
- [50:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Can I run a hypothesis by you that you're probably going to hate, but I think might be true?
- [50:23]
Tim Spector
Go on.
- [50:25]
Tom Bilyeu
I think you have to let things be a little dangerous. And I think that for the greater good, you have to let kids be in a situation where some of them are going to die, but the ones that live, they're going to be better off. And that once you try to save every single one of them, you get the problems that we see today. That sounds terrible when I say it out loud, but that seems true to me in general.
- [50:48]
Tim Spector
I agree. I think doing things to save a 1 in million chance of something happening. Because we've got to remember, anyone listening, it is incredibly rare if you dropped a pacifier on the floor and you put it back in your kid's mouth that they're going to die of food poisoning.
- [51:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Right.
- [51:07]
Tim Spector
I've never heard of a case, so I'M not saying it doesn't happen, but it just incredibly rare. And the chances are that by doing that you're going to actually protect them against many disease when they get older, improve their immune system, build them up is far greater. It's like people who, they've done studies of people who have dogs in the house. Smelly dogs are coming in, licking the babies and kids, those kids are healthier, they have better gut microbes and the family is generally healthier with you know, these other dirty microbes in the house. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's changing that house's environment from this sterile place to one that is more natural to us where we wanted as many bugs in us so that we can train our immune systems properly to defend itself and know when it's a real threat or a fake threat. So it's not going to get upset about when we eat peanuts, which is a recent phenomenon, peanut allergy. And it's going to, but it is going to react against you know, cholera or salmonella properly. So I think it's this training of our gut microbes that we need to reinstill and eating real food is a part of that as well. So yes, there's the environment, but also the idea of weaning kids early onto real foods and playing with food and playing with vegetables, even if there's some dirt on them, is it should be part of every, every kid's repertoire.
- [52:39]
Tom Bilyeu
Is that true even if you bought the food from the grocery store? Because I'm always conflicted. I want to get the microbes and I'm worried about pesticides.
- [52:47]
Tim Spector
Well, you for a young kid. I would, if you've got the money, I would buy organic because you will get some pesticides on it but you get 10 to 20, 80% less than you would in a non organic product. So if you're particularly keen on fresh vegetables, definitely worth doing that for your kid. But it, you know, it's, I think it's just moving away from those sterile cans of pre treated ultra processed foods, baby foods and things this to actual real foods and getting them to play with their hands and things so that they are just constantly ingesting foods and, and playing with the environment and not worrying about them getting dirty.
- [53:35]
Tom Bilyeu
Does this apply for adults as well? Like should I be touching more things, dirty surfaces, licking my fingers and not. I am Captain Paranoia. So I haven't been sick since February of 2020. So I realized that when Covid kicked off I just elevated my level of paranoia to 11 and I haven't dialed it back down. And I still, I haven't gotten Covid, haven't had a cold, nothing. And I used to get at least one cold every year for sure. But now my vigilance is just on another level. I've destroyed the speakerphones on two iPhones because I sanitize them if I go out and about as soon as I come home, I sanitize my phone, sanitize my hands, wash my hands. And it's been effective in terms of me not getting sick. But am I now cruising for a bruising as I get older? And it's like my immune system has been allowed to get lazy or how does this play out in the long run?
- [54:36]
Tim Spector
The honest answer is we don't know. I was like you. I. I used to get colds all the time. Covid marvelous. No colds, no sinusitis, nothing. And you know, but two weeks ago I got a cold. I said, oh no, it's dreadful. But I think I have to look at your gut microbes to, to tell if you had really good looking healthy gut microbes. I say you don't have to worry too much. But at the same time, you know, there's a difference between going out and, you know, you going on the subway in New York or you going for a walk in the park in the woods, playing with dirt, playing with animals. So I think we have to be sensible about what the threats are. You know, you don't want a respiratory virus. So going, you know, getting close to people, breathing on you, you don't know that could be infected, that's a reasonable precaution. But worrying about our natural environment, that's not a natural thing to do. You should, yeah, you don't have to be near people, but you should be quite happy with animals and space and dirt. And if you are too sterile, I think you will run into problems if you're not exposed to that because your immune system does need a certain stimulus. I know of a lot of medical colleagues who from India and they say that they have to go back every six months to eat street food in order to stop being ill. Because they once went a few years without going and every time they went back home they got ill. Use it or lose it, but. Exactly. So they had to go and have some, you know, slightly polluted bit of fruit and it kept them, their defenses ready, you know, so they, they. I remember going so horrified as they go, you know, some grubby looking fruit stand in India and picking some breadfruit and eating it. I said, no, no, I'm fine, you know, I'll be okay.
- [56:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Now that's so interesting. But that makes sense. I get it. Okay, so we're probably not going to go straight to street vendor food in India, but what should we be eating to get diversity? So in the beginning we talked about the structure of food. So this all started with calories. A calorie is not a calorie. There's something far more complicated going on here. We know that it's not as simple as you can devastate your microbiome and then just eat your way back. But eating your way back, not over sterilizing, those are probably other than fecal microbial transplant. Those are our options. So how do we eat well for our microbiome?
- [57:24]
Tim Spector
Okay, well the rule one is eat a diversity of whole plants.
- [57:29]
Tom Bilyeu
And if you could snap your fingers, and not for ethical reasons, but if you could snap your fingers for people to feel better, live longer, all that. Would we all be vegan?
- [57:44]
Tim Spector
I think we'd all be vegetarian. I don't think the evidence is out that dairy makes such a big difference. And in the studies, the sort of early citizen science studies we did, the American gut and the British gut projects, we found that the sweet spot for gut health measured by diversity was 30 different plants a week. And it didn't matter whether you were a meat eater, a pescatarian, a vegan or a vegetarian, as long as you got those on your plate, your gut was happy. So I think that's a really important point, that we don't get too obsessed with these religious categories of eating and realize that what is the really good thing about this and focus on those good things and there are many different ways you can achieve that. I think that's really important. And it's not as hard as we think because a plant is every different type of nut, every different type of seed herb. It's a difference between purple sprouting broccoli and a normal broccoli. Purple carrot and an orange carrot have different chemicals. So they're all giving nutrients to different microbes. So they will you get a greater range of microbes feeding off them. That's, that's, that's the important thing. And going back to the question you asked me ages ago, which I didn't answer, was about structure. These are all whole foods, so they are structured completely differently to ultra processed food. So that you're getting all the structures of that plant, you're getting the fiber, you're getting all the nutrients in all the layers of the plant and the calorie is the energy is not going in fast the body, so it's going to release slowly. Most of it will get to the lower intestine where the microbes are. It's not. If it was refined and in poor structure, same calories, it would have very different effect because it'd be released straight into the bloodstream. So whole, whole structure is important, not stripped away, not the equivalent fake food that you get, that is, you know, plant extracts and things. So that's rule number one. Rule number two, eat the rainbow. Nice, brightly colors because of the polyphenols, these defense chemicals that our microbes like. And countless studies show that what we thought were these called antioxidants are actually really useful for growing our microbes, give them more energy, help them reproduce, produce helpful chemicals in reply. And these are bitter, brightly colored berries, coffee, dark chocolate.
- [60:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Why bitter? That seems like nature saying, don't eat this.
- [60:31]
Tim Spector
Yes. Well, it's. It's saying maybe stopping insects eating it, quite possibly that's protective device. So it's obviously plants were around before humans, so they maybe didn't evolve just to be tasty for humans, but it was other animals. So they wanted some animals to eat them that were perhaps trained to realize that some of these bitter foods were actually very nutritious.
- [61:00]
Tom Bilyeu
But nature could make anything taste good. To me, like, dogs will eat literal shit. So nature obviously said dogs, you know what, this is a delicatessen for you. But for me, I want to vomit when I see a dog do that. It is the most horrifying thing in the universe. So I have to imagine that even though the plants didn't develop the bitterness because of me, evolution left it tasting bitter for a reason. Instead of like bitter could be where we're all like, oh, yo, I love bitter stuff. But for the most part, we're not bitter sucks. And we want to add something sweet to said bitter thing. So why is that? Because you go into this a lot in the book of like, just a laundry list of bitter things that my palate tells me to avoid. But my belief in your ability to steer me well tells me I need to start eating. Why is there a discrepancy?
- [61:59]
Tim Spector
Well, I think babies are averse to bitter things, but as we get older, we actually start to enjoy them.
- [62:11]
Tom Bilyeu
You're saying I have a baby's palate?
- [62:13]
Tim Spector
Yeah. Is that what I'm hearing? You know, we've. It's like, you're not going to get a baby to drink coffee or tea or Whatever. And yes, you start off having sugar in it. And as, as your palate gets more refined, you drop down the sugar and you can have, you know, black tea, black coffee, these bitter tastings, dark chocolate. But unfortunately in this country, you know, we give them so much sugar, the contrast is very great. But you go to countries that don't have a lot of sugar, or most of Europe that, for example, doesn't have dairy chocolate, it just has dark chocolate. Kids love it, you know, so I think a lot of it is, is our cultural upbringing rather than sort of hardwired in us. And so, yes, first few years, most babies will avoid bitter foods because it's unsure whether they're going to be good or bad for them. Okay, so that, but as adults, you start to realize these are nutritious and beneficial. And it's a bit like the whole question of sour, sour foods. We have a sort of love hate relationship with them because we know that they have acid in them and but it was important source that we actually quite liked that taste. So the citrus acid because we get vitamin C that way. So, you know, our evolution has told us that, yeah, it's a bit, you know, there's something tangy about sort of vinegary, you know, acidy foods we do actually quite like. But of course the context is to survive until that point, we have to love sugar because that's breast milk. So that was the first thing. But all these other tastes have a role, but they're slightly more subtle. So I think, you know, I like bitter foods and many cultures do like bitter foods. And I think average American has lost that appreciation because just being swamped with so much sugar, which doesn't really appear in nature. So I think that's my, that's my view of that.
- [64:20]
Tom Bilyeu
Would. I agree with that. So what about fruit?
- [64:23]
Tim Spector
Yes, well, you can have fruit, but you wouldn't be having fruit six times a day in the average place. If you go and, you know, I spent time with the Hadza tribe.
- [64:38]
Tom Bilyeu
How did you spend with them? Out of curiosity, how long did you spend with them?
- [64:40]
Tim Spector
I was there for about six days.
- [64:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Tell people who the Hadza are. This is pretty interesting.
- [64:45]
Tim Spector
So they're a hunter gatherer tribe who live in East Africa on the border between Tanzania and Kenya. And, and they've been in that same spot for about 15,000 years and essentially haven't really changed their way of life. They're a diminishing number. There's perhaps just a few thousand of them left. And they live off the land and they don't have refrigerators, they don't store food. They just get up every day and get what they need. And they don't really have many possessions. And they move camp quite so regularly. And they're super lean, they look super healthy. They never appear to get any western diseases like diabetes, obesity, cancer, heart disease. And they are surrounded by little treasures. But the foods they eat, which is what our ancestors ate, are things like baobab, which grows on trees. And you get these husks which break on the ground. And 10 months of the year they've got this baobab, which is a slightly bitter, citrusy fruit you mash with water and it's like you get a porridge, but it has an acidic tastes good, lots of vitamin C in it, but it's not sweet. It has some sugar, but it's masked by all the acid. And they also eat these little tiny berries which are uncult, you know, nothing like the sort of cultivated berries we see. And they are very tiny and they have a mixture of sourness and sweetness and very 10 times amount of fiber you get in modern berries. But they're not sort of luscious sweets. So the only sweet they get is when they eat honey. And first like one or two months a year, they just gorge themselves on honey and they love it.
- [66:46]
Tom Bilyeu
Do bees produce honey seasonally?
- [66:49]
Tim Spector
They do seem to there. Yes. So. Or they. I wasn't quite sure whether they rotate their, their nests and things, but most of the year they can get some honey. But the different species of bees that they're tracking do seem to work that way. So it wasn't a constant supply of honey. And when they got a big one, it was quite a big celebration for the whole group. And they. And when there's, there's honey, they don't bother going for meat, which is quite interesting. So, you know all these ideas that we're all obsessed with meat. Give humans honey instead and they'll. Nobody wants to hunt.
- [67:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, you give them enough sugar. If you give me donuts, I wouldn't be worried about meat either. Okay, so that's the had. How, how much variety do they have in their diet? Because like when I think about having to get 30 different plants every week, I'm like, and I can go to the grocery store and get them. And that sounds exhausting. So do they have that level of diversity?
- [67:49]
Tim Spector
They have enormous diversity, but a lot of it's through the animals they eat.
- [67:55]
Tom Bilyeu
So they eat that many different variety of animal?
- [67:59]
Tim Spector
Yes.
- [67:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa.
- [68:00]
Tim Spector
So someone's calculated that they eat Hundreds of different animal varieties. Everything apart from snakes and hyenas, I think the sort of virtually everything else.
- [68:16]
Tom Bilyeu
Do they avoid them on purpose?
- [68:19]
Tim Spector
Yes, they don't eat, they don't eat things that eat. I think they've got some rule about
- [68:27]
Tom Bilyeu
they don't eat carnivores. Yes, interesting. So ruminants only.
- [68:31]
Tim Spector
They don't eat lion much either. That's right. But they're happy to eat giraffe and when I was there they ate porcupine
- [68:40]
Tom Bilyeu
and all kinds of little rodents are also vegetarian. Yes, that's really interesting. Have you looked at that at all as to. Is that like a thing that many cultures have had where we only pursue ruminants?
- [68:57]
Tim Spector
Yes, I think. And there's a few religions that have used that, that general rule that these things are dirty, you don't know what they've eaten. In other words, so they could have it because they might have eaten humans or might have eaten, you know, something you like. So it's that it's like no one eats vultures, for example, as well. That was a.
- [69:18]
Tom Bilyeu
Other fish or fish. I know a lot of fish are meat eaters, but I don't know how many eat other fish versus eat plankton. But that's really interesting. So we definitely eat fish, but I guess we don't have to worry that they eat humans. I don't know. I don't know what that means. I'd be very interested to dig into that.
- [69:40]
Tim Spector
More specifically, they eat a lot of birds as well because there are hundreds of different species of bird. And every kid after the age of about six learns to use a bow and arrow. And their job of young, the young boys is to kill the birds. And they, they eat them and they stick on long sticks and they barbecue them. And so they're getting a huge variety. There may be 10 different types of berries they have there, four or five different types of tuber they dig up, the women dig those up. They instinctively know where they're growing under the ground. And the berries do change seasonally and there are various other leaves and things they eat. So yeah, the stories about them having masses of different plants are very exaggerated. And most of their diversity is coming from eating all these different animals. But with a huge base of massive fiber base, they probably get 70 grams of fiber as opposed to the average American is not about 15. So that.
- [70:48]
Tom Bilyeu
So why wouldn't you recommend that diet? Why wouldn't. I don't know if that's. They're. They're a one off. And you think that there Are other ways that our ancestors would have come up. But is there a reason why you wouldn't say, hey, get a ton of variety in your meat? Because that and man, this is so anecdotal. But I have, I've tried a few times to go plant forward and eat primarily plants, and I never feel as good as when I eat meat. And I've gone through periods where, honestly, just out of laziness, I have been virtually no vegetable matter whatsoever, just meat. I've been fine. Bowel motility, perfect. No constipation. The quality. Not that anybody wants to hear this, but the quality of my bowel movements, money. Like, yeah, you know, the high quality ones. And that's always been a bit mysterious to me. Like, I never want to come out and just say, like, oh, people should be eating meat. But certainly in my own life that has been. It's never had any negative consequence in the moment that I can tell. I just don't know if it's killing me slowly.
- [72:04]
Tim Spector
Well, I don't have a problem with meat as long as you're getting enough
- [72:07]
Tom Bilyeu
vegetables and plants because there's something in them. Is it the fiber or micronutrients? What do I need to make sure that I get from vegetable matter?
- [72:18]
Tim Spector
Well, it's everything. It's the micronutrients, it's the polyphenols we discussed which are fuel for your gut microbes. It's the fiber, all the different fibers in those whole plants that the microbes are eating, and many other things. We still don't understand what's in them, but we just know that all the science points that people who eat lots of plants and have high fiber levels. So both that combination of diversity and high fiber, regardless of whether they eat meat or not, are the healthy ones. So meat, I see it as an option which some people might feel healthier on or not. But it's not a sort of obligatory, you have to have meat or you don't need vegetables, you know, So I think everyone needs plants. Some people can do well on meat eating and others may not. And we. There's increasing evidence that some micro. The microbial composition of your gut might be more tuned to eat meat and not cause harmful side effects. This a chemical that breaks down in meat called tmao, that is only produced in some people who have certain microbes. And this tmao, when it builds up, can cause heart disease, atherosclerosis, little clots and things like this that can lead to heart disease. But other people don't have that and they might be fine eating meat.
- [73:49]
Tom Bilyeu
Now, is that based on the microbe or based on a genetic predisposition? What's creating the tmao?
- [73:56]
Tim Spector
Well, again, why it's broken down in some people is due to an enzyme, and that enzyme is produced by microbes, not by our human body. So.
- [74:06]
Tom Bilyeu
So if you did a fecal study on me, you'd be able to tell if I'm, if I have the microbe that produces that?
- [74:14]
Tim Spector
I would if we knew all the microbes that do. It's, it's technically been very difficult to tease that apart. So it's generally done on blood tests.
- [74:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Got it. So it just present in the blood?
- [74:28]
Tim Spector
Yes. And there seems to be this big personal individual difference between people. And so this could be another reason that, you know, we have these people that say, I feel super healthy on meat. And other people say, well, I feel dreadful on meat.
- [74:41]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you cringe when you see people that are on the lion diet or the carnivore diet or you like? No, I get it.
- [74:50]
Tim Spector
I cringe when they, they try and tell other people that this is the, the diet for everyone and they're crazy not to have it because I think they're real outliers and that if people, and also they haven't really studied our ancestors, you know, the hunter gatherers, what they really eat. They eat a huge amount of plants and you know, for several months a year, there are no animals. It's the, you know, the wet season and they can't get near the hunt them. And, and so they're very happy on their honey and their plants. And all of these people, regardless where they're eating meat, are getting huge amounts of, of plants and fiber in their diet to stay healthy. So these carnivore diet people, they might temporarily feel better and healthy. Um, but if they're not getting the plants, they get a very shrinking supply of gut microbes, which means they're not getting those chemicals that they need for their immune system to look after them long term, you know, they're not going to be as robust against infections and things like this. Long term, short term might be fine. You know, and I think humans are flexible and there are also other, you know, we might have genetically modified in certain parts of the world to live in places that are little plants. You know, Inuits and in the Arctic, etcetera, you know, have very little access to plants. But they, they're designed to eat, eat fats and things. Doesn't mean they're super healthy. But they have evolved in that way, but for most people, no. So as a generalization, I think it's a bad idea to think that's healthy and plants need to be the basis, a diverse set of plants for most people.
- [76:38]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. And so your, if we don't know exactly what it is about eating plants that works or doesn't work. The studies that you're looking at, are they correlative? Are we looking at meta studies, meta analysis? Like what, what is the evidence that, that drives you to feel that way?
- [77:00]
Tim Spector
Well, it turns we're talking about general health or we're talking about the microbiome,
- [77:03]
Tom Bilyeu
but can those BTs depart?
- [77:07]
Tim Spector
Yes. So there, well, there are lots of epidemiology studies linking amount of plants you eat and your healthy gut. As I explained the 11,000 people in the American Gut Project, many other studies says, pretty much uniform that if you look at people and say how healthy is your gut? How many plants do you eat? There's a correlation. There's also a correlation in the literature between the amount of fiber people eat and their health, whether it's heart disease, cancer, overall mortality from over 30 studies and meta analyze. So every serious nutritional epidemiologist recognizes there's a link between eating fiber and health. And there are also randomized controlled trials where people have gone on say a Mediterranean diet which is high in fiber versus say a low fat diet or one other one that was thought to be healthy. And in every case the Mediterranean diet with a higher fiber has a better result in a over a few years that they're followed.
- [78:22]
Tom Bilyeu
So I never heard anybody correlate high fiber to Mediterranean diet. Is that what you think makes the Mediterranean diet work is the fiber content?
- [78:30]
Tim Spector
It's one, one element to it, but it's the plant, it's the variety of it and it's, it's the fact that it's pretty gut friendly. So Mediterranean diet, you've got olive oil in there which is high in polyphenols, you've got lots of nuts and seeds high in fiber and polyphenols, you've got fermented foods in there which are good for the gut. So it's a mixture of things, but it's a gut friendly, generally high fiber diet. So there are whole grains in there, there are lots of salads and plants and fruits that you don't get in a lot of these other traditional diets. So generally that seems to be the consensus that is a healthy diet. And that's where I see it is the basis of. Most people are happy with that concept because it doesn't mean military. You can have a little bit of fish and a little bit of meat. It doesn't mean it makes it unhealthy as long as you're getting those basics.
- [79:32]
Tom Bilyeu
So.
- [79:32]
Tim Spector
But I don't want to get obsessed with fiber, and I think we should be. That's, again, reductionism. It's, it's. And you said, I don't really understand what's, what's good about these plants. I think I do. And we are, we do understand. There are also, you know, that all these nutrients locked into the, into the whole plants. We've got all these different fibers in there, and it's not just one single thing. We don't understand exactly how the fibers all work. We haven't really studied them very well. You've got the polyphenols, you've got the fibers. And we know that when you give them in experiments to people, they will increase the amount of gut microbes they've got. And we know that those gut microbes then produce more chemicals. So there's a lot we do know. And I don't think it's a big leap to say that this is the basis of a healthy gut and a healthy lifestyle. And I think it's a different question to saying, well, are there a few people that can survive eating large amounts of meat? Probably, yes. Is that a generalizable good idea for the world's population? No.
- [80:43]
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- [81:13]
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- [82:14]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, let's dive in then to why that might be true. So a big part of your thesis as it comes across to me, is that the diversity in your microbiome, they are kicking off, you're referring to them as chemicals, is it fair to say metabolite as well? Okay, so the microbes eat what you eat and then they create these metabolites, which is basically it's their excrement. I mean that might be a horrible word, but that help me at least conceptualize what was going on. Is that accurate or is that not how this is working?
- [82:47]
Tim Spector
Well, byproducts of their chemical reactions. So they break something down and they throw out this other stuff, which might be a. Yeah, a short chain fatty acid or something that's. It's a byproduct. So yeah, you can call it excrement if you want, but it's.
- [83:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Right, not quite accurate. Okay, and so all of that is then signaling to our body. So how much? And, and I'm gonna guess we just,
- [83:11]
Tim Spector
they evolve together to do that. It's not by chance, you know, they know, you know, they get fed by us and in return they're, they're sending out chemicals to keep us healthy because they want us to be healthy. Otherwise, you know, they've got nowhere to live.
- [83:26]
Tom Bilyeu
And let me ask, so I've heard it said, and I find this really interesting, that humans are the vehicle that microbes built to carry them around. Basically that they're driving it. When you look at the amount of DNA that we have in and on our body, the human part is some tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the overall DNA that you have inside your body, on your skin, all that.
- [83:54]
Tim Spector
That's right, yeah. At least 300 times more sort of genes in our microbes than we have in our bodies. So genetically we're much more microbial than we are human. And so, yeah, we could be all living in a microbial matrix. We don't realize it, but we're being controlled. But I think these are just, you know, Evolutionary fantasies. But, you know, we evolve from microbes. So if that's a way of saying that, you know, microbes created us, it's a bit like saying that primates created humans.
- [84:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, it would if the primates were still riding around in our guts. But the interesting thing, so the reason I say that is it becomes a useful framework to think about why I should be eating what I should be eating. So if your framework is correct, actually the marriage of our frameworks is how it ended up here. So the way that I was thinking about it is, okay, I'm being puppeteered by my microbiome. It's telling me me, it's giving me cravings, it's telling me what to eat, what to want. I personally can make myself anxious based on drinking Diet Monster drinks, and that will give me generalized anxiety. It's surreal. And so seeing how much I can influence my own neurochemistry by the things that I eat, the general way that I feel by what I eat, very profound. And so if those are me responding to signals, being the metabolites, the chemicals, however you want to say it, being kicked off by my microbes, then it's like, okay, if I conceptualize myself as this vehicle for my microbes, obviously I have intelligence and all of that, so there is a sense of I that is separate from my microbes. But when I think about myself as really I, you can't separate the two. I would be fundamentally different if my microbiome were different. And this actually starts coming in with the AI debate. It's like, will computers ever be intelligent in the way that humans are intelligent if they don't have the body, if they aren't influenced by emotions, which are driven largely by the microbes which influence your neurochemistry? On and on and on. So it's like, okay, then that really makes me think about how I eat, because when I eat meat, I feel great, but would I be better? Would some of the problems that I have, like, for instance, I still, even though I can manage my anxiety tremendously. And I would say that I've taken it from. It used to be a hundred percent where I'm like, I don't know if you get more anxious than this. And then I was able to reduce it dramatically. I would say cut it down by 70% just by removing Diet Monster. And I have a half a Diet Coke on Saturday and a half a Diet Coke on Sunday, but that's it. Other than that, I almost never drink Diet Coke, so I don't have artificial things in my life, but because I eat very little vegetable matter by your standards. So I probably eat 10 vegetables a week. So I'm way off. And it may be lower than 7. I may be way off, but I don't have a feeling that oh, I need to change something, I need to do something different, but I may just be ignoring things like I still have 30% of the anxiety, maybe that would go away if I were to broaden and the diversity in my gut. So anyway, that's why I'm conceptualizing it like that because it does make me think, oh, if I am actually being puppeteered by my microbes then maybe I need to be more thoughtful.
- [87:35]
Tim Spector
Well, I think all of us need to think what can we do to experiment with our own bodies to try and improve it given that there is this dynamic relationship. And you know, because we, until recently we had no clue that these microbes, if you fed them differently would produce substances that can affect your brain. And numerous studies have shown that people with anxiety and depression have abnormal gut microbes. So they lack diversity and they have certain pro inflammatory ones. And now lots of studies showing that certain probiotics can help can have an improvement in about a third of people with anxiety and depression.
- [88:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you have one that you recommend?
- [88:23]
Tim Spector
Not off the top of my head. All the studies use different ones. That's the annoying thing about this. But there are mixtures and there's a group in Cork, Ireland that have done a lot of work on this recommend people to look up their work. And there's a book called Psychobiotics which is quite fun to look at but we know they work. We don't know exactly what the best mixture is and whether it might be highly individual as well, but so these probiotics do work. But also there's an Australian study gave for three months people a Mediterranean diet, high fiber Mediterranean diet had even more dramatic effects on the anxiety and the depression and the effect size was actually larger than you'd get with the standard antidepressant. So I would say to anybody with anxiety or depression issues, it'd be worth doing a three month experiment with your diet to say, okay, forget everything. I think, forget what I've read, whatever, just do a, an experiment and see. Okay, I'm going to chart. You can use an app or whatever it is to just chart your mood and see how you get on with a knowing that you're changing your microbes. My changing your microbes, you're going to be changing all those brain chemicals and could be for the better or for the worse because you know, these studies are always averages and some people might do well and some others do badly. You don't know until you study it. But I think.
- [89:57]
Tom Bilyeu
And what would that look like? I'm the 30 different plant matters per week.
- [90:02]
Tim Spector
I would recommend a gut friendly diet. So just going tick off your. Your 30 different plants go for. Go for rainbow colors. Fermented foods I think are really important
- [90:14]
Tom Bilyeu
even if I'm getting the 30.
- [90:15]
Tim Spector
Yes.
- [90:16]
Tom Bilyeu
Different.
- [90:17]
Tim Spector
They're really important for inflammation and your immune. Immune system and there are a few poor quality studies showing they help anxiety and depression as well.
- [90:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Poor quality studies.
- [90:29]
Tim Spector
Yeah. I mean a lot of this.
- [90:30]
Tom Bilyeu
So you're not putting a lot of weight in them but early indicators.
- [90:33]
Tim Spector
Yes, exactly. And do other things I don't know if you're doing on your meal timings as well.
- [90:41]
Tom Bilyeu
I do, yeah.
- [90:42]
Tim Spector
Time restricted eating. We've done a big study in the UK with our citizen science project and most people who manage to do a 10 hour time window do notice an effect on mood. So can be mood enhancing to not snack and not eat in time when your gut should be recovering and finally cut back on. You know, give up your two diet drinks with those artificial sweeteners which you know are harmful to your gut microbes.
- [91:17]
Tom Bilyeu
How dare you. Tim.
- [91:18]
Tim Spector
Yeah.
- [91:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Take my one treat away. No.
- [91:21]
Tim Spector
Okay, so give yourself another treat. You know, give a. Who knows replace it with something else that is a natural treat rather than a chemical that your microbes have never encountered that is designed from the, you know, the petrol industry. Whether it's sucralose, aspartame or one of these other ones, you know that they're not going to be good for you. And just what even do this for a month? I'm not saying, you know, don't deprive yourself of your. Your diet monster drinks but oh no,
- [91:50]
Tom Bilyeu
those I've had to cut out unfortunately.
- [91:53]
Tim Spector
But it's fortunately, you know if you look at the list of them it's like a list of your, your microbes worst nightmare, you know to be dealing with those sort of chemicals that you certainly don't get in the jungle in Tanzania.
- [92:09]
Tom Bilyeu
So let me. I want to go back to your son because I find this very distressing because this is exactly what I'm going through with my wife and maybe sort of the lingering reasons why I can't get my anxiety to what I would consider a normal level. Have you looked at what makes it resistant? Are we looking at biofilms where the microbes now have defenses against my. Basically I don't know if you know biofilms well and can explain it to people. That would be amazing it. Unless it's not that at all. But what do you think is making it resistant to change?
- [92:50]
Tim Spector
Well, biofilms are basically groups of microbes that group together and they produce a sort of slime. So salivary slime that protects them, walls them off against invaders. And it's. It's a defense chemical. Like they produce antibiotics against other foes. They've all got. It's one of their defense mechanisms. And it's what you see in a kombucha mother basically is a giant biofilm. You get 30 different microbes all grouping together with some yeasts and they all live under this little protective shell. It's kind of. Kind of cute. So why some people are resistant to improvement, I don't think we know yet, to be honest. I think we haven't had nearly enough studies of the individual. Always looked at groups. Traditional medical science is just saying the doc, as long as you get a significant result, you don't care about the individual. That's just an outlier no one's really looked. And I think that's one of the big things we're going to be doing with Zoe is much more emphasis on the individual's journey and why that person didn't respond. So it could be they have a certain species that are really entrenched in there and you have to might people with some of these gut disorders, they have to have very. Sometimes the only thing you can do is to wipe them out the antibiotics and start again. Oof. Right. Which is like the worst case scenario because it can go wrong. But you do see this in some small intestinal overgrowth and other things that they've tried everything and you have to sort of clear out the whole process and then start again. Sometimes washouts and colonoscopies can do that. And there are. You can get resets that way. So if you speak to gastroenterologists who do a lot of colonoscopies, they do report just the bowel prep. You know, when you take the stuff and you get evacuated and you're not eating for a couple of days. They say a percentage of people are in brackets cured by the prep process. So sometimes it's some reset like that that needs to be done.
- [95:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Has your son tried fasting?
- [95:15]
Tim Spector
No, he's not very compliant because I'm his dad, he doesn't really believe me. So it's not sufficiently bad that he's worried. He's young, you know, he's. But I'm working on him. We're going to retest him and we're going to give him this strictly give him the Zoe method to do and see if we can throw everything at him and get his microbes up because you know, he hasn't fully committed to this yet.
- [95:46]
Tom Bilyeu
But now I am hyper compliant. So if I wanted to make improvements and I was going to try anything and everything, but let's say I've already done the, I'm doing the 30 a week and I'm like, still we're testing and it's coming back that I'm also in that resistant class. Would you have me fast, a prolonged fast? Would you have me go do a cleanse? Like what would be that ordered list of things that we would try on me?
- [96:16]
Tim Spector
Well, I definitely do. I do a 10 hour time restricted eating, definitely. And if you could go maybe to eight hours, you know, do that.
- [96:24]
Tom Bilyeu
So I do daily. My average over an 18 month period when I was tracking, just absolutely religiously averaged to 17 and a half hours. That includes weekends, holidays, everything.
- [96:34]
Tim Spector
Okay, so you're already doing that.
- [96:37]
Tom Bilyeu
But what about like a three day fast or a five day fast or a seven day fast?
- [96:42]
Tim Spector
I, I definitely wouldn't advise any long fasting because there is.
- [96:47]
Tom Bilyeu
When does it become long?
- [96:49]
Tim Spector
I'd say more than 48 hours. There's some evidence that your microbes start eating your gut lining once you get over a certain period of time. Because when there's nothing to eat, the, the repair team come out and normally they, they nibble away at the sugars on the lining of your gut and they're quite happy tidying that up until the food comes, you know, 14, or in your case, 17 hours later. They can wait, but if it's not there, they do keep nibbling away. And there's some evidence that caused gut leakiness, et cetera. So I'd be, I'm very wary about long fasts. But you know, I think up to 48 hours is probably, it's probably healthy and may kick start some activity, but there's no real hard evidence for that. So you know, we're just trying to experiment with different things to play around with. But so far, you know, we've just started doing retesting in the Zoe program of people who've been doing the, you know, increasing their plant intakes and things. And people who aren't are compliant, you know, high percentage. Only a small percentage of people are not seeing an improvement in their gut microbes and certainly hardly anyone is getting worse.
- [98:08]
Tom Bilyeu
What do you do when somebody has a bad reaction to a food? So take my wife. We've built her back, we've made a lot of progress. She used to, I mean literally she could just eat beef and lamb. And that was it. And if she tried to introduce any plant matter, it was doubled over in agony, just really, really bad. But now we found the things that she can have. We've added those back into her diet, but there's just a certain subset of things that she can't have. Now there are two things that if you can teach me how to get her back on those, she would be ecstatic. And they are soy sauce or soy and sesame for some reason. And of course, it's in every sushi item ever. And as people that love sushi, she is traumatized. Is there a way to selectively go, okay, I want to bring this thing back into my diet, I need to do xyz?
- [99:06]
Tim Spector
Well, you know, I'm not a gastroenterologist. You might want to ask Dr. B afterwards. But the general principle is sort of microdosing and build it up and mistake most people make when they try to reintroduce foods is just too much of it. And so all the immunology work and all this stuff, even on people with really severe peanut allergy is just absolutely tiny amounts. So homeopathic amounts. And then building up really slowly is the way to do this. Whilst you've also got, you know, the protection of all the other of a good microbiome base. So you know, you've got high plant levels, high fiber levels. You're not doing it just with meat, you know, so that you, you've got the things that you can tolerate built up and then you start doing this micro dosing idea and slowly, slowly building it up. And that, that's worked for a number of other food intolerances. And so that, that's all I can suggest. I'm not done anything particularly about soy sauce and sesame, but I like Japanese food as well, so it would annoy me.
- [100:20]
Tom Bilyeu
It is very heartbreaking. Okay, let's go. I want to talk about how the microbiome is being implicated in cancer treatments and some of the new things that we're learning about immune based therapies for cancer and how there seems to be a direct tie to the state of the microbiome. One, walk us through what we're learning about immune based therapies and then how is the microbiome implicated in this?
- [100:51]
Tim Spector
So one of the biggest breakthroughs in the last 10 years in cancer has been immunotherapies. And they revolutionize certain hard tumors, solid tumors, such as melanoma, kidney cancer, lung disease, and to a lesser extent prostate cancer. And this involves giving a drug that allows the body's immune system to attack the tumor, which is its normal purpose. But the tumor usually has a careful cloaking system to stop recognition of it. So the drug is breaking that cloaking system, allowing the immune system to then attack the tumor and effectively destroy it. And these are these immune therapies, also checkpoint inhibitors. And they've revolutionized what were near always fatal conditions in the end stage. So particularly starting with melanoma, metastatic melanoma, end stage, malignant melanoma has been transformed. And we actually I co led a big consortium in Europe looking at several hundred people in this condition, followed them for a year when they were having these drugs because even with the drug only about 40 or 50% respond really well on average and so survive and the others don't. So that better than zero. But it was a lot, it still could be better. And we looked, we looked at their microbiome, we saw that the state of their gut microbes at the beginning of their treatment, if they had a diverse one with good to bad ratios, compared to the people in the lowest quartile who had the poorest one, they had double the chance of survival. And also did another study and well, another analysis and link that also to eating a healthy Mediterranean style diet, high in fiber, high in plants, et cetera, et cetera, gut friendly diet. So that was the largest study done, but there are now four or five other ones, some small, some large, all showing the same thing. So this is a very major breakthrough, showing the link between having a healthy gut microbes, which then enables your immune system to work really well in conjunction with the drugs to overcome the cancer. And it I think is, is bigger than just immunotherapy because it tells you how important a gut microbiome is against all cancers and our natural protection system against all cancers. So we forget they've done these studies of people who die early in accidents and looking at their bodies, we're full of micro tumors all the time. So we've perhaps got five or six little micro tumors in our body and our immune system is fighting that cancer cell very early and destroying it. We've got a brilliant system for doing it. And I think what we're realizing is that our ability to fight off cancer is totally dependent on this immune system, which is in turn driven by the gut microbes and our diet. So it now explains that really good link between healthy diet and cancer in ways we hadn't really understood before. I think that's a really important point. It means we're not really talking about toxins and foods and all this. We always talked about the bad things in food. We haven't really focused on all the good things that people should be eating to give us those anti cancer benefits through our own body's natural defense system.
- [104:42]
Tom Bilyeu
That's interesting. So you think given the relationship to the microbiome, this is more a thing of you're not eating enough to get the diversity and the right chemistry being pumped out there that you need in order to supercharge your immune system versus, hey, there are problems in your diet and you need to get them out.
- [105:00]
Tim Spector
Well, it's a mixture of both. I mean, but yes, the core is having a healthy gut microbiome and if you've got a healthy gut microbiome, it will help your immune system to fight the cancer and it will help those drugs. And I think that's, that's the key bit. And you, that by not, you know, not having nasty things in your system like you drinking monster drink three times a day, which you don't, but.
- [105:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, but I did.
- [105:27]
Tim Spector
I'm sure you did. Would really sort of cripple your microbes and your immune system and also having these good things to make sure they're as diverse and healthy as possible.
- [105:39]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, speaking of good things, there was something that you go into great length about in the book that I am not phobic, but I'm coming right up to it and that is mushrooms. Talk to me about mushrooms.
- [105:53]
Tim Spector
Well, I discovered this really in only doing the book. I thought, well, mushrooms, they're sort of interesting, but I didn't realize what an amazing health food they are. And of course they're part of the fungi family, which are more animal than plant.
- [106:10]
Tom Bilyeu
That is the freakiest thing you said in the book. How is it that fungi are more like animals and plants?
- [106:19]
Tim Spector
They've worked this out based on the genetic lineage and the genes that we share with fungi are more closely related and so evolutionary wise we are more related to them. So they're definitely not plants and they're not in the plant kingdom. And you know, the way they work their networks, they work as teams, they talk to each other, they probably cover, I think a third of the planet, interweave across our soil. They communicate with each other. You know, they're amazing things. I mean, just, just when you go out and you wonder how, how did that mushroom suddenly pop up there and look so beautiful and go down again and you know, and underneath you've got these, this sort of incredible neural network undermining it all. So there are hundreds of species of these, these mushrooms. And we know that on the one end you've got the, you know, the psychedelic ones, the ones with the psilocybins that are transforming some of the treatments of depression, you know, super powerful drugs that seem to have very little side effects if used in the right. The right way.
- [107:32]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you think that's a psychological breakthrough or a microbiome adjustment?
- [107:41]
Tim Spector
No, I think it's due to the actual chemical. It just these. They naturally produce these chemicals, but in a way it's getting some other. A bit like our microbes could have produced it. And there might be other things inside our gut that are just like psilocybins if we could synthesize them and mine them as treatments. And this is in a way a nice example of we've sort of ignored things that come from nature and, you know, only want it synthesized from chemicals and the petrol industry. But all this natural stuff is out there. So I think it's. That's the really cool bit. But of course, they do all kinds of other things. And I was amazed to show that a lot of the cancer studies, and we talk about cancer, that in addition to chemotherapy, if you have a regular supply of mushrooms, you have a much better chance of survival.
- [108:41]
Tom Bilyeu
And so they've done a formal study on that.
- [108:43]
Tim Spector
Yes, multiple studies.
- [108:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa. What kind of mushrooms?
- [108:47]
Tim Spector
Well, again, they used lots of different ones, but, you know, there have been the shiitake mushrooms, the lion's mane variety of different ones, chanterelle. They're not quite sure which are the best mushrooms because we still don't really. You know, there's not many people studying them as, as their main source of interest, it's been a bit peripheral to medicine and I think. But because of the psilocybin work which they. They're now making artificially, they don't. They don't need the mushrooms anymore.
- [109:21]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you think that's a mistake? I am always super skeptical of supplements. Because you're isolating it. There's odds are there's a whole bunch of other stuff. It's like juice versus the actual fruit in general.
- [109:33]
Tim Spector
I totally agree with you and, you know, it's again, reductionism. But they've done the clinical trials to show the way. Whereas when you do the supplements and you do a clinical trial, it never works. Right. Whereas. So you're right on the supplements versus whole foods. Um, but in this case, they, they have actually extracted the chemical, given us a pill form and done randomized trials that show it works very well for, for depression Et cetera. So let's keep, let's keep an open mind on that. But there's a treasure trove of other chemicals in these mushrooms, like effects on cancer that we don't still understand. And so I think eating mushrooms regularly is, is a, is a really important point that we should be eating more of. So I've made a big thing of doing this. And I've seen now there's mushroom teas and mushroom coffees. And it's one of those rare trends that I actually approve of. As long as they don't over synthesize it and it's still got the real bit of the mushroom in it. For the point you made that for some of these things, we don't know what the actual active chemical is. So let's not guess. Let's just use the whole plant.
- [110:51]
Tom Bilyeu
What's your personal mushroom protocol
- [110:55]
Tim Spector
is to eat as many different ones that are in season that I can find. I'm not a. I'm not into. I'm not a microdoser or that much.
- [111:06]
Tom Bilyeu
Funny thing is, I didn't actually mean that side. I meant the edible side. But now that you bring it up, have you ever tried any psychedelics?
- [111:15]
Tim Spector
I was given some chocolate once.
- [111:19]
Tom Bilyeu
I love it.
- [111:19]
Tim Spector
But I can't discuss anymore for legal reasons.
- [111:23]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, fair. So going back to the ones that you eat that are non psychedelic, truly non discriminating, you go into the grocery store, if they've got seven different kinds, you pick up seven different kinds. I have one that you prefer. Prefer. There's no study that says this one over that one.
- [111:42]
Tim Spector
Well, there are some so. So things like lion's mane shiitake do crop up time after time as, as if they have some special properties and they've. But. And so generally ones that look more interesting, more complex mushrooms rather than those, those round field mushrooms, the button ones that are perhaps grown everywhere. If I can get them and they're in season. Yes. I'd go for the more interesting ones.
- [112:16]
Tom Bilyeu
How important you keep saying in season. So they could be in the grocery store but still be problematic if they're out of season.
- [112:22]
Tim Spector
Well, that's just for more environmental reasons. You know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't ship around the world just so I can. Can try that one. I have whatever's local.
- [112:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Right.
- [112:32]
Tim Spector
I like to think it's, you know, getting it fresh as well.
- [112:35]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. So food preparation, you on mushrooms and I would love to know about extra virgin olive oil. So I cook with extra virgin olive oil all the time, but sometimes it Smokes, like how tense do I need to be about the level to which I heat it up?
- [112:57]
Tim Spector
Not nearly as much as we've been led to believe. So the smoke point of most of the olive oils, the good quality of olive oils is over 200 degrees. And usually it's only when you're wok frying that you get anywhere near that sort of temperature. So for the vast majority of your general frying and cooking, you're not going to get over 200 degrees. So it's not a real problem. And then the actual problems of that smoke point, even if it did smoke, I'm not really worried about. There's no real hard evidence that you get sufficient of these chemicals that are going to give you cancer or whatever. It's extremely weak data that says they're bad for you. So the benefits of eating and cooking with extra virgin olive oil, extra virgin is important. Not the cheap stuff is refined and doesn't have any of those high levels of polyphenols that are really good for you. Is really important because they've done massive studies in thousands of Spanish people showing that cooking with it, eating with it, people are given, you know, extra two liters a week over six years. They actually less cancers and they're, they're cooking with all the time. So I think we can be totally relaxed about olive oil, not worry about smoke points. Even if you have the occasional stir fry with it. If you do occasional stir fry, well, you know, just on that one occasion, I don't know, use some other oil that, as I say, if you're worried about it, but it's much more, you know, there's obsession with smoke point is overrated because other, other oils that, because it has saturated fat in it, it's actually more stable and doesn't decompose as we use other vegetable oils that are higher in polyunsaturates. So keep doing what you're doing.
- [114:54]
Tom Bilyeu
And what about mushrooms? Do I need to cook them raw? Does it matter?
- [115:00]
Tim Spector
They have slightly more nutrients when they're cooked and I don't think anyone's done a formal study on that. But lightly fried in olive oil with a bit of garlic, gotta be the healthy way to go.
- [115:15]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, what if I. Because the only way that I could bear to do this would be to put them in. I do like a vegetable and fruit smoothie is probably the right way to think about it. Mixed with a little bit of protein powder. I'd be curious to know if you love or hate protein powder. And then I could see Blending a few of them up and putting them in that. My hope being that I do not taste them at all.
- [115:39]
Tim Spector
You're not a fan, are you?
- [115:41]
Tom Bilyeu
I. Dude, I hate mushrooms in ways you can't imagine. And I've tried them six ways a Sunday. And the number of people that say, like, they're so good for me, and I want to do everything that's good for me. And like I said, I will find ways to be compliant. But if you tell me that I can just dice them into little teeny smithereens, I'd be really happy.
- [116:01]
Tim Spector
I'm sure they're still good for you in raw form. There isn't. You get slightly more nutrients when you cook them, but not massive. Not massively different so that you'll still get plenty of the goodness if you just mash them up. If you prefer them that way, I
- [116:15]
Tom Bilyeu
prefer not to taste them. That's my real punchline. Okay, so stepping back out to 30,000ft, people that are really trying to do their focus on longevity, they want to feel good. What is something surprising that they might not realize? You go into great detail on several different key things in the book. What's one thing that when you were writing it, you were surprised that you think people just are completely oblivious to
- [116:47]
Tim Spector
how important it is for longevity or
- [116:50]
Tom Bilyeu
for longevity, what we'll call general health. So it could be something that surprised you about cancer. It could be something that surprised you about stress, strong immune system. Just something that the average person. It's not on their radar at all,
- [117:06]
Tim Spector
I guess. Well, I learned lots of little things, and I think that's the. You know, the book is full of tiny little nuggets that would nudge you towards these things. I think what for me was interesting is how the aging and cancer came together. So people have always sort of separated them out and said they're sort of opposites, you know, in some way that. But it's looking like, with this new idea of the immune system being key to our health, that there is a NASA now, a common model about what we need to sustain our health. And we've talked about the immune system in fighting cancer, but we haven't talked about the immune system in fighting aging. And there's clear links between how immune. Immune cells will detect early cancer cells and kill them off if. If we've got the right apparatus. And as you get older, the ability to do that fades. Your body is too busy repairing other things to. Gets distracted and therefore might miss that cancer cell. That's this common idea why cancer Increases with age. But at the same time, most of the current theories of aging around this inflamma aging. So that the aging process is associated with inflammation in the body. So you're getting these stress levels. So we talked earlier about, you know, these sugar spikes and these fat spikes, spikes hanging around. Why are they bad? Because they cause low level stress in the body, this inflammation. And if that long term means that your whole body is in a slight state of stress, so that each cell is not performing at the top level and might get damaged and cause byproducts. And your immune system is constantly going and having to clean that up. So it's having to tidy up the mess and detoxify the cell at a cellular level, get rid of the debris, because, you know, each cell is like a little battery that's always producing all this stuff. And if we just set the level higher, so everything's working a bit higher, they've got to work harder. So the current theory of aging is, is actually that if you can either reduce that inflammation and, or you can improve your immune surveillance, you can reduce the ravages of aging. And I think that's a really quite neat system that fits in with the brain and Alzheimer's and mopping up the damage that's caused. And it nicely links in how diet is so important because, you know, we've never really understood why is diet so linked to Alzheimer's. And you know, they're called, they call dementia, you know, diabetes type 3. Why are they so linked? But it sort of makes sense when you start to think, well, okay, food, gut, microbes, immune system. The immune system has these multiple roles that we didn't really envisage 10 years ago that suddenly it's absolutely crucial in not only fighting cancers and cancerous cells, but also getting rid of the damage of normal processes and repairing our body. So aging is the failure to deal adequate, adequately repair cells that are damaged. And if our immune system's tip top, you'll. You'll be able to keep repairing for much longer. And I think that as a general concept, I don't think many people have got yet. And I think it changes our ideas of aging and how we view it. So we just need to reduce these stresses long term. So some of these things which seem like short term, like your sugar peak or your fat level, you know, it doesn't matter, you know, well, you just times that by 50 years and you start to see how it does, and you start to put a structure strain on your immune system that can't Quite cope because it's being pulled in all directions when actually it should be focusing on just nailing those cancer cells or dealing with that bit of plaque buildup or whatever it is in the body. So I think as a concept, that's one I think I'd like people to think more about.
- [121:42]
Tom Bilyeu
How far can we push that? How much can we slow aging? I'm going to guess you're not in the we can reverse it camp, but how far can we slow it? Like can we start seeing the average life expectancy 100, 120 or no?
- [121:58]
Tim Spector
I think so. I mean, we've already got 25 years difference in life expectancy between people on, you know, the lowest of our society and the most, well, often educated. So that's. And if you, you push those extremes and you realize, well, that's maybe just the effect of diet, so you could actually really, you know, push it. So I think if we, we understood much more about these systems, yeah, I mean we could be living easily another 10 years longer. But I'm not. I don't want to live 10 years longer. I just don't want to. I want to have a healthy life for longer.
- [122:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Fair.
- [122:45]
Tim Spector
So healthspan to me is where we should be aiming, not lifespan.
- [122:51]
Tom Bilyeu
Now, is there a health span though where you'd want to tap out? I would live forever if I could do so with health. Would you? Or is there a point at which you might be.
- [123:02]
Tim Spector
Might get bored after a thousand years, do you think? It depends if you've got any mates, isn't it really?
- [123:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Let's say that you do, yeah.
- [123:10]
Tim Spector
If you all got our mates. Yeah. I think nobody wants to die if they're healthy.
- [123:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, no, no, no. This is a raging debate. And when I bring this up, there are some people who are like a. It's disgusting, Tom, that you would even ask that. Like you should want just the natural cycle of life. There are people who are convinced that, yeah, like once I've been around for 80, 100 years, I'm done. I don't want to live longer. I was shocked to find that my frame of reference was not necessarily even the dominant frame of reference.
- [123:38]
Tim Spector
Yeah, well, I might get bored after a couple of hundred years. I think it depends if you can still surf or do stuff, isn't it?
- [123:45]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, if you can get another hundred years, either we will completely obliterate humanity or I'm sure we will solve for that problem. And the reason I believe that is AI, which I actually want to ask you about, what is the role that AI is playing right now for you guys. Are you using it, Zoe?
- [124:01]
Tim Spector
We've been using it in simple forms, so mainly machine learning, which is a simple form of AI, but it's definitely part of the plan and we're brainstorming how we're going to be using in the future. So definitely for the complexities of things like the microbiome, it's perfect because you're
- [124:23]
Tom Bilyeu
trying to get it defined patterns.
- [124:24]
Tim Spector
Yes. So that's a big project we've got. So we can work out the functions of all the microbes. We feed in all the data on 50,000 people, all the health data, all the food data, try and work out these myriad patterns that will be not only in the species, but also the substrains of the microbes.
- [124:43]
Tom Bilyeu
And is your gut that this is going to be a big chunk, this type of microbiome leads to these types of outcomes, or do you think it's going to be this individual species leads to this type of outcome?
- [125:03]
Tim Spector
I think we're going to see that there'll be groups or communities or some people have called them guilds, where you get, say, a group of 10 microbes that can all make similar chemicals or work together as teams. So I think the idea of using AI to try and work out what these teams are that will use each other's, as you call it, excrement to, you know, one person's excrement is another person's meal. Right. So there's no waste, zero waste. They use these teams to work out what their functions are. I think that's going to be really cool. And then we work out what you need to feed to get that team to be optimal. Because at the moment, we're still in a bit in the dark. We're dealing with these individual species. You know, we have a few chemicals, we know they do, but there's so much, you know, left to discover. And I think now that we've suddenly we've got these 50,000 people at one point in time, we're going to get, you know, 50,000 at two points of time, look at changes and what they've changed their diet, that's really going to help this, speed this up. So I think, you know, the next year or two is going to be super exciting in this field.
- [126:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Agreed, Agreed. If people want to follow along in that journey, how do they stay in touch with you?
- [126:18]
Tim Spector
Stay in touch with me, I guess on Instagram, where my nutrition stuff is and joinzoe.com is where, if they want to find out about the company I love it.
- [126:30]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, everybody. This stuff is real. Pay attention to it. And speaking of things you should pay attention to, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.
- [126:39]
Tim Spector
Peace.