PROF TIM SPECTOR: 60% OF THE UK’S DIET IS ULTRA PROCESSED

0:28Hey, it's Adam Grant from WorkLife, a podcast from TED. software, you'll work smarter, not harder. Freshworks uncomplicates. Learn more at Freshworks.com.

1:00Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today. If you're a smoker or vapor ready to make a change, you really only need one good reason. But with Zinn Nicotine Pouches, you'll discover many good reasons. Zinn is America's number one nicotine pouch brand. Plus, Zinn offers a robust rewards program. There are lots of options when it comes to nicotine satisfaction. But there's only one Zinn. Check out Zinn.com slash find to find Zinn at a store near you. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

1:38This episode is brought to you by Huggies Little Movers. It's fun having a baby that loves to move, but it can be challenging to find a diaper that can keep up with them. Huggies Little Movers is designed to move with your baby. With either the double grip strips or the new HugFit 360 degree waistband, you can be confident relying on Huggies Little Movers for your active little ones. Huggies Little Movers made with double grip strips or the new HugFit 360 degree waistband so your little double can keep moving like you. Huggies, we got you baby.

2:13Hello everyone, my name is Jamie Lang and this is Great Company.

2:22Well hello, happy new year. Happy new year, Jemima. How are you? I'm well and how are you Jamie Lowe? Very good, 2025 I feel like it's going to be a big year for loads of people Yeah, what's going to happen for you? Do a prediction Prediction? I don't know I don't want to say it, I think some things are going to happen But I can't, I don't want to say it Oh my god, okay, don't say anything, that's way more mysterious Yeah well I think otherwise it's one of those things where you're just sort of Saying what your dreams want to be and maybe you should keep them to yourself Oh because otherwise they won't come true They won't come true Fine For anyone who hasn't listened to this show My name is Jamie Lang I'm the host of the show And you are PJ She's the Producer Jemima Also known as PJ We got a DM from someone saying Hi PJ No we didn't We did Wow It's happening It's starting to kick on It's happening Oh my By the way I'll tell you one thing that I want to do this year Go on I would like to do A Maybe a Small tour Really?

3:21Yeah I think so That'd be fun I think so I'd like to do it Yeah so So I would like to go and find some few people, really amazing people to interview. Yeah. Do maybe three shows. Live shows. Live shows, live interview. Around the world? Tokyo. Maybe around the world, but definitely throughout the country. Maybe we do a few dates and we find some amazing people to do it with. That would be really fun. Yeah, it'd be amazing. Let's make that happen. Well, I would love that, yeah. So we're going to try and do it. Okay, first episode of series two. Series two, kind of. First episode. So we were thinking about who we wanted to put in the first episode.

3:56And what we kind of think of is it's new year, new you, trying to kick things off with a fresh start. And so we have a lot of people who we've recorded with. So many people to choose from. So many people to choose from who we were recording with. But the person we chose is Tim Spector. Professor. Professor Tim Spector. Now, if you don't know who Professor Tim Spector is, he's the founder of Zoe. He's a doctor of nutrition. He's a doctor of twins. He has incredible knowledge in this world of improving your gut and your mind and your body and what you put in your body reflects of what comes out.

4:36And I thought for the new year, we would kick off with him because he is fascinating. Yes. And what I truly know now and what he preaches and talks about is really our diet is fundamentally one of the most important things that we should take care of. and for a long time I haven't really taken care of my diet because I've been a bit slack with it not really focusing on it and actually if you focus on diet not only does your health get better you feel better you actually your brain you feel happier and lighter and more focused and all those kind of things for the new year 2025 I think that's what people need yeah 100 % your gut the gut microbiome yeah correct and it's linked so yeah there's something called the vagus nerve which like connects your brain to your gut but also what's interesting is you know when you need a nervous poo that's nerves in your brain affecting your gut isn't it?

5:28and that's like a really normal thing but I've never massively connected that I'm like oh yeah my nerves are affecting my gut and bowels yeah so when you're feeling slightly anxious that means you need to go to the bathroom quite a lot because it's affecting your gut we know that we all know that but we don't know that yeah it's not scientific It's not knowledge that we all are. Yeah, we colloquially know that. So we're going to discuss all of that today and discuss his business, Zoe, as well, which I'm really fascinated with. So I'm really excited for this to kick things off with the new year 2025 with this one.

6:01An excellent first episode for the year. It's going to be amazing. So listen to you guys, if you've just joined the show, welcome. You can get in touch with us on our email, greatcompany at jampopproductions.co.uk or you can send us a DM on... At Great Company Podcast. Yeah, so please let us know what you think of the show. And if you haven't subscribed to it already, please do. It's going to be an amazing year of some amazing guests. It's going to be incredible. We've got some real corkers, including this one. Including this one. So here we go. Please enjoy this episode of Great Company with Professor Tim Spector.

6:32Hi, I'm Professor Tim Spector and I'm Great Company.

6:42So if you had to look back at your life and you had to tell me what's the scariest decision you've ever made truthfully what would it be when i was a junior doctor i decided to apply for a job in in brussels uh as a as a junior doctor that uh involved speaking french and i didn't really speak french but i at all or just no i could read a menu okay and i could sort of bluff you know um bonjour exactly so And at the interview, that's exactly what I did, because the interview panel of 10 eminent professors spoke less French than I did. And so I had a conversation with some old duffer that they brought out.

7:33He said,

7:37And I said, you know, And they sort of clapped and I got the job. and then and then i arrived in brussels thinking i was going to have a month's induction and basically within half an hour i was shown these are my 12 patients get on with it and um you're kidding me no you know they were cardiology patients and you know some of them quite severely ill and stuff so and um yeah it was definitely that was that was the deep end but And, you know, I didn't, each of these decisions, you know, I didn't quite realize, if I'd known how scary it was, I would have prepared a bit more. But that was, I guess, because, you know, you've got people's, you can make serious mistakes.

8:27That was probably the most scary part of my life, you know, going there. But, you know, it is the fastest way to learn. And, you know, when you have to. And luckily, medicine has a bit of Latin base. So a lot of the conditions had the same name. It's just, you know, made a lot of mistakes with all the drugs and things like this. The nurses used to laugh at me. And occasionally, when you saw the patients, they had their own words for things. So I had a great consultation with outpatients, which was even more scary because you're a bit on your own there. You can't ask anyone. and you've got to, you know, being a doctor is all about pretending to be confident in things you don't really know much about.

9:14And this is all your training is this. And so I'm, yes. And I kept saying, and this woman kept saying she had, you know, terrible, terrible pain. And, you know, and it was all coming from the mattress, you know, and I was saying, I kept saying, well, yeah, well, you know, it was going on for about five minutes. and kept going back to this mattress business. I said, why don't you just change the mattress? And she got quite shocked. And it turned out that she was talking, it was the sort of colloquial word for womb. Matrice instead of mattress. So I'd made a few cock-ups like this. And I said, you know.

9:54Why don't you just change the mattress? Exactly. So there were some brilliant moments like this that I couldn't really share with anybody, but, you know, years later, you can still laugh. But they were very forgiving, these patients. And so after that time, I've always been very forgiving of anyone foreign, you know, who doesn't speak English and trying to get by, you know, with various colloquialisms and things like this, but yeah.

10:31Gut, I'm fascinated with, right? And I think this is one of the big things, like you said, that recently people are obsessed with, because what we're putting in our bodies affects our brain. However, you do have people who don't believe that still, and they think that there is no correlation between the gut and our brain and the decline of mental health. Can you talk to me about that and the sort of data that surrounds it? Yes. Well, I think everyone believes there's a connection, but there'd be other scientists that said it's rather trivial. and hasn't been proven yet. Whereas, you know, and these are people who are perhaps embedded in more solid areas of science like genetics.

11:11So, well, you need to explain it all. People are generally distrustful in science of new areas that they haven't been trained in. And initial thing is you just say that's a fad or that's driven by commercial interests. So you're creating something just in order to sell some probiotics or something. But there's no doubt there are very clear gut-brain interactions. The number of studies of probiotics against dummy placebo showing you can improve depression in patients. There are other studies showing just by improving diet of mild to moderate depressives, you can improve their symptoms to the same extent as antidepressants.

12:07And they've done lots of careful mouse studies where you can actually generate anxiety in some mice, take their poo samples, put them into other sterile mice, and those sterile mice become anxious. Get out of here. So in a way, yeah, anxiety and depression, you know, are partly infectious. What? If you think about it in a different way, which is a bit mind-blowing, but if you start thinking about what microbes do, they're basically chemical factories. They produce chemicals, thousands of chemicals. Some of them affect the brain, like serotonin, or there's one called GABA, which is affected when you take Valium, for example.

12:58And there are probably many others that also affect the brain. And so if your microbes are stimulated in a way that in your stool sample, it's like a soup of all these chemicals. You're putting them into someone else. those chemicals are going to reach the brain of that person or that mouse and have an effect. So it does sort of make sense once you break down this idea of the difference between poo and food and things and just think of everything as chemicals. For anyone who doesn't know, can you explain what serotonin is and what GABA is just very briefly? They're both neurotransmitters, which means that they're produced in the body, in the blood, and they will have an effect on the brain, in that they're receptors in the brain for these things.

13:57So your brain will react to them. GABA is a key one for stress responses, so that when you're taking a valium benzodiazepine or a valium, you're changing these receptors in the brain, these GABA receptors, which will just calm you down. And so the fact that our microbes are producing these is a clear evidence of this brain-gut connection. And serotonin is part of this whole process that comes from tryptophan and serotonin and then the dopamine pathways. where we have receptors for these chemicals which can change our mood, which can make us feel warm and happy or lacking it more depressed. And they're just two examples of the many chemicals that we still don't know about that is likely our gut are producing.

15:05and we know for example that um nearly everyone if you test someone with depression or anxiety you'd have abnormal gut microbes on testing when we sequence them you're doing something like the test we'd see you know far more unhealthy microbes than healthy ones and the we realized that most to the nerve cells, the second biggest set of nerve cells are in our gut. So our microbes are always talking to nerve cells. And it's called our second brain is in our guts. So every time, you know, before an exam or stress, you know, you're getting signals from your gut that, you know, are actually transmitted that should be in your brain, right?

15:55You say, The two are really highly connected, and this is why we get gut feelings and butterflies in our stomach and all these other things, because the two systems are highly connected. They're always talking to each other. And therefore, this just tells us much more that in order to help our brain, we really need to get our gut microbes in order. In order to get our gut microbes in order, producing the right chemicals, we need to feed them right. and this this disconnect this three-way connection is is really really important and a lot of our current mental health issues and there's an epidemic of them at the moment are due to the fact that we have abnormal gut microbes producing the wrong chemicals and our brain misinterpreting these signals and thinking that you know we're actually iller than we really are.

16:54And this is this strange loop that we're probably in at the moment. This is the beginning of the year, 2025. So people are listening to it and they are in their sort of zone at the moment where they're thinking, right, new year, new me. And perhaps they are depressed. Perhaps they're anxious. Perhaps they're feeling low mood and they're not feeling great. You would say to that individual who's listening, first place is look at your diet and try and change that. Absolutely, yes. 100 %? Yes. But sadly, when you go and see your GP, they're not likely to do that. So this is why you have to do this yourself.

17:34And it's particularly hard because if you are in that depressed or anxious state, often your brain switches off interest in food and you just really see it as fuel so it's really important for also people around you or in your family to actually help someone who is in that state uh to eat better and there's even evidence that um if you you have more severe depression and you go on antidepressants a third of them third of them don't work at all because you have the wrong gut microbes inside you. So they're just never going to work. The microbes are actually breaking down the antidepressant chemicals, and so they don't work.

18:21They're inactivating them. So again, really clear links between mental health, also the medications and food. But one of the most important things everyone should do if their mood is low is start to think about their diet. And this is something I wasn't really aware of until really fully, until about a couple of years ago, how important it was when we first started putting people on, seeing what happened to people on the Zoe program. This is this personalized nutrition program and they get, you know, much, a gut friendly diet, avoid sugar spikes, fat spikes, et cetera. One of the first things people noticed and reported back to us when they followed the plan was their mood and energy improved.

19:10So way before anything else, before they noticed even change in constipation or weight or even before their gut microbes, we could see a change, mood and energy were the first things they noticed. And quite big, significant changes. And we've seen this throughout our studies as how even people shifting their whole diet or even taking, we've got a mixture called the daily 30, which is a high fiber prebiotic of 32 plants. We give that in a randomized trial. And again, the most dramatic effects are on the brain rather than the rest of the body. So everything's telling us how crucial this link is between the gut and the brain.

19:57And I think it's been totally underestimated. And of course, because we have this division in medicine between the brain and the body. Psychiatrists generally who deal with depression haven't had any interest in the gut or in nutrition. And we need to treat all the bits of the body in the same way and have a much more holistic approach and not see this as, oh, that's brain disease. That's someone else's domain. It's all absolutely linked up. So anyone listening to this, absolutely. If you've got any mood, energy problems, feeling a bit low, you know, those blues, then, you know, first thing to try, the safest thing to try is to, you know, overhaul your diet and keep your gut microbes happy.

20:50that's interesting because if you if you're um not as sort of um driven by sort of challenging the status quo right like yourself and you go to the doctor and they say well you're depressed you then label yourself as depressed or anxious and you go well i'm just depressed and anxious and then you just say well that's what i am rather than going oh hang on a second maybe it's because i'm eating junk food or i'm eating something wrong or just something else is there absolutely yes and I mean, you're treating the wrong thing. And anyone with gut problems knows that, you know, their mood is really low.

21:26And it's not just the physical side of it. There's something else going on that's sending signals to the brain to say, you know, I'm sick. Go into depressed mode, which, you know, we think is a sort of protective mechanism. evolution is given depression as a protective mechanism leave me alone

21:49my body thinks it's under attack I'm just going to go under the duvet and stay there for a couple of weeks so that's the sort of theory about why humans have depression which has a some genetic basis as well it's an evolution thing Same with anxiety, because you think your body thinks it's under attack. So it's the fight or flight where you either fight it or you run because the Sabre 2 Tiger is coming around the corner. Yeah, there has to be some advantage in some scenarios of it existing. Otherwise, depression wouldn't be around because it would have been outbred. Because if you're depressed, male or female, and you'd spend all your time under the duvet, you're not likely to be running around having babies and keeping the genes going.

22:47No one would find you. So clearly there had to be some survival advantage to outweigh the fact that you weren't the life and soul of the party. And it's that balance that is interesting. But I think in the modern era, it's obviously quite different. Our genes were designed for a different time. And so we have to get involved in that and realize that our brain sometimes gets it wrong. and you know this is so this is a whole area i you know i'm really interested in yeah same i'm fascinated by the fact that with the mice who are anxious their stool samples their poo samples were given to other mice and then they became anxious so ingesting that's wild to me and there are other i mean what we we also know is that we when we live with someone we start to share their gut microbes as well.

23:41Talk me through that. What do you mean? We did this big study, about 20 ,000 people looking at how closely they were related to other family members, whether they were brothers, sisters, parents, even twins, identical twins, and saw the sharing of their gut microbes, the species. Did they share exactly the same strains? And there's a clear link between who you're cohabiting with. so you're going to be swapping microbes with your wife for example you both have you have an exchange of them you might have some also if you had a dog you might have some in common with your with your dog so in theory the ability you might be able to transmit some of these mood things from one person to another they've done studies showing you can transmit possibly some obesity or thinning microbes from one person to another as well.

24:44We don't quite know how big an effect it might be, but in theory, all this stuff is quite possible. But just being naive, how do they go across? Because I understand this. So if your wife or partner or sibling or housemate is feeling depressed, you can also start to feel their emotions. So you can feel anxious or you can feel a bit low because the person that you're with is feeling that way. But how has that passed across? I just thought that was just because it was the general energy. Well, there might be some of that, but there's also the physical side of these microscopic organisms floating around in the air that you're ingesting all the time, that you're swapping just by being in the same bedroom or bathroom as someone else.

25:30We're talking tiny amounts of these things, but the studies clearly show there are this that cohabiting um you get very similar microbes that the rest of the population don't have so in your household you're going to have a unique set of microbes that you and your wife share and no one else does because one of you had it and has given it to the other one um we saw this in twins living together up to the age of 18 they share them and gradually as they live apart they get less they get they lose that similarity but living together yeah is definitely part of it so some of these emotions might be driven by these microbes which then produce chemicals which might make you anxious or relaxed or increase your risk of obesity or make you more likely to lose weight in in in mice experiments where they put them in the same cages, they found that actually you're more like, you were better off being put in with a skinny mouse and the skinny mouse microbes would be more effective than the obese mouse microbes.

26:42So if you're picking a friend, pick a skinny one to sit next to.

26:49This is fascinating. It is fascinating. The world of microbes is this whole new world that, you know, none of us really sort of think, give much thought about, you know, and we haven't been able to study it really until the last 10 years.

27:06So, so microbes are almost to the point where, where you, you can feel someone's, if you feel quite relaxed around someone or you can feel sort of anxious, it's because of their microbes almost, you can, it goes into your body and you can, I'm sounding like an idiot in front of you, but you know what I mean? You can start to feel that. Yeah, well, this is all in theory. We don't know. Sure, I get it. You can only do these experiments in actual mice, because doing poo experiments in humans, you can do it, but it's quite complicated. And who would sign up to that? Ethically tricky to say, we want to give you depression, or you want to do this.

27:47you can't do that but we did study something recently we just published um uh last year a paper on coffee and it just illustrates how fussy microbes are so there's there's a microbe in all of us called lawsonobacter that only drinks coffee okay and if you drink coffee you've got bags, you've got masses of it, okay? It's growing, it's there, it's very happy, you're nourishing it every day, and it gets all the fiber from coffee and breaks it down, and probably helps us, you know, reduce our fat levels and do other good things for the heart. But if you don't have, you're not a coffee drinker, you're a tea drinker, you still have small levels of this microbe sitting there that have been transferred, perhaps from a kiss from a coffee drinker, or it's just been in the air, and it's waiting.

28:48You're not born with it, you get it as a kid, and it just sits there in this shriveled form in your gut, waiting for that first cup of coffee when it can bloom and have wild sex and carry on. So that just gives you an idea of, you know, how detailed our gut microbes are, you know, and how important it is to eat all these different foods. Because Dorsinobacter is just the one that does coffee that we know about, but there's, you know, thousands of others waiting for you to have these interesting foods for it to go crazy. But teach me the understanding of that. So if I'm starving that, if I'm not feeding it coffee and it's staying dormant, then what happens?

29:34is it negative or it doesn't matter doesn't seem to matter it just uh it's patient it just sits there waiting in a suspended animation form it doesn't seem to use up much uh energy it it shrinks down into a small size microbes often can go into spore formation and and spend years you know just waiting but but i i don't now i'm gonna change i don't drink coffee i don't drink coffee because I find that the caffeine sends me absolutely loopy. Am I missing out on the fact that I'm not having sex within my body? Yeah, I think your Lawson Abacter is very upset. They said, why is this guy, he's not being very friendly.

30:17Why can't he have just the occasional cup of coffee? And he'd be very happy if you give it decaf. So you're worried about caffeine. There are thousands of other chemicals in coffee that are important. and it equally likes decaf. So just give it some decaf occasionally. So coffee is a good thing? Coffee is a health drink. It's a good thing. It reduces your risk of heart disease by about 30%. And that's because... Are you kidding me, Dim? I'm not kidding you, no. It reduces my chance of heart disease by 30%. Yes. And heart disease is one of the biggest killers, we know. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, and up between...

31:00Did someone get me a coffee, honestly? Yeah, you know, the only other thing that comes close is perhaps green tea. Green tea is also good for the heart disease, perhaps slightly less of an effect, but it's also consistent. But black tea doesn't cut it. Black tea is perfectly fine. You know, it's a healthy drink, but it doesn't seem to have those same benefits. We think that's because of the chemicals in them are different. so they're all to some extent fermented so microbes when you take a coffee it comes off the big pod it gets broken in the ground and then for several days microbes in this hot climate wherever they are will then break it down into lots of different chemicals and then you roast it and then you grind it etc that gives it two things It's got lots of fiber.

32:00A glass, you know, a big mug of coffee has probably the same amount of fiber as an orange juice, slightly more. And it's got these natural defense chemicals called polyphenols that give it the bitterness that feed your microbes as well. So it's got, you know, it's a perfect example of really good gut-friendly foods. So someone listening to this right now who is starting their new year, you would say drink coffee. Yeah, and if you don't like the caffeine, have decaf. And if you don't like the taste of coffee, yeah, go for green tea, you know, to have some similar benefits. But these are all the things we're, you know, we're just learning about changing the way we think about food.

32:47And that's really what, you know, I'm trying to do is move us away from this rather simplistic view of food and drink as calories and fats and sugars and all this nonsense that we've been taught for the last 50 years and embrace the fascinating complexity of it and realize it's one of the most exciting areas of science today rather than, you know, what I was taught. It's the most boring. Speaking of disease, there's a rise of bowel cancer in young people. Why is this? Oh, this is interesting. It's a study. we're doing a part of a big 30 million dollar study with the us that we're i'm leading the uk arm of and it's um there are lots of theories for this and part of the study is to really try and crack it down one is um pollution um things like microplastics in the air things that we haven't really been studied properly and we don't know how we know that they're around we don't know how big those effects are.

33:51It could be other pollutants that we know about, such as traffic, diesel, etc. Or it could be, again, due to our poor diets affecting our gut microbes, because there are increasing correlations between certain gut microbes and cancer. that if you have a certain microbe in you, you have like a tenfold increase of getting colon cancer in the next five years. And we don't know whether that is actually causal or it might be a very early sign. We don't know if the microbe's causing it or just a microbe that happens to live once the cancer's started because some of these cancers can be around a long time in microscopic amounts that you can't see.

34:48So we're exploring all this stuff, but I think the microbiome has got to be the main driver of this. And I think poor diets is the most likely thing that's changed in young people. When we say the rise of bowel cancer, what are the stats? Like how many people, how young? There aren't clear, precise stats on this, but if you speak to colorectal surgeons, it used to be incredibly rare below the age of 40. And increasingly, they're seeing this from the age of 20. So this whole new group of people coming forward, because they used to say there's no point screening anyone until you're in this country over 60.

35:37it's earlier in other countries, but it's clear there isn't a clear line as they used to be. And so it's just that they kept seeing more and more younger cases occurring. They're still rare, so they're still less than 1 % of the total, but colon cancer is one of the most common cancers that people get and die from. So total numbers are actually large. yeah so again these are these are some new conditions that that a bit like you know but if you think of what what are the new conditions that are happening in young people that weren't around 50 years ago you know ibs is another one that's really common now that was really rare um food allergy when i went to school there wasn't a single person in my school with a food allergy Now it's pretty hard to find someone who hasn't got a food allergy.

36:36Even in restaurants, do you have any allergies? That's the first thing you ask. You know what I say when the waitress or waitress asked me? I said, no, I'm too old. And it's absolutely true. They just stop asking people if you're over 50, you haven't got an allergy, under 50, you probably have. It's like this huge cutoff. And you say, well, how did that happen? So I think when you start thinking of these allergies, these weird cancers, IBS, these mental health conditions, you start thinking what could be a common factor? The most likely is our diet.

37:28Go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today. If you're a smoker or vapor ready to make a change, you really only need one good reason. But with Zinn Nicotine Pouches, you'll discover many good reasons. Zinn is America's number one nicotine pouch brand. Plus, Zinn offers a robust rewards program. There are lots of options when it comes to nicotine satisfaction.

38:09But there's only one Zinn. Check out Zinn.com slash find to find Zinn at a store near you. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families. With Greenlight, you can set up chores, automate allowance, and keep an eye on your kids' spending with real-time notifications. Kids learn to earn, save, and spend wisely. And parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money with guardrails in place. Sign up for Greenlight today at greenlight.com slash podcast.

38:53What is your idea of diets? Do you think they're a good thing or are they a bad thing? Well, the word diet, to me, conjures up a bad thing. Why? Because it's like a punishment. It's like, okay, it's January, I'm feeling a bit chubby, you know, a bit slothful. I'm going to go for the next month. I'm, you know, not, not going to eat any carbs or I'm just going to have, um, some product out of, you know, powdered low calorie soup. I'm going to go on the cabbage diet and fart myself to death. um you know i'm just going to eat raw liver um raw liver you know um these are what traditionally been these these diets that people said oh you can reset your body and the diet industry has been conning us for you know 60 years into the idea that you can do something temporary and it's have some magical effect on your body and it's all complete bollocks i mean you know and because you know these short-term fixes just don't work um you have to have a long-term approach to this and the body reacts brilliantly every time you you restrict the calories to any meaningful way your body ramps up the hunger levels and it reduces your metabolism so you don't burn up the energy as you should do.

40:37Explain that in simple terms for someone who doesn't understand. What does that mean? If you say the normal female would be eating 2 ,000 calories a day and you're going to go on a special diet, you've seen something in a magazine and says, okay, we're going to go on the 1 ,200 calorie diet, okay, eating whatever it is, or it comes in a magic powder or whatever. So every day you have 1 ,200 calories. So therefore the theory is you've got 800 calories less every day. You should be losing, you lose a kilo a week and you do that for 10 weeks, you lose 10 kilos. That's the theory. The reality is that you'll lose for the first two weeks and then your body says, hang on a minute, if this continues, we're not going to have much left.

41:33We need to change the thermostat here so that we're not burning energy at the same rate. We're going to shut down all the body systems so that they're running much slower, much more efficiently. And so we can get by on less calories. Okay, so we're not going to start damaging our muscles or lose anything essential. So your metabolic rate really drops. So you're just totally relaxed all the time. Probably means you also get a bit tired because your brain says if you want to save energy, just go and lie on the sofa, right? Don't do anything too much. So you feel a bit lethargic. your metabolic rate goes down.

42:15So that means your rate of loss of weight won't go at the same rate. It starts to balance up. And at the same time, in your brain, your hunger levels are ramped up. So appetite is switched on massively. So the longer it goes on, you're getting an extra sort of 5 % every week of the hunger level. So every time you walk past the fridge, that signal to open the fridge and, you know, have some ice cream or something gets more and more intense. And so these two things conspire so that after about four to six weeks, when you've achieved some weight loss, it becomes absolutely irresistible. You can't lose much more because your metabolic rate is really low.

43:07And it's so tempting to go back to that fridge because of the appetite signal is just focusing on eat more all the time. You just wake up and say visions of your fridge. So that's what the reality is. And that's why we need to be focusing on, and we talk about this in the book, about quality of food, not calories. Wow. Because you need to be changing the message to your brain, particularly on appetite. You need to not do this suddenly. And that's why this book is full of 100 healthy recipes that are generally going to be good for your gut health. You're not going to get sugar spikes, you're not going to get fat spikes.

43:53but they're in abundance there's you know you can have as much as you like um and because they're full of fiber they're full of things that fill you up more that will um not stimulate your appetite signals will not cause inflammation not mess up your gut microbes and i think that's that's what people need to understand is there's no point in doing a one-month diet um i really don't believe in them, unless you're going to address the quality issues and these other long-term ones. Because, you know, you need to change the way you're thinking about food for decades. The idea of these quick fixes every January with a reset is patently failed.

44:41You only got to look around you and see how many people are overweight and obese who do these regular purges, you know, these punishment diets. The only people it helps are, you know, diet companies and gyms and people selling slim fast products and other such rubbish. Focusing on the quality of food, not calories, is key, and that will change. And also eating times and things like that. It's not only what you eat, it's how you eat, spending more time over it, giving your body time to feel full, giving your gut a rest overnight. You know, there's time restricted. If you had to sort of structure someone's day and what they should eat, what would you say that looked like?

45:31Well, first I'd say no one's day is going to be exactly the same. And what I'd want people to do is to experiment, okay? Don't believe everything you've been told. Don't believe what your mom told you. You know, you may be someone that doesn't need breakfast, right? You may be someone like me that eats their breakfast after 10, 30, 11. I do that, yeah. Or you might be someone that really is super hungry as soon as you wake up, and therefore you need something and you need to be eating regularly. There are perhaps three groups of people. So find out which one you are, but use breakfast as the best time to experiment.

46:11So an experiment with different foods. you know that's why we set up zoe to see whether you better with carbs or fats but if you can't you know afford zoe at the moment then just experiment yourself um with different breakfasts and see how you feel three hours later do you feel lethargic do you feel energized you know listen to your body much more because i think we've not been told to do that so that's really important and then um but i would advise everybody whether they're having breakfast or not to give themselves a longer longer break overnight for the gut to recover which means don't do late night snacks you know no late night kebab on the way home um no no bickies and and and milk you just as you're going to bed.

47:04All these things are really not ideal. You want to get all your snack in around your meals if you're going to, and give your gut and your gut microbes the time to recover because they, again, super specialized teams come out at night and repair your gut, and they really help your immune system, and we think that's really important for your metabolism and energy levels, et cetera. So I feel much better since I've started doing that, and many other people do as well. So think about the timing of your food as well as the quality of your food. What are your thoughts on a Zenpeg? I have mixed thoughts on it.

47:48I think it's an amazing blockbuster drug that when I was doing genetics, that was what we were trying to achieve, right? Every genetic scientist would have loved to have found the gene that ended up this drug that can reduce 20 % of body weight with relatively few side effects and reduce heart disease, cancer, and dementia over five years by halving these rates. So it's an incredible set of drugs, these GLP-1 drugs, and there's many more. And we're going to see more of them, combinations. We're going to see tablet form coming out soon. So they're here to stay. So for anyone who is obese, anyone with diabetes, they are life-changing.

48:44You know, people forget that someone living with obesity has a worse prognosis than the average cancer in terms of longevity. So we're changing that. So that's really important on that one side. On the other side, I don't think, you know, celebrities using it who might have, you know, the odd love handle or something they're not happy about. I think is very dangerous because about one in six people do have side effects with it. And what are the side effects? Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea are quite common. And then less common, you can have inflammation of your pancreas, pancreatitis. You can have some rare cancers you can get in your gallbladder.

49:42um so you know it's like any drug there are there are side effects but the studies and as it goes out more in the wider population you'll see more side effects than in the very controlled randomized trials where they sort of selected people very carefully so i think we have to assume it's here we will live with it we're going to work out how we're going to deal with it as society, but it shouldn't be used by, say, a government to ignore the whole obesity question of why we're producing so many obese individuals that need these drugs, why the food companies are feeding us up so that pharmaceutical companies can then - Lower us down.

50:30Lower us down again. So we've got to be, at the same time as using for the people who have obesity now, we should be trying to stop the flow in the future. And that's what's something that the last 20 years of government have failed to do dramatically. And that's what we desperately need, and particularly for our children who are these future patients of a Zimpik. How do we stop that flow, which we know we can? It makes no sense, because it would also bankrupt the country. I mean, at the moment, I think it's one in six Americans who have tried a Zempic already. Get out of here. Yeah, and so that's what's coming our way.

51:17What? They're used to paying for it themselves, you know, or their plans. Hardly anyone in this country has used it relatively, but you can see the direction of... One in six in America. Yeah. I mean, one in three are obese, so that's, you know... Okay. That's telling you that 50 % of obese individuals have tried it. Is there an impact on one's mental health using a Zempec? Anecdotally, there are stories, but there's not much good data as far as I know, other than there are some strange effects. It seems to have effects on the brain that reduce addiction. so it can stop smokers, for example, craving nicotine.

52:06It can stop gamblers wanting to bet in the races. That's insane. It can be maybe affecting these sort of hedonistic, addictive centers of the brain, which on the one hand is good to get rid of some of those behaviors. At the same time, it makes you slightly concerned there might be some long-term changes to your personality or anything that go on if it does do that. So I don't think we know enough about it yet.

52:40We were speaking before and you mentioned ultra-processed foods and you said that 60 % of the UK's diet is ultra-processed foods. Yeah, that's correct, which is the worst in Europe. And for children it's... It's something like it's over 70%. And the latest survey showed that was even higher than in the United States. So that's the highest in the world. Tim, what is happening? Why is that happening in the UK? The food industry has found that the UK is its best market. It's where they've managed to infiltrate themselves into government and all walks of life. and we are a population and a culture that has welcomed ultra-processed foods and cheap, available, convenient foods more than virtually anywhere else in the world.

53:36So it's a combination of all these factors and we didn't have a strong food culture that was preventing it like you might get in Mediterranean countries or Asian countries that have their own special cuisine. So we've embraced anything new, good or bad. And it turns out that, you know, we've been made slowly more and more addicted to these products. And they've been, you know, lobbying governments to make sure that, you know, nothing prevents this slow increase and rise. And as they've, you know, tried to, they've maximized eating as foods, they've tried to make us convinced that we need extra food mealtimes.

54:29So that's why all these mid-morning snacks and these afternoon snacks and these late night snacks have come in. You have some really early research about UPFs. What can you tell us about it? What are they doing to our bodies they act in a number of ways on our bodies we don't know which mechanism is the most important but probably um they act so that we overeat so studies have shown that eating identical foods as ultra processed or not makes you overeat by about 25 percent that's their their key property now how they do that is by first they're being they're very soft so you eat them fast. They're like baby food.

55:11You don't actually have to chew them. And that's why children's jaws are actually getting smaller. And dentists are reporting there's enough room in the mouth for teeth because they're not chewing like we were evolved to. So jaw sizes have got smaller. so we're eating baby food. Many people, particularly in deprived areas, won't have had breast milk, they'll have had formula feed, so basically ultra-processed food all their life, which is a continuation of baby food. So this baby food gets absorbed very quickly, and you can ingest a lot of it before there's any signal going to your brain to say, I'm full.

55:59So that's one mechanism just as a physical one. The other is that it lacks fiber. So the thing they don't like to put in is fiber because fiber fills you up. So that you don't get those triggers from the fiber and the other real nutrients. And it also generally doesn't reach the gut microbes. So diets like this are totally lacking in fiber.

56:30won't help your gut microbes, so you get a denuded set of gut microbes as well. So you're perhaps a third less species than someone who's eating things with fiber in it. And then you've got the other chemicals in there that make this fake food seem real. So you've got glues like emulsifiers and gums and you've got preservatives you've got colorants and you've got artificial sweeteners all of which have been shown to harm the gut microbes that they're in evolution not used to dealing with these totally artificial products you don't find in nature as they form abnormal chemicals that might send signals being prohibit making you put on weight or giving you diabetes.

57:20So it's a combination of these factors that makes you overeat them. And about one in eight people are addicted to them. So their brain lights up when they get these foods. And that's because they have brilliant chemists working for these companies because they pay them three times more than they would get in universities. And they work out the exact amount of sugar, fat, and salt you need to tickle the brain. And they're doing brain scans to work out exactly how much that combination is that, again, you didn't find in nature. And, you know, we've all faced it, that pack of biscuits, those, you know, potato-ish snacks, that, you know, you can only have one, you know, so you can't just have one of it.

58:15You know, they're really amorish. You want to go back and have, they are delicious. But you also know, like, you know, I think the best example is something called Pringles, which I used to eat a lot of, but I realized they were making me sick. How much were you eating? Well, too many, obviously. But if I had one, I was okay. But, you know, you can't just have one. And after you had about six or 10 of them, you know, the chemical flavors started overcoming you You really felt quite nauseated. But some people just keep going because of this addictive quality of these foods. So, yeah, the more you get into it, the more frightening it is.

58:58And basically, the UK has been used to this massive experiment. And the food companies absolutely love the UK. And they control the government. They've controlled the nutrition committees that advise the government. nearly the majority of people on those committees have received money or funds or grants from these big companies and it's entirely corrupt. But I think people are talking about it more and there was a big Lord's inquiry last year which I was a part of which the government has got to answer soon which pointed this out and came out very strongly to say we do need protection, we need government protection against these companies, against this food environment.

59:45It's not about individuals lacking willpower. Some people have no choice. They're just surrounded by all these foods. There's no fresh food. It's a very uneven playing field because these foods get cheaper and real food and farming. Real food and farming and getting the real stuff gets more expensive. And so these companies are literally killing us? Yes. That is frightening. You know, it is frightening, but it's not unexpected. When cigarettes started to take a hit, the cigarette companies started investing in these food companies. And so the same people in the 1970s and 1980s, you know, those same tactics that worked so well for cigarettes for so long.

1:00:33Get out of here, Tim. By not working in the food industry. It's not that tactical. It is, yes. What? yeah they they know exactly what they're doing and um it's sinister they don't want to add healthy stuff to it if you know it was very interesting i heard of a beer company that that experimented they wanted to do the right thing they said let's add some fiber to our beer to see if this could be a nice healthy way of getting fiber so they added some soluble fiber in there and it tasted great no problems but they did some taste tests and people were drinking 20 % less because it filled them up so they had to get rid of it because they weren't drinking enough so even if one food company wants to do the right thing and there was a head of one of the companies Danone wanted to start making healthy food but they started losing money and so he got sacked by the the shareholders So it needs the government to come in and say, we've got these rules.

1:01:41You've all got to stick to it. Because these companies just, they want to make money. They're companies. That's what they do. We shouldn't expect otherwise if we're so gullible as to pretend they'll be working in our interest. But if you're an individual, right, listening to this again, and you can't afford Zoe for whatever reason, and it's the new year and you can't get that and you're surrounded by UPFs and there is no fresh food and that's expensive, what choice do you have? What do you do? Well, you choose the least bad UPF and things like lots of can products that are cheap. You know, for 40 pence, you can buy a can of beans and you're getting all, you know, protein and fiber and nutrients in that in a way that just takes two minutes to cook and eat.

1:02:35So I think, I don't think there's any case where you can't, you don't have access to some good food. You may not know what it is and you may need educating to think it doesn't, good food doesn't have to be a fresh, expensive steak. It can be a bag of frozen peas. It can be, you know, some frozen spinach. It can be various beans. Even, you know, there are some baked beans that are relatively healthy. So that's hopefully what I'm trying to get people to do is think about food differently. And especially if you move away from meat and you pick your vegetables carefully, you can eat well on a budget.

1:03:24Do you eat meat? I do eat meat once or twice a month. That's it? That's it, yes. I did go completely meat-free for about six years. I got a bit of B12 deficiency, and I got fed up with taking vitamins. So I find having an occasional bit of meat sorts that out for me. And I'm nothing against people doing that, having occasional bits of high-quality meat. But I really am against people having regular low-quality meat because not only is it bad for your health and takes up room on the plate where you can't put healthy plants, but it's the worst thing you can do for the planet. As individuals, it's not about giving up your car.

1:04:14As individuals, if we want to make a statement about climate change, we should be reducing our red meat intake. Can you reverse the impacts of consuming UPFs? Absolutely, yes. You can. The beautiful thing about the gut microbiome is whatever state you're in, you can reverse it and make changes within a few weeks. That quickly? Yes. And this is what we've seen in the Zoe studies is that the microbiome is improving rapidly. And the worse you are when you start, the quicker that happens. And it can happen at any age, whether you're 20 or 80. We can all improve our gut microbes. and, you know, everything is very positive because, you know, I used to write about genetics and changing your genes.

1:05:13You can't change your parents very easily, you know, and this is really important that everyone can improve their gut microbes and if they improve their gut microbes, everything else flows from that. Their immune system's better, their mood's better, their brain's better, They'll feel better, guess less diseases, less inflammation. You know, everyone should be trying this and feeling positive about a change, particularly in January.

1:05:44Tim, we've spoken about so much, you know, your book. We haven't even really touched on Zoe, the business that you co-founded. And as I, it's the beginning of the year, right? People are wanting to change themselves. They want to better themselves, especially in diet, as we've been speaking about. They can get your book, But if someone wants to get Zoe, why would you say it's a good thing? I think it's the best way to fully understand your body and how you respond to food. It's a fantastic educational tool because as you learn about your body, you know, you start to learn how food affects you.

1:06:18There's nothing quite like when you put that glucose monitor on your arm, you see how your average breakfast of muesli or orange juice affects you. and, you know, from that point on, you'll never think of that food in the same way again. So just quickly to caveat that, so you put it onto your arm, you have the app, you go onto the app, and it shows you the spikes that you have in glucose or different areas that affects you, right? Yes. I mean, this is just one, just to dial back a bit, if you purchase the Zoe program, you're getting separate tests. You get a glucose monitor, which measures your sugar spikes after a set meal.

1:07:01You get a little thing that captures your blood painlessly through a vacuum, which measures your blood fat after a meal to see how much fat is left floating around in your blood six hours afterwards. And you get a microbiome test through a stool test, which is done genetically. And those three are put together to then, as an algorithm, to go into an app, which you then use to log your meals, to plan your meals, to get recipes, to really change the way you think about food long term. And you can keep checking in to see how you're doing and what your average score is for the week, etc. So it's pushing you in certain directions based on your own biology.

1:07:52And then you can get a retest of your gut health to see, you know, have you improved in six months, etc., etc. And we've done a big randomized trial of this because most of these plans never get tested properly. But we're based on science. We test everything. and clear difference between government-type diets, which tell you to reduce your calories and eat more fruit and vegetables. The Zoe program was far superior to that in all these domains, particularly as we mentioned things like mood and energy as well as a little bit of weight loss. So that's what people learn from it. It's very educational, I think.

1:08:33And for many people, it is transformative. They've said it's completely changed the way I think about food and their life. So if you value your health and your food, then I think it's an investment worth making. We also have another product for people who want the simple approach. It's something called Daily 30. We have 32 freeze-dried foods, plants, and six fungi that you can just add to your food, your whatever, sprinkle it over your breakfast every day. And we've shown that if you do that, again, you get significant improvements in your gut microbiome, even more than a probiotic. Wow. So that's an easy, you know, I wouldn't want people to stop there.

1:09:19Yeah. But at least they can say, well, I can take this stuff that is giving me some diversity, because 32 plants, we want people to get at least 30 plants a week. If some people find that difficult, this is a way to nudge you towards that goal, at least make you think about food differently and about particularly supplements differently because it's a whole food supplement. It's not a chemical powder that you have to sort of froth up and mix and, you know, it smells weird. This is real food. Also, you know, we have quite an instructional podcast about nutrition. It's amazing. Every week. It's amazing.

1:09:57It's doing very well, the Zoe podcast. And that's free for everybody. It's a fantastic podcast. Tim, I feel very inspired to kick off my 2025 in a good way. We like to end the conversation with eight questions. Are you ready for this? No. Good. What's a saying or phrase that you'd want people to take away from this interview and conversation? The food choices you make every day are the most important you can make for your health Best compliment anyone's ever given you for your work? The Queen gave me an OB for COVID That's a good one Which was a real surprise because I thought everyone hated me Particularly the government So yeah, that was a shock Just quickly on that Why did you think everyone hated you?

1:10:48And Zoe, during COVID, was an anti-government alternative view of the information. We were doing stuff that the government wasn't doing properly. They wanted to shut us down. They refused to endorse us. And we kept going. And we had a huge following and many supporters. And I'll always be probably most proud of what we did in that. And I think I still get people coming up to me in the street saying, thank you for what you did. you saved my mental health. Wow. Just by feeling we could contribute because people every day were reporting their symptoms and in their area and getting feedback. And so we had an incredible, it was an incredible feeling, incredible time.

1:11:34We restored my faith in the public, really, that it's a perfect example. It can work and could work again in the future in the next pandemic. No, don't say that to me. what scares you most about your research that it's always going to get more and more complicated and i'll never you know never find the truth when was the last time you cried either watching a film on the plane for some reason on a plane i blub on a plane everyone um it's something about altitude perhaps that just sort of releases those glands but um but more sadly it was probably the the funeral of Michael Mosley, who was a friend of mine.

1:12:16And there was a private funeral that was very moving. What is something that you can't let go of? My latest idea. What's something that people are most embarrassed to admit with gut health? No one likes to talk in this country about how many poos they have a week. I'm fine with it. In Belgium, they couldn't stop telling you or bring you samples. Are you serious? Yes. look at this one it's a bit green isn't it it's a bit yellow you know in England it's oh I never look down

1:12:53Tim I my wife sent off a stool sample and she sent it to the wrong address so it got sent back to her two weeks later

1:13:06so posted through the door was a sample of her boo it's unbelievable Yeah, poo in the post. It's a whole new concept. What turns you off? Anything that's too boring and obvious and administrative. What turns you on? Any new idea. I'm easily excited by new thoughts, hypotheses, and how the body works. What do you like most about yourself? That I'm easily bored. Love that. That's my favorite. That's so good. Tim, thank you so much. That's fascinating. Thank you so much for coming on Great Company. That was amazing. Thank you. That was so good. That was amazing. That was a good one to kick themselves with.

1:13:55So good. Amazing. I feel inspired. Inspired to go and make some changes. Yeah, and just like live a real sort of good, healthy life in the best way. Look, we can have cheat days and we can do different things and sure we can have a drink here and there and smoke and keep being happy but also take care of what you're putting in your body I think is really important and some absolutely mad mad facts the UPS everyone's jaw is getting smaller that blew my mind crazy crazy I even forgot about that just now yeah I know so good I mean not good but such an interesting fact an amazing way to start 2025 right I absolutely love that guys listen if you want to get in touch please do we want to hear your thoughts you can send us an email greatcompany at jamppoproductions.co.uk or you can send us a DM.

1:14:41At Great Company Podcast. Also on YouTube and TikTok and everywhere as well. And please subscribe to the show because it makes so much difference to the show. I cannot tell you. It's amazing. Are you ready for next week? I'm very excited for next week. Okay, well, we're not going to say who it is. Okay, a little secret. But it's going to be amazing. So we'll see you next episode for another episode of Great Company.

1:15:15If you're a smoker or vapor ready to make a change, you really only need one good reason. But with Zinn Nicotine Pouches, you'll discover many good reasons. Zinn is America's number one nicotine pouch brand. Plus, Zinn offers a robust rewards program. There are lots of options when it comes to nicotine satisfaction, but there's only one Zinn. Check out Zinn.com slash find to find Zinn at a store near you. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Say what you want about AI, but it's here. And it's helping businesses get more done in a day. Wix's website builder is infused with AI so you can stay ahead.

1:15:55Create a beautiful, functional website just by describing your idea. Track how your site appears in AI search results. Create custom images on demand. Or launch an entire campaign in a matter of minutes. Wix gives you AI wherever you need it. Try it out for yourself at Wix.com. Did you know 39 % of teen drivers admit to texting while driving? Even scarier, those who text are more likely to speed and run red lights. Shockingly, 94 % know it's dangerous, but do it anyway. As a parent, you can't always be in the car, but you can stay connected to their safety with Greenlight Infinity's driving reports.

1:16:29Monitor their driving habits, see if they're using their phone, speeding, and more. These reports provide real data for meaningful conversations about safety. Plus, with weekly updates, you can track their progress over time. Help keep your teen safe. Sign up for Greenlight Infinity at greenlight.com slash podcast. Hello, everyone. We're Jamie and Sophie. You may remember us from Nearlyweds and then Newlyweds. But now, guys, things are about to get even wilder as we take on our biggest adventure yet, becoming parents. Yeah, that's right. Newlyweds is now Nearly Parents. And we're bringing you the same honest, heartwarming takes on our journey to parenthood, I guess.

1:17:06Join us as we find out what it really means to become a family while trying not to kill each other. Get ready for Nearly Parents, your favourite new podcast.