Prof Tim Spector: How Food is Affecting Your Mental Health | GREAT MOMENTS

0:02Hello everyone, I'm Jamie Lang and this is Great Moments. hey guys uh welcome back uh now today's great moment is with professor tim specter who i can now call a friend okay he's the founder of zoe the health app and is one of kind of the most fascinating scientists out there now on this podcast i love speaking to a variety of different people and i love speaking to experts and tim didn't disappoint he completely and i'm being honest with you he completely changed the way i think about food and inspired me to eat better So trust me, this is going to blow your mind. Okay, so here we go. Enjoy this great moment with Professor Tim Spector.

0:51Gut, 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.

1:30So, well, you And he explained 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 placebos 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.

2:27And 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.

3:18And 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 difference between, you know, 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? um they're both neurotransmitters which means that um they're produced in the body going in in the blood and they will have an effect uh on the brain uh in their receptors in the brain for these things um so your brain will react to them um GABA is is a key one um 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.

4:42And 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. It 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. And we know, for example, that nearly everyone, if you test someone with depression or anxiety, you'd have abnormal gut microbes on testing when we sequence them.

5:37Doing something like the Zoe test, we'd see far more unhealthy microbes than healthy ones. And we realized that most of 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? You 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.

6:26They'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 three-way connection 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.

7:14And 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.

7:54And 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 to eat better. And there's even evidence that if you have more severe depression and you go on antidepressants, a 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 they'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 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.

9:13This is this personalized nutrition program, and they get 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. So 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 on the brain rather than you know the rest of the body so everything's telling us how crucial this this link is between the gut and the brain and i don't i think it's been totally underestimated and of course you know because we have this division in in medicine between the brain and the body um psychiatrists generally who deal with depression haven't had any interest in the gut or in nutrition and you know we need to we need to treat this 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 that's someone else's domain it's all 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 at 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.

11:10That's interesting because if you're not as 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, well, hang on a second, maybe it's because I'm eating junk food or I'm eating something wrong or something else is there. Absolutely. Yes. And I mean, Wow, and so you're treating the wrong thing. And anyone with gut problems knows that their mood is really low, and it's not just the physical side of it.

11:48There'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, you know, depression is a protective mechanism. and say, leave me alone. My 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 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 or you run because the Sabre 2 Tiger is coming around the corner.

12:40Yeah, 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. No one will 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.

13:26and so we have to um get involved in that and realize that you know our brain sometimes gets it wrong okay did that blow your mind well i really hope you enjoyed that episode with tim specter i mean fascinating i mean the link between what we eat and our mental health i mean sometimes we forget so much that actually what we're putting in our body will also affect our brain and i promise you the more that i started eat to eat healthier the better my clarity less brain fog the better I feel about myself. Okay. Also the changes in your diet can decrease levels of anxiety and depression. That's mad.

14:03So if you're feeling anxious, maybe you're feeling a little low, try changing your diet as well as all the other things you can do. Now, if you like that, you need to check out Tim's full episode. Okay. He has so many amazing insights. We're going to leave a link in the show notes. Just go and click on it or take you to the full episode. Tim is just one of the many amazing guests we've had in great company. So if you haven't already, make sure you check out some of the others too. And don't forget to follow and subscribe. And we'll be back next week for a brand new episode of Great Company.