Moment 145: The Alarming Link Between Your GUT & Depression: Tim Spector

0:00This episode is brought to you by Me Undies. While Me Undies can't totally help your love life this Valentine's Day, they can offer you insanely comfy undies and loungewear to buy or gift. Me Undies has so many awesome Valentine's Day prints and styles. Plus, you can match with your partner, friends, or even your pets. This Valentine's Day, give the gift that'll keep them thinking of you and score huge sight -wide savings at meundies .com slash Spotify. That's meundies .com slash Spotify. Me Undies. Comfort from the outside in. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead.

0:36And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform. You'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio. As over the last year, we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode. We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors.

1:11Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future -proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netsuite .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett.

1:29What is the micro -bion? The word we use for the community have got microbes. These are microscopic bugs in our intestines. And it's a biome because it's like this jungle community. It's lots of different species altogether, thousands of them that coexist in our lower intestine, our colon. And it's like we've discovered in the last 10 years a new organ in our bodies. If you put them all together, they weigh about the same as our brain. So that's mind -boggling really to think about all these bugs, which individually are tiny, putting them together, they actually weigh several pounds. So you can either think of them as a microbial garden, but increasingly I'm shifting that towards thinking of them as an incredible pharmacy.

2:26So all of them are able to pump out chemicals all the time that are vital for our body. So thousands of different chemicals are pumped out every minute by these gut microbes when they're fed the right foods. And these chemicals are key for our immune system. Most of our immune system is actually in our gut. Most people don't know that. We think it's under our armpits or somewhere. But actually all the immune cells are actually talking all the time to our gut microbes through these chemicals. And our immune system obviously is crucial for our whole body. And fighting aging and cancer, COVID infections, allergies, all these kind of things.

3:12So then you've also got the microbes, can produce chemicals that affect the brain. And we'll make the difference between you being happy or sad. Or we know that they're vital in depression. Important for regulating how much you eat, you're appetite, when you feel full. They also provide key vitamins for you, all the B vitamins. And many other components, neurochemicals like serotonin that's key for the happiness and how antidepressants work are all produced by your gut microbes. So we're slowly learning that these guys are absolutely crucial to how our body responds to anything coming into it.

3:55Whether it's painkillers, whether it's antidepressants, whether it's chemicals in the form of food. And this is why I want people to think about food very differently than we have done in the past. The idea that food is just calories, macros, with its fats and carbs and proteins. Those four things, that's 100 years old mentality. But key to it is this core of our gut health, which we've ignored totally. And this was this big ahah moment for me after research of attendiers. Why would identical twins be different? What could it be? And it turns out their gut microbes are different. That's the only thing I've ever found in 30 years that's really different about identical twins.

4:47And that explains why one gets cancer, the other one doesn't. Why one gets an autoimmune disease or one's depressed or one's happy. So for me, the twins were perfect, obvious way to show that how important these microbes are for all of us. What are some of the biggest myths you encountered as you started researching the microbiome that most people currently believe. That I probably sat here now believe about how to keep my gut healthy. What are some of those key myths? Because I know you're like myth busting. Well, I think most people believe that probiotics in yogurt get killed by your stomach acid.

5:33So they don't work because everything gets killed off. That's a common one I hear. But they don't. No, some get killed. But you're ingesting billions. So always enough get through to have an effect. And we know that probiotics do work, although the best probiotics are in food rather than in capsules. And there's plenty of fermented foods, which is the same. I think we most people learn very little about microbes. They think that most of them are harmful. So, oh, they cultured this microbe or they found a parasite. 50 ,000 people have now looked at their gut microbes in the US and the UK. In the UK, 24 % have a parasite.

6:19And that parasite is actually beneficial. It's called blastocystis. And it's associated with good health, being thinner, having less internal fat, lower blood pressure. And in the past, we're trying to kill it off. And actually, the reason we're in the state is we've killed off a lot of our good bugs. So I think people need to realize that most of the bugs in our system are trying to help us. And we've actually lost half of the good ones compared to if you go to hunter -gatherers, or I spent some time with the Hads of Tribe in Africa. And they have twice the number of species that we have. Because they don't prop antibiotics.

7:08They don't have sterile foods. They have a very wide range of diverse plants, et cetera. So I think people think that they've got microbes that are really only there to hurt them, when they're a bad cabab or something. They don't think of all the positive benefits that don't think that you need to build them up. And that actually, they're like the more you've got, the better it is. How do I build them up? How do I become more like that tribe? You have to have a more diverse range of plants. So we did a study a few years ago with British and American guts that showed that if you can get up to 30 different types of plant a week, you maximize your diversity of species in your gut.

7:56And that's that diversity that we want. Remember, 30 plants, you look a bit shocked, but that's a plant is a nut, a seed. It's not just kale. It's a herb. It's a spice. And things like coffee are a plant to me, because it comes from a fermented bean. So is that diversity? It's having more fermented foods. It's having a range of colors. It's cutting out the ultra processed chemicals as well, which all the all the groups in the population that have the best gut microbes, they don't eat the ultra processed foods. They don't have antibiotics. They don't have this modern Western lifestyle. The microbiome as an organ, one of the things you talked about earlier was the impact it has on mood.

8:52And you know, this podcast is started as kind of a business podcast. We have a lot of people that are interested in being more productive, being more successful, reaching for their goals. How significant and how pertinent is the microbiome on my performance as an entrepreneur, as a business person? What do I need to know about the relationship? As a relationship? My mood, my performance, my mind. Well, we know more about mood than anything else. And so we do know that depression and anxiety is intricately linked to the quality of your gut microbes. We know this from mouse studies where they've transplanted poo from anxious mice into sterile mice and those new mice then become anxious and depressed.

9:41Really? So it's a transmissible condition. And if you go back to me telling you that one of the chemicals that our microbes produce is serotonin. Okay, some sort of sort of cuddle, you know, love friendly warm chemical that affects our brain, that you know, is the key to dopamine and everything else that goes on in our head. So the levels of that are really important for us having the right neurochemical balance in our head that stops us getting very depressed or very anxious. So we know that you can transmit it between animals. So when they say they take the poo out of one mouse, they put it inside its gut, inside its stomach, to give it the same microbiome makeup inside its stomach.

10:27Yes. And then that mouse will become depressed and anxious. Yes. So a lot of the science behind microbiome is based on large scale human studies where you've just got cross -sectional data. This is associated with this, but you don't know if it's cause or effect. And so this whole other group has been going off of projects for 30 years where they have these sterile mice who have no microbes. And you create in a lab these other microbes that you would make them anxious or they're genetically anxious. You look at their microbes and you take their microbes and you put them into the sterile mice and you can change their mood and their attention span and everything else about that.

11:09So that shows that these have a direct effect rather than just being secondary. And that links to the human data that shows if you take a group of depressed or anxious people, you'll virtually all of them will have deranged microbiomes and be producing abnormal chemicals. And there have been now some recent studies showing that compared to traditional antidepressant medication, probiotics do as well in many of these studies if you give a course of probiotic medication. But even more impressive is if you give them a Mediterranean gut -friendly diet, you get actually better results with more remission than you do with antidepressant medication.

11:57So it's one of the best examples of how feeding your gut can actually improve your mood. And it's particularly important because we're seeing an epidemic of anxiety and depression. That's partly because of not having many good gut microbes to start with. Lots of junk food diets which make it worse. And then of course once you go into that cycle, once you're depressed, you're not thinking about food. The last thing you want to go out and is, you know, oh, I've got to go and get my kimchi today. You know, you just what it's just fuel. So once you understand that, you realize if you want to help some with depression, you know, the first thing is not to put them straight onto an antidepressant, which in many cases doesn't work because of this individuality, as we're talking about, which probably again relate to the microbes because they break down the tablet into its active chemicals.

12:51But it's to make sure they've actually got got friendly diet. And so this is a really exciting area of research.

13:03Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform. You'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio. As over the last year, we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode.

13:38We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors. Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netsuite .com slash Bartlett. And free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett.