Why Your Gut Controls Your Mood, Energy, and Performance: Prof. Tim Spector (E381)

0:01Rather than the brain being in charge, it's probably our gut is more in charge. This is a really sort of major shift in our thinking. We're finding more and more that these mental health disorders are related to the gut. A gut-friendly diet is as good as an antidepressant. The more interesting foods we embrace, the healthier we can become. We need to lose some of this baggage of thinking we knew the answer and this reductionist thing about fats and salts and sugars and whatever. Hey, just a really quick note to say thank you so much to all of our new subscribers. and if you haven't yet subscribed, why not?

0:37It means you're the first to know about brand new episodes of High Performance and it also means we can attract incredible new guests to the show. So please, hit subscribe right now. Enjoy the show.

0:51Well, Tim, welcome back to High Performance. Here we go, round two. Round two, yeah. Round two, book number six, and Ferment is your new book and I was lucky enough to read it. And you know, what I'd actually like to share from the book is almost the very first thing that I read, because I think it sums up so perfectly the conversation we're about to have. You start the book by saying, of all the ways to prepare food, fermenting is surely the most mysterious, miraculous and misunderstood. Now, I think all of us can relate to why fermented foods are mysterious and misunderstood. Why are fermented foods the most miraculous?

1:29Well, because fermented food, which is what we mean by that, is it's food that's transformed by microbes into something better, into something that tastes better, it's more complex, it's got more flavours, smells, and it preserves better, so it's going to not go rotten. And it also transforms its health properties into, you know, from milk, which is rather neutral for your health, to, say, yogurt or cheese or kefir, which is really good for your health, and grapes, which are very boring and sugary, into a really complex wine that has hundreds of different chemicals and flavors to it. So it's that transformation.

2:15That's what we're talking about here. So look, the podcast is called High Performance, right? We're trying to help people find their own version of high performance, and I think with all of the research that's happened in the last few years, the link between gut health and our overall well-being is absolutely clear. I think in a moment I might just ask you, for those that don't know, just to lay bare the link between gut health and our overall well-being. But then I think maybe most people that listen to this will probably still get their dinner from the supermarket. So I'd love to then have a conversation about, in the modern way in which we all operate, how can we get more fermented foods in?

2:48What can we do at home? What are the practical steps that we can all take? So that at the end of this conversation, people that have listened to it are inspired to go and at least give this a go. Does that sound good? That's why I wrote the book. So yeah, I want to inspire people to either try it or make it or do something with it, but don't just sit there and ignore it. Right. I've always wondered how improving your gut health can improve your brain health and how your skin looks. Because I'm thinking that the microbiomes in your gut never leave the gut, right? Generally, they don't. No, in normal health, they shouldn't do.

3:24you've got to remember the microbes are basically mini pharmacies. They're pumping out all kinds of, making all kinds of chemicals all the time. Each different species will produce a whole different range of chemicals. And these are signaling to the cells lining the gut wall and telling them what to do and what messages to pass on. So whether it's messages to your immune system to say, I'm under attack, you know, I've got an infection, I've just had a terrible kebab. you know, whatever it is, they can also communicate with the nerve cells. So again, our second brain is in our guts. So we always feel things in our gut, right?

4:03We have all these expressions about gut feelings and butterflies. And, you know, if you remember back to the days of exams, you know, running for the loo and this sort of stuff. So our nerves are also there. And that's how, through both the immune system and the nervous system, our microbes through these chemicals will tell the brain what to do and how to act and so we now think rather than the brain being in charge it's probably our gut is more in charge than our brain and this is a really sort of major shift in our in our thinking and it explains why people get depressed or anxious or stressed because they're just often they're getting the wrong signals go on just explain more on that I'm intrigued at depression, for example, how that's linked.

4:53So depression, everyone gets depressed short term. So if you have a vaccine, for example, you might feel a bit down for 24 hours, right? We were told to rest after the COVID vaccine, feel a bit shit. That's like a mini version of depression. So what's happening is the vaccine is tickling your immune system, and the immune system is telling the brain, there's something going on here. It's like, I'm ill. Let's just hide under the duvet 24 hours. Don't want to go out with your mates. You're not really interested in going to the pub, having a big pizza. You just, you know, chill out. What's happening in depression is the current idea is that your gut is full of inflammation.

5:39And when there's no obvious cause for depression, which happened and it just, that inflammation just keeps going so your brain is saying, gosh, I'm still, you know, maybe I've got some long-term infection here. The way to react to that is to stay under the duvet. That's the simple version of what's happening. So we're finding more and more that these mental health disorders are related to the gut and that goes for anxiety, goes for ADHD, goes for spectrum disorders. you know that's an amazing revelation which I still don't think people have cottoned on to the link between gut health and depression.

6:16Totally and that's why you can treat a lot of these disorders by treating the gut. So studies have shown that a gut friendly diet is as good as an antidepressant tablet for people with mild to moderate depression why lots of these fermented foods can help depression and anxiety. So you used that phrase before that the fermented food stimulates the gut. What is it that it's doing that would ward off depression or some of these other conditions you've just described? We don't know exactly, so I'm going to be clear. What I'm saying is speculation because it's very hard in humans to work out exactly what's going on and where it's going on.

7:03The current theory is that you eat these fermented foods, they pass through the stomach acid, some of them die off, but enough carry on because you start with trillions of them in foods as opposed to billions in just a probiotic capsule. They survive and then they're probably having their main effect in the small intestine, which is just before the colon. And that's where a lot of the digestion happens and there's less competition. They're not surrounded by other microbes. that would be a million to one outnumbered. So that's how your little food microbes probably get noticed. And they are probably latching on to sensors there that are then triggering the immune system in some way that's beneficial to us to then dampen down inflammation.

7:54Tell the body, it's cool, we're healthy here, relax, just chill out. These are good signals. and we've probably evolved to have these foods because we have literally had them since humans first started walking around and we're naturally drawn to these types of foods and the sourness and other things. So that's how we think they're mainly acting and then they pass through and then they die off and you have to keep eating them to have an effect. So you can't just have a wild binge once a month. They won't have that effect. Small amounts regularly is how they work. They're not designed to live in your gut because they're designed to live in your kombucha or your kimchi or your milk.

8:43So there's only a small overlap between the microbes in your gut and in food. So they're sort of extra passengers that you're taking like vitamin supplements or whatever that will have this magical effect on you. That's the current scientific thinking. What sort of timescale does it take to start seeing that 20 % to 30 % reduction in the risk of depression? We did this big study with my company, Zoe, where we do the citizen science project. So we asked about 9 ,000 people if they wanted to take part in a home experiment. So we said, okay, you can only take part if you don't really take fermented foods.

9:22So we got 6 ,500 people who hardly ever took fermented foods, and they agreed to do a week of just logging their normal foods and mood and then take two weeks of what we wanted, three a day, three different ones a day. And 1 ,000 couldn't hack it or dropped out, only partly did it, but over 5 ,000 did the whole thing. And in those 5 ,000, over 50 % noticed improvements in mood, energy, hunger, bloating, constipation. within about a week. A few had negative side effects, but they outnumbered about three to one by the people that benefited. So it has a quite rapid onset. The other study was done in just 28 people with the blood levels.

10:14And again, they saw these effects after a couple of weeks. But I think the effects on the brain seem to be the fastest ones. And that's what I notice when I start upping my fermented foods a few years ago is, yeah, my mood was much more stable than it had been. So the effects on the brain, we don't know exactly how they work, but they seem to be much more rapid than some of these other ones, like on your actual gutter or transit time or things like this that we've traditionally thought of. That's how fermented foods work. So it's absolutely fascinating. And the other bit about how they work is also when they're dead.

10:57So I don't know if you read that in the book. I did, yeah. This was post-biotics. Which blew me away. Because I'll be honest with you, I have kind of experimented with fermented foods only in the last two years probably. I was relieved when I read that in 2010 even you were ignorant about the power of fermented foods because I think sometimes we can sort of feel we've missed a trick. but if Tim Spector's not caught on to it, it's okay that we haven't. But I've always sort of been taught that if it's not alive, then it's not impactful. It needs to be alive. And even for a long time, because I take a daily probiotic tablet, and sometimes when I take that, people are like, oh, well, there's no way that stuff can be alive.

11:40So it's an absolute waste of your time. It has to be a live culture that you're absorbing. But your book talks about dead microbes. Yeah, but when I started writing the book, I believed that. There was dead microbes, completely useless, you're just wasting your money, all these companies just conning you, right? Or they were pretending it was live because they didn't want to say it was dead, but actually it was dead. And all this science is really in the last three or four years as they keep doing these trials, and the dummy arm where they pasteurize the probiotic worked as well, sometimes better, than the live one.

12:18And the first time they did it, they said, oh, this must be rubbish, you're just a useless scientist. And they went back to the drawing board and did it again and the same result and then be repeated three or four times and then they did it in kids and there's now eight studies in children with diarrhoea giving them dead probiotics and they're all working. So suddenly the field has now accepted they work and they've actually given them a name called postbiotics. I call them zombie biotics, but post is the official term. They can work life after death. They can still be having an effect. And we think, again, it comes back to the way the microbes in the immune system are working.

13:02We think that if you think of a microbe, it's like a cell. It's got a cell wall made of protein, and on that lots of proteins are sticking out. and even if it's dead, you've still got the structure of it. It may not be wriggling around and eating and having sex, but it's still there. Lots of these dead ones are around. Sounds like me. And we think that the protein is then interacting with the immune cells, and so a bit like a vaccine. So a lot of the vaccines we have, like polio vaccine and things like that, is dead virus, and it's just the cell wall is tickling our immune system to say, hello, we're here, you know, and that has an amazing effect on the immune system.

13:49So that plus the fact that the microbes also produce these chemicals, like this soup, full of these good chemicals, they're also being passed into us and being used. So suddenly, this whole field has exploded, and the possibilities are much greater, because it's much easier to produce and add dead microbes to things than live ones because health and safety reasons and you know it's not going to go out of control and take over your body because it's dead. And this is why even in Zoe we've reformulated our, we've got this prebiotic daily 30 mix and we're now in a few weeks going to add in dead kombucha to that as a postbiotic.

14:38because, A, it's safe, so we don't have to ask approval for it, which we would if it was live. And we believe it's going to have a beneficial effect in addition to all the other things. So I think we're going to see more and more of this stuff being added to foods, which in the past you couldn't have marketed because it said, well, that's rubbish. So it's really fascinating. They probably have different mechanisms, and generally you still get more benefit from the live one, but not always. And so having both. But when you ingest a normal fermented food, obviously you'll be getting dead and alive ones because they generally only live a few hours.

15:19And then what happens to their bodies, they have to come out. And so when we go and have a poo, half of that is dead microbes. So a lot of that has just been passing through. It gives you an idea of the carnage that's going on in there. There's quite a lot of massacres. because they live fast and furious microbes. They have very rapid lives. As part of this, a lot of our healthy gut microbes have been thrown in the bin as well as we've been sterilizing ourselves, hitting us with antibiotics as soon as we're born and every few years having sterile foods in plastic containers. We have the highest rates of high-processed foods in Europe that we eat compared to anyone else, and everything's in plastic and it contains no microbes in that, and also nothing to feed the microbes.

16:13So as well as the lack of fermented foods, that's also gone with our basic food environment being dreadful and coming out of a factory rather than out of the ground and having dirt on it and soil and all these other things that we should have. So, yeah, our guts are much less healthy than they were 50 years ago. So how did we end up in a position where as young people, you know, growing up as we did in the 70s and 80s, that's gone off, don't eat it, that's gone fizzy, throw it away, put that in the fridge instantly. If it's more than a day old or a day out of date, make sure it goes in the bin.

16:50Why did we move so far away from this idea of fermented foods being something that we should be focusing on? Because in this country, we lost that connection with our past. So I guess up to the Second World War, everybody was fermenting, making their own yogurts and cheeses and probably fermented milks, fermented oats, things like this. And we industrialised, we got rid of a lot of our local cheese manufacturers in the Second World War in order to just everybody making cheddar, for example. That was part of the war effort. And because the UK has always been at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, people moving into towns and cities, I think the rural ways just got seen as that was backward and we must move forward.

17:40And we embraced the supermarket before most countries, followed very closely after the US. And in that, we lost all our connection with these sort of home industries. And basically, we've gone several generations now without knowing about it, you know, whereas most of Europe still has got connections with it, has got a granny who used to do it or still does it and is passing this stuff on. So, and you speak to people from other countries, you know, whether it's Indians or others from Asia, you know, even Africa, they always had someone in the family who was fermenting something overnight. So they would always see this pot of slightly stuff that was being transformed into something smelly, but they knew it was going to be really tasty in 24 hours.

18:33So they didn't have that fear. Well, my mate Chris, who's got Polish ancestry, said his mum just used to leave glasses of milk out for a couple of days and when it was kind of gloopy enough, she'd just knock it back and that was her kind of medicine. Sour milk, yeah. I mean, that's a big tradition both in Scandinavia and in Eastern Central Europe. And, yeah, we just got this idea of it being unhealthy. And, you know, perhaps it was our, at the time, advanced medicine telling us that, you know, medicine could sort everything out, antibiotics could sort everything out. We were at the forefront of this.

19:10And that made everything that was slightly dirty or smelly it was consigned to the bin. And we've kept these bad habits.

19:24So I was pleased you mentioned the daily 30, because for a long time we were told eat five a day, five fruit and veg a day, and you thought if you got that, then you're doing okay. And now it's very common, 30 ingredients a week, 30 different plants a week is what you need for your gut health. But then this idea of fermented foods, there's another whole layer on top of that. So I think about my kids, we've tried really hard to mix in all sorts of herbs and spices and salt and peppers and little bits of chopped up veg to try and get up to this 30 a week. But I don't think my kids have any fermented foods apart from maybe sometimes a kefir yogurt.

20:02Is fermented foods doing things that a diet full of variety can't do? Correct. Right. So this pivotal study, which was done in Stanford, of this inflammation actually compared it to a high-fiber diet. So we know high-fiber diets. So what you would consider a good diet, right? Correct. and in fact they had the fermented foods thinking the fiber would do better and the fiber had less effect on the immune system than the fiber. So they are both contributing to our health. So it's not one or the other. It's if you want to maximize, optimize your gut health, you go for these two approaches. and I still think that, you know, we've got these sort of set six principles now of eating for your gut and number one is still eat a diverse 30 different plants a week but I think in my mind fermented food has leapt up the charts to number two to say get at least three different ferments a day to optimise your health.

21:10Would you complete the list for people to hear the full? yes so this is really the ethos of my books and zoe's sort of messaging is the 30 plants three fermented foods eat the rainbow so you're picking foods that are high in these polyphenols you're pivoting your protein so eating less meat more legumes so you get your protein but you also to get fiber. Quality, not calories. So that's avoiding highly processed, high risk processed foods and going for real whole foods instead. So you're not getting those chemicals. Giving your gut a rest is the other one. So time restricted eating is the other sort of way of doing this.

21:56And the other one is, you know, if you can personalize your choices, so you know whether you should be cutting back on the carbs or the fats in order to reduce peaks of inflammation. So I think they're the key things that we need to be doing. And if you do that, really you're optimizing your health. It's pretty good general advice wherever you live or whatever your situation is. Do you think fermented foods have got a PR problem though? Do you think people fear them in some ways? In this country, yes. in most of the countries in Europe, no. Right. So it's very much a regional, there's a yuck factor to it.

22:39There's a, oh, it's a bit smelly. Yeah. People are not used to smells. Also, we're bringing kids up just to like sugar rather than that sour taste that our ancestors used to look for because they knew it was actually good for you to have that slight sourness or that slight sourness in milk. You know, and so that's why we're putting artificial sweeteners and to yogurts to make kids eat them and all this sort of stuff. Yeah, as we were talking about at the beginning, you know, scraping, throwing everything out. My mum never threw anything out. She was brought up in the war. You know, you just scrape the mould off and you eat it.

23:15There's nothing wrong with that. And, you know, I've generally kept that. I'm not quite as ruthless as she is on some of the foods, but, yeah, the idea that mould is there, it's a sign of actually the food is real. We did some tests in the book on all these different foods, and it's quite reassuring to see that some processed foods have actually got microbes in it. So yes, the average cheese, if it's properly made, will have five or six different microbes in it. But you take something like Philadelphia cream cheese, where you'd say, well, that's made in a factory. but three species really growing in it and it does grow mould on it if you leave it in the fridge.

24:03That's good. But take a craft slice. I've got one in my kitchen that I opened five years ago and it's still there, shining and gleaming in its glory. It's got a bit curled at the edges. There was that story, wasn't there, about a teacher in a school who put a McDonald's burger in a cupboard. Do you remember that story? Have you seen this? Yeah, of course. It was like literally, I don't remember exactly, but it's something like 30 years, wasn't it? and there's no mould. And it's like, how is this? What is in this? Because this is going in your body. So you've got to be very sure that you don't mind.

24:36But yet we've been brought up to think that, well, having no mould is better than having mould, but actually it's the other way around. Mould is a sign that actually it's got living things in it and these could be good for us. So I think it's just re-educating people, but that was my motivation for writing this book and to try and give people tips about how they can, introduce it easily with their families without that yuck factor. And yeah, it's not easy. The first time I had kimchi, yeah, it was horrible. I was in Seoul for a conference and went down for breakfast and all they had was kimchi.

25:19That's quite a wake-up. That's a good alarm call for your gut as much as for your brain. I'll be honest. This is like 20 years ago, but it put me off for a while. But if someone had said, well, okay, kimchi is really good, but why don't you just mix it with a bit of cream cheese or you can just have it in a dilute form, put that on a bit of toast, you'll love it. And lots of people I'm trying to improve their gut health on other podcasters. I was talking to Davina McCall and she hated all fermented foods. So now, by giving her these tips, you know, I've managed to convert her and she's a… Well, can you give a…

25:59So if anyone listening to this then that maybe has a family that they're thinking, how do I, like, raise the bar for us all, can you share some of the top tips that you've discovered that do work? So first is buy the right stuff. So before you start making your own, you know, try to see what it should taste like. So get some good makes. if you're buying yogurt, you buy full fat Greek yogurt, nothing added. And you should be able to have that. And if kids don't like it, well, you can add a bit of fruit to it. But at least you know what you're adding, right? It's not added in some factory, you've got no clue.

26:38It's dirt cheap, easy to do. So just normal bog standard Greek yogurt, regular natural yogurt is a fermented food? Correct. Right. It doesn't have to be kefir. It does not have to be kefir, no. So this is the misconception, you know. So a lot of people, if you tell people you're already eating fermented foods regularly, because if you have yogurt and you have cheese, they're fermented foods. And if you give them to my lab and I can grow up microbes from them, it's not a problem. People just don't think, you know. They have a Stilton. They don't think that's actually a fermented food. They don't realize that the blue streak in it is actually mold.

27:17Okay. They inject mould into it to give it extra taste. Did you know that? I didn't know. Yeah, that's mould, yeah. Wow. So, you know, we all worry about mould, but if we thought about the food we're eating, boys, well, the mouldier it is, the nicer it is, right? It's a furry white crust on a brie. Is that mould as well? Yes. Is it? Is it just a mould? Did you know? No. Come on. So we're constantly eating what we would consider mouldy things, but it's controlled microbes. Only a certain species are growing. It's not random. If you leave a bit of meat out on the counter for three weeks or something, it's going to grow all kinds of bugs in it in an uncontrolled way.

27:59That's rotten food. It's not fermenting. Fermenting is when you control the conditions so that only certain microbes will grow in it. And so that's why cheese has a certain amount of salt in it, that only microbes that like salty conditions or very acidic conditions will live. All the others will die off. All the bad guys die off. That's the basic concept here is certain amounts of sugar, certain amounts of salt changes the environment, particularly the acidity, so that you've got a very small range that then makes sure that only their friends carry on living and they kill off the nasty bugs that would give you food poisoning and everything else.

28:39So that's really crucial. It's not random. And it's like when you're making it yourself, you're like a little farmer. You're like a microbial farmer doing this stuff. But yogurt, going back to your... Everyone has yogurt. Even the crappy stuff, the children's yogurt that should be a mace of health warnings, in there you can still probably grow some microbes. But still avoid it if you can. No, 100 % avoid it. Just kids should have normal yogurt, not stuff with all this artificial sweeteners and flavorings. Because that's, I think, and you have spoken about this many times, that's the trick that catches a lot of well-intentioned parents out.

29:22It's to go, well, I'm getting my kids yogurts. Yeah. But the ones with the bright color faces or the cartoon characters on, I mean, you look at some of those, and sugar's the second ingredient after milk often, isn't it? Well, it's the same as breakfast cereals. a lot of, you know, they've got healthy labels on them, all the vitamins that they've added in and stuff like this. It's all complete nonsense and it should be banned. It is in many countries now. They're banning the cartoons. They're banning this fake health promotion. So children's yogurts, children's cereals, yeah, they're out. Bog standard yoghurt works every time.

29:57It doesn't have to be Greek, you know, if you can't find it. Just full fat so it's not manipulated. so they haven't added stuff back in or starch and other things. So not a low-fat yogurt? No. I mean, unless you particularly like it, but the more you manipulate it, the less healthy it is, the less it resembles the original product. Right. Because you're often adding in starches from other plants into there to give it the same feel in your mouth as if it had fat. And there's no advantage to having low-fat foods. So this is now standard advice in nutrition that full fat is perfectly fine and low fats are generally unhealthy.

30:39So for people that are trying to lose weight so they buy low fat food, what would you say to them? Well, they're making a very big mistake. Why? Because they're more likely to eat more and get fatter. That's what the science says. Why would that happen? Because fat actually fills you up more and if you replace the fat with starchy carbs, which is what they do, that makes you more likely to eat more of them and therefore you don't get full up and you're still feeling hungry. That's why the food companies love it because that's what they want you to do is to eat more of it. So as soon as anything is manipulated, it says low calorie or low fat or anything else, it's a big warning sign that that food has been manipulated to get a health label on the front, but also to bypass your normal mechanisms in your gut and your brain and make you overeat and hence put on weight.

31:37So we're in the supermarket now. We're pushing our trolley. We've put the full-fat yogurt in. We've put some cheese in. We avoided the low-fat foods. Where else should we be shopping? Go the next aisle and you'll get some milk kefir. Okay, and this might be new to some people. it's fermented milk and the difference is you're just using starter cultures which are these grains which have been handed down for millennia which are communities of about 30 or 40 different microbes that will then take over the milk and transform it into this more acidic, sour but very healthy drink when you're starting out by all means get a flavoured one to start but very quickly try and wean yourself off that or what I tell people is to mix it 50-50 with a yoghurt because it's essentially like super yoghurt and some of the ones in the stores are basically yoghurt they've just added some extra microbes in so that it tastes very like a dilute yoghurt so in a way that's your gateway drug into this whole thing Do you ever have kefir?

32:52No, no. It's actually nicer than yogurt once you start taking it regularly. But the first few times you think, oh, this is a bit sour. If you're used to, you know, having a sweet yogurt with fruit in it. You know when yogurt goes off and you try it to see whether... Yeah. It's a bit like that, isn't it? That's like fizz and tang. Is it? Yeah. You know, in the shops there's a whole range of not very good kefirs to, if you're lucky, some ones that will fizz and have real microbes in it. Is there a brand that you really recommend? Well, it depends on your taste. But for the biggest health gain or the most benefit?

33:24It'd be something like this one called Key Kefir. It's a good one made from cow's milk. How's that spelt? Like K-E-Y? Yeah, I think it is K-E-Y-F-I-R, I think so. And there's another one called Chuckling Goat, which is for hardcore users. It's made of goat's milk and it smells quite goaty. But both of those will actually fizz when you open them because they've got, as well as the bacteria, they've got yeast which make CO2 gas. And so you know it's real. Whereas the other ones are made by the big dairies for mass production. They're still good. They've still got four times more microbes than yogurt.

34:08Okay, so they're all good. But there'll be a much milder taste. So you can sort of get the one you really want to go for before you go to the high end. But you're getting more microbes as it gets more traditional. But they will fizz and smell and do other things. So this is a journey you want to go on. So first, get a simple one, mix it with your yogurt, and then increase the mix. But even I still have my yogurt in the morning with my kefir. I haven't really sort of moved on to just skipping the yogurt. I still quite like the consistency of it. You know, it's a very good vehicle for fruit and nuts and seeds and things in the morning, so I don't mind it.

34:53So that's one tip of how to get the milk kefir going. Then I think you've got your other drinks you can have. So you've got something called water kefir, which most people have never heard of. The other name is tibikos. There's not many of these, but I think we're going to see more of it because in my studies it's scored one of the highest in terms of number of different species. And it's like grains as well that you add to just sugar, sugary water, and it will grow. And there's a brand out there called Agua de Madre, which is a good one. That tastes just like soda because it tastes of not much and then you add fruit afterwards and sort of fruit cordials and things and it is really easy to drink.

35:44So it's easier than kombucha, which is a fermented tea. We make our own kombucha at home, you know. So kombucha. Well, you have like a starter. Yeah, it's a big blob. And it looks like a jellyfish almost, doesn't it? It's an alien jellyfish. They are super cool. And I think everyone should have one in their kitchen, for the kids to play with as well. Oh, wow. I'm very attached to mine because it's actually quite hard to kill. How old is yours? I think it's been around a while. Yeah, it must be, I think, 12 years old. What's it called again? Scobie. The Scobie. And sometimes when you... So you make it in a big jar.

36:30We just do a house with green tea and sugar. Right. And you leave it for a couple of weeks in our cupboard and then you pour it into some glass bottles. Sometimes bits of the scoby come off, don't they? And you pour it into a glass and it looks like, you know, when you've got a cold and you get really like snot down the back of your throat. It's like that floating, I'm not really doing much service to fermented foods in, but you drink it and you let it go down your throat. Homemade kombucha, which is so easy, isn't it, to do. It's like one of those things that feels like some Eastern mystic potion lotion thing.

37:03We don't even think about it and you get regular kombucha for pennies, basically. And it's got like 50 different microbe species. But you leave it for too long. It's like drinking vinegar. Yes, which is the big mistake I made when I first started making it. We do it all the time. And my family said, oh, it's horrible. And a few friends used to pretend to like it. We get weeks where only I will drink the kombucha because it's gone too far. But I'm much better at it now. And so I don't overcook it, as they say. and I add fruits and do a second fermentation. Anyway, we digress because kombucha, you can get that in all the supermarkets now and they all come in all flavours.

37:49But again, if you pick one that's real, they all have a fizz, but some of them are just adding carbonated water to it. It's not real. But the real ones will have a little sediment in it, a mini scoby. And that's how I got my first one. Right. I basically grew it out of a little bottle and just gave it sugar and tea, this black tea. And it grew into this giant, enormous alien. And, you know, I just leave it in the fridge. And it's quite happy. It just goes to sleep in the fridge, hibernates. And you bring it out. Here's some more tea for you. and it will change this sugary tea into this incredibly complex, you know, drink that is half beer, half wine, half vinegar.

38:39And 100 % good. And now they're selling it, you know, in the best restaurants, they now have a kombucha menu and a kombucha sommelier. Everyone should try sauerkraut and kimchi. and when you start mixing them with cheese, cream cheese, makes them much easier to have. Putting them in at the end of soups or in stews. And they're quite a complicated thing to make at home. Like buying those from the store is okay? Yes, absolutely fine. But you can put them into salads, you can put them onto nearly any dish. just like you can pour kefir instead of cream onto the end of a curry or something all these things you can use and that's what we should be doing finding more and more ways to get your three a day in So the three K's there, kefir, kombucha and kim tree so to stop people from feeling overwhelmed I don't think they would be from listening to this conversation it feels really quite practical and easy to adopt but I did want to point out some stuff that a lot of people eat bread, right?

39:48So is switching to sourdough something that does get our gut microbiome firing or is that a myth that I've read somewhere? We all pretty much cook with vinegar. We might chuck it on our chips sometimes. Is there a certain type of vinegar where we're still getting the flavor, but we could be adding to our gut microbiomes? The same with soy sauce. And also in your book, you talk about tea and coffee as well. So I would just love to just cover those things, which I think are pretty common things that we're all eating and whether there's a way of just slightly lifting up those regular ingredients into our diets?

40:20Yeah, so vinegar, definitely, you know, chemical vinegars, you know, you want higher quality ones. So if you can get an apple cider vinegar or a real wine vinegar that's got a mother in it, they're always going to be higher quality and better for you than just the acid. How much better, we don't know health-wise, but it just seems intuitively real, and there's much more flavor and taste in those ones. Soy sauce is definitely healthy. That is fermented soybeans. And most in this country is pasteurized. In Japan, some of it will be raw, but all soy products are good. That also means I cook with miso paste rather than stock cubes.

41:15And so I think that's a real tip because stock cubes are basically highly processed, very chemical. And also the taste of miso is just amazing. And I make my own, but I don't expect people to do that on day one. Sourdough, a lot of hype on sourdough, a lot of fake sourdough. So that's a bit of a problem. Supermarkets would just sprinkle a little bit of sourdough flour or smelt to give it a smell, but it's still made not the right way. So big red flag about being conned by paying extra quid and you get a sourdough loaf. It's not real sourdough. It's still made the chemical way rather than fermented way.

41:59So you've got to pay more for real sourdough. if it's still very white it's still going to have so much sugar and it's not going to be good for you what else and tea and coffee they're dead most black tea is only lightly fermented it's green tea that's actually health has health benefits and coffee is a fermented health product as well it doesn't matter if you get decaf or not you're still getting a lot of these if you get good quality coffee you're still getting the benefits of it so I think that's that's an important way to get fibre and polyphenols in your diet from a fermented product. Don't forget chocolate.

42:35It's another fermented food. And certainly if you go up the quality route, you're going for these bean-to-bar, single estate type ones. You're paying more for. You might have to pay three or four quid a bar, but you know you're getting no additives, nothing. You're just getting cocoa and sugar. And you go for over 70%. that's a really healthy snack as well. So lots of fermented foods we don't think about. Marmite's another one. Love it or hate it? Love it. What are you? Hate it. I hate it too, but I talk about it because I think people are interested in it. Is bovril fermented? Probably not. No, it used to be.

43:22A lot of these ones used to be. It's like tomato ketchup. Well, I read somewhere that it's not even beef anymore, bovril. Vegetarians can eat it because it's now a beef flavour. like beef crisps what are you doing to us guys and you say tomato ketchup tomato ketchup yeah so modern tomato ketchup is basically 50 % or 30 % sugar I think it is it's quite horrible and plus you know it's of no health benefit it's terrible but originally it came from China and Malaysia and it was called ketchup and it was made from fermented fish sauce and then they slowly added tomatoes and mushrooms and things to it and i've actually got a recipe for old-fashioned tomato ketchup in the book and it's fantastic you can make your own fermented tomato and it's actually really healthy and has virtually no sugar in it so you know some of the old ways are actually much better and it's quite fun to think of Mr.

44:24Hines had to recreate, you know, some of the, and they hide a lot, disguise a lot of the flavours by adding sugar. So once you get back to it, you can really taste all the interesting flavours and plants and things in there by, you know, all these mushrooms and tomatoes and things that we've sort of forgotten. So lots of good stuff, even beer, you know. We've found one. We've finally found a fermented food that Damien... Here you go. I'm familiar with this. So Belgian beers and perhaps Guinness do have a bit of a sediment in the bottles, and that yeast is dead. But under our new way of thinking, could have some benefits, you see.

45:08And has there been any research into... So this is all about feeding the gut microbiome, improving the health of the gut. Let's say on the way home tonight, I'm working late, I'll be on the 10 o 'clock train. I go for a fast food, like a burger and fries and a Coke right from a takeaway. What does the evidence tell us that does to my gut? And if it damages it, is there an amount of time it takes to kind of repair the damage that I've just done?

45:40It all depends on what the state of your gut is at the time. So if you've got a healthy gut, you know, You're obeying the principles of gut health eating, and on the way home you just have a wobbly moment and you go for your burger or whatever, a junk food meal. It probably won't do you any harm as a one-off. You'll be very resilient. Your microbes will brush it off and just say, well, we had a bad day there. Let's get over it. If you're doing that most days, then it will have a very negative effect on your gut, and you will start to lose all your good microbes pretty quickly within a week or two.

46:30And that's what the state of many of the people living in this country is. They don't have any real food. It's all this pap. So you're sort of starving your microbes to death. and those that are alive are being hit with chemicals. The occasional one, if you've got good habits, is fine. We shouldn't demonize having the odd, you know, whether it's a pizza, a burger, a kebab or whatever it is, you know, if it's part of your social life, don't get upset about it. But if you're doing that day in, day out, very rapidly, you will lose your good gut microbes. The bad ones take over. They'll be pumping out chemicals, giving you inflammation.

47:12That inflammation message goes to your brain, starts affecting your mental health, starts affecting your performance, and that can happen pretty rapidly. So quality of what you're eating is absolutely crucial because you've just got to start thinking, how do I eat for my gut microbes? I've got to keep them happy. They're keeping my immune system happy. What do I need to do? And I think this is a total new mindset for nutrition where we're all obsessed about vitamin this and vitamin that and a bit of magnesium, a bit of potassium. They don't care. They can make anything as long as they're given a diverse menu that's got all the different chemicals because each plant has got 600, 800 different chemicals in it and different amounts of everything.

47:58But if you've got those 30 different plants, you can create anything. You're not going to go deficient. So that's what we should be thinking of. And it's a new way of thinking about food and nutrition. But I think it catches on because it's inclusive. It's putting more on your plate, not less. It's not saying you can't eat this, you can't eat that. I think as long as you maintain this level of keeping your microbial garden happy, you know, you can go away for a few days and have a binge and it won't really affect it too much. And in the United States, is this conversation happening? They're a few years behind us, I would say.

48:39So when I talk about gut health there, they're just about probiotic shots, and they haven't really cottoned on that food has a big effect. So Europe is definitely ahead of the US in terms of this debate. And they want quick fixes and pills. and don't quite realize that the secret is actually through real food. They'll get there, but I think we need to show them the way. And unfortunately, our habits in this country are still nearly as bad as theirs, and so we are the worst in Europe. But also, we are the fastest in Europe to change food habits. So all the marketing people know this. and so we can dramatically turn things around that other countries can't you know if people stop buying thing in a supermarket next week they're stock it's out and they're stocking with something that people do want that's why our supermarkets are now full of all these fermented foods that weren't there five years ago and you know so edgy people educate themselves listening to these sort of podcasts you know they go out and they can they can change the food environment And so this is what I want to do, is this revolution from the ground up of, you know, demanding better food and things that are healthy, and it will happen.

50:05See, what's fascinating to me is that a lot of this research, like you say, it's only in the last five years we've discovered the benefits of this. You're on the cusp of the next wave. What do you think the next discovery will be in the next five years? if I had a magic wand to say what I would discover, I think it's going to be, we're going to unlock some of these mechanisms about how the microbes are interacting with the immune system and maybe we'll be able to develop some, who knows, artificial foods that can be targeted just for mental health that will exactly simulate a Zempick-like drugs that will know how to switch, because gut microbes make GLP-1, the sort of anti-hunger chemical.

50:59We'll learn how to switch them on in significant ways. Like a natural azempic, you think? Yes, things like this. So I think mental health and this whole appetite

51:14and our interaction with the immune system about how we can use some of these foods in fighting cancer and things like this, I think this is where a lot of the action's going to be. But it's only when we get these big data sets, and that's why I'm so lucky to be working with Zoe that's now got 300 ,000 gut samples with all the nutrition and health data so we can make these discoveries and start learning more. And once we've got a million, we can do amazing things. So I think it's a super exciting time to be talking about gut health because I'm sort of changing my opinion on things every year. And for a scientist, that's just so exciting.

51:54You really know you're in the fast lane. I mean, that's such a lovely line that, well, I mean, Professor Brian Cox, he spoke about, we should all learn to think like a scientist and embrace the ability to change our mind or accept we're wrong. What's been the biggest surprise then in the research that you've done for this book? Well, the zombie microbes was probably the big shock because I said, oh, this is just rubbish, you know. And I just kept finding another paper that found the same thing and another paper that found the same thing and said, well, this isn't rubbish. The fact that people have been studying this for so long, so bashing their heads against a wall, you know, and no one believing them.

52:38And suddenly you can mass these small studies together in a meta-analysis and you show that, yes, you can actually reduce heart disease and a lot of these things that people said were, you know, you can't have kimchi or sauerkraut because they're full of salt, bad for your blood pressure. And they've done this massive study in South Korea and showed that in 20 ,000 people, those that had kimchi had lower blood pressure than people that had. So I love things that really sort of crush these myths that we should be really worried about salt. We don't have to worry about salt if we're eating the right foods.

53:13You know, it's like complete nonsense. They're natural foods and they're healthy for us. So these things just fill me full of optimism, really, that the more interesting foods we embrace, the healthier we can become. We need to lose some of this baggage of thinking we knew the answer and this reductionist thing about fats and salts and sugars and whatever. That's what's really exciting. But I think the biggest thing is mental health, is the links between fermented foods, gut microbes, and mental health to me. is the biggest thing because that's the biggest need at the moment. We're going through this massive mental health pandemic here, and nobody's talking about how you can treat that through your gut.

54:02And hopefully someone listening will try fermented foods. And, you know, I've had many people come up to me and said how it's really helped their anxiety or depression or whatever. I'm not saying it's the only answer, but, you know, People just aren't even thinking about it, about thinking of their diet. They're just going straight to tablets and talking therapies. So it should be another real part of this whole discussion about why we're so sick. Thank you so much for your time. Really interesting conversation. I love the fact you're optimistic about the future. And it feels like so many other elements of human existence is like we're so desperate for data, and what we realise is the data is telling us that 2 ,000 years ago when they had no data, they were doing it better than we are today and we need to be more like they were thousands of years ago it's very interesting isn't it that they didn't know what they were doing but they were doing the right thing all that time ago yeah we need to learn from our mistakes and learn from the past that's right thank you Tim been a pleasure

55:03Damien Jay I've been on this kind of fermented food train for a long time I will admit I wasn't as aware as Tim has now made me that basically what he's saying is fermented foods can help with depression, with anxiety, with mental health challenges. And I think that's the big takeaway for me is I've got friends who, and I'm one of them, actually, my kids don't really take any fermented foods. And if you have got kids that maybe they're struggling with attention, they're struggling with behavior, discipline is a problem. From what Tim is saying, instead of just medicating them, even with a good telling off, right?

55:38You try medicating them with some gut-healthy fermented foods and just see the difference it makes in the lives of your kids. That's a really good advice. I didn't think of it in that way. We're familiar with exercise and the benefit that does and diet, but the stuff he was talking about there, about making this a third pillar for your mental health, as much as anything else, was a game changer for me. I think there's a big education process about buying yogurts and you buy low-fat yoghurt, and then he's like, no, don't touch that. Stuff like that, I wasn't aware of. or like salt is bad for you.

56:13Actually, people that ate kimchi, which is high in salt, has lower blood pressure. I mean, actually, when we stopped recording, I asked him about butter and he's like, you know, oh no, I spoke to him about cheese and he said for years, doctors have said don't eat cheese because it gives you heart attacks. He's like, no, cheese is good for you, good for your overall health. I think you're right. There's a lot of myths that need busting. I think the other thing that I need to be smarter on is I think if I'm in a shop, like a corner shop somewhere and I'm going to get a drink and I see a kombucha, I'll just buy a kombucha in a can or I will buy like a kefir because it's in the supermarket.

56:47And he's like, be really careful about the ones you actually buy. So I think the other message for me is do a bit of research about this stuff if you've got the time and make sure that if you are going to spend a bit more money on some fermented food, get the proper stuff. But as somebody that's further along this journey than someone like myself, what's the one thing that you're going to take from Tim's advice? I just want to get into my kids a bit. So actually what I'm thinking is, like a shot of kefir yogurt at the end of breakfast or before they walk out the door for school, anyone can just line up four glasses, pour a little bit of kefir and go, come on everyone, quick shot, have a good day, enjoy school, shot of kefir, off you go.

57:22Little things like that I think are important, getting that stuff into the kids. Because there will be kids whose guts are just stripped of any goodness. And they never get this stuff. We used to talk about five fruit and veg a day, didn't we? Well, if you eat the same five fruit and veg every single day, that's five varieties over the course of a week. It now should be 30. So the old ways of thinking are dead, and we should all be now looking at our diet in a new way and going, is this food alive? Does it smell? Does it fizz? Is it salty? Is it sour? It's got to, you know, bland, flavourless, colourless food.

57:58It's just basically crap. The other thing that I'd add to that then is that just how quick he said the benefits start showing up. So, you know, we were talking before we recorded with Tim, weren't we, about a lot of this stuff is often hidden. You know, like you can talk about exercise and you will see the benefits of it. This is stuff that traditionally you eat it and you don't quite know what it's doing to your gut. And the evidence that you can turn around your mental health, your depression, your anxiety in up to two weeks is worth any of us giving it a go. Thank you, mate. Pleasure. Thanks, mate.

58:32thank you Tim for sharing your incredible bountiful knowledge with us his new book for men is out now if this episode has resonated with you please consider sharing it with someone who you feel needs to hear it and if you'd like more incredible conversations like this please go to the app store and get early access to episodes from the high performance app but above all thank you for being with us we look forward to seeing you again next time Thank you.