3 gut bacteria that protect your heart–and what to feed them | Prof. Tim Spector & Prof Nicola Segata

28:13This is the number one bug that I would like to have in my gut to help look after me. Correct. I think a lot of people listening say, well, hang on a minute. How can you have found it, but you also said nobody's ever found it? Could you help us to understand that? That is the power of Schott's metagenomics, and is the idea of reconstructing the puzzles of each genome, of the genetic content of each bacterium. Each bacteria has a different genetic code. We read that genetic code, and if we find a code, a book, the genome, that no one else saw before and is different enough from everything else that is known to scientists, that is a new species.

28:56And this bug was found thousands of times in different individuals, so it cannot be just by chance that we messed up the puzzles. And this is a new species then. So it's like we found a totally new color in a jigsaw puzzle that wasn't there before. And I think that's a decent analogy. And Nicola's team are really, you know, the best puzzle solvers at the moment in the world. That's amazing. So it's a bit like with people hunting dinosaurs and you find this little bone of a dinosaur. And because you're an expert, you figure out there's this whole new species of dinosaur that no one had ever seen before.

29:33And this is what it looks like. But you're doing this with sort of the DNA. So even though it hasn't been grown outside, you actually have found the DNA of this bacteria over and over. And you've been able to see that it's linked to people being healthier because you just have so many samples to look at. Exactly. And you said, correctly said, analyzing this data is a lot of computer science, is a lot of statistics, is a lot of artificial intelligence, which is 90 % of what we do because it seems that we are looking at the microscope. We are not. We are analyzing DNA, which means just staying on the computer and analyzing big data like is done in other fields.

30:10That is the secret here. So as soon as I heard you explain that this was the top bug, I obviously went back and asked the team whether or not I have it. And I think as many people listening on this show will know, I broke my toes two years ago and I ended up having these very intense antibiotics and it wiped out almost all the bacteria, good and bad, inside my gut. And since then, I've been testing very regularly. So I've tested about 18 times. And sure enough, straight after the antibiotics, I didn't have this. In fact, I only had six of the 50 good bugs. And a year ago, I still didn't have this bug either.

30:47But it turns out that on my last two tests, I have had exactly this bug. So I'm excited. I still only have about 23 of the 50, which is still quite a bit less. I had 38 before I took the antibiotics, which was the result of quite a few years of it going up. But I do have this one. And now I feel much better about my score than I did yesterday. So thank you, Mr. 15249 for helping look after me. And I will bet you also have the third microbes in this ranking because that is the micro that is also more changing when you improve your diet. So do you have the SGB 4964? Oh, I'm going to have to come back and I haven't got the list in front of me.

31:30They need some catchier names, Nicola, for me to remember. But I do know that there's a second one that you wanted to talk about today that you're also really excited could you tell us about that yeah the one i asked you no and is is called the nuts and seeds microbe because is the microbe that is changing the most when you increase the amount of nuts and seeds that that you're eating is after the the bacterium that grows only with coffee is the second bacterium that is mostly impacted by the diet. And it's impacted specifically, we think, by nuts and seeds and maybe some particular nuts and seeds we still need to find out.

32:08Is that new to understand this link between individual foods and individual bacteria? Absolutely, yes. Before that, we just had groups. So we could see changes in thousands of microbes together as a group, but only because we've got to this number, this scale of this project that we can now identify an individual microbial species that is strongly correlated with a particular food. So that's why we're making this link. This is why when we saw the coffee microbe, it was a one-to-one relationship. Here we're also seeing this microbe, just like me, loves nuts and seeds and it really doesn't need anything else to thrive.

32:54And that's what we're seeing. And it's just this level of detail that wasn't possible before. And this is so much more important than seeing thousands of them, that some of them going in one direction, some of them going in another direction. It doesn't allow you to have that same precision about the advice you can give people and the personalized advice. And some people listening will be saying, why is there any particular link between the food that I eat and the bugs that I have inside my gut? Well, because the food is feeding also your bacteria. The bacteria are growing. They need food themselves.

33:30And specific components of the food are feeding specific bacteria. So fibers is an example that is very well studied. Different fibers are the food for different kinds of bacteria. We do think that things inside nuts and seeds are the substrate, the food for these microbes. We still need to find which one, like the same with the bacterium that grows with coffee. We don't know whether it is caffeine, whether it is another component of coffee. Also here, nuts and seeds are still complex foods. So we need to tease apart which are the components. But still, we know for sure that if you increase the amount of nuts and seeds, then this bacterium on average will grow.

34:09And this is a good thing. You've got to try and remember that any plant has hundreds of chemicals in it, and our microbes might be super specialized. So of those 800 chemicals, they might only be interested in about 10 of them. And they're the ones that really drive their production and their growth. But the other interesting finding is that there have been some researchers who have worked out that of the total amount of food we eat, our microbes are perhaps consuming somewhere between 5 % and 10 % of it. I used to get told, always leave some food on your plate for Mr. Goodmanos. You know, that was what my Jewish grandmother used to say.

34:45Well, actually, you know, have an extra 5 % for your microbes. And, you know, that's really important because, you know, you're not just eating for yourself. I think that's the other thing. And this specialization, it also means that we need to eat a lot of diverse food. So it's not about healthy food, but a diversity of healthy food, because these different chemicals in each food are pushing, are improving different microbes. And so the more healthy chemicals you eat, the more good bugs you are probably pushing. And to make sure I've got it, what you're saying is, you know, you've discovered in this paper, these sort of 50 good bugs that are supporting your health.

35:21They don't all just want the same food. So it's a bit like being in the zoo and like all the animals are very picky about the different things they want. You might think, why can't they all just eat grass? But that's not how it works. And you're saying it's the same for these bugs. You need to be feeding them different sorts of food if you want to have not just one or two. I guess the question I might have is why wouldn't I just want to have lots and lots of your 15-249 that's number one? Why wouldn't that be the best thing to do? Because if this buggy is healthy, yes, but it's going to do one operation, one activity, and this is not enough for you.

35:55So you need a lot of activities by different bacteria, different short-chain fatty acids, different anti-inflammatory molecules, and so on and so So it's much better to have a little bit of all these 50 or 70 good bugs than having one of them or two of them that are most of what you have in the gut. Yeah. And that's why people who say only eat kale aren't as healthy as they think they might have been based on the old science. The old science would have said, OK, they're getting enough fiber. It's all green. They're getting all the nutrients they need, but they're not. And so it's the people with the diverse diets have the diverse microbes and they get more of our top contenders and they're the healthy ones.

36:40So coming back to my latest gut health results, I was feeling really smug that I had number one, but I only have 23 of the 50 good bugs. So what you're saying is if I can push that up to 30, 35, 40, then that's going to be even better in terms of supporting my health? Yes. Did you come back to the number you had before, the antibiotics? I haven't yet. I had 38 good bugs before the antibiotics. But when I started, Zoe, I actually had about 20 good bugs. So I slowly increased. When I first met Tim, I had about 20. I got it up to 38. Then the antibiotics wiped all that good work out in seven days, which is really depressing.

37:19But I think what is really exciting, I've been following this, is I went all the way down to six good bugs straight after the antibiotics. It's been steadily going up. I've gone to 23. That's about double the number it was a year ago. But also interesting, I've been looking at the bad bugs. And I know we're going to come to that in a minute, so I'll save that. I would say I have just been looking at the results since now you've told me this other number is really good. And since I do eat a lot of nuts and seeds, it turns out that I do have this bug within my 23. And you're saying that you sort of predicted that because you knew that I was going to be eating lots of nuts and seeds?

37:51Correct. You are confirming our science. I love it. I think you have one more newly discovered gut bug you wanted to tell us about. Yes, I can tell you a little bit more about that guy because I can present it. It's this guy here. It's called Caterin Bacterial. So, Nicola, you're actually holding up a little stuffed animal. Do you want to describe what you've got in your hand? He is you. All right. Well, I've been past it. So it's quite cute, isn't it, Tim? It's got little hairy stuff off the top, two little eyes. I guess that's probably not real. And it's made in sort of three segments. It's kind of a chain shape.

38:25And that's why it's called catenibacterium, because in Latin, chain is catenibacterium. We can show this because we saw this bug under the microscope. This is one exception because we saw it with what I told you, metagenomics. But then we targeted it and we were able to grow it in vitro. And then we are able to study it. So this is not one of the 50 good bugs for a reason, because it's very rare in our populations in the UK or in the US. But there are a lot of these microbes in what we call non-Westernized populations, so populations that are unable to have antibiotics even when they need it. They don't have high-fat diet and stuff like that.

39:05And there's also the microbiome that was in our gut 5 ,000 years ago in our population. Our ancestors, microbes, really. So we probably all had this bug originally. Usually they're good ones, aren't they? Exactly. We saw it in mummies. Ancient mummies have this bacterium. And guess what? This was first isolated from my gut microbiome. So I had very little amount, but they were still detectable in myself. And this was coming out of my gut. That's amazing. So basically you're saying we found this bacteria in mummies that are thousands of years old. We find it now in people who are still living sort of non-Western lifestyles.

39:44But anyone listening to this in the US or Australia is very unlikely to have it because of our modern diet and lifestyle. Exactly. So that's why it's not in the top 50. But, you know, this is more long term science, I would say, because we are trying to study this and try to study whether it's safe to think to reintroduce it in our populations. and whether we can then feed them the right food to keep it in our population. This is sort of a new generation of probiotic intervention potential in the future. This is very early stage. I just wanted to give you an example of where we can... We might be seeing this chain bacteria in our yogurt in 10 years' time.

40:26Tim, can you just help us understand what is a probiotic? And we see them on the supermarket shelves all the time. Are you telling me that they aren't like really good stuff like catinobacterium? The probiotics we have in our shops are really the same that we've had for about 100 years. They really haven't changed much. Probiotic just means a live microbe that's been shown to be good for your health. And the ones that we're allowed to sell are those that exist naturally in foods. so we've pretty much discovered all the ones we're ever going to find in food and there are several thousand of them but we tend to really use the same 10 or 20 over and over again and what we're seeing here is that with these new discoveries we can suddenly go to much more important much more advantageous microbes and if we find they're safe to put into foods and into the human body, then that's going to be a massive advance because the probiotic field really hasn't changed much at all.

41:35We do know they're helpful, but they're not helpful for everybody. And they're not helpful in prevention. They're helpful for specific conditions. But we think we can do so much more with these new bugs that Nicola and the team are finding. So Nicola, in this paper, you now have listed sort of the 50 top bugs. Can I buy a probiotic from my supermarket for any of these 50 today? Not yet, absolutely not. But we are trying to cultivate it. Our science here is trying to target these microbes to culture them and think about having a new way of having probiotics. So this is one of the goals. It's a much more long-term goal than what we are talking about today, but it's something we are really working on.

42:27I feel like a lot of people would be quite shocked because I think a lot of people have been taught that, oh, well, you know, if you want to improve your gut health, you go and buy a probiotic and you eat it. And now, like every product in the supermarket says, you know, has probiotics on it and you can get probiotic soda and whatever you want. But I think what you're saying is that none of those probiotics actually are the good bugs that are going to support your health. available commercial available probiotics have any of those 50 good bugs no they cannot have them so in a way it's a different mechanism i think what we're talking about is the probiotics you see classically in foods and yogurts and kefirs and things been discovered historically a long time ago and they they're not normally part of our gut so they would come in and they would pass through and they might stimulate our immune system but they're not going to stay there and multiply.

43:21Whereas what we're talking about with these ones, these can naturally inhabit and live in our gut for a long time. Therefore, if we can get them into you, then they could have much more profound effects. And Tim, if you're listening to this and you're suddenly saying, oh, I would like to have more good gut bugs. And in a bit like my own personal story, which is it went down to six and you get it up to 24. If you can't get it up to 24 by eating a probiotic, what can you do? Well, prebiotic is the other answer. And some people have heard of this term. It really means a fertilizer for your microbes.

43:59And it's a broader approach than a probiotic, which is just targeting one particular microbe and hoping that it has other effects. So prebiotic is scattering lots of fertilizer in the soil of your gut so that the good microbes will grow and they will push out the bad microbes. So we think that the way to improve your good microbes is definitely through fertilizers from the tools that we have at the moment. So we think this diversity of plants on a regular basis is really the key currently. And that's available and it's actually easier to give people these probiotics than probiotics because there aren't any real health risks associated with it.

44:46Absolutely. We have also to say that they are not enough per se. So probiotics alone or prebiotics alone are not enough because probiotics are living bacteria that are getting into your gut, even next generation ones. But then you have to feed them the right food. Otherwise, they will not stay there. And the same with prebiotics. So it's not that you can think of taking pre and probiotics and then eat just junk food all the day. So it has to be a system approach. You need to get the right environment for your microbes. then maybe you need the specific microbes to be given to you. But this does not mean that diet is not important.

45:24The first thing is diet, then some supplements can really push and improve. And I think in the future we might be looking at personalised fertilisers, personalised prebiotics, really to tease apart these different ones. At the moment we're going for generic. They work really well, but I think we can do even better in the future. Do you know someone who's worried about heart disease or diabetes? Why not share this episode with them right now? This new scientific breakthrough will give them the right tools to feed their gut so they can protect them from getting sick. I'm sure they'll thank you. Now, we talked a lot about the good bugs, but I'd love to touch at least briefly on the bad bugs, the sort of the villains of this story.

46:06How are they impacting our health? The bad bugs are, as we've discussed, only bad when they get too numerous. And when they're too numerous, they seem to interact together and they produce a nasty environment. They produce chemicals that irritate the immune system. They cause inflammation. They might cause slight swelling of the gut lining, making it leaky. They might change the acidity of the local environment. They can mess up your fat transport, interfere with the way your body gets rid of fat, so it's hanging around and causing even more inflammation. Many of them seem to like sugar. They're like spoiled kids who only want to eat in the sweet shop.

46:53Tim, I can tell it's a long time since you've had kids. That's all kids. All right. So yes. All right. They're like childish nuisances that are in your gut. and once they proliferate, it's very hard for your good bugs to make a comeback because they're school bullies. They're elbowing out the other guys. They're pumping out all these chemicals. And the more nasty chemicals they pump out, the harder it is for the good guys to survive and flourish. And it also attracts more bad guys. And there's even some evidence that if you've got lots of these bad guys, they even could send signals to your brain to say, give me more junk food.

47:35They've only done this in mice and rodents and other lower insects. But it's a kind of cool idea that, yeah, I like this inflammatory environment that suits my microbes. What are my microbes like to eat? Oh, lots of fat, lots of sugar, lots of nasty stuff. What is most dangerous about this is that you don't feel to have the bad bugs, you know, because they are there, they are doing the inflammation, but it's not like they are not as bad as pathogens that cause infectious diseases. You don't know you've got them. Pathogens that are even worse than the bed bugs that we are talking about are making you sick.

48:08So you need to be treated. These microbes, you don't feel that you have them. Yes, you may have lower energy, lower, more information, things like that, but it's difficult for you to associate it with that. That's again why it's important to test, to know that you have them and be aware about that. And Nicola, I'd love to share again, I was just, I'm listening to you and I have opened like the set of results for my own microbiome test over time. And just before I smashed my toe to smithereens, I had six bad bugs in my gut. And immediately after the antibiotics, actually that fell to three because it was like almost everything was wiped out.

48:45But I was looking at, interestingly, by the end of that year, my number of bad bugs had gone all the way up to 13. So I had like twice as many bad bugs. and today that's slowly come down and now it's back down to four. How does that tie into the story that you're describing? Your main focus should be improving your good bugs then by growing they will decrease the bad bugs. I like gardening so this is a bit like weeds the way I'm hearing this like I've got a garden like there's only so much room in the garden so if it's full of weeds there's not room for a lot of flowers. If I have lots of flowers actually it's hard for the weeds to grow, right?

49:22Because they're sort of shaded underneath. But equally well, if I have lots of weeds, it's really hard for the flowers to show. And so there's a sort of, if one grows, the other shrinks. It's a balance, it's an equilibrium, yes. There is only some ecological space is called in the gut. And if you have enough of good bugs, there is no space for the bad ones, yes. And so when I took the antibiotics, it sort of wiped out the garden, and then suddenly I have all these weeds shoot up. I'd worked hard on my diet. I mean, this sitting next to Tim for a long time, who's very smug about how healthy he is.

49:54And I'm like, no, I want to be on this path and feeling better. And then I took very intense antibiotics and I sort of wiped it out. You resetted your microbiome. And that's why it's important, it's even more important to die just after the antibiotics because it's where you are regrowing your garden. The food that you're eating after antibiotics is really important because you need to give them, you want to sort of feed the good bugs, the flowers. And starve the bad ones. Exactly. And what is the diet that the bad bugs really want? They love junk food. They love what we call pro-inflammatory foods that are high in saturated fats.

50:30They're high in sugars. And they're low in most of the traditional fibers that are hard to digest. It's easy to be bad. Instead, the good bugs are much more specialized in some operations. That's why you need to put effort in diversify your diet. So the bad bugs basically love all the junk food and the good bugs are like picky and you have to give them particular sorts of plants and things. Is that the sort of rather depressing message that you're sharing here? Sadly, yes. And we used to have the perfect diet, but, you know, suddenly the Western or the sad diet, the standard American diet has taken over the Western world.

51:10And that really suits the bad microbes and doesn't suit the good guys. I'd love now to switch to really actionable advice. And I think we've talked about a lot of things you can do, but I'd like to try and make it really specific. Maybe starting actually with what you can learn if you've actually done a gut test and got the results, because I know a lot of people listening are ZOE members, quite a lot of them will have participated in their science, and they'll have been given a list of foods that are called gut boosters associated with their microbes. What makes a food gut boosting? Is it simply like it's a fermented food like we've been talking about today or something else?

51:49It's something different. These are foods that we are associating with microbes. So when we're suggesting a gut booster, it is in the belief that if you increase that particular type of food, you're going to increase some of your good microbes and reduce some of your bad ones that are specific to you. And each time we evolve these scores, this advice is going to get better and better and more specific. And so hopefully this will be really very targeted advice within a few years' time. And so everyone could be pinning down, okay, I've got microbiome number four is really low. What combination of foods do I need to get this guy up and going?

52:39because it has this very specific job that I want it to deal with. So this is really the start of this journey as we get these huge numbers and we can really nail this down. But it's the era of personalized nutrition very much and personalized microbeam analysis, which is where we're all heading here because, yes, there is general advice, but that only gets you so far. when we find a new association between a food and a microbe we will tell our members that this is what they need to eat without necessarily waiting for that paper to go through this rather lengthy process of peer review so it's constantly evolving it's constantly improving and i think this is the whole name of the game in in what we're doing and that what's make makes it so exciting as our as our data from all our members allows it to do better and better every time.

53:35Almost real time. One of my gut boosters was tofu. I never ate tofu in my life, but because, oh, it's supposed to be good for my microbes, I started eating it. And what do you know? After a while, I quite like this. It's an interesting example of something I've added to my diet now thinking about it. Now, a lot of people listening to this won't have ever had their microbiome tested. So what should everyone be thinking about eating more of if they want to support the sort of fussy good bugs that we've been talking about? Well, the general principles are still the same. And, you know, our research is just confirming that having a rich diversity of plants in your diet is good.

54:17And we still believe that hitting a target of 30 is achievable and seems to be a reasonable one to go for, 30 different plants, including different types of nuts and seeds, herbs and spices, trying to eat the rainbow. So you're getting all the different chemicals from these polyphenols, these defense chemicals into your diet, having regular fermented foods, which gives you your gut microbiome a bit of a boost in ways we don't totally understand yet. And you probably need to have three little portions a day of ideally different ones to really optimize it. And Tim, you said before that none of the probiotics that we buy in the supermarket actually match up to any of the good foods.

55:05And then you're talking about fermented foods that have like these live bugs in. Are they going to be some of the 50 good bugs or is there something different? No, they're not because there's a difference between the microbes that live normally in food and the microbes that live normally in our gut. There's only a very small overlap of a few percent of these that you find food microbes inside your gut. And in general, they're not the ones that are in most of these fermented foods. I think I'm right, Nicola, on that. So it's a different type of microbe. And we think they might have an effect on our gut through, say, stimulate our immune system, a rather different mechanism to our normal gut microbes.

55:48They might be working higher up. We don't know yet. But we do know from our studies that we've done our own Zoe fermented food study and other more detailed ones that having at least three portions a day can in just a few weeks really improve your immune system. And that's going to help your gut microbes as well. So everyone should try and do that and experiment with new fermented foods. The other thing I think people should do is to what we call pivot their protein, try and have less meat and get your protein from things like legumes and beans, because you get pretty much the same quality protein, but you also get lots of fiber, which our microbes love.

56:36So a lot of people aren't really used to, in the US and the UK, having a whole range of these beans and lentils. And I think that's something we can all do. And then finally, thinking about the quality of the food you're eating, which means you want to go for whole foods, you want to go for real food, and you want to really reduce your high-risk processed foods or what's called ultra-processed foods. And actually, Nicola, I was going to ask, because that's a lot about feeding the good bugs, What do I want to eat less of to try and push down those weeds, the bad bugs that we've been talking about?

57:14But again, I don't think there is one single food that is bad for you a priori, unless you eat too much of that bad food. So, you know, little amounts of bad foods here and there is not a big problem. I think it's much more the advantage of eating a lot of healthy foods and a diversity of healthy food and pushing down the bad bugs. So this is the first thing. Of course, too much red meat, of course, is a problem, clearly. But we shouldn't feel bad in eating every now and then the food we love. You can have the occasional pizza, can you? Absolutely. I have to. And Tim, you mentioned about fermented foods.

57:54I think this is something that still for a lot of us is not very familiar. What fermented foods are in your fridge? My wife says too many. You can smell them, probably. She can smell them. Yeah, from a long way away, especially if I've been home for a while and I've been doing a bit of my own fermenting. So I've always got yogurt and I've always got kefir, kefir, which is fermented milk. I've just made a batch of water kefir, which is also called tibikos, which is like a fizzy drink. No kombucha? I haven't made any kombucha at the moment. I've got my blob in the fridge, which looks disgusting to anyone who's not an aficionado like myself.

58:40I've got kimchi. I've got some kraut in there. I've got some miso paste. I've even got some garlic in honey. It's fermented in honey, which I use in salad dressings. I've got usually a whole range of smelly cheeses, lots of different ones. And I also got my sourdough mother and I've just made some sourdough yesterday, actually. So that's that's on the go. So I've got a full range. And so, yeah, I'm never short of fermented food. So that's that's I always try and get my three portions in. Amazing. And might you have a new fermented recipe, a simple one that someone listening to this could follow?

59:29oh um it depends what you've got but it's a very practical one so often i find i have to go away on trips i've left my fridge with vegetables in the bottom shelf that are probably going to go off if i don't do something with them so i call this my fridge raid ferment and whatever's in that lower compartment except aubergines which go horribly soggy so things whether it's carrots sweet potato cauliflower broccoli onions tomatoes garlic doesn't really matter a bit of cabbage and even it's you know a quarter of it you chop it up into small chunks half an inch thick try and get it fairly even stick them in a bowl weigh them then do some maths and calculate two percent of that weight and you put that as salt and you throw salt on it massage it in a bit until it's really worked into the veg stuff it in a jar which which has a lid and ideally a little valve so you've either got to burp it every day or the valve will do the trick for you and leave it for five days while you're away you leave it out in room temperature and that will be bubbling away and fermenting.

1:00:51And you should, when you come back, have a beautifully preserved fermented fridge veg. And it's, yeah, that's an easy way to start and very good for the planet. That sounds great, Tim. And I think that that is actually a recipe that is coming from your brand new book. Am I right? That's right. Yeah. This is a sneak preview, which you can pre-order. And there are many other recipes that are really useful and practical in this book if you want to learn more about your ferments. Well, we will share the recipe in the show notes. And we'll also share a link to your new book. Tim, I know that you like to spend months and months hiding in your room writing these books.

1:01:37So I always think it's an immense amount of work, but I appreciate the amount of effort you go into to then allow us to understand the latest science and how that ties into our health. You're very welcome, Jonathan. Thank you both. Thank you so much, Nicola, for flying in to take us through this amazing new paper. I'm going to try and do a quick summary. I think I'm going to start with the thing that is brand new for me and I love, which is I am a coral reef, which is a brilliant idea that somehow I have all these bacteria sort of living in me and I'm sort of coexisting with them. On a more serious note, you're both clearly very excited.

1:02:14You feel like this is a really major breakthrough. Tim, you gave this great analogy that being published in Nature is sort of like winning the Oscars for scientists. And the key point I think I've taken away is this is like 34 times bigger than the previous biggest study. And that scale is allowing scientists to unlock really the links between food and bacteria and the links between individual bacteria and health in a way that hasn't been possible before. And I think, you know, I would definitely like to thank everyone listening to this who's actually contributed to the research, which I know is a lot of the listeners who have, which is amazing.

1:02:50I know you're very excited because you're already working on the next stage of this, you know, with hundreds of thousands of samples. So thank you, everybody. And the key thing that this enables us to do is to really take a snapshot of our gut microbiome today and understand its health, not in some vague way, but really literally, yes, there are specifically good bugs and bad bugs, and you can look at the amount between them. And then you can track it over time in the way that I've been able to do since my antibiotics and really see that you're making progress, which I find incredibly reassuring.

1:03:26It's a big part of my motivation to continue is to see the progress, while also maybe a little frustrated that I haven't got all the way that I want to, because I can be a perfectionist, but that's my own issue. And the other big thing I took away is that the good bugs are pickier than the bad bugs. The bad bugs, they love junk food. And they're really, you know, they then create all these chemicals that are damaging your gut and causing inflammation, but they're very happy with just eating, you know, whatever the junk is that surrounds you. The good bugs are pickier and it's not all right to just feed like one good bug.

1:04:00actually really want to have all 50 of these good bugs. And so you need to be trying to feed them all of these different things. We know they like plants, but they like different plants. And so that is really where, you know, Tim, you often talk about this idea of diversity. And I think it sounds like the science is helping to understand more of this, which is, you know, they actually respond differently. And Nicola, you predicted that I had this particular bug and you were right, which I wrote down 4964 needs a better name, because we now know it really likes nuts and seeds. And if you feed it, then you're going to have that.

1:04:32And I think the final thing that I took away is the food that we eat and the sort of prebiotic, as you describe it, is the most important thing because we've all been told about these probiotics with like living bugs that you can take. But actually, we now know that none of those are actually the same as these 50 good bugs that you want. And even fermented food that you're talking about, which has really great positive impact isn't going to replace the 50 good bugs. So I can't just say, oh, I'm getting fermented food and then eat my junk food. Like the most important thing is like these foods that actually are going to feed my bugs.

1:05:06And if I can do that right, a bit like in my garden, I have more of these flowers, less of the weeds. And that brings us right back to the beginning of saying genuinely, this is linked to better health and reducing my risk of heart disease and diabetes and all of these things. You got it. Fantastic summary. Now, if you listen to the show regularly, you already believe that changing how you eat can transform your health, but you can only do so much with general advice from a weekly podcast. If you want to feel much better now and be on the path to live many more healthy years, you need something more.

1:05:41And that's why more than 100 ,000 members trust Zoe each day to help them make the smartest food choices. Combining our world-leading science with your Zoe test results, Zoe is your daily companion to better health for life. So how does it work? Zoe Membership starts with at-home testing to understand your unique body. Then Zoe's app is your health coach using weekly check-ins and daily guidance to help you shift your food choices to steadily improve your health. I rely on Zoe's advice every day and truly it has transformed how I feel. Will you give Zoe a try? The first step is easy. Take our free quiz to find out what Zoe Membership could do for you.

1:06:22Simply go to zoe.com slash podcast, where as a podcast listener, you'll get 10 % off. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolfe. Zoe Science and Nutrition is produced by Julie Pinero, Sam Durham, and Richard Willem. The Zoe Science and Nutrition podcast is not medical advice. And if you have any medical concerns, please consult your doctor. See you next time.

1:06:54As you can imagine, hosting this podcast, running Zoe, juggling family life, it all keeps me pretty busy. So I try as best I can to stay energized and show up well in all those parts of my life by fueling my body with the right food, by exercising, and by adding a scoop of Daily 30 to my meals every day. If you haven't heard of Daily 30 yet, it's the gut supplement designed by our gut health scientists here at Zoe. It's made of over 30 high-quality, hand-picked plants, including seaweed, fungi, and different types of fiber. Better yet, it contains ingredients that support gut health, digestion, and energy, which is ideal for packed calendars and busy lives.

1:07:37Simply add one scoop a day to any meal for an extra boost of fiber and plant diversity. And because it tastes delicious on just about anything and adds a satisfying crunch, it quite quickly slots into your life. becoming a daily healthy habit you'll always have time for. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains four grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. So order yours today at zoe.com slash daily 30. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

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