Most replayed moment: Lessons from a 5000-year-old diet | Frank Maixner & Tim Spector

0:00Hello, and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. We have to stay sharp at Zoe. Nutrition science moves fast, so it's important for us to stay up to date with new discoveries and the latest advice. However, every now and then, it helps to look back, way back. And in this recap, we're turning to a rather unusual teacher, a 5 ,000-year-old ice man, preserved in ice and carrying clues about the diet of our ancient ancestors. I'm joined by Frank Maxner and Professor Tim Spector to uncover what this prehistoric man ate and what those findings can teach us about our diet today.

0:46Frank, can you tell us about what happened, I think, about 30 years ago, high in the mountains, you know, between Italy and Austria? Yeah, it was in 1991, actually. So there was this couple from Nuremberg, Erica and Helmut Simon. They made holidays and they were on a hike in the mountains, in the alpine ridge between Austria and Italy. And it was quite late already at that day. And then they need to take a shortcut back to the hut there. And when doing this, they stumbled over a body, which was still sticking half in the ice. And they immediately thought that this maybe is a hiker or skier who died up there.

1:27And they informed the hut owner. And he informed then the Italian police, which then not felt responsible for this. And they then said the Austrians should take over this case. And yeah, this body was recovered. And it was for a long time not considered precious. It took some days, actually, until an archaeologist had a look at this finding. And it turned out that it's a 5 ,300-year-old mummy. who died up there. And this was the start of this research on the Iceman, actually. So they've discovered this 5 ,000-year-old body sort of sticking out of the ice at the top of the Alps. Who was he and what happened to him?

2:09It's a good question, actually. So some things we not yet know who he was, actually. This would be a nice question to ask him. But it became more more clear that he belonged to the so-called early European farmers, which already lived a settled lifestyle. They had access to domesticated animals and plants also. Yeah, he lived and grew up also in this Italian Alps, so in this Eastern Italian Alps. And so what have we been able to discover about what he was eating? We were lucky because normally mummification, if it's not starting immediately, the degradation of body starts in the intestinal region.

2:48And here this mummification stops this, and we have still access to the intestinal contents, to the stomach content, and also the lower intestines. And by analyzing this, we not only microscopically, but also molecularly could see that he has eaten Ibex meat, actually, of this mountain goat, red deer meat. And in parallel, this was supplemented by cereals, ancient form, the einkorn wheat actually was part of his meal. And interesting was also the discovery of a toxic bracken fern, which definitely was also part of his meat, which we not yet can really identify why he has eaten this. So maybe in a young form where it's not so toxic.

3:30So it was composed of these parts. And a second thing which we see is 50 % nearly was then also fat. So it was very lipid-rich, very fatty-rich diet to get the energy he needs up there. So this was another observation we had. Wasn't there something about the type of meat that was fatty meat rather than the lean bits? I remember reading something about that. Can you remind us how that deduction was made, that they had the fatty bits of the meat, not the lean bits? That's true. So it was definitely intentionally sampled at the regions where the fat is more enriched. And these ibex, for example, normally the meat is quite fatless or not rich in fat.

4:10But certain regions like in the neck or other regions, you have quite accumulations of fats. And the Iceman took these parts and used it as his diet also. So it was most likely then air dried also. And we can imagine that it's in a form of a speck or in a form of an air dried fat meat consumed. for weeks. They hunted together and they needed to, of course, also to conserve and preserve this meat. And the best way to do this is really to air dry it. And I think you talked a bit about the fact that we were actually able to look at the health of his arteries. Could you just explain a bit? Because we often talk about everybody being completely healthy in these sort of ancient times.

4:52And I think actually you got some quite surprising results, didn't you? Yeah, that's actually really an interesting discovery, talking about this maybe modern day diseases like atherosclerosis. It's a purring of the arteries, isn't it, that can lead to heart attacks and things like this? Yes, and he has really severe calcification already of his arteries, also in the heart region already. And this is a little bit stands in contrast also to his lifestyle because he was slim. He was really hiking a lot. And the diet, you can, of course, argue now we have a snapshot only in the stomach content to have seen a lot of fat, actually.

5:28But this maybe is just an exception. But the interesting thing is when we now look also at other mummies from different regions like South America, also Egyptian mummies, we see always 30 to 40 percent of these mummies also suffer the same level of cardiovascular diseases or calcifications, actually. So our assumption is that we see this also in the Iceman, that there's a major also component coming from our genes or their genes. So the Iceman has actually a high genetic predisposition to develop this kind of disease. And we see this also in other mummies, which show already the signs. And this seems to be independent from the diet, from the origin, from the population you belong to.

6:12And I think this brings us away a little bit from this. This is only a modern-day disease linked to our lifestyles. I think we should also not forget this. And just remind us how old we think he is. The Iceman is 40 to 50 years. All right, so he was an early middle-aged man. So normally it would be quite unusual, even in modern times, to have heavy calcification of the arteries without it being genetic. So the genetic theory might be the one rather than diet or lifestyle-related, given unless he had some other disease we don't know about, but that seems most likely. So we've talked a bit about the diet, and I think that's already amazing that we can understand this.

6:53But you and your colleagues have managed to go further, right, and actually understand the bacteria, the microbiome that he had 5 ,000 years ago. Tell us about it. This was actually also in cooperation with Nicola Sigata's group and others, which are focusing on modern gut microbiomes, actually. And what we saw there is that the Iceman still carries these traces of the gut microbiome community, actually, and that we can confront this also to communities we know from modern persons. And this was quite surprising to see that he resembles not the gut microbiome we most likely carry in us, but more the one which indigenous populations also still carry nowadays.

7:34So populations which have more traditional diets, which have a different lifestyle to ours. So we called it also non-westernized populations. And the ISM was the first time also the proof that these non-westernized populations maybe are a good proxy of how the gut microbiome of our ancestors was. So this is really amazing. We're basically having this ability to look back 5 ,000 years and understand the microbes at that point. And 5 ,000 years is a lot of time for us. I guess for microbes that are potentially having another generation every 30 minutes. is like some unimaginable number of generations.

8:10What was the most surprising thing that we found out when we look at the microbiome? Yeah, this difference to nowadays, and this is what you said already, 5 ,000 years seems to be not long, but within this 5 ,000 years, there seem to be changes going on. We not yet understand well when this happened, but there was clearly a higher diversity of microbes in the Iceman. So strains we nowadays not carry anymore in our guts were present in the Iceman. shifts of this gut community, which we see. And this is actually very surprising that within this very short time frame, we see diversity decay, similar to the decays in diversity in plant or animal kingdoms.

8:51And this potentially can be linked also to some other developments, diseases we nowadays know linked to diet maybe. And when this decay or when this diversity change happened, this we are now currently investigating, actually. And Tim, can you explain a bit for us what this diversity means? Yes, diversity is a way of microbiologists generalizing a very complicated picture of our gut microbes into something that most people can understand. And it's the way of saying how many different species there are in all the trillions of gut microbes in the average gut, you know, what that community looks like.

9:32And so a highly diverse gut microbiome is one a bit like a garden where there are lots of flowers of all types flowering and the soil is incredibly rich. And there's hardly any room for weeds to grow. It's a very healthy community with one species helping another. And it just looks beautiful all year round and a non-diverse gut microbiome. It looks more like an Arizona backyard with dust bowls and toxic waste and other things going down it. I'm not sure everyone in Arizona is going to like this particular positioning. Not all gardens in Arizona are like that. But I'm just trying to envisage a more desert-like thing where there's a few sparse plants.

10:17that have adapted to that rather rugged environment. And there might be cactuses and things like this. So it's that large contrast you've got to bear in mind visually in how you might see your gut microbes. And we know that people with nearly all the common diseases we're seeing today of Westernized societies, which don't happen in non-Westernized societies, such as diabetes, such as obesity, such as autoimmune diseases, cancers, heart disease, et cetera, anything with chronic inflammation, plus even mental disorders as depression, autism spectrum disorders, they all have a reduced diversity compared to the healthier types of Western society.

11:03So we sort of generally link this number of species with health in a very broad sense of it. What does this mean for us today? And what's the actionable advice? So I think it's this amazing story and insight is so much fun. But if I can't just go and get these microbes a day and I can't buy them in the store, what's the actionable advice that comes out of this, do you think? I think learning that when non-Westernized populations have better sets of microbes means that we should be generally thinking about reducing our antibiotic intakes, particularly for our children who generally have 18 courses of antibiotics by the time they're 20, certainly in the US and in most Western countries.

11:45So we're overusing antibiotics, which is one reason that we've probably killed off a lot of our microbes, not being too sensitive about sterilizing everything and making sure that our children, particularly when the microbiome is really most responsive, are given the chance to be outdoors and hug trees and eat dirt and play with animals like our ancestors did. And then finally, improving our diet so that we don't pollute it with highly processed foods, chemicals, and that we try and eat a rich diversity of plants and try and learn some of the lessons from our ancestors. I think that, to me, is the take-home message.

12:26We don't have all the answers, but I think there are some sensible things we could start to do now that would try and reverse some of this really bad trend in our biology. As 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.

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13:48So order yours today at zoe.com slash daily 30. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

14:02And IoT. So