Most replayed moment: The hidden battle inside your gut | Tim Spector & Nicola Segata

The gut microbe war

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.

0:11Professor Tim Spector often refers to the microbes in our guts as mini pharmacies. This is because they provide us with powerful chemicals that help support our health. But not all gut microbes are on our side. In fact, there's an ongoing battle in our digestive system between the beneficial bugs and those that wish to do us harm. I'm joined by Tim Spector and microbiome researcher Nicolas Agata to explore this microscopic war and explain how simple changes to your diet could help tip the balance towards the good guys.

0:45Gut bacteria are trillions of single microorganisms present in our gut, thousands of species, more or less, in each of us. And they are part of an ecosystem that are an interface between the food we eat, our environment, and our health. So the diet, the food we eat is broken down by gut bacteria, that they are in turn producing molecules, small molecules that are then arriving in our blood and in our system. And so they are having an impact on us. I call them mini pharmacies is the way I describe it.

1:17Yeah, mini pharmacies, yes. In addition, they also interact with our cells, with our immune system. So they are directly touching and interacting with us. And so if you have the good bacteria that are able to produce good little molecules, because metabolites is good, otherwise not. So it's like an amplifier of our diet. The good bugs are amplifying the good effect, the positive effect of an healthy diet. And vice versa, they can actually be detrimental for our health in other situations. So we need to push, increase our gut ecosystem to be an ally for us.

1:53So you want to improve, have more of these good pharmacies, and you want to have less of the bad ones, you know, doing the breaking bad type home chemistry and producing these nasty chemicals. And is this real? Is there such a thing as like a good bug and a bad bug? It's not so much black and white. And also in our research, we see that there are bacteria that tends to be associated with better health and better diet. But we also need to consider that our gut microbes are very personalized to each of us.

2:26So it's only with big, big numbers that we can tell apart which tends to be good in which situation from those that are likely not to be there. But as Tim was saying, it's also about the diversity of them. Because the more we have, the more good function they can bring to us. There is no single bacteria that can make all the work that is supposed to be done in the gut. So some of them, bad ones, for example, may be quite harmless in small numbers. But when the conditions are bad, they're fed the wrong foods, they have a so-called inflammatory

2:57environment, maybe the acidity changes slightly, then they can grow to an extent that they produce chemicals that influence everything around them, and they become bad guys. There is this transition. And so it's best to think of this as a bit of a war between the good guys and the bad guys. The more good guys you've got, the more you can squeeze out the bad guys so that it doesn't matter if they're around because they're in small numbers and they're just playing around and really any chemicals they produce are just so diluted, you don't really feel the consequences.

3:32But the real problems are when you lose your good bugs and suddenly the bad guys multiply, and then you're really in trouble because you're producing all kinds of chemicals that attract even more unhealthy microbes, and the whole thing starts to go downhill very fast.

Why your microbes are unique

3:49The three of us sitting here, will we all have roughly the same bugs inside our gut? Not really. I think we have around 30-40% of species in common. And at the level when you get even below the species level, the subspecies level, it's probably even less than that. We're only sharing 10-15%. So all of us have a unique set of some microbes that the others wouldn't have. And even if you took 1,000 people, you'd find nearly everyone has something unique to them.

4:21So there's a broad pattern that might be similar, but the more fine detail you get, the harder is to find things in common, even in, as we discovered, Nicola and I, when we looked at this, even in identical twins, who have identical genes in every cell in their body, but their microbes are really only slightly more similar than unrelated people. And probably they are more similar because they live together, because we see that we are transmitting our gut microbes, or all our microbes.

4:52It's like pathogens. If we live together, we are going to share some of these subspecies, some of these specific strains or variants, like we know for infectious diseases, no? So firstly, just all the bugs inside me are really different from the bugs inside everybody else. But also, even when it seems like we might have the same bug, it's a bit like saying, well, we both have a dog, but I might have an Alsatian, and you might have a chihuahua. They're pretty different. And they behave quite differently, yes. Absolutely, yes. That's right. That's the point, yes. And always worry for the chihuahua, right?

5:22Even if you had two chihuahuas, one would be aggressive, and the other would be nice and docile. So having listened to all of this, is this just because people aren't eating a very healthy diet, Tim? So if someone is listening to this and saying, well, that's interesting, but I know I eat healthy, so therefore I will obviously have a healthy microbiome, a healthy set of bacteria inside my gut, and therefore it's going to be protecting me from heart disease and these other things. So if someone out there is eating as healthily as they think they can for their gut, generally

5:59following, say, all my advice and Zoe's advice, on average they will have a healthier gut score. On average they will be living longer, et cetera. But they can't be sure they don't have the microbes that are maybe predisposing them to certain risks of disease or others they're lacking that could prevent them from having disease. And the only way to be sure about that is to do a gut microbiome test using this sophisticated genetics that Nicola has been working on.

6:31Nicola, is it only food that affects the makeup of my microbiome? It's not only food. The microbiome is a complex system that is modified by a number of things, like food for sure, but your lifestyle, the activity you do, the interaction that you have, the sleep that you have, and so on and so forth. But also, as we were saying before, the interaction. We have studies, for example, of babies at the daycare that they acquire from their peers at the daycare so much microbes that they are reprogramming completely their microbiome.

7:01And this is also in adults, two students that are starting to live together, after two, three years, they share quite a bit of their microbiome they didn't share before. So yeah, there are a lot of effects on the microbiome. Also, you know, pollutants, the environment we live in, so tons of effects on the microbiome.

How to feed good bacteria

7:21And Tim, if you're listening to this and you're suddenly saying, oh, I would like to have more good gut bugs, what can you do? Well, prebiotic, some people have heard of this term, it really means a fertilizer for your microbes. And 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

7:52will 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 prebiotics than probiotics because there aren't any real risk, health risks associated with it. Absolutely. We have also to say that they are not enough per se.

8:24You know, so probiotics alone or prebiotics alone are not enough because probiotics are living bacteria that are getting into your gut, even the 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.

8:54But this does not mean that diet is not important. The first thing is diet. Then some supplements can really push and improve. And I think in the future, we might be looking at personalized fertilizers, personalized prebiotics, really to tease apart these different ones. At the moment, we're going for generic. They work really well. But, you know, I think we can do even better in the future. So what should everyone be thinking about eating more of if they want to support the sort of good bugs that we've been talking about?

9:25Well, 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. And 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

9:57into 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 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 like push down those weeds, you know, the bad bugs that we've been talking about? But again, I don't think there is one single food that is bad for you a priori, you know,

10:31unless 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, you know, too much red meat, of course, is a problem, clearly. But we shouldn't feel bad in eating every now and then the food. You can have the occasional pizza, can you? Absolutely. I have to.

Fermented foods in the fridge

11:00And Tim, you mentioned about fermented foods. I 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 that probably. She can smell them, yeah, from a long way away, especially if I've had 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.

11:40Not 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. I'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.

12:14And I've also got my sourdough mother. And I've just made some sourdough yesterday, actually. So that's on the go. So I've got a full range. And so, yeah, I'm never short of fermented food. So 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? Oh, it depends what you've got.

12:44But 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, the things, whether it's carrots, sweet potato, cauliflower, broccoli, onions, tomatoes, garlic, doesn't really matter, a bit of cabbage, and even a quarter of it.

13:20You 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 2% 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 has a lid and ideally a little valve.

13:52So 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. And you should, when you come back, have beautifully preserved fermented fridge veg. And it's, yeah, that's an easy way to start and very good for the planet. That's all for this week's recap. At Zoe, we believe that when it comes to your health, small changes can actually add up to a big improvement over time.

14:25And that's why we developed Daily30, the gut supplement that's specifically formulated to become your new daily healthy habit. You simply add a scoop to any meal once a day to support your health and increase the plant diversity in your diet. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains 4 grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. To make Daily30 part of a gut health routine, simply visit Zoe.com slash Daily30.

14:57See you next time.

15:02Bye.