Dr. Tim Spector
speaker
158 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 27 Jan
Dr. Tim Spector’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The benefits outweigh the risks for people who are obese, who have a body mass index over 30 or have strong reasons for diabetic control to take it. And it has additional benefits on gambling, drug addiction, smoking, and alcohol. So it's like, wow, this thing does everything, okay? But... Side effect profiles are such that 1 in 1,000 people have serious side effects and end up in hospital.
And quite a few, you know, it varies, but, you know, it's somewhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 10 will have some side unpleasant side effects that mean that they get vomiting or nausea and quite a few find it hard to keep going. And of course, most of the people in the US are getting it from compound pharmacies or online without any supervision. And
Clearly, if it has the supervision of a nutritional therapist or a sort of health professional, you're going to do much better and still stay on it. So many people are trying it in the U.S. Many people are seeing if they can come off it because it's too expensive, and then they generally fail and have side effects. So that's the sort of playing field.
And there's also a lot of people are taking it who don't really need it. They're just – what I call a little bit chubby, and they just want to look good in the gym in a few weeks. And for those people, I think there is a risk, which we don't really know about yet.
And people should be aware this is quite a drug that really does affect your whole body, and it particularly affects bits of your brain. which is, I think, what you're getting at is it affects the appetite centers in the brain, but that also can affect your addiction centers, which may, as well as good stuff in stopping your smoking and drinking, may just subtly change your personality so that
If, like me, you're a bit of an entrepreneur, you don't mind taking some risks, it's possible that this might just dial it down a bit so that you're not quite the same person personality-wise as you were. Now, like all traits, they come with gambling or risk-taking. There's always a good and a bad side, but it just might change people in ways they hadn't thought.
So I'd get people to think twice about taking it if they don't really need it.
The experts I've seen who've been treating like 20,000 people on this aren't seeing anything clear because they've been dealing mainly with the obese patients. The people who don't really need it are not going to their medical practitioners. So we're not really getting good data on on what's happening. So that's why it's a really unclear picture at the moment.
But if you do suffer from an addiction, then it's probably one of the best ways to get off alcohol or drugs at the moment that we have. And so for those people, that personality change is a bonus. All I'm saying is there's a red flag around this other idea It could long-term change you, but there just isn't any hard data that I've been able to find about that.
And there's hardly even any stuff on how it affects your gut microbes. We do know that gut microbes can produce small amounts of this gut hormone, GLP-1 themselves. and we do naturally produce it. So some of these microbes might enhance it. And there's many companies claiming they've got products that naturally produce it. Most of these are in tiny amounts that probably don't have any real effect.
We don't know of any major disturbance to the gut on regular users as yet, but the numbers studied have been tiny. And this is something that With my company, Zoe, we want to look at, because we think we've got probably a couple of thousand GLP-1 users who have done the Zoe nutritional program, that we could look at their gut microbes.
And so that's an ongoing project, which I think will be really fascinating to see what what other effects there are of this drug. Because it seems to do much more than just weight, you know, and the effect on the immune system, et cetera, seems to be quite marked.
Well, coffee is a great example of sort of nutritional fads and myths. So over the last 30 years, it's been seen as, you know, the most evil thing you can drink and suddenly it's had a revival and suddenly it's the best thing you can drink. I've seen this in my career and I've published on it. I published a paper recently over about 30 years ago saying it caused cancer.
It didn't, by the way, but it was a typical sort of scare story that I'm not proud of today. But now we definitely know from the epidemiology that regular coffee drinkers have less cancer and less heart disease than people who do drink, that drink, say, tea. And not that tea is unhealthy, but there seems to be something extra in the coffee. And we wondered why that was.
And we think it's related not to the caffeine because you get similar effects with decaffeinated coffee. So I don't know whether you... you can have decaf coffee or not. We did discover that there's one microbe in the guts. So we studied about 100,000 people's gut microbes in the US and the UK from the ZOE studies. And there's this one particular microbe that's very fussy, only drinks coffee.
And it's called laucinobacter. named after a Dr. Lawson. And it's specialized and it's waiting around, hanging around, it's probably in you in tiny amounts, just waiting for you to have a drink of coffee and then it's going to explode and reproduce, have babies and become a really big deal.
And we think some of the chemicals that it produces as a side effect are healthy for your heart and the rest of your body. So it's a great example of how we need to feed our gut microbes in a very diverse way because they're such super specialists that they're not going to be content with just having kale salad every day. They want a big variety.
And so this is just the tip of the iceberg of what we're going to be able to find, all these new microbes that we didn't know about, all these specialists. And this is very much part of our ongoing research. Now we've got a database of, Of 250,000 people we can study with all their data information, all their health data and all their gut microbes.
And these are all the ZOE members that have consented to do research as well. So it's really a really cool, exciting time to be studying the gut microbes. So sorry if I get overexcited by it all.
I've not seen anything in our data on that. No real difference between tea and coffee. And of course it's difficult because tea has some benefits. particularly green tea may be as powerful as coffee. And the data do suggest that, although it's mainly in Asian green tea drinkers rather than in sort of Europeans or Americans. Matcha looks, it's like you're having a bit of a revival.
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