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
Well, what I do is, um, I start, it's always good if it's breakfast, you can get a lot of them in. So that would be, you generally have a full fat Greek yogurt. I have a mixer with dairy, milk, kefir. And I would have, I add a jar, what I call the diversity jar of nuts and seeds. And these are mixed nuts and seeds. And so that often gives me eight to 10 plants because they're different ones.
Each type of seed, you can find all kinds of these things. So that's an easy way. And you add a few frozen berries in there. You've got 10 to 12 plants on a Monday morning. That's pretty good. You don't have to do much else to get up to your 30. It's adding a teaspoon of mixed spices to your dish. That's been shown in clinical trials to actually improve your gut microbiome.
So some of these concentrated spices and herbs, you don't need very much of them to have a real impact. So it's about adding more to your plate. It's about adding different colors. So you might... get those Persian carrots that are purple and add those or your different colored eggplants. They all count as different plants for your gut because the chemicals are different.
So I think once you get into the habit, it's not that hard. And what is hard is I noticed when I was traveling in the US, if you're away from home, it's pretty tough. So that's why we came up with a a prebiotic supplement called Daily 30, which is 30 – it's actually 34 freeze-dried plants, including seaweed and eight different types of mushroom.
It gives you that rich variety of things you can't always get, and you could sprinkle that on top of your peanut butter on toast or on your avocado or – I like it on my yogurt. And that's an easy way to get you not only five grams of fiber extra a day, but you're also getting in a very unprocessed way this variety of real freeze-dried plants and fruits.
Yeah, probiotics are always difficult because clinical trials show that it can work in certain disease situations. They've never shown they can prevent anything. So taking them as a sort of preventive has never been shown to be much good, but it's clear that they do work in many clinical situations. And, for example, in depression,
Quite a few studies have shown they can have effects that are nearly as good as antidepressants, sometimes more. But so can a gut-friendly diet. So I think we should be, first of all, always thinking of what can I do through diet alone?
And whether that probiotic should be given as part of a kimchi prescription and a kombucha one, where you're getting 20, 30 different types of microbe, as opposed to trying to select one of those probiotic ones, which may or may not suit the individual, because we have... incredibly different gut microbiomes. So we only share about 20% of our microbes with each other.
So picking off and off the shelf probiotic with say two or three strains is not gonna work for everybody. So until we start out, really get to grips with personalizing this, I think, I personally prefer using fermented food as my medicine rather than these probiotics. But it's an evolving field. I think the industry is getting better and they're starting to do proper studies in that area.
So once something comes on that's amazing, I'm happy to embrace it because I think we might need all the tools we've got in order to treat some of these problems. Mm-hmm.
Autoimmune thyroid disease is one of the commonest autoimmune diseases. And I used to be a rheumatologist, so I used to see a lot of crossover of people who had thyroid antibodies and then would present, say, with rheumatoid arthritis or something else. So it increases your predisposition, and it is predominantly in females. But it's the whole family of disease.
I don't see them as very different. There's some reason that it turns into some people have a gut colitis, others arthritis, others it attacks the thyroid. But in all of them, there is a gut connection. And that is because most of the immune system, 70% of the immune cells are in the gut. And clearly, they are getting some abnormal signals from the gut microbiome or
It's probably a two-way passage, so the immune cells might also be sending out chemicals, disrupting your gut microbiome. And I think we're now much closer to realizing what's going on, that we inherit genes that give us a predisposition to these problems. But we never had as many cases until the last 30 years when something's happened and we're passing these thresholds.
And that's why many more people are getting it. Luckily, they're getting it more mildly. So in the past, when I was... Seeing patients 30 years ago, rheumatoid arthritis was rarer, but much more severe. Now it's commoner, but generally milder. And the same, I think, is true for thyroid disease. So there's definitely a connection.
And I think no doctors are really addressing is how everyone should, with these immune conditions, be first trying to sort out their gut and get their gut microbiome in the best place possible. Because it acts as a brake on the inflammation.
So if you can send those clear messages of calm from your gut microbes by feeding the right thing, your gut microbes are essentially little chemical factories. They're pharmacies. They're like compound pharmacies producing all kinds of things that you didn't know you needed. And your immune system uses those as signals. And the more it gets, the calmer it is.
And if it's not getting those signals because you've been on a diet of junk food or you've had all kinds of highly processed foods irritating it and irritating the gut lining, then your body thinks it's under attack, and then that stimulates your body to start attacking itself.
And I think that's an emerging theory here, that if we can control the inflammation in our guts, then a whole of our immune system, whether it's attacking your thyroid or your knee joint, is going to be better controlled. And I think...
We see this all the time, and it's why in many of these studies where we're changing people's gut microbiomes, one of the first things we notice people when they report back to us is their fatigue and energy levels are improved.
And as anyone knows, with an autoimmune disease, one of the first things they notice is how hard it is to get out of the bed in the mornings, how that inflammation slows you down, you get a bit of brain fog, all these other things that are associated. But we can definitely improve that with diet. And This is relatively new.
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