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
If you said this 10 years ago, people would have just said you're a quack, you're a crazy alternative medicine guy. But now the science is catching up and people are listening. But doctors aren't very good at asking the right questions. So they don't generally say, well, what's your energy level like?
But that's the first thing that changes when you improve your gut microbes and you improve your diet. And we've seen that in our ZOE trials recently. or the ZOE program and also with fermented foods and with the daily 30, the thing we all have in common is they're all improving the gut microbes and the first thing you see
Well, you're right. There may be none, so there may be no way to tell, but you've got to really sort of focus in on knowing your body. One is transit time and think how long it is from eating to when everything passes through you. And the closer that is to We think between 14 and 18 hours, the more likely you are to have a good gut health.
You don't want to have bloating or constipation and diarrhea, particularly after meals. That would be a sign that it's irritated. Having some heartburn at night is a sign that things aren't perfect either. It's quite hard though to know that, but if you combine that with feelings of tiredness and you notice after certain meals how it really affects you, I think that's important.
But certainly a lot of patients with autoimmune disease do end up with constipation or... really irregular bowel movements. So there's just no consistency in what's going on. And that's a sign that things aren't good. If they need laxatives or, you know, it's a sign you're really not healthy. And you should be going at least once a day to the toilet. It just means you're not getting enough fiber.
And 90% of Americans are deficient in fiber. So even if you're better than average, you're still not likely to be hitting the fiber targets. And that's probably because all the promotion at the moment is for hitting your protein targets. Yeah. I mean, you know, in the US, you know, last month, I couldn't believe how much protein advertising is out there. It's like unbelievable. It's a lot.
The hype over protein. And you think, well... No one's protein deficient. The average American has twice as much protein as they need, and yet nearly everyone's deficient in fiber. Who's fighting for fiber? So hopefully you'll fight for fiber, and anyone with any immune problems should be fighting for fiber because...
That just in itself is anti-inflammatory and protein doesn't do a thing for your immune system, you know, unless you're in a desperate starvation state. So, yeah, it's focusing on the important things that you can do something about, I think is really important.
We're just about to publish a paper about what defines good gut health. And we used to think it was about diversity and just purely counting the number of different microbes. And that's what most gut tests do. But we now know that there are 100 microbes that are related both to the food you eat, so they change, and they're also related to your health outcomes.
And it turns out that about a third of them are new. They don't even have names. It just shows you how fast this field is moving. And what we've shown is that as you increase the number of good microbes, you squeeze out the bad ones. So I don't think we need a specific diet to get rid of the bad ones other than to crowd them out
by really feeding properly those good microbes with everything they need so that there's no spare nutrients left for the bad guys because they tend to feed off when there's spare sugars around when there aren't enough good guys, so they're not mopping it all up super efficiently.
And this allows space for the bad guys to grow, and they like sugars and spare fats and things like this the good guys can't deal with. So I think that's a really important concept. So whatever it takes to improve your good microbes, which again comes back crucially to this diversity. So
a lot of people changing their diet they say oh i can't eat too much fiber it makes me bloated you know i've got to just stick to my beige food or whatever it is so realizing you don't have need large quantities of anything you need small quantities of lots of different things Some people say, oh, I gave up beans because they gave me too much gas.
Well, again, it's about cutting down the quantities of that to tiny amounts and building it up so that you can build up those good microbes. So small portions of variety. And if you're really struggling, then you might want to add in things like that prebiotic mix I was talking about. If you then layer in the fermented foods as well, that's another way that you can stimulate
the good guys to improve. And we've seen those changes in our studies as well. And yeah, there's no magic bullet. Again, it's giving your gut a rest if you can, not late night snacking particularly, and avoiding antibiotics. Nothing we haven't talked about. The average American takes three or four times as many antibiotics as the average Scandinavian.
The amount of antibiotics used dropped dramatically during the pandemic. So, and, you know, People survived. So that's a real damaging factor to your good guys. So keep any course down to a minimum. Take fermented foods around the time you're taking it is another useful tip as well. Yeah, so I don't think there's anything specific.
that you need to do and everyone needs to find out what they can eat and avoid, you know, the worst highly processed foods. They are going to have really negative effects. So things like the emulsifiers, the artificial sweeteners, they can really impact your gut microbes in a bad way. So stick to whole foods if you possibly can.
Well, good quality fats. Okay. So remove bad – so realize that all fats are not equal and that we shouldn't demonize fats and we certainly shouldn't be demonizing seed oils just because they're seed oils. There's no hard evidence that in clinical trials, you know, they do you any harm and they're certainly better than eating beef tallow, which is being promoted politically now.
But, you know, extra virgin olive oil – You know, massive Spanish studies for eight years show that people who have that regularly, you know, cooking with it, having it on salads, get less of all these kinds of diseases. So, yeah, so it's trying to feed the good guys, squeeze the bad guys out, not focus on these diseases. this concept of detoxing, because I think that's the big difference.
I'm sure most people who come on here will be talking about ways to get rid of the toxins from your body and et cetera. So I don't believe in any of that. You know, we've got kidneys and liver, which have had millions of years to evolve to be the perfect detox vehicles. Yeah. We want to stop getting more toxins in us. Definitely. You know, if you want to have organic foods and, and,
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