Prof Tim Spector
speaker
647 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Prof Tim Spector’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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They only shared a small fraction of all those species and even less of the subspecies.
And that was the first time in about 20 odd years that I'd seen anything really different in identical twins.
Generally, they matched because they either had the same environment or they have the same genes.
There wasn't this rather randomness of finding these microbes.
So for me, that was a big turning point in my career as a researcher and got me moving away from genetics.
which I thought was the magic bullet for everything, into this new field, this is about 15 years ago, of the microbiome and gut health.
Because for me, it was perhaps this missing link between
what we've misunderstood about food, thinking that everyone who eats the same food reacts the same way.
And suddenly you realize, well, if identical twins have different microbes, then they, in a way, react with food differently.
That could explain why they die of different conditions, why one gets ill, the other one doesn't, et cetera, et cetera.
So that really fascinated me is this extra bit of individuality we've all got
that you can see clearly in these identical twins that's quite difficult to see in the general population.
But we use them as chemical factories.
They're like a whole grouping of communities of mini pharmacies that are converting the components of the food we eat into amazingly helpful chemicals for our body.
And so I think that's the best way of thinking of them is this.
really rich diverse community of you know maybe everyone has maybe a thousand different species and subspecies inside them all of which are producing different chemicals and they do that depending on what you if you feed them right you get the biggest diversity of chemicals and those chemicals go on and help us in three key ways they
They help our metabolism to stop us maybe overeating and putting on too much fat and sorting out our heat and the general mechanics.
They also are important for our nervous system.
So things travel up from our gut to our brain, and they will determine things like our mood and influence whether inflammation in your gut is going to cause depression, things like this.
And they're also really important for our immune system.
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