Prof Tim Spector

speaker

2,014 appearances 16 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 3d ago

Prof Tim Spector’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 16 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 4.

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ZOE Science & Nutrition · How to build a better brain: The 5 foods you need to protect your memory, mood and to cut dementia risk | Prof Felice Jacka & Prof Tim Spector · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

Normally, if you've got microbes from someone else and it causes a brain effect, you could call it infectious in some ways, just like we've talked about obesity potentially or type 2 diabetes being infectious because microbes are responsible for it.

I mean, it's not in that sense.

Or display symptoms that were in that direction.

I'd add another one to that is that the other consistent message you get is that you get microbial patterns that are pro-inflammatory.

Yeah.

So they're driving the immune system to produce protein markers that you might see in the blood of things we've talked about, CRP in the past, that are just slightly higher, not clinically really high, but just above the surface.

And so this is a consistent pattern across all brain disorders.

Yeah.

is that there's something going on in the guts of these people that must be sending messages up to the brain to say, you know, be on alert here.

You know, you've got to work harder.

There's something going on that isn't right, in addition to the changes you've suggested.

We're linking the two together.

We now know that, yeah, if you improve your diet significantly from the poor diet that most people with brain disorders are on, that will shift your gut microbes.

And those microbial shifts are in a certain direction that can produce these healthy chemicals like butyrate, or they're gonna produce anti-inflammatory compounds that are gonna counteract the inflammation.

And these then have effects on the brain

and can improve a lot of the symptoms.

That's essentially what we're summarizing from all kinds of different evidence, although no one study has done it all.

But the other exciting thing is effect size of, say, a diet, a healthy diet on brain symptoms is not trivial.

We're seeing effects, just to put it in context, that are bigger than you would get with starting an antidepressant on average.

So we know that some people do well on antidepressants, but many people don't.

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