Professor Tim Spector

I think...

It's reasonable to explore, particularly with, say, sleep, exercise, and food.

If you do it for short periods of time and you're not going to overdo it, it's probably reasonably safe if you don't have any other medical conditions and you're fairly young and healthy.

Everything I believe in now is about self-experimentation because everyone is different.

And learning what sleep is good for you, how much exercise is good for you, what the right diets, you know, what are personalized to you, or you should be on a high fat or a high carb diet.

These all require some self-experimentation, you know, if you don't have access to things like Zoe program.

But I think I would do it for short periods of time.

You know, the danger is if you overdo it.

And in areas we don't fully understand, and I think the gut microbiome was one, certainly when we did this 10 years ago, we didn't understand quite how harmful some of these practices could be.

But I think we should really, yeah, everyone should be encouraged to some extent to do self-experimentation.

Do you agree with that?

But what I think is really cool is that we've learned that just with food, if you just record how you feel a few hours after eating it,

in a notebook or something, you can get a pretty good idea of, well, that food does agree with you or not.

And these are things we never thought of before, because we always assumed we were all the same.

We will respond to exercise, food, and sleep the same way.

But, you know, there's some experiments Brian's doing, you know, very methodical, very technical, but I think everyone can just make a mental note to think about how they feel.

How does it make them feel?