Professor Tim Spector

So when we started Zoe, we did a number of trials and we gave our participants apps so they could report how they felt.

In every study we did, we started getting back these incredible results of people saying when they started the Zoe diet, for example, the first thing they noticed was their mood and energy improved and their hunger got less.

And that was before any blood changes, before any gut changes.

And so initially we slightly discounted it, but it happened in every study we did.

We'd look to the menopause.

And again, the most dramatic change when people were improving their gut health through food with menopausal symptoms was on mood and energy.

Because originally I'm a rheumatologist and was really interested in inflammation, I'd never put that connection...

between what was inflammation in the body and in your joints with what was going on in your brain.

And suddenly the latest science, when I'm going away and doing my reading, is making it all so much clearer.

It's really become, you know, this new idea of things like depression, things like mood changes, things like fatigue and energy, which I hadn't really thought about as, in a way, a malfunction of the brain.

responding the wrong way to signals from the rest of the body.

But it suddenly all comes into focus about how holistic the whole system is and how really the brain is just another organ.

And this link with the gut is absolutely crucial because that's where it gets most of its information from.

We have this vagus nerve that goes from our gut to our brain, the longest nerve in the body, and 80% of the signals go gut to brain.

Only 20% go brain to gut.

So all these things together have just made me realize how important what going into our gut is, our diet is, and how that influences many things in our brain that I didn't put together before.

And I don't think most of the medical world have put together before.

We've all put the brain on a pedestal, I should say.

We think it's this unique thing that's driving our bodies, but actually it's not.

It's just responding to them just like any other organ.