Professor Tim Spector

We saw a change in roughly 40 of these microbes with the prebiotic, the daily 30.

Whereas with the probiotic, which we know works from other studies, we saw a change in about four or five of the bugs.

Okay.

So it was...

So they both worked, but the prebiotic was working better than the probiotic, which has sort of changed my mind about what's more powerful.

Prebiotic is like a fertilizer for gut microbes.

It's giving them food.

So that in an indiscriminate way, because we're giving a wide variety of foods in these 34 plants, each of them has hundreds of chemicals.

So there's thousands of different things for them to feed on.

Whereas a probiotic, we used lactobacillus rhamnosus, which is a well-known one that's been studied worldwide.

you know, hundreds of trials.

It's a live microbe that lives generally in foods like yoghurt and things like this in a concentrated form in a capsule.

You give that and it improved the gut microbiome much less than this.

It put bugs in there, and we used to think it was like a seed.

So fertilizers and maybe seeds.

But we now know that that bug will never really seed in your gut microbiome.

And so the science and our thinking has changed.

We think the probiotic is really tickling your immune system as it's going down.

So it's probably working higher up in the small intestine, which is further up in the gut.

Where is the gut?