Professor Tim Spector

So anyone with high blood pressure generally has slightly stiffer arteries than most people, and that impacts the arteries in your brain, so you are slightly more at risk.

And with these diabetes genes that I've got, thanks to my grandmother, I am more at risk of vascular dementia.

And so what I wanted to do was learn about that in order to...

optimize all the things I could do to postpone it or prevent it as much as possible.

I think I saw the brain as a rather distinct organ that was the domain of psychiatry and

perhaps gerontologists who look at dementia, that wasn't really part of the major picture and certainly wasn't within my domain of expertise.

I think I still believe in the Cartesian view of the difference between the mind and the brain, the mind and the body.

these two separate entities and you've got this barrier between them, this blood-brain barrier that was really like an iron curtain.

So I was interested in it, but I didn't realise this huge connection I've now discovered really that has really excited me.

And I think the thing that triggered it was some of our own experiments, which happened a bit by chance.

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.