Professor Tim Spector

Hmm...

That's what's interested me because I think being on a long-term keto diet is never going to work, right?

It's just too brutal and it's incompatible with keeping your gut happy.

So to me that's – I mean very few people can tolerate it anyway.

As you know, it's tough.

If we can come up with a regime that every three or every six months, you had a few days of going into keto just enough to reset your body and your brain.

And at the same time, you protected your gut, say, by taking daily 30 or other things that weren't going to get you out of keto but could keep your…

your gut in a in a in the right place then i think we could potentially be have a something of practical use for brain health issues and i i'd love to you know do more i'm planning at some point later in this year to do to test myself see if i can do a week of keto whilst keeping my gut microbes happy have you ever done keto

Not properly, no.

If you've done a 24-hour fast for a colonoscopy, you are just about getting into keto at the time you're doing it.

But you've got other things to worry about, like going to the toilet to distract you.

I've had other people say this, that they do get this sort of clarity, which could be a more exaggerated way of feeling the benefit of a long overnight fast.

When you come in after 14 hours without eating and you're doing a podcast like this, yeah, I definitely do feel better than if I'd had a big English breakfast just before.

But I think the danger is that if people disregard their gut microbiome and do this,

Any advantage would be wiped out so quickly by the problems of what's happening to your immune cells and everything else in your body.

So if we can find this intermittent middle way while you can still look after your gut, then I agree that would be cool.

But I couldn't find any good data.

On this, apart from anecdotes of fanatics who will obviously say it's great for their patients, but without any control group, because it must be a big placebo effect as well.

It's very hard to not have a placebo effect when you're doing that, when you're struggling so hard to do things that...

As I say, you know, people get keto headaches and they get, you know, as you go into it, people say it can be quite rough.