The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Microbiome Doctor: Doctors Were Wrong! The 3 Foods You Should Eat For Perfect Gut Health!
26 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: How does gut health impact brain function?
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Chapter 3: What role do ultra-processed foods play in mental health?
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Studies show that if you are flossing, you can reduce your risk of dementia by nearly half, which is quite impressive. So I started to research the brain much more and it made me realize this link with the brain and the gut is absolutely crucial and how that influences many things in our brain.
Chapter 4: What are the eight gut health rules for better wellbeing?
For example, things like depression, mood changes, fatigue and energy.
Chapter 5: How does coffee affect gut health?
But for 40 years, we've been going down the wrong path. We've got so distracted by treating the brain as something so different to the rest of the body.
So what do we do about it if we want to have optimally healthy brains?
So Professor Tim Spector is one of the top 100 most cited scientists worldwide. And he's back to reveal the critical role our gut plays with our physical and mental health, our cognition, and the prevention of chronic disease.
Chapter 6: Why is eating a variety of plants important for gut health?
We can dramatically improve our lives and our health just by making the right food choices. And I've got eight rules for gut health which work for all health. So first thing, pivot your protein. Then there's quality, not calories.
Chapter 7: What is the difference between prebiotics and probiotics?
The whole idea of assessing food by calories is wrong. Calorie-restricted diets have been shown for the vast majority of people not to work. Your hunger signals go up and hunger is the main driver of obesity. And we'll get into the other rules. And what about coffee? So drinking between two and five cups of coffee reduces your risk of heart disease by about 25%.
And then what do you think of almonds? So there's lots of studies showing they're good for your cognition and mood.
And what about your views on GLP-1s like Zempac?
I think from a public health perspective, they're going to transform medicine and we ought to be taking it much more seriously. But I've got two real worries about them. My first worry is that
Just give me 30 seconds of your time.
Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.
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We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you. Professor Tim Spector, who is this lovely lady? And how does she tie into the work you're focused on right now?
That's my lovely mum, June, who is still with us, aged 93. But for the last seven years has been in a home in London after suffering a stroke and then developing dementia. And so, yeah, that's changed some of my views on life. And she was really pro-euthanasia and signed every paper possible that if this ever happened to her, you know, she would be able to end her life. But unfortunately...
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Chapter 8: How can fasting benefit gut health?
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. 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.
It made me reflect on the days that I've had good and bad moods and how... how much it's linked to my diet in the preceding couple of days, like how I feel. Sleep is such a big exacerbating factor in how I feel. But if I'm slept and I still don't feel good, it's typically linked, I think, to something I've been eating or something I've eaten very recently, maybe in the last 24 hours.
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