77. Professor Tim Spector: Your Gut Bacteria Control Your Health More Than Your DNA

Your doctor says your health problems are genetic, so you're destined for the same fate. But what if that's completely wrong? In this episode of Extend, I'm joined by Professor Tim Spector, one of the world's leading microbiome researchers, to reveal the truth: your gut bacteria have more control over your health than your genes do. We explore Tim's 30-year twin study that turned modern medicine upside down, the devastating effects of antibiotics on your internal ecosystem, and why ultra-processed foods are as dangerous as cigarettes. We also dive into why 95% of Americans are dangerously fiber-deficient, and how fermented foods can reduce inflammation like natural steroids. Professor Tim Spector is a genetic epidemiologist at King's College London, co-founder of Zoe, and author of multiple bestselling books on the microbiome. His research on 16,000 twins has revolutionized our understanding of how gut health trumps genetics in determining health outcomes. We Also Discuss: (02:18) 30 Years of Twin Research: The Study That Changed Everything (08:35) The Antibiotic Crisis: Why Your Childhood Meds Are Still Hurting You (11:31) C. Diff and the First Clue About Good vs. Bad Bacteria (22:40) Why Your Gut Microbiome Matters More Than Your Genetics (30:30) The Hidden Connection Between Gut Health and Autoimmune Disease (35:39) Ultra-Processed Foods: The Modern Cigarette Industry (43:51) Why 95% of Americans Are Fiber-Deficient (And Obsessed with Protein) (58:58) The 30 Plants Challenge: Diversity Over Restriction (01:05:22) Sourdough Secrets: Real vs. Fake (Most Is Fake) (01:13:46) Inside the Zoe Kit: Personalized Nutrition Based on Your Biology (01:19:53) GLP-1 Drugs: The Perfect Window for Gut Health Reset (01:27:36) Prebiotics vs. Probiotics vs. Postbiotics: What Actually Works (01:41:29) The Food for Life Cookbook: 100 Recipes for Your Microbiome Thank You for Our Sponsors: TruNiagen: Whether you are looking to stay sharp, feel more energized or simple age better, go to https://www.truniagen.com/ IFit: If you are looking to elevate your home gym fitness experience with the best in fitness tech, choose IFIT. Go to https://www.ifit.com/NextHealth: Your destination for cutting-edge health optimization—from IV therapy to hormone balancing. Explore at https://www.next-health.com/IM8: Get 20% off your first order with code DRSHAH at https://im8health.com/discount/DRSHAH. Learn more about Dr. Shah: Website: https://www.drshah.com/ Clinic: https://www.next-health.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/darshanshahmd/ Learn more about Professor Tim Spector: Instagram: @tim.spector https://www.instagram.com/tim.spector/?hl=en Website: https://zoe.com/en-ushttps://www.elissagoodman.com Pre-Order Ferment https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ferment-Life-Changing-Microbes-Tim-Spector/dp/1787334651

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Welcome to Extend with me, Dr. Darshan Shah, a podcast dedicated to cutting-edge science, research, tools, and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21, and trained and board certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board-certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results when it comes to your health span. We're living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system, no longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality. Join me as I interview world-renowned experts, offering you a step-by-step guide to proactively avoid disease, and most importantly, extend your health span.

• 0:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Dr. Specter, thank you so much for joining me today on Extend. You came quite a long way, and I really appreciate you being here.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  It's a great pleasure. Looking forward to it.

• 0:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank you. I hear that you sometimes do your podcast right across the street from where we are here in West Hollywood. Is that right?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, just a few months ago, we were doing a whole series of podcasts, the Zoe Podcast. Yeah, so it's always nice to be on the other end of the mic as well.

• 1:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It is, right? I always say, you and I were talking about this a minute ago, that this podcasting thing is probably the best thing I do. I love having these conversations with incredibly intelligent individuals like yourself and doctor and professor Specter. Tell me a little bit about the professorship. Where do you teach?

• 1:31Speaker 01

  I'm professor of genetic epidemiology, which most people don't know what that means, but it's looking at genetics in populations at King's College in London. And so that was based on my work there, which for 30 years was building up this big twins cohort.

• 1:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  So I was originally a rheumatologist.

• 1:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  And was a practicing rheumatologist. Then I decided I was much more interested in research and then switched. And set up in nineteen ninety three, this massive twins cohort.

• 2:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, famous cohort, yeah.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is, you know, unique in the world. That's been following sixteen thousand twins for thirty years now. Look at nature v nurture and that got me really into looking at all kinds of different diseases.

• 2:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  So not just the arthritis as a rheumatologist, I just, I had the same model. And I, whatever was common, I could look at it and it, it just really opened my mind to all aspects, so holistic aspects of medicine.

• 2:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  But obviously with twins, I was focused really on the genetics.

• 2:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  And really doing that for twenty years, discovering genes, you know, for obesity, for, you know, all kinds of things. But then latterly got a bit disillusioned because I couldn't see how the genetics was going to change treatments or change people's lives. And it was rather a sort of pessimistic message to tell people, what are you going to do? Blame your parents for everything? And it was like, well, you can't change your genes to any dramatic extent. You can tweak them a bit and I've played around with epigenetics a little bit. And realized that still we were talking about tiny little increments rather than the big changes I want to do.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  So that partly, you know, and a few other things led me to change really into this whole area of gut health, which is, is where I am now. And then that, I got there via the microbiome.

• 3:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right. Your twin study is absolutely fascinating because like you said, you know, following along on some of the papers that you've published, it did seem like a little bit of a over enthusiasm about genetics and how much we could control these genes. Initially, that's what we were thinking when, when the DNA first got sequenced and it was going to be the holy grail of all of medicine. And it turned out not to be.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and as always in medicine, it, the story is always more complicated.

• 4:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  People think, aha, it's simple, right? There's an obesity gene. All we got to do is knock that out and then there'll be no more obesity. You know, there's a rheumatoid arthritis gene, there's a colitis gene, there's a depression gene. And it turned out that there weren't, there were. You know, ten thousand of these genes or tiny gene variants all having minute effects. So the ability to just cut them out of the equation or have a drug that interfered with them really wasn't on. And so it took us a while to realize that because as the technology improved, we got more and more finer detail. Right. And as you get more and finer, it kept finding more and more genes. Right.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  We thought it was really simple when we started because we couldn't really see, you know, we saw these segments of the of the whole chromosome. We thought, oh, you know, and people were selling whole segments of chromosomes to drug companies, you know, Columbia would buy, you know, the leptin gene segment or something and think they would. So it was all kind of crazy stuff. So it turns out that genetics has been amazing for rare diseases. Absolutely, right. Game changer for people with these rare, single gene mutations. And you can have therapies for it, but for the everyday disease of aging, really it's a very limited use, other than often telling us

• 5:29Speaker 01

  some of the mechanisms that are going on, that the genes will point to a protein and they'll say, okay, this is clearly involved. And ten years down the line, you might then, you know, a drug company might work on that pathway, which could then lead to some help in that disease. Right. But it really hasn't, wasn't the big game changer in the way we expected. Absolutely. And it's, it takes a lot longer to develop anything that's going to change it. So that's why all the the big medical breakthroughs have often been by chance, you know, by studying something else like, you know, the GLP one drugs or whatever. Right. Rather than us saying, oh, we knew that, you know, GLP one

• 6:12Speaker 01

  was one of the key obesity genes. Right. It didn't work out though. It was in the list, but it wasn't, you know, didn't stand out. Right, absolutely. So, but yeah, so, but it, you know, I think it was a very necessary step. And without the genetics, we wouldn't have had the techniques and the tools to look at the gut microbiome. Sure, exactly. So. I don't regret any of it. And in a way, you've got to go down these scientific journeys full of optimism. Right, exactly. Because otherwise, if you wouldn't be a scientist if you weren't an optimist. You have to be an optimist, yes. And you realize, you know, yeah, at a certain point, you've got to say, okay, I've given that a go, I need to change track. And you know, a lot of my colleagues never change track. Right.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  And you must have known this, you know, your days of Mayo. Yeah. For these people that just stay on the same pathway. And they just hope before they die, you know, it's going to come to something. But, um, you know, people like myself will, you know, every few years will change and say, no, that's not going anywhere. I want to, what's the most exciting thing I can follow? Right, right. So that's been my modus operandi, if you like, is to, you know, chase up whatever the latest new thing was, thinking this was going to be the big thing. So that's why, you know, back in two thousand, I think it was about two thousand nine, two thousand ten, I discovered the microbiome. Right, right.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  But no one else was talking about it. Uh, and said, this could be something big. And unlike some of my other decisions, that was the right one. Yeah. And so, you know, you could have hedged your bets a bit, but if one of your choices is a good one, then, you know, as a scientist, that's, that's pretty cool. So Yeah. I don't regret that decision. And, you know, it's still one of the most exciting areas of science today and still, you know, we're only scraping the surface of what we know about it. Yeah. And it's kind of fun, but it was genetics that got me in there. Yeah. Because you use genes to determine what these microbes are. Right.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Um, otherwise we'd still be growing them on petri dishes and looking at their colors and, you know, trying to work out, uh, what they were in old fashioned ways. So it's, yeah, it's, it's really fun. And it's now opening up, us discover not just bacteria, but also, you know, all the fungi that live inside us, the viruses, that kind of stuff. So. Yeah, it keeps me excited.

• 8:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, it's extremely exciting. And like you said, for the listeners that are listening to this, the science took a massive leap forward with the microbiome when you can use the techniques that we use to sequence the human genome to sequence the genome of the bugs that live in our gut. And prior, the only way we knew was to grow them on Petri dishes and look at them under a microscope. And you could also not really quantify. It's extremely confusing because you have a lot of different.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  And you could only grow about 1% of them.

• 9:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, exactly.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  And we were already obsessed with the ones that were killing humans, you know, so infectious ones. And so we had this very distorted view

• 9:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  of microbes. We just thought, they're out there to kill us.

• 9:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  So we've got to eradicate them.

• 9:28Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  You know, we've got to sterilize everything. We've got to throw antibiotics at everything. We've got to nucem, you know, because we had this selective view, you know, we were only taught about in medical school, the nasty ones.

• 9:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah. And so, you know, I did my first half of my career as a surgeon, and we would always do what's called a bowel prep before we did any surgery in the intestinal area. Because if a bacteria were to get out into the abdominal cavity outside of the bowel, it would kill somebody. It would make them septic. And so I always wondered, like, why does our body allow these bacteria to live in our gut? I mean, it just seems so counterproductive. This would have, nature would have evolved against something like this. But then the realization came to me when people on high doses of antibiotics were actually dying from C. diff. And when streptomediococcal, to your point, you know, was grown in some

• 10:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  of these patients' Petri dishes, when you, when you measured, when you sent their samples to the lab, you knew that this was a big problem. This person would likely die from sepsis from C. diff. And so during my career, they actually figured out that C. diff was an opportunistic bacteria, an opportunistic meaning that when the good bacteria are eradicated, then the bad bacteria would grow. And that was the first inkling I had that there were good and bad bacteria that live in our gut.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and even now, most people don't think there's a downside to antibiotics. Right, yeah. Uh, you know, they go to their physician and they say, you know, Mm hmm. I've got something and the physician will say, well, it's probably a virus. I say, well, I don't care. If there's a one in a hundred chance it's a bacteria, give me the, give me the pills. Right. You know, they're gonna cure me. And we have this strange, you know, love of, love affair with, with antibiotics that are really, you know, nuking our, our good bugs every time we take them. Exactly. And, yeah, most people recover from them. Some people can take six months. We, you know, there are lots of studies now and there's some people who never recover. And, you know, a lot of the problems that we face in life,

• 11:37Speaker 01

  we may look back in time and say, well, when I was a kid, you know, why did my parents give me so many antibiotics? Why every time I had a viral problem was I given this? And I think the average American eighteen year old has had about twenty courses of antibiotics. Absolutely, yeah. By the time they're going to college. Right. And the average three year old has had, you know, three or four courses. Oh, absolutely. And you think, this is no way to treat your, your body's defense system by, you know, knocking it on the head all the time. And we need to change this, you know, quite dramatically and stop using these nonspecific antibiotics that just, you know, blitz everything. Right.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  You know, why don't we, you know, go for these more targeted types of treatment or, you know, not use them because often the difference is maybe half a day of sickness, you know, most of these chronic respiratory problems or sinusitis or, I used to take tons of antibiotics. I used to get recurrent sinusitis. Yeah. Yeah, particularly as a student, it was, you know. Mm hmm. But the studies have come out and said, yeah, if you take them, or you don't take it, it makes at most about a day extra symptoms. Right.

• 12:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Trivial.

• 12:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Trivial.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. But if that by taking it, then you're getting more and more infections every time your your immune system isn't working as well. And then if your immune system's not working as well, well, that's also got implications for, you know, your response to aging, your mental faculties, your ability to fight cancers, you know, all these things we we never reckoned with.

• 13:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Until we understood how important your gut microbes are. So.

• 13:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, if I if I had my life again, I think, you know, I'd be making really different decisions.

• 13:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely. I think I think many, many people would say that, especially around antibiotics, growing up in the eras that you and I grew up, where, like you said, antibiotics were a panacea for everything. You know, they would give premature infants antibiotics as soon as they were born, even though they had zero infection, they would just give it to them prophylactically. There's this whole concept that we've learned through the years about prophylactic antibiotics. And I could tell you, my career as a surgeon, again, we would give everyone prophylactic antibiotics and.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  And you wouldn't even ask. I mean, that's the other thing, it was like so routine, it was given with the anesthetic often, wasn't it?

• 14:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  So, every childbirth, every C-section, you know, so most people didn't realize they were getting all these antibiotics as well, because it was like routine care.

• 14:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  And and all the surgeon cared about was making sure there was no infection in their operation, right?

• 14:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  And that's, that's how we judge a good surgeon is to say, well.

• 14:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  They don't have infections.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  The less, least infections, because otherwise it's his fault, right? Or her fault, not thinking, well, yeah, but if that, you know, six months later, that patient's going to be in trouble again, was that related to giving them these unnecessary antibiotics?

• 14:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Or later in life. Yeah, so it's, you know, it's stacked up against the poor old microbes. They have a tough time. Anyone going to hospital, you know, it's really hard to persuade surgeons not to not to use them. And you can understand why, because that's the way they're assessed in a way. They don't get any benefit from taking that tiny increased risk, do they? I mean, it's just, so somehow we need to change that dialogue.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  To make people accept, you know, the fact that there is this tiny increased risk of infection, but. We're going to keep their immune system and their microbiome much healthier if we do that.

• 15:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of surgeons now were giving prophylactic antibiotics after surgery too. So you put people on a seven to 10 day course of antibiotics, whether they needed it or not, to prevent an infection. And that is pretty much stopped now for what we call clean cases, where you're not going into the gut. But still, it's still a massive overuse of antibiotics in the medical community, as we both know. And I think that's something that the listeners of this podcast should really, really take to heart, because I think if they're being prescribed antibiotics, they should question that prescription. Do I really need it? And it would save their years of damage. We don't even know what the damage that we're doing with these antibiotics to our gut microbiome in the long term.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  What I'd like, I mean, I think one way to deal with this is to let everyone know what their risk is of antibiotics, because there's a growing evidence that there's a personalized response to antibiotics. We don't all react the same way, our gut microbes. So now that with my company Zoe, we've got a quarter of a million people's gut health results. And a lot of them do come and say, well, I've been on antibiotics and I retested. And so we tell them not to take antibiotics for three months before, because it'll mess up the results. But a few of them still do. And we see a very different response in some

• 16:43Speaker 01

  people to others. So some people will recover really fast. Within a couple of weeks, they've bounced back. And others can take a year before they're back to normal.

• 16:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  A year?

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  After taking antibiotics?

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Their gut doesn't recover for a year?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, my co-founder Jonathan Wolf, he took antibiotics, he had a

• 17:06Speaker 01

  A crush fracture of his foot, he had to take antibiotics. And yeah, he dramatically lost about forty percent of his diversity and his, in his good bugs. And it's taken him a year to get back to where he was. So if people knew if they were at high risk or low risk, I think that would also change their, you know, it's, it's like knowing, you know, you're allergic to something or, you know, you take more care about how quickly you, you, your, your gut responds to a standard antibiotic. And, you know, I think we're not far off being able to tell people.

• 17:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  What risk category they are, but for the moment, everyone should be, you know, really conscious about it. One of the biggest questions I get is, you know, I've just, I've had to take antibiotics, you know, what do I do to counteract it, you know? And this is something the medical profession has no answer for.

• 18:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Because most of the medical profession don't know about the gut microbiome. We're not taught about it. Not enough teachers out there and it's fast moving.

• 18:09Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  And, you know, my advice generally is, you know, throw everything you can at it, you know, like.

• 18:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Just have gut friendly food above all, you know, as many fermented foods as you possibly can to build up your, your gut microbes and hope for the best. You know, but it, but I think, I think we're going to, we're going to see more and more of this, this area being, being absolutely crucial. And people are starting to count how many courses of antibiotics they've had in their life. Did they take, you know, some probiotic or fermented food while they're on it? You know, and then as these gut tests, you know, get more common, people will actually track it a bit like blood pressure or other things. So they'll have annual checkups and they'll see, okay, it's gone down. That's because I did X and Y or I didn't do X and Y.

• 19:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right. I think that's such great advice, you know? As I've been learning more about the gut microbiome, and like you said, you learned zero about this in medical school. And I think still there's very few medical schools that teach. Current physicians that are training about the gut microbiome and its importance. And so I think there's going to be a long time before the medical profession really espouses the knowledge that's out there on this.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Even gastroenterologists, you know, who should be specializing in this stuff are not taught it. And so, you know, patients will go and see them and, you know, and the average one will just not know the latest research in this field. It's not yet become part of current practice. You've got to seek someone out who does know about the ins and outs of the gut microbiome. And, you know, there are some countries, I mean, I worked and lived a bit in France, and there, there is a culture of giving out probiotics when you're taking antibiotics and these sort of things. So at least, you know, this part of medical practice to discuss it with your patients.

• 20:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I agree, I agree. So for those who don't know much about the importance of the microbiome, could you give us like a laundry list, maybe, of some of the top five or six things that we need to think about why the microbiome is important? What is it, what is it doing there for us, living in our colon, our intestines? Why do we need to make sure our microbiome stays healthy?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  I think it's important to conceptualize what the gut microbiome is. So it's very hard to think of these, you know, 100 trillion microbes there. Main, most of it are lower part of our intestines, the colon, although they're all over our body, but big concentration where we think the action is, is mainly right down there. We talk about bacteria, but they're, they're related species called archaea, there's viruses, there's fungi, there's parasites, and they're all working in a sort of eco-community, a bit like, you know, an eco-environment and working with each other. And the way to think of them is, is like mini pharmacies.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  They all got different genes and different makeups, but the thing they all have in common is they produce chemicals. They're chemical factories and they're pumping these out. Some of them are things we know, like vitamins that are really essential for us. The B vitamins mainly come from our gut. They produce brain chemicals, such as the serotonin and the...

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Things that supply dopamine, things like GABA, which are sort of anti-anxiety, things like you get with Valium. They're also key chemicals. They produce short chain fatty acids, which are absolutely crucial for our immune system. So they're signaling to all the, all the immune cells, which most people don't realize, but seventy percent of our immune system is, is in our gut. And it's there because it's interacting with these microbes. This is all stuff we've only recently found out. So there's, these chemicals are making sure that the immune system is reacting appropriately. It's not overreacting and causing allergy or autoimmune disease.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  It's not underreacting and allowing infections to occur. And it's balancing this, you know, when, when it goes overboard, you get inflammation, irritation, and this sends out these sort of warning signals to the whole body. So key chemicals to make sure that's dampened down. And then you've got other ones signaling about appetite and metabolism. We think that the microbes do play a role in when you feel full and interacting with the normal human gut hormones. And so there's a, as food is going down, the gut, they're all signaling to each other.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Probably higher up in the gut, they're signaling about glucose response, metabolism. And I think, you know, on, once you start thinking of this way, you say, well, is there really anything they don't? Right, exactly. You know, because they're affecting mental health, your metabolic health, your cardiac health, the way you respond to food, pretty much everything and, and getting rid of toxins, dealing with things that shouldn't be in your gut. So they really just about do everything. And we've also, there's also data showing that the majority of pharmaceuticals you put in your, your gut, your microbes will deal with them. And depending on what makeup of microbes you've got, they'll metabolize them in different ways.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Hmm, interesting. So simply, you know, that many people take Tylenol, but it doesn't work very well in some people. And they might prefer, you know. Ibuprofen instead. And it turns out that's just the microbes are in some people deactivating the analgesic properties of the acetaminophen.

• 24:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  So antidepressants is another one. They don't work in up to fifty percent of people because in many people, the microbes they have are deactivating it.

• 24:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  So I think we're going to also see that, you know, because they're, if you start reducing everything to chemicals.

• 24:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  And you see pharmaceuticals as chemicals, but you also see food as chemicals, which, you know, in the new way of thinking about food is not just fats, sugars, proteins, calories, it's approaching a hundred thousand different chemicals.

• 24:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Biological signals, chemicals, right?

• 24:40Speaker 01

  And they're just broken down and the microbes see them just as chemicals, the same way you see pharmaceuticals. It all starts to make sense.

• 24:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  And that's why the gut microbiome is so crucial to everything, everything from brain chemicals to our immune system. And, you know, we ignore it at our peril. You know, it seems to be probably the most important organ in our, in our bodies that

• 25:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Ancient, you know, Indian medicine.

• 25:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Recognized this without knowing, without being able to see them.

• 25:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  And I think this is, you know, some of the, and the Chinese as well. So I think we're coming a bit full circle here.

• 25:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  And, you know, and, and Western medicine has got to get to grip on something they've only really discovered in the last twenty years.

• 25:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Be quite so crucial to everything that we've sort of ignored before.

• 25:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  And, um.

• 25:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Seems like a large missing piece of the puzzle that we've just now discovered.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's, it's hard for scientists and, and, you know, physicians to start changing the whole way of thinking about the body, how to treat it. And we have to start thinking about everything that's good for you has to be good for your gut health and your gut microbes. And ignoring our diet as we've been doing and hoping that just by therapies and magic bullets and, you know, um, just vitamin supplements, you know, we can ignore this, the key essence of our health because there's no doubt, you know, I was a geneticist for twenty five years. Give me a DNA sample or give me a poop sample.

• 26:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  You know, I can tell how healthy you are. So much better from your, your microbiome poop sample than from your DNA.

• 26:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  And I think to me, that's, that's a huge change and we need to just start realizing this. And I think it's the best indicator of everything that's going on in your body. If that's right, everything else is going to be right. If that's wrong, it's going to be really hard for you to fix it.

• 26:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Well, that's so powerful. I mean, just to highlight in the way that you did, I'm hoping that the listeners of the podcast really take that to heart, that this gut microbiome has more to do with your health than your genetics do. And therefore it's really important to, number one, treat it well. Number two, don't destroy it with antibiotics and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. And we'll talk about ultra-processed food and all these things that we do to our gut, not even realizing how damaging it is to our microbiome. Then lastly, I mean, that's the first place to look. If there's some chronic disease or something that a diagnosis you might have that people can't figure out, looking at the gut and the gut bacteria, the microbiome specifically could hold some answers there.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Well, nearly always it does. And, and we've done studies, we did studies on our twins looking at their gut microbiome and, you know, hundred different diseases. And in nearly all of them, people who had more, most disease had more abnormal gut microbes. So there's hardly anything that wasn't associated to some degree. But, you know, particularly looking at things like our, our modern epidemic of allergies, epidemic of Irritable Bow Syndrome, reflux, esophagitis, things that didn't really occur, fifty years ago.

• 27:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  It can all be traced to, you know, anxiety, depression, all of them traced to abnormalities in the gut microbiome, which then said, well, why is that? Well, that's, it's all directly related to diet and how we've been getting things wrong. And sort of ignoring the major impact of, of food as, as a medicine. And I think, uh, we, we hope that technology would get around that. And I think that was this sort of naive view, you know, when we were at medical school, it was you, you know, you could, surgery and technology would get through everything.

• 28:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Fix through everything, right?

• 28:32Speaker 01

  And, you know, we'd just be eating food out of pouches and, you know, like in Star Trek and it would all be fine, you know?

• 28:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  And we just got it so wrong. And the important thing is unlike genetics. However bad your gut microbiome is, and if you're listening now and you're suffering from, as probably most people are, some chronic disease. You can, everyone can improve their gut microbiome in a few, just a few days. And, you know, what we're seeing with people who do improve their gut microbiome is dramatic improvements in things they didn't expect. So mood and energy are the two things we see.

• 29:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  That no doctor actually asks about.

• 29:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  It wasn't on our list.

• 29:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Those two questions, yeah, they're not on the symptoms list. How's your mood? How's your energy? Right?

• 29:21Speaker 01

  It's not there, is it?

• 29:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And it should be the first two things we ask.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  So we need to change that because that's the thing, if people listen to their body more, they'd realise that, you know, when they start eating properly and their gut health improves, you know, the chemicals the gut, those microbes are producing are the things that are really going to change their, their perception of their health and their, their energy. And that, that's, that was the big learning thing for me. When we did these studies with Zoe, where we used personalised nutrition to improve their diets, in a way by chance, we, we started seeing the, the biggest effects were on mood and energy, which we hadn't meant to measure.

• 30:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  And so we, people were reporting it, so we started adding it in. And then, you know, within two or three days, this is what people were reporting. And so we started then designing trials to actually measure it.

• 30:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Ah, that's great.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  And it, it came out. So, you know, and I, I was guilty as anyone of not even thinking, oh, well, no, you just put, you know, weight and cholesterol and blood pressure, you know, these sort of standard things. Cause no one can measure, you know, mood or energy, but you, you can actually do it.

• 30:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Ah.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Especially within the modern age of apps and daily logging and things, these things have become routine, whereas. In the past with a questionnaire every six months, they were pretty meaningless.

• 30:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right. I think definitely the apps have, in having just a device with a questionnaire on it that you can answer every day, you had so much better data, better resolution. Cause the memory questionnaires that we used to use, no one remembers what their mood was like the last six months.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  And it was totally biased.

• 31:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Totally biased.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, by all kinds of other factors. So we were told to ignore pretty much everything in a questionnaire. Where it was like, oh, that's all rubbish. What does the patient know? They're just making it up. Cause if you ask every day, it's sort of, it's much less biased.

• 31:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  And people will answer honestly. So I think that's, that's something where

• 31:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Powerful.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  This new technology has really changed how medicine is being applied.

• 31:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So I think it's important to make that mental leap from having gut dysbiosis or having your gut bacteria, gut viruses, your microbiome not be healthy. Making the mental leap that that's not just a gut issue. Maybe you have some bloating, maybe have diarrhea, constipation, irritable bowel. That can also lead to psychological disturbances, mood disturbances, energy, lack of energy, and other chronic diseases, metabolic disease, which then is the root cause of heart disease and even neurodegenerative disease in the future. So I think having that realization that your microbiome has a lot to do with all aspects of your health, not just your gut health, is important.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  I think so. And I think it, we're, you know, we're changing our views. I, I certainly am about it. Trying to, there is actually some common ground, you know, you've mentioned all kinds of things that seem rather disparate.

• 32:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  What, how they connected? Well, there is this, the immune system does connect it all. And I think I'm coming to the realization that if the immune system is not perfectly tuned, you're going to get low-grade inflammation. And low-grade inflammation is this, you know, this idea that the body's slightly under attack. Can't be in a totally relaxed mode. It's, it thinks it's, it's got to fight something. So it's looking for a fight. And it's like, there's some smoldering embers all over the body that's trying to put the fire out. And that affects your, your mood. It's been associated with depression. It's been associated with dementia. It's been associated with anxiety.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  It's your cardiac risk, it's your risk of autoimmune diseases. You increase your risk of cancer because your immune system's distracted, it can't fight things. And so more and more, suddenly, this picture of all these chronic diseases are related to our immune system being just slightly out of whack, whatever reason. And our microbiome is the main controller of that. So to my, you know, it starts to build up this very holistic picture of medicine that, you know, I think we'd completely forgotten. Right. Or thought there was no link between any of these things. There was no link between the heart or the gut or the brain.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  And yet, we see that's absolutely not true. And the current science is telling us absolutely that this low level inflammation that probably everyone in the US has to some extent. Absolutely. You know, whether it's through pollution, bad diet, stress, drugs, whatever, that they didn't have maybe fifty, sixty years ago. Right. Is causing such a strain on the body that all these other events are happening. Yeah. Because our normal repair mechanisms are a bit overwhelmed. And I think if you start thinking in a very broad sense of it, it starts to make sense. And realizing that, you know, there are anti-inflammatory remedies, you know.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, a good night's sleep and meditation, stress, you know, relief, bit of exercise. But predominantly diet can change all that, I think, is probably the most important message we can give to people. And that, you know, you cannot ignore what's going into your gut.

• 34:53Dr. Darshan Shah?

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• 35:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You started your career as a rheumatologist, you were saying, and so that's a specialist in the immune system. And you saw all sorts of diseases. You know, I myself suffered from an autoimmune disease 20 years ago, and it was really addressing my gut that I think was the key factor in reversing my autoimmune disease. And so I'm curious, from your perspective, how gut health and autoimmunity tie together? And do you think this low-level inflammation predisposes you to some of the common autoimmune diseases?

• 36:04Speaker 01

  I think autoimmune diseases definitely have a genetic component. So I'm not a genetic denier. I mean, I was a geneticist for a long time, and it does run in families. But it's one thing to have the gene, but not every... You know, we were studying twins, and if one twin had rheumatoid arthritis, which is a well-known autoimmune arthritis, the other identical twin with the same genes only had about a 1 in 5 chance of also having it. So four times out of five, they wouldn't get it.

• 36:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  So there was some other factor. And I think that other factor was something that would trigger their immune system, which might have been infection, it might have been their gut microbiome secreting the wrong chemicals, things like this. So often, it was a two-stage process. There's a genetic predisposition, but if you had the right lifestyle, you would never get that disease. So I think that, to me, is, you know, is where we're heading in terms of our ideas of the etiology behind these conditions, and why, you know, a lot of them are increasing in that. The genes have already been been there, they haven't changed. But our modern lifestyle is making it more likely

• 37:21Speaker 01

  that those genes are going to be switched on in somebody. And that's why we see more inflammatory bowel disease. Um, we, you know, and autoimmune diseases, you know, what used to be rare, perhaps more severe disease is mu- much more common mainstream problems that that we're just seeing everywhere. And the good news is that I think a lot of them are, can be helped with diet.

• 37:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  And most of my career, that was always dismissed as whackery.

• 37:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, partly because they did just use, you know, a good example is aubergines and tomatoes. So eggplants and tomatoes were seen as the demons of, uh, you know, rheumatoid arthritis. And so people thought, oh, you can't eat that, you know, deadly, uh, deadly nightshades.

• 38:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  And that was proven to be rubbish.

• 38:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Um, and so that gave the whole diet idea. It has mainstream medicine just said, that's a load of nonsense.

• 38:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  And threw everything out.

• 38:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  So the idea of actually sort of improving diet and then that.

• 38:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Threw the baby out with the bathwater.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think we need, we need to now redress that and say, actually, listen, a good diet has been shown to improve inflammation. There's, you know, there's been some good studies recently of fermented foods. If you take, you know, three to five portions of fermented food, within two weeks, your inflammatory markers will drop. Now, I mean, that's equivalent to taking low dose steroids.

• 39:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  So why doesn't every doctor recommend that? You know, uh, so we need to start just. To relearn our medicine and say, yeah, well, obviously having food rather than steroids.

• 39:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Makes sense, right?

• 39:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Makes much better sense, right?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  And just emphasize the importance, you know, of good food in our, in all our diets.

• 39:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You know, I think we've said diet many times and it's a really an important concept to always start with modifying your diet. And when I talk to my patients about the key things that they need to think about when modifying their diet. Number one, I would say, which leads to an automatic improvement in your diet overall is just completely swearing off ultra-processed food. Just removing 90% of the ultra-processed food from your diet and aiming for 100%. I think, I think that's critical and I would love to hear, you know, I've heard you speak in other podcasts about ultra-processed foods and some of the damaging effects of it. I'd love for you to say, talk about that right now. What is ultra-processed food specifically and why is it so damaging?

• 40:11Speaker 01

  So ultra-processed food doesn't have a clear-cut definition as yet, so people use different ones.

• 40:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right. I think that's what makes it confusing for people too.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  And the food companies have deliberately kept it that way.

• 40:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  And they spread misinformation.

• 40:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  No.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  And they love the fact that experts can't agree on it.

• 40:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  No.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  But it is fake food. It's food that's had, taken from extracts of real food and put together using glues, emulsifiers, flavors, sweeteners, preservatives. Everything to change the shape, taste, texture, smell, color of that food so it resembles what looks like real food.

• 40:55Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  So it's fake food that has enormous amounts of extra additives and chemicals to disguise it.

• 41:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  And they have certain properties that make them particularly unhealthy. So first is they generally lack nutrition, they lack fiber. And that's because if they had fiber in it, people wouldn't eat as much of it.

• 41:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Um, so they want to sell more.

• 41:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  They have high levels of fat, sugar, salt.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  And there's, they do that because that makes you eat more of them. And so happens to, they use the cheapest types of fat. So the palm oils and the coconut oils and um really bad fats that are bad for you. Cause not all fats are bad for you. And they also make it like baby food. Right. So. Easily digesting. It takes nothing to eat, to eat it. And so you can consume it super fast. Right. And before your brain has got an idea that you've just consumed hundreds of calories. You're on to your next one and the next one and you're finishing the whole packet or the bag or whatever it is.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  So they designed to dissolve like instantly in your mouth and have no uh fibre that ever reaches your gut microbes. So, and that means that the sugar and the fat is getting instantly into your bloodstream. Without really having to trouble your, your intestine really at all. And so you keep eating them and this, this means you're eating, studies have suggested twenty five percent more. Uh you know, calorie equivalents. Yeah. And so they're contributing massively to the obesity crisis. And then finally you've got all the chemicals that are in there. Yeah, that's true too. It's the one thing that does get down to your gut microbes and all these extra chemicals. Right.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  And these are the, these glues, the emulsifiers which make your microbes stick together. The preservatives which can kill off your microbes and things like the artificial sweeteners which we know also disrupt them. And all of these also affect the gut lining. So more likely to make it leaky and uh stop it working normally, which you need for this really important immune function. And so it's a combination of all these things. Are in the perfect ultra-processed food, which is what, you know, at least sixty percent of American meals are made up of.

• 43:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  At least, yeah.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  And it's, I think, and it's higher in kids, it's over seventy percent in, in children. And as you go into, you know, more deprived, poorer groups, it gets above ninety, ninety-five percent.

• 43:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  This is cheaper.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  It's, it is much cheaper, it's much more convenient, it never goes off, there's nothing real, so it

• 43:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  It doesn't ever get moldy and, you know, and that's, that's why seven-eleven sort of exists, because they, you know,

• 43:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  They don't really need fridges or anything.

• 43:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  They don't need fridges or anything, right?

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's, you know, it's costing, you know, taxpayer a fortune in, in ill health.

• 44:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  And obesity and unlike the cigarette, you know, it's, to my mind, the same as cigarette manufacturers.

• 44:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  They should be paying for all the, um, damage they're doing to people and that, that money should be given back to, you know, the real food is, is, has a fair chance of being sold to people who, you know, who struggle to, uh, to afford it. But it, you know, we reached a crisis point here and I think we are at a moment where governments are starting to talk about, about this and hopefully the power of the big, big food companies is waning because they spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying, stopping any legislation, you know, saying, well, you know, you got free choice and all this kind of stuff, but it's the same argument, but alcohol and, um, cigarettes, yeah, it,

• 44:56Speaker 01

  it, it's, it's terrible and, um, unfortunately, the US is leading the world in bad food.

• 45:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I know, it's just, you know, I think it's really interesting to see that, what the food companies, and these are massive corporations, I don't think people realize how massive they are, there's, what, five or six companies that own almost all the food that we eat in the Western world and these companies have, like you said, tremendous amounts of budget and so a lot of this budget is used to hire scientists to trick us into eating more food.

• 45:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Food. Um. There's a lot of marketing misinformation spread. Even think, you know, just even the labels on food that have calories on them. It's a way to trick us into thinking, oh, it's a low calorie food. So I think maybe this might be better for me. But in reality, just the fact that they're able to quantify the calories, but still trick you into eating more of it because the of the additional flavorings and

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Well, and these

• 45:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  texturizers is just all a trick.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Added vitamins, you know, they add.

• 45:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Added vitamins, right.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  You go to any cereal packet.

• 45:55Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  A aimed at children and you'd think this is the most healthy thing they could possibly eat.

• 45:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Fruit loops, for example. What is a fruit loop? No one can tell you what is a fruit loop. It's made out of what?

• 46:04Speaker 01

  A fruit loop tree.

• 46:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly, a fruit loop tree. Yeah, it's terrible.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  You know, and it's got low calorie, low fat, might say gluten free, uh, high in protein, you know,

• 46:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's all a trick.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  source of fiber, and you've got a list of vitamins on there, and it's complete junk because it's thirty percent sugar.

• 46:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  And, you know, people are being conned and you talk to the the general public and they might think, oh, it's not that bad for the kids, you know, I I chose the one with the more more vitamins on it. It's totally misleading. These health halos, and it's the same with, you know,

• 46:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  you go to the children's dairy section, or you think some parents might say, I'll give my children's yogurt. That's healthy. And it's, they've got low fat, low fat is a warning sign. That's an unhealthy food. It's it, you know, the people should be educated. The the more health claims on a packet,

• 46:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  The more unhealthy it is. The more it's a trick.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Correct. You you should be, and but they shouldn't be allowed to do it. And other countries around the world are changing. A lot of the South American countries where they have massive obesity problems as well, they've blanket bans on on children's products having these these fake claims. And I think that's the first thing that, you know, a respectable government should do is to stop people being conned.

• 47:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  They want to buy something that's unhealthy. That's fair enough. But don't pretend it is something it isn't.

• 47:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, and don't don't allow, especially advertising to our children with cartoons on boxes to trick our kids into choosing foods that are more harmful to them than good to them, right?

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and several countries have gone and banned the cartoons and they, you know, in the same way that cigarettes move from, you know, having nice pictures of cowboys, you know, sort of. On that, you know, smoking, it says now they've got, you know, pictures of death and things. I mean, I'm not there yet with this, with the series, but you can see that's where it should be going.

• 47:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It should be going that way.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  But as you said, the big companies have got, you know, they can buy politicians, they can buy influencers. You know, I get attacked on social media and I'm fairly sure a lot of these people are paid by big food corporations.

• 48:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  For sure.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  To muddy the water, to say no one's clear about what's going on, you know. Is this an ultra-processed food? You don't really sure, you know, and just trying to keep things as they are because they're making billions and billions every year out of our bad health. It's a total disgrace and, you know, they should be, they should be paying for it. But, you know, they're incredibly powerful, but I, I think, I think the tide has turned. I, you know, I am optimistic now that we've got as bad as it's going to get. And, you know, we saw for the first time, you know, in the last election here, people talking about food for the first time.

• 48:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Other than we should eat more beef, you know, that was the, which, you know, in the past has been a, it's been a thing in Texas, but you know. So suddenly people are saying, you know, we can do something about it. It is a disgrace. So, yeah, I'm optimistic that things can improve now and that people, you know, are ready for change.

• 49:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's interesting you say that thing about social media because when I post something about ultra-processed food, there are certain people that jump down my throat about what's the proof and what, you know, where, where is this really being made? And I think those people are hired by these food corporations to create confusion with social media commentary. And it's, it's very obvious, there's no question that ultra-processed food is bad for you. Let's not mince words. It is what it is and, and you can try to.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  We don't have all the details, but it's, it's, I, I lived through the, um, the time when passive smoking was being.

• 49:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  I was studying epidemiology then, it was exactly the same. We all knew the passive smoking, which is, you know, driving in a, being in a car with smokers or, you know, in, in a restaurant or whatever, where you're surrounded by smoke all the time, had some health effects. Now, we couldn't exactly quantify how much it was, but the smoking industry paid all these people.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  To confuse the issue and anyone who's standing up there now on social media, who is trying to defending ultra-processed food and say there's no evidence, you know, chances are, as you said, they're just paid lackeys

• 50:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  of the food companies and so are the politicians who are also standing up for them.

• 50:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  And, you know, we, we should be arguing, okay, you know, we know it's bad. We do need to know more details. Let's fund the big studies to do this, but not, not just pretend it's not a problem.

• 50:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly. And I think also people need to realize that food has many more qualities that we don't even know that are healthy for us. And so, you know, there's hundreds and thousands of, there's thousands actually of phytochemicals in our vegetables that you only get from whole food. You cannot find and individually figure out every single one and then add it back into a processed food. That's just not, there's no way that's gonna happen. And there's such a long tail of these that there's no way we're gonna even know what all of them are. So why not just eat real food? Cause then you're gonna get everything that's good for you.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I think, you know, the last few years, we've, we saw this reductionism.

• 51:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  So that people would take one food and say, okay, there's only one thing good about that, right? So red wine, there's only one thing good, resveratrol, right? So we went obsessed and said, okay, instead of red wine or a grape, you just have

• 51:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  The pill of resveratrol.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Um, you know, instead of a carrot, you take carotene, right? But hang on, there's eight hundred and forty other chemicals in carrots that we don't know anything about, that are likely to be, you know, food for our gut microbes.

• 51:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  That will then allow them to produce some amazing chemicals that are good for us. And you're so right, we have to realize that food is this rich, you know, hundreds of thousands of different chemicals that we can eat. And the more different ones we're feeding our gut microbes, the more defense chemicals they can make, you know? It's like giving them all the tools and anything, any idea to reduce this to, you know, one powder, one vitamin, one, you know? Or it can be made industrially is just absolute nonsense.

• 52:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, you get asked all the time, what's the best protein powder? What's the best fiber supplement? I'm like, best protein powder is a piece of salmon and the best fiber supplement is eating your broccoli.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, because we don't know yet.

• 52:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  We don't know yet.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  You know, we've only got a fraction of the knowledge about what it is in real food that actually helps our microbes, produce those chemicals most yet we still don't know about that really boost our health. So, yeah, why take a chance on some manufacturer saying, I know the answer.

• 52:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  It's the single one.

• 52:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  I'm ignoring all the others, the other 99%.

• 52:55Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Just have this one. Yeah. So that's a mindset, though, but humans are suckers for the magic bullet.

• 53:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, we are, aren't we?

• 53:02Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, we've all been there and so we, you know, oh, yes, take that, you know, that pill, that will do it. Don't worry about anything else. And I think, you know, I, you know, I'm, you know, there are some vitamins, for example, that are useful.

• 53:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  But the vast majority are not. And my big worry is that anyone who's into vitamins is doing it because they're not interested in real food.

• 53:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  And so it's their alternative. And so that whole industry is there really to sort of say, food doesn't matter. And that really is, is the worst kind of messaging to get out.

• 53:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I agree with you. You know, one of the unsung heroes and things that we rarely talk about, because I think there's very little money in it, is fiber. And I feel that it's such an important component of food. And, you know, there's a lot of talk about protein. There's a lot of talk about, you know, maybe fats, right? And low fat versus what are good fats and bad fats. Rarely do you hear about fiber. And I'm wondering, curious, why is that? And how much do people think about fiber?

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Well, the reason is that food manufacturers don't, they don't want us to be talking about fiber.

• 54:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Because it keeps us full.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Yes. There was a great story. I was in Spain. I was talking to some beer manufacturers. And they did an experiment. They said, can we make our beer healthier? So they experimented, they, they did a test brew and they added fiber to the beer. And people quite liked the taste. It was no different, although they worked out that they were drinking less of it.

• 54:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  So they

• 54:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  They didn't want to talk about that.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  They abandoned it.

• 54:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Got buried, but that makes you think you say, well, because our our food is is, you know, has these these sort of 10 companies.

• 54:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  No.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  They want us to eat more. They don't want us to be healthier. They've got shareholders, you know, they're just doing what any company would do. Why would you produce something that makes you have less of it? Unless it was for three times the price or something. And they know their competitors will be able to sell any more. And they're always worried about their competitors. So logically, fiber doesn't feature for these for these companies. They want to cut it out. It's it's really bad for them. And so that's that's the thing we're fighting. And, you know, it turns out the most of the fire high fiber products are very cheap and there's no great margin in them.

• 55:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  So they don't do it. And until, you know, they get help from government or whatever, this is always going to be a bit of a problem. You know, why is where are people supporting beans, you know, beans, a great source of protein and they've got fiber. It is a major problem. And in the US, 95% of people are deficient in fiber.

• 55:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  95%?

• 55:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Almost everybody.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Nearly everybody is getting enough fiber. Yeah. And and yet most people worry about protein. And the evidence is that 90% of Americans are getting enough protein. And so why? Well, manufacturers make all that money on protein snacks and protein shakes and protein drinks and making everyone insecure about their protein. Oh, the reason you're not muscular is you're not you're not getting protein. And yet, you know, people some people are getting so much protein, they're just peeing it out, or it just goes to converted to fat.

• 56:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Because you can't store protein. But it's marketing driven.

• 56:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Uh, it it is, you know, it's a sad state of affairs, but I think if people learned more about the gut microbiome and realized that They thrive on fibre and in the US generally microbes are being starved of fibre.

• 56:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  If people are having mainly, you know, ultra-processed meals and junk food, et cetera. You know, they will start to, we, we can get people to start thinking differently and that's very much, you know, my, one of my missions and in life and, you know, why we founded Zoe is to start getting, you're thinking about food differently.

• 57:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Move away from this obsession with calories, obsession with low fats. You know, all carbs are bad, you know, all this, these fad diets, these exclusion diets.

• 57:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Realise that more is better and that diversity of food is better and get people eating whole foods. Cause it's the range of fibres, you know, there are hundreds of different types of fibre. We understand very little about them.

• 57:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  But we do know that they're, they're, you know, amazing fuel for our, for our microbes and then, of course, as well as fibre, the other thing that comes with real foods is polyphenols.

• 57:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, absolutely.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  I mean, you, I think you call them fi-, you know, phytonutrients, which just means, you know, uh, in Greek, you know, plant nutrients, but um, these defence chemicals that you get in real food that you don't get in ultra-processed foods, that give the bitterness and the colour to, to, to everything we're eating that, we used to think of as antioxidants and that's what we were taught at medical school. They magically get into your blood and sort of calm everything down, you know, it was like some tranquilizers for your blood. Turns out that was rubbish and most of their effect is via the gut microbes.

• 58:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Our body can't use most, most of these polyphenols.

• 58:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Um, you know, we taste them in our mouth.

• 58:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  You know, we have a glass of olive oil, that's, gives you that cough, that, you know, that, that slightly bitter.

• 58:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Flavours, but incredibly important for our gut microbes, so.

• 58:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Our microbiomes are using the polyphenols and creating chemicals for us that are beneficial.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that. Plants use them to defend themselves, to stop them dying in the sun or the wind or the cold or against other bugs and things. And that's why these fresh plants and vegetables are so good for us. Why nuts and seeds are so good for us. Why olive oil, chocolate, coffee, all these things that we were maybe told were bad for us,

• 59:09Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  end up being actually good for us because they have these really high levels of these these polyphenols.

• 59:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, no one's adding polyphenols to ultra processed foods. There's this.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Well, they probably will.

• 59:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  They will eventually try to.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  On the cereal packets.

• 59:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  With polyphenols.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Polyphenols, that's right. But you know, it'll be the worst kind, the cheapest ones. And it probably won't have anything real in it. Because no one's checking up on them. They can they can put anything they like on those labels.

• 59:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  This episode was brought to you by Next Health, a health optimization and longevity clinic located in Los Angeles, Manhattan, and soon to be opening in Montecito, Nashville, Miami, and many other cities in the United States and Canada. Next Health is the Apple Store of Wellness, where you can optimize your health span and lifespan using cutting edge technology. I actually founded Next Health eight years ago to give my patients a place to go get extensive biomarker testing done and provide them with all the tools that I use to get my health in order. The longevity circuit in Next Health using hyperbaric oxygen, sauna, cryotherapy and LED light is a game changer. In addition, the doctors at Next Health measure thousands of biomarkers

• 1:00:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  and put into place a longevity optimization plan using advanced tools like ozone, plasma exchange and peptides. Go to www.nex.health to check it out.

• 1:00:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I want to break down fiber a little bit more because you mentioned there are many different types of fiber and you know, there's insoluble and soluble fiber. Can you talk about how someone can think about fiber and the different types of fiber and how they can get them into their diet more?

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, they're broadly categorized as insoluble and soluble, which means when you add water to them, they mix up or they go right through. Now, both types are helpful, so we mustn't always think of any one type. And again, we mustn't be guilty of this reductionism.

• 1:01:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Just say, okay, there's only one thing I need, I need this one type of fiber. You can commercially buy about 80 types of fiber.

• 1:01:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Eighteen.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Eighty.

• 1:01:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Eight zero, okay.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  I don't know the names of them, but, um, and there's very few fiber experts, even academically, to work this out. And we still don't really understand how they're used by the body. So at the moment, best way to think about fiber is to get a diversity of fiber sources, not rely on just one, and not rely on any ultra-processed forms of fiber, you know, say bran-flake cereals or something like that, which would probably only have a rather limited amounts of fiber, and get them from as many different plants as you can.

• 1:02:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  But realize that many things have fiber in them that you didn't envisage. So it turns out that the average American gets about a third of their fiber intake from coffee.

• 1:02:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Coffee?

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Brewed coffee?

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Yes. So, again, and you know, there'd be more, uh, there'd be more fiber, you know, in a cup of coffee than a glass of orange juice.

• 1:02:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, wow.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  So sometimes one's ideas of where fiber comes from is a bit distorted.

• 1:02:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  So you've got to realize, yeah, well, coffee comes from a bean, that bean is fermented, and you know, if you have three cups of coffee, that will give you, you know, four to five grams of fiber a day, which is about a third of the average, you know, US intake.

• 1:02:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  So you've got to start changing your idea of where fiber comes from.

• 1:02:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  So you get it from beans. You know, bread contains fiber and so in the US again, bread is probably the primary source of fiber.

• 1:03:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  At the same time, you're getting at a high cost of a lot of sugar.

• 1:03:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, a lot of carbohydrate sugar.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  So whereas you don't want to stop eating the fiber, you want to shift to look at your bread to see, can you get a bread that has a higher fiber content and a lower sugar?

• 1:03:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  Content and so starting to look at the grams of fiber on the back of your pack is a really good way to see how healthy something is and also if you're going to eat it, is it going to fill you up more?

• 1:03:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Because the other important thing about fiber is that as well as being good for your gut microbes, it signals fullness much quicker than it is, even more than protein. It's really important. So then that balance of fiber to sugars is really important.

• 1:03:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, yeah. And I think some people, they advocate looking at the nutritional content on the back of a back of bread or whatever you're buying and doing a little calculation on fiber versus the amount of carbohydrate total, right? And so the closer that your total carbohydrates is mainly made of fiber, the better that food is going to be.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Fiber wise.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  That's right. And, you know, so I've slightly progressed to having rye bread.

• 1:04:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, rye bread is a great source of fiber.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  And it has relatively little sugar and so the ratio is really good. But you get other ones that look fantastic on a supermarket shelf, you know, and they've got all the health halos all over it.

• 1:04:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  They've got marketing.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  They've got nuts and seeds and, you know, pictures of wheat and all this kind of stuff. And you actually look at it and you say, wow, you've got, you know, forty grams of sugar in there and you've got like. Two grams of fibre, you know, that's not a good ratio.

• 1:04:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  No.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  Um, and so, but it, it's really hard for consumers.

• 1:04:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It is.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Cause they don't make it easy for you to, to pick that out. And in a lot of places, you know, fibre is not compulsory to put on many labels. And so, you know, you have to really look for it.

• 1:05:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I think bread is a huge source of confusion for people because for a long time, people thought they were being healthy by buying brown bread.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:05:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  But in reality, brown bread has a minimal additional fibre in it, but it's still a lot of sugar. And, um.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  It's often dyed anyway.

• 1:05:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's, uh, exactly, it's often fake brown, right?

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  It was fake brown, you just add a bit of carrot juice to it. And, uh, it suddenly goes brown and, yeah, and people are, yeah, being conned all the time, you know, by, uh, clever marketing.

• 1:05:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  How do you feel about sourdough bread?

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Uh, well, most of it is fake.

• 1:05:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's terrible.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Um, you know, I, if you make it yourself, you know, it's not fake. You, you've actually gone through the, and I do make my own, but I am very careful. I've been gonna buy sourdough bread. Most of the stuff in, in supermarkets is, is fake. They don't have to, they, they've, they've done some studies recently showing that they can find chemical yeast in them. And to call it sourdough bread, you just have to have a bit of dried sourdough flour.

• 1:06:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Really?

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Sprinkled in it. There's no, there's no strict guidelines of what makes sourdough bread. So unfortunately, again, the big food manufacturers have zoomed in on a, a health.

• 1:06:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Trend and.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Trend and said, okay, so, so most of it's fake, but if you, if you can get the real stuff, the studies show that it is, uh, better for you. Provided though, you still haven't got this massive sugar to fibre ratio. So it doesn't mean you're, you, you don't have to look on the back of the pack. But if you get a good one and it's high in fibre, then there's evidence that the people who are even gluten intolerant, sensitive. The fact that the sourdough fermentation has broken proteins into small amounts does allow them to eat it. So it's, it's easier to digest. And, but, you know, I think the main reason to eat it is it's, once you've eaten good sourdough bread, it's so much nicer.

• 1:07:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It is.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Than chemical bread. And it's the old fashioned way of, we all used to, we all used to eat it. And it's, it's also made with care.

• 1:07:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  So. It's more expensive, it takes longer to, you know, you've got to rent it overnight and it, you know, this is something that's been created properly rather than just churned out in, you know, in ninety minutes, ninety minutes in a factory.

• 1:07:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  That has nothing to it. But yeah, give it, but making your own is, is great fun as well. There's some evidence that people who make their own are actually healthier.

• 1:07:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  And it's maybe this, you get all these microbes on your hands.

• 1:07:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  And they get into your mouth so that you, that they've worked out the gut microbes and the hand microbes of, of bakers are actually healthier.

• 1:07:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Ah, interesting. That's so interesting. So for those of, you know, I got my first Zoe kit, maybe eight years ago. It's been a long time that you've had Zoe.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Wow, you got it. You got one of the prototypes back then.

• 1:08:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, like I think it was, it was a yellow box and I remember getting it and then.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  It's still yellow.

• 1:08:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's still yellow. Okay. And I remember back then it was just a gut microbiome test and some literature, but then since then I've seen another one. And now you're including a continuous glucose monitor as well as part of the Zoe kit that people can order. Can you talk a little bit about why you added that piece in there? And maybe the whole Zoe kit in general, because I think it's a, number one, it's a beautiful kit and it gives you so much incredible information. I'd love for you to kind of walk us through the thought process around the Zoe process.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So well, when, unlike most companies, we spent the first three years just doing research.

• 1:08:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  So most health and wellness companies spend all their money on marketing and work out, you know, what the message is going to be afterwards. But because I was a scientist, I, I forced the other two guys to go out and get the money to redo the science. And so we studied a thousand people, mainly twins, in great detail. We did another parallel study in the U S and. Learned really what was going on and we we realized that you needed gut a gut health measurement was fine, but it didn't on its own, it didn't tell you enough about personalizing nutrition. So we wanted to come up with a test that would allow us to really personalize

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  your your nutrition. So gut health was fine, it's going to tell you something about your general health, but it really on its own wasn't quite enough. So we realized that when we did this study, we gave a thousand people identical cookies at exactly the same time of the day, it would be high in sugar, high in fat, and and we saw their glucose response to it and their fat response to it. And they varied tenfold between people. Tenfold. Which was Massive. Wow. I had no idea. I I imagined maybe two or threefold, possibly, at most. So to see this tenfold variation that was wasn't just random, it was, you know, consistent.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Said, obviously, we need if you're reacting. So some people are reacting to carbs, some people are reacting to fats. They couldn't clear the fats after six hours. Others could easily. So somebody could deal with fats, some people could deal with carbs. So we saw even when we tested identical twins, got different results. So genetics played virtually no role in this, which was for me, a bit of a shock. Yeah, that is shocking. Mister twin guy, so everything's genetic. So I got that wrong. You know, because we were going to include genetics in our test originally. So we scrapped genetics because it didn't work in identical twins. Why wouldn't you look at it, right? Exactly. How were you measuring the fat response? We looked at something called triglycerides. Sure, of course.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  Which is something that goes up and down with food. And normally at six hours, it should be cleared from the body. Got it. And should have gone to the liver and be repackaged and circulated. And so in some people, we were about a third of people, we saw the triglyceride was still hanging around in there, which meant that you you're getting inflammation in those blood vessels. And that would be that chronic inflammation you'd be getting that, you know, we we talked about could be so so important. Similarly, blood sugar spikes, triggering, if you're getting them all the time. Every nanometer, but if you do it every day, you're just stimulating your immune

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  system. So these are two things we wanted to avoid. We then combined those two tests with the gut microbiome. That's what we do in that in that kit.

• 1:11:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  And we put that together. That gives us an algorithm which allows us to give you scores for every food. So we predict how you would then respond to every food. And so after that testing phase, you download the app with your scores on it. And then you can log every food just by photo logging now, which is

• 1:12:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  A totally cool feature. So you don't have, you probably did logging manually, which was a real pain. Now you just got to take a photo of it. It tells you exactly what's in the food.

• 1:12:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's incredible.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  How much fiber, how much protein, how much, you know, everything about it, all the ingredients and your score. And the idea is to move people gradually towards getting high scoring foods. And unlike nearly every other company, I know, we actually tested our method against a control group, which was doing the FDA approved diet, which is restricting calories, low fat. And after three months, we saw significant improvements in our group compared to the FDA diet.

• 1:12:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  Showing that this combination of gut friendly foods and pushing people towards foods that would help their gut microbes, plus reducing the sugar and fat spikes, did much better than, you know, traditional diets, et cetera. So, you know, and the first thing we noticed in these was improvements in mood and energy within a few days.

• 1:13:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Wow.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  And so that, obviously, that was a few years ago. We keep evolving our plan and making it better and better. So that it's easier to adhere to. Cause there's no point in doing something just for six weeks. This isn't a six week crash diet. There's plenty of those or there's injections you have instead. This is something to sustain your health for years. So it's about building healthy habit loops. And it's also about

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  Introducing people to new foods.

• 1:13:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  We, we encourage people and give bonus scores if you, if you can hit our sort of targets of thirty plants a week.

• 1:14:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  Including spices and herbs and

• 1:14:09Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  nuts and seeds and you're getting plenty of color on your plate. You get bonuses for fermented foods.

• 1:14:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It sounds like a great adjunct if you are on a GLP-1 medication, which many people are now considering to use this concurrently with your GLP-1 medication to change your relationship with food and understand what foods are actually beneficial for you. Cause that time that you're on a GLP-1, you're not craving

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:14:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  ultra-processed foods, fast foods, et cetera. So now it's a perfect time period to reform your relationship with food, which so it can give you the education you need.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  I think that's absolutely right. And, you know, now, you know, statistics are showing that one in six people in California have sort of, you know, used GLP-1s.

• 1:14:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  It is the perfect moment when, as you said, your brain has time to think.

• 1:14:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  You know, you're not dominated by going to the fridge and, or, you know, the junk food adverts or, or whatever. You don't have those cravings.

• 1:15:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  You can actually think sensibly about what you're, you want to eat and, and try to check, train your body without that ogre

• 1:15:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  sitting there of this, this incredible dominating appetite signals coming in there. So I, I think this is a new era. We have to embrace that, you know, GLP-1s are here to stay.

• 1:15:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  But it's a huge opportunity for many people to use that.

• 1:15:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And to have behavior change.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Change, totally change their behavior, get their body used to these new types of food and they should be able to, you know, and that also allows them potentially to reduce dose. Even come off them at some point.

• 1:15:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  And not be a slave to these drugs for the whole of your life.

• 1:15:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  But use this synergistically. So I think you're absolutely right.

• 1:15:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's a huge opportunity. To see, you know, one of the biggest problems with GLP-1s is people are told by the pharmaceutical companies that they're going to need to be on them forever because the rate of regaining the weight is pretty much guaranteed. But I think that's 100% due to the fact that they're not using the time period to change their behavior and they're not changing their gut microbiome. And so if you change your behavior and you change your gut microbiome during this time period, which we do at our practice at Next Health, we tie patients with a continuous glucose monitor with dietary recommendations and a nutritionist, we find that almost nobody gains their weight back. And they also don't lose muscle and they also, you know, actually decrease their cravings for the long term.

• 1:16:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And another big point I want to make here is that eating a healthy diet actually does work out to be cheaper for you in the long run because you're less hungry, there's less snacking going on. You know, I think people think that there's misconception that eating healthy is expensive. The opposite is true, is eating too much is expensive. Eating healthy helps you to eat less, which in the long run will save you money.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. What's interesting is all the studies we've done at Zoe and, you know, we are already a science-based company. So whether it was the standard Zoe diet, we've got another one with our prebotic, which is 30 freeze dried plants, different ones, in order to improve the diversity. When we gave that in a trial, you know, people's weight reduced and their hunger reduced. We've just done another study of fermentation.

• 1:17:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Giving people at least three samples of fermented foods a day in 10,000 people and they reported reduced hunger, thanks. So just by changing the food you're eating. You can do the same things as GLP one is doing. So I think it's an incredible opportunity for people and they should really seize it. Rather than just being complacent, so I can keep hitting this junk. You say, well, take a longer term view. You retrain your body, you know, when you're, you can get free of all these chemicals that are, you know, partly addictive.

• 1:18:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  I think, you know, we think something like one in 10 people are actually addicted to these, these foods. This, this is a really good way of getting rid of that addiction and getting your body craving real food.

• 1:18:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  And then you'll find, yeah, as you said, don't eat a snack. You know, you can leave a good interval overnight. And that's another thing we encourage at Zoe. We did a study of a hundred thousand people. We got them all to do time restricted eating.

• 1:18:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm, a hundred thousand people.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love, I can't wait to hear the results of this one.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  So you read all these studies and of course, you know, they're all done in Stanford or some little lab and they're all 20 year old students, you know, and, and they're all males. So, you know, it's not, you can't relate to it if you're a middle aged female.

• 1:19:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  And all sounds too good to be true. So let's do a real life experiment. So we, we signed up a hundred thousand citizen scientists. And so do you want to do this study? And we, all we're asking you to do is have a time window of 14 hours overnight where you're not eating. So you've had to stop their late night snacking and, and they could choose to do it early in the morning or late at night, didn't, you know? And it turns out that two thirds chose to cut the, cut or delay breakfast. Only a third wanted to have it early, although it's slightly better earlier on. Just it's less convenient.

• 1:19:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  So they all signed up for it. A third couldn't hack it.

• 1:19:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  They said, I'm a snacker, you know, I can't do this. Uh, which, you know, you never hear about in trials, right? I want to see all this a hundred percent. So a third of people couldn't do it. A third of people sort of quite liked it, but weren't sure they were going to come. A third loved it. And they're still doing it now. So I think that gives you more of an idea and that that third that did it really well.

• 1:20:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  You know, they lost weight, they had less hunger. Their IBS symptoms improved. They got less bloating. You know, they had more energy, more mood. So lots of things that we can all be doing, not even what you eat, but just how you eat.

• 1:20:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  You know, and, and in the U S, you know, average, there are six eating. There's now six meals a day, apparently is the average. You know, and, and one in four are eaten in the car.

• 1:20:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  Whereas all the healthy countries you go to, military ones, you know, it's all decent mealtimes. But, you know, two or three max.

• 1:20:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  No snacking.

• 1:20:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  No snacking, right?

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  So I think that's the other thing to change. You know, if you're on the G O P ones, that's the perfect time to change not only what you eat, but how you're eating.

• 1:21:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure. Can we touch on probiotics? You mentioned a probiotic that you were developing and.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Prebiotic.

• 1:21:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  A prebiotic.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  Okay, which means the fertilizer for the microbes.

• 1:21:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Got it. Yeah, let's break that down. Prebiotic versus probiotic versus postbiotic. And, and do you say Zoe's making a prebiotic?

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:21:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay, tell us a little bit about that too.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Uh, well, so there's, so we came up with this idea based on the research that we did a while ago. Combine the British gut project with the American gut project. We got, these were volunteers paying for their own gut testing. It was quite innovative, I think about 10 years ago. And it showed that the, the optimum gut health was for people who ate 30 plants or more, different ones a week.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  It didn't matter if they were meat eaters, fish eaters, vegans, vegetarians, whatever. What mattered was getting that diversity of plants on your plate. And I think that's a really important message. True. And so we had this, it wasn't a big study, but it was all we had. And thirty, we've tried it out and it rings, it's worked really well in a campaign in the UK. Thirty plants, I can remember that. Yeah. I can tick it off, you know, and how many have I had in my meals? Yeah. And we've started encouraging people to start thinking about adding plants. And just a spoonful of spice counts as one, you know, coffee is a plant. You know, you can start thinking about plants in very different ways. True.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  I have a jar of nuts and seeds in the morning that I add to my yogurt. Yeah. That gives me an extra ten plants, you know, it's like, it's not that hard. No. And so that was a really important thing. So we, but a lot of people did find it difficult to do this, or if they're working or getting night shifts. Mm hmm. To get the thirty plants in or if they're traveling. So we designed this pre-botic that would give us over thirty two plants. Mm hmm. Including six freeze dried mushrooms. Some interesting ones you wouldn't normally get in your diet, like baobab. Yeah. Unless you go to Africa, you know. And it also gives you a considerable amount of fiber.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  So you get five grams of fiber, you know, which just by one scoop of five grams of fiber will reduce your risk of death by fourteen percent. Fourteen percent, wow. That's what, that's what the epidemiology studies show. So it's a high fiber, diverse, plenty of polyphenols, diversity in color, and you just add it to food. Okay. So it's not, it's not a meal replacement. Got it. You just sprinkle it on like you would nuts or seeds. What does it taste like? It's, it's savory. Okay, good. So, you know, it tastes like real food. Mm hmm. As opposed to these sort of green powders. Right. That just tastes like chemical green powders. And you can see the bits in it. Hmm. And because we're a science company, we actually tested it and against.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  We had two arms. One was a probiotic arm.

• 1:24:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  And the other was a dummy arm where it's still these granules. We just had little bits of dried bread.

• 1:24:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  And we showed really significant improvements after 12 weeks in the gut microbiome. And in most of the symptoms are, you know, energy, mood, slight changes in weight. Uh, things like this that said, well, this is, you know, it works.

• 1:24:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  And so that's why we're, we're keen on, you know, I'd rather eat, eat real food. But if you can add this up, you know, it's, it's like an extra insurance policy.

• 1:24:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  For you and it, you know, I always take it everywhere I go traveling.

• 1:24:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  So you'll have to try some.

• 1:24:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I can't wait to try it. Yeah.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you can now buy it in the U S.

• 1:24:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  Um, so.

• 1:24:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  What's the name of it?

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  It's called Daily Thirty.

• 1:24:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Daily Thirty. Okay. I love it. Yeah. I remember hearing about the thirty campaign a while ago and sounded very reasonable to me. It just seemed a little overwhelming. Where am I going to find thirty plants a week?

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And but then it makes sense when you add in the nuts, the coffee and.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think in a way, you know, this is a good entry into it. It starts you thinking about it. And we want people to do both, you know, but not everyone can always get their thirty in, you know, we're busy. It's not always easy to guarantee it, you know, always that, especially if you're traveling.

• 1:25:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  True.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and traveling in the U S, you know, you can get some horrible food, food environments where, you know, you really wish you weren't there and there's nothing else to eat except frozen pizza.

• 1:25:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  So that's where you desperately need to be hanging this around with you and even give it to your kids who might be reluctant to eat all those plants, you know, they won't notice. A bit of a sprinkle of this stuff on them. So it's something that we know improves your gut health and it worked better than our probiotic.

• 1:25:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm. Interesting.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  And the probiotic we were talking about is, you know, that's live microbes.

• 1:25:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  True.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  Um, that work in a different way. So is the pre-biotic is something that you give so that it helps all your mi-, your natural microbes.

• 1:25:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 1:25:58Speaker 01

  Grow more and get more diversity and produce more good chemicals. A probiotic is a bit of a, a guesswork that this particular microbe is going to have an effect on your, on your, on your gut. Uh, in ways we still don't really understand. And, you know, it worked a little bit, but again, it comes back to the idea these probiotics you buy, a bit of a lottery, because we all have a very different gut microbiome. Right. Uh, inside us. And it worked really well in some people and not only others. So the moment, we think the pre-biotics are actually a better bet. But you mentioned post-biotics, and I'm really interested in post-biotics. Yeah.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  This idea that a post-biotic means either a dead microbe or a the juice. Yeah. Of microbes. Right. Without with the microbes extracted from them. And it's a really new concept. Right. It's come out of a number of trials where the control group was were dead microbes. Yep. They'd killed them, they'd pasteurized them, and in at least three trials, they found out that it did at least as well as the the active one. So it's how do dead microbes work? Yeah. You know, because it seems nonsense. And. It was discovered by accident. It was discovered by accident because, yeah, nobody sane would think it would work. And then you start to think about it. Well, actually, how do vaccines work?

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Right, right. These are dead viruses. Right. The uh, or or dead bacteria. They have an effect on your immune system. And we know, you know, you feel different after you after a vaccination. And so they are having this effect. And increasingly, I think we're going to start seeing this. And, you know, we've got some plans to to add this to our daily thirty. And, you know, we need to do the the same trials to show that it's working. But I think I'm super excited by this idea because it means that there's less safety concerns. True. You know, they last a long time. And some of the the products that, you know,

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  are used like kombuchas and a lot of these these drinks that can't really be live because they're in a can that's been there for six months. And, you know, if it was live, it just exploded. Exactly. So they've they've killed them. Right. But they could still be healthy. They could still work, right? If it's post-biotic effect. Yeah, just a year ago, I would be saying, they're nonsense. Don't drink them. Yeah, that's interesting. Actually, the, you know, just by having some dead microbes floating around, also means that. You know, some things like beers.

• 1:28:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  Yeasty beers where we've got a bit of dead stuff in the bottom might be good for you. Or even some of these breads that have dead microbes in them. So this could be a whole new era.

• 1:28:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  In the food industry and myself and my current other microbiome specialists are really excited by this area. Because it's going to make it really fast track to get some of these products that might, you know, medicinally you'd be worried about what's that microbe doing.

• 1:29:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, of course.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  It's not normally in food, but if it's dead.

• 1:29:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  You know, it's going to be much easier to play with. So this could be a whole new explosion of medicinal foods.

• 1:29:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, no, it's extremely exciting. That's why I mentioned it. There's one called Urolithin A. Have you heard of Urolithin A, which increases mitochondrial health and more mitochondria increases mitochondrial turnover? There's no drug I know that does that. And so to see us using, you know, I always talk about our microbiome as this hundred billion dollar pharmaceutical factory that we're all born with in our guts. And there's so many effects that we just don't even know yet. And it's such a good idea to.

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  And the microbes that reduce your cholesterol.

• 1:29:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  That these bile acids, so they can produce these. And so, you know, do the job of our liver, you know. And so, yeah, I think, and the fact really that it's hard to see many downsides of having particularly the dead forms of these.

• 1:30:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  These microbes, because they will get flushed out of your system. You know, we'd be able to monitor them really very easily. They're not going to take over, which is the danger of.

• 1:30:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  They don't replicate.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is the danger of, you know, we're finding these interesting microbes that might be anti-inflammatory in our guts. But if you've started putting them in foods and other things and going to people where they weren't normally, you don't know how the rest of their community would deal with it, you know. So I, I, I think it's, it's, it's super exciting to, uh, yeah, just another phase in, in, in the wonderful world of the gut microbiome, but it just means, you know, we all need to be experts in this.

• 1:30:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I think another exciting area of research right now too is fecal transplants as well. You know, you see a lot of pre-publication data around fecal transplants being useful in certain disease states, in fact, completely reversing certain disease states. And I was wondering to get your opinion on fecal microbiome transplant.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  I was really excited about 10 years ago.

• 1:31:02Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  In fecal, I wrote an editorial on it, on it. And this was a time they were just starting a lot of the clinical trials. Turns out that most of them have failed.

• 1:31:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  And, uh, the particularly ones that have failed, it's failed to show any benefits for obesity. Uh, it works in mice, but not in humans. So a lot of these worked really well in mice, but you can never totally trust mice studies. Because experimenters can just, you know, lose a few hundred mice in, you know, failed experiments and they never report it. You never quite know what's going on. And the effect sizes might be completely different in humans. So I think that's what was the case here. So it doesn't work in, it didn't work in diabetes, didn't work in obesity. And the only cases it has worked, uh, in osteiv colitis.

• 1:31:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  And recurrent C. diff.

• 1:31:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hmm. Yes, C. diff, we used it.

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  So it is now the number one treatment for recurrent C. diff, uh, has 90% success rate. So it is established medicine, if you like.

• 1:32:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right. No, we use it in the ICU when people get C.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. And, you know, the, the only other treatment at the time was like gentamicin antibiotics, which had a 25% success rate and equal chance of making much worse. So, but it, the studies I, I think it's about one in five patients on, with osteiv colitis will get major improvements that could be permanent.

• 1:32:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  One in five?

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is not dissimilar to, you know, some of the immune drugs.

• 1:32:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  But it hasn't worked in other conditions. And that's a bit disappointing. There's some evidence in children with some spectrum, you know, autism spectrum disorders.

• 1:32:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's where I'm hearing a lot about it, autism spectrum.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  It's all very anecdotal.

• 1:32:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  And I'm not convinced yet that it's, it's, it's absolutely true. Yeah, so I don't think it's going to be the answer. You know, the last 10 years haven't haven't done it. So I I I'm going to put my faith in food rather than no. So don't offer me a poo transplant.

• 1:33:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So one of the topics that I always love talking about with food is how important it is to regain your relationship with food. And part of that is knowing your food. What are you? What are you eating? What are the benefits of it? Focusing on real food and then also bringing the food home and cooking it and making making and preparing your own food. And you know, you have this book coming out, your cookbook. And I would love to talk about what this cookbook can bring to someone's life and how is it different than other cookbooks perhaps?

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the Food for Life Cookbook came about because, you know, I've written books on the theory.

• 1:33:47Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  And getting into the gut microbiome, but people saying to me, oh, it's all right. Yeah, I've read your books, you know, I get it. But, you know, what do I eat day to day? I said, well, just follow the theory, you know, and they said, no, no, I will, you know, more. So I realized that people did want some practical examples of what I thought was eating for your gut. Really good food that is also tasty. So that's where this idea of the cookbook with 100 recipes came out that is that is plant based. And follows basically these six key principles that we've got, which is eating a third, you know, trying to get as many plants in a week as you can. So every recipe is maximizing plants.

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  You're eating the rainbow, so they're all colorful dishes, which means you you know, you're getting defense chemicals and all the other good nutrients. You've got plenty of fermented foods, so finding opportunities to add fermented foods into these recipes. So most books don't tell you how to add in kefir to a recipe instead of instead of cream. They don't say, how can you introduce sauerkraut into a salad? How to make a kimchi salad dressing?

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  Or all these mixing things which we had to come come up with of, you know, how do you get more fermented foods into your regular diet without just going hardcore?

• 1:35:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I struggle with that.

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  And how do you get kids to like it?

• 1:35:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, how do you get kids, right, right.

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  So these are ways of just blending it into the food so they'll find it super tasty.

• 1:35:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Then there's a thing about protein pivoting. Because there's no meat in here, you know, the average American's going to be worried about their protein because they've been indoctrinated about protein. So it's, well, you realize how much is in beans? You know, you can swap lots of things, you know, a white sauce that you make with flour, you make that with beans, you know, there's a bechamel, you can just, many recipes with swapping, like a lasagna recipe is swapped, made with a bean layer to re-pump up the protein. Then you've got, you know, this sort of concept, none of the recipes have a calorie count in them. And it's moving people into quality, not calories, and there's nothing ultra-processed. Even stock cubes, we've switched out here.

• 1:35:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  Because they're ultra-processed, so giving people a way to make your own stock cubes or use miso paste, you know, so, which is a very natural fermented alternative to, which I'm now addicted to. And then finally telling people, you know, don't snack, have these big meals that fill you up and then leave a gap so that you're, you know, you're trained to do it this way. And also don't get obsessed about having to eat breakfast, you know.

• 1:36:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  So a lot of these are meals that can be at any flexible time. And I think we should learn from other countries that, you know, you go around the world, you know, they don't have the same breakfasts and they can be having their, you know, savory dishes at 11 o'clock in the morning or whatever. So it's about that flexibility. So hopefully people will see this as a new way of thinking about food. And it doesn't, just because it's healthy, doesn't mean it's not also, you know, delicious and good for your gut microbes. So all the recipes have plant count in them as well as a fiber count. And to my mind, they're the two thing, the main two things you. You look at and they're all dead simple to make. I mean, that's the other, the other thing.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  So, you know, I can make them all. So, you know, I'm a doctor, not a, not a chef. So, you know, that's why. But I love doing it. It was great fun, actually.

• 1:37:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's a lot of fun. I can't wait to.

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  It's the practical aspect of all that science.

• 1:37:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  That, that's really fun.

• 1:37:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, that's fantastic. I, you know, I love that plant count, fiber count, but no calorie count. I try to get all my patients to focus away from calorie counting. I feel like there's a lot of, like, you know, we talked about earlier, tricks involved in calorie counting. And also, if you eat real whole foods, you won't need to count. You're gonna be full. You're not gonna over them. And so.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's plenty of things. And there's also treats, you know, there's desserts. It's not like there's no dessert. So we've got a chocolate mousse, right? That scores really well. It gives a really good Zoe score because we use olive oil.

• 1:37:53Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  And we use chickpea to bind it all together rather than eggs. So, you know, you're getting protein, you're getting fiber. It's all these little, little tricks and things that you can still get, you know, really comfort food that's, that's still healthy.

• 1:38:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Okay, great. Well, next time you're in town, we're gonna have a chef come and cook a few things out of your book and we'll share a meal together. How does that sound?

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  That sounds delicious.

• 1:38:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love it. Or maybe I'll give it a try. I'll try cooking it myself.

• 1:38:20Speaker 01

  You should try first.

• 1:38:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love it. Well, this was fantastic. Thank you so much, Dr. Specter. This was a true treat to have you on. And I've been a huge fan for a long time and it's great to be able to talk to you in person. And I would just love to let the audience know where they can hear more about you. Obviously, they can find your book, called The Food for Life Cookbook, and that's being sold, I assume, bookstores and Amazon and everywhere else you can buy books. And where else?

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  So, check out my own Instagram, obviously, TimSpecter, the Zoe Instagram, Z O E, or the Zoe website, zoe.com. And we also have a Zoe Health Science and Nutrition Podcast, very specifically around nutrition. If people are interested to go into depth in, in some of these subjects, that's a, a free podcast. Yeah. And, and any of my, I've also got, you know, lots of previous books, which are more scientific than this one, if you want to go into it about the microbiome, etc. But yeah, there are plenty of ways to find me.

• 1:39:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank you. A very important podcast. I think the microbiome needs to be highlighted and I'm really glad to have had this conversation with you and I can't wait to have you back on again. Dr. Specter, thank you so much for joining me. Look forward to it.

• 1:39:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Please remember to subscribe if you like this episode and give us a good review and share a link with your friends. It really helps to support all of our efforts. I also want to remind you that the information shared on this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your healthcare provider or physician before making any decisions or taking any action based on what you hear today, especially if you have any underlying health conditions or on any medications. Your doctor knows your personal health situation the best and it's always important to seek their guidance.