Doctor Tim Spector: The Shocking New Truth About Weight Loss, Calories & Diets!

What if everything that you knew about health was wrong, if calories didn’t count and food labels lied? That is exactly what Tim Spector OBE says in his multiple books, innumerable articles and TV appearances. Following the ancient greek belief that food is medicine, Tim has made it his mission to let people know how central gut health is to overall health, affecting your immune system, energy and even mental health. In this essential conversation, Tim discusses everything you need to know for your health, from eating the rainbow to fasting, this episode will change the way that you look at food and diets forever. You can purchase Tim’s most recent book, ‘Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well’, here: https://amzn.to/3ZLrpsX Follow Tim: Instagram: https://bit.ly/46vt340 Twitter: https://bit.ly/3VG0zil Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  Exercise doesn't help weight loss?

• 0:01Tim Spector?

  No. The reason exercise doesn't work is because...

• 0:06Speaker 02

  Professor Tim Spector.

• 0:07Tim Spector?

  He's an award-winning scientist.

• 0:09Speaker 02

  Best-selling author and medical professor.

• 0:11Tim Spector?

  And he is ranked in the top 100 of the world's most cited scientists. Can we talk about the future of personalised nutrition?

• 0:17Steven Bartlett?

  Many consider you to be the leading expert on gut health and diet. What's your view on the ketogenic diet?

• 0:23Tim Spector?

  Virtually impossible.

• 0:24Steven Bartlett?

  What about vitamins?

• 0:25Tim Spector?

  Waste of money.

• 0:26Steven Bartlett?

  What are the facts around fasting?

• 0:28Tim Spector?

  Oh dear.

• 0:29Steven Bartlett?

  Oh shit, what do you mean idea?

• 0:31Tim Spector?

  The food industry wants you to focus on calorie, fat content, sugar, so you don't have to think about the quality of the food. There's never been any long-term study showing that calorie counting is an effective way to lose weight and maintain weight loss. This is why I want people to think about food very differently than we have done in the past.

• 0:52Steven Bartlett?

  So what is the cost?

• 0:55Tim Spector?

  Depression and anxiety is intricately linked to the quality of your gut microbes. These are microscopic bugs in our intestines. All of them are able to pump out chemicals that are vital for our body when they're fed the right foods. The reason we're in this state is we've killed off a lot of our good bugs. I think people don't think of all the positive benefits, they don't think that you need to build them up.

• 1:17Steven Bartlett?

  God, it's so confusing, you know? When you walk down the aisle in the supermarket, everything is trying to pretend that it's good. So how do I know what is good?

• 1:24Tim Spector?

  You have to...

• 1:36Steven Bartlett?

  Tim.

• 1:39Steven Bartlett?

  Many consider you to be the leading expert on topics relating to gut health and diet and food etcetera, but how would you describe your own professional academic bio? What is that bio in your own words?

• 1:54Tim Spector?

  It's complicated.

• 1:56Tim Spector?

  So I've changed form over the years quite a lot. And I'm quite unusual in in in terms of academic medics. Who usually stick very strictly to one speciality all their career. And fear to go anywhere else. So I was at medical school. Did the usual stuff, then wanted to be a physician, then did rheumatology. What's rheumatology? And bones and joints. Okay. So that was my subspecialty, if you like. Mm hmm. And but I got interested in epidemiology, which is the study of. Uh, risk factors in populations. Where you just look at thousands of people rather than one patient.

• 2:39Tim Spector?

  Really, I I switched again to study because I I got. Really interested in the idea that. Identical twins should be the same. They're clones, they've lived all their life together. All their genes are identical. What makes them different? Counter to what everyone thought, identical twins often die at different times. They get different diseases, one gets depression, one's fine. It's all these differences. So what that was my sort of conundrum. What makes identical twins different? When they have the same, they've lived the same lives. It was only through this sort of search to find this out that I looked at the gut microbes in in twins.

• 3:24Tim Spector?

  And found they were different. And that really scientifically took me on to this. Whole new path. From there, I made this sort of leap into nutrition. To say, well, now we've discovered this whole new science. All this stuff we got wrong about nutrition suddenly makes sense. So now I would say I'm, you know, an epidemiologist. Who's really specializing in in nutrition and gut health and trying to change. The way people think about food.

• 3:58Steven Bartlett?

  That was a brilliant summary of your career and academic background. As a muggle like me, that's really, you know, new to many of these topics. What I understand is the study of epidemiology is the study of the like genetic root causes of disease.

• 4:13Tim Spector?

  Not just genetic, so it's any, any, anything.

• 4:16Steven Bartlett?

  Cause of disease, right.

• 4:17Tim Spector?

  So the people studying Covid.

• 4:18Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 4:19Tim Spector?

  Were all epidemiologists, tracking a disease, trying to work out who's getting it, when it's coming back, how common it is.

• 4:26Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 4:26Tim Spector?

  All these basic things in populations at a, at a sort of big population level.

• 4:32Steven Bartlett?

  Right, got you. You've also written eight hundred articles, more than eight hundred articles on this subject matter. In two thousand and fourteen, you set up the British Gut Microbiome Project and you've written five books on these subject matters. I mean, I've read two of them that are sat in front of me here. I'm really intrigued by, by the personal story as well, because writing these books and doing all the work you've done is a lot, it's a lot of work, it requires a lot of drive. I mean, this particular book, you, you said it took almost six years to finish. What is the personal drive behind that? What is driving you to pursue the, the subject matter?

• 5:10Tim Spector?

  You know, I just love getting into a new area, finding out that something that everyone's been quoting for decades is total BS and was based on some tiny study of nine people. It's like I'm a detective and so I've always had this, this quest to sort of be this obsessional detective, I think, going into these areas. And at the same time, it's, that's coincided with, you know, various events in my life as well that have probably pushed me in certain directions more than other, you know, that I wouldn't have gone otherwise.

• 5:46Steven Bartlett?

  What were those events in your life?

• 5:50Tim Spector?

  I guess, you know, I was a pretty lazy student at school.

• 5:55Steven Bartlett?

  Same.

• 5:55Tim Spector?

  Might surprise some people. We always assumed if you're a professor and you've made it, you were a swat at school, but I did the absolute minimum. So I scraped into medical school, scraped through the first few years of medical school. I'd spent one year proving you didn't have to go to any lectures and could still pass, which was a lot of work actually. At the end, I realised it was harder. Then, of course, aged 21, my father died, suddenly overnight with a heart attack, no warning at all. I was off on a skiing holiday with some friends. And I think in retrospect, that that event changed me and perhaps gave

• 6:40Tim Spector?

  me, you know, a bit more direction and drive than I would have had. I'm not quite sure, you know, how it would have turned out if he hadn't died. But to me, him dying at 57, suddenly like that, made me think I need to, you know, make more of my life. I could die early too. This was something that, you know, I think spurred me on to do all this kind of stuff that I didn't need to do, but I felt perhaps more compulsion to do. And maybe also got me interested in this whole idea of genetics to say, well, you know,

• 7:22Tim Spector?

  did he have rotten genes? Have I got the same genes? Am I going to die in my 50s? So I think that, looking back now, I think that's, it's hard to be absolutely sure, but that that seems a reasonable scenario.

• 7:37Steven Bartlett?

  I've read and I've heard from members of your team that that left you with a feeling as you've kind of said there that you might also die young if it is a genetic thing.

• 7:45Tim Spector?

  Definitely, yes. No, I was always telling my kids, you know, this is, this is it, you know, how many, how many, I was sort of half joking, but saying, well, you know, my time's, you know, I've only got seven years to go now, you know, whatever it is.

• 7:57Steven Bartlett?

  You were saying that to your kids?

• 7:59Tim Spector?

  Yes, you know, but.

• 8:01Steven Bartlett?

  To trump a pattern?

• 8:02Tim Spector?

  I guess so, but it was my way of, you know, I did it a jokey way. It wasn't like I was writing my will and saying, you know, the candlesticks are here and the everything else. But it was. Yeah, I used to make light of it, but you know, underneath it, yes, I felt, well, you know, I could go early, so I need to get on with it, I think. And I was also at that time, probably speed was sped up by another personal incident I had at that time.

• 8:34Steven Bartlett?

  Which was a mini stroke?

• 8:36Tim Spector?

  Yes, we call it a mini stroke. It's a vascular occlusion, but I couldn't work for three months. I couldn't read and I got a bit depressed about that.

• 8:48Steven Bartlett?

  So those three months where you you can't read, I read that you were the quote, I went from being a sporty, fitter than average middle aged man to a pill popping, depressed stroke victim with high blood pressure. They said you were flawed by this experience and for three months you couldn't work. From having a pretty fast paced frenetic life to being bed bound. And in those three months, you your focus on the microbiome

• 9:17Steven Bartlett?

  increases, right?

• 9:19Tim Spector?

  Yes, I was I was just finishing up the very last bits of the previous book, identically different, which is about why twins were different.

• 9:27Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 9:28Tim Spector?

  And as a sort of afterthought, I had acted one page about, well, actually, the microbiome could be the key to this.

• 9:37Steven Bartlett?

  What is the microbiome?

• 9:39Tim Spector?

  It's the word we use for the community of gut microbes. These are microscopic bugs in our intestines. And it's a biome because it's like this jungle community. It's lots of different species altogether, thousands of them that coexist in our in our lower intestine, our colon. And they, it's like we've discovered in the last 10 years, a new organ in our bodies. If you put them all together, they weigh about the same as our brain. Okay, so that's mind boggling really to think about all these bugs which individually

• 10:19Tim Spector?

  are tiny, putting them together, they actually, you know, they weigh several pounds. So you can either think of them as a microbial garden, but increasingly I'm shifting that towards thinking of them as an incredible pharmacy. So all of them are able to pump out chemicals all the time that are vital for our body. So thousands of different chemicals are pumped out every minute by these gut microbes when they're fed the right foods. And these chemicals are key for our immune system. Most of our immune system is actually in our gut. Most people don't know that. We think it's, you know, under our armpits or somewhere, but

• 11:01Tim Spector?

  actually, all the immune cells are actually talking all the time to our gut microbes through these chemicals. And our immune system obviously is crucial for our whole body and fighting aging and cancer, Covid infections, allergies, all these kind of things. So then you've also got the microbes can produce chemicals that affect the brain and will make the difference between you being happy or sad, or we know that they're vital in depression, important for regulating how much you eat, your appetite, when you feel full. They also provide key vitamins for you, all the B vitamins and many other components,

• 11:45Tim Spector?

  neurochemicals like serotonin, that's key for the happiness, and how antidepressants work are all produced by your gut microbes. So we're slowly learning that these guys are absolutely crucial to how our body responds to anything coming into it, whether it's painkillers, whether it's antidepressants, whether it's chemicals in the form of food. And this is why, you know, I want people to think about food very differently.

• 12:15Tim Spector?

  Than we have done in the past. The idea, the old idea that food is just calories, macros, you know, with its fats and carbs and proteins. Those four things, you know, that's a hundred years old mentality. But key to it is this, this core of our gut health, which we've ignored totally. And this was this big aha moment for me after research of ten years. What, why would identical twins, twins be different? What could it be? And it turns out their gut microbes are different. That's the only thing I've ever found in thirty years that's really different about identical twins. And that explains why one gets cancer, the other one doesn't.

• 12:59Tim Spector?

  Why one gets an autoimmune disease or one's depressed and one's happy. So for me, that, the twins were a perfect, um, obvious way to show that how important these, these microbes are for all of us.

• 13:16Steven Bartlett?

  What are some of the biggest myths you encountered as you started researching the microbiome? That most people currently believe that I probably sat here now believe about how to keep my, um, my gut healthy. What are some of those key myths? Cause I know you like myth busting.

• 13:32Tim Spector?

  Well, I think most people believe that probiotics in yogurt get killed by your stomach acid. So they don't work because you're, everything gets killed off. That's a common one I hear.

• 13:45Steven Bartlett?

  But they don't.

• 13:45Tim Spector?

  No, um, some get killed, but you're ingesting billions. So always enough get through to have an effect. And we know that probiotics do work, although the best probiotics are in food rather than in capsules. And there's plenty of fermented foods, which is the same. Um, I think, um, I mean, most people know very little about microbes. They think that most of them are harmful. So, oh, I've, you know, they, they cultured this microbe or they found a parasite. Fifty thousand people have now looked at their gut microbes in the U S and the U K. In the U K, twenty four percent have a parasite. And that parasite is actually beneficial.

• 14:31Tim Spector?

  It's called Blaster Sisters and it's associated with good health, being thinner, having less internal fat, lower blood pressure and, you know, in the past, we're trying to kill it off. And actually, the reason we're in this state is we've killed off a lot of our good bugs. So I think people need to realise that most of the bugs in our, in our system are trying to help us. And we've actually lost half of the good ones compared to if you go to hunter gatherers or, you know, I spent some time with the Hadza tribe in Africa. And, you know, they have twice the number of species that we have.

• 15:13Tim Spector?

  Because they don't pop antibiotics, they don't have sterile foods, they have a very wide range of um diverse plants, et cetera. So I think people uh think that, you know, their, their gut microbes are really only there to hurt them when they have a bad kebab or something. Uh, they don't think of all the positive benefits, they don't think that you need to build them up. And that actually, you know, they're like a mu- the more you've got, the better it is. How do I build them up? How do I become more like that tribe? You have to have a more diverse range of plants. So we did a study a few years ago with British and American guts that showed that if you can

• 15:56Tim Spector?

  get up to thirty different types of plant a week, you maximise your diversity of species in your gut. And that's that diversity that we want. Remember, thirty plants, you look a bit shocked, but that's um, it's, a plant is a nut, a seed, it's not just kale. Um, it's a herb, it's a spice. And things like coffee are a plant to me. Um, because it comes from a fermented bean. Um, so it's that diversity, it's having more fermented foods, it's uh having a range of colours, it's cutting out.

• 16:39Tim Spector?

  The ultra-processed chemicals as well, which all the, all the groups in the population that have the best gut microbes, they don't eat ultra-processed foods, they don't have antibiotics, they don't have this, this modern Western lifestyle.

• 16:54Steven Bartlett?

  You mentioned calories there as well, when you were talking about the microbiome. One of my friends is a prolific calorie counter and, you know, he eats a lot of Domino's pizzas. He listens to this podcast, he's going to know exactly, he's going to know that I'm atting him. He eats Domino's pizzas all the time, he eats like a real, you know, processed food diet, but then says to me, it's all about calorie counting. Now, with all due respect, friend, he's never managed to, I shouldn't say, but, but it's not necessarily worked for him in terms of the goal that he's set himself. So when I was reading about your view on calorie counting in your book Spoon Fed, it was, I screenshotted it this

• 17:39Steven Bartlett?

  morning and sent it to him and I sent, I said, you are a bullshitter. That's what I said in the message and we had a good laugh about it this morning. But what is your view on calorie counting and this idea that we can, you know, weight loss or being healthy is just about having a calorie deficit?

• 17:52Tim Spector?

  It's complete nonsense.

• 17:54Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you. I will clip that and send it to him.

• 17:56Tim Spector?

  There's never been any long-term study showing that calorie counting is an effective way to lose weight and maintain weight loss after, you know, the first few weeks. So yes, very strict calorie counting, if you deprive yourself for a few weeks, you will lose some weight, but even if you're successful, your body's evolutionary mechanisms will make you hungry and hungry every week you go by where you're depriving yourself of energy. Your body will go into sort of shutdown mode, your metabolism slows down, so you're not expending those calories. And inevitably, I'd say more than 95% of people will go

• 18:40Tim Spector?

  back to their baseline and many go above it. They sort of rebound back if they're doing this, this style of calorie restriction. Now, calorie counting is a part of that. So people try and say, okay, I'm not going, I'm not going on a dramatic diet, but I'm going to just try and reduce by 10% my calories in the day, which in the old theory was supposed to make you lose weight. Well, it's virtually impossible, even professionals, to count calories. And because they're not very accurate for a start, everything on the packet, you have to weigh everything. And in restaurants now, we're supposed to have these calorie counts,

• 19:21Tim Spector?

  they're plus or minus about thirty percent because portion size makes such a huge difference to it. And it's been shown in the US to be a worthless exercise anyway. So you can't count them going in, you can't really count your metabolism going out either. We're all incredibly different. You know, your friend's probably been told two thousand five hundred calories is what he's allowed. Hmm. Well, that's an average, but it doesn't mean it relates to him. My average is much lower when I tested it. So everyone is an individual. And this is another thing we need to move away from this one size fits all guidelines. But I think more importantly

• 20:02Tim Spector?

  is that the whole calorie counting assumption means that it doesn't matter what form that calorie is, it has the same effect in your body. Therefore, whether you're cutting out fat calories or carb calories or, you know, low calorie sodas or whatever it is, it's going to be fine. But we now know that's not true. And there's several science experiments which now absolutely nail that. One was in America where they gave people identical meals for two weeks in a sort of enclosed semi-prison. And one was homemade and one

• 20:43Tim Spector?

  was ultra-processed, both identical calories, macros the same. The group with the ultra-processed foods overet by about two hundred calories every day. They kept coming back to the buffet for more. Okay, so yes, the same calories, but the effect on the body meant they were hungrier. Why is that? We don't know for sure. It could be. That those chemicals in the ultra processed foods affect the gut microbes. And they then send signals to the brain saying, eat more, this isn't a natural. You know, this is a really weird chemical. It's doing something weird to me. I'm producing something weird in exchange. It could be they get absorbed much quicker. So you get a big sugar rush.

• 21:25Tim Spector?

  And you know, the nutrients get in to your body in a way faster than they should do in nature. And so your brain doesn't have time to say, I'm full. It normally takes 20 minutes or so to to get that fullness. Um, or, you know, it it. So it could be the matrix of the food. It could be the chemicals in the food. It could be its effect on the gut microbes. Um, but it also could be things like your sugar spikes. So in the Zoe Predict studies. Where basically we've given now 50,000 people um in the US and the UK, the same foods at the same time. Same time of day, everyone's got these muffins. We show that people, um.

• 22:10Tim Spector?

  One in four people who have these muffins and are wearing it, we wear glucose monitors, which tells you. For two weeks, what's happening in your glucose. One in four people get a real sugar dip. Three hours later. So this is where you you rise in sugar, which is normal. And then as it comes down, it goes below baseline. But only in one in four people. And when that happens, those people end up uh overeating their next meal. And during the day, they feel more tired, more hungry. That's this, the sort of 11 o'clock slump, if you like. If you've had a carby breakfast, some people feel that, others don't. And what's really interesting is that so one in four people eating an identical muffin of identical calories.

• 22:53Tim Spector?

  Will then overeat by this, you know, another 10% that day. So you can see how that just blows the calorie um idea out, that the calories in equals calories out. Everything's the same. And.

• 23:09Tim Spector?

  And the third thing is that ultra-processed food says it has the calories that's equal to the whole foods, but often they don't account for the fact that it's ground up, it's highly refined. And so if you take like almonds or something like this, they might use ground almonds. And you compare ground almonds to whole almonds, there's perhaps thirty percent less available calories in the whole almonds than there is in the other ones. So the whole thing is a complete nonsense and it's there because the food industry wants you to focus on the calorie, the fat content, sugar, so you don't have to think

• 23:49Tim Spector?

  about the quality of the food. And it's something that they can control very easily, get their profits higher, keep adding stuff to the product that's synthetic. When we know that a lot of things they're adding are harmful for our gut microbes, so that the artificial sweeteners are harmful, the glues, they stick the foods together, the emulsifiers, some people react quite a lot to those and they cause problems. So the whole thing is like this giant camouflage. And that's, that's really one thing I'm, you know, it might probably my number one bugbear is to get people to see the light, stop obsessing

• 24:29Tim Spector?

  about calories and start thinking about food much more as quality and what it does to your body.

• 24:37Steven Bartlett?

  Quality food. What is quality food in your definition of the phrase?

• 24:43Tim Spector?

  It's the opposite of ultra-processed food, which is whole food, which is made with, from the original ingredients of plants, mainly plant-based, but it's not exclusively, that contains all the nutrients that those, those plants produce, without it being stripped away, or boiled up, or highly pressurized, deformed. And so they have to add in back those nutrients. So, you know, it's things in their pure form. So it's, it's nuts, it's seeds, it's, it's grains that haven't been ground up superfinally. It's all the amazing plants and fruits and vegetables that we've got. They, they're healthy foods, but, you know.

• 25:29Tim Spector?

  It's it's not straightforward. Yes, I've got this list of ten superfoods. It's it's understanding that many foods that you know, are healthy for us, most of them are, in their in their original form. Berries, nuts, um virtually every vegetable

• 25:48Tim Spector?

  is healthy for us if it's in that original form. It's only because we've we had to learn to preserve things, we had to do trickery to make, you know, margarine and things with chemistry that we've moved away from that. But, you know, going back, you know, olive oil, for example, is is a great example of something that would be vilified often because it has lots of fats in it and you know, certainly, I was told, oh, the Medtrains, they have they have olive oil on everything. It's horrible. It's all fatty. Turns out that's that's a perfect, you know, it comes from the olive.

• 26:26Tim Spector?

  The good stuff, extra virgin olive oil, has very little done to it. And that is a a good, healthy, quality food. But it can be refined. You can take that and you can keep refining it. Um, you can take corn on a cob as an example, and then you, you know, and then you've got, I don't know, uh tortilla chips or something down the other end is which bears or cornflakes, which bears no resemblance to the original, and they're all versions on the spectrum.

• 26:58Steven Bartlett?

  God, it's so confusing, you know, because what you've said to me is, you know, based on research and studies, but then when I go to a supermarket labeling, even I was just thinking in cornflakes, I think I grew up thinking cornflakes were healthy because it says corn in the title. You know what I mean? And it's and when you're trying to navigate, I was just thinking, if I'm going down an aisle now, hearing what you've just said, that that quality food is food that is not ultra-processed and kind of resembles its original form. When you walk down the aisle in the supermarket, everything is trying to pretend that it's good. So how do I know what is good? I mean, I can go to the vegetable aisle and I can say, okay, that looks like a cabbage. It looks like no one's messed with that. There's been no study done on that. It hasn't been through a laboratory. But how do I, like, if I'm in an aisle tomorrow, how do I know what food is good and what is not?

• 27:42Tim Spector?

  Well, you've said the first thing, if it's not in a package, you're pretty sure it's good. Okay, so if it's concealed in some package that's got, you know, happy children and signals of vitamins in it, that should be a warning sign. You know, the more they have to advertise the food and say what its additives are and everything, the more you should be wary about it. The number of ingredients is another pretty good sign. So once you get over 10, particularly if there's lots you've never heard of, you wouldn't find in your kitchen, you should also be wary that that is ultra-processed food. Anything that says low calorie, that says, means they've had to add in lots of artificial sweeteners, or

• 28:26Tim Spector?

  protein extracts, or something else, is also a big danger sign. Low in fat means they've replaced the natural fat with something else that's cheaper. And these are all warning signs, you know. And, you know, you take breakfast cereals. I mean, I used to, I used to eat lots of breakfast cereals. I was brought up on them, highly sugary stuff. And then I thought I was being healthy when I moved to Moosley's and Posher, Posher stuff. But actually, when you still, you know, that appearance of healthiness, it's still got lots of additives in it. It's still got lots of sugar in it. It's just, and those cereal

• 29:11Tim Spector?

  packets have added vitamins in it, but they're often in a very poor form. I did the experiment once where I took some cornflakes or Special K, I can't remember, that says had added iron. And if you mix it up, you can put a magnet on it, you can get off the iron filings. They're so cheap that they're just added to tick a box saying it has iron, but they don't get into your body or do anything. So anything that's got These things added with this in it, low in this, is a sign that they're obscuring the quality of the product. So it's, you know, but there's a lot of brain, you know, we've been brainwashed for years and decades in this. And, you know, I was as well as a

• 29:56Tim Spector?

  doctor, you know, I should know better. And yet, I've completely changed my, two of my meals completely. So I've gone from having muesli with low fat milk and an orange juice and a cup of tea. Because I did, you know, I started doing these tests for Zoe, I found out that gave me a massive sugar spike. And it was a terrible way to start the day. And I got these dips at 11 o'clock, to a high full fat yogurt, nuts, seeds, a few berries. And I never have orange juice, that's on my, that's a really unhealthy drink

• 30:36Tim Spector?

  for everybody. And I have lots of black coffee, which I now know is good for me. So that's totally different. I changed my lunch for at least 10, 15 years. When I got in the hospital, I was having a hospital lunch, which used to be in the canteen, then it was Marks and Spencer's. Got a healthy looking sandwich with brown bread, sweet corn, and tuna, and a smoothie, in a little bottle. And that gave you a massive sugar spike. And I wouldn't have known that. And I was told that should have been a healthy thing to eat. So, you know, there's the general rules, but also there are specific rules.

• 31:21Tim Spector?

  And this whole idea of individuality is coming in. So it could be that you could, you might be fine on that. Don't know. I was very annoyed because when I started, we were starting doing this testing for Zoe, I had all these spare kits and I gave my wife one as well. And we sit down, and she's French Belgian and loves croissants. And so we'd have croissants each. Mine would shoot up. She had no change at all in her, her, her sugar, which was really annoying.

• 31:50Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Tim Spector?

  So, but it also brings, brings home the fact that, you know, Everyone loves simplistic rules, but you can only get so far with them. You have to start experimenting yourself and see what works for you and not just take everything for granted. And that's really the, that's the whole essence of really, you know, setting up this personalized nutrition, research and Zoe and everything else. But on top of this general advice about changing our idea of food, I think, because I think they do go hand in hand, that if you realize there are these individual differences, you realize it's not as simple as you've been told. It's not that fats are evil. It's

• 32:33Tim Spector?

  not that calories are bad, you know, it's, it's much more nuanced.

• 32:38Steven Bartlett?

  You mentioned breakfast there. I heard that you do some intermittent fasting, intermittent fasting. I think I pronounced that correctly.

• 32:45Tim Spector?

  Intermittent fasting.

• 32:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, we'll just use AI to swap that for my voice. What is intermittent? Let's just call it fasting, okay? Just for people at home that can't say it. Fasting has become a really popular thing over the last three or four years. A lot of my friends talk about it. Again, it's, it's almost feels like it's going into fad territory again. But what is the, what are the facts around fasting intermittently?

• 33:12Tim Spector?

  Okay, it's, I guess it's been quite a hot topic for about 10 years now, but it's intermittent fasting is an umbrella term for all kinds of different fasting. And you might remember the five two style of intermittent fasting was quite big about 10 years ago. And there were also these extended fasts often used in America, people doing two or three day fasts and detoxifying.

• 33:39Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, gosh, yeah.

• 33:40Tim Spector?

  That sort of stuff. So you've got to realize that you have to specify what time, what, what we're talking about. But I think the most interesting type of fasting now is what's called time restricted eating.

• 33:51Steven Bartlett?

  Time restricted eating, I can say that.

• 33:53Tim Spector?

  TRE. Okay, so the idea is you don't change what you eat, you just change how you eat and you change your eating window. So most people in, in the UK and US, they'll be eating for 14 or 16 hours a day.

• 34:09Steven Bartlett?

  It's me.

• 34:10Tim Spector?

  Right? Lots of snacks and extending late night and.

• 34:16Tim Spector?

  What time restricted eating is we're trying to reduce that to something like ten hours on average, okay, varies, there are some more extreme ones, some milder ones, but that seems to be about the sweet spot that most people can manage. Ten hours, which means you start eating at eleven and you finish at nine, for example, or you might want to go from eight in the morning until six at night, uh, seven, I can't do my maths. Um, now, there's actually science behind this now, so there's plenty of studies showing that not only in mice and rats, this helps their metabolism, their energy management,

• 34:54Tim Spector?

  but there's some evidence it helps with weight loss to a small extent, but it improves your inflammation levels and a lot of people report energy and mood improvements. We've just done a big study with the Zoe Health Study, which is the free app, where we had one hundred and thirty thousand people sign up to do this trial, if you like, where they would do this for two weeks, and amazingly, most people managed it, and we did see improvements in mood and energy, um, just in that two-week period. And actually, hunger went down weirdly, but a lot of this, we found, is people were actually snacking less. So, they weren't, we won't tell them to do less, you just, you can do whatever you like in that time,

• 35:39Tim Spector?

  but people were just paying more attention and not grabbing something to eat just before they went to bed. Now, the science behind it is really interesting, because your body needs time to recover, so your cells, we're programmed on this circadian rhythm that is very much in line with the sun from, you know, when we were all in East Africa, and it was, um, everything was quite programmed, so that our body is in this state of work during the day, we eat, do all our stuff, and then at night it recovers. As the stress hormones go down, then your repair stuff comes out, so cleans up all the muck in our cells. But we now know that it's the same happening in our guts. So if you rest your gut for

• 36:21Tim Spector?

  Fourteen hours, you give time for all the other microbes to come out and act as a repair team, like a cleaning force that hoover up all the mess you've left behind. They clean up nicely your gut wall, and so it's not leaky, get rid of inflammation. And this change, giving them this break, really seems to have these great benefits. So I'm, I was a real skeptic about, about this, and I did lots of fasting and things for experimenting with the books. But I think the last two years, I've really been convinced that this is something that, that does work and is right for some people. But importantly, it's

• 37:02Tim Spector?

  not right for everybody. And there is an individuality. You may be a snacker that finds it very hard to go long periods of time without eating. Okay, I do know we've got several people at Zoe who say, oh, this is terrible. But for me, I suddenly realized when I wake up in the morning, I'm not starving. It's not the first thing I, I think in my head. And it's very easy to wait till eleven o'clock to have something to eat. And it's not a big deprivation. It's something you could carry on the whole of your life, which I think is what we're, we're, we're into here. So I think there's a lot to be said for this, but I think people need to personalize it. Again, you know, people love a single,

• 37:44Tim Spector?

  single black and white solution to all their problems. But I'd say to everyone, try it. You may want to, you know, do, do a sort of American style, eating really early and finishing early. You might be that kind of person, who's a morning person, or you might be someone that prefers the social life of eating in the evening and skipping the morning.

• 38:06Steven Bartlett?

  It's gonna be, it's gonna be, take quite a lot of discipline for me to stop having chocolate at two AM. So could you just summarize again, time restricted eating, the, the key benefits of it are my microbiome will be healthier, gives my microbiome more time to clean up, which will have an impact potentially on weight loss and overall energy levels, et cetera, et cetera. Mood. Okay, cool. That's enough for me. I think that's a convincing enough reason. And I imagine there's also an impact on sleep there, because, you know, me having chocolate at two AM is probably not going to give, help me have quality sleep at night.

• 38:41Tim Spector?

  Absolutely, yes, no, I think there is a link. Uh, we're studying that, we don't have any results from that trial, but we are logging uh, sleep quality as well. Uh, but personally, I've, when I've started to do it, I do sleep better. I did start to get some reflux as well, so a lot of people suffer from um, heartburn.

• 39:01Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 39:01Tim Spector?

  And, and that's again, because you're eating and drinking alcohol quite late, then not leaving enough time to go to bed. That causes sort of stress on your body when it's supposed to be relaxing, so I think, yeah, everyone give that, you know, give that a try and, you know, it could be right for you. And it just makes you think, also, just thinking about more what you're eating, you know, to say, okay, let's give my body a rest, just like you would if you're doing an exercise regime, whatever, it's just thinking about eating in a different way, other than just fuel.

• 39:33Steven Bartlett?

  What about vitamins? You know, I've, I've got all these vitamins by my bedside, not by my bedside, by my, by my bathroom sink in my bedroom. Cause, you know, I went, I went to some market and the lady there told me that all these vitamins are important and then, I don't know, I might have seen an ad on Facebook or something and I ended up buying more vitamins and I've, I'm like a collector of vitamins.

• 39:54Tim Spector?

  You're not alone, I think fifty percent of the British population have a regular vitamin or supplement every day and it's massive industry.

• 40:04Steven Bartlett?

  I read chapter five of your book.

• 40:06Tim Spector?

  So I'm a bit rude about vitamins in there.

• 40:07Steven Bartlett?

  Please, please be.

• 40:09Tim Spector?

  So I, I know, and I, it's the thing that upsets people most. Um, people say, I don't, I believe everything else you say, but I don't believe your chapter on, on vitamins. And I, again, it's, it's a bit like a religion, you know, popping a pill and hoping that it's doing some good. All the evidence shows that when you do a randomized controlled trial, these vitamins don't work. Unless you've got some really weird disease or deficiency, or for some reason you can't eat a normal diet, but it's a last resort for people who have terrible diets. If you have a decent, varied diet with plenty of plants in it, uh, you don't need vitamins at all.

• 40:52Tim Spector?

  And I used to take them and I don't take any now, except the occasional B twelve. Because I um I've always been low in B twelve and I have hardly any meat. But apart from B twelve, all the evidence points to these things being a complete waste of money.

• 41:13Steven Bartlett?

  You're telling me all those vitamins I've swallowed over the last ten years have been a the result of me being duped by the vitamin industry and have no material impact on my health?

• 41:26Tim Spector?

  Yes, well, they might have had some harmful effects, like people taking calcium and things like this. Showing if you take regular calcium tablets, more likely to get heart disease.

• 41:35Steven Bartlett?

  You're joking, I've literally got a tub of calcium tablets by my by my kitchen sink as we speak.

• 41:40Tim Spector?

  Yeah, well, there's calcium in nearly every plant and things that we we normally break down, absorb in small amounts regularly. You take something like a calcium supplement, you might be taking half a gram of it. Our body isn't designed to break down that huge slab of chemical. And so it doesn't get distributed well. And studies show that it gets deposited in your arteries and and can harden them up. So there's there's no evidence that calcium helps people, doesn't help broken bones, it doesn't help osteoporosis, all the things that we were told it did do. So all the evidence was out there and you've got all these companies pushing it. So many of these things can be counterproductive.

• 42:25Tim Spector?

  But my main worry about them is if people think they can pop a pill, they don't have to think about proper food.

• 42:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 42:34Tim Spector?

  And therefore, everything comes in a bottle or a pill. They can go, you know, just have a junk food diet and be healthy. And that's so wrong because diet, I think, is the most, as I said, the most important food choice we make for our health. And to take stuff that doesn't work, that could be counterproductive and sometimes harmful, is is a daft delusion.

• 42:58Steven Bartlett?

  I have been under a daft delusion. I've got so many supplements upstairs.

• 43:03Tim Spector?

  They could have a placebo effect. You might feel better because you've taken them, you know, you say.

• 43:06Steven Bartlett?

  I feel like a healthy person because I take them. I don't know whether I am a healthy person, but I feel like one. When I do it, I do it. And it's really uncomfortable because I'm taking, sometimes I'm taking like eight different pills, like calcium and potassium and whatever else. And when I'm doing it, even though it's hard to swallow them and it tastes rancid, I feel like I'm doing future Steve a favor.

• 43:26Tim Spector?

  Yeah. Well, there you go.

• 43:27Steven Bartlett?

  But clearly I haven't.

• 43:28Tim Spector?

  Well, take, get someone to make you some dummy ones. So there's got nothing harmful in it and you can still feel good. But a lot cheaper.

• 43:34Steven Bartlett?

  I'll give that a shot. Um, what about sugar? So I, I was keto for the last, roughly the last two months. I tried the diet because I had a lot of good things about the ketogenic diet as it relates to inflammation. And I have to be honest, I lost about a stone in weight fairly quickly. First time I've really seen a huge dip in my weight. But also, not just that, my, the gut issues that I'd had seemed to, to, to go. So I, I'd almost lived for the last couple of years, specifically like after the age of 25, for some reason. Suddenly foods that I thought had gluten in them, like white breads and pastas, and even like soy sauce and things like that.

• 44:16Steven Bartlett?

  Were making me live in this permanent state of like being bloated and I'd go to the toilet and I didn't feel great. It was kind of this pain throughout the day, a couple of hours after eating one of those foods. And then I tried the ketogenic diet. So I cut out pretty much all of those things. Like I didn't have any bread. Most of the sort of processed bad carb, I don't even know what I'm talking about here. So correct me, but I cut out what I thought were the bad carbs that were having a bad reaction on me. And then I cut out a lot of sugar, like refined sugars, basically cut it completely out. And I ate meat, vegetables, berries and things like that. Felt fantastic.

• 44:49Steven Bartlett?

  Lost a stone in weight, very, very, very lean, body fat dropped completely, slept well, high energy. What's your view on the ketogenic diet?

• 44:58Tim Spector?

  Well, your story, I mean, you can take it two ways. One, you could say you really improved your diet because you had, it sounds like you had a pretty shitty diet before that, right?

• 45:05Steven Bartlett?

  Well, yeah.

• 45:06Tim Spector?

  So, you know, I mean, so anything could have been an improvement if someone says, if you're eating real foods, right? So.

• 45:12Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Tim Spector?

  Sounds like the keto, you weren't having keto out of a bottle or a plastic.

• 45:16Steven Bartlett?

  No, no, no, I was having meals.

• 45:17Tim Spector?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Steven Bartlett?

  I had some kind of a problem for me.

• 45:19Tim Spector?

  Proper, proper home-cooked meals rather than takeaways and.

• 45:23Steven Bartlett?

  Exactly.

• 45:23Tim Spector?

  So you're making the shift from perhaps, you know, the average UK diet, which is high in refined carbs, which is, you know, probably had a fair bit of ultra-processed foods in there as well, to this other diet. So I would expect you to feel better. To be a keto diet, you've got to get to about seventy percent fat, right?

• 45:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Tim Spector?

  Which is really, really hard for anyone to sustain. It's virtually impossible.

• 45:53Steven Bartlett?

  That's why I said for the last two months, I'm no longer on the keto diet.

• 45:57Tim Spector?

  So, you know, you've, you've gone, you're so, so you have probably done a mild keto diet.

• 46:02Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 46:03Tim Spector?

  That didn't put you into ketosis.

• 46:05Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 46:05Tim Spector?

  But got you off these high refined carbs.

• 46:08Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 46:08Tim Spector?

  So, but going back to the basic question, keto diets do seem to work for people with diabetes, who are overweight, as a way of getting them off their medications and sort of kick-starting them into a better health pattern. And there are some people I think it can work for. I think for, as a sustainable diet, I don't think it makes any sense. I don't think many people can still be on it a year later, if it's a true ketogenic diet. Because no studies have really shown that people can sustain eating that level of fat and protein and virtually no carbs.

• 46:48Steven Bartlett?

  That's all I ate for about eight weeks.

• 46:51Tim Spector?

  Yeah, but you were eating, you were eating plants as well.

• 46:53Steven Bartlett?

  So I'd have like some plants.

• 46:55Tim Spector?

  Wasn't just steak, was it?

• 46:57Steven Bartlett?

  It was, I mean, at one point it felt like that. It was, there were some plants in there. There was sort of like lettuce and broccolis and stuff like that. But I was Googling everything to check if it was keto-friendly before I put it in my mouth.

• 47:07Tim Spector?

  So, yeah, I mean, so I think what, interesting is if you, you went from that to a more mixed, healthy, gut-friendly diet. You know, which includes fermented foods, small amounts of breads, grains, et cetera. Um. I think you'd still find the same benefits because you're shifting from ultra, you know. Cause I would suspect that if you did the Zoe test, for example, um, you would have a quite a big reaction to sugars.

• 47:36Steven Bartlett?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:37Tim Spector?

  And your fat control would be quite good. So it sounds like you tolerate quite large amounts of fat without too much problem. Whereas the sugars would spike like me, you get um a reaction, you get hunger, you get, you know, these feelings of tiredness, et cetera. So just by upping your fat levels, lowering your refined carb levels, you might have produced the same without doing that extreme idea, because my problem with the keto diets is ultimately it's restrictive. You're reducing the number of foods you're thinking about, you're uh ultimately then harming your gut microbes long term. Because you're not giving them the variety of different plants if you're not careful. And that happens to a lot of people.

• 48:23Tim Spector?

  They go down any of these slightly fatty diets and they end up with a much more restrictive. Um, you know, intakes than they would have done, which long term will cause some problems for their immune health and long term health. So that's why I'm generally against these extreme diets of any kind, other than if you are, you know, seriously ill diabetic and you're overweight, it for three months, it could be a really good way to get you off your meds.

• 48:48Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. Yeah, because I'm trying to, I'm trying to find now. So I went from the keto diet to the New York diet. Basically, we went to New York for two weeks and I just, I really fucked up. Um. But now I'm back, I'm trying to find the nice middle ground, the sustainable middle ground. That word sustainability in my diet and also my fitness has been key to me. Um, because if I can't sustain it, there's no point doing it because you end up yo-yoing afterwards. So I went from the keto diet, as I said, to the New York diet. And now I'm back in the, in the UK. So.

• 49:17Tim Spector?

  Go on the gut friendly diet.

• 49:19Steven Bartlett?

  Which is, please detail the gut friendly diet.

• 49:22Tim Spector?

  Just, it's, you know, thirty different plants a week. Um, lots of fermented foods. That's your yogurts, your keffirs, your kombuchas. I don't know if you like kimchi, um kraut. Uh, miso, koji, Japanese food.

• 49:40Tim Spector?

  Eating the rainbow, so you've got plenty of colours on your plate. Everything's got, because that means they've, you've got plants there that have got these defence chemicals. And we haven't talked about these, but these are the polyphenols that are in plants that give them their bitter taste, but also the bright colours that you get in berries and you get in bright coloured lettuce and cabbages and they are rocket fuel for your gut microbes. So the more you've got of those, the healthier your gut, the more you dampen down inflammation. So really important, as well as diversity, lots of colour and lots of high polyphenol foods, things you wouldn't have thought are healthy. So dark chocolate. I know you like dark choc-, yeah, was it, well, I'm not sure. Is it milk chocolate you have?

• 50:23Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's milk chocolate.

• 50:24Tim Spector?

  Well, you need to change to dark chocolate.

• 50:26Steven Bartlett?

  My girlfriend says that she's obsessed with dark chocolate.

• 50:28Tim Spector?

  Well.

• 50:29Steven Bartlett?

  And she always tells me it's

• 50:30Tim Spector?

  Take her lead and slowly, slowly wean yourself off the milk and get on to real chocolate, okay, which actually tastes of something really good rather than sugar.

• 50:39Steven Bartlett?

  Isn't white chocolate the worst?

• 50:40Tim Spector?

  Yes.

• 50:41Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know how I know that? That's the only thing I know about food. Um, I went and did a chocolate making class. And at the start of the class, the instructor says, pour the sugar into, we had these big tubes, and she said, pour the sugar into the tube. So I'd like poured a bit in. She was like, no, no, no, no. Fill that tube with sixty percent sugar. I was like, what? She was like, fill the tube with, I was like, why? She goes, that's white chocolate, it's sixty percent sugar. So I pour this, this sugar into this tube and it fills it sixty percent. And then I put this little like oily liquid in and she goes, mix it. And she goes, that's white chocolate, sixty percent sugar. There's people right now that are sat there eating it. They'd realise that they're giving themselves early onset diabetes, but.

• 51:20Tim Spector?

  So dark chocolate is a good example. Coffee, we already mentioned. And if, do you like coffee?

• 51:24Steven Bartlett?

  I do. I, well, I don't. For me, coffee's more of a utility. I use it before I have these conversations, so I don't fall asleep because I'm very, you know, I've never been good.

• 51:33Tim Spector?

  You might have a boring guest.

• 51:35Steven Bartlett?

  Well, sometimes, but it's more so just to try and keep my mind sharp and to keep focus. But um, I, I've read chapter thirteen of your book about coffee. And I've always been a bit of a coffee skeptic because I tend to have a belief that everything in life comes with a cost. And no one I've sat here with has ever been able to tell me the cost of an artificial boost in my focus, attention, energy. I feel like nothing's for free in life, you know? So what is the cost of coffee?

• 52:00Tim Spector?

  Well, I think there's a variability. Some people, there is a big cost. They get the shakes, they can't sleep, and it has other neurotoxic effects if you have too much. So I think it's all about dose. And this is, it is a drug that if you get the dose right, is very beneficial for you. If you get it wrong, or you've got some genetic problem, you can't process it right, it's a real, it's a problem. But some of the benefits I was talking about are also there in decaffeinated coffee. So it also has these, because again, it's a great example

• 52:41Tim Spector?

  of how we always think of coffee as caffeine, right? And yet, if you do these epidemiology studies, you know, these big population ones, people who are having regular decaf coffee also have similar heart benefits. So it's other things in this fermented bean that are helping us. And I think this is just, you know, it's a great lesson, moving away from our reductionism. We always like to think of, you know, one food is one vitamin or one chemical, and that's an easy way to think about it. We can't comprehend they've got a thousand different ingredients. So decaf coffee, but yeah, well, you've got green

• 53:19Tim Spector?

  tea is also pretty good. You know, there's many other fermented foods, but polyphenols are really good and important to realize. In the book Food for Life, I go into exactly that. It's a practical guide to when you go into the supermarket, you go to the aisle. So gosh, I'm in the vegetable aisle. Do I get my usual iceberg lettuce? That 90% of us do, because it lasts for two weeks or, you know, longer than our prime ministers? Or do we go for a slightly more expensive loose leaf rossololo with purple leaves that has a thousand times more polyphenols? So you really shop on colour?

• 54:04Tim Spector?

  Yes, now I do. I had no idea about this until Dewey. But also, the fact it's loose leaved means that those, those plants have had to survive in more difficult conditions to fight off predators and wind and everything else. So they're tougher. That's why herbs and spices are also tough, because they're the growing tips of the plant. That's where you get all the good bits. And so it's a rethinking. All this idea about what's good about food in this, when you start thinking about your gut and you know, the sugars that it releases, et cetera. So for you, yeah, I mean, if I think as a general rule, if everybody ate to keep their gut microbes happy, they'd

• 54:47Tim Spector?

  be on a pretty healthy diet, even before you get into personalization.

• 54:53Steven Bartlett?

  Now, chapter thirteen of your book, we talked about coffee there, is called Coffee Can Save Your Life. You mean that quite literally, don't you?

• 55:03Tim Spector?

  Yes. As an epidemiologist, if you drink three cups of coffee a day, you are less likely to die 10 years later.

• 55:12Steven Bartlett?

  Jesus Christ. But there's also a link between coffee, depression and suicide, right?

• 55:18Tim Spector?

  Well, there are lots of links.

• 55:20Steven Bartlett?

  Because I was reading that in studies, people were less suicidal if they'd been drinking coffee.

• 55:27Tim Spector?

  I think that I'm sure there is a study on that. In general, what I, what I do when I look at these is I don't take any one study on its own. I would try to get, look at all the literature and say how many studies there are in that. And is there a confirmatory one that would make it real or not? So I've tried not to overclaim.

• 55:51Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 55:51Tim Spector?

  Because if you look at, you know, you look at the Daily Mail or, you know, the general press in the UK, they will pick up on any one story and say, coffee gives you cancer, coffee does this, coffee gives you dementia, next year, you know, it saves your life, it does this. So you can switch. But what I think people need to do is, you know, especially after COVID, has been much more selective about how they see a study. It's epidemiology, you know, that it has to have confirmatory data. So I think, yeah, coffee, we know it improves sports performance by 1%, right? So for most people, that doesn't really matter, right? You know, 1%, am I going to run faster on my treadmill at the

• 56:33Tim Spector?

  gym by 1%? No, but it does give you a little bit of focus. And for most people, it's, you know, it's a good drug that's found in food. And I like coffee because also it helps, it's allowed in a fast. So time restricted eating, you allow black coffee and black tea.

• 56:54Tim Spector?

  And it, because it doesn't cause a sugar spike or anything else, but it's, you have to cut out the sugar.

• 57:01Steven Bartlett?

  I feel like more and more people are becoming gluten intolerant. I consider myself one of them. I am a self diagnosed gluten intolerant. I read chapter sixteen of your book and you think most of that is made up.

• 57:15Tim Spector?

  Yes, most people who think they're gluten intolerant aren't when you test them.

• 57:21Tim Spector?

  Okay, so that's, that's the fact. It doesn't mean that everyone's making it up, that some of those will be real. But I think gluten got this bad rap about ten years ago and there's, we know that yes, one percent of the population really do have a gluten problem. It's called celiac disease and they'll be vomiting and have terrible diarrhea with the smallest bit of gluten. Then there's a whole other group of people that believe they have gluten intolerance, of which studies show about three quarters, when they're tested with gluten are fine. In a blind, blinded way, if someone slipped you a biscuit or something, you know, or pasta is often the way to trick people.

• 58:06Tim Spector?

  And I think many people have probably a more general irritable bowel syndrome that, that are blaming gluten because it's one, they're taking that one protein that they know about from foods that have thousands of them and saying, this is the problem. Again, this reductionism and then they cut everything out, but they might be cutting out things that were like the sandwich, for example, that was causing me glucose spikes. So they might feel better when they cut that out and they then say, okay, I've cut out bread, therefore I'm not getting sugar spikes and tiredness. That must have been the gluten, but actually it was nothing to do with that.

• 58:48Tim Spector?

  It's just cheap bread that has nothing to do with it. So I think often people are taking gluten as an excuse and sometimes they do feel better when they cut out all those foods because they're eating less processed foods as a result of it. Not always, but it's something else in the bread or the pasta that, that they were eating too much or they were eating too fast or these things that I think are important. So I would urge everyone to.

• 59:22Tim Spector?

  You know, look again at whether it is gluten or it is something else about their food habits before that was bad and reevaluate it and, you know, build up your plant diversity and your gut microbes instead. Because the worry is that all these people on gluten, most of them have a rather restrictive diet. They get very worried about new foods and that's like the worst scenario because you end up on a vicious circle where you get more and more nervous, so you have a smaller and smaller group of foods you're happy with.

• 59:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 59:53Tim Spector?

  Your microbes get diminished and you have much less flexibility to deal with any new food that hits you.

• 1:00:01Steven Bartlett?

  One of the, we've got a fitness group amongst some of my friends, there's about ten of us in it, and we've been tracking how often we work out and how frequently we work out and the workouts that we do. And one of the things I have to say is pretty much no one in the group has lost any weight. We've been doing this for a year. And that kind of bucks what you would think. So the only time that I lost weight was actually when I went on the keto keto diet. I went from fourteen stone eight to thirteen stone eight in roughly in several weeks. But exercise and exercising for almost religiously for the last two and a half years doesn't really seem to impact my weight at all in a, you know, in the way that the fitness experts might tell me on Instagram. What's your stance on the role that exercise plays in weight loss?

• 1:00:44Tim Spector?

  Has very little role in weight loss. All the studies, such long-term studies show it doesn't help weight loss. And it's been grossly exaggerated as an easy fix for our obesity problem.

• 1:00:59Steven Bartlett?

  Exercise doesn't help weight loss?

• 1:01:01Tim Spector?

  No. All the studies show that. The only caveat to that is if you have changed your diet, improved your diet, and you've lost some weight, maintaining some exercise does help prevent it going back up again. But as on its own, if you don't change your diet, it's of no use. And that's well known now by all the obesity experts and all the studies.

• 1:01:26Steven Bartlett?

  Does sugar make us fat? Is that the culprit? Is that one of the main things that's contributing to?

• 1:01:33Tim Spector?

  No, again, that's that's reductionism, you know, we the.

• 1:01:38Tim Spector?

  But the reason the reason exercise doesn't work is it's important to realise this is because we all know this, that, you know, you go for a walk, build up hunger before a meal, that's what your parents told you, you know. And everything about exercise is after it, your body slows down, your metabolism slows down. And it tries to regain the energy that you've lost. That's just what our evolution. And so that's why it's a you're not gonna, it's great for your health. I know I exercise. Fantastic for your mood, it's great for your heart, anti-cancer, all kinds of things, we should all do it.

• 1:02:18Tim Spector?

  But absolutely not if your goal is weight loss. You have to do something about changing your diet. And I think that's that's the big, a huge myth, particularly perpetuated by gyms and fitness apps and everything else. And it is complete nonsense.

• 1:02:34Steven Bartlett?

  I read that you, when you looked at studies over thirty years and you looked at how many studies had been done on the relationship of exercise and weight versus things like sugar and weight, there was twelve more, twelve times more studies done on the relationship of exercise and weight versus sugar and weight. And why, why is that? Why is there less research done on the latter?

• 1:02:58Tim Spector?

  I think that's the influence of governments and the food companies and the drink companies. So a lot of the exercise research done in the last twenty years was sponsored by large corporations who wanted to make this link between

• 1:03:19Tim Spector?

  exercise and weight loss, so that they could continue to sell sugary, ultra-processed foods and drinks. And just say it's, you know, childhood obesity is because we've, we don't have playgrounds and we don't encourage this. And that's why the Cokes and the Pepsis are always there at the Olympic, sponsoring Olympic events and associating themselves with sport. And they gave hundreds of millions to various physiology departments, sports.

• 1:03:51Tim Spector?

  Departments, nutrition departments, to do research in this area. Basically, it was really hard to get anyone to do research into how sugary drinks make you gain weight or cause problems. Because they, the amount of money for nutrition has been abysmally poor, you know, in, from, from governments. And that's why, you know, we, the only, the first ever study of ultra-processed food in a controlled trial was only about three years ago. And it's been around for, you know, thirty, forty years. So such is the power of that lobby, that it, it doesn't necessarily distort the research in a sort of, you know, evil way. But they point it to make sure that the researchers are working in an area that they want

• 1:04:37Tim Spector?

  people to work in and distracting them, keeping them away from talking about sugars or even artificial sweeteners, which in my view are nearly as bad, because they're sort of, you know, hidden.

• 1:04:49Tim Spector?

  And deflecting us from the idea that, yes, giving kids sugary drinks or even artificial sweet drinks is going to be bad for them and, and cause obesity.

• 1:04:59Steven Bartlett?

  Wait, so I'm, I've been, I've cut my, I cut out sugary drinks about a year ago. I still have the same brands, but I have the no sugar version.

• 1:05:09Tim Spector?

  Oh dear.

• 1:05:10Steven Bartlett?

  Oh shit, what do you mean, oh dear?

• 1:05:12Tim Spector?

  Well, all the, all the summary of the trials shows that if you take young adults, young adults and kids, and they were say on two cans of, you know, full sugar sodas and you change them to the diet version, there's no real difference in, in weight or metabolic

• 1:05:34Tim Spector?

  changes in their blood.

• 1:05:37Tim Spector?

  You will go to the dentist less, so you don't get as many fillings, but.

• 1:05:44Tim Spector?

  And yet, you know, you should be gaining three hundred calories, right? If you were doing two cans a day. So it doesn't work out as it should do. And that's because of the extra, these chemicals are not inert. So the sweeteners in kids, they change their, their brains to give them. They want more sweetness in their food. Okay, so it, it could reflect your wish for your, your late night milk chocolate. Who knows? Um, and it, it makes, it very difficult. Train kids to have more bitter foods or sour foods if they've got these artificial sweeteners in their diet all the time. But they've now shown that all these sweeteners actually affect your gut microbes.

• 1:06:25Tim Spector?

  So even stevia, you know, these sort of so-called healthy ones have an effect on your gut microbes. And they're not inert. So we know that saccharin and sucralose also cause spikes in your blood sugar. Uh, when I did it, you know, I have a trace. They're not supposed to, but they, they actually do things they're not supposed to. So we know very little about these, these products. And my view is that they are harmful, probably not as bad as having the sugar. But they are absolutely not a health drink. And we should be encouraging people to have, you know, teas and kombuchas and uh,

• 1:07:06Tim Spector?

  more bitter tasting, interesting flavors and foods than just this ultra sweet uh, chemical concoctions.

• 1:07:14Steven Bartlett?

  It's this sugar conglomerate that have been funding much of the research that points towards um, some of the things you're talking about there. There, that's also the conglomerate that wants us to believe the calories in, calories out approach. Because if I just view every, all foods as kind of equal and on this sort of calorie number, then I can drink some of the sugary fizzy, fizzy drinks and some of the processed foods. As long as I keep it within that sort of calorie deficit, I'll be fine. And so are they, is that sugar conglomerate, is the processed food conglomerate? For the calorie model.

• 1:07:47Tim Spector?

  Absolutely.

• 1:07:49Steven Bartlett?

  They need that, right?

• 1:07:49Tim Spector?

  They absolutely, it's vital, you know, zero calories or one calorie, you know, on the can, that's what you see. And, you know, you're fooling people into thinking this is a healthy drink. And, oh, you know, if I used to have full Coke or Pepsi and now I'm having the diet version, I'm getting three hundred calories less a day, I should lose weight. It's exactly what they've been doing. And they're also desperate to show that artificial sweeteners are really healthy and they come down on anyone who tries to say that they're, you know, could be in any way dangerous. And yet they're not obliged to test them. So none of the, none of the chemicals added really go through rigorous testing on how they affect

• 1:08:33Tim Spector?

  our gut microbes. And this is, this, you know, their testing mechanisms haven't changed in fifty years.

• 1:08:39Steven Bartlett?

  The gut microbiome, the microbiome as an organ, one of the things you talked about earlier was the impact it has on mood. And, you know, this podcast is, was started as kind of a business podcast. We have a lot of people that are interested in, you know, being more productive, being more successful, reaching for their goals. How significant and how pertinent is the microbiome on my performance as an entrepreneur, as a business person? What do I need to know about the relationship? As it relates to my mood, my performance, my mind?

• 1:09:08Tim Spector?

  Well, we know more about mood than, than anything else. And so we do know that depression, anxiety is intricately linked to the quality of your gut microbes. We know this from mouse studies where they've transplanted poo from anxious mice into sterile mice. And those new mice then become anxious and depressed.

• 1:09:35Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:09:36Tim Spector?

  So it's a transmissible condition. And if you go back to me telling you that one of the chemicals that our microbes produce is serotonin, okay, some sort of cuddle, you know, love, friendly, warm chemical that affects our brain, that, you know, is the key to dopamine and everything else that goes on in our head. So. The levels of that are really important for us having the right neurochemical balance in our head that stops us getting very depressed or very anxious. So we know that you can transmit it between animals.

• 1:10:12Steven Bartlett?

  So when they say they take the poo out of one mouse, they put it inside its gut, inside its stomach, to give it the same microbiome makeup inside its stomach?

• 1:10:21Tim Spector?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Steven Bartlett?

  And then that mouse will become depressed and anxious?

• 1:10:24Tim Spector?

  Yes. So a lot of the science behind microbiome is based on large-scale human studies where you've just got cross-sectional data, all this is associated with this, but you don't know if it's cause or effect.

• 1:10:35Steven Bartlett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:36Tim Spector?

  And so there's this whole other grid that's been going off of projects for thirty years where they have these sterile mice who have no microbes and you create in a lab these other microbes that you would make them anxious, or they're genetically anxious. You look at their microbes and you put, take their microbes and you put them into the sterile mice and you can change their mood and their attention span and everything else about them. So that that shows that these have a direct effect rather than just being secondary. And that links to the human data that shows if you take groups of depressed or anxious people, you, virtually all of them will have deranged microbiomes and be producing abnormal

• 1:11:21Tim Spector?

  chemicals. And there've been now some recent studies showing that compared to traditional antidepressant medication, probiotics do as well in many of these studies if you give a course of probiotic medication. But even more impressive is if you give them a Mediterranean gut-friendly diet. You get actually better results with more emission than you do with antidepressant medication. So it's one of the best examples of how.

• 1:11:55Tim Spector?

  You know, feeding your your gut can actually improve your mood. And particularly important because we're seeing, you know, an epidemic of anxiety and depression. That's partly because of not having many good gut microbes to start with. Lots of junk food diets which make it worse. And of course, once you go into that cycle, once you're depressed, you're not thinking about food. The last thing you want to go out and is, you know, oh, I've got to go and get my kimchi today. You know, you just what it's just fuel. So, once you, once you understand that, you realise if you want to help someone with depression, you know, the first thing is not to put them straight on to an antidepressant, which in many cases doesn't work because of this individuality as we're talking about,

• 1:12:39Tim Spector?

  which probably again relates to the microbes because they break down the tablet into its active chemicals. But is to make sure they've actually got gut-friendly diet. And so this is a really exciting area of research.

• 1:12:53Steven Bartlett?

  You mentioned attention, the impact that the microbiome can have on attention. That's really interesting to me because ADHD has become a very widely discussed topic. Do you think there's a link between ADHD and the microbiome?

• 1:13:12Tim Spector?

  Highly likely, yes. I mean, there's less data in it than there is in depression and anxiety. The studies are smaller, but those that I've seen all show again a, an abnormality in the gut microbiome of ADHD kids. And there've been a few studies showing that you can reverse it with poo transplants, which is another area that was quite big a few years ago. It's not showing the same potential as it, as it did, but certainly affecting attention and mood with gut microbes is definitely on the cards. These studies need to be bigger, but there's certainly preliminary evidence

• 1:13:57Tim Spector?

  that what's true for depression and anxiety is also true for this whole spectrum of other conditions. Also, you know, that have been linked in the past to diet and, you know, over sugar and E-numbers and all these kind of things. So. We've sort of known vaguely there's an association, but I think people haven't really pinpointed the gut microbiome, which I think they should. And so absolutely sure that if you improve the diet of many, many of these kids with ADHD, you, you would improve their symptoms. And I know there are some ongoing trials at the moment.

• 1:14:30Steven Bartlett?

  It's really been startling over the last couple of years, how mental health has really taken centre stage in conversations, even conversations on this podcast. Most of them, we discuss mental health issues and things like anxiety and depression. And as we look around the world, the stats around people that are being prescribed antidepressant pills, like they're called SSRIs, I believe, is rising. And I think it's doubled over the last decade or so, with the US kind of leading the way, and then other countries like China and Japan at the bottom of the pack. What's your overall view on these, these disorders, depression, mental health, anxiety? Do you think it stems predominantly from

• 1:15:12Steven Bartlett?

  the microbiome? Is that your perspective now from what you've learnt?

• 1:15:18Tim Spector?

  No, I think they're, they're multifactorial. So I think we can't, we can't just blame the gut microbiome, because you do get these conditions in people who are, you know, otherwise healthy. Genetics plays a role, you know, going back to my old, my old career. A lot of evidence of strong genetics in things like depression, anxiety. But you can have the tendency to it, but you need to be triggered into it. You need some environmental event. And it could be that once your gut microbes get in such a bad, your gut health is such a poor state, your diet is so bad, that triggers this and you just lack those chemicals that tip you over into it. So that's why I think.

• 1:16:04Tim Spector?

  If you if you link these epidemics which we're going through at the moment, whether it's dementia, you know, depression, obesity, diabetes, what are they all linked for? Increasing amounts of ultra-processed foods in our diet. You know, we're the number one country in Europe for this. Rates are still going up. Kids have over seventy percent of their food as ultra-processed now. Horrendous. Adults, it's nearly, you know, between fifty and sixty percent of our of our meals. So I think that's effect on the gut microbes probably just tips this threshold in people who are susceptible. So it could be that, I think that threshold is going to vary genetically. Some people are very resilient.

• 1:16:47Tim Spector?

  Some people are actually quite susceptible. And that's my that's my view of it. Which probably isn't popular because it's, again, I make things more complicated than people like. But, you know, I think as a as a scientist, I think most of these diseases are built up of a different number of risks. But unlike your genetics, you know, your gut health is something you can do something about. And that's what you're doing with Zoe? Exactly, that's the whole idea behind Zoe is to empower people to change their health by individualizing what they eat that suits their own metabolism.

• 1:17:31Tim Spector?

  What is Zoe if someone hasn't heard of Zoe before? Zoe is a personalized nutrition company that I founded nearly six years ago with two of my co-founders who came to one of my talks, I was talking about the diet myth and the microbiome. And they came up to me and said, you know, we think what you're doing is really exciting. We'd we'd love to talk about getting a company together to personalize this. And. I I do get people asking me to do startup companies and I said, uh, I'm not really interested unless we can spend several million on doing research first, you know, I'm not interested in the usual lifestyle company based on marketing.

• 1:18:14Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:18:15Tim Spector?

  And I thought I'd never see them again, but they came back two weeks later and said, yes, we've got several million, we're up, we're up and running. So I was, I was stuck then, I couldn't say no. Um, and basically that we got together this massive study called the predict study, which uh, looked at a thousand people, mainly twins, gave them these identical meals, gave them these really fancy tech glucose monitors, um, we'd measuring blood spots with with fat, looking at their microbes, logging foods, seeing how they got on for two weeks and use that data as algorithms to then predict how they would, people respond to any food. And then we met developed a home test and launched that initially in the, in the U S

• 1:18:59Tim Spector?

  and uh, in the last uh, year, the U K. And we've now got fifty thousand people doing this identical home test, which is now a program that they then, once you've got your scores personalized to you, you can look up any food and it gives you a score from naught to a hundred on what that, uh, how that food is for you, based on your sugar, your glucose, blood sugar profile, your fat profile and your microbiome. So it's pushing everyone to have less sugar peaks, less fat peaks and better gut health. And so it's changed, you know, so in a way that's, my muesli would give me a terrible score, uh, my orange juice would, you know, a score of zero.

• 1:19:44Tim Spector?

  Um, but it's also made subtle changes. So, you know, I used to eat bananas and now they, they scored badly. So now I have pears instead or apples. Um, little minor shifts often pushing people and then you, and you have a virtual nutritionist who helps you plan your menus to get overall scores that are pushing you more and more in this healthy direction. So you just start to understand how, what's best for your body and in a sustainable way. And we don't talk about calories. It's like a taboo word and we're not after crash dieting or anything else. It's like improving yourself from the inside out. So you, and most people.

• 1:20:27Tim Spector?

  Get improved, dramatic improvements in their energy levels, which we hadn't even thought about was the reason, but people started telling us, I feel much better because maybe we're cutting out all these fat and sugar peaks that until the technology came along, no one knew about that were causing these problems. So it's going super well. We've got still a quarter of a million people waiting for the product in the UK on the waiting list. And what's really nice is because we've got this, this commercial arm, it allows us to do these other, um, we have the Zoe Health Study, which is a free app, which, um, uh, now we're sort of moving that towards lifestyle, like this, these fasting aids and

• 1:21:10Tim Spector?

  things like this. We've got a neat podcast, the Zoe Nutrition Podcast, which is getting the word out about our science, plus blogs and things. So, you know, it's part of a whole package of things that we're doing to sort of educate people differently. And as I said, make people think about food in a very different way. And I think it's super exciting because we're, you know, we've just raised some more money. We've done some crowdfunding as well, which has gone amazingly well.

• 1:21:40Steven Bartlett?

  I saw it this morning. It's a big valuation for a company.

• 1:21:43Tim Spector?

  Yes, it is. Um, and you know, I think.

• 1:21:47Steven Bartlett?

  Two hundred million? That's a big number.

• 1:21:50Tim Spector?

  It is. And it, but you know, I think we've just got people's attention exactly the right time.

• 1:21:58Steven Bartlett?

  I agree.

• 1:21:59Tim Spector?

  And the technology has just been exactly right. So often it's about timing.

• 1:22:02Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I agree. I mean, I've heard, as I said to you before we start recording, I've had two of my guests come here and tell me about Zoe individually. So I think it was Davina McCall and Gabby Logan, who both mentioned it. And then I had this email in my inbox, um, from a friend of mine who connected me to George. And then I started reading about some of the work that you'd done and saw some of your videos. And that's why I was compelled to reach out and have you on this podcast. But the idea of personalized health kind of debunks the longstanding narrative and myth that there's this one perfect diet for all of us. There's this one set of foods that we should all be eating to be healthy. And this personalized approach makes a lot more sense. Um, so I think that's the kind of the moment in time that you've arrived perfectly in from a Zoe perspective is this

• 1:22:45Steven Bartlett?

  awakening to the perspective that personalized individual diets are, um.

• 1:22:51Steven Bartlett?

  The way forward?

• 1:22:52Tim Spector?

  Yeah, and yeah, and of course, Covid didn't, you know, Covid was an amazing time for apps.

• 1:22:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:58Tim Spector?

  And people wanting to take um control when they feel they had no control. So I think the idea that you give people an app and they suddenly are empowered to do things is a very new idea, particularly in the UK. People said, no one over sixty is ever going to do that. They told us it's going to fail. And it was an incredible success because if you give people that interaction, that feeling that they are talking to someone and they're getting information back and it's a two-way process. It's a completely different idea to the old way of communicating with people. So I think it is a super exciting time for for science. And, you know, we've just scratched the surface of what we can do with this personalization.

• 1:23:40Tim Spector?

  Because once we get to a million people, you know, the less of detail we can provide back about whether you should be eating in the mornings and the evening, you know, how hungry does this make this food make you feel, you know? How do you stop, you individually, stop getting those sugar dips? How um what combination of food should you have, you know? How do you react to protein? Or, you know, what do you do to best sleep well? All these things which people want to know are going to be possible once we get the these huge numbers.

• 1:24:12Steven Bartlett?

  This is all quite, you know, it's all, we turn on the, I'm going to have this conversation with you, then I'm going to turn on the TV or go on the internet or go on Instagram. And all of the the influences there are going to be telling me a bunch of stuff, a bunch of fatty diets, because they've all got their own incentives and their own ways of making money. If there was like one principle I could take away from all of your work, which I know is almost an impossible task to do. But if there was one thing ju- just to focus on as I try and navigate the bombardment of social media and advertising posts that I'm I'm going to be um on the receiving end of as I leave this conversation, what would that kind of guiding principle be for me not to forget?

• 1:24:53Tim Spector?

  Pick changes that are going to last for life, not as a quick fix. I think that's, that's what we're after and that's what we want to try and instill is this sustainable, healthy way of eating.

• 1:25:06Steven Bartlett?

  So that means not, not feeling like I'm not depriving myself and.

• 1:25:09Tim Spector?

  No.

• 1:25:10Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:25:11Tim Spector?

  I think absolutely the, the, the philosophy we have at Zoe is that nothing is off the table. There's no, nothing's banned.

• 1:25:19Steven Bartlett?

  White chocolate?

• 1:25:20Tim Spector?

  Even white chocolate, you can be the Milky Bar kid, you know, you can, you can have it. Uh, but realise that, you know, it's that rare treat.

• 1:25:29Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:25:29Tim Spector?

  And the more you just, and so it doesn't break everything and you have to, you know, start again, uh, it, it's about making sure that the rest of your week is full of good foods that give you a high score that can make up for it. So we all gonna, you know, you know, the Christmas season, everyone goes crazy and overeats and stuff. As long as, you know, you've got this long-term plan that your gut is healthy and you're working and you're overall these, you're not going to get these peaks over time for years. That's the, that's the goal. So absolutely, it's about enjoying food, realising that it's incredibly important social event. It's why the Mediterranean countries probably do so much better because it's so much part

• 1:26:14Tim Spector?

  of family life and social life in even in the elderly, whether it's with a glass of wine, it's just taking more time, enjoying the novelty of foods and increasing our range of foods. So it's really broadening it. So I really want everyone to really love food again and, and not have all these hangups about I can't have that, I can't have this. If you've got enough plants on your plate, face it, you know, you can eat anything.

• 1:26:37Steven Bartlett?

  Tim, thank you. I feel like that's a good place to end and I'm really going to go upstairs and reconsider that vitamin stack that I have and also, um, throw out all those zero calorie, sugar-free drinks that I thought were good for me. Um, you've given me a lot to think about and I'm incredibly honoured to have met you at this time in my life because as I said, it's very relevant to me, but also to have been given the chance to read your books. You've got so many amazing books, five of them in total, I believe. You're working on a new one. Um, my favourite was these two. So the, the spoon fed book and also your most recent book, which is Food for Life, which is basically like a. Glossary of food, is that an accurate statement? It goes through all the key main foods and talks about the role they play in our health?

• 1:27:20Tim Spector?

  Yes, I mean, it's been called a food bible or a sort of a it's a practical guide to pretty much all the common foods. So you can get what the latest science is telling you about them all from a ethical, health and environmental perspective.

• 1:27:37Steven Bartlett?

  We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're asking it for. So the question that's been left for you is, you seem nervous.

• 1:27:51Tim Spector?

  Yeah, I'm very nervous.

• 1:27:52Steven Bartlett?

  Why do people get nervous? People always seem to get nervous when I ask this question versus all of my questions.

• 1:27:57Tim Spector?

  Ask me any science question, I don't mind.

• 1:27:59Steven Bartlett?

  Well, it's, you know, the question that's been left for you is, if you could say one thing

• 1:28:09Steven Bartlett?

  to a family member you've lost, who would it be? What would you say and why?

• 1:28:20Tim Spector?

  Well, it's got to be to my dad.

• 1:28:28Tim Spector?

  I guess I'd, I'd probably say, I'm really sad we never got to talk properly.

• 1:28:38Tim Spector?

  And I think you'd be proud of me now. And because, as I've explained, he died when I was 21. It's just the time you're sort of coming out of studentship, you're becoming more mature, the time you could start to talk to your parents, but you don't. So I feel that's my missing part of my life, if you like, that I never got to discuss.

• 1:29:05Tim Spector?

  Anything meaningful with my father.

• 1:29:09Steven Bartlett?

  Why was that? I have that problem too now. Have that problem where I struggle to talk to my, my father.

• 1:29:20Tim Spector?

  Um, I don't know, I, I think i- i- in hindsight, it's, it's, it's a much easier thing to say, I should have done this.

• 1:29:28Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's what I'm scared about.

• 1:29:29Tim Spector?

  And, and I think it could be that it's built into us that, you know, we have a very different relationship to our, with our, our fathers. That makes it hard to, to actually talk to them at the same level, or, you know, not feel some sort of competition or critique. Um, so I, I, I think you're absolutely right, that if I was sat down here with my father, um, it would be quite different to wishing I had done, uh, all those years ago. And I think it's part of that grieving process, probably. That having lost someone, you always feel somehow responsible that you should have done something before.

• 1:30:10Tim Spector?

  Um, I think that's, that's part of it. And many people have recurrent dreams also about, um, cause my father, you know, I never saw him, he just, I was just told he's dead. Came back from holiday, that was it, go to the funeral. And it was a slight, I'm unreal. Um, series of events for me. And so for years I used to have these dreams, he'd so, you know, he'd been in South America and suddenly appeared again. Oh, so I had to disappear and I've come back. So that was an interesting, um, idea going on my brain that in some ways he, he wasn't really dead and, um, you know, I'd get a chance to talk to him again. So it must have been,

• 1:30:51Tim Spector?

  you know, a key part in the, the, those subconscious bits of my brain.

• 1:30:58Steven Bartlett?

  That communication goes both ways though, doesn't it? Because they have to also be.

• 1:31:05Tim Spector?

  Yeah, in retrospect, he, you know, he was very much a, you know, a nineteen sixties dad.

• 1:31:14Tim Spector?

  Uh, that, you know, um, who wasn't really supposed to deal with children or anything else. His, he went to work and stayed in his study and, cause he wasn't sporty, he never did anything with, with me. So absolutely, yeah. It's, um, but as I think you've talked about before on this podcast, you know, children have a very different perception of that relationship. They feel it's, um, uh, it's their fault in a way.

• 1:31:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:42Tim Spector?

  But, uh, yeah, he would, he was not a, by modern standards, he wouldn't have been seen as a great dad.

• 1:31:54Steven Bartlett?

  Tim, thank you. What a wonderful conversation. Really, really appreciate your time and thank you for coming and sharing your wisdom with me. Absolute pleasure.