Moment 145: The Alarming Link Between Your GUT & Depression: Tim Spector

In this week’s moment, gut health and diet expert Dr Tim Spector discusses the power of the microbiome, your crucial community of gut microbes. Discoveries about the microbiome have exploded in the last 10 years and revolutionised the way we see the tiny bugs living within our intestine. Tim sees the microbiome as an incredible pharmacy within us, as individual microbes pump out vital chemicals for your immune system. These chemicals also affect brain function and your moods, playing a vital role in depression, as this is directly linked to the quality of your gut microbes. How do you improve your microbiome? Food plays a vital role in feeding microbes, Tim says the key is to consume as diverse a range of plants as possible, aiming for 30 different types of plants a week to maximise the diversity of species in your gut. Listen To The Full Episode Here - https://g2ul0.app.link/zvl4zqtbtGb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Tim Spector: https://www.instagram.com/tim.spector/?hl=en-gb https://tim-spector.co.uk 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.

• 0:03Tim Spector?

  What is the microbiome? 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 are tiny, putting them together, they actually, you know,

• 0:48Tim Spector?

  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, 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. We, most people don't know that. We think it's, you know, under our armpits or somewhere. But actually, all the immune cells are actually talking all the time

• 1:32Tim Spector?

  to our gut microbes through these chemicals. And that 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.

• 1:59Tim Spector?

  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, 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 than we have done in the past.

• 2:42Tim Spector?

  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 for 10 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 30 years that's really different about identical twins. And that explains why one gets cancer, the other one doesn't.

• 3:24Tim Spector?

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

• 3:42Steven 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.

• 3:58Tim Spector?

  Well, I think most people believe that probiotics in yogurt get killed by your stomach acid.

• 4:06Tim Spector?

  So they don't work because you're, everything gets killed off. That's a common one I hear. But they don't. 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 US and the UK. In the UK, twenty four percent have a parasite.

• 4:53Tim Spector?

  And that parasite is actually beneficial. It's called Blaster cystis 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 realize 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.

• 5:39Tim 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?

• 6:10Steven Bartlett?

  How do I become more like that tribe?

• 6:12Tim Spector?

  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 get up to thirty different types of plant a week, you maximize 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

• 6:55Tim Spector?

  that diversity, it's having more fermented foods, it's, uh, having a range of colors, it's cutting out, um, 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.

• 7:20Steven Bartlett?

  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, 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?

• 7:47Tim Spector?

  Well, we know more about mood than, than anything else. Um, 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, uh, poo from anxious mice into sterile mice, and those new mice then become anxious and depressed.

• 8:14Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 8:15Tim Spector?

  So it's a transmissible condition. And if, if you go back to me telling you that one of the chemicals that our microbes produce is serotonin, okay, some sort of sort of cuddle, you know, love, friendly, warm, um, 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.

• 8:51Steven 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?

• 9:00Tim Spector?

  Yeah.

• 9:00Steven Bartlett?

  And then that mouse will become depressed and anxious?

• 9:03Tim 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, or this is associated with this, but you don't know if it's cause or effect.

• 9:14Steven Bartlett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:15Tim 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 a groups of depressed or anxious people, you, virtually all of them will have deranged microbiomes and be producing abnormal

• 10:00Tim 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.

• 10:34Tim Spector?

  You know, feeding 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 then, 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 onto an antidepressant, which in many cases doesn't work because of this individuality, as we're talking about,

• 11:18Tim Spector?

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