3 gut bacteria that protect your heart–and what to feed them | Prof. Tim Spector & Prof Nicola Segata

**Jonathan Wolff** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
Deep inside your large intestine exists another world teeming with life. Trillions of bacteria crawling around your gut form the complex ecosystem known as your gut microbiome. And just like in the world where you and I live, some inhabitants help their environment while others harm it. Some gut bacteria support the immune system, create anti-inflammatory compounds and help maintain the gut lining. Others meanwhile, are more like invasive species, disrupting their ecosystem with nasty chemicals. If these disruptive bugs grow too numerous, they can significantly increase our risk of getting the most serious conditions, like heart disease and diabetes. So, is it possible to understand how our ecosystem is balanced? So we can start to tip the balance in our favor and stop these diseases before they start? Today, we reveal groundbreaking new research that dramatically advances our understanding of what bugs live in our gut. This research, a collaboration between the University of Trento and ZOE and recently published in the science journal Nature, has taken us much further to map out this hidden world, identify more of the bugs helping us and more of those that are causing us harm, so we can better nurture our microbiome with the right foods and improve our health. In today's episode, we're joined by Professor Nicola Segata, co-author of ZOE's new study. His lab uses world-leading technology to map and analyze the trillions of microbes living inside us. He's joined by another pioneer in microbiome research, Professor Tim Spector. Tim is one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists, professor of epidemiology at King's College London and my scientific co-founder at ZOE. Nicola, thank you so much for being here.

**Nicola Segata** (2:08)
Thank you. It's a pleasure.

**Jonathan Wolff** (2:09)
And Tim, thank you also.

**Tim Spector** (2:11)
Looking forward to it.

**Jonathan Wolff** (2:12)
So Nicola, we have a tradition here at ZOE where we always start with a quick fire round of questions from our listeners. We have very strict rules. You can say yes or no or a one-sentence answer if you absolutely have to. Are you willing to give it a go?

**Nicola Segata** (2:27)
Let's try. Good.

**Jonathan Wolff** (2:28)
All right. Are diseases like heart disease and diabetes on the rise?

**Nicola Segata** (2:34)
Yes, they are.

**Jonathan Wolff** (2:35)
Could some gut bacteria protect us from these diseases?

**Nicola Segata** (2:40)
Yes, some protect us. Some actually can actually be against us on this.

**Tim Spector** (2:45)
Yes.

**Jonathan Wolff** (2:46)
And could the wrong balance of gut bacteria push us towards disease?

**Nicola Segata** (2:50)
Yes, absolutely. It's not only about single bacteria, but the community of them.

**Jonathan Wolff** (2:55)
And Tim, can we change our gut microbiome composition in a matter of weeks?

**Tim Spector** (3:01)
Absolutely.

**Jonathan Wolff** (3:03)
Can scientists now link individual bacteria to your likelihood of getting sick?

**Tim Spector** (3:08)
We can now, yes.

**Jonathan Wolff** (3:11)
And lastly, what's the most common misconception about our gut health?

**Tim Spector** (3:16)
It's probably that we think it's so complicated, we can never really understand it properly. And our research, certainly over the last year, has really changed that so that we can now really define what a healthy gut and an unhealthy gut looks like, and we can start to tease out the key players there, like never before. It's really exciting.

**Jonathan Wolff** (3:40)
It's amazing, and I'm very excited to have you both here. Now, just before the show, our team did some research, and apparently around the world, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and other cardiometabolic diseases are now the number one cause of illness and death. Now, your new research reveals that gut bacteria may play a big part in our level of risk for these diseases. Now, there's nothing we like more than to discuss new science on this show, but it's even more exciting this week because these breakthroughs are actually a result of ZOE members who listen to this podcast, and who have actually contributed to this research themselves. So I'd like to dive in, but maybe just to set the scene, Tim, what are these cardiometabolic diseases, and why are we seeing cases climb?

**Tim Spector** (4:26)
Well, it's a group of disease that we used to think of as really being separate. So things like heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, central obesity, and resulting metabolic problems from them. We now know that there's a common causality, there's pathways that are all causing increased risk of all of these diseases together, that are coming from an interaction between microbes and the immune system and producing inflammation, upsetting the way we handle glucose, upsetting the way we handle fats. And it's all coming together that these things interact in a way we weren't aware of just a few years ago. So it means that just by changing something as simple as our gut microbiome, we can actually impact all of these diseases and reduce our risk of all of them by interfering in a way with these pathways and reducing inflammation and impacting our immune system.