Can a traditional African diet help protect against inflammation? | Quirijn de Mast & Tim Spector

**Jonathan Wolff** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
The case against the western way of eating is stacking up. Heavy and saturated fats and refined carbohydrates has been linked to heart disease, stroke and other chronic diseases. We hear a lot about potentially healthy alternatives, like the Mediterranean or Japanese diets. But today, we're talking about another diet that you probably haven't heard of, but seems to have some astonishing and fast-acting health benefits. The traditional African diet, rich in fibre, grains, fermented food and plants. This diet has never been properly studied or understood until now. Today, we're joined by one of the scientists behind a groundbreaking study that has just been published in Nature just a few weeks ago, exploring the traditional African diet. Dr. Quirijn de Mast is an infectious disease specialist at Radval University Medical Centre in the Netherlands. And by the end of today's episode, we'll have a better understanding of how the traditional African diet improves our immune system, our metabolism and our gut microbiome. And some simple tips on food swaps that you can make right now as a result. Quirijn, thank you for joining me today.

**Quirijn de Mast** (1:25)
Thank you. Lovely to be here.

**Jonathan Wolff** (1:28)
And Tim, thank you for joining me as well.

**Tim Spector** (1:29)
Likewise.

**Jonathan Wolff** (1:31)
So, Quirijn, we always start the show here with a rapid-fire Q&A with questions that come from our listeners. But we have some very strict rules, very hard for scientists. You're allowed to say yes or no or a one-sentence answer if you absolutely have to. You're willing to give it a go?

**Quirijn de Mast** (1:49)
I'm ready.

**Jonathan Wolff** (1:50)
Can a traditional African diet really transform your health?

**Tim Spector** (1:55)
Yes.

**Jonathan Wolff** (1:56)
Do you need to wait months before getting the benefits of an African diet?

**Quirijn de Mast** (2:01)
No, certainly not.

**Jonathan Wolff** (2:03)
Tim, is the Western diet harming people?

**Tim Spector** (2:07)
Sadly, yes.

**Jonathan Wolff** (2:08)
Is a traditional African diet healthier than the Mediterranean diet?

**Tim Spector** (2:13)
Not necessarily.

**Jonathan Wolff** (2:15)
All right. Quirijn, for a Western listener, what's the most exciting thing about an African diet?

**Quirijn de Mast** (2:22)
I think what excited us the most as researchers was the clear effects, the immune effects of a traditional fermented beverage that we used in the study.

**Jonathan Wolff** (2:33)
Everyone has their Achilles heel when it comes to sort of tempting treats. And Quirijn was telling me that he was raiding the breakfast buffet of the hotel he was in last night. And it's funny because for me, it's like fresh bread, it's chocolate, and actually it's that ultimate combination where they put the fresh bread and the chocolate together and they make a panneau chocolat or chocolate croissant depending where you are. And all of those are sort of key foods in the Western diet. And that diet in general features a lot of process. Meat, high sugar drinks, and refined grains. But I'm very excited to be talking about a completely different diet today and to be speaking with a scientist behind the very first significant clinical trial of the Sub-Saharan African diet published in the world leading journal Nature just a few weeks ago. But just before we dive into it, actually, I thought maybe, Tim, you could just summarize, what's the problem with the Western diet?

**Tim Spector** (3:28)
The Western diet, also known as the SAD diet or the Standard American diet, is basically responsible for millions of deaths a year through the chronic diseases that it's causing. So obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancers, autoimmune disease, mental health problems, you name it. This has been linked to our poor diets. So anything we can learn from other populations about how to manipulate or change our diets, looking at other examples, is really important for our health. And it's increasingly true that it's not just about the fats, it's not just about the calories. It's about something else in the food that is upsetting our immune systems and our bodies and our gut microbes in ways that in the past we haven't really thought about. So think about new mechanisms about how other diets might be beneficial is really absolutely vital for us moving forward to really redesign the way we eat and think about food.

**Jonathan Wolff** (4:32)
I really asked about this Mediterranean diet versus African diet because I think we hear about the Mediterranean diet often as the answer. Tim, why is that?

**Tim Spector** (4:42)
That's probably because we've got most data worldwide that comes from our study of the Mediterranean diets. Since the 1950s, we've been really looking at that as the model of why there was this big difference between North and South Europe in terms of heart disease. That's how it all started. And American researchers like Ansel Keys did these big epidemiology studies following populations that were eating lots of dairy and fatty foods, but with large amounts of legumes and vegetables, fresh fish, et cetera, and plenty of olive oil, and found they had a third of the rate of heart disease of the average American. And so it was this idea that we should be somehow mimicking what they were eating in Southern Europe, in Greece, in Italy, in Southern Spain. And if we could recreate that in Northern Europe and North America, then we would actually dramatically help improve our health. So that idea has been with us for over 50 years now, although it's been very difficult to define the Mediterranean diet. And if you go to the Mediterranean now, you'll see pizzas and pasta. And that isn't what they originally thought of as the Mediterranean diet. So this is the problem. And that's been exported. There's pizza places everywhere in the world now. It doesn't mean that's now the healthy diet. Places like Italy are getting increasingly obese and having problems as well. So, it's trying to define what are the key elements in these diets that are helpful, rather than just saying, oh well, just eat like the Italians or the Spanish and you'll be fine.