Dr. Tim Spector: The Truth About Diet, Gut Health, and Why Calories Fail | Health & Wellness | E410

**Tim Spector** (0:00)
Calorie counting just doesn't work. We've been brainwashed for the last 40 years into thinking that calories were the thing. When you look at the actual data of all the studies done, 80 or 90 percent have returned to their baseline weight, and then they tend to overshoot.

**Hala Taha** (0:15)
Dr. Tim Spector is the founder of the UK's largest twin study and the co-founder of ZOE, a personalized nutrition company. This episode deep dives on how gut microbiome determines our individual response to food and by shifting focus from calorie counting to food quality, is the real key to long-term health.

**Tim Spector** (0:33)
Seventy to 80 percent of people believe that if they see high protein in a product, it's healthy. Only 10 percent of people need more protein, whereas 95 percent of people need more fiber.

**Hala Taha** (0:44)
If something is labeled organic, is that something that we should take seriously or is that just hype?

**Tim Spector** (0:51)
The certification of organic in the US is pretty poor, and you might end up paying twice as much for something that says organic. There are lots of exceptions, but food companies deliberately make food softer and faster to eat. They want you to absorb it without noticing in front of the TV. We all know that feeling where it's a big bag of Doritos or Pringles or whatever it is, they've got exactly that formula.

**Hala Taha** (1:16)
We're reading the back of a package and looking at the ingredients, what are some red flags to show? Okay, this is ultra processed.

**Tim Spector** (1:22)
If you had to look at one thing on that, even if it says low fat on the front, that's a pretty good red flag because.

**Hala Taha** (1:30)
Tim, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

**Tim Spector** (1:32)
Great to be here.

**Hala Taha** (1:33)
I am very excited for this interview. I can't wait to learn all about gut health and the types of foods we should be eating. When I was studying you, one of the things that I found really interesting is that you've done an extensive amount of studies on twins. You actually started something called Twins UK.
Based on that, you realize that genetics aren't the major factor when it comes to what we eat and how it impacts us, and that different foods can actually impact people with the same genetics differently, which I just thought was so mind-blowing. Can you explain to us some of the studies and research that you've uncovered via twins that helped you understand how food really impacts our bodies?

**Tim Spector** (2:15)
It's taken me 30 years to get to this point. So it wasn't overnight, and I was very keen geneticist, thinking that everything was genetic, and so a big proponent of that, and it took really one experiment to change my mind, which was looking at identical twins who were raised together and really lived together until they were in their 20s, and looking at their gut microbes, and seeing that when you looked in detail and you sequenced their gut microbes, the species they had were really very different. They only shared a small fraction of all those species and even less of the subspecies, and that was the first time in about 20-odd years that I'd seen anything really different in identical twins. Generally, they matched because they either had the same environment or they have the same genes.
There wasn't this rather randomness of finding these microbes, so for me, that was a big turning point in my career as a researcher and got me moving away from genetics, which I thought was the magic bullet for everything, into this new field. This is about 15 years ago of the microbiome and gut health because for me, it was perhaps this missing link between what we've misunderstood about food, thinking that everyone who eats the same food reacts the same way and suddenly you realize, well, if identical twins have different microbes, then they in a way react with food differently, that could explain why they die of different conditions, why one gets ill, the other one doesn't, etc. So that really fascinated me is this extra bit of individuality we've all got, that you can see clearly in these identical twins, that's quite difficult to see in the general population.

**Hala Taha** (4:13)
I don't think our listeners truly understand what microbiome means. Like this is a really trendy word that we're hearing. I just had Naveen Jain on the show and he was talking about gut health and microbiome. I'm curious to understand, what is the job of the microbiome? What does it actually do? I know it transforms simple food into more complex food, and I don't think people quite understand what is the job of a microbiome.