How to feed the 50 gut bacteria that shrink body fat, calm inflammation and cut cholesterol | Prof Nicola Segata & Prof Sarah Berry

Jonathan Wolf (0:00)

Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.

Inside your body, there is an entire civilization. It tells a story that's millions of years older than humanity itself. Trillions of microscopic organisms inhabit your gut like a vast unseen city, working in darkness, negotiating, competing, surviving. They decide how efficiently you pull energy from food, how your immune system reacts to threats, and how close your body drifts towards health or disease. For a long time, this hidden world has remained largely out of reach. But now, in arguably the biggest breakthrough in microbiome science for a decade, ZOE's scientists and collaborators have finally brought this hidden ecosystem into tight focus and unraveled the secret of what makes a gut microbiome healthy. They identified a stark divide. Certain microbes consistently appear in healthier bodies, while others are linked to obesity, inflammation, and cardiometabolic risk. The gut, it turns out, holds a mirror to health, a biological fingerprint written in bacteria. However, the good news is that this record is not permanent. Unlike your genetic code, your microbiome is not set in stone. You can be the author of your own microbial story. The gut microbiome is responsive. It shifts with diet, environment, and daily habits. When conditions change, some species flourish. Others fade. And over time, the balance of this internal ecosystem can move gradually in one direction or another. This research has just been published in Nature, the world's most influential scientific journal. And I'm delighted to have two of the senior authors with me today. Professor Nicola Segata from the University of Trento and Professor Sarah Berry, ZOE's Chief Scientist and Professor of Nutrition at King's College London. After listening to this episode, you'll know how to improve this dizzyingly complex civilisation within your gut and help add extra healthy years to your life.

Nicola, thank you so much for joining me again today.

Nicola Segata (2:20)

Thank you, Jonathan. It's great to be here.

Jonathan Wolf (2:22)

And Sarah, thank you also.

Sarah Berry (2:23)

Pleasure. I'm really excited to be here with Nicola.

Jonathan Wolf (2:26)

And that also means you're a bit experts on this. So you know I'm going to hit you with a rapid fire Q&A. Are you ready to go?

Nicola Segata (2:33)

Yep.

Jonathan Wolf (2:34)

Nicola, is there really a link between the species of bacteria in our guts and our long-term health?

Nicola Segata (2:41)

Absolutely. Yes.

Jonathan Wolf (2:42)

If our gut contains lots of bad microbes, are we stuck with them?

Nicola Segata (2:48)

No, we can change it.

Jonathan Wolf (2:50)

Sarah, if we change the food that we eat, can we increase the number of good gut bugs?

Sarah Berry (2:56)

Absolutely. Yes.

Jonathan Wolf (2:57)

Will taking a fiber supplement guarantee a diverse gut microbiome?

Nicola Segata (3:02)

No.

Jonathan Wolf (3:03)

Nicola, what's the most exciting thing that you discovered in this groundbreaking new research?

Nicola Segata (3:09)

I think it's exciting that now we have the panel of the top 50, the best bacteria we may want to have in our gut.

Jonathan Wolf (3:16)

I'm thrilled to discuss today what I think is the biggest breakthrough in microbiome science for a decade. So Nature, like the world's most influential scientific journal, recently published a science paper by ZOE scientists. And the two of you are lead authors on this paper, which established this sort of first reliable, repeatable way to measure the health of an individual's gut microbiome. And I'm excited because it's sort of like the culmination of more than eight years of work at ZOE. And it's also only been possible thanks to more than 34,000 ZOE members who took part in this research. And I think many of those members will be listening today, in which case I'd like to say thank you to all of you for being part of this. And I suspect Nicola and Sarah feel the same.

Nicola Segata (3:59)

Thank you so much.

Jonathan Wolf (4:00)

So today, I'm really excited to share how a listener can use this groundbreaking research to improve their gut health and therefore their overall health and sort of show the link between something that can seem very abstract, right? Some sort of complicated science paper and something that's really actionable. Before we get into sort of what's uncovered in the paper, Nicola, why is publishing in Nature like such a big deal if you're a scientist?

Nicola Segata (4:27)

Well, Nature is the most respected, the most read scientific journal in the world. So everyone wants to publish that because your research will then be amplified to all the audience of scientists, but also non-scientists. And also it's very difficult because you have a very strict policy of your work being reviewed. It's called a peer-reviewing process. And so there were five, in our case, reviewers that really scrutinized our work from the first world to the last number in the supplement. And so it means that it's also recognized that our work was extremely valuable and high-impact.