LIVE Q&A: Your gut health, dementia and weight loss questions answered by Prof Tim Spector, Prof Sarah Berry & Dr Federica Amati

**Jonathan** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
The room hums with anticipation. Conversations fade. Stage lights glow against a packed audience as hundreds of people settle into their seats. Some have traveled for hours. Others have brought notebooks full of questions. All of them have come for the same reason, to get answers. For the first time ever, our ZOE Science and Nutrition podcast left the studio behind for a live recording. We brought together a live audience of ZOE investors and gave them the opportunity to ask their biggest questions about food, health, and the latest science directly to the experts that they know so well.
Professor Tim Spector, Professor Sarah Berry, and Dr. Federica Amati all joined me on stage. For the first time, this episode isn't shaped by a script, a producer, or even a guest. It's shaped by the burning questions that people brought with them.
The questions range from the deeply practical to some of the biggest debates in nutrition. How quickly can changing your diet improve your gut microbiome? Does eating 30 plants a week really make a difference? Are oats healthy? Is snacking helping or harming us? What should you do after a course of antibiotics? And how should we think about weight loss drugs, dementia prevention, and the many nutrition claims competing for our attention every day?
I was terrified before doing this, but actually it ended up being a lot of fun. A conversation between experts and audience, spontaneous, insightful, and sometimes surprising. With no retakes and no shortage of curiosity, this special episode captures the excitement of a landmark first for the podcast, our very first live Q&A.
Welcome everybody to what is a bit of a milestone for the podcast. This is the first time we have ever done a live podcast recording. This is also the first time we've ever had all three of our ZOE spokespeople together in one show. So we're about to discover whether or not we should have done this ages ago or this is like a disaster and too many opinions all in one room. So I know you're all really excited about the audience Q&A and ready to go. But I thought before we could kick it off, I was going to ask each of you just one question. Starting with you, Tim. What does ZOE mean to you?

**Prof Tim Spector** (2:55)
Is this a yes or no? No, no.

**Jonathan** (2:58)
You're even allowed more than a sentence, Tim.

**Prof Tim Spector** (3:00)
Well, ZOE means life in Greek. And it certainly changed my life from when I first met you nine years ago now. And it changed me from a dull academic to a dull entrepreneur.
And a scientist. But it's really allowed me to do what I was doing on a very small scale, talking about gut microbe, but just talking to small rooms of academics, small amounts of people, reading my work to really bring those messages to hundreds of thousands and millions of people in a way that wouldn't have been possible before. And as it's grown and the company has evolved, we're seeing this as a very long-term mission. It's very hard at the beginning of it to see anything long-term, because you say, are we going to survive a year?
Will I strangle Jonathan after the first few meetings? Because when academics and business people clash, then often there are fireworks. But we got through that honeymoon period, and we can now see this really important future. And I see this really important role for myself now, through the media stuff I'm doing, and the stuff we're doing for ZOE. It's all coming together as a real mission to change the way we all think about food and the importance of food, and give us extended healthy life. And that all brings it back to the mission of ZOE. So it's really now very close to my heart. And that's for me what ZOE means. It's bring the science to so many more people that couldn't have had it before.

**Jonathan** (4:47)
That's really lovely. Sarah?

**Prof Sarah Berry** (4:49)
I would say for me it's about putting science into action. So I've been like Tim, an academic scientist for over 25 years. I've run more than 30 randomized controlled trials. And yes, I'd spent years doing these studies, years applying for the funding, years recruiting people, years analyzing the samples, years writing it up, getting it into a manuscript.
Did it make a difference? Well, I'm sure none of you have ever read any of those manuscripts. So I think what's really exciting is that we rarely as academics ever have the opportunity to communicate our research at the scale that we've been able to through the podcast, but also put into action research findings in the way that we do at ZOE from the own research that we do at ZOE in these hundreds of thousands of people at the scale, depth, breadth and precision that we could never ever do in an academic setting, but also to be able to have all of the incredible resources that we have at ZOE that turn scientific information, scientific findings into actionable advice that actually really makes a difference. And I've had the most exciting eight and a half years of my life. It's just been so fun. I don't consider it work, my ZOE journey. I get up and I'm just so excited because the opportunities that we have, it's just so fun as a scientist.