The 9 best foods to beat the winter blues, end brain fog and stop anxiety | Prof Tim Spector

Jonathan Wolf (0:02)

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

You wake up to a blaring alarm. Your brain isn't ready to face the day. Your thoughts are slow, your concentration is scattered, and even simple decisions feel hard. Your brain is the seat of your emotions, your decisions and memories. It's the most complex biological structure in the known universe. Historically, we thought of brain and body as separate worlds. Brain health belongs to psychiatry. Nutrition might influence our body, but surely not our mind. But that morning alarm clock should make clear that this separation makes no sense. If one early alarm can cause your brain to struggle, imagine what years of inflammation, quietly working away in the background, can do to your brain. Together, we are going to explore how the gut microbiome affects our brain. With Professor Tim Spector, one of the world's leading experts in nutrition and the microbiome, a professor of epidemiology at King's College London, and my scientific co-founder at ZOE. His recent research has focused on how the gut microbiome shapes the level of inflammation in our body, and as a result, our brain health. This is culminated in his new book, Good Mood Food.

Together, we'll get under the skin of the gut-brain connection, unpack simple principles for better brain health, and discover nine foods that you should be adding to your shopping basket each week to help boost your mood and protect your long-term brain health.

Can what you eat increase your risk of dementia? Yes. Could you prevent everyday brain fog by changing what you eat?

Tim Spector (1:50)

Yes.

Jonathan Wolf (1:52)

Can a diet that includes lots of ultra-processed food harm your mental health?

Tim Spector (1:57)

Definitely.

Jonathan Wolf (1:59)

Can poor gut health make you feel tired all the time?

Tim Spector (2:02)

It can do.

Jonathan Wolf (2:04)

To eat for better mood, do you need a lot of expensive ingredients?

Tim Spector (2:08)

No.

Jonathan Wolf (2:09)

Is eating for brain health complicated?

Tim Spector (2:12)

No, once you know the principles.

Jonathan Wolf (2:15)

Finally, while writing your new book, what was the most important thing that you learned?

Tim Spector (2:20)

It was how important the link between our guts and our brains are.

Jonathan Wolf (2:28)

Most people listening will have at some point worried about their brain, whether it's worrying about their memory fading in some way, feeling we aren't quite as sharp as we once were when we were 20, or just feeling low or anxious. I've spoken a number of times on the show about my personal experience with my grandmother getting Alzheimer's, and just how profoundly that affected, not just her, but my dad and the whole family.

I think it's really easy to feel helpless in those moments, like there's very little we can do. I was definitely brought up to believe the brain is completely separate from the rest of the body. It was basically just genetic lottery. Were you lucky enough to have good genes or not? I think it's amazing to hear from you that this isn't really true.

A new book, Good Mood Food, it's really all about this idea that the brain isn't completely separate. There are secrets, things that you can do that can actually improve your brain health. I think it's fascinating, it's very practical. Today, I think we're going to discuss, firstly, your principles for better brain health, and then we're going to get really practical, right, Tim? You're going to give us nine foods to focus on for our weekly shop. Why did you get interested in brain health yourself, and why do you decide to go through all this hard work to write a book about food and mood?

Tim Spector (3:52)

I think the thing that immediately prompted me was looking, as a scientist, at the ZOE studies we were doing when we were improving people's gut health. We've done a number of randomized control trials, the first being what we called the method study, where people followed the ZOE diet, as opposed to a US. FDA approved diet. And people that followed that diet got lots of bodily benefits. But the first things we saw improve were mood, energy, and hunger. All within a couple of weeks, those improved in the majority of people. And I thought to myself, well, they're all brain effects. That's a bit odd. And then, we did these other studies, the study of the pre-Bartic, Daily30, against a pro-Bartic and against a dummy placebo. We saw the same results. Then we did a big study of fermented foods, where 6,000 people were asked to take some fermented foods, and we saw the same results. So, it doesn't seem to matter how you improve your gut health. The first signs of that seem to be brain effects, which a few years ago we would have said was impossible. This is just purely placebo, but we know it's not because we've got control arms. So, that made me think, what's going on between the gut microbes and the brain that can have this really big effect in such a short time? I've heard about the gut-brain axis, didn't think there was that much to it, but now I'm convinced there isn't. The more I've read about it, the clearer it gets. As you said, we used to view the brain as basically being in charge of everything, giving out the orders, and the body was just a redundant thing that followed the orders. It's completely the other way around. Basically, the brain is there to just assimilate all the signals from our body and give an appropriate response.