Why You’re Tired, Anxious & Inflamed I Dr Tim Spector

Tim Spector (0:00)

A major discovery in gut science.

Michael Gervais (0:02)

Gut health guru, Professor Tim Spector.

Tim Spector (0:04)

If you don't have a healthy gut, you're highly likely to have a whole host of diseases like type 2 diabetes, a heart disease, dementia, depression, stroke, cancers, and accelerated aging. There's virtually nothing that isn't touched by having poor gut health.

Michael Gervais (0:19)

What if one of the biggest nutrition mistakes we're making isn't what we eat, but what we're missing?

Tim Spector (0:23)

We've really discovered a new organ in our bodies, the gut microbiome. There are 100 trillion of these microbes. They're like chemical factories. And to produce all these chemicals that are really good for our immune system, metabolism and our brain, you need them to be fed properly.

Michael Gervais (0:36)

I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais.

Tim Spector (0:38)

A high-performance psychologist named Michael Gervais.

Michael Gervais (0:41)

Who Pete Carroll brought in to work with the Seahawks. Famous for his work with Felix Baumgartner when he jumped out of space in the Stratos project.

SPEAKER_3 (0:49)

Olympic athletes depend on something more than just training and talent. They have to stay mentally tough.

Michael Gervais (0:55)

Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. The idea behind these conversations is simple. It's to sit with the extraordinaries and to learn. To really learn how they work from the inside out. Today's conversation is with Dr. Tim Spector, one of the world's leading experts on the gut microbiome and its powerful connection to health, nutrition and even mental well-being.

Tim Spector (1:17)

The state of your gut plays a huge role in your mental state. They've done randomized trials of probiotics and gut-friendly diets that improve people with mild to moderate depression more than antidepressants.

Michael Gervais (1:29)

We unpack why calories are a poor guide to health, how ultra-processed foods disrupt hunger and metabolism, and why diversity, not restriction, is one of the most important principles for eating well.

Tim Spector (1:41)

The big misconception that was out there that's still around is the obsession with a calorie. That if all you have to do to lose weight, exercise a bit more and eat less calories. But 95% of people failed miserably, but there was of course a multi-billion dollar diet industry totally based on that as well. It's what you eat is important, not purely the calories.

Michael Gervais (2:03)

Tim challenges the idea that most of us are protein deficient. He argues instead that we've been sold a narrative that conveniently benefits food and supplement companies.

Tim Spector (2:12)

The food companies have 60 or 70 different names for sugar that they're allowed to put in there to fool you. It's a war out there, a consumer against the food companies. At the moment, they're winning.

Michael Gervais (2:22)

What we're actually facing, he explains, is a widespread and serious deficiency in something most of us barely think about, but our gut microbes depend on to keep us healthy.

Tim Spector (2:31)

The average American probably has twice as much protein as they need, but we also know that 95 percent of Americans are deficient.

Michael Gervais (2:39)

With that, let's jump into this week's conversation with Dr. Tim Spector. Tim, I've been looking forward to this conversation for a handful of reasons. One, the gut brain access is really important to me. And I found that unlocking that connection is really important to vibrance and vitality and performance as well, let alone longevity and whatnot. So there's so many things I want to talk to you about, but first, thank you for making the trip and thank you for being here. I know it's a long haul.

Tim Spector (3:16)

It's a pleasure.

Michael Gervais (3:17)

Yeah, it's really great. So before we get to microbiome and the gut health that you are absolutely at the tip of the arrow about, can you explain first why you got interested in gut health?

Tim Spector (3:30)

Yeah, I first came across gut health in about 2009 because I'd been doing genetics for about 20 years and I'd been going to genetic conferences and I'd begin to get a bit disillusioned with genetics was going to solve all our problems, which we thought in about 2000 That's what Bill Clinton told us, so we believed it. And I went to this meeting and there was this guy called Marty Blazer talking about these bugs that caused you to have ulcers. And when you got rid of these bugs with antibiotics, you caused other problems. And this whole suggestion that with a whole series of microbes in there that could actually be doing you some good. As a doctor, you know, being beaten into us that every bug was a bad bug. No such thing as a good bug. They just get in the way of proper tests. We used to call them commensals. They used to ruin any analysis. And it was a mindset that was completely different. So that sort of blew me away. And then I decided to research that as part of the twin study that I'd been running. So I set up in 1993 one of the world's biggest twin studies of 15,000 twins that we were following for our range of common conditions and traits, mental and physical. It took a few years to arrange that because no one was doing these tests back then, gut tests. And after a couple of years, we eventually got the money, worked with a group in Cornell, got the results and found that the microbiome was different in identical twins and that was wow. And check the results, however many we did, same findings. So even in identical twins who are clones, live their life together, the species were only about 25% similar, 75% were different compared to you and I would be, you know, unrelated people, about 20%. So it was mainly in a random environmental thing. And that rang a little bell in my head and said, that could be really fascinating, could be the reason why one twin gets a disease like cancer or rheumatoid arthritis, and another one doesn't. You know, why one gets depressed, one doesn't. Remember these, you know, absolutely these are like laboratory animals, they're genetically identical, go to this, have the same mother, the school, food, everything, but something's different about them to cause disease. So I thought this could be the missing link of why, you know, genetics isn't everything and why, you know, we've been able to explain this randomness of disease to an extent.