The scientist has spent years studying how gut health relates not just to nutrition, but to all aspects of our everyday wellbeing. He explains why it really is what’s inside that counts
Tim Spector’s kitchen fridge is swarming with life: kefir grains, sourdough mother, homemade kimchi and kombucha. Then there’s the vegetables: as varied and colourful as possible.
The event that prompted this change was suffering a mini stroke at the top of a mountain in his early 50s, after an energetic day of skiing in the Alps. “I went from being a sporty, fitter than average middle-aged man, to a pill-popping, depressed stroke victim with high blood pressure,” he recalls. It was a wake-up call that prompted him to reassess everything he thought he knew about healthy eating, including much of what he’d learned at medical school.
The discovery, in 2014, that the composition of the microbes in people’s guts could influence their body weight, provided Spector’s first “Aha!” moment. But the blinkers really fell off when he and his colleagues measured twins’ and non-twins’ responses to identical meals, and discovered that they could vary hugely between individuals, influenced by both the microbiome and genetics.
“We don’t know exactly how, but the state of your gut microbes will influence your blood sugar peaks, as well as how you digest fats and how quickly those fats are cleared by the body. Indirectly, both of those will lead to inflammation.” So, how do we eat for our microbiomes? In Spector’s view, this comes back to consuming a diverse and predominantly plant-based diet, which is free from highly processed foods. “These are foods that you recognise, and could make yourself from your kitchen ingredients,” says Spector. “It’s plants that are rich in defence chemicals called polyphenols – generally ones with strong tastes and colours, slight bitterness, thick skins – basically the opposite of an iceberg lettuce.
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