EPI 242: FIBER - Why It's The Most Underrated Piece Of Nutrition. Different Types + Other Foods For Gut Health. Plus What The Largest UK Twin Study Revealed. With Tim Spector

Welcome back to another episode of the Peak Performance Life podcast. Today, I am very excited to have a very special guest on the line with us. His name is Tim Spector. He is the professor of epidemiology at Kings College in London, UK, and scientific co-founder at Zoey. And so he's actually been a director of the Twins UK study, which I'm sure we're going to touch on here today. Just absolutely fascinating. He's one of the world's most cited scientists. And he's also the author of the bestselling books, Spoonfed, The Diet Myth, Food for Life and Ferment. And the Twins study, it followed thousands of twins for decades, unearthing fascinating insights into how genes influence health and just as importantly when they don't. So his work demonstrated that while the genes of identical twins are of course identical, their metabolic responses to food, which we're going to discuss here today, can still vary significantly. In other words, lifestyle factors like diet and exercise must play important roles. And this new understanding inspired him to cast a wider net and eventually leading him to the gut microbiome and nutrition, which is what we are going to dive deep into today. Tim, thank you so much for joining us here today. It's a pleasure looking forward to it. Yeah, looking forward to it as well. Why don't we start with maybe a little bit of the background of how you got to the work you're doing today and a little bit about the twin studies? Yeah, well, it's a long story. I'll try and make it shorter, but I started life as a medical doctor and practiced as a rheumatologist, a board certified rheumatologist and took some time out to do a thesis on epidemiology of female sex hormones and arthritis. Got into epidemiology, done a masters in it. And after a few years of just doing rheumatology, got a bit bored and said, I want to really focus a bit more on the research. So I started twins, this big group of collecting group of twins in the UK, which was the biggest in the UK. And we eventually got 15,000 twins together and really studying nature and nurture. This is back in the early 1990s. And that was great fun. I taught myself genetics and then, you know, molecular genetics, finding genes for things and then I got into epigenetics. Then I was more interested in why identical twins ended up being different, you know, which is always been a bit of a mystery. Why are clones that live their life first 18 years together? Why do they end up with different diseases? And in that quest, ended up discovering in about 2011, the microbiome, which no one had heard of then, which these gut microbes in our colom that have this huge effects on our body. And I tested it in 350 twins and it turned out that even identical twins had very different microbes. So that was the main scientific shift. And so from that time on, I saw something when it clicked in my head and said, wow, if identical twins have different microbes and microbes are key, you know, we were learning that they could be really key to our health. Maybe they're the missing link about why twins get different diseases because we've never accounted for the microbes before. We've always assumed that if people eat the same diets, the same results happen. We never thought of anything really different apart from genes. So in identical twins, you take out the whole gene element. And so that to me was a real wake up call that this could be one of the most exciting areas in science. And I should ditch all my previous work on genetics and, you know, finding thousands of genes for common diseases and focus on this. And by focusing on this, I also had to learn about nutrition from scratch. And I did that by writing a book on it, which is always, you know, an easy way to go ahead and come into it. So that's sort of where I am. And really that academic story was going quite nicely until about 2017. And then two guys came to one of my talks. I was giving a book talk and they were entrepreneurs and they said, do you want to start a company looking at personalizing nutrition? And that's where the company Zoe was born. And that really led to me, you know, expanding my research from with big studies of hundreds or thousands of participants to where we are now with a third of a million people taking part in research and really trying to make a big difference globally. And so, yeah, it's super exciting. That's amazing. That's amazing. I can't wait to get into what you're learning from this huge data size, sampled size that you have here that very few people have. It's very fascinating. And I love just to kind of touch on what you said. I love the fact that genes are not your destiny and that's kind of proven through the twin study that different lifestyle habits, different ways of eating, even if you have identical genes, one person can turn out one way and the other person can turn out another way. So I think there's a lot of people who think, oh, this runs in my family or that runs in my family and maybe it creates a belief system, which could then be created placebo effect and all sorts of anyway, I don't want to get too far down the rabbit hole, but it's a very interesting topic to me. Very fascinating. But I just love the fact that for our listeners to know genes are not your destiny. You regardless of your genes, you can have a different outcome than someone else who had your same genes and that's what this twin study proved. So absolutely love that. Yeah. You're, you know, I used to think like most people that that, you know, that wasn't the case and your genes were your destiny. So I've, I've turned 180 degrees on that one. And so, yeah, it's as the science changes, you know, you need to change your opinions and I think twins have been a really good example of that because I think even the general public, you don't know much about science can really visualize that, that twin model. You know, they can look the same, have the same habits, you know, the same smile, the same laugh, but what's going on inside can be very different. And that's why one will get depression, one will get cancer, the other one won't. And I think it's the fact that the microbes were the only thing that, you know, in 30 years studying, I found really different in twins. I think is, is pretty remarkable and it's not by chance, you know, and it just shows us that we've evolved with these creatures inside our, our guts for a reason. And it's to give us this individuality, this personalized approach that perhaps was a protective mechanism against us all being wiped out by the same thing or the same virus or whatever it was. And, but it has meant that we're perhaps more individual than we've been led to believe and that certainly means there isn't one diet that fits all or one supplement that fits all or one regime of anything. And I think that's been borne out by more and more science now. Yes, yes. And that's one thing in the beginning, you know, when I first started this podcast, I basically had healed myself from eliminating a lot of inflammatory foods and kind of following a paleo style diet where it was kind of low inflammation type of diet, not saying it was a ton of red meat or anything like that, but just kind of eliminating all the bread and pasta and things that were causing a lot of inflammation for me before it completely changed my life. And so in the beginning, I was like, everyone needs to, everyone should go paleo and but over a couple hundred episodes of this podcast now, it's become clear to me that it's not a one size fits all and that, you know, I've seen people where going vegan completely destroyed their health and we've had guests on here that are vegan and there are in incredible health, right? So it's very interesting and I completely agree. There is no one size fits all, but going into I'm really curious to hear some stories about either the twin studies or some of the data sets that you have going on now about what was a big difference? Like let's say there was a couple of twins and one of them ate a certain way and another one ate a different way and what were the outcomes? Do you have any stories related to that? Well, I've got plenty of anecdotal stories, but scientists don't tend to believe them because they're highly selective. People's recall is distorted over time. So the best evidence comes from a real trial we did, which was the first Zoe study called the predict one study where we took a thousand volunteers relatively healthy, most of them middle aged, most of them twins because at the time I thought genes were going to be crucial in this experiment, which was to see what happens when you give a thousand people an identical meal and you follow them for 24, 48 hours and you work out what happens to them over that time using a huge range of blood parameters and gut parameters, etc. Because everyone had said, well, if you have exactly this amount of fat, this amount of sugar, this amount of protein, we can predict exactly what happens. And what we know is that there was a tenfold difference in how people responded in terms of their sugar and their fat levels. So that was for me a big wow moment because obviously we had 600 twins in there and even when we looked at the twins, we saw the same difference. It was slightly less than tenfold, but it was still significantly different and that was a really tight experiment all done under hospital conditions so that they couldn't cheat or pretend or anything else. And we were using blood parameters so there was no placebo effects or anything else. So a tenfold difference in how maybe you or I will react to the same, you know, English muffin or something is pretty amazing really because that then translates to many other things that we never thought about. So you and I are eating the same amount of calories in that muffin and, you know, afterwards I might get a big sugar spike. You don't. Two hours later, I might get a sugar dip after that spike, which one in four men do and one in three women do. And I'm going to be hungrier by lunchtime than you are. And so I'm going to overeat my lunch and over the 24 hours. I'm going to overeat by about three or 400 calories. On top of that, it may be that you reacted to the fat in that muffin more than me so that your body doesn't clear the triglycerides from your blood vessels, which is, you know, one of the main transport fats that go up when you eat. So three hours later, it's still hanging around. You know, three to six hours later, it's still there. It should have been cleared, but because it's there, it's going to have an effect on inflammation and that's going to really be sending signals to the rest of your body that it's not happy. It's not healthy. And I'm not getting that same signal, for example. So that's how these, all these foods and these choice of foods can have a really big impact. And so when you gave up bread, for example, that could have had a big effect on you, but my not on a friend of yours. And so that, that's how we really got into this whole area of personalization. And that really was the basis of, you know, forming the company Zoe that realized that we had these consistent results and all we need to do was then predict how people would respond based on a serious or fairly simple other tests. And we can now actually predict how you respond based on your gut microbes, which is even cooler. So we'd, we used to use glucose monitors, you know, the CGMs, which I'm sure you've talked about on your pod, but the, they're, you know, not, they're high tech, they're fun, but you know, they're not really some of you want to have every day of your life, get a bit obsessed with it. Some people don't like the blood and the jabbing things. And so we can now just from a stool sample, say, do you have the sort of microbes that are going to give you a sugar spike or not? And that's only possible because we've now got vast numbers. We've got 300,000 people's results from doing it. So it just shows you how you can go from a small experiment extended out. And in this model, which we call a sort of citizen science model, because obviously to be part of Zoe, you've got to buy the kits, the test kit yourself, but you're also signing up to share the data and be happy for it to be published, et cetera. And I think this is this really beautiful model we've created that works really well in the US and the UK that, you know, hopefully we can soon get to a million people and then there's all kinds of other discoveries we can make, which the average academic just can't do. You know, so even in my, I was pretty successful in my previous life, getting grants, but I couldn't dream of getting, you know, a money enough to do something on this scale. That's amazing. Yeah, that's really amazing. I'm sure people listening are wondering, they're probably at the edge of their seat saying, okay, so what do I do differently to make sure I'm not the one who spikes much more than, than the same person with the same genes would spike? What, what are the strategies? What do I eat? What do I not eat? Are there any, and I do want to obviously get into as well the type of testing as well. And it's very interesting to me that you went to, this is now a gut microbiome test sounds like you mentioned from a stool sample versus doing a glucose monitor and blood testing, right? Which show much completely different things as well there, right? It's like, I guess with your blood markers, you'd be looking at kind of completely different markers than I guess the microbiome, there's a gut microbiome effect, your blood markers as well. Quite a bit. Did you find? Yeah, it's, it's correlated with it. So in these 300,000 people, we're lucky enough to have the blood glucose mark monitors in a portion at about 5000. We've got blood markers as well. And we did a fat, a blood fat test based on a pinprick again in another 300,000 people. So we're able to colorate, correlate the gut tests, you know, the type of microbes you've got with what's going on in your blood. And that allowed us to say, well, don't actually need the blood, you know, we can predict the type of microbes that go with people, not only have type 2 diabetes, but have pre-diabetes, but also people that show a very exaggerated sugar spike. And so that is only because we've got these huge samples. Because you've got to understand the reason other people haven't found this is that the microbiome is really unique to all of us. So we're all have, you know, genes and things are quite similar compared to our gut microbes, but you and I only share about 25% of our gut microbes. And we've all got ones that are unique in 10,000 people. So it's very hard to generalize stuff without really big numbers. And I think that's, that's the key here that anyone who tries to tell you that gut microbiome is dead simple and you just have to look at one microbe and you can tell everything. It's rubbish. You need really big scale projects and big computers and scientists that I work with with really big brains. Amazing. Amazing. And so what are some of the things? What are some kind of obvious things or first steps for people listening that are wondering like, oh, wow, okay. So how do I get a, you know, quote unquote, good gut microbiome? Yeah. So I mean, to answer your previous question, part of the part of the way to get less of a sugar spike and less of a fat spike is to have a good microbiome. They're correlated. Everything's increasingly, everything is correlated with everything else. So the best way to start is, is a more holistic view and just say, okay, what can everyone do regardless of how bad their fat or their sugar is? And that is improve their gut health. So you're actually right. So we've now got some general principles which we formulated with Zoe, which, you know, we keep adding to it was six. It's now eight. I can't always remember them all, but I'll start. So the first is mindful eating before you grab something off the buffet. Just think, what am I eating? Not only, you know, what's in it? What's disguised in it? What effect is that going to have on my body? How am I going to feel after eating it? May just take 10 seconds, but I think that space gives you time just to reflect and fight back against, you know, the food companies that are trying to shovel bad food into us. Second is to try and eat 30 plants a week. And that is important because we know that plant diversity, not just the total amount of plants, but the diversity of different species of plant is crucial for your gut health because the more different plants you've got, the more food you're providing for your gut microbes. And that is, if you do that, you're probably going to get enough fiber. You're going to be getting your 30 grams of fiber every day. But on top of that, you're getting this diversity that may be hard to get where depending on when you live or if you're traveling or whatever. So it's a really good focus in terms of the quality of your gut micro. And it's quite fun because it means you're picking new stuff. You're not just having the same boring salad every day of your life. I think that's the other thing that I've learned in this journey is that it's got to be fun as well as healthy. And that's why we also developed this product called Daily 30, which you can get online in the US, which is 34 freeze dried plants that you use on top of your normal diet because many of those products, there's eight different types of mushroom and their Bayer Bab dried kombucha, things like this that you wouldn't normally get in the average American diet. So whatever you can do increase your number of plants. The second I would say is to try and eat the rainbow. So you're getting brightly colored plants, fruits and vegetables on your plate because that signifies these polyphenols. I guess your listeners have heard of polyphenols, these defense chemicals. Used to be called antioxidants that supply energy to the microbes. So part of their action is because they are actually feeding microbes as a fuel and brightly colored ones, brightly colored berries, but also bitter tasting ones like chocolate, red wine, olive oil, black coffee. All of these are really helpful and as well as the broccoli is and the other classical plants. Then you've got fermented foods regularly. In my book, Firm Ent, I did a lot of research and things have really changed in the last three years. So we now know that eating fermented foods regularly at least three portions a day is like an anti-inflammatory. It can reduce your inflammatory markers by about 25%. And this very new data, but it backs up a lot of the observational stuff that we were seeing earlier on. So the average American read doesn't get much in the way of fermented food. And I think we need to start introducing this concept doesn't have to be a large amount, just small, regular amounts. You can just mix in whether it's sauerkraut. It's kimchi, it's your yogurts, your kefir's, whatever it is, it's going to be beneficial. Where are we? There's another one would be Pivot Your Protein. So I know the US, like the UK, obsessed with protein at the moment. That's because the food companies are making huge amounts of money on it. It's very cheap to produce. It's cheap to add it into processed foods and let basically give it a halo of saying it's a health food. Nothing wrong with protein. Although 90% of Americans are getting way more than they need. Only 10% really are deficient in my understanding. But take your protein, but take it not as big chunks of red meat, but as beans, legumes, mushrooms. These are fantastic sources, not only of the protein, but also fiber and all other stuff to feed your gut. Can I ask you a quick about, because you mentioned beans and legumes and this is the protein one I want to go back to as well, because as you probably would imagine, we have had many guests on this podcast and talk about, you know, some of the, they've seen in their clients that a higher protein, lower carb diet is more beneficial for weight loss, for building lean muscle, things of that. So I would like to hear, I guess also on the protein side, what do you feel is a necessary amount? And then on the, on the beans and legume side, there's a lot of people that talk about potential gut issues from, from beans and legumes. Of course, that's going to be specific to the individual person, but I'm curious if you've seen that as well. So kind of two questions there for you. Yeah, no great questions. Um, well, anyone can produce anecdotes about any diet, improving anybody or any supplement, changing someone's life. Um, I don't believe that stuff. I'm trained as an epidemiologist, trained to look at hundreds of thousands of people and give results on average. So on average, everything, you know, that's the way I'm talking. Doesn't mean there aren't exceptions or weird things happen that we can't explain. Um, so the advice really is for the, the average person. Um, protein levels, you can't store protein in your body. So it's use it or loser. Um, for protein to be effective, you probably also have to exercise a lot of the same time. And if you have excess protein, it gets broken down, uh, into fat. So it's not something that, you know, just is empty. If you're not using it, you, it doesn't go anywhere. You can still get fat on eating lots of protein if you're not using it up and building up your muscles. Um, it does, it is better than carbs for appetite suppression. There's no doubt about that. Um, it's pretty not quite as good as fiber, but it's still better than eating starchy carbs. So again, it's when we look at nutrition, you know, we shouldn't say one thing is either good or bad. It's like saying, well, instead of what? So I'm all in favor. If someone has more chicken on that plate than fries, um, that's good, uh, because eating lots of starchy carbs or big bowl of rice or, uh, probably big bowl of pasta, you know, it will be more detrimental relatively than having a little bit of extra, uh, protein on your plate. And that will probably fill them up more than the carbs, which tend to make you hungrier. So no, I've got no problem with that. Um, but I think by obsessing with, uh, protein, we're forgetting that the big picture data is much stronger, that fiber is more important for our long-term health and 90% of Americans or 95% according to the latest survey are deficient in fiber. They're not deficient in protein. So it's a sort of, you know, I think protein's fine, but the current obsession doesn't match the public health data, the big data sets, the fact that we're not getting enough. And I feel that a lot of it is marketing driven by the companies that make much more money out of selling protein than they do by selling us vegetables. And, uh, we have to be very wary in this world about, you know, who's saying what, who's paid to say what, and the consumer confusion by thinking that anything with a protein sticker on it. Uh, and we did a survey with Zoe saying that, you know, 65% of Americans we looked at in California said 60, you know, believe that is a health, that is a healthy product, regardless of what else was there. Whereas fiber they were less interested in. So I think there's a, there's a big gap in understanding here. So, you know, both fiber and protein are important. Um, but by focusing entirely on protein, we're, we're, it's not going to help help our gut microbes, uh, certainly. And people like yourself can hear all these anecdotes. I switched to meat. I gave up starchy foods. I felt great. Is that because you switched to meat or because you gave up the crappy food instead, and if you switched to, you know, a mainly plant based, uh, cut out the starchy stuff and the, and the process stuff and the breads and the rice, you know, you might have felt the same. So that's, that's my general view. And I think the, the, the guidelines are different in every country by a little bit, but I think, um, and the U S guidelines have just changed. As you probably know, they've gone up massively, um, by over 50%, which, um, I don't think is justified by any of the data. I think it needs to go up a little bit because, um, there were people as you get older or, you know, on the Zempix or whatever, we're not getting enough. And so a target of, uh, one gram per kilogram, which is in my mind the easiest way to think about it, uh, is the best one. Whereas the pre previous guidelines are about 0.8. Um, the current guidelines, which seem to be written on the back of a, um, an envelope, uh, the shortest, you know, uh, FDA guidelines, you know, for, for decades, um, have come out much higher, much higher than that. But I have to remember the average American has twice as much meat as the average European. And to my mind, they don't look much healthier. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. I agree with you. It's a sort of, you know, a big industry, you know, beef industry, dairy industry, you know, they want Americans to keep, uh, eating more of this stuff. But yeah, I agree with you. Fiber is not, there needs to be a better marketing campaign around fiber. Hopefully this, this podcast will be, uh, help in that regard of making fiber more popular and more important and more on people's radar, because there is a lot of very clear data around getting enough fiber being very beneficial to your, to your gut microbiome. Um, and then my other, yeah. And then my other question for you was also around the beans and legumes and how that could affect your health if you've seen that issue. Um, yeah. Well, obviously we have a problem with many people suffer from irritable bowel syndrome, IBS, bloating, uh, and other similar, uh, problems which didn't really exist 50 years ago. So this is a modern epidemic, if you like. And I think it's largely driven by a poor state of the gut microbiome. So that you don't have the range of, uh, microbes in your gut in order to digest some of these plants well and, uh, or efficiently. So what happens is someone who hasn't been eating these things, uh, suddenly gets a big dose of, of these slightly hard to digest, um, fibrous, like these beans, they, uh, will suffer and they might get bloating and say, okay, I can't do that. But, um, a lot of, we do find though that, um, in our studies, if people go slowly, um, and they don't try and overdo it and go crazy on the, on the first week, they can, they can reintroduce these things, uh, pretty successfully. We also found that, um, little tricks like the other guideline that I was, uh, we talked about is, is time restricted eating, which is intermittent fasting. Um, uh, we, we did a big experiment with nearly 200,000 people asking them at home just to do time-restricted eating for two, for two weeks. And a lot of them had bloating at the beginning and, um, most of them improved and reduced their bloating symptoms just by giving their gut a rest. So I think we've got to look at this rather than saying this causes this problem to think, well, actually it's because there's a, a general poor gut health problem that's leading to people having symptoms of IBS and bloating and that if they do gradually change their diet, we see in all our studies symptoms of bloating, um, slowly disappear. And so I think it's, um, it's taking a step back and saying, well, why am I getting this problem? Humans are not allergic to beans. Um, our ancestors never had any problems with this. Um, it is just, I'm coming from a very deficient state and I mustn't overload it too quickly. You know, the average American diet of fries and burgers and, uh, et cetera, just was too deficient. So the, the microbes that are left really struggling to, um, to digest this stuff. That's my, that's my take on it. Um, and so people shouldn't be frightened of switching their diet, whether it's time-restricted eating. We saw the same benefits with fermented foods, you know, which, um, act on the immune system, but also we found people had less bloating, uh, after it, although they were expecting to be had more bloating. Um, it doesn't mean that nobody will have bloating and in our studies, uh, we had, I think it was, um, one in five people's bloating got worse, but, uh, 50% of people, they're bloating not better. Hmm. So this is, this is this, uh, you know, the problem when you do studies or you pick anecdotes, uh, but what I'm telling reassuring people is that most people who try to improve their gut health will, um, still improve on these symptoms. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Is there any one super food or, you know, plant or type of fiber that you is like at the top of your list that you've just seen consistently when people increase this in their diet, it improves their gut microbiome results? Uh, no, this is a simple answer. I know, I mean, everyone wants a super food. They want, I don't, you know, I want to go into store and just buy this and just eat this and just do that. And everything I, you know, learned to the last 15 years is, is, is, has been arguing against the super food against us against the super supplement. It's, uh, you know, it's a boring message, but it's like just eat a variety of stuff because you've got to start imagining what it's like, you know, inside your gut. You know, you've got all these microbes, they're chemical factories. There are thousands of different species, each of them producing different chemicals, they've got all these genes. We've evolved with them to do this stuff that keeps our immune system in top shape. How do you keep them happy? Uh, and it's, you can't keep them all happy. It's like a, you go to the, your local zoo and you try and give them all the same food, right? Or I say, okay, well, a tiger's not going to eat the same as my lizard or whatever, you've got to give them variety. And so that really to me is the, the importance of this diversity concept. And it, it means that we need to sort of expand the sort of foods we normally eat because we've massively restricted. We have 30,000 edible plants and you know, the average American has about 10 different ones per week. Um, and it's about thinking what else can we add? You know, what are the, let's get some new stuff. And that's, that's why we added, you know, into, into our daily 30 mix things like Baobab, we've got eight, eight different types of mushroom. I'm, I mean, I was tempted to say mushrooms are my, um, favorite plant because they're not a, but they're not a plant. They're actually somewhere between animals and plants. They're fungi. Um, and, but they have a very different cell wall structure. You know, different chemicals and I, there's increasing evidence they're good for you, but I don't want to focus on one thing because people will say, okay, I'm only going to eat mushrooms for the next week and ignore the rest of his advice. Cause you know, that's what I've remembered. And that's humans are like that. We, we all love a simple solution and I'm a sucker for that as much as anybody. So, um, it is interesting, but I think it's about, it is about variety, diversity and trying to sort of visualize what your gut microbes would like to eat, you know, nobody wants to eat the same food all the time, including your microbes. If someone is not able for whatever reason to get it through real whole foods, which is obviously the ideal situation to eat 30 different types of real whole foods, different ones each week, if possible is a green superfood powder as well. I know you have your, your Zoey daily 30 mix, which sounds amazing. I'm probably going to buy it after this as well to just increase my fiber and gut microbiome diversity. Um, I do also take other kind of prebiotic fiber supplements as well. Um, I kind of blend it. Actually, I blend about, I think it's about somewhere around 15 to 20 grams of fiber into my morning coffee actually with a few other things in there as well. I do put a little protein in there as well. In that morning coffee, just cause I don't like to eat much of a breakfast and I do want to get a little protein in, but I put fibers and proteins and stuff like that as well. But, um, is a green superfood powder, something like that as well. Would that be something that would be if, if someone can't access a huge diversity of plants? Of the ones I've seen that are very much the green powders. We're talking about the well-known brands that dominate the market and podcasts. Uh, I would say no. I mean, they, they're very cheap to make. They have a huge margin on them. Um, and they basically will be stuffed with the, the cheapest ones. Uh, they will have lots of vitamins you probably don't need because you have plenty of them and very little, um, real plants in there, just a few, uh, chemicals and your body knows the difference between, you know, artificial stuff and real stuff. So, um, it would help you if you're a vitamin deficient, you know, so if you were only able to eat, you know, rice or something like that, then it would help you. But if you're just someone on a rather poor, generally poor American diet, I can't see it, uh, helping as much as, um, you know, just having a vegetable soup every now and again would be 10 times better. I think. So I think there's a big mismatch between, um, our view of these vitamin powders claiming to have hundreds of magic ingredients. Just look and say, well, where are the studies? Um, you know, I'm a scientist. I look at the studies. Give me a big placebo control trial. You know, one of them did do a study. They only found a result because they added a probiotic to it and, um, the probiotic had an effect on the gut microbiome. The rest of it didn't have any effect. So are you a fan of probiotics, by the way, on that topic? Um, great question. Um, I'm a fan of probiotics when they're in food. That's in fermented food. And we talked about the, you know, the fact they have this really big effect on our immune systems. Um, so fermented foods, yes, but you've got to have them, you know, probably three portions daily, small amounts daily to be effective. Most probiotics have very variable effects in humans. They do work, but they seem to be highly personalized because you're just giving a few strains, uh, to people and we're all different. So one probiotic may work for you, but not for me. And there are very few comparisons of probiotics and pre-biotics. I don't know if you see many, but when we were designing our daily 30, we, uh, and most people, you know, like for these supplements and powders, they don't actually do a big study in case it goes wrong. But we looked at 350 people. We had a dummy, uh, dummy powder. We had a probiotic and we had our daily 30 and we said, okay, let's look and see how they get on. And the probiotic and the prebiotic, our daily 30 both worked. They improved our gut microbiome, but the effects were 10 times greater in the prebiotic than the probiotic. So probiotic has an overall average minimal effect. Um, and it sort of makes sense when she start thinking of one is a fertilizer. The other is very specific seeds and the fertilizers are much bigger chance of helping the growth of all the microbes, whereas the seeds, you know, everything's got to be right for those seeds to, um, have that knock on effect in your gut when it's dominating so many other microbes. So I think we're getting a better sense of the science behind, uh, what's going on here. Um, so yeah, they work. I don't think that as good as they're made out to be. And, uh, in certain people, they seem to work much better than others, but as a general bet for your gut health, I think fibers and prebiotics, um, as wide or diverse a range as you can get are the best. And, you know, we know there are hundreds of different fibers. All of them might feed specific microbes. It was a great example. We published a paper about coffee and showed that, um, uh, we, there's one microbe that only eats coffee in our gut called Lawson a Bacter. Um, you don't, you know, have tiny levels in tea drinkers, but 10 times the level in coffee drinkers. And it just brought home to me how there must be so many other microbes there. They're just waiting for you to have some exotic fruit or vegetable or something. And then it will go crazy and proliferate and have babies and, um, uh, have a long and healthy, healthy life. So that's why we need to encourage this diversity and, you know, just one artificial fiber source may not do the trick. So we've got to start thinking of fiber, not as just like a macronutrient, but, you know, in a way of, uh, what it can feed. I think that makes sense. Yeah. Don't, don't just take 30 grams of one type of fiber, split it up, try to try to get a bunch of different ones. That makes a lot of sense. And just a few years ago, you know, this is very new thinking, but we used to think in your Lynn, uh, you dad in your Lynn, which comes from chicory route at it to everything, it will cure everything. And it didn't. It helps a certain group of your microbes, but it squashes out the other ones that can't eat it, you know, and so, um, we need to be just very sensible about what we're, what we're doing when we're taking the, the supplements. And so the closer you can get to nature, the better. And that's sort of why we came up with, you know, not trying to overthink it. We just say, okay, let's just freeze dry as many different things as we can, whether it's seaweed, kombucha, baobab, you know, stick them all together and with mushrooms and sort of hope for the best and see what the trial shows. And that, that's what we did. Amazing. Sounds amazing. I know we're coming up to the end here. I did want you to tell people, obviously, I know where they can find you, follow you, buy your books, but also tell them a little bit about how does Zoe work? So I know this is a gut microbiome test. You have a, you know, hundreds of thousands of people that have gone through it. So, um, how does that work? Do you take this gut microbiome test via stool sample and then you'll get recommendations based on your current gut microbiome? Is that kind of how it works? Well, it's, it's evolved. So basically Zoe is a, it's a bit more like a toolkit for people to navigate the food landscape and fight back against the food companies. So we've got various things. So we have our, our products. The first is the daily 30, which anybody can buy. You don't need a test or anything. You just get on, use it. We also have an app. So, um, you can download a free, it's currently free in the US. So anyone can download the app and try it out. Just, uh, you know, Zoe health. You get, get it. And that will, uh, give you a non-personalized scoring of your, um, your foods based on the average person from our database and tell you how to avoid sugar spikes, fat spikes, how to improve your gut health. It also does photo logging. So you can track your protein levels, your fiber levels. You don't have to record anything. Tells you how many plants you've had that week. Um, you know, how many ferments it's, it's got everything in it. Um, it's a sort of, you know, and you, it's got AI so you can ask it questions. It's, it's like your nutritionist in your pocket. And then we've got the gut health test, which, uh, will, once you've done it, then it would personalize your, your scores on, on the app. And so, you know, whether you're a sugar spiker, a fat, you've got a fat problem. Uh, all these other factors that we've now learned from our database, we can put into that information and as well as giving a target, knowing that, um, you can improve your gut health. You can track it a bit like blood pressure because we're the first company to really have a, to develop a new system of tracking, uh, your gut health. And we published in the journal nature, which is the world's top journal, this new scoring system. There's 50 good bugs, 50 bad bugs that everybody has regardless of where they are in the U S or Europe. Um, and we, we see this ratio a bit like a cholesterol ratio is a really crucial step to saying, am I getting there? You know, am I improving my good bugs? Am I getting rid of my bad bugs? So very motivational and, uh, helpful long terms because we want people to change their habits, not just for six weeks in a crash diet, but see this really important change long term. So that's, that's, that's what we've got. We also got a podcast that's free called, uh, Zoe science and nutrition. We're all about nutrition. Just get scientists talking about their, their work. Uh, we, um, I've also got my, yeah, my books. Um, and, uh, if you want to go into depth and, but Zoe.com for the website is probably the main, uh, place to, uh, find out all, all about us. But, uh, yeah, it's a good time. Everyone can download that app for free, which is really cool education as well. I think then that's very much part of what we're, we're trying to do is bring, you know, knowledge of, of the gut microbiome and, and, and better eating, uh, to millions of people. That's amazing. Tim, thank you so much for the work that you're doing. I mean, the information that you're putting out the actual clinical studies with real results that you've done and now creating such an amazing app and amazing product as well to help people improve their gut microbiome, which we didn't really even get into all the in depth about how your gut microbiome affects your mood, how you feel, uh, how much you love your life, literally. And so many other things that we could, uh, discuss maybe in a, in a future episode, but, uh, this was really great. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time. And yeah, I hope we can do it again sometime. Yeah. No, there's so much more to tell you. So, uh, I can't wait. Thank you. Thanks. Bye. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, it would really mean a lot to me. If you would forward this episode along to any friends, family members, anyone that you think that would get value out of it and learn something important. The mission at peak performance is to help people prioritize and transform their health. And so if you think someone will get value, please, please, please do forward this episode along to them. Also, if you could please rate and review and subscribe on whatever podcast player you are listening to this on, we would greatly appreciate that as well. It means a lot. And I want to tell you about a couple of new products that we just released. You can get 20% off your first order at buypeakperformance.com. That's B U Y peakperformance.com. We just released a brand new grass fed beef protein isolate. 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