Gut Expert: Eating these 3 foods could improve your mental health | Tim Spector: Full Interview

My name is Tim Spector. I'm an MD. I'm a professor of epidemiology at King's College in London and I'm also co-founder of the nutrition and gut health company, ZOE.

Today on Big Think, I'm going to talk about the connection between what's going on in your gut and your gut microbes and how that affects your brain and your mental health. I'll also be giving you tips about how you can

improve your gut health to improve your overall health. Chapter one, how the gut microbiome works. The gut microbiome I like to think of as as it's like a virtual organ in our bodies that we've only recently discovered.

Something like discovering we had a liver. And essentially, it's made up of trillions of little tiny microbes that you need a microscope to see. bacteria, fungi, parasites, viruses, and other things we still don't exactly know about.

This collection forms a community mainly inside the lower part of our colon, the large intestine. They essentially need to be thought of as mini pharmacies. They convert the food that we eat into chemicals, into hundreds and thousands of different chemicals.

And those chemicals have this amazing impact on our body that we're only just beginning to realize. This collection of microbes has something like 200 times more genes than we have in our own human cells. That means they're much more versatile.

They're more flexible in what they can produce in terms of chemicals and they're actually more numerous than our uh human cells. This is important because we evolved from these bacteria and the very first mammals and then humans were built because

they contained these colonies of microbes that could interact with them and without these microbes we really wouldn't function and particularly our brains don't develop normally. So, one way to think about our gut microbiome is either as a the environment of a jungle or an

amazing natural zoo where you've got these thousands of different species of microbes that have taken over a little niche inside our gut that is very specialized to them. They're not all fighting for the same food. They've evolved just like animals have to get have very

specific tastes. The example I like comes from our own research where we found there is one bug that only really eats or drinks coffee. It is so fussy it hangs around maybe for years

just waiting for that first cup of coffee before it will replicate and really start to be noticeable. If we start thinking of coffee as a great example, then you think about all the other bugs that we might have lying dormant in our guts that are waiting

for us to eat something unusual, say a bit of baobob or some beetroot or um some particular type of of nut or herb or spice. And so that's a really important concept because we now know that the more diverse your gut microbes are, the

healthier you are. So that's why uh we need to be thinking how can I best feed these very different gut microbes. Some of which might like coffee, others will only like uh the leaf of a bit of cabbage, others uh

might like seeds or nuts and others will like the leftovers from what the other microbes have eaten. And this is also a really interesting concept because they they're working together. They make sure there's no waste.

they are these perfect ecological beings. So that the concept of waste doesn't really exist. And what they've shown in some mouse studies is that um if you uh have a really strong colony of gut microbes that are very diverse, then you eat your

standard diet, you have no waste left over. But if you only have a few microbes, rather poor uh colony, they're not very well diversified, you get leftovers. And when you get the leftovers, then you get what we call the bad bugs will eat those uh because