How to Keep Your Gut Healthy - What Your GP Doesn't Tell You Podcast

Professor Tim Spector explains what you need to eat to optimise both your gut biome and overall health

The latest episode of What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You - How to Keep Your Gut Healthy - is now available on Spotify, Apple and other podcast platforms. And you can sign up to the podcast mailing list at What Your GP Doesn't Tell You, where you can also find out more about the pod.

Professor Tim Spector reveals how developing research about our gut microbiome – the microbes in our gut – is revolutionising our understanding of diet and disease.  He explores how these microbes play a vital role in our health and can even affect our weight, metabolism and brain chemistry.

Spector argues that for too long the importance of the gut biome has been overlooked and this has had a critical impact on our understanding of what we should eat.

While humans share 99.7% of their genes, we only share around 25% of our gut microbes, which Spector believes may help explain why each of us may be prone to very different diseases.

And it turns out that people with  different illnesses  have gut biomes that can look very different to healthy ones. 

Currently, doctors can  do what are called faecal transplants, when they take faeces from a healthy donor and introduce them into a patient’s gastrointestinal tract, which changes the patient’s gut microbiome. So could it be in the future that we develop other approaches to alter someone’s gut microbes that might improve their health?

In the podcast, Spector also talks about the findings from his recently published book: Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well and  reveals what we should eat to optimise our gut biome and health.

Tim Spector is a professor in genetic epidemiology at King’s College, London and one of the founders of the personalised nutrition company Zoe.

Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well by Tim Spector is published by Jonathan Cape.

You can find out more about the podcast at What Your GP Doesn't Tell You and follow me on Twitter @lizctucker.

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