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

—discovery in gut science.

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

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

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 These chemicals are really good for our immune system, metabolism, and our brain. You need them to be fed properly.

I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais. A high-performance psychologist named Michael Gervais. 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. Olympic athletes depend on something more than just training and talent. They have to stay mentally tough. 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 wellbeing.

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.

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.

[Speaker:DAVE ERICKSON] The big misconception that was out there that's still around is the obsession with the calorie, that if all you have to do to lose weight, exercise a bit more and eat less calories. But 95% of people, it 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.

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.

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, the consumer against the food companies. At the moment, they're winning.

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.

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

So 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've 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. It's a pleasure. 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?

Yeah, I first came across gut health about 2009, because I'd been doing genetics for about 20 years and I began 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 Blaser 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, it'd been 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 a 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 finding. So even in identical twins who are clones, live their life together, the species only about 25% similar, 75% were different, compared to you and I would be, you know, unrelated people, about 20%. So it was mainly, you know, 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. And the same year I ended up having a bit of a medical health crisis at the top of a mountain. I was ski touring in Europe and got to the top of the mountain, had double vision, and I'd had a microstroke in my— the vessel supplying my eye. And I had high blood pressure and I was sort of off work for 3 or 4 months, feeling very depressed and very tired and wanted to sort out my own life and health. And so suddenly got very selfish about my studies because I'd been trained as an epidemiologist, which is looking at thousands of people, studying populations, not individuals. So suddenly, what advice would I give myself? You know, do I exercise more? Do I change my diet? What do I do? So that is when I, I said, well, I could combined these two things and spent 3 months basically researching from scratch everything about nutrition and realized that everything out there at the time, this is back in about 2011, was complete rubbish. Everything on the internet, the government advice both in the US and the UK. For example? We should be eating low-fat foods. Cut out any high-fat foods, have low-fat foods even if they're highly processed. We should be eating lots of starchy foods. He encouraged things like rice and potatoes and pasta. Across most of the developed countries at the time were saying this. You should keep grazing. You should snack regularly. You should never skip a meal like breakfast. That was fatal. And all this advice missed the point. And when you looked it up, you saw there was actually no scientific evidence to back this up at all. It was based on very old research that had since been counteracted, but probably the pressure of the food industry had been forcing these guys in government to just keep saying the same thing so the food companies could keep selling us crap food that was low in calories, low in fat. And the other big misconception that was out there that's still around is the obsession with the calorie. That if you— all you have to do to lose weight, exercise a bit more and eat less calories, and it's that easy, you know, you lose weight. Of course, it all sounds good, but for 95% of people, it failed miserably. But there was, of course, a multi-billion-dollar diet industry totally based on that as well.

So, and if somebody wants to lose weight, you probably wouldn't suggest eat more calories and exercise less. What would you suggest? I know that's not the focus of this conversation, but it's an interesting kind of hot button.

Yeah, no, it's what you eat is important, not purely the calories. So it's going for quality food, it's eating food that actually makes you less hungry rather than make you hungrier. If you go for low-calorie foods that are highly processed, they're designed to make you overeat. Lots of recent studies now showing that high-risk processed foods will make you overeat by 25%. So they're actually making you hungrier. And so this high-carb rich food that's been pushed on us just makes us hungrier and hungrier throughout the day. And as we know from the Ozempic GLP-1 type drugs, hunger is the main driver of this thing, not our metabolism and our sort of balancing process. So that's why this idea that calorie restriction works is basically wrong, 'cause people who are calorie restricting are generally not eating the good foods. And even if they were eating good foods and you're only calorie restricted, the body reacts to compensate for that. So you lose weight for 6 weeks, then you start to regain it because your hunger signals ramped up. So, you know, we can go on for an hour about what's wrong with this, you know, calories in, calories out idea. But if you go to obesity research meetings now, nobody believes in this calorie idea anymore. And I think the Ozempic-type drugs have shown the relative importance of foods that can make you hungry and those that fill you up.

Just for somebody who might be confused, you know, or not quite sure about what an ultra-processed food is, can you give a couple that are easy to look at and then some that are more surprising that many people might overlook?

That's actually a harder question than it would have been a few years ago. Ultra-processed food, the term came into research use in 2009. It means any food that's been modified to have extra flavorings, additives, or chemicals and color in a way that you wouldn't do in your home kitchen. That's a very broad description of these foods, and it accounts for over 60% of the American diet.

[Speaker] I love that framing. Like, if you can't make it in your kitchen, it's probably a processed, like I don't think I could make a gummy bear. I could kind of get around to figuring it out maybe, but you know, gummy bear's a little tricky.

And you certainly couldn't make a Pringles, could you?

Couldn't make a Pringles. Hard to figure that one out. I could make ketchup. Yes. If I were to buy it in the UK.

Yeah, but ketchup was originally made in people's homes and it was a fermented food. Yeah, with vinegar. Vinegar. Vinegar, yeah. It's in my book, the recipe, you can make it.

But I don't know how to make high fructose corn syrup. No. So I can't do the American version, but I could do the UK version.

And you couldn't do anything with a sweetener because you'd need access to the petroleum industry to get all those byproducts to make your aspartames and ACE-Ks and sucraloses.

So ketchup in the US is an easy, highly processed food. What are some other ones that you're like, hey, listen, pay attention, because if you're consuming these, you're working a little bit against the health grade?

Yeah, so what I want people to focus on is not the 60% of all these foods, 'cause some of them only lightly processed, right? They might just have ascorbic acid added to it, a preservative, which most people know is vitamin C. Vitamin C, yeah. So it doesn't mean they're all bad. And what we think is, we've done some research at Zoe, redefining this. If anyone's interested, there's a free app you can download that will allow you to scan any food and see how, how risky the processing is in it. And what we see is that most breads that you buy in a store, from Wonder Bread to things that look healthier, are highly processed. They've got all kinds of additives and chemicals that are bad for you. And then you've got other ones like most breakfast cereals. I'd say 95% of breakfast cereals are highly processed. You've got snack bars, cookies, ready meals. Anything that's low fat or low calorie is virtually all ultra-processed. The vast majority of stuff that you see in stores that isn't in the fruit or veg component is ultra-processed. And we think that about a third of all those are high risk. So at ZOE, we've come up with a new risk score, which to be high risk, you have to have an additive, that is harmful for you, or several additives. It has to be hyperpalatable, and this is what the food industry do to make food— make you overeat the food. So they, they have something called the bliss point, which certain specific combination of salt, sugar, and fat, which you don't find in nature, tickles dopamine bits of your brain to trigger a sort of addictive urge to, to keep eating this stuff. And there's a very way to look at foods and see if they've got that formula, then they're designed to make you overeat them much more than your body want— would normally want to. And the third thing is that they're often designed, uh, structurally to melt in your mouth. It takes no effort at all to eat it, and instantly those calories are just going into your body. You don't even notice eating it. So you finished a whole pack or a whole grab bag or whatever it is without exercising your jaw at all and just watching, watching TV, you know, you've consumed enormous amounts and you're going back for a second one. So those three things are what the food industry do to us.

Name the three one more time.

So salt, additives, hyperpalatability. Okay, yeah. And this structure are the three things that the food companies are trying to put into food. And the more they do that, the best the more they get a bestseller like a Pringles, like Cheerios, like a snack bar that's, quote unquote, healthy protein bar. But it's— yeah, it can have a healthy label on it. It'll be low calorie, high protein, extra vitamins. They're all signs that these are highly processed foods.

Before we go to how to look at ingredient list, let me come back up for air real quick on this. There's two concerns I think, that are looming of why we're starting here. One is they're designed to keep you going, to ingest kind of empty calories. It's a little bit like an empty meal. And the second, there's probably a gut issue that happens when you're consuming those. Correct. Okay, so pin those two ideas and then drill down into, like, helping me understand what to look for, the ingredients. I'll tell you my shorthand to this. It has more than 5 ingredients. I really pay attention to what is in there. So I'm trying not to eat anything that has more than 5 ingredients. Is that an old way of thinking, or would you say, yeah, it's probably about right? And if I can do 3 ingredients, if I'm buying something that is canned or bottled, or like, I'm probably on the better side of it.

Yeah, I'm not sure there's a number because that would depend on the product. Chocolate bar is a good example. You buy a craft chocolate that just has dark chocolate in it, cocoa butter, and sugar. So it met my criteria. 3. Right. That would be perfect, right? But you get one that you could add in an artificial sweetener in that, right? And that's making it very bad for your gut microbes. You add in lecithin, that's an emulsifier, which is also bad for your gut microbes. So already you've got 5, which is better than the ones with 10, but it's still— Still problematic, right? It's complex and the food companies will always be one step ahead. They have the best scientists, they're testing this stuff, they have millions spent on budgets to test this stuff. So they'll be looking to modify the names of those ingredients, they sound good to you. They have 60 or 70 different names for sugar that they're allowed to put in there to fool you. So you think, "Oh, that sounds okay." Agave, that sounds better than sugar or whatever, or reverse dextrose or whatever it is you're talking about. So I think we need tools to understand that. That's why we developed this free app that— You scan your food. You scan this food or the barcode and it will just tell you, you know, from our research how many of these criteria it's hitting. And you get a, you know, a 4-scale, zero risk, low, medium, and high risk, and you can make your own mind up. 'Cause it's so complicated for us to keep in our heads all these chemicals and products. And you can have 3 peanut butters, all look identical, all have the same labels. You haven't got the time to go into a store and, you know, with a magnifying glass and look at them all. So use an app that is continuously updated, you know, with new information because it's changing fast and it's a war out there, you know. The consumer against the food companies. And at the moment, they're winning.

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Well, I'm concerned about a lot because the state of our, our guts at the moment is, is appalling. And I'm hoping this is the turning point when America realizes And I think, you know, we are seeing signs of people talking about the food poisoning kids and changing our health, our physical and mental health. So I'm hoping this is the point people start to pay attention to all those things. And it's everything from overuse of antibiotics— the US uses far too much compared to other countries— pollution, poor state of our food system, and the fact that some Kids just go, you know, never had a non-processed meal in their lives and their guts are being completely starved. So when you compare an American gut with countries, you know, tribes, people in Africa, they're half the species, the other half have been wiped out.

And you want a healthy ecosystem of microbiome.

Yeah, the last 10 years have taught us that You know, 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 diversity of species. And to get diversity of species, you need them to be fed properly. And if they're only fed on low fiber, highly chemical food, it's not surprising they're dying out and the good guys got nothing to eat. Only the bad ones that feed off the poor quality fats and proteins are left. So the chemicals they're producing to help our immune system are no longer there. And I think once you grasp that so much of our general health comes from our gut, then I think you can convince people to spend more attention, more focus on eating properly for your gut, because everything else follows from that. This has been a slow-growing revelation. I won't say I didn't instantly get it, but the science keeps backing it up every year, making it even stronger than when I started the journey, you know, back 15 years ago.

I do want to go to like basic model inputs to outputs. High-quality inputs tend to, not always, lead to some security around high-quality outputs. And so if the case was like, let's say mental health, or if the case was an overall kind of vibrance in life, you would definitely say that part of the input equation would be to ingest foods that will feed your microbiome. Absolutely.

And, you know, nutrition is very complicated. And so when I started writing my first book on this, I tried to find concepts that might make it easy for people to say, well, how do you put all this together? You know, some people are telling me this, and I said, well, just think of it if you're like this zookeeper or a gardener for your this incredible garden and you want to keep all these different species going, you wouldn't feed them just one, the same food, right? If you're in a zoo, you know, some animals would die if you just fed them all the same. So you give them a diversity and you don't want too many chemicals. You want to nourish it, put seeds in there, new stuff, fermented foods. You can have this concept that if you look at nutrition through the lens of your gut microbes, what do they want to eat? Everything just about follows logically that that's true. So the foods that we originally thought were healthy, like orange juice for example, heavily pushed by Florida, Tropicana and these places, and Pepsi, none of that really gets to your gut microbes. The sugar just comes out of that, goes straight into your system, and there's virtually no fiber gets through to your gut microbes. So the alternative would be We've always thought of coffee as a rather harmful drink, but the epidemiology is now reversed in the last 5 years and shows it actually reduces heart disease if you have 3 cups of coffee a day.

Is that because of the polyphenols?

It's partly because the polyphenols, because they're very high in polyphenols, these defense chemicals you get from plants, particularly the bitter ones like coffee or dark chocolate, but it's also due to the fiber itself. 'Cause you need to remember that coffee originally was this fermented bean. It's a plant.

When I tell people, like, I don't drink coffee, I drink a lot of tea, so I do wanna get to it, but I say, "Do you really like bean juice?" And like, "No, that's gross." But they love their coffee, which is bean juice basically. But you're saying there's fiber. That's a totally new idea for me, that there's fiber in coffee.

Yes, so 1.5 grams of fiber, which is, the same as you get in a small banana. So per cup, per cup. So the average American will have 3 cups of coffee a day. It's probably the major single source of fiber in the American diet. I do supplement with fiber.

I try to eat a lot of, a lot of natural food, but I do supplement with fiber as almost like a prebiotic. But I do want to hold back.

I have to have a word with you about that.

Okay, good. Let's do that because you're going to want me to eat more.

Well, have you tried matcha? That's nearly as much fiber as coffee. And so— I like matcha.

Yeah. But it's still like, isn't a supplement, I think the supplement I take is like 5 grams. And so you're saying a couple cups of matcha, but none in tea. This is not— Green tea, yes.

Black tea has very little fiber. Yeah, okay. But matcha is closer to coffee. So you need 5 cups of matcha matcha to get your 5 grams of fiber, but I'll be buzzing by. There are, there are easier ways to get your fiber. That's right.

Okay. Yeah. Good. Okay. Awesome. These are gems. These are great. Based on your research, the general recommendations to invest in gut health, I would love to start with like a big idea because I feel like we're down into like drink 3 cups of coffee and you're— So we need to get back to the— We gotta go back up to like—

General principles.

Yeah. General principles. So, okay. Why is gut health important?

Because we can't exist without healthy gut microbes. We've evolved to live with them, and they provide key chemicals that our body can't produce itself. Key vitamins, the B vitamins, the vitamin K2. They produce some B12 but can't use that. But they also produce many brain neurochemicals, serotonin, dopamine. And they're key messengers for our immune system. So our immune system can't function normally without a functioning microbiome. And we're realizing how important the immune system is for our overall health. So the last few years it's just exploded, understanding that it's absolutely key, not only for autoimmune diseases, allergies, but also fighting cancer, fighting aging. And controlling inflammation and mental health.

If you were to say, if you don't have a healthy gut, you run the increased risk of— how would you finish that thought?

If you don't have a healthy gut, you're highly likely to have a whole host of diseases, you know, 2 or 3 times the risk of metabolic disease like obesity, like type 2 diabetes, heart disease. You're more likely to get dementia, you're more likely to get depression. You're more likely to have a stroke, you're more likely to get cancers and accelerated aging and food allergies. So there's virtually nothing that isn't touched by having poor gut health. And we know this because at Zoe now we've done 300,000 gut tests and compared that to health profiles. And so it's obvious that it runs across the board. People with healthy guts just get less of all those diseases.

So you have my attention, okay? And I didn't need you to say that, but then when you say it that way, it's like, oh goodness, okay. Go from a macro position or a model, if you will, about what are the most important factors to think through to invest in a high-quality gut microbiome.

I think we've got several principles that are worth just going through to remember. The first, and I think the most important, is to eat a diversity of plants. From our studies, we think around 30 plants a week is the optimum. If you can get to that target, you look skeptical, but to get to 30 plants, you gotta remember what a plant is. So I've said coffee is a plant, okay? So you're allowed coffee or matcha. You're also allowed nuts and seeds. Each one is different. Herbs and spices, okay? So once you start thinking more broadly, it's not as hard as that. And that is a very effective way to do this. The average American has between about, between 9 and 12 plants 11 plants at most a week. So, you know, there's a way to go, but it's a different way of thinking because in the past we've said, well, you can have the same food, you know, you just get your banana, your apple, beans and peas, and that's it, you know, that's all you need every day and you're fine. The truth is that doesn't work. People have the same salad every day, are not as healthy as people have a different salad. So it's It's embracing diversity, and you do that, that keeps your gut microbes happy more than anything. And I think that's a foundation really, because you don't have to count fiber, because if you're doing that, you're going to be getting a lot of fiber, um, just automatically. It's very hard not to boost your fiber amounts because we need to be getting over 30 grams of fiber a day. Average American is having less than 15. So we need to double the amount of fiber, and that's one way of doing it. The second general principle is to eat the rainbow, and that's because colored plants and vegetables, as well as bitter ones, have these defense chemicals, these polyphenols. Such as? Bright-colored berries, dark purple blueberries, blackberries, lettuces that are, you know, the rosso lolo lettuce that have purple leaves. Are much better than something boring like the iceberg lettuce, which has zero polyphenols. It's just water. Cabbage. All cabbages are actually good. Surprisingly, they are a slight exception, but always pick ones with the darker leaves. You'll do better. Things like dark chocolate are high in polyphenols. Extra virgin olive oil, red wine, coffee, all these things where you're getting a slight bitterness and a slight astringency on your tongue. They are signs that these have natural chemicals in them that we used to call them all antioxidants, if you remember that. And that was such a vague term, and it was pretty obvious that scientists were just bullshitting. They didn't really know what it meant. And now we know that they actually feed our gut microbes. They're energy for our gut microbes, and they convert that into other products that are good for our immune system. That's what we want. So polyphenols are really important, and choosing your— what you eat partly based on the polyphenol counts is really important. So beans are another great example of something that are high in polyphenols and in fiber. And there's many sort of foods in those categories— seeds, nuts— all these things are also really good.

Let's go back to cabbage for just a minute because I know eventually we're going to get into fermentation, but raw cabbage, I, I remember somewhere in my research that like some of these more raw foods are really hard, like hard on the gut. Like I think kale, cabbage. Is that a misnomer or does that show up to be true?

There are always some exceptions, but on average, the nutrient value of raw food is less than slightly steamed.

Slightly steamed is a little bit better. Significantly better. And okay, so this is— Oversteamed is terrible.

This raw food diet stuff. Yeah. It doesn't stack up scientifically. You can't digest this easily if it's all raw, but at the same time, if you, you know, you boil the shit out of it for 2 hours, like, then you do destroy it unless you're drinking the liquid. So the sweet spot is this done just for a couple of minutes, al dente, minimum amount of water, Just fry it up in oil. That's the perfect way to— Oh, fry it in oil? You can do it in oil as well, yeah, particularly olive oil. You get actually more nutrients out of it. High heat olive oil?

Or you don't want to overcook the olive oil?

It's hard to do that actually, 'cause the smoke point of olive oil is actually, it's above 200 degrees. It's really high. So unless you're wok frying, You won't get it there. So that was a bit of a myth that you couldn't use olive oil for frying because it was harmful. The science doesn't support that. Let's stay there for a minute.

What about using seed oils for cooking, whether it's avocado or whatever it might be? I think the jury is pretty clear that canola oil is something that's probably not great, but I even read some counter-evidence that, no, get over it, canola oil is fine. What is your position on it? Finding Mastery is brought to you by Rag Bone. I've been a big fan of Rag Bone for a number of years. I just love what they do. It's a go-to for me when I'm choosing clothes. I've been wearing their Infused Denim for a while now. They've done just a really nice job with this product. For me, I am really intentional about what I invest in. In clothing, it's no different. I want things that are well-made, that stand the test of time, that don't distract me, that support my focus on the things that matter most. And that's exactly why these deliver. And they look sharp, full stop. They've spent 20 years obsessed with getting this product right, and that kind of long-term commitment to craft, that's something we talk a lot about here at Finding Mastery. Quality compounds. The right inputs made consistently over time show up in everything, and you can feel that the moment you put these on. If you're ready to upgrade your denim with something that's genuinely built to last, head to rag-bone.com and use the code Finding Mastery for 20% off your entire order. Again, That's rag-bone.com, R-A-G-B-O-N-E.com, and use the code Finding Mastery for 20% off.

This anti-seed oil campaign is massively hyped, right, by a few influencers who are not scientists. I think most of the evidence doesn't support anything really deadly about seed oils. Doesn't mean that I use them myself. I'd much rather have extra virgin olive oil, which I know is the healthiest oil on the planet. Why would you use anything else unless you couldn't afford it? There are good seed oils and there are bad seed oils. There's down the bottom end, highly refined, the food companies are mixing them all up, adding all kinds of industrial processes to them. That's a problem of the processing, not the seed. So high-quality seed oil, I'm sure is fine. I don't personally use it. I just use extra virgin olive oil for everything. But if someone said, "I'm got any," here's some avocado oil and/or some high-quality rapeseed oil, canola, I would use it.

Yeah, okay. And when I go shopping for extra virgin olive oil, I use the same thing. I don't know which brand to trust, so I'm kind of going down and looking for labels that look like, I don't know, you know, like it's a little bit of a mess for me to choose. So I choose a dark bottle. And from Italy. So I'm not even sure how I got to those two ideas, but can you give me, us, me, but take a little bit more guidance?

Italians would never buy their olive oil from a giant store or supermarket, right? They would have their supply, their guy they know. Right. Because they know all kinds of trickery goes on in olive oil, right? And by the time it's imported to the US, There's lots of contamination, you know, labels get switched, and there have been some surveys showing that often it's not good. So the most important thing is to check the date of the olive oil, because it goes off. Okay, so each year there's a harvest, it's in October and November, and it will normally last about 18 months. And very often by the time it gets shipped over from Europe to the US, They say, well, the US, they don't mind, they don't know much about olive oil, we'll just give them the old stuff. So they might be 2 or 3 years out of date, it's lost a lot of its punch, its polyphenols. You lose a lot in the first 12 months. So you want something that's really been harvested recently, it's in a dark glass bottle, and when you drink it and have a bit raw taste it, just put it in a teaspoon, It should have a bitterness and should make you cough. You know, it should sort of—

I always thought it was like a spice that I would taste. Yes. Yeah, right.

But the key is to get a supplier you trust. I think that's the way to do it. Most of the mass brands are mixtures and they're not very good. You wanna get, you know, single, like you would a wine. Don't wanna get a wine from 20 vineyards mashed together. You know, you wanna get something that's real. That you know comes from a single estate, and they're the really good ones. But once you start tasting, you know what's a good one.

Great. Diversity, colorful plate or colorful foods.

Yeah, and there's many other examples really of, you know, that's what I love about this idea. It's not about restriction, it's about adding. And you know, we're so used to talking about food and nutrition and diet as you can't have this, you can't have that, you know, exclude this. Whereas what we're trying to do is to get more on people's plate and try new stuff. And every time you go to a restaurant, you're eating out, oh, I haven't had that plate before, or that, it makes you more adventurous. Try and get some new plant you've never seen before and just try it. Or different colored ones of the same ones. Why always orange carrots when you can have purple Persian carrots that have 9 times the polyphenol count? It's a whole new world once you start thinking in those terms of adding more and new different things, because, you know, A, it's gonna help your taste buds, but also it's gonna help the microbe guys down there.

One of my favorite things, my wife and I, Sunday mornings, we've got a local farmer's market. I do a little fitness, she does a little fitness. We meet at the farmer's market. You know, both of us are, you know, just kind of the glow after fitness or exercise, and we're shopping down and it's like, feels like it's a treat for the gut biome because there's so many different things to choose from. And it's a place we also get sourdough bread. I don't know exactly, but it's like an artisan sourdough bread, which I know you're high on sourdough as a fermented food. Would you suggest that on the diversity bit, that if there's a bread, you would stick with sourdough versus other breads? Or would you expand the types of breads beyond sourdough?

There's a lot of fake sourdough around. So supermarket sourdough is not controlled at all. They just can sprinkle a bit of sourdough flour in there or spray it with something, gives a sourdough smell, a slightly acidic lactic acid smell, and it passes as sourdough. Be wary of those cheap brands that say they're sourdough. They're just exactly the same. They're not of any health benefit at all. If you have a sourdough white loaf, it's still generally not good for you. It'll be slightly better than the equivalent white loaf.

What's a sourdough non-white loaf? What do you mean by that?

Well, the stuff I make and I eat regularly would be a sourdough made with at least 50% rye and 50% whole grain wheat. So it's not containing any refined flour in there, so it's full of fiber, it's very dense. It fills you up and it's a completely different taste. It doesn't have that sort of instant sugar burst that most breads do.

What do I ask the person that I'm buying my bread from? What do I ask him to know if I'm getting a properly fermented sourdough? Well, you ask him, you know, how long it's fermented for, where does the fermentation process take place, He's gonna look at me sideways, but how long is the fermented process?

It usually should be at least 12 hours. Okay. They can do longer ones. And is it all done on the premises? Does it come in frozen? Okay. These are sort of questions you can ask, but bread itself is one of the things that we all eat, but one of the most unhealthy things we can eat, 'cause most of it is sugar. So even if you sourdough it up, which means that the gluten particles are slightly smaller. You've got some dead microbes in there. You're still having a lot of sugar. So if you can go towards grains that are whole grains, so it's, it's made with the whole grain, not the refined grain, and it's got more rye or spelt in it, then it's going to fill you up much quicker, give you less of a sugar spike, and be much healthier. So I'm worried about everyone saying, oh, it's sourdough, therefore it's healthy. That's not the case. It's definitely not the case.

How many slices of bread do you have a week?

Oh, that's a tricky question.

One a day, probably. One slice a day, yeah. And then do you put corn tortilla and flour tortilla in the same conversation?

The same principles apply in that whatever your flour is, there's a huge difference. And this is the same for rice, for pasta, for all these things. If you're having the whole grain version of it rather than the refined white version of it, you're getting more fiber, it's harder to digest, it's helping your microbes, and it will fill you up more. So across the board, it will always be the better option. That's a general rule that people should be looking at.

Do you eat corn tortillas and flour tortillas? Rarely, yeah.

I mean, I eat most things occasionally, but I wouldn't be having them regularly. Yeah. And I was in Guatemala and it was very hard to avoid having tortillas.

You know, there's lots of options. And then kind of stay in this Southwest diet, if you will, here for just a moment. What about like tortilla chips that are, quote, organic? There's only like 2 ingredients in it or whatever, you know, back to that idea that we're talking about earlier. Danger food or it's okay?

They're a treat. They shouldn't be a regular thing. They're still going to give you a big sugar spike. They're not really going to give you any significant fiber. So of no great benefit to you. And yeah, the best ones may not have many additives, but you know, you go for the average tortilla chip, it's got 20 ingredients that you really don't wanna know what they are. And so these should be rare treats, definitely not part of a regular diet.

Okay, principle number 1, diversity. Eat with lots of different types of people.

30 plants. A second, eat the rainbow. Third would be have regular fermented foods. So try and get 3 fermented foods in a day. And the science is backing this up now. Is this the 4 Ks? Includes the 4 Ks, but not restricted to the 4 Ks. There's many more fermented foods than the kefir, the kombucha, the kraut, and the kimchi. You've also got all the misos. So miso paste, the soy sauce.

Soy sauce, yeah.

The nattos, if you're brave, which is the fermented soy sprouts. Water kefirs called tíbicos. Which is a drink. I haven't seen much of it in the US, but I've never had it. Yeah, it's quite big in the UK now, which again is made with grains, a bit like milk kefir grains. And you've also got some things like Worcestershire sauce, which are actual ferments. Tabasco.

Tabasco, when you mentioned that, it really surprised me. So Tabasco sauce, yeah, is a ferment.

Yeah, so a lot of these original, these condiments were made by fermentation and then often they got like the ketchup, Heinz took it over and it's no longer fermented, it's just chemically made. But some of these have kept those ferments and most people don't realize that high quality soy sauce is fermented.

I watch my salt intake. So when miso soup comes around at like a Japanese restaurant per se, I tend to pass from the salt intake. On the sodium or on the soy sauce, I tend to go low sodium. And I was reading your book, I was like, man, I need to maybe be rethinking this. Can you talk to me about salt and soy and salt and miso? And salt in all ferments really.

So I mean, kimchi is the one a lot of people avoid 'cause they think, well, this tastes really salty. Salty, yeah. And you know, I ferment and I'm adding a lot of salt to this stuff. 2% of everything you go in, it's salt. And if you're making miso paste, I make my own miso, you put in like 6% salt. So you'd expect people who have fermented foods a lot to have high blood pressure. And it turns out the opposite is true. In Korea they've done studies of 30,000 sort of kimchi addicts compared to 30,000 strange Koreans who don't have any kimchi, and their blood pressure of the kimchi guys was actually lower than the others.

With higher salt intake. But the way it works with the gut biome, it's awesome.

Well, clearly it must be the benefits of these fermented foods outweigh any negative effects of the salt. And I think, you know, we were always taught in medical school that salt is bad for everybody, we should all avoid it. But the research is really quite controversial. It's suggesting that Some people are salt sensitive. People from African background, for example, are much more likely to be salt sensitive. But overall, only about 20% of people in the US and UK are really sensitive to salt. The others, meh, makes only a tiny difference, a few percentage difference if you had really high salt intake. You know, it's interesting, so the reason I was sensitive— It's overstated, you know, 'cause it was a nice easy thing. Okay, your doctor says, "Don't have any salt," you know? Don't have any fat, don't eat salt, sorted. But the science doesn't tell us that. And what it does tell us is that if you have lots of plants, for example, that contain potassium— and many of the things we're talking about, the plants we're talking about, have high potassium levels— that is, having high potassium or potassium supplements is 3 times more effective than stopping salt. So it could be that all these plants you get in by having kimchi or even the ferments in miso, the soybeans, are reducing your blood pressure, and that far outweighs any bad effect of the salt. I believe that fermentation itself plus eating high potassium foods is actually good for your circulatory system, and that has been far underplayed by the medical world who are obsessed with just salt and that, you know, very simple solution. And it's actually clear from a lot of the data Yeah, some people suffer, they do need to pay attention to their salt, I'm not saying that's not true. But the majority of people are much better off having more, forgetting about salt, having, as long as they're not eating junk food, 'cause most of the salt comes from packaged goods. But if you're eating fresh food, adding salt to your food, life isn't worth living without adding salt to your food.

A little pinch, you're saying, yeah. But if you're opening a package, there's so much salt in those things, right?

Like, if you're doing your own stuff, you know, you should be adding salt to it to taste. You know, meat, for example, without salt, there's no point in eating it. It's totally tasteless. And we've evolved to have salt. You know, I stayed for a week with the Hadza tribe in Tanzania, and the one thing they used to trade for— they didn't need anything, but salt was the one thing they wanted, uh, when they met any, any other tribes. That's all they wanted. And you can understand why it was so precious.

I think the easy button is potassium banana. What are some of the other things that you think about for potassium-enriched foods?

Things like kiwi fruits, virtually all leafy vegetables, spinach, kale, they all have high potassium levels. Most fruits do. So it's, again, it fits into this idea of this wide variety of of plants, you'll naturally get high potassium levels if you do that. And I don't like to obsess about one particular plant or fruit because I think, you know, because everyone's trying to say, what's your super— what's your superfood? What's this one thing that's going to do it? It's getting this diversity of richness. You will naturally get the things that your body needs. Yeah, it's— and, and stop thinking, oh, you know I was told I mustn't have this. And so you cut out all this range of things from your diet that are really useful. I mean, beetroot is an amazing vegetable. I do a fermented beetroot. That's what I'm eating, yeah. It's wonderful. That's been shown in trials to have 3 times more effect on lowering your blood pressure than stopping salt.

How about it? I tripped on it by accident.

And the Romans said it was good for your sex life, so they had beetroot in all the brothels.

Oh, did they really? Yes. Yeah, that's funny. Finding Mastery is brought to you by our flagship mindset training course, Finding Your Best. Anytime you feel the pull to reset, to zoom out, to refocus and ask, am I moving toward the person I want to become? It helps to remember this: lasting change comes from training, not resolutions, not short-term sprints, but deliberate practice of the skills that shape how we show up in work, in relationships, and in the moments of great intensity as well. That's what Finding Your Best is all about. It's a science-backed framework for training your mind. It's the same set of tools that we've taught to Olympic athletes, top executives, elite military teams, and artists at the peak of their craft. In this course, you'll learn the foundational psychological skills to be your very best, full stop. And the best part is you can start anytime. To get started, head to findingmastery.com/course and use the code mastery to get $50 off your registration. Again, go to findingmastery.com/course. Course and use the code mastery because your future isn't shaped by what you intend, it is shaped by what you train. Finding Mastery is brought to you by AG1. Spring is— it's just a natural time to reset. You know, the days are getting longer, at least for the Northern Hemisphere, and there's just an energy in the air that shifts. There's a kind of pull to simplify for me, to recalibrate what's working, what isn't. And one area I come back to regularly is my daily routine. It's not about overhauling it, but it is about scrubbing the material of it to really making sense of why I'm doing what I'm doing. So I look at it all and I reexamine it. AG1, it's been one of those foundations for me for over a decade now. I'm still using it. I like what they're doing. What I appreciate most is how much it simplifies the equation. One scoop covers a lot of ground. They've got some multivitamins in there, and more than anything, it's the pre and probiotics. That I appreciate that they've done. It's all in one glass of water. So if you're taking a bunch of supplements, you don't have that pill fatigue that so many people talk about. I'm traveling a lot right now for our corporate clients, and that means shifting time zones and schedules. That's when consistency really helps. The AG1 travel packs, they've been a game changer for me. I throw a few in my bag and I don't have to think twice about it. I'm giving my body what it needs to keep showing up for work, for the people I care about for the long game, really. Visit drinkag1.com/findingmastery to get an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 free in your welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription. That's a $72 value for free. Again, that's drinkag1.com/findingmastery. Okay, so what do you say to the influencers? That say stop eating kale, it's giving you gas, it's a problem for your gut. That narrative, we just had somebody on that went pretty wild about that idea.

Kale's fine, but I wouldn't have it every day. I mean, you know, it's like everything in moderation. If you like kale, eat it, but you don't have to. There's plenty of other, you know, we have 30,000 other edible plants on the planet. We just get obsessed with a few we think are the only healthy ones. We're in this culture of, you know, what's the latest superfood? You know, I'm in LA, what's the, you know, what's the 2026 superfood I'm gonna have? Is it gonna be this Icelandic seaweed? Is it gonna—

You seem like you have an attitude about LA a little bit. It's great.

No, this is where all the food trends happen.

Is it? Is that the case? Interesting.

It is. A lot of food trends happen here. A lot of food myths happen here as well. So, you know, it's the good and the bad. Well done. Often starts here, then it goes often to London as the next big food influence place. And then if it's big in London, then it will come back to East Coast US and other things happen that way. It's, it's really interesting. But generally LA is still behind Europe in gut health. That's something I've noticed.

I think your warm beer is probably winning. Okay, keep going. So we got diversity, We got lots of colors. We digress. Yeah, we digress. Number 3 is—

We've done number 3, which is have 3 ferments a day.

3 ferments a day.

And that's— studies have shown that that will reduce your levels of inflammation. Right. Which we all know is crucial.

Linked to chronic disease.

It's linked to everything, right? Mental health, it's linked to, it's linked to physical health, it's linked to longevity, heart disease, immunity, you name it. You know, in the Western world, we have levels, low levels of inflammation, they simply don't have in underdeveloped countries.

Low levels of chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation. And what do you, on the blood, a nutritional blood draw, what do you look for for a marker for inflammation?

There's either one called a high sensitive CRP level. That's C-reactive protein. C-reactive protein. That's often not sensitive enough. And the other one is something called glycA. GlycA. Is a metabolite that's not very well known, only used in research, but that's what we did in our, in our Zoe studies. And that's why we used— as when we see like what happens after you eat some carbohydrates or you have too much fat in your blood, your glycA will go up progressively after these meals. So you're getting these little peaks of inflammation after bad food, and that builds up over time so that you're getting these low levels. But we know that many things contribute to inflammation, including stress and past trauma and pollution and everything else. So it's a pretty good marker of your environment and what you're doing. So get your fermented foods. You can get 3 fermented foods a day. And don't forget, we haven't discussed cheese. If you can find real cheese, right? Not the Kraft slice or the Cheez Whiz or the stuff in the tubes. You get fermented from that.

Hard or soft, does it matter to you?

It doesn't matter as long as it's real and it's, you know, has microbes in it and it's gonna go off.

Parmesan versus Brie.

They both have high levels of fermentation. In my book, I surveyed lots of foods and even Philadelphia cream cheese, one of the most popular ones, you know, has 3 microbe species in it. So most cheese is actually healthy for you and despite the fat content, despite what we've been told, that should be part of your, you know, people's diet if they wanna get another fermented.

Real cheese, not packaged cheese for the most part.

Nothing that comes too hyper-packaged that has a shelf life of 2 years, you know that that's not real.

And low-fat cheese. The processed low-fat cheese. No fat, you don't want that.

You don't want frozen cheese, you don't want most frozen pizza cheese, that's analog cheese, it's fake cheese. So it's real stuff. You may have to pay a bit more for it. It's very hard to get it in the US, but raw milk cheese has even more microbes. So sheep versus cow doesn't matter. They're both, both great. And goat is also good. So it doesn't matter what the original—

Sheep and goat work way better on my gut. Thank God. I don't— maybe you look at me like I'm crazy, but like, well, yeah, well, I like the look. You know, like, oh, I've heard this before.

Everyone, yeah. Did I tell you we're in LA? Yeah, you're in LA, so you can say whatever you like. Everyone's got some allergy, so I know that. Yeah. Or intolerance. I'm used to it now. That's fine. But, you know, we weren't designed to eat cow's milk for the rest of adulthood. 80% of the world's population can't drink milk, but you ferment it, you break it down to small bits, Most of the world can eat fermented milk.

When would you recommend kids stop drinking milk?

If they're growing fast enough, then probably they don't need it. It's quite good for promoting growth, but if you give too much, there are some evidence that like the Dutch kids are growing too quickly and too tall and they're having lots of fractures when they're older. So sometimes— Too much milk? That's— they drink— Yeah, 3 times more than any other country. Is that right? Yeah, you go to a university campus there and they have it on tap behind the bar.

I find the consistency to be nauseating.

So I don't think adults should be really drinking milk. There's no evidence now that it is healthy. We used to believe it was good at women at the menopause and all this kind of stuff, but all the latest science shows that's not true. So it's only good when it's fermented, and I only, I only have it when it's in a fermented form like a yogurt or a cheese.

Let's go back on the fermented food. The kraut is like one scoop, like one spoonful, one forkful. Like, how much are we talking about throughout a day?

We don't really know. I mean, there isn't the science yet to say what's the minimum amount you need. The studies that have been done have used portions like a small bowl or a cup. Yeah, so it's not a huge amount, right? Yeah, and it's something you can add to your meal rather than it being the meal itself.

I put it on top of things, you know, right?

That's all you need to do, just add a bit of color to your plate. That's what I do. That's what I do. Okay, so a little cup in the corner, that's my— add a bit of kraut to it, that's my portion. My breakfast is a mixture of Greek yogurt and kefir. And oh, you blend the two together? I blend the two together because I find Greek yogurt a bit too solid, and I find the kefir a bit too runny. And I recommend that to anyone who thinks kefir is a bit too sour as well. It sort of softens it. And so I put that, you know, together with some nuts and berries. That's my breakfast. But I've got my two ferments and I've got, you know, a really good start to the day.

Throw a little chia on there, now you got another superfood. Yeah, we're in LA. Yeah, okay, uh, I do that. A little chia on there is good, uh, some nuts.

And sometimes if I put my Daily 30 on actually. Do you? Yeah. Okay. Because that trumps your cheer. See, I can't wait to get to the Daily 30.

Okay. And then kombucha, per your book, not all kombuchas are the same. And so I'm not making my own kombucha. I am buying one that's artisanal, if you will. But then we, like I said, we've got on tap here at the Mastery Lab, we've got a kombucha tap. And I mean, this is one that you buy kind of off the shelf that I'll have you take a look at it. But should we be wary of the kombuchas that we buy off the shelf at like a in, in the U.S., like a Whole Foods or one of those markets that has slews of kombucha?

Yeah, I think you should be wary, but at the same time realize, well, is this better than what I was drinking before? So is this better than a regular soda? Probably yes. Does it have too much sugar in it, or does it have artificial sweeteners in it? Oh yeah, maybe it does. So it's all relative. Most mass-produced kombuchas you know, can go all over California or all over the US, have to have long shelf lives. So you think, how does a live microbe and yeast producing CO2 gas exist in a bottle or a can, you know, when it can't be refrigerated all the time? It can't. So they've either killed them, say most commercial kombuchas are either have dead microbes in them or they're filtered out. So they have this microfilter so none of the actual little bugs can get through. And so they've just got the soup they're in. They'll still be giving you some benefits. So all the recent studies show that dead microbes, whether it's in dead kefir or in dead kombucha or any other form, still have some health benefits for individuals. And they've done the same with probiotics, they've killed some of them and given people dead microbes as capsules. And amazingly they work. In some cases better than the live form, which is really strange, but in most cases not quite as well. And I think we have to still say we don't know the evidence here, but suddenly this opens up this idea that dead ferments could be good for us and could be why Sourdough bread has some advantages. So we're going back to the sourdough. Of course, it's baked in an oven, everything's killed. 'Cause if you heat anything above 65°C, everything's dead. But eating these dead bugs can provide some benefits. And what's really interesting is how do they work? How does a dead bug help you? It's a bit like a dead vaccine. We think it goes into the small intestine and then tickles your immune cells and that sends signals to the rest of your body to lower inflammation and calm things down. So I think we have to keep an open mind on these products. And if you can't get the very artisan one that's local to you, yeah, have the mass-produced one. It will still probably be giving you some benefit.

[Speaker] Oddly, like, it sparks the idea that, again, back to your book, "Ferment," is that if you are partners with somebody that drinks coffee, which my partner, she's Cuban, she drinks plenty of coffee, and you give her a kiss, that somehow you might be getting some of that in your gut as well.

Yes, you'll be getting the microbe, microbe, that's called Lawsonia bacter, that is a very fussy microbe that only eats coffee. So if we did the Zoe stools test on you, we likely to find reasonable levels of Lawsonia bacter because you have a partner that has coffee. But your partner would be 5 or 10 times higher. Yeah, right, okay. Because your one doesn't get a lot to eat. I don't know how many kisses you're getting, but it's probably not as much as drinking 3 cups of coffee a day. Yeah, okay. And so we do transmit our microbes between ourselves, our partners, our family, even our dogs to some extent. So there's much more crossover than we think. It's quite a flexible system.

Since we're talking about poop, scooping your poop is kind of the, the kind of classic test for, for gut biome. I think it's probably worth, before we finish off the, the other main factors— we got 3 of the, the main kind of principles, uh, when I first came across that research where they were inserting feces into mice, and you'll do a better job of explaining it, and that was changing their health profile, I was like, whoa, that was a remarkable groundbreaking bit of research. Can you set up that research and what the findings were that— if they were interesting to you as well? Yeah, so this—

really a lot of the breakthroughs, as you said, in the microbiome came from the ability to take a stool sample from diseased or healthy humans and put them into special mouse models that were these so-called sterile mice that had been raised in a microbial vacuum. Very clever systems. And these mice didn't develop very well, but they could keep them alive. And they gave a transplant of these microbes into these mice that had nothing in there at all. So suddenly they're getting these human microbes in there, and you could observe what happened to those mice. And the first experiments they did, they took some twins. One was obese, one was, uh, skinny, and they gave those to the mice. And sure enough, the one that got the obese microbes got fatter than the other one.

It's wild. Same with anxiety, same with depression. But anxiety— I don't think depression was one of them.

They find it hard to get a perfect model of, uh, mouse depression.

Yeah, but anxiety, the anxiety definitely.

And the effects were even bigger compared to the obese model. So we think the effect actually on the brain is bigger than on weight. They've replicated those anxiety studies in mice multiple times.

Just to be clear, you take stool from an anxious person, person, and you put that stool into a sterile environment, call it this mouse in particular, that mouse becomes anxious. Correct.

And then you can actually transfer from that mouse to another mouse and make it anxious, and you can reverse If you then give them antibiotics, you can actually reverse it as well and calm them down.

Is that also the case where if you took some stool from a very calm, grounded person— I'm using grounded as a non-medical term— and then had an anxious mouse and then inserted the stool from the calm person, that would that alone do it? Yes. Yeah. So, and there's— I haven't read that research.

Yeah, no, it works both ways. Works both ways. And it is remarkably consistent, these effects on the brain.

So let's stay here one more turn. Is that if somebody is struggling with anxiety, depression, a mental health condition of the such, and we are missing— or if you— I'll speak to the listener/viewer right now. If you have anxiety or depression and you're feeling those symptoms, whether you're in a medical diagnosis of it or not, take a look at your gut health.

100%. This is something I'm researching deeply at the moment, and the research is overwhelming that the state of your gut plays a huge role in your mental state. And this is borne out by numerous studies comparing people with mental health conditions against normals, looking at their gut health. Virtually all cases, you know, there's abnormalities. And we know that they've done randomized trials of probiotics and gut-friendly diets that improve people with mild to moderate depression more than antidepressants. It's a remarkable bit of research.

Doesn't mean that there's not a place for traditional medicine for folks that like— however, and I'll take a strong position with you, I think, on this, is that if you are not investigating gut health as part of a mental health condition, you are missing a massive, massive contributor to overall function.

Yeah, it doesn't matter whether you respond to antidepressants or not. If you can improve your diet and your gut, you know, you're gonna improve your outcomes massively. And you remember about at least a third of people don't respond at all to standard antidepressants or don't respond to talk therapy. So I think this should be part for everybody Regardless of whether they're on drugs or not, or on therapy. And my view has been hardened on this because of some trials we've been doing with Zoe. We're unusual in terms of a direct-to-consumer company that actually does science. So we've done 3 trials. One was a trial of just going on the Zoe program diet, where we get personalized nutrition and they improve their diet along these principles and we saw big improvements compared to the control group in terms of mood and energy and hunger, right? And they happened before anything else. We did a study I was gonna talk about where we gave our prebiotic, this Daily30 mix that's now commercially available, and compared that to a control and to a probiotic arm. And before we saw any changes in the gut microbiome, after a few days, mood and energy improved significantly. Self-report? Yes, it was self-report, but there was a dose-response effect as well. So the people that dropped out, you know, had much less effects. You can't really measure any, any other way in psychiatry. So, but that really supports all this animal data that one of the first effects of changing your gut health is actually on, on mood and energy and As you know, energy is particularly a sign of neuroinflammation.

When you say energy, what do you mean by energy?

It's a perception of how much fatigue you have. That's right, yeah. Whether you're dozing off at the end of the day, you need a nap, you're just not motivated to get out of your chair and go to the gym or meet friends. It's hard to separate that from mild depression. They do go together. It's a common complaint, and it's not something that most physicians really ask patients about, but it's something I've got interested in because it's so striking in our trials.

Okay, I want to take a quick minute here to talk about finding mastery. If you are leading a team right now, you already know that strategy, execution, priorities, accountability— those matter. And what I've seen time and time again is that organizations don't rise or fall to plan alone. Of course not. They rise and fall to the internal conditions of the people that are carrying the plan. That's the inner game that I'm pointing to. And the teams that invest in their psychological skills, they're the ones that are best prepared to navigate dynamic environments like the one we're all living in right now. At Finding Mastery, we help leaders and teams build the mindsets and psychological skills that support sustainable high performance, and we do it inside the rhythm of business. This not as one more thing, but as a practical way to operate when pressure is real and the stakes are high. We have partnered with teams at Microsoft and Salesforce, LinkedIn, New York Life, Merck, Adidas, AIT, Waymo, and so many more, helping leaders lead through change, strengthen culture, and perform more consistently in high-stress and high-stakes environments. And you're not just getting me, you're getting a whole team that includes high-performance psychologists, performance strategists, and Olympians who know how to bring this work to life. So if you want to really unlock the edges of your team's potential, simply go to findingmastery.com/innergame to learn more. Again, that's findingmastery.com/innergame. Let's keep pushing. Let's keep exploring. There is one solution, which is like, eat more diversity, eat more color, and Skittles doesn't mean color. M&M's is not color, right? Real color. Yeah, we're talking about the real color. Okay, so that's going to solve it. You're going to eat less packaged foods if you're eating more real foods. There's going to be a gut health, which is going to have, for most people, I should say, I think it's 50+ percentage would be an easy number, a net positive impact on brain and mood, correct? Yeah, roughly. Okay, so there's one indicator. The second is knowing how to modulate and work with stress. Stress is always part of the human condition. When— and there's different types of stress: acute stress, moderate stress, chronic stress. And we're really talking about the inability to meet acute stress with high skill. So when there's an acute stressor that takes place and a person lacks the ability to meet that demand, then it kind of slides eventually over to moderate, slides over eventually to chronic stress. And what we're really talking about is chronic stress is an underlying factor for so many conditions. And breathing, meditation, exercise, smiling, laughing, holding hands, being in nature, magnesium baths. Okay, lots of things that you can do to modulate stress well. Optimism training and, and, and. Okay, so if you did some of those training recommendations, you would also have a gut health without a benefit. I think a net positive increase in gut health if you did both together. Quality food, quality psychological kind of buffering with acute stress. I think there's a winning combination in that.

Yeah, I think you've got to see this as a two-way— you've got inflammation in your gut which can make brain disorders worse, and you've got things like stresses which can make your gut inflammation worse. So it's a two-way street. It's hard to know in a way where to start this idea because you've got to try and come up with some holistic view of everything from, you know, some people believe that childhood traumas cause long-term stress and there's some evidence, you know more than I do, but there's, you know, that this is the case that can cause physiological stress levels, which means your immune system is just primed. More, so that it's going to react more to things than it would.

Sympathetic dominance, as we would say.

So if you had this whole history of these traumas and then you got a bad diet on top of that, which may be trebling those rates that you would have had because of those incidents, you're just stacking up all these features that are— continue to drive this physiological inflammation which is the signal to your brain to be stressed. That's right. Right. So it's all rather circular and they do connect up and it does start to— I think this is really important because it starts to link, you know, psychological theory with something hard physiological that you can measure. And this is— and the gut is probably reflecting a lot of this stuff that, you know, as well as transmitting stuff to the brain, it's also sensing what the brain is, is telling it as well.

It's such a wonderful emblem for the interaction between what we would call a top-down and a bottom-up approach. The bottom-up being the gut, in this case, is telling the brain some stuff and influencing the psychology, and psychology is going to tell the brain, uh, some stuff that influence the gut. And the choices that you're making about how you're framing a situation and the choices you're making about what you're ingesting into the ecosystem, you know, it's a beautiful harmony. I've been really interested in nutrition for all of those reasons, and I think it's near negligent to not talk about optimization or becoming your very best, let alone lifespan, healthspan, longevity— of course those are great topics— without including gut health, nutrition, and psychology as part of the narrative.

No, it's clear now that I think once you start to think about what's going on in your gut and that incredible axis to the brain that goes in both directions, and the fact we've evolved millions of years to have these microbes that are in a way telling the brain what's going on, and if we see it that way, the brain sometimes— a lot of our common mental health problems I think are the brain misinterpreting what's going on. It says, hey, I should be depressed or stressed because my gut tells me I'm ill. Maybe the brain can't say whether I've got the flu or I've just been eating lots of junk food and crap for the last, you know, 6 months.

Or flipping through your phone. If I'm on social media for, I don't know, longer than 15 minutes, I feel something. I feel like there's a nauseous feeling that I have.

You've had too many Big Macs.

Is that the similar feeling? Yeah, right. Yeah. Okay, let's hit principle 4, which is intermittent fasting.

Yes, and what we're talking about here is time-restricted eating, where the evidence is all piling up for this is really beneficial for people because it is eating the same amount of food but in a limited time. It's not about dieting or anything else. It's just saying, okay, I'll just be careful when I have my first and my last meal of the day. And if you can do that in a 10-hour window, ideally, You know, it could be a bit flexible around that, but leaving 14 hours overnight, that seems to be pretty optimum in terms of how you can do it, but also helps your gut. And the reason that it helps your metabolism, helps some people lose weight, a lot of that is due to the fact that it's helping your gut repair itself and getting us out of this cycle of late-night snacking, doing what the food companies want us to do, eat 7, 8 times a day, So you're not giving your gut time to rest, repair the gut wall, and realize that this whole other defense team comes out at night from your gut microbes, completely different set of species, and they just clean up and they clean your mucus layer and they smarten everything up. And the better that is, the better your metabolism. And that is really important for your immune health.

And you can get to that autophagy process within, a 10-hour window of restricted eating? I thought autophagy didn't happen until like, I don't know, 36 hours in, or—

We're not talking about autophagy here. We're really talking basic cleaning operations that the microbes are essentially eating your mucus layer. And so they're tidying up this, and your body is able to sleep. And it's all about circadian rhythms so that your gut is in the same circadian rhythm as you are. And the more we look at it, the more important it is, is everything is aligned. If you just before going to bed, you know, you have a Snickers bar or some cookies, you're totally confused. You're not letting your gut sleep at all. And so, you know, you're getting the effects of insomnia in your gut. That's the way to be thinking about it. So it's a much more holistic view than this concept of autophagy, which is a bit reductionist because just one of the many.

It's one of the many. One of the many systems we have for being healthy, but which is the clearing out of the senescent, the, the— yes, but quote-unquote bad cells.

But we know that, you know, the better you sleep, the better your circadian rhythms are, the more you can control this kind of repair processes of the body. And it's repairing all the cells in your body, you know, whether senescent ones or cancerous ones. It's allowing your immune system to be optimally surveying everything. So I think it all, it all fits in and In those studies, you know, we did the study on 140,000 people who are Zoe members in the UK, and they just said, hey, I'll give it a try. And a third of people loved it, and they're still doing it, you know, 2 years later. A third hated it and said, I don't want to do this, you know, I want to— I can't control when I, you know, stop eating. And about a third are in the middle and are still doing it a bit. So it's not for everybody. But I think it's definitely in there that if you can do it, you will feel a lot better and it can definitely shift your mood and energy levels.

I intermittently do intermittent fasting and I search for that 12 to 14 hour restricted zone. I like it. Like, I really— I think that I feel— I feel better when I do it, but I intermittently do it. It's not 7 days a week. It's more like 3 or 4.

All the things I'm talking about, you shouldn't— you try for 80% of the time, right? There you go. Because what you want to do is sustain this for decades, not just for a few weeks in January, you know, when you're changing habits. That's— we've made that mistake so often as humans that we just try and be good for a few weeks and then we break it once because, you know, some friends come round and you, you know, and take you out for a meal or whatever, and it's all over. So it's really important to have a social life, really important to not be too restrictive in your habits. And I think we can get too obsessed with this. 80% of the time is fine, you know. If you fall off the wagon for a couple of weeks, doesn't matter, go on and do it. You know, I find, you know, if I've got something important like a podcast and it's at 11 in the morning, much better if I haven't eaten. Me too. Um, I'm sharper and And as long as you're engaged, it's easy to do. If you're hanging around on a Sunday by the fridge, it's quite hard, right?

So I've got 3 things left. I wanna hit the last principle. I wanna talk about alcohol and then I wanna hit us on probiotics.

Okay, let's get the last principles out the way, shall we? Yep. So it's quality, not quantity, ignore calories and go for whole plant foods, avoid ultra-processed foods. Pretty clear one for the reasons we've already discussed. The other one is pivot your protein. Everyone's obsessed with protein at the moment. It's— still see that trend continuing for another year or so, but let's try and focus not on total amount of protein, but get quality protein. The average American probably has twice as much protein as they need, but they're not getting enough of the right protein. And by the right protein, I mean, let's get things like legumes, which are packed with protein and they're also really high in fiber. Because we also know that 95% of Americans are deficient in fiber. Get those protein goals in, but also be sensible and switch rather than just, you know, having it as powders. Start getting, you know, get those beans in the system. So I think these are some general principles that are really helpful in thinking about everything that you can do to help your gut health.

Awesome. I love principle-based approaches to everything. So thank you for those. Hit us on alcohol really quickly. Your take on alcohol in general. There's a fermentation involved in it, which I'm sure you're— you like that. But there's also so much concern about kidney and other organ health, including brain health, when it comes to alcohol.

Yes, there's no doubt that alcohol is bad for us. Okay. You know, it's a neurotoxin. It's bad for our brains, increases our risk of cancer, etc. Many populations do have alcohol as part of their culture, and some of the most long-lived populations on the planet have a culture of drinking wine. For example, lots of centenarians will drink lots of wine and be healthy. So there's a slight mismatch here. I'm someone who does drink alcohol. I, I drink 10 to 14 units a week, mostly wine, mostly red wine.

What is a unit? A glass.

A glass. A small glass, a European-sized glass, not an American-sized glass. 12 ounces of wine. Yeah, yeah. You can have half a bottle in a glass in some bars here, I've been to. And the reason is that red wine is actually healthy for your gut. So it might be overall bad for your health slightly, but it does, because the grape is, the grape skin is in contact with water, those polyphenols come out and they're very high polyphenol foods. So generally red wine drinkers have healthier guts than non-drinkers. So we did a study on this. But I do think we need to be careful when we say— so I think drinking one glass of wine a day is fine. There are risks involved, but I worked it out in my book. You get far more risk by driving an hour a day in your car And if you're drinking one glass of wine, you need to be drinking about a million bottles before one person's going to die because of that. So when people talk about there is an increased risk, there's no safe level of drinking, they never say compared to what.

Driving. There's no—

which I think is a pretty good thing to say. Yeah, you don't have to drive, you know, you could take, you know, right? Yeah, right. But you don't have to drink, but you could do so. I think we have to be sensible and realize that, yeah, it's dangerous for many people. Alcohol is a drug, but for many people it's important for their social cohesion, uh, going out. In Mediterranean countries, a lot of social contact revolves around it. It makes them more sociable, makes them live longer. So there are other advantages. So I attract a lot of criticism when I say this, but I think it is important to get Perspective, I'm an epidemiologist, so I do talk in terms of risk. It's something I do know about.

Red wine versus gin versus wine versus tequila.

Spirits are bad. So they have no benefits on gut health.

Less sugar in, call it a gin versus red wine. Yeah, but the difference is not that important.

And so just having that distilled spirit means it's got nothing really beneficial in it. And interestingly, we were talking about postbiotics, these dead microbes. There are some beers that have yeast in them, that dead yeast in the bottom of sediment, some Belgian beers, et cetera, and Guinness, could actually have some health benefits to counteract the alcohol.

They're gonna love you if you find some of that.

That's really funny. Well, they are doing some studies now because of this new idea. And interestingly, because this postbiotic thing is, becoming real, these dead microbes. It's one reason we put dead kombucha into our Daily30. We added it recently. So I think we're going to see many more dead microbes or dead fermented foods added to normal food because it's so much easier to deal with a dead product than something that's alive. So this is, I think, a big trend for next year.

Dr. Specter, I could talk to you for a long time. I'm getting a hook from our producer that we are way over time. So, um, thumbs up or thumbs down on probiotics versus prebiotics or both?

They both work, but our studies show that prebiotics like Daily 30 have a much bigger effect on the gut microbiome.

I love the approach you're taking that is principle-based, evidence-informed, research-backed, and very practical. So thank you for carving out the time. I'm wishing you the flat-out best on your book. It's a great read. I've really enjoyed it because it also teaches like how to do fermenting, you know, the benefits, a position on gut health, and super practical, like low alcohol content wines, red wines included, you know, and, and, and, and so I just wanna say thank you for your contribution to, you know, human health. And I've really appreciated your work. That's right.

I love it. And it's been fun. Yeah, thank you.

Next time on Finding Mastery, we are joined by Dr. Angela Duckworth, psychologist and bestselling author The Father of Grit.

In this conversation, Angela and Mike go beyond perseverance to explore what it really takes to sustain effort over time, how purpose shapes resilience, when pushing harder helps or harms, and why passion is something we develop, not discover. They also dig into thoughtful insights on parenting and how to support growth without pressure.

Join us Wednesday, February 18th at 9 AM Pacific. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com/newsletter to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors, and we take our recommendations seriously, and the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love and endorse every product you hear on the show. If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers you heard about in this episode, episode, you can find those deals at findingmastery.com/sponsors. And remember, no one does it alone. The door here at Finding Mastery is always open to those looking to explore the edges and the reaches of their potential so that they can help others do the same. So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend, and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, Information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your healthcare providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring. Come on.