The 5 things you NEED to know for better GUT HEALTH with Professor Tim Spector

Looking after your gut health is one of the most important things you can do for your overall health. By the time you've finished this video you'll know exactly what to do. Research shows that if you do these five things you could improve your immune health, your digestion, reduce problems of excessive appetite, increase your energy levels and even possibly live longer. Hi, I'm Professor Tim Spector. I'm a professor of genetic epidemiology and a co-founder of ZOE. My number one tip for improving gut health is eat more plants. It's about diversity of plants. It's that full range because each plant is full of different chemicals that are nutritious for our gut microbes and remember that gut microbes like you and I have their favourite foods. So some microbes might like a purple carrot rather than an orange one so give them a treat and the more you do that the more different microbes you have that will be then acting in their pharmacy role pumping out all these vitamins and chemicals that help our health. This diversity is really important based on a study we did with the American Gut Project and the British Gut Project that I was leading that found that the sweet spot for optimum gut health was around 30 plants a week. You might be saying 30 plants that's far too many I can't cope with that. Well you've got to remember what a plant is. It's not just a vegetable. It's nuts, it's seeds, it's herbs and it's spices. So my first tip is to add more herbs and spices to your cooking and actually a herb and a spice has the highest level of defense chemicals in it which gives it those aromas it gives it that incredible taste and so you don't need very much of it to have a really big effect on your gut microbes. If you want to get as many of the different ones as you can into your cooking try combining those herbs for example selections of Mediterranean herbs where you've got four or five of them in the same jar that works very well. You can also get other ones where you've got the spices so spice mixes are very common again getting four or five. There are studies and there was one recently in Singapore gave volunteers a single serving of spice mix and within two weeks they'd improved their gut microbes so I think as long as you're generous with it it should be having a good effect on your gut. So as well as buying mixed herbs and spices you can also buy mixed grains and nuts so that gives you four or five plants straight away. When you get your nuts don't just go for one nut go for four or five of them they're all really tasty and remember each one is helping your gut microbes who might be a bit fussy. I want to show you what I do as my go-to hack is to make my own diversity jar so I don't have to worry about it every morning and I'm just going to fill it up with a variety of nuts and seeds. So there we've got it my gut health cocktail and it's so gratifying to know that of the 30 plants a week I've already got about a dozen of them ticked off that I just simply have to add to my morning yogurt. For gut health I always choose this over this and I'm going to tell you why. Well it's all about eating the rainbow because these plants get their colour and sometimes their bitter taste from defence chemicals called polyphenols. It turns out the same polyphenols that help the plants also help us because they're like rocket fuel for our gut microbes so it's really important to recognise which plants have the highest polyphenols so you can choose them ahead of those the ones that don't. So it's super important to learn how do we get more of these polyphenols into our diets and I'm going to show you how. Always pick brighter coloured plants over the others so for example if you happen to come across some of these purple carrots these will have nine or ten times more polyphenols than the standard one. My other tip is to go for these green vegetables like kale are a fantastic way to get your polyphenols they're often slightly bitter and that's a really good sign as well as dark coloured. Remember each of these colours is going to give you a different chemical, a different pigment and so if you want to feed your microbes different things that's why this rainbow concept is so important. And of course we all love chocolate if it's over 70% it's going to be packed with polyphenols that are really good for you as well as having your extra virgin olive oil and of course the last of that trio that I can't go without is my daily polyphenol dose which is my cup of coffee. Cheers. I can nearly guarantee there's one key nutrient for gut health that you're lacking. Over 90% of us are not getting nearly enough fibre in our diet to optimise our gut health. This all came home to me a few years ago when I visited the Hadza tribe in Tanzania they're hunter-gatherers who still have the same lifestyle as we did 30,000 years ago and it turns out that this tribe have twice as many microbial species which means twice as good gut health as we do. They get less western diseases, virtually no cancers or heart disease. Now the simplest way to up your fibre content starts with whole grains and whatever they are it's always better to pick the whole grain darker version of it like whole grain pasta for example which has twice as much fibre. Next, beans are absolutely packed with fibre as well as other nutrients and I like to get a mix of them. You can get cans that have mixed beans in them that give you even more variety of fibres and I like to add those to my pasta sauce if I'm having pasta with it or even instead of the pasta to make a really nutritious high fibre meal. Then you might want to swap out your normal crisps for popcorn. Three grams of fibre in a portion of popcorn. Your frozen peas, these guys have four or five grams per portion which is amazing and of course back to your good old raspberries and other berries which have one of the highest fibre contents around and they're so easy to add to all kinds of meals and finally let's not forget about the skin of plants because that's where a lot of the fibre is hidden and in potatoes if you peel them you lose over half of the fibre so always trying to keep the skin on and there are some fruits as well like these kiwis so now I eat my kiwis with the skins on. Do you like your food dead or alive? I prefer mine alive and by that I don't mean running around but they're full of live microbes in certain foods, certain fermented foods that end up being really good for our gut health and there are all kinds of ways to get your ferments. The one most people know about is good old yogurt. Yogurt is basically just any milk, cows or sheep or goats and you add some microbes to it and they grow and they love living there and you get two or three different species in there. What most people don't know is that kefir which is increasing in popularity is like a super yogurt so rather than just two or three microbes there are often 10 to 20 different types of microbe in a kefir that can be used in addition to yogurt because it's slightly more sour so I tend to mix them up myself. I like the taste of both and so they're really good and you can add these two sauces, add it to salad dressings for example as easy ways. Kombucha is another one that's fermented tea, make sure it hasn't got too much sugar in it but this stuff fabulous to just drink on its own and then of course you've got sauerkraut and kimchi which are basically cabbage based, one with chilies and other spices and others just with some herbs. They're both delicious on their own whether it's on top of an avocado or it's on a sandwich. I tend to find all kinds of fascinating ways to get my ferments in so that way I can get several portions of fermented foods into my daily pattern of eating and studies have clearly shown that this improves your immune health and you'll improve your gut health. There's one major food that we eat in the UK more than anyone else in Europe and nearly anyone else in the world that is slowly killing our gut microbes, it's ultra processed food. Ultra processed food makes up nearly 60% of our diet in the UK. We know particularly from our own Zoe snack survey we did that 75% of the snacks we eat which is a considerable amount of our daily calories are ultra processed, that means they're really harming our gut health every time we eat them even if they've got some health halo saying they're high in protein or high in this or that, they're not good for us. So I want to suggest a few swaps in our snack habits that can make a dramatic change to you and your gut health. Always nice to have olives around because they're a fantastic high polyphenol snack. Popcorn is a really good swap for some of those really synthetic savoury snacks that we're tempted to buy. You've got peanut butter, nuts and seeds, just a handful of nuts can reduce your risk of death by about 14% if you have that every day. So these are incredibly healthy and eating the rainbow again with snacks that you can dip into something like hummus, so easy to have as well as a handful of berries if you fancy something a bit sweeter. So there are many ways to make the transition from an unhealthy snacking habit to a healthy snacking and in doing so really improving the health of your gut and its microbes. Thanks for joining me on this gut journey, I hope you enjoyed it. Do leave us any comments, we'd love to know how you got on and if you want to learn more to go to the next level, do check out our videos. So it's goodbye from me and it's goodbye from my gut microbes.