Inflammation drives the leading cause of death: Here's how to reverse it | No.1 Gut Scientist

Inflammation is actually about our body repairing itself, we would be dead without it, why is it bad if it continues? It's been likened to lighting a lot of fires that are normally fine and they go out straight away, but if you keep doing it, it's like you have these embers in your body in a permanently elevated state, which means you can't function normally. You cannot perform normal repair processes. You are more likely to miss cancer. You are more likely to repair part of your body wrong. you age faster, well I think that's really interesting, it's important for people to understand that this goes far beyond the immune system and the activation of the immune system, this is more dire in the big picture in terms of our health and if We go through the list of The most common

cause

s of

death

that afflict our two countries, what you will find is that the main

cause

s are all inflammatory diseases, so is it possible to reduce

inflammation

or is it something of a one-way street?

It can absolutely reduce

inflammation

in less time. 24 hours if we could do one thing and you would be welcome to Zoe Science and Nutrition, w

here

world-

leading

scientist

s explain how their research can improve your health. I'm your host, Jonathan Wolf, co-founder and CEO of Zoe,

here

today. We talk about inflammation being critical to our health but it is often misunderstood, what if I told you that your gut could be a source of chronic inflammation and that this inflammation can cause serious conditions like type 2 diabetes, heart disease and even cancer? And then what would happen if I told you that? it is possible to

reverse

this that good bacteria in the gut could reduce inflammation today we are joined by two giants in the world of healthy nutrition and the microbiome Professor Tim Specter and Dr.

Will Bwitch Tim and Will are here to help us learn how to reduce inflammation and improve our health Tim is a professor of epidemiology at Kings College London, a noted author, an authority on the gut microbiome, and my scientific co-founder here at Zoe will is a board-certified gastroenterologist, New York best-selling author Times gut health expert and Tim, Zoe's US medical director, I'll appreciate you joining me today so you know the drill which, of course, we're going to start with a quick round of questions from our listeners, uh, and for anyone who's new to the program, that means you can give us a yes or a no or if it's absolutely necessary to answer with one sentence, uh, and I'll start with Tim, can inflammation cause serious long-term illness?

Yeah, well, if I have high levels of inflammation in my body, will I feel it? Possibly Tim can. what I eat causes inflammation after meals could definitely improve my gut bacteria reduce inflammation throughout my entire body absolutely and then for you two, what's the most surprising thing you've discovered about inflammation? I would say that inflammation is more than just the immune system. I would say that inflammation actually has to do with how our body repairs itself and is crucial to repairing the aging body as well as all of our immune functions, so it's incredibly important that we get it right so I'm really excited about this episode and I think those answers are kind of an explanation of why because I think you know most of our listeners are going to be like me, I mean.

Before meeting Tim and Sarah years ago, I hadn't paid attention to this idea of ​​inflammation, and in fact, what surprises me as I've met more and more

scientist

s over the last seven years with Zoe is how often that focus on inflammation. Now what I do understand is that it is connected to the health of our gut microbiome. There are trillions of bacteria in our gut and they can be seriously harmful to our health, but after that it all gets very complicated, so I'm really excited to have you both here so I can explain it in a very simple way. way, but also to explain to us a lot of practical tips about what we can do to reduce inflammation and improve our health and I guess I would like to start with the simplest question: what is inflammation?

I would define inflammation as the activation of the immune system um and that activation is usually in response to what the immune system thinks is a threat now, whether it's actually a threat or not is a different question, but the immune system has essentially said that it is time to go to work, we must protect and defend the body and therefore the immune system is activated and Tim is good or bad inflammation is essentially designed by Evolution to be good, we would be dead without it because our body does not would react to anything from, you know, a little cut against a rose bush to stop bleeding, to prevent scarring or to combat some little microbe that was trying to get, you know, into our mouth and into our intestines, which is why we all need inflammation, and we generally talk about this as if acute inflammation means short-term inflammation. and it is when this normal response continues that what is called chronic or long-term inflammation occurs and that is when the body is in a permanent state of heightened awareness, so it is like picking a fight all the time, but often inappropriately because there's no more infection, there's nothing else, it's that he's being tricked into thinking he has to fight and that's where we have the problem and the analogy that I think about a little bit is that, as you both know, I broke my toe.

A year ago I tore it into pieces and there was definitely a lot of swelling in that finger afterwards, like it had swollen to this huge size and what I understood, actually, when you were explaining it to me, is that swelling is good. Pretty much this whole process where the body has been activated to heal this wound and interestingly enough it lasted quite a while. I would say the inflammation didn't completely recur for probably more than six months in that case. but now it's gone, so I think you're describing it as an example of inflammation working the way it was intended, Tim, that's right, it's designed there to open up the blood vessels, you get extra fluid in there and stuff. it sort of gets rid of the waste and the damage and then it also signals the white blood cells to get out of the blood and into that system to start repairing the damage and so you get this whole cascade of events that leads to you having a swollen, red, painful, dilated toe, is exactly the defense mechanism you want and you know you notice it as swelling, but eventually you get inflammation around the cut, so new cells are driven to that place and begin to repair and establishing new skin and eventually the whole process after a few months, you know, it pretty much goes back to where it was, it's a normal system so generally what we've found in health is you know most Pathologies occur when normal defense systems fail a little and this tends to happen more and more with age and as we have small defects in how these things happen, often the body reacts to something that it thinks is a threat, but in reality is its own fabric and that is its own fabric.

The body is gone and attacks its own skin causing funny rashes or it might attack its own joint thinking that there is actually some germ in there that it has to get rid of and that is why people get long term arthritis and skin diseases and of the intestine. You could also have intestinal colitis because the body reacts against itself in the same way to your injury, so if inflammation is good in these examples, I guess the obvious question is why is it bad if it continues, you might think it's great to always have it on so help us understand why it's not good if there's too much there are always consequences there are always consequences for the activation of the immune system so when you're in an acute environment in response to an infection. or uh, to bodily injury, those consequences are worth the price of admission because you're defending the body in a way that is necessary, but when we talk about unnecessary chronic inflammation, which is really the root of the problem here, the consequences that we receive are not those we want or intend and can have effects on our entire body.

Tim mentioned autoimmune diseases and we could add allergic diseases to the list of classic inflammatory things, but actually the list goes much further than this. in terms of conditions associated with inflammation and in many cases conditions that people wouldn't even think are actually inflammatory, so it's important for people to understand that this goes much deeper than we think, as you know. , the immune system. system and the activity of the immune system, this is more harmful in the long term, in terms of our health, and well, just to make sure that I have it, what you are saying is if you have this as long-term inflammation for years instead of just days or maybe months, that actually increases the risk of really serious diseases like heart attacks and cancer and things like this absolutely and if we go down the list of the most common causes of

death

that afflict our two countries, what you will find is that the main causes are all inflammatory diseases, so you know, coronary artery disease, cardiovascular diseases, strokes, different forms of cancer, the vast majority of forms of cancer are inflammatory, as a result of long periods of time. long-term inflammation diabetes is an inflammatory disease, uh, obesity, Alzheimer's, these are all inflammatory conditions, so it sounds like you're saying that basically inflammation is this kind of hidden cause of almost everything that probably worries people. the people who listen to this. or at least it is one of the causes.

I don't think we want to spend the hour doing this, but you could easily generate a list of over 100 health conditions associated with chronic inflammation and what's important for our listeners to understand. is that you can go to five different doctors for five different health conditions, but the root cause that unites them all is inflammation and the frustrating part of that is that if that's what's going on in the aggregate, why don't we talk more about it? from this? part that's frustrating, well, I think everyone's probably paying attention at this point and I guess the next question is, is there more long-term inflammation today than in the past?

Because I think we're obviously aware that there seems to be a big increase in these kinds of serious long-term chronic diseases, compared to the past, I think we're seeing a change in the past, people had chronic infections, so it was very common for people to have tuberculosis, for example, which was the classic example of an acute inflammation that continues because you can't get rid of the virus that causes tuberculosis and so your body continues to react against it and you get a similar effect with things like leprosy and very often these chronic diseases. The inflammatory conditions were related to an original infection and we have really entered an era where we are not exposed to as many viruses and infections, but now we have a higher level of autoimmune diseases and these Western lifestyle diseases that now have an effect inflammatory. component, so I think we went from modern life of living surrounded by microbes with a really strong immune system to suddenly going to modern life in its sterile form with poor diets, which means we're suddenly much more prone to things such as food allergies and maybe Some of these food allergies trigger long-term autoimmune diseases and chronic intestinal problems.

The way we have had it, the defense system hasn't changed, but the challenges have and it may not be as well prepared in childhood as it was in the past. and that's one theory about why we're suffering more from these problems now, besides, of course, our terrible diet, and there's a question that's a classic scientific question: Is it nature or nurture? Is it genetics? or is it? the environment and Tim, you've spent your life studying this question and um, genetics don't change that quickly in humans, now in microbes they can change very quickly, but in humans we don't have the capacity or ability to do that, um , what happened?

Our environment has changed and you know, we spent millions of years living in a pre-modern, pre-agricultural environment, and then we spent 12,000 years in a slowly adapting, slowly changing agricultural environment, but really, if you think about it, we reached a point where which Science and technology took off in the last few hundred years and as science and technology took off we became evolutionary pioneers as human beings and in the process of doing so and allowing science and technology to shape our environment, let's change our environment radically even in the last 100 years. years, um, what we have lost sight of is that those changes have an effect on our body,those changes have an effect on the microbes and the microbes are responsible for training our immune system, yes, and that is why food allergy was really unknown to medicine. back around 1969 when man walked on the moon and now it's one of the most common things you see in schools, so something pretty dramatic happened in our interaction with our immune system, uh, training it when we were kids, That was, uh, that was.

Really different before and after that kind of wartime and I think that's really fascinating and it's really just a snapshot of what's happening in a lot of other diseases. I think what you're saying is that long-term inflammation levels are much higher. that in the past and particularly that when you had them in the past I think you were saying Tim that it often came from some active disease similar to that you had leprosy. I haven't met many people walking the streets of, you know, New York, London or Los Angeles with leprosy, so I feel like that's not the case anymore.

The main problem that

drives

inflammation is this Fair Tim in India and uh, Nepal, the country that I visited, there are still many leper hospitals, but tuberculosis, its cousin, is very common, you get it, but in terms of driving the rates of cancer and diabetes and all the things you're talking about, it's not leprosy or tuberculosis. is causing this right, that's right, yeah, that's right, and that's just the way the immune system is working differently, so you're saying this is a really high level of inflammation over the course of years. that has been caused by our environment.

Hello, were you surprised? Learn how important the role inflammation plays in serious illness. I know it means a lot to me and the entire team now that you hear this every week. We put so many hours into this podcast and released the show for free. Ad-free to help millions of people improve their health with cutting-edge science. In return, all I ask is that you help us on this mission by hitting the Subscribe button below. It really helps, thank you and continue with the program. Most of the people listening are of legal age. out of five, right, they can't change what happened in those first five years.

It's pretty clear that they have a lot of control over the food they eat and perhaps some other aspects of their environment, so how does food influence this? story of increased inflammation, well, until recently, food was vaguely discussed in terms of pro-inflammatory diets and stuff, but there wasn't a lot of science to back it up, it was fascinating when, in Zoe's prediction study. I think Sarah Barry was

leading

this work and she found that when people had very large sugar spikes and particularly fat spikes after a meal, remember these vary tenfold between people, which is also associated with large increases in inflammatory markers, these are little telltale signs in the blood that your immune system is really activated and trying to kill other things and is very aggressive, so most ultra-processed foods would cause in some people these really inflammatory spikes and if you were having a snack every two or three hours, you would be triggering this inflammation every few hours, you know, 14 or 16 hours a day, so your body was in this state of high tension excitement.

You know, the immune system was waiting for someone to attack and sometimes it would mistakenly attack things that were. I'm not supposed to trick the body into thinking it was on the warpath and that's what many people in our populations in the Western world constantly find themselves in who eat junk food regularly, their body thinks it's in a state of war. crisis and then everything is on high alert, it's not trying to repair itself, it doesn't have time to repair itself, it's really sending all the wrong signals to the body and that's why we have these problems in all these other organs of our brain and our heart, etc., so realizing that certain foods in certain people will cause these inflammatory spikes is really important and we also know that our gut microbes can buffer that as well, so that's also really important, in addition to our genes, you know, that we partially control our immune system, we also have genes in our microbes that can also produce anti-inflammatory signals that dampen the signals to put out these hot embers, so it's been compared to lighting a lot of fires that are normally fine and go straight, but if you continue to do it it's like you have these embers in your body in a permanently elevated state, which means you can't function normally, you can't do the normal repair processes, you're more likely to miss a cancer, you are more likely to repair something wrong in your body, so you age faster.

This is, I think, the modern equivalent of what long-term inflammation is doing to all of us and basically to our diet and to me, I have microbes in my heart. It's a bit of a scary story, isn't that Tim you're talking about? You touch a little on the type of sugar and fat in the blood. Could you explain a little more about what's going on since someone thinks you know who maybe new? this um and they're thinking about you know they're eating something, how does that relate to the kind of spikes that you're talking about that we see in studies that we liked the zo prediction study that people do? use a blood sugar monitor to know what your blood sugar levels are every few minutes and when you eat something like a breakfast muffin or a cookie, after about 30 minutes you will get a spike in your blood sugar and then About two to four hours you're going to get, you're going to start to have a spike in your blood fats and at those spikes, that means your body is under stress if it stays there for too long and we think the body sees that as a threat with the that he has to deal with. causing some general stress to the system and in response the body then pumps out these inflammatory chemicals that are arming the immune system to help deal with it in a way that helps deal with removing that fat from the system and, uh, trying to start some kind of repair and it's a failed system because it's never really going to work that way and that's why we think people have too much fat in their system, let's say four to six hours after a meal, these little particles of fat get trapped. they're in the blood vessels and they trigger even more inflammation and that irritates the whole system and makes it more likely over time to build up heart disease and heart disease, so we think there's a real link between not just what you eat but also how he eats.

It responds to that food, how quickly you get rid of it and how big the immune reaction is. If you put those things together, it's an unpleasant cocktail for a lot of people you know, and Tim, one of the things that completed part of the puzzle. For me when I read that study, the prediction study that you and Sarah were a part of was that the inflammation peaked 6 to eight hours after the meal, so there was a buildup and a lag, and if you think about these people you're snacking at 10:00 at night, you're essentially putting your body in a constant state of inflammation because it peaks in the middle of the night and then it starts to go down, you wake up in the morning and you just turns on again. and that's why fasting overnight is probably helpful because your body can buffer that inflammation and while you continue to snack, it's usually pretty bad for your metabolism.

I think some people listening to people say, "Wait a minute, you're saying I can." He doesn't eat, but I don't think that's the message. It's not that all foods cause this or even that having an increase in blood sugar or fat is bad, you're talking about the way these are really big. spikes and over and over again in a way we probably didn't experience them before, the kind of foods we eat today are that right, yeah, that's ABS, right, Jonathan, you know that until we did these kinds of studies on normal people . We didn't know what a normal blood sugar or fat spike was, so we were still finding our way even back then and those early studies, but it's clear that many people can metabolize food and get a little spike that says they get fat. and eliminate. is very efficient and there is little to no inflammation left, so it's not that all food is bad, right, it has something to do with the type of foods we eat today compared to those of the past, so definitely all Foods don't.

It doesn't cause an inflammatory reaction and if you have, for example, a mushroom and lentil dish that's high in fiber and high in good fats and protein, you're very unlikely to see any inflammatory reaction, it seems like it's really with fatty foods. we get this. Big reaction and particularly poor quality fats, these saturated fats that are found in foods without fiber, which are found in ultra-processed foods and, to a lesser extent, also in sugary drinks, so those are the ones that cause a really big spike, say six hours later. After you've eaten you still have fat in your system and then after that you have this inflammatory reaction, so it happens a long time after the meal and it doesn't happen in everyone, there seems to be a degree of personalization with that as well.

I think we're discovering more and more about how we all respond differently to food, but for many people, eating bad foods regularly at regular intervals throughout the day keeps them in a high state of inflammation, which is a high state of stress. body, so you have this kind of high level of inflammation because you're just eating all these foods and probably your environment, which has it too high all the time, how does the gut fit into that story? We talk about gut microbes on this podcast all the time, but there's one part of our body that I want to introduce that I think is vitally important to this conversation that goes along with gut microbes and that's the gut barrier, so Throughout our entire body of our intestines there is a single layer of cells and that single layer of cells has the responsibility of separating the 38 trillion gut microbes that are on one side inside our intestines from our immune system. 70 to 80% of our immune system is in the other. other hand, so first of all, people should know that the home of your immune system is in your gut, it's in your gut, in the bone, so I never would have guessed that and it makes a lot of sense because it's actually here where, although it is the deepest part of our body, standing toxically, this is actually the place where we interact with the outside world.

Our skin is a barrier, our skin blocks the outside world, but the intestine, this is the place where you know in some way our The intestines is like a beautiful river and that river brings clean water and brings the nutrients that we need and that give us life, but at the same time that river can sometimes be dangerous and there may be things there that we would prefer. don't come into contact with and I'm going to interrupt just for a second because I love it only a gastroenterologist could say that our intestines were beautiful River I was thinking about my poor girl who was very sick last weekend and vomiting everywhere and Be it whatever, it wasn't a beautiful river, but I'll let you continue with this beautiful river metaphor now, well, yes, I have a beautiful optimistic view of the intestines, which is quite different from most other people, it's distorted, um, so none, anyway. um uh, this is the responsibility of this barrier, which is to allow us to recruit into our body the things that we really want, the things that we need, and at the same time, protect us from, you know, some kind of dangerous piranhas or whatever you want to call it. basically we want to keep it out and leave it inside the intestines and eventually push it out, so now these three parts, the gut microbes, the gut barrier, and our immune system, are constantly communicating with each other and working together.

Our intestinal barrier, which is responsible for protecting us, is actually renewed every three or four days, so we get a completely new intestinal barrier. By the way, the total surface area of ​​our intestinal barrier is much larger than a football field. in the UK and yet on every blade of grass there are microbes that matter on every blade of grass, so the way we ultimately set this up, Jonathan, is that we want a healthy gut barrier to protect us. The managers of that gut barrier are the microbes build the barrier, strengthen the barrier, make sure it's intact and can do its job to protect us when our gut microbes are healthy, they can do their job the way they do.They're supposed to do that when our gut microbes have been beaten up and torn apart, they can't do their job and part of their job is actually to help us maintain that gut barrier and when that happens, we're allowing our body access to things that they are not supposed to receive.

There and the classic is something called bacterial endotoxin and this is something that you will find with eoli salmonella basically the pathological bacteria that are a normal part of our body and that can actually transmit and inflame our immune system and this. is a big part of the origin of chronic inflammation, so our gut microbes play an essential role in maintaining this barrier to protect us and just to add that when you eat healthy foods like fiber, the beneficial microbes will eat that fiber and produce chemicals that are then really boosting our immune system to dampen any inflammation in the rest of the body, so there's this link between eating good foods and making sure that our immune system is functioning perfectly, not overreacting, and if anything, that can dampen any of these fires, but you can't do that if you don't get the right foods for those particular microbes that are very specialized and need real food to eat, they can't just exist on hamburgers because those microbes tend to produce pro-inflammatories. substances that actually increase inflammation more, that's how our diet starts to influence this delicate balance that Will talks about.

Hello, I want to take a short break and tell you something new. We've created a free guide that will kick-start your journey to better gut health, as we're learning from Tim and will today, and as our members know, by using Zoe we feed our gut microbiome through the variety of foods we eat and Instead, our microbes provide us with a host of health benefits. They are responsible for everything we have been learning from digestion to immune support and even our mental well-being. So how can you best nourish your gut? What food swaps can you try to nourish those good bacteria?

What does a high-fiber shopping list really look like? Stay tuned for top tips from Tim and Will; However, if you want even more support, our free gut health guide shares all the emails and practical tips designed to put you in control of your gut health and get yours free, simply visit zoe.com gutu. Is it always one way? So do you basically start with um if your gut bacteria are good or not and then it causes inflammation in the body or is there also something that you know is coming? There's also a chicken and egg where you know I have I have inflammation somewhere else and that then shapes my gut microbes, how do we know it's absolutely a two-way street?

So when you have inflammation, the inflammation does affect your gut microbes. So ultimately the part that we have the most command and control over is the choices we make with diet and lifestyle, those choices are ultimately shaping the environment of the microbes. When you shape the microbe environment, you're ultimately creating a specific microbiome that can create an anti-inflammatory immune system or that's going to promote inflammation in the body and we've talked about the microbiome and bacteria. I'm aware that there will be some people joining us at the beginning of the year for whom this might be a little new.

Could you help us explain something like? what those two terms mean and how it relates to this idea. I think about what people are really interested in here, which is fine, so I want Red. I want to have the things that will reduce my inflammation, but also how I know what's going on with these things that are actually increasing my inflammation, so that what we mean by microbes is microorganisms, that means bacteria, it also means parasites, it means fungi and little viruses, but we tend to call them all the same type of community and that community is called the microbiome and there are good and bad types in there, and if you're healthy you'll have a good balance of good guys and relatively small amounts of bad guys and essentially they're all like a lot of pharmacies pumping out generally healthy chemicals, but the bad guys can sometimes be pumping out chemicals that increase inflammation and They irritate the body, so you have to get that ratio right and that's where lifestyle comes into play and it's possible to reduce inflammation in the intestines.

I think you were both describing this pattern where you might have this really inflamed G, there were some horrible things going on that sounded pretty scary, so is it possible to reduce the inflammation or is it kind of a one-way street, you can absolutely reduce inflammation and you know, it's something exciting and empowering? about the gut microbiome is that it is constantly evolving and changing and also extremely forgiving. There's research that was done almost 10 years ago that was one of the first major papers on the microbiome where they basically showed that in less than 24 hours after changing your diet, you'll start to see those effects take shape within your microbiome.

Now this is not to say that 24 hours is all it takes to reshape the microbiome. That wouldn't be true, but the decisions you make today will begin to manifest. tomorrow in your microbiome and it will be a snowball effect, that snowball starts very small, but if you go back and fold and consistently follow these same patterns, you start to build that snowball, you start to build momentum and that momentum can there will be an anti-inflammatory boost and then what happens when the inflammation is reduced? How does this work? What happens as a consequence? We've talked a lot about how increasing there are two effects, one inside the gut, you're going to get a greater number of beneficial microbes instead of pro-inflammatory microbes, so a more useful set of chemicals are produced and your immune system will return to its normal regulation. and it will be able to continue to repair the body and pick up fight cancer and deal with aging and really refine the metabolism so that you don't waste energy and you feel healthier and the chemicals that go to your brain improve your mood and your energy, so which is really bringing you back to that perfect state.

In the above scenario, somehow this false infection hit the body, so the idea is to use restabilizing things and because your blood no longer has that inflammation, that also acts in two ways and again helps the good microbes to overcome the bad microbes inside. your gut, so again, this two-way process is as good as it goes in the bad way, when you get a disease or an infection, the same thing happens when you can improve your diet and then everything else falls into place, so I would love to, I guess , having talked about how serious inflammation is, how deeply interconnected it is with our gut microbes, these bacteria, to start talking, what's the practical advice?

What can people do? And I think a lot of people are listening. To this you will say: Okay, that's great, I want to go and make some changes, Tim, maybe you could start by saying: "Imagine that one of the people is thinking about changing what they want to eat, what would you tell them to do?" to really achieve?" There is a difference here: eating a greater diversity of plants, having more color on the plate, having more fermented foods, is particularly important and fermented foods are very interesting because our clinical studies show that people who ate several servings a day obtained reductions really big in their inflammatory levels. markers right after a couple of weeks, we don't know the exact mechanisms, but we do know that fermented foods are probiotics, so they are live microbes and these people, this was a study in the US where there were many types different species of microbes, so maybe 30 or 40 different species each day seem to have a beneficial effect on the resident microbes in the gut and that meant they were expelling useful anti-inflammatory chemicals and actually bringing down and suppressing the previously high immune system and this It was a remarkable achievement. result because no one expected this to be so dramatic and there was a much larger effect with just the fermented foods rather than just the fiber alone, so this is a real sign that, of all those changes in D Tre that we're talking about, it's the multiple plants, whether it's the polyphenols in colored fermented foods, it's probably the most specific for inflammation in the immune system and it's something that I think we haven't paid enough attention to in the past, so little and often, but I think it is not enough to have a container of yogurt for children once a week.

You need several servings a day, probably three small servings a day to get these beneficial effects while still cutting. Find out some of the negative things in your diet, ultra-processed foods, foods that contain bad fats, which we've talked a lot about and we know from our own experiments that people have these highly processed saturated fats in convenience foods, etc., and junk food. They are what cause these particular spikes and inflammation, so cut them out and then give your intestine a rest so it can't get punctured and can repair itself. I think those are the key essentials that everyone can do.

If they want to get a nice inflammatory state and even lwi in them and people with a lot of chronic diseases, I think they would benefit from this advice and most of them are not being given it right now, yeah, it's interesting that you know that it is as if it boils. to two essential principles from a dietary perspective: adding more plants and adding fermented foods and these are two things that we have done throughout human history and that we have lost in the last 100 years, so restoring them somehow would be restoring a more natural environment for these microbes and could you help us understand a little bit more about how the plant side of this ultimately ties into this reduction in inflammation?

Well, you know, it goes back to a concept that Tim introduced earlier, which is that these microbes have the ability to transform our food if we were sterile, which we are not, we have never been sterile humans, we have always evolved with these microbes. , but if we were sterile fiber, it doesn't mean we can't. have children but there isn't just I want to make sure I understand this that it's not, yeah, sterile in terms of not having a microbiome if we lacked a microbiome, which is not possible, all humans have always had a microbiome, fiber doesn't The purpose is that it does so because fiber exemplifies our relationship with these microbes.

It is mutually beneficial. We consume fiber. Fiber is actually your food. We don't have the enzymes to break down fiber and release its nutritional quality, but microbes do. They actually have thousands of enzymes that allow them to typically work in teams, decompressing fiber and releasing what are called short-chain fatty acids. These short chain fatty acids in my 20+ years of studying medicine, I can say without a doubt. These are all the most anti-inflammatory compounds I have come across and are responsible. This is how gut microbes restore our intestinal barrier. This is also how our gut microbes suppress, control and shape the immune system.

And it's also how they have an anti-inflammatory effect throughout our body, not just in our gut but even up to our brain, so the way that fiber ultimately manifests itself is that fiber comes into contact with microbes, those microbes make us a favor by releasing these short chain fatty acids. acids and in the process of doing that, they have an anti-inflammatory effect on our body, so they basically create this magical thing, these short chain fatty acids, which I've heard you guys talk about a lot, I literally have no idea. really what that means, but that's good and basically the point is that we can't get it directly just in what we eat, that's right, it doesn't seem to work when you give it as a supplement, people have tried giving it to you. supplements in clinical trials and it doesn't work like that and butter rate is the most used and it also smells like rotten fish so you wouldn't really want to have it as a supplement so that's not just like it's not a big part of which needs to be made clear, because you know, I don't understand this, most people don't understand it.

It's not like there's a lot of these short chain fatty acids when I like to, you know, eat a banana, it's something that actually You need these bacteria inside of us to create from um, you know, the usual foods that we can eat, so they are always a product of microbes, um, but there are foods that contain short chain fatty acids, such as butyrate,for example, um. There are dairy products that because the cow has microbes produces these short chain fatty acids, you will find them in dairy products, they are in trivial amounts, they are not known to have the same effect on the body and most likely what you Whether it's when you drink them, these fats are absorbed almost instantly into your body, um without actually getting to where they're supposed to be, this is a very different thing than consuming fiber and having that fiber move down through, you know, 8 MERS of intestines uh 25 feet and they reach the colon where the microbes reside and then they are released in that specific location.

I think it's important to note that it's not just the short chain fatty acids, it's this process of Dietary fiber has this effect on the colon, so it's like delivering this medication to the right place, you know, in the right way and in this case, although you know, we feed the bacteria that way and then it actually creates this kind of medicine for us, you know, where it's needed, which is what you know deep down in our intestine, which is absolutely correct and this is the clearest example of the millions of years of coevolution that have passed. place between humans and microbes, we need them, they need us and that's how we thrive together, yes, and that's where the analogy that they are mini pharmacies is really useful, but to produce these wonderful chemicals you have to give them the right supplies .

And our job is to make sure that they have the right elements to produce these amazing chemicals for us. If I was really thinking I want to reduce this inflammation, I want to give the bacteria the best kind of food. I talked about fermented foods, but in terms of feeding bacteria, what are the other kinds of key rules that you would like people to follow, so a diverse range of plants is important, because that creates a wide range of microbes. different and the more diverse your set of microbes, the more chemicals they can produce together, the less waste there will be and interestingly, there is a new study that shows that the more diverse your microbes, the fewer nutrients will be left for invaders, so if you have salmonella or something like that.

It can't take root in your gut because your microbe community is ABS and it eats up all their nutrients so they will literally starve to death, whereas if you don't have many because you have a pretty limited diet, new invaders like eoli or salm. Manila will take care of the different colors that are there because they have these polyphenols that are defense chemicals that are a general energy for all their microbes, so in order for them to flourish, they use them as an energy source as well. so regardless of what they eat, everyone likes those polyphenols and then Thirdly, there are fermented foods, which are these probiotics that have this effect.

We still don't understand exactly why they pass through the intestine, they stay for a few days and seem to energize the intestinal microbes to really get our immune system in order. then it goes down the toilet, so you have to consume them regularly so there are three things that essentially have to happen, but you know one thing, Tim, with fermented foods, the study you're referring to that was out of Stanford and involved Professor Christopher Gardner , who serves on Zoe's scientific advisory board. One of the main findings, in addition to fermented foods reducing inflammation, is that adding fermented foods over a period of just eight weeks, which is exciting and fascinating.

In fact, we are able to increase the diversity of the microbiome and this is a pattern that we see over and over again because when we look at people who have these inflammatory conditions, specifically autoimmune diseases, if we look under the hood, their microbiome generally has less diversity. intestinal. So it's pretty quick that when you move the gut from less diversity to more diversity you also reduce inflammation, it's a pattern that we see over and over again, yeah, and I mean, I constantly have patients tell me that their doctor has said that their system Immunity is not very good, so don't eat fermented foods and I think we should move away from this rather primitive advice, apart from the very rare individuals who might be receiving cancer therapy without literally any bones. with marrow or without white blood cells, but I think I would agree that the vast majority of people would benefit from having more fermented foods in their diet.

I think that's a myth that really exemplifies how misunderstood fermented foods are and how far we've come. far from what was a traditional diet, well I think that's really interesting now for people listening, at this point it seems like only foods can reduce inflammation, but well, I think there's a lot of other things that you talk about , uh, what you can add, I think. that there are so many things you can do, frankly, without even picking up a fork and that to me is quite empowering because, for example, if you're a person, I've had SE, I've taken care of a lot of people with Crohn's disease. diseases or all kinds of colitis and these people have the worst food intolerances, it's very difficult for them to do some of the things that we describe here, you know, eat more fiber, like I fully recognize that as much as I want them to. doing that is not easy for them, so maybe for them a place to start is doing these other things and it includes some of the classics that we always think about, so for example, sleep, sleep is incredibly restorative and people who have a better night's sleep has a healthier gut microbiome and when you participate in studies where they take people to a sleep lab and deprive them of sleep, it doesn't take long before you start to see the effects of the lack of sleep in the gut microbiome, it happens very quickly.

So, by the way, do some extra exercise because many different forms of exercise have different effects on the microbiome, so don't always do the same thing and change your routine, but I would recommend both cardiovascular exercise and also weight training or strength training , believe. They both complement each other and then Tim alluded a little bit to Tim's intermittent fasting or restricted eating and to me this is an important concept in terms of reducing inflammation and also supporting the microbiome achieved and if we could do that. One thing and it would be early dinner for me early, it depends on you knowing your personal lifestyle, but that would be before 7pm. and then say no food, no alcohol after dinner and allow your body a period of time where it now relaxes and then you go to bed and you have a truly restorative period of time that is in inflammation, which which is actually fantastic for the microbiome and It doesn't take much, you know, we did a study in that study, the big study if we had people who did 14 hours of fasting, which means they had a 10 hour eating period during the day and by doing this we found a number of different benefits, including increased energy levels, better mood, reduced hunger and, personally, I'm excited about this, less bloating, and that's very simple when making those decisions, so again, there are a lot of different things that we can do that aren't necessarily foods that can make us feel better and empower us incredibly, although I don't think I'm G to sign up for that.

I have to finish all my dinner before 7 p.m. m. every night, uh, I plan on anytime soon, but I like your kind of perfect life. Well, I think it's more like, I want to get people away from the idea of ​​a midnight snack or an alcoholic drink at night, that's what I want to get people away from. Well, I have to say it every night while I'm finally crashing. After finishing email and eating dark chocolate while watching TV around 10 p.m. I think about you two, you know, frowning over my shoulder at my terrible period of not eating, but there's always something that's good, it's nice to have something to look forward to.

Is there any final thoughts on this for someone who likes to read this story and say, "Okay, I'm really convinced that I want to reduce this inflammation." In fact, I'm worried that maybe I'm on the road to some kind of long-term recovery. serious illness, whether it's heart disease or diabetes or anything else you want to make sure you were thinking about, as we're coming to the end here, I would just add that a lot of people get confused if they went on the internet and it said I have inflammation, my doctor said I have this new disease and I might show up on social media, whether it's Tik Tok or Instagram, they would be faced with this whole range of strange diets and exclusions, things like alkaline water or potato juice or chlorophyll tablets or um, when I was doing rheumatology, patients were told that they could never eat anything with too much tomatoes or jees again, the point is that you should add things to your Dart without excluding them and it's ultra processed, so I think that's the main message that I would tell people: If you understand the key role your microbes play and are looking to feed more and more of those guys, don't go the way of these crazy people.

Exclusion diets that have no scientific basis and call themselves anti-inflammatory diets. An anti-inflammatory diet is generally good for gut microbes. I think that's the message I would leave: it's a diet of abundance that we ultimately need. To be successful there are no restrictions and I think going back to these essential concepts of fiber and fermented foods and if we could just add them because the reality is that the opportunities that will have the greatest impact are the ones that we are not doing, doing more of what we are doing. currently it won't really make a big difference.

What helps is when we take something we just aren't doing and we know that 95% of Americans and 90% of Brits have inadequate fiber intake and the average daily intake of fermented foods in the United States is zero , so if we could increase that a little bit, it would make a big difference and that's it. where I, I, would encourage people to start this year and also the last thing is that consistency is extremely important, the choice that you make and that you can make on a daily basis, go back to the idea of ​​the snowball, if you can do it and I can come back and do it again tomorrow.

It will make a much bigger difference than what they did that time. Great, thanks to both of you. I'm going to try to make a quick summary of a fairly complex topic. I thought, um, this. week and please both keep me straight so we start by basically explaining what inflammation is and they both explain that basically if you don't have the ability to have inflammation you die very quickly like an infection or like you don't know. being able to heal, you know that my broken finger, like a short-term acute inflammation, is a good thing that we are made for, but the problem is that today many of us find ourselves in a situation where a kind of inflammatory answer. and it never goes out and for people who are therefore in that inflammatory state year after year they will have this terrifying list of basically all the diseases that anyone could worry about, they are more likely to get, including, I think, things like cancer that I think you know I was very surprised, but you also know things about diseases that you don't really think are related to inflammation at all, that there are many reasons why that inflammation could increase, including our environment. and what's happening to us as children, um, but we talk a lot about how you know, for those of us who are adults, hearing this is very determined by what's happening in terms of what we're eating, um and by the way that that's affecting our gut microbiome, you talked about this incredibly thin layer, I think that's going to get between our body and our microbes and that almost all of our immune system is actually in our gut handling this with our bacteria and that's basically from The food we eat shapes the bacteria we have inside our gut shapes the type of microbiome we have and unfortunately today it is known that the diet we eat is a diet that is primarily the diet that the bad bacteria want. eat and not diet. that the good bacteria want to eat, so we end up with the wrong kind of bugs that actually increase our inflammation, so that's all very depressing, but I think the good news is that you say you know what happens if you change your diet. you can change, you know you can increase the amount of good bacteria in your gut and that will actually reduce inflammation and I and I think Tim you're saying that you could positively reduce, therefore, your disease risks and your potential symptoms. of some diseases.

That's right absolutely yes that's really exciting and then you said there are some really simple rules of thumb so first of all what you eat is really central eat more plants because plants have the fiber inside them that feeds to microbes and then createthis. Something magical called short-chain fatty acids, which I think only Tim and Tim will understand what they are, but otherwise, those are the good things that bacteria make, so you need to give them the fiber to be good. things, um and there's no shortcut, you can't just eat like a short chain fatty acid supplement, it doesn't work, you have to get this fiber to make all these different bacteria make it think in many different colors because that's you know. , this other kind of concept of polyphenols, which again basically means a lot of foods with these different colors, that's how I understand it, which again is feeding the microbes that are giving these anti-inflammatory properties, and then separately, I think both Tim and Will You've become more excited about fermented foods in recent years with this new research and it's really just eating a lot of fermented foods, not one, you said Tim once a week doesn't get you there, really.

I have to eat some of these various P's, it's a pretty high bar and I must admit I often don't reach it, that could make a difference and then if people hear this, it's not just food you can do, interestingly , like sleeping and exercising. Both could also reduce inflammation and I think we ended up with this idea of ​​Tim restricting his eating, so he would have long periods of the day where he doesn't eat, so don't snack at midnight and then have something at 7 p.m. tomorrow. but having maybe 12 whole hours without eating or in fact if you could go up to 14 hours which I never can then you know it could be even better and finally whatever you do don't go on any diet that comes up afterwards to click. about the words anti-inflammatory diet on the internet uh that's my conclusion too because basically you're going to have a totally strange diet where you have to exclude things and I think what I heard was that you know every good diet is like it's good. to your gut, it's about adding more stuff and ultimately it's about consistency because the only thing that's relevant here is something you can stick with, you know, for years, a DTS so crazy you know it won't get you there , something that supports long term.

You got it brilliantly, well, I think everyone has their marching orders and I think there's something incredibly exciting about this idea that there are things you can do right now that can really reduce your inflammation and can really improve your long-term health. Basically, bringing all these microbes to fight in your corner. Wonderful, thank you very much, bye, thank you all, bye. I hope this episode opened your eyes to how important your gut microbiome is in keeping inflammation under control and that you learned something new. Tim and Will, are you interested in learning more about your gut microbiome like I did with a Zoe membership?

They can understand what's going on in their gut microbiome with the most advanced testing available and then receive personalized advice and support on how to eat the best foods to maintain a healthy gut Zoe can help you feel better now and live healthier for years to come. by real clinical studies. Simply visit the zoe.com podcast to learn more and get 10% off your membership. Join us next week when I'll be speaking with Dr. Andy Galpin about how you can improve your fitness to live a long and healthy life. I'm your host Jonathan Wolf Zoe's Science and Nutrition is produced by the yellow huin Martin Richard Willen and Tilly forfor, as always, the Zoe's Science and Nutrition podcast is not medical advice, it is for general information. purposes only if you have any medical concerns, consult your doctor until next time