Your gut microbiome, a bustling community of microorganisms, is a vital player in your overall health. It doesn’t just impact your digestive system — it has a profound influence on your brain health and well-being.

However, the gut microbiome is a complex, long misunderstood realm, and figuring out how it affects daily life can leave even the most dedicated health enthusiasts scratching their heads.

Here at ZOE, we’ve transformed our understanding of this bustling microbial world, where both “good” and “bad” gut bacteria reside.

In today’s episode, Jonathan speaks with Prof. Nicola Segata and Prof. Tim Spector to explore how ZOE's microbiome testing and unique microbiome health scores provide personalized insights into your gut health.

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• Nicola Segata is a professor and principal investigator at the Laboratory of Computational Metagenomics, at the CIBIO department of the University of Trento. His background is in metagenomics, machine learning, microbiome research, and microbial genomics.
• Tim Spector is ZOE's scientific co-founder and one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists.

Timecodes:

00:00Introduction

01:41Quick fire questions

03:38Why should we care about gut microbes?

07:00How many different microbes do we have in our gut?

11:37Why would we want to measure our microbiome?

13:15Can we change our microbiome?

18:00Is it possible to make a dramatic change in your microbiome over time?

20:21What does the latest data tell us about improving our diet?

23:24How does the ZOE micobiome gut test work?

27:07What goes on in the lab to get these results?

30:54Is there enough information in the gut microbiome to make a full health assessment?

34:20What can our microbes tell us about diseases?

35:55What useful information does the microbiome test show us?

36:51Are we still making new discoveries in the microbiome?

41:03Do different microbes prefer specific foods?

43:14How do different lifestyles around the world change your microbiome?

47:445 simple tips to improve gut health

50:45How rapidly can you damage your microbiome?

53:58Can taking painkillers regularly negatively impact the microbiome?

56:10Summary

60:03Goodbyes/Outro

Mentioned in today’s episode:

• The person-to-person transmission landscape of the gut and oral microbiomes from Nature
• Sharing of gut microbial strains between selected individual sets of twins cohabitating for decades from PLoS One
• A genetic gift for sushi eaters from Nature

Find Nicola on ResearchGate and X.

Episode transcripts are available here.

Is there a nutrition topic you’d like us to explore? Email us at podcast@joinzoe.com, and we’ll do our best to cover it.