“All we’re saying is that the microbiome is a major modifiable factor.” This doesn’t mean that other factors are irrelevant to people’s health: “How much you sleep at night, the quality of your food, the exercise you get, all these things are also important,” says Spector. “We’re all very different in how we respond to the same meal, and a lot of this is explained by the huge differences in our microbiomes.” “Up to that point, we didn’t really have enough belief that you could personalise nutrition, or that you could link the uniqueness of the microbiome to the uniqueness in the food response – but suddenly, you had those two elements together,” says Spector. But the blinkers really fell off when he and his colleagues measured twins’ and non-twins’ responses to identical meals, and discovered that they could vary hugely between individuals, influenced by both the microbiome and genetics. The discovery, in 2014, that the composition of the microbes in people’s guts could influence their body weight, provided Spector’s first “Aha!” moment. “Trying to understand why one twin is sometimes overweight and the other skinny one gets diabetes or cancer and the other doesn’t, has been a major theme for the past 20 years,” Spector says. The trouble is, although identical twins have many similarities, they can often be quite different – despite sharing the same genes. Trying to understand why one twin is sometimes overweight and the other skinny, one gets diabetes or cancer and the other doesn’t, has been a major theme for the past 20 years For instance, Spector’s group was among the first to demonstrate that people’s weight distribution is largely influenced by their genes. In 1993, he founded the UK Twins Registry at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, one of the richest collections of data about identical and non-identical twins in the world.įor years, Spector believed that genetics would explain much of why people are the way they are. It was a wake-up call that prompted him to reassess everything he thought he knew about healthy eating, including much of what he’d learned at medical school.Ī professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, Spector has spent much of his career researching how our life choices and events fuse with our genes. “I went from being a sporty, fitter than average middle-aged man, to a pill-popping, depressed stroke victim with high blood pressure,” he recalls. The event that prompted this change was suffering a mini stroke at the top of a mountain in his early 50s, after an energetic day of skiing in the Alps. I am virtually vegetarian, and eat far fewer starchy foods than I used to.” For lunch, I might have a curry, or some other heavily plant-based meal. “My breakfast now is a mixture of kefir and full-fat yoghurt with some berries and mixed nuts and seeds on top, plus one or two big cups of black coffee. Spector’s diet today is a far cry from what he used to eat: typically, muesli, orange juice and tea for breakfast – sometimes with toast and marmalade – and a tuna mayonnaise sandwich, packet of crisps and carton of orange juice for lunch. It really is changing the way our body works.” “Once people start seeing that there is this link between the food we eat, our microbes and our immune systems, I think that changes the way we think about food. “It’s that diversity of gut microbes that gives you a diversity of chemicals and, we believe, a healthier immune system and a better metabolism,” Spector says. Diversity cultivates a healthy microbiome – the micro-organisms living in our gut – which plays a vital role in digesting food, regulating our immune systems, and tweaking our brain chemistries through the chemicals they produce.
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