Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're zooming in on our gut. It's our favourite topic here at Zoe, and for good reason.

Research into the gut microbiome continues to reveal just how astonishingly far-reaching its effects are.

From immune function to metabolic health and even mental well-being, your gut is quite literally

at the center of everything. I'm joined by microbiome experts, Professor Nicholas Agarter and Tim

Specter, to recap how we can nurture and take care of it in our daily

lives.

Let's start at the very beginning and, you know, Tim, why should we care about the microbes in our

gut at all?

Well, although it's not a question of life or death, they are pretty much crucial for so many

processes in our body. And I think what we're realizing is just how crucial they are for our

immune system. Because we've assumed that, okay, microbes are there to digest our food,

which is true. They have thousands of chemicals that our body doesn't have

itself in order to break down food and extract the nutrients. We know that from mouse experiments,

if they take away the microbes, make them sterile, those mice have to eat like 30, 40% more

every day just to stay alive because they don't have those careful processes.

So life would be a struggle, but I think it's the new science is telling us that the immune

system is the key to why we need a gut microbiome to be healthy because 70% of our immune

system is in the lining of our guts and that's interacting

with our microbes. So our microbes are essentially mini-pharmacies pumping out chemicals that are

interacting with all those cells, those immune cells, and that's priming them so they know whether to attack things or to

defend things or just to get it right. When it goes wrong, that's when you get food allergies,

...