Get our best content directly in your inbox
Sign up
Podcast / The Big Interviews
Podcast / The Big Interviews

Tim Spector explores the connections between gut health and nutrition

The first in a series on gut health, hear from one of the most exciting people working in this field, Tim Spector. A renowned Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and author of The Diet Myth, join Tim from Kings College, London as he explores the relationship between the microbiome, health and wellbeing and what this means for the food and drink industry and consumers.

Tim discusses what the microbiome is, what we can do to improve our gut health, what potential benefits we could see from improving our gut health, and what exciting research is taking place from Tim Spector that suggests good gut health is a way to prevent disease.

Find out more about Tim Spector here

About Tim Spector

Tim Spector is a Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and Director of the TwinsUK Registry at Kings College, London and has recently been elected to the prestigious Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He trained originally in rheumatology and epidemiology. In 1992 he moved into genetic epidemiology and founded the UK Twins Registry, of 13,000 twins, which is the richest collection of genotypic and phenotypic information worldwide. He is past President of the International Society of Twin Studies, directs the European Twin Registry Consortium (Discotwin) and collaborates with over 120 centres worldwide. He has demonstrated the genetic basis of a wide range of common complex traits, many previously thought to be mainly due to ageing and environment. Through genetic association studies (GWAS), his group have found over 500 novel gene loci in over 50 disease areas. He has published over 800 research articles and is ranked as being in the top 1% of the world’s most cited scientists by Thomson-Reuters. He held a prestigious European Research Council senior investigator award in epigenetics and is a NIHR Senior Investigator. His current work focuses on omics and the microbiome and directs the crowdfunded British Gut microbiome project. Together with an international team of leading scientists including researchers from King’s College London, Massachusetts General Hospital, Tufts University, Stanford University and nutritional science company ZOE he is conducting the largest scientific nutrition research project, showing that individual responses to the same foods are unique, even between identical twins. You can find more on https://joinzoe.com/ He is a prolific writer with several popular science books and a regular blog, focusing on genetics, epigenetics and most recently microbiome and diet (The Diet Myth). He is in demand as a public speaker and features regularly in the media.

Return to Table Talk

Share this episode: