... [+]“People want to know, ‘am I someone who can have a high-fat diet, high-carb diet, what’s the best way of eating for me?’” says Spector. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, ZOE offers personalized recommendations on what and when to eat based on how each person’s blood fat, blood sugar and gut microbiome responds to different foods. “Everyone following the same advice about eating identical foods and 2000 calories a day is non-sense,” says Spector.
It’s this openness to having his beliefs uprooted that enabled Spector to discover the importance of the gut microbiome in determining the body’s response to various foods. Having trained in genetics and studied twins for 27 years, the professor says he was “desperate to show that genes were important for nutrition.
But what does eating for the gut microbiome look like? “It’s about getting a diversity of plants,” says Spector, citing studies that find eating thirty different plants a week provides the optimum diversity of gut microbes. The motivation behind adopting a diet centered on the gut microbiome stretches beyond weight and appearance, as research increasingly shows it’s one of the most important organs in the body. The microbes in the gut not only “influence how we metabolize foods, our sugar spikes, how we break down fats,” according to Spector, they produce thousands of vitamins and brain chemicals that affect our mood.