Dieting, calories and gut health: What you need to know to lose weight - The Little Things

Eating a blue cupcake or muffin could the key to finding out your gut health! Photo / Getty

Over summer, we’re revisiting some of the biggest and best podcast series from the NZ Herald network throughout 2023.

Today, we’re revisiting The Little Things ahead of its new season. Hosted by Francesca Rukin and Louise Ayrey, the series looks to the science to answer the health and wellbeing questions women want answers for. In this episode, Professor Tim Spector provides all the tips you’d need if embarking on a new year diet!

If you are trying to lose weight or eat healthier, there are plenty of options for diets or fads to pick from the global, billion dollar nutrition industry.

The science behind it is something Professor Tim Spector, a British epidemiologist and science writer behind The Diet Myth and Spoon Fed, has been trying to get his head around for decades.

“I studied twins for the last 30 years, and I’ve been very interested in genetics, so originally I thought genes would be a major controlling factor, and certainly they are important in how much fat we lay down and how much we put on,” Spector told Francesca Rudkin and Louise Ayrey on the Herald’s new podcast, The Little Things.

“But the discoveries we’ve done with the company, Zoe, and these predict studies have shown us that our response to food is really hardly genetic at all. We all respond to food very differently, we all have a different metabolism. We’ve now looked at 50,000 people, giving them identical meals, and we see this huge difference between people.”

What he is now looking into is the gut microbiome - “a vast community of all kinds of different bugs” that work as “mini pharmacists” producing different chemicals vital for a range of bodily functions such as the immune system and our metabolism.

“It’s this treasure trove of knowledge that’s only recently come to light that’s really changing the way we think about food in a big way,” Spector said.

He said that current fads, such as calorie counting - “complete nonsense” - and exercise - “unless you’re running marathons every day or are a professional athlete, exercise is not the way to lose weight either” - are holding back the nutrition industry and medical community, when the focus needs to be on what’s going on inside our bodies.

Professor Tim Spector. Credit / Peter Shiazza.

And there’s a very easy way for people to test this - the “Blue Poop Challenge”.

The challenge is being run by ZOE, a company co-founded by Spector, and is part of a clinical microbiome study. The challenge encourages people to eat entirely blue food, such as muffins or cupcakes with food dye in them, and then see how long it takes for the food dye to pass through your body and come out the other end.

Spector said that the “transit time” is very useful to know as it helps with the variability between people.

“People of different sizes, of different races, for various random reasons, have very different length intestines so that it can vary really two twofold. We’re talking several metres can be different.

“So that the shorter your transit time - I’m not talking about people have to go to the toilet every two hours, but if it’s over 12 hours, and there’s a sweet spot somewhere between probably about 18 and 20 hours or something like that, then you’ll have a likely to have a healthy gut. If you have, like most people in the UK and New Zealand, an average of closer to 28 hours, and some people have four days, you are gonna have a less diverse, less healthy gut microbiome.”

So if you are looking for something to do this weekend - get out that food dye and a stopwatch and see how you get on!

Listen to the full podcast for more tips on the right foods to eat, what doesn’t work with losing weight or nutrition, and more on the power of gut microbiome!

The Little Things is available on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes return in February.