From The Times
London, UK
6 July, 2017
Professor’s gut feeling that a tribal diet will boost health
The recipe to beat western diseases is simple. Take one part baobab, mix with several parts wild tubers, marinate in a soupcon of mud and, as an occasional treat, serve with a porcupine steak. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but the results are astonishing.
A scientist has suggested that we need to “rewild” our gut bacteria, after he lived and ate with an African hunter-gatherer tribe for three days — and found a huge improvement in the diversity of his microbiome.
The Hadza in Tanzania are one of the world’s last surviving pre-agricultural societies. They live in small communities amid the savannah, eating only seasonal fruits and vegetables, and hunting game and birds.
Scientists have discovered that they have some of the most diverse gut bacteria found in humans anywhere in the world, a discovery that may go some way to explaining their lack of western ailments such as asthma, diabetes and various autoimmune conditions.
Tim Spector, from King’s College London, went to spend some time with them to see if there was anything we in the West could gain from returning to the lifestyle of our evolutionary past.
“The Hadza have the healthiest guts in the world in terms of diversity,” said Professor Spector, who is the author of the book The Diet Myth. “They live as we would have done, in the same spot eating the same food.”
He decided to do the same — and was surprised not just by the health results, but also by how pleasant the experience proved to be.
There is growing research into the effect of gut flora on health, and of the western diet on gut flora. Two years ago Professor Spector persuaded his son to live solely on McDonald’s fast food for ten days, and showed that his gut flora diversity fell by 40 per cent. Professor Spector said he enjoyed his diet a lot more than the McDiet alternative.
“I was a bit worried about being starving, but I was just amazed by how much food there was.”
The first exotic taste he had to get used to was the fruit of the baobab tree, which was crushed and filtered. “I wasn’t expecting to like it. But actually it ended up like a citrusy milkshake,” he said.
He was less impressed with tubers. “We dug them up and stuck them on the barbecue and they were a bit dull. Halfway between a turnip and celery. But they were fine.” As was the meat: a rare delicacy of fresh porcupine. “Once you had taken the fur off and the quills it was pretty much like most barbecue meats.”
The highlight was the dessert, of wild honey and berries. The proof of the pudding, though, was in the pooing. Professor Spector is fascinated by the emerging science into how gut flora affect health. “A more diverse microbiome is [inversely] associated with the risk of almost every western ailment,” he said. “It’s not so much the microbiome itself, it’s what it produces. All these microbes produce thousands of chemicals and metabolites.”
So everywhere he goes he takes a stool sample. “I’ve taken 50 samples or so in the past couple of years, and it doesn’t go up or down much. I went to India, and it didn’t change anything like this.”
After his African adventure Professor Spector gained 20 per cent more microbe types. Obviously, it was a single sample, but this matched what would be expected: the Hadza have, on average, 40 per cent more gut microbe species than western humans.
“Perhaps this is where we were meant to be before we started losing them all. Is it this amazing combination that keeps the Hadza thin and in a better immune state?”
If it is, how do we recreate it? Professor Spector, who will talk about the experiment on BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme, says eating porcupine and tubers probably isn’t the best approach. “If I ate exactly those foods in north London for a couple of weeks would I still see the same result? Probably not. The Hadza don’t use utensils, don’t sterilise anything, and everything is thrown on the fire, fur and all. That’s what we all used to do, what our bodies are pretty much designed for.”
That, he thinks, is the key. Western hygiene is a wonderful thing, but maybe we need less of it than we have. There is increasing evidence that gardeners, for instance, have healthier microbes.
“It’s not just the food, it’s the outdoor, non-sterile lifestyle. Maybe we should occasionally go back to our roots — rewild ourselves, go camping with the kids, and get dirty.”
Diet of a hunter gatherer
Main course
Fresh porcupine
Hyrax
Tubers
Dessert
Kongorobi berries
Wild honey
Washed down with
Baobab fruit porridge
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