Rich Roll: Why midlife is a crucial moment to improve your health

Midlife is often seen as a point of no return for health, but it could be the perfect moment to make a radical change.

New research suggests that your gut microbiome holds the key to aging well, protecting you from chronic disease, and even reversing some of the damage from years of poor diet and stress.

He’s joined by Prof. Tim Spector, one of the world’s top 100 most cited scientists and professor of epidemiology at King’s College London.

Tim explains why gut health becomes even more important as we age, and how small changes to diet, movement, and daily habits can have an outsized impact later in life.

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Transcript

Jonathan Wolf: Rich, thank you for joining me today. 

Rich Roll: Very happy to be with you guys today. Thanks for having me. 

Jonathan Wolf: And Tim, delighted to have you as well. 

Tim Spector: Great to be here. 

Jonathan Wolf:  We like to always kick off our show here at ZOE with a rapid-fire Q&A with questions from our listeners. And we have very strict rules, Rich. You can say yes, or no, or if you have to, a one-sentence answer.

Rich Roll: Hmm. 

Jonathan Wolf: Are you willing to give it a go? 

Rich Roll: Yeah, as a long-form podcaster, this is going to be challenging, but I'm up for the challenge. 

Jonathan Wolf: We know you can do it. Rich, is 40 too late to transform your health? 

Rich Roll: No. 

Jonathan Wolf: At almost 60 years old, are you healthier than you were in your 30s? 

Rich Roll: Absolutely, yes.

Jonathan Wolf: Tim, is midlife too late to transform your gut microbiome?

Tim Spector: No. 

Jonathan Wolf: Can the food you eat increase your rate of aging? 

Tim Spector: Yes. 

Jonathan Wolf: And finally, Rich, and you can have a whole sentence, what's the biggest misconception when it comes to changing your health during midlife? 

Rich Roll: Rome wasn't built in a day. It doesn't happen overnight and it's really about making small, incremental changes and building upon them.

And I think if you devote yourself to that process, you'll be able to change in ways that might astonish you. That's my experience. 

Jonathan Wolf: I love that. And I think just that itself explains why you're an inspiration to a lot of people, both in terms of that sort of motivational message. And also because you're a plant-based ultra-endurance athlete.

It's all a bit daunting if I'm honest, as somebody who is the opposite of an ultra-athlete, whatever that is. We had a lot of people actually specifically asking about tips on developing the willpower to make change. 

So normally with this podcast, we're very focused on trying to educate people so they can make better food choices for their health based on their latest science. But I think sometimes for all of us, food doesn't really feel like a choice. It can feel like a craving that has to be met right now.

I know you've developed a lot of insights from your own journey with addiction and recovery. You talked about them in your best-selling memoir on your very successful podcast. And I hope that you're going to share them with us today. 

We're also very lucky to be joined by gut health expert, Professor Tim Spector and Tim's going to talk to us about the power of the gut microbiome as a tool for change that you can still use even as you get older. 

But I'd like to start right at the beginning, Rich. So today you're an ultra-endurance athlete on a fully plant-based diet, but you made this big pivot I think around the time you were 40, could you tell us what your life was like before that? 

Rich Roll: To answer that question, I think we have to sort of cast the gaze backward a little bit. So leading up to that, throughout my 20s, I had a struggle with drugs and alcohol that really took me to some pretty dark places and I was able to get sober at 31.

I went to treatment for a hundred days, which is a long time to be voluntarily incarcerated in what's, you know, kind of a mental institution for the temporarily insane. 

But that really changed my life and provided me with a new set of tools around how to organize my decision-making and my actions. When I emerged from that experience, building a foundation of sobriety was my number one priority and I went all in on my recovery and over the next nine or so years was very focused on that.

But at the same time, I was also very intent upon reestablishing myself as a sort of respectable human being who could show up on time and be relied upon and the like and rebuild my career as a result. During that period of time, I really overlooked my health and well-being because I was so focused on that one thing.

It's only in retrospect when I look back on it that I realized the extent to which my relationship with food and lifestyle habits was still very alcoholic. I was using food to medicate my emotional state. 

Shortly before I turned 40, I was about 50 pounds overweight, so I wasn't obese, but I was quite sedentary. I'd been an athlete in college. I swam for Stanford in the late 1980s at a pretty high level but really hadn't taken care of myself in quite some time.

And I had an incident, walking up the staircase to my bedroom, where I had to take a break halfway up, I was literally winded by the exertion of just, you know, walking up a simple flight of stairs and I had some tightness in my chest and it was a scary moment. 

Heart disease runs in my family. My grandfather, who had also been a standout swimmer, had died young of a heart attack. And so heart disease was something that my mother was always telling me, you got to be careful with your heart, and everything kind of snapped into focus as a result of that experience. 

I realized that not only did I need to make some pretty significant changes in how I was living, I actually wanted to. I was blessed with a level of willingness to actually take action on that.

I think the reason I bring up the sobriety aspect of my story is because I'd had that history. I'd had that moment, that bottoming out moment where I made a decision, acted on it and made a change that changed my life dramatically. And I felt the same energy. I was like, I think I'm having another one of those experiences.

What I learned about that prior experience was that you need to take action quickly because these… it's sort of a sliding doors moment. If you don't act upon it with some level of urgency, whatever willingness you're experiencing tends to fade pretty quickly. 

I thought, I kind of need detox for my lifestyle. I need to kind of recreate that treatment center kind of experience but for food and lifestyle habits. And so that set in motion a series of experiments with food and diet and fitness that kind of catalyzed this journey that I've been on that took me from there to here. 

Jonathan Wolf: And Rich, can you tell me a bit about, I guess, what your diet looked like before you were climbing up those stairs, and then tell me, what did you change?

Maybe over the next, I don't know whether this was instantaneous or this was the next year. What did it look like by the end of the year? 

Rich Roll: I was on what you would call the window diet. Do you know what the window diet is? The window diet is when you drive up to a fine dining establishment, you roll the window down and they hand you food into your car. That was the diet that I was on. 

So, a lot of fast food, a lot of late-night takeout, in the law firm in which I was working as a lawyer. Pizza Hut, Domino's, McDonald's, Jack in the Box, cheeseburgers, fries, you name it, I tried them all. A lot of greasy food.

So it was a big shift to actually go fully plant-based and I did it almost as an experiment to prove to myself that it wouldn't work so I could make peace with the fact that I just felt the way that I felt and this is the way I'm supposed to feel and was not expecting the sort of dramatic shift in in in how I felt.

But I tried a bunch of stuff. I dabbled in paleo. I tried vegetarian. I sort of checked a bunch of boxes and the one thing that I hadn't done because I was reluctant to do it, was to go entirely plant-based because it sounded hard. It was like, who wants to do that? It just sounded difficult and I couldn't imagine how I could ever be full or sated with anything that I was eating.

So I did it kind of as a challenge again, to prove that it wouldn't work. Because I really didn't want it to work. That's the truth. So I was as surprised as anyone when it actually seemed to resuscitate me. 

Jonathan Wolf: If you're going to describe the key components of that diet. Because I think it is quite powerful, what you're describing about the shift so far.  

Rich Roll: It was eating plant foods as close to their natural state as possible. So limiting exposure to processed foods. Trying to reduce the oil intake and just grazing on as many varieties of plant foods as possible.

Home-cooked and nominally limited processing. 

Tim Spector: It wasn't raw particularly?

Rich Roll: No, I never went totally raw. I ate a lot of raw foods and started doing a lot of, you know, smoothies, the base of which was always dark leafy greens.

Keeping it pretty simple. A lot of legumes, a lot of beans, a lot of quinoa, and variety. I think making sure that I was getting a lot of variety on the plate. 

Jonathan Wolf: And Tim, you're listening to this, you're a medical doctor. You know, I think a lot of people relate to this story, right?

This is a classic story of someone anywhere in the Western world with the modern diet. You're obviously layering onto that also this story about alcohol and stress it sounds like with the job that you're describing.

What are the implications for your health? And is it really shocking that Rich would already be feeling that sort of health impact at the age of 40?

Tim Spector: Well, sadly, it's not that unusual, and many people in the U.S., U.K., on really high ultra-processed food diets, are feeling sick, and a lot of them don't realize it until they are able to change to something else and realize that's not normal. 

They were in this state where the food is basically, you know, as you're describing, driving a lot of mental health issues as well and depriving you of energy and sort of sucking the life bit out of you.

It's only when you make that switch that you realize the problems that we were in. And this comes from a level where the majority of the foods you're eating are these artificial foods rather than real foods, and you're not really getting the whole plants at all in any way. If you are eating plants, they're highly refined and lack any of the goodness in them.

So it's not that unusual. And this is sadly why our gut health is in such a poor state as well. So that these foods in these States, you do see in people in their thirties and forties who have appalling gut health because of their diets and their state. And this has effects on the whole body, not just the gut.

And that's really what we're just starting to understand. 

Jonathan Wolf: I actually wanted to pick up on that because I was really struck by how much you were talking about the mental health and energy within this story. How rapidly did you see this shift?

I'm particularly interested because it's something that I think we haven't tended to associate with diet in the same way that we might understand that it affects our risk of a heart attack or something.

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Rich Roll: Sure. It was pretty rapid. Like I said, within 7 to 10 days, I did feel this resurgence, the spike in my energy levels. But at the same time, kind of hand in hand with that, there was a hopefulness that I was starting to experience. 

I was used to, you know, eating a midday meal and being so tired, feeling like I had to take a nap and, and just kind of being checked out of my life. And so to suddenly be able to eat without that food coma that I was so acclimated around almost like, you know, gave me more hours in the day.

My sleep improved. And when your sleep improves, your stress levels go down, you're able to kind of navigate tricky conflict-oriented situations a little more gracefully. And of course, your cognition and problem solving is better. 

So there was really no area of my life that was untouched. And yes, of course, we are holistic animals.  We're not separated from the environment and our mental health and what's going on in our brain obviously impacts the entire body.

My experience was pretty much 360 across the board. So many things improved as a result of that. And that gave me the enthusiasm to just say like, Oh, this doesn't need to be an experiment, how can I make this sustainable so that I can continue to learn about how to do this properly and make it work for my life?

Because I want to feel this way all the time. 

Jonathan Wolf: One of the things we talk about at ZOE a lot is this idea that if you want to make a change for your health, it's actually got to be a lifelong change. There's not some sort of quick-fix diet that you go on to make things better for a month or two, and then you go back. 

Obviously, that pushes it on to the question, how can you make something sustainable?

So I think what's striking here is you're talking not only about making this big change at this one period in time but then you've sustained that over, you know, close to 20 years. 

Did you get all the benefits literally in the first seven to 10 days? Have you learned more and changed more through this period? 

Rich Roll: I've been doing this for a very long time, you know, so yeah, I iterate, I get my blood work done, Oh, maybe too much olive oil, maybe I shouldn't, you know… Of course, I'm not a perfect human being.

I've tried to continue to learn and also to figure out how to do it when I travel and in situations where, you know, social situations where you feel like you need to make a compromise, all of those things,  it has to work in the context of your life.

But I think to your point of making it a lifetime thing, that can sound daunting and intimidating for someone. Like, Oh, I have to change, you know, my whole life, that's sort of scary, right? 

The only way I was able to do it was, I didn't make plans like, Oh, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. I always try to focus my energy on what the next right decision is, what's the good decision that I can make in the present moment?  

All we have is what's happening right now. Right. We spend all this time. We're like, Oh, what am I going to do when I have to go to that wedding? And I know they're going to serve… It's like, forget about all that, just try to do the best that you can in the circumstances in which you find yourself in.

Breaking it down into tiny little chunks and let the lifetime aspect of it take care of itself. And that's a lesson that I learned in recovery. I mean, the trope of one day at a time, I think applies in this context. And so much of what I learned in recovery has been incredibly helpful in navigating lifestyle changes like this. 

Jonathan Wolf: Why do you feel there's such a strong link between understanding how to shift from the traditional diet that so many of us are having, to this plant-based diet? Why do you feel that's so closely linked to recovery?

What makes that work so? 

Rich Roll: I think it's multifactorial. But I would say In my experience, because I never thought I could get sober. And then when I did, that was very empowering.  I made a huge life change that I never thought that I could., so that gave me confidence that I could make other changes in my life.

But what I learned is that literally, all you have is one day of sobriety every day. Your job is to have your head hit the pillow without taking a drink and it's very binary it's like you're either sober or you're not, there's no gray area.

When I made this dietary change, I kind of needed a binary rule and that's why plant-based was very helpful to me because it's sort of, well, I just don't eat these animal products. Let's just start there. Right. 

My job every day is to get through the day. And at the end of the day, make sure that I made the right dietary choices. And when you drill it down into just the bare essence of it and, and just focus on what's happening that particular day, it makes it a lot easier. I don't worry about what's going to happen tomorrow. We'll deal with that tomorrow. And so that's super helpful. 

Then also the accountability and community piece. You don't get sober alone, you do it as a collective. And I think if you're trying to navigate any kind of lifestyle change, it's helpful to have somebody to do it with or somebody to hold yourself accountable to. 

We're community animals. We’re best when we're a member of a tribe. So don't try to do these things alone, do it with someone in your family. If you don't have that option then find a friend or at least find somebody who can check in on you, that you kind of have to report to, and that's always helpful also to kind of keep you on track.

In sobriety, if you relapse the most important thing is making sure that you get right back to it. You can go down a shame spiral or just you know throw the baby out with the bath water and say well that was hard I can't do it.

But I've learned that yes, what's the next right thing? The next right thing is to make the right choice again and try to course correct as quickly as possible and learn what drove the relapse.

Because I think what's under-discussed in this conversation around making diet and lifestyle changes is the emotional piece. On paper, we all know we should eat more fiber and we should eat more plants and all these sorts of things. So why is it so difficult? 

I had to learn about how much my emotions are caught up in the food choices that I make and I think many people unconsciously are medicating their emotions through their food choices or are unduly influenced by their social environments and make choices that are not in their best interest because they don't want to upset anyone or draw unnecessary attention to themselves.

Tim Spector: When I had my medical episode, my shock, my equivalent in a way. It was not as severe probably. I tried going vegan for six weeks for the same reason, I wanted some strict rules just to say let's change something and see if see what happened.

So in 2011, I was doing some ski touring in the mountains and high up at 11,000 feet. Got a funny turn, double vision, and I ended up having a mini occlusion, a mini-stroke that left me with double vision for three months and high blood pressure, and lots of investigations and worries about my health.

I was four years away from the time when my father died of a heart attack. So that was my particular scare. I was 20 pounds overweight, but otherwise thought I was quite healthy. I didn't have as bad a diet as you did because I was a doctor. I thought I knew better in retrospect. 

It wasn't a good diet, but it wasn't quite as bad as yours. So it was full of low-fat foods and lots of carbs, lean meat and orange juice and mueslis and things like this that are really bad for my blood sugar. 

For anyone who wants to change, it is quite hard. Because you see, well, no one's telling you how to change. And you didn't want to do anything gradual. You just say, I want to do something immediate and that's probably the attraction of all these kinds of diets. 

The keto, the carnivore, whatever, it's strict rules. It's like joining a religion, you know. So I did give up all meat, 99% plant-based but not the full vegan, I still had fermented dairy. I find it easy to give up meat, but not so easy to give up my fermented dairy and my cheese.

I just wondered whether what you went through with the alcohol made you feel that if you'd sort of eaten cheese, that would have been a way, the sort of easy way back into meat and things. Did you have a feeling about that?  

Rich Roll: Yeah because I have an addictive nature, you know, and so actually, dairy was much harder to let go of than meat.

Meat, I'd been eating meat my whole life. And I was like, I don't even know if I like this. I've just always eaten it. But like you, dairy was difficult.

I had cravings, but I was like, oh, your cravings are your teachers though, why do I crave this? Well, if I crave it, perhaps there's some kind of unhealthy relationship that I have with it, that I need to look at.

It took me, you know, quite a while to kind of overcome those cravings, where they didn't kind of take up residence in my mind, but actually getting rid of the dairy was the thing that changed the way that I felt the most. 

Jonathan Wolf: Okay, that's interesting. I'm struck, Rich, that when you made this change, you were already entering midlife.

And I think it's a time when a lot of people, including, I think, quite a lot of listeners feel, I'm worried it's already too late to make a change that I will stick and a change that is actually really going to be able to transform my health. 

I think that's definitely the way that I felt probably 10 years ago. It was, well, this is my entire health, set by my genes, those are fixed and also by my upbringing, my first 20 years, and now I'm just on the path and I can't change it. 

I actually think when I first met Tim, it was one of those sort of light bulb moments where he sort of explained to me this whole new idea around the microbiome that I'd never heard of before. And that because it was changeable, then actually maybe I wasn't locked in as much. 

Tim, maybe for the benefit of listeners who might be new and haven't heard this before, could you describe a little bit about the microbiome, what it is, and then this question about to what extent is it still changeable?

And why does it matter for our health at the point that you're maybe in your forties? But then also continuing, I think there'll be plenty of listeners who are in their seventies saying, well, does that mean that it's too late for me?

Tim Spector: Sure. The microbiome is the word we give the community of microscopic organisms or microbes that live in our gut, mainly in the lower intestine where that's what we know about. That's where most of the action is going on. 

There are trillions of these guys, about as many as there are cells in our body and they work together. There are viruses, bacteria, archaea, fungi, and some parasites and they're all producing chemicals. They're like chemical factories and the chemicals they produce, interact with the rest of our body, particularly our immune system and our nervous system. 

So we're finding out that these chemicals they produce are absolutely key to the healthy maintenance of our normal functions. If we focus even just on the immune system, we know that if the immune signals are right from the microbes, our immune system is going to be really well balanced. It's going to stop us from getting infections, it's going to fight disease early on, it's going to fight cancers early on, it's going to mop up some of the debris of aging and allow our body to be really efficient going forward. 

So this is what we currently believe is, the key to why the microbiome is not just our gut or a few sporadic mechanisms of the body. It's really crucial to the whole way the whole thing functions. And it also dampens down inflammation, which is this low level of the immune system being tickled all the time, which is very common these days.

There's a common theory about aging, accelerated aging is called inflammo-aging, inflammated aging, that people who have this low-grade inflammation will age more rapidly. That includes heart disease, dementia, and arthritis.

Just because the immune system is so preoccupied, with putting out fires all over the body that it can't really do its principal job of mopping up the debris from the cells or fighting those early cancers or keeping all the blood vessels nice and clear and open and doing all the things that the immune system is really good at. 

So that's the concept of why our gut microbes and aging are so closely linked. And studies have been going on for a while now, looking at differences in age. And it's not as clear-cut as we think. 

So many people can maintain a really healthy gut microbiome into their hundreds.

Jonathan Wolf: Is that right? 

Tim Spector: So they've done some studies in China and Italy, in centenarians, showing that if you look at their gut microbes, they have the same gut health as many people in their forties or fifties. 

So you can maintain this. But if you look at elderly populations over 75, particularly those maybe in residential homes, you see it sort of drops off a cliff and their gut health, their diversity of gut microbes really plummets.

It's also associated with frailty increasing and we did some studies on the twins that predated the ZOE studies, showing this clear link between gut microbiome diversity and an increase in frailty. Obviously, this is still a new science, so no one's tracked 40-year-olds for 50 years down the road. So we have to make a few assumptions on the way.

But it's pretty obvious that if you can maintain your gut microbes from 40 and 50 years on, and do it right, you can keep that going right up to be 100, without a drop in your immune system and all the things that come from it.

That's what most of the data are telling us. And particularly the latest ZOE data, you know, this ratio of good to bad microbes, we see it doesn't matter what age you are. If you've got that good ratio of good to bad bugs, then you're going to be in pretty good shape, even in your ninth decade.

Jonathan Wolf: And Tim, when you're thinking about Rich's really dramatic change in diet, I love this, from the window diet to the plant-based diet, that's definitely two quite extreme shifts. How might that have impacted his microbiome, and what were the implications from that for his health, and I guess what Rich was describing to us?

Tim Spector: When we see someone shifting from a really poor diet to a really good diet, there have been a number of small studies and population studies and some ZOE studies show you, you do see a really rapid change in the gut microbes. 

Probably you could see it, I imagine in Rich, within a week if we'd tested you at the time, as you transitioned from the junk food diet to the plant-based diet.

When we get ZOE members having their personalized nutrition program, those who are adhering to it are seeing effects within a few weeks on their gut microbes. 

It all fits because those same people, although it takes for us to detect it, several weeks to see it, probably the changes are earlier because mood and energy in all our ZOE studies also improve within a week.

So if you ask them, you can see differences in mood and energy, whether it's just by shifting your diet or it's having something like prebiotics, you can see these changes. 

The mood and energy comes first actually, before you see the actual changes in the gut microbes. Which again, goes back to this idea of how important the gut and the brain are. Energy is the one thing that doctors don't ask about, but actually is perhaps the most important global feature of how you're feeling that I think needs much more medical attention.

So, yeah, in summary, these things can happen really fast, particularly if you're moving from a bad place to a good place. If you are on a really good diet, and you just want to incrementally do it, it would be harder to see that, and the differences would be more subtle.

But anyone who's on a poor diet and really if they make that effort, they will see results very, very fast.

Jonathan Wolf: When is it too late, Tim? So, you know, here we're talking about making a change at 40. You're describing a really dramatic change here, right? So you're saying the microbiome changes rapidly, in a big way, and then you're saying the health outcome changes in a big way.

When's it too late? 

Tim Spector: There's no evidence that it's ever too late, because what you're doing, even if you're 90 and you, you suddenly say, you know, I've been lucky maybe on the window diet, and there are these people that smoke and drink and have terrible food and they're lucky they get there. 

But, you know, they want to keep going, they can improve their gut microbe just as well as someone age 40 by making that change. And they will also see improvements in their mood and energy.

Because we're talking about instant changes in these microbes producing chemicals. And these chemicals can instantly impact your brain and your immune system. So it's not like you've got to wait for vessels to rebuild or some major changes to the structure to happen. 

This is what's so great about the microbiome and lifestyle is it all happens in real time. And that's why it's so much nicer to talk about this than what I used to talk about, genetics, because that, that really, really is slow. It's, well, several generations on, you know, there'll be really reaping the benefits here, you know.

Jonathan Wolf: And could you explain a little bit, just help us link this mood and the food, because I think a lot of people listening to this and I think they sort of understand that you can somehow improve your heart and this makes sense, but the mood thing seems rather magical. 

Does science understand what's going on?

Tim Spector: Well, we understand a little bit of it but we're probably just scraping the surface of what these microbes can do, and the chemicals they can produce.

But it basically comes from the chemicals they produce. As I said, they're chemical factories. They produce brain chemicals, for example, like serotonin, really important for brain and enjoyment and happiness and calm.

They also produce things like GABA, which is the equivalent of a Valium tablet. And the body can't produce much of this stuff, so most of it comes from the gut microbes. So they will be producing these chemicals which then get passed over and picked up by receptors in the brain which will change those moods.

Similarly, the effect on the immune system, we would damp down inflammation, and then the brain suddenly senses, Oh, there's no inflammation going on here. I don't have to be in this rather depressed state thinking I'm ill. 

Because the brain is just like a giant program. It's predicting what's going on. Often it's wrong. We think the brain is always right, but actually, it's just another organ in the body, and sometimes it gets these algorithms wrong. 

So that's what I think, would explain these changes and why getting rid of a terrible diet has such a profound rapid effect on people. The brain is perhaps the first thing to pick it up because it's not getting those sickness signals from the rest of the body.

Jonathan Wolf: That's fascinating. Now, Rich, when you made this big change, it wasn't only diet that you changed. I think you also made some big changes around exercise. 

Rich Roll: The diet set in motion the exercise though. The diet came first and that kind of resurgence of energy made me want to move my body and it was one step at a time, but I started getting outdoors more, and I pulled an old pair of running shoes out of the closet.

My wife bought me a bike for my birthday and it was all very casual, but I lost weight very quickly and was able to restore some level of fitness also very quickly. 

It was like the lights came on, I had forgotten as a lifelong athlete, how much I enjoyed this. And so with that, there was also kind of a recapturing of joy that I used to experience that I was reconnecting with.

Then that led to a new found kind of sense of possibility because alcoholism had sort of derailed my competitive swimming career, I suppose. I felt like I was not fully expressed as an athlete, and I think 40 also, that's why all these guys do Ironman's at 40.

There's a little bit of that too, a little bit of midlife, you're kind of taking inventory of your life. And so that's what kind of led me towards tackling some challenges and realized not only that I had an aptitude for this, but that I really enjoyed it, and ended up going on to do things I never thought I was capable of. 

So to your question of is it too late? I'm not a scientist, I'm a layperson. All I have is my experience. But I can tell you that these changes that I made at 40, I was convinced that I was just sort of sliding into middle age. Instead, I kind of revolutionized how I was living to such an extent that it changed my entire life and with it my perception of latent potential.

I've become convinced that we're all kind of tiptoeing above these reservoirs of potential that we don't give ourselves credit for having, let alone are we encouraged to kind of tap into them. 

So I don't think it's too late. To Tim's point, the body is incredibly resilient and if you can shift a gear and start to treat it better, the body will kind of respond in kind and treat you with kindness as well. 

Jonathan Wolf: And Rich, I want to paint a little bit of a picture for the audience. Some of them, people will be listening on audio, so they won't see what a fantastic specimen of manhood you are sitting in front of me.

But also I have no idea about what does an ultra-endurance athlete mean? What is maybe the craziest thing right now that you feel that you have achieved post this change?

Rich Roll: Yeah, I've done a couple of crazy things. I've done double Ironman distance races. If you know what an Ironman is, you swim 2.4 miles and then you ride your bike 112 miles and then you run a marathon. Well, I've done double of that. 

Jonathan Wolf: All at the same time?

Rich Roll: Yeah, basically. But probably the craziest thing that I've done that people know me for, is doing five Ironmans on five Hawaiian islands consecutively, which ended up taking six and a half days or something like that. So back to back to back to back, literally just doing Ironmans for a week essentially. 

And I say that as somebody who, I promise you, I'm not somebody who's gifted with some kind of extreme athletic talent. I worked very hard to achieve those goals. But they are all a product of changing my diet and prioritizing my lifestyle habits.

I'm not here to tell anyone that they should be an ultra-endurance athlete, I'm here to merely say that you probably have more inside of you than you realized, and when you kind of shift that lens and start to really think about how you're caring for yourself, these things tend to suddenly become more expressed in your life. 

Jonathan Wolf: I think it's an amazing story. I could also see that maybe there is this alternate outlet for some of this obsessive behavior that you were describing out before. 

Rich Roll: Yeah, there's a little light dusting of alcoholic behavior on top of that. I am prone to extremes. But that's what got me interested in a plant-based diet, to begin with, right?  Dancing around the outer edges of what's possible. 

Jonathan Wolf: Now, Rich, I have an investor who's going to be listening to this podcast right now and he is very serious about his exercise. He exercises a lot, every day. And he does some of the activities you're talking about. And he insists on eating red meat every day, to get enough protein to perform. 

Since I've got this opportunity, because he doesn't listen to anything I say, or Tim hasn't really convinced him, but you've done a lot more Ironmans than either of us, infinitely more than either of us, is there anything you'd like to say to him?

Rich Roll: Well, the first thing I would say is it's not for me to tell him what his diet should or shouldn't be. I'm not that person, I'm also not a scientist or a medical professional. 

All I can do is share once again, my experience. And my experience was that I was able to do things I didn't think possible without any animal products. I went way beyond what I had even imagined for myself.

My experiences along the way of that journey was, and this is somebody who, I was a lifelong athlete. I was a competitive swimmer at a very high level at Stanford and I was eating lots of meat and you know, whatever.

I discovered that in my forties, I actually was recovering better. In between my workouts. And that's where you make the gains. It's not the training where you get stronger, it's the periods in between when your body is repairing itself.

My experience was that I was able to kind of shrink the period of time necessary to make those repairs, which allowed me over time to go further, train harder, and push myself a little bit harder the next time. Over an extended period of time, I think I was able to realize outsized gains as a result. 

So my experience is that you don't need to eat red meat in order to be a competitive athlete at the peak of your powers. And I'm not alone in that perspective, there's plenty of elite plant-based athletes out there. 

I would suggest to him to hold his ideas loosely and maybe look into some other examples that are similar to my own. Perhaps even tune into our mutual friend, Simon Hill’s podcast, The Proof where he talks about this subject matter at length as a scientist.

Jonathan Wolf: And Tim, are you saying that people who want to be really healthy need to give up meat and animal products in the way that Rich has talked about? 

Tim Spector: No, I'm not saying exactly that. We've just done a huge microbiome study of 30,000 people including vegans, vegetarians, carnivores, omnivores, and mainly plant-based people like me. 

And conclusions are similar to earlier, smaller studies that gut health measured by the ZOE score; good to bad ratio, is correlated with the number of plants you're eating, not whether you are labeled as a vegan, a vegetarian o, or a meat eater. 

But it is much easier to get more plants on your plate if it isn't blocked with a big steak or a big bit of fish.

Rich Roll: You're saying it's not so much about what you're taking off the plate as much as it is what you're putting on the plate. 

Tim Spector: Correct. 

Jonathan Wolf: I'd like to come back just for a minute to the exercise point that we're talking about and almost tie it back to the microbiome. Because I think we've done a lot of podcasts that have talked about exercise, and I've yet to meet a scientist who doesn't tell me exercise is really good for your health, so that feels like it's pretty uncontroversial. 

Rich, you're describing the fact that you first did diet, then you layered exercise on top. Tim, you talked a lot about the impact of diet on the microbiome, does exercise also have an effect on the microbiome?

Tim Spector: Probably, but it's not nearly as clear-cut. The studies just haven't been as good. They've done lots of studies from elite athletes to sedentary individuals, and trying to work out whether the more training you do, the better your gut microbes. 

It hasn't been shown conclusively to be true, and certainly, they haven't looked at elite athletes, and they don't find any difference in their gut microbes compared to amateurs or else. There's been a few mouse studies, but I'm always a bit skeptical about extrapolating from mice to humans for this sort of behavior. 

So my guess is, although I think we still need more science, that exercise has some benefits to the gut microbiome, but if they are there, they're proportionally much less than diet.

I don't think people that say, I'm not worried about my diet, I'm going to the gym five times a week, I'm okay, Jack. That's not going to work, is my view. And I think we would have seen a big effect on exercise by now, it would have come out of these studies. 

People are desperately trying to find it because you're right. Every doctor will tell you exercise is good for you, and I'm saying that as well, and I exercise. But I don't think it's working the same mechanisms and certainly for gut health. 

I don't know how you feel. I mean, if you'd had a magic pill that allowed you to exercise, do you think you'd be in the same place?

Rich Roll: There's that adage that you can't out-exercise a bad diet. Any kind of very enthusiastic exerciser is sort of quietly telling themselves that that doesn't apply to them.

It can be used as a way to kind of have a healthy appetite and enjoy foods that maybe, you know, you couldn't get away with if you weren't exercising. So in that context, exercise can work across purposes with everything that you're sharing. 

If repairing or really caring for your microbiome is something that we should prioritize, then we have to be careful about the stories we tell ourselves about exercise, giving us permission to kind of indulge in food. So I think that is something that that that I just feel is important to be to flag. 

But I think to the point of us being holistic where the brain and the body are all connected. When you exercise, you feel better, and when you feel better, you have a sunnier disposition and suddenly you have a deeper sense of how you're caring for yourself.

If you're exercising, that is an act of self-love and self-care that then kind of leads to better habits in other areas of your life. So I think there's a compounding effect, but my mental health is very much dependent upon, you know, my exercise routine. And when I'm not exercising consistently, I don't feel as good. And when I don't feel as good, then it's easier to slough off on healthy habits. 

Jonathan Wolf: So there's a sort of positive reinforcement 

Rich Roll: Yeah, there’s a reinforcement loop I think. 

Jonathan Wolf: We’ve definitely established that the microbiome is this very powerful tool to transform your health. And Tim, I love this idea that you could even be 90 and you can sort of improve it, which is brilliantly positive.

I'd love to now hear some actionable tips for showing up for this change consistently. Rich, I know you've already touched a little bit in parts already, but I'd love to talk about how do you find the motivation to start a change and how do you find the motivation to stick to a long-term health check.

Rich Roll: I think the first thing I would say to that is to kind of challenge the presumption here, which is that you need motivation in order to take action.

How do I find the motivation? You mentioned willpower earlier, how do I find the willpower to do all these things that you're telling me to do?

I think that assumption that you need motivation or willpower and you're kind of sitting around waiting for it, is something that keeps people paralyzed in bad habits. I have a mantra that I use, that I think is very helpful, and again, it's something I learned in recovery and it goes like this: mood follows action.

So rather than waiting until you're struck with inspiration, what is the thing that you can do right now? And the mood, i.e. the motivation is a product of taking the action.

This is something that's validated in neuroscience. Behavior first, thoughts, feelings, and emotions follow. So it's about kind of reversing that equation in your mind and breaking down again, everything into tiny actionable items.

So there's a wonderful book called Atomic Habits that you've probably heard of by James Clear and he always says habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. So you always default to your habits and if you want to make a habit change. Break it down into its tiniest sort of elements.

When you think of, Oh my God, I have to change my diet for the rest of my life, it's all very daunting and like I said earlier, intimidating. So I'm always encouraging people to start with very easy lifts and lower the ceiling on your expectations. Broaden your timeline or forget about a timeline altogether and just take one tiny little thing.

Maybe, you know, Tim, you can get rid of the fermented dairy in your fridge and replace it with something else that might be a little bit healthier and that's all you're doing. 

Just go into your pantry and you know what? All these chips in here, I'm just going to take them out of the house. Maybe that was all you did that day, but you chalked up an easy win. 

So I think it's about assembling a lot of easy wins. And when you just kind of focus on tiny little things that you can master, that does have a compounding effect. And when you teach yourself that you can do that, and you make that one little change, you're like, Oh, I did that and now that's really not an issue for me anymore. What else can I do? Let's move on to the next thing. And you just kind of build on these things. 

I believe that that is really how you make change. So it's about the tiny little daily habits that you're almost reflexively or unconsciously kind of indulging every single day and drawing attention to those, rather than making dramatic wide sweeping statements. I don't think that's how it really works for most people. 

I think, you know, kind of just gradually leaning into this as a process rather than a result driven by this day, I have to weigh this much. I think you're in better stead to then adopt habits with staying power because this is really all about sustainability and having it all kind of work in the construct of our, you know, we all have busy lives and we're all kind of doing lots of different things.

So how can you create an environment that's conducive to making the healthy choices and chalk up those little wins with small little habits that you can build upon? 

Jonathan Wolf: I'd love to just follow up on this thing about how you describe exercise actually providing you with this sort of support for your mood that it sounds to me is helping to enable all the things you're describing.

So if you were to give advice to someone who's trying to, let's assume they're not a super sophisticated athlete, but maybe they're thinking, Oh, I'd never even thought that I could use exercise in some way to sort of support my mood to achieve change. What would you say to them? 

Rich Roll: To find a movement practice that you enjoy. So what's the best exercise? What should I be doing? Well, what's the thing that you like doing?  If you enjoy it, you're more likely to kind of invest yourself in it and make it kind of a sustainable habit in your life. 

So think about what it is that you actually enjoy and find a way to incorporate that into your life in a way that's not overly disruptive to your daily schedule. So you won't abandon it on February 1st, you're like, okay, I can't do this anymore.

Find people to do it with, make it a community-oriented sort of thing so that you're kind of sating yourself with human connection at the same time that you're moving your body.

Set reasonable goals or don't set any goals at all. Just do it for the sake of doing it. And that could be a walk in the woods or, you know, walking the dog around the block. It doesn't have to be any kind of big daunting thing.

I think it's important for everybody to understand that in terms of healthspan extension and longevity, there is no more powerful lever than exercise.

It's never too late to start. And it doesn't mean again that you need to go and be an ultra-endurance athlete. It just simply means that you have to find a way to exert yourself. I think if you find something that brings you joy in the process of doing it, you're more likely to stick with it.

Jonathan Wolf: I think it's beautiful. 

Tim final, simple question for you. What is one type of food that someone could add to their diet tomorrow that could improve their gut health? 

Tim Spector: Fermented food would be the obvious one for me. A lot of people don't have much in the way of fermented foods, fermented vegetables, the kimchi's, the sauerkrauts. 

These are an amazing source of microbes and will help your inflammation, which should, in theory, reduce the speed of aging. 

Jonathan Wolf: Amazing. 

Rich, Tim, I'd like to try and do a quick summary. We covered a lot of stuff in this episode, so definitely let me know if I've missed anything. I'm going to try and pull it together. 

So my biggest takeaway was that Rich was on the window diet, which I'd never heard of before, which meant that all your food came in through the window of the car and then into your mouth. And this is a pretty terrible diet to be on. 

I also am really struck by this idea about medicating your emotions with your food choices. That this food becomes this thing that's really linked to how you feel and it's giving you this sort of short-term boost, which I think we can all identify with.

But in describing just how bad an impact was having on you, I think the other key message is that that I took away is it's never too late to make a change. You know, we're talking here about making this change in midlife, but I think I'm also hearing from both of you that it's almost never too late to make a change that can be profound. 

A lot of this comes from the realization that our microbiome is so important in our health and unlike our genes, it's not fixed.

I think Tim was describing some of the science, Rich, to go with your experience of how your mood could actually change in seven to 10 days because of the way these chemicals from this bacteria were changing. 

That then it gave you energy, it affected your sleep, and that then that itself sort of gave you the positivity to do more exercise, which then sort of became this reinforcing loop.

We talked about meat and I definitely took away from you Rich that you can do the sorts of things that you're doing without eating meat. That on the other hand, it's not like you have to give up meat, the point is that once you really reduce the meat in your diet, suddenly you're creating all this space to eat all of these plants that have the positive side. 

And then we talked about how you think about willpower coming from a lot of your own experience through recovery, which I'd never heard before. And that a lot of the things that I take for granted, you're like, well, actually, I think that's wrong.

So, for example, take it one day at a time. Don't think about making a permanent life change, actually just say, I've got each day to do this.

Rather than saying, I need to wait till I have enough willpower to do it actually, it's the complete reverse. Your mood follows action. So do something and actually in a sense if I understood rightly, your mood will improve and that will give you more of this willpower to go for it.

If you relapse, then start back on the course. So it's just very different from this New Year's Day, make this big, crazy plan and then sort of give up. It's okay to start with an easy win, I think you said. So again, it can be sort of incremental step by step because you're building on this.

And then finally, my takeaway was one of the things that's interesting about exercise is not just about long-term health, actually, it can provide a lot of mental support for you to actually be doing these other positive things with your life. 

So you're describing that actually exercise helps to support your mental health, that helps to support your diet.

Maybe to wrap up, you were saying, that if you want to get into exercise, find a movement practice that you enjoy. So it's for something that you are actually going to enjoy doing it, that you can incorporate into your life. You're not going to give up after a month. It's not disruptive. Find people to do it with. 

Then finally, I love this idea, you said, set reasonable goals or no goals at all. And all of this just increases your chances of success.

Rich Roll: That was great. Will you now come to my podcast and do a synopsis summary at the end of every conversation? Because that was fantastic.