Hello, and welcome to the Microbiome Medics Podcast.

I'm Dr.

Siobhan McCormack.

And I'm Dr.

Sheena Fraser, and we're your co-hosts.

We are both GPs and lifestyle medics with a shared passion for microbiome science.

We'll be translating the evidence and packaging it into actionable, bite-sized chunks so that you could harness the power of the microbiome to improve your own health and that of your patients.

Hello, and welcome to another Microbiomedics podcast.

Today, I'm joined by an amazing guest.

She's a forager.

She's a research herbalist.

She's an author.

She lives in East Lothian.

Her name is Mo Wild.

And today, we're going to be talking about what foraging does to your microbiome.

Mo took part in an amazing sort of self-experiment where she foraged for her food for a whole year and we monitored, well she monitored her microbiome while she did it.

So really interesting, we're going to talk about that in more depth, we're going to talk about why she did this and you know she's quite an interesting person to talk to.

She's got an incredible depth of knowledge on foraging.

She's got an incredible depth of knowledge on herbs and herbalism.

She has a master's degree in herbalism and there's just so much to learn from her.

So we're going to try and fit this into one podcast but I think what we're going to have to do with Mo because there's so much to discuss is we need to turn this into two podcasts where we can really get into nitty-gritty of herbalism as well.

So welcome Mo to the podcast.

So Mo tell me a little bit about yourself.

I've given you a brief intro, but tell me a little bit more about you.

Well, I'm.

I practice as a research herbalist, so I've been specializing in particularly lime, but working with people who are chronically ill after 5, 10, 15 years and more after having had a bacteria or a virus.

But I also have developed this unusual specialism in wild food.

And that really came about because back in 95, when I first arrived in Scotland, I was bringing up three very small children on my own and with no other financial contributions.

And so I started teaching people about wild food as an extra job.

Plants were something I'd always been fascinated with and living outdoors and bushcraft because I grew up in Kenya and Malawi.

But was sent back here to boarding school.

So, you know, I had this extra knowledge and just sort of fell into it by accident.

But in actual fact, the wild food side of things has become over the years a really important part of what I do and what I've learned about.

And then, of course, it really culminated in that year towards the end of lockdown And, When, you know, having taken people out on foraging walks for years, people would always say, well, you know, it's all very well you're telling us that you can use the sticky bubbles off cleavers, known in Scotland as sticky willy, to make coffee.

But, you know, come on, you know, when would you really do it?

I mean, could you really do this stuff, you know, you know, live off it, like for a year or something?

And I've never been one that doesn't rise to a chance.

So I decided to live for a year only on wild food, nothing bought.

If I didn't have it, I was going to have to find some way to trade it or inveigle it out of others.

And really see what it was like to try to live within the seasons, as a Mesolithic person would in Scotland 12,000 years ago.

Okay.

where you know we were indigenous although we know very little about our indigenous microbiome in school that's true i i certainly don't it's not an area that that i believe there's any real research into that i've come across um and we don't have any indigenous populations that i'm aware of that are still you know living that close to nature um yeah well that's true and i I mean, if you look at studies comparing our microbiome to indigenous people, I mean, the last meta-analysis I read, they were comparing people in westernized urban civilizations with 14 indigenous peoples, all of whom were non-European.

It's mainly African.

Yeah, and having grown up in Africa, I know only too well that our diet is very different.

The plants are different.

And, I mean, for instance, in the Kalahari, which I visit a lot with a foundation I'm working with, the Ju/'hoansi will go out and find tiny, tiny little plants in the shade of a bush.

You know, they look so insubstantial, and yet they'll leap on it and dig down and come back with a tube of the size of a baby that, you know, gets shared out and everybody eats it, you know, full of fiber and carbohydrate.

Hydrate, but you'd struggle to find anything bigger than a golf ball in Scotland, tuber size.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And yet we have this lush amount of greens and we've got all the sea vegetables and so on and so forth, which were not available to the Hadza nor the Duke of the Hadza.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so I was very interested in the fact that a lot of microbiome research is comparing us to people whose diet we didn't share.

Yeah.

So when I set about doing my year on wild food, I decided I would basically just do lots and lots of tests and see what happened to my own gut.

And then a friend decided to join me for the year as well, Matt.

And so we tested his microbiome as well.

And that was also very interesting because they acted in, you know, there were some commonalities, but they also acted in quite different ways too.

Yeah, that is really interesting.

and so tell me before we go into the year let's go back a little bit and let's decide what were your rules what what did you decide because you mentioned that you know had to be everything from the land not buying anything but you did have to make certain exceptions and.

With eggs and...

Ah, yes.

Well, it's, you know, our ancestors would have eaten a lot of eggs in the first part of the year.

It's only pigeons that lay in the second part of the year, really.

But it's both illegal and, you know, the birds need all the help they can get from us.

It's illegal and immoral to harvest wild birds' eggs.

Yep.

So I kept some chickens and fed them, you know, everything was organic or, you know, they were free range and want to eat what they liked as well so substituted those eggs on the basis that I'd have to find a nest and work out you know what the equivalent was in chickens eggs, so you were still having to do the work you're finding them do the work you know but it's wonderful when I found a rook colony about 36 nests then it was egg bonanza yeah amazing amazing so you would essentially have an egg if you had found the nest in nature and you're foraging and you would work out what that would have equated to in the number of eggs and you would then allow yourself to have your chicken's eggs.

Right.

I have an egg chart.

Excellent.

That's pretty impressive.

Okay, so eggs were one exception.

The other exception you had was extra virgin olive oil.

Well, no, I wasn't using it, but I had preserved things the year before, like for instance mushrooms or hogweed shoots and things.

And some of them were in, you know, being preserved in oil, a little jar.

And I, you know, I ate them and then there'd be traces of olive oil in that.

Yeah.

But other than that, you weren't using any cooking oils.

What would you use as your oils throughout the year?

Well, people would use wild animal fats, you know, so for instance, you know, venison tallow.

And when we later did the wild buying projects, quite a few people used that.

But I just really found that you don't actually need to cook with lots of fat.

You can actually, you know, start frying things and just put a little water in the pan.

And that will, you know, stop it burning and sticking.

So there's lots of different ways.

And I think our ancestors probably didn't spend a lot of time frying food.

No.

They spent far more time, you know, boiling it or toasting it on hot rocks.

Mm-hmm.

Perfect.

Perfect.

Okay.

All right.

So any other rules that you had before?

So you were allowed to barter for things.

Yes.

But not with money.

Yeah.

So things like your meat.

Yes.

How did you get your meat generally?

Well, I don't have a rifle.

license so um if i needed um a deer which i would about once every four months you know a deer will you know if you're if you're eating the whole animal yeah which you know actually respects the animal's life far more um a whole deer will last you between three and four months okay um and then i would have to um ask my friend bob if he'd be willing to let me have another one and he's somebody who's been.

You know, involved in deer management all his life, you know, in culling.

He knows the herds extremely well and keeps them in balance.

So I offered to keep him healthy during COVID and, you know, in exchange for the occasional deer.

So, and then very sweetly later, because I didn't know him terribly well at the time when I persuaded him into this bargain.

But later on, he said, somebody asked him why he did it and he said because she's my friend and I was very touched but I think also that people in the area so I live halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow in that sort of West Lothian hinterland yeah which even in the medieval times they said was pretty bleak you know but in that area you know there's still some farms and farmers do you know control wild animals and kill things so you know when they're planting out grain or oats or barley for the next year and there's lots of pigeons descend you know the pigeons will get you know shot on mass and when people found that um the same with rabbits and carrot fields you know um and when people found out that i was eating only wild food mysterious things started to end up on my doorstep or hanging over my door.

Brilliant.

Not always welcome, but very often it was.

And then, of course, I can also fish for myself as well.

Great.

Excellent.

And shellfish and things you can forage for as well.

So your proteins came from those sources and they were all native Scottish species.

What about?

And things like wasp larvae.

Oh, yeah.

What does that taste like?

Lemons.

Interesting.

Very lemony flavour.

Yeah, because, you know, I can understand that my dad's a beekeeper.

And sometimes in the honey, you might get a bit of larvae when it's straight on the cone.

So I remember that, actually.

I remember having that sort of sweetness from the larvae.

But yeah, that's probably got to be quite good for you.

I have read a study on the nutrition of wasp larvae.

Interesting.

I mean, you know, what about insects in general?

And was that the only insect you would eat or are there others?

No, I've eaten quite a few.

I mean, I was in my teens when I was in Malawi and my parents had split up.

We were in my father's custody.

So I started cooking for a family from the age of 14.

And not very adventurously to start with.

But the first cookbook I was given was the Malawi cookbook, and Chapter 5 was devoted to the preparation of insects.

Wow.

And so presumably they eat a big variety of insects over there.

Yes, quite a big variety.

I remember as a small child catching and eating flying ants.

Okay.

You know, when the rains came and the ants came out of their burrows and started swarming, there'd be a great big hullabaloo.

Everybody would be out with lights and head torches and great big baskets trying to catch them.

And then in the morning, they would be just tossing out all of the wings and frying them all up in a pan, a little salt and pepper.

And were they tasty?

They're very tasty.

But then most things fried a little salt and pepper.

Okay, fair.

So, you know, what about Scotland, though?

What insects can we eat in Scotland?

You can eat grasshoppers and you can eat ants I mean the bigger wood ants are protected in Scotland So you just need to be aware of what things are protected, There's a huge amount of mollusks of course You know snails and clams And I've got a book from the 1800s on Britain's edible mollusks And it's an incredible range that people were eating in those days.

And actually, they taste fine.

I mean, I've had snails in France before, a bit of garlic, and they're pretty tasty.

Well, a lot of it's about how you prepare things, and that sometimes gets lost.

And I certainly found that, just jumping ahead a little, you know, when we started to do what's called the Wild Biome Project, and I started to repeat this experiment with other people, that it was, you know, partly about foraging skill, but also partly about knowing how to prepare things and some of the older cooking methods.

Because when you approach everything with modern cooking methods, you can really mess it up.

And you have to go back to looking at not just can you eat this, but how do you eat this and how do you prepare it?

And I should have said at the start, but Mo has written this beautiful book about her whole year of foraging and is genuinely one of the nicest books I've ever read.

It's just incredibly detailed, incredibly beautifully written, so descriptive.

You know, every day is a new forage, a new foraging experience, and every day is a new culinary experience.

And I think what comes through in that book is your attention to all the little details of each plant and how you use each plant in the best way.

And your recipes are kind of like something you would expect from a Michelin star chef.

They're so detailed.

There's so many different ingredients in those recipes.

Some of them are quite mind-blowing.

So I was impressed at just how you were using all of these foraged herbs, vegetables, all the things that you were eating, and not just steaming them up and scoffing them down.

There was a lot of attention to how you were preparing them and how you were eating these and getting flavor from all the different herbs and spices.

And what's amazing is just the sheer number of different herbs and flavourings that you got from, you know, plants in Scotland, which I was really blown away by just how many plants you can forage.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, during the course of that year, I counted it up.

And this wasn't me just sort of like checking off to see how many I could do.

This was things I genuinely ate.

If I'd been just trying to tick boxes, I could have added more.

But over the year, I ate 300 species of plants, 87 species of wild mushrooms, about 20, 21 species of seaweed, and 44 species from what's known as kingdom animalia, which is those shellfish.

Fish and fish and game boats and animals.

Which is actually quite astounding, given that when you go into the supermarket these days and you see the variety of plants that we're eating, it seems to be a much lower level of variety within the supermarket than you're getting in Scotland.

And when I look out and I see green everywhere, I'm thinking, where are all those varieties of species coming from?

It's incredible.

And, you know, I wouldn't have thought as well that the part of Scotland that you were in would be so abundant as well.

Yeah.

Well, one of the other rules was that I wasn't trying to do it like Bear Grylls and as a survival experiment.

So I did use a car and I did use a freezer and I did use jam jars.

You should never underestimate the critical importance to the progress of civilization as a humble jam jar, you know, the things that you can preserve.

You know in a jar just by you know steam steaming them to pasteurize things yeah you know so when you know thinking about the complexity of food but you know there were i was still working during this time and you know on days where there wasn't time to necessarily forage and prepare food i might fall back on foragers pot noodles which is basically um young sea spaghetti which is the fronds of a type of seaweed that i would pick in march or april so one trip to the seaside and i could gather enough and then freeze it to keep me going for a while and i would freeze it in 100 gram packs and then it literally just needs to go into boiling water for four or five minutes, and then while that was just steaming i would put open a jar of rosehip puree just a sort of passata made from rose hips in the autumn that was, you know, just pasteurized in the jam jar.

And, um, you know, it tastes a little bit like, um.

Um sweet you know sweet peppers and tomatoes that it's that sort of group of flavors um and then just put it over the top of my sea spaghetti and it's fairly instant food yeah so it wasn't all complex but you know i do like cooking and um and i cook very fast you know when you're a 14 year old and you've got you know four younger brothers and sisters and your dad and you've got to produce something quickly, you learn to be pretty quick rustling up a meal.

But I think it's also that when you go to the supermarket, you can buy things in quantity.

When you're out foraging, you're not necessarily just picking one thing in quantity.

You tend to be picking lots of things.

So I know one summer, I was doing a lot of events for other people, not the previous year, and would produce these salads made of forage ingredients.

And for the whole summer, I counted all the ingredients that I put into every salad.

And it was always 40 or, you know, pretty much 39, 41.

Well, you know, if you go for a little walk along a hedgerow and come, you know, just before dinner, you can come home with 40 ingredients that will go into a salad.

Yeah, it's amazing.

Now, given that we're supposed to eat five a day.

You know, this totally changes it.

And the difficulty is that since the Second World War, We've really focused on there just being some macronutrients.

So you've got the calories, carbohydrate, fats, proteins, fiber, and then a handful of vitamins, A to K, and then a handful of minerals.

But plants contain hundreds of phytochemicals in each plant.

I mean, they've found so far in the scientific literature over 10,000 phytochemicals.

Mm-hmm, it's amazing.

Let's call them phytonutrients.

Why not?

You know, I mean, although some of them are obviously toxins.

Mm-hmm.

But we just don't really know what we're missing.

Mm-hmm.

And throughout history, you know, well, agricultural history, since people started, you know, farming.

Really, people were farming calories, farming carbohydrates and calories, which would keep people going over the winter, which offered people food stability.

But the nutrition came from the wild still for many, many hundreds of years.

The nutrition came from the wild.

And it was only really with urbanization and people, you know, basically moving into these sort of, you know, huge urban areas where humans get to be battery farmed that it really changed.

That real sort of loss of the wild in the diet came about.

And in other parts of the world, you know, I mean, here people think, you know, foraging is a bit niche, a bit middle class, a bit yuppie, you know, sort of an obvious thing.

But in 50% of the world, it's still absolutely vital wild food as part of the nutrition.

And what happens in Africa, in Asia and places, you know, people are moving into urban environments for work as they get taken off the land and traditional land use is disrupted.

And all they can afford is maize meal, cornmeal, rice, and things like that.

And they're still dependent very, very much on what they can forage for the actual nutritional aspects of it.

And we've gone further than that.

You know, we have this variety we feel in the supermarkets.

But really, a lot of them are the same things.

Mm-hmm.

Especially things that are descendants of cabbages, for instance.

It's all one species, but just different variants with different types.

I think a cauliflower and a broccoli are pretty much the same species, aren't they?

Yeah, and if you think about the types of species we're getting in the plant world, in our local supermarkets, the taste is very different as well, because we've obviously bred them to be much sweeter, much less bitter.

And much less fibrous.

and much less fibrous.

So they are a very different type of plant because that's one thing I do notice when you eat forage plants is the depth of flavors that you get in forage plants that you don't have that same flavor in a lot of the cabbages and the leafy plants that we get in the supermarket.

Yeah, they can be really, really strong flavors.

I mean, you only need a tiny bit And that's really because, you know, these phytochemicals are there for the plants to defend themselves.

So at the point that you eat something, you know, normally what happens is an enzyme will convert a passive compound into an active fighting compound, which objects to being munched.

So you'll get these sudden, you know, sometimes you don't really taste anything.

And then suddenly there's this burst of flavor as it says, stop eating me.

But, you know, those more active compounds are very often the ones that are, from a health point of view, the ones that are the most medicinal, the most antibacterial or antiviral, most anti-inflammatory.

Because plants are defending themselves and, you know, no sensible plant likes to, you know, bleed to death.

If it's the sap or, you know, have inflammation hanging around or have toxins hanging around in its tissues.

And they've been doing chemistry for, what, 12 million years?

Yeah.

And that's really interesting.

Obviously, the herbal side and the fact that a lot of these plants are medicinal.

And, you know, we don't think about it when we go into the supermarket, you know, which foods we should be getting from a medicinal point of view.

But, you know, lots of the fruit and veg in our supermarkets have anti-cancer properties, have, you know, really anti-inflammatory properties, have properties that help to clean up our arteries, you know, various things like this.

And we're beginning to learn more and more about this.

But were you, because as a herbalist, you've got a very good in-depth knowledge on the medicinal side of these plants.

So when you're foraging, are you thinking, I'm going to need some more of these type of plants because, you know, medicinally wise, this is what I feel like I need at the moment.

This is, or, you know, how do you, how do you choose your foraging or is it just what's available at the time?

It's, it's a mixture.

I mean, certainly what's available at the time comes into it, but I also pick and dry a lot of things.

So I drink a lot of herbal teas and it's not like a little tea bag of dust like you get in the shops.

You know, I have a great big kilner jar that I just, you know, fill up once a month and I get all my little bags.

I've got brown craft bags of different dried flowers and leaves and herbs and put them all together.

But I know that that tea blend as well as tasting really delicious I've not met anybody even people who don't drink tea who don't like it but that is actually going to look after all the health needs of our family and you know it keeps blood pressure down it's you know it keeps us healthy.

It maybe it's why I didn't have any menopausal symptoms worth speaking of because there's lots and lots of red clover in it so and you know that tends to change in the winter i tend to put more things that i know are antiviral and you know immune supporting in the winter okay and it tends to be a sort of lighter fresher blend in the summer but then i also know you know i know when my body needs iodine for instance and when i need some more seaweed um great and and just being in touch with your body in that way I think you know that's another thing that I think modern society's lost you know that ability to sort of self-care and self um treat um we we rely on medical professionals to do the diagnosing and the um.

And the treating for us um which is fine but but i do wonder whether we've lost some of that instinct um in knowing you know what's up with us and what we need and you know in terms of self um treating just you know common kind of ailments that you get throughout the year you know tiredness at certain times of the year um you know as a woman sort of menstrual issues and you know various different things that might happen to you over your lifetime.

You know, I do wonder whether we should be doing a little bit more self-care around these kind of things.

Yeah, I think some of not being able to listen to yourself, particularly as to what you should eat, is the fact that there's so much noise around that it's difficult.

And if you're not in a healthy place to start with, it can be confusing.

You know, you can say, oh, well, I'm going to listen to what my body says about what to eat, my body wants to eat loads and loads of sugar or carbohydrates.

Well, that may well be because you've got a high prevalence of candida, albicans in your gut that are going, give me sugar.

Yep.

And once you take away the noise of all the distracting modern processed foods, then I think your body's actually able to hear itself, to hear itself speak.

And I would say also there's a lot of noise around the busyness within which we are trying to fit into these very rigid work-based cultures that we live in, which are the same every day of the year.

You know, whereas, you know, our bodies still, you know, react to the seasons, for instance.

I think the conversion between T3 and T4 slows down in the winter.

You know, everything, you know, slows down in the winter.

We'd normally have been sitting around in caves for the whole winter just chilling.

And it's not until the light enters the pineal gland around the, you know, the spring equinox that we start to feel ready to go again.

But we nevertheless keep trying to drive ourselves through with the same amount of energy in the same patterns.

And you're exhausted.

I mean, we work far harder than hunter-gatherers.

You know, people would say to me, you know, like, oh, foraging, you know, gosh, you must spend so much time doing it.

Well, you know, Matt and I did a time and motion study, and I think we've got it down to the equivalent of an hour and a half a day, foraging and making and preparing and processing foods to keep for later, as long as there's one day at the weekend where you're outside and, you know, having a good time.

Sounds pretty efficient.

Yeah, I mean, obviously it's going to take you longer if you've never done it before.

One of the participants recently on the Wild Bio Project this year where we had 100 participants taking part, she was in the paper and it said, I spend three hours a day foraging.

And I thought, it's the first time you've done this.

Yeah, I can imagine that.

I think, you know, certainly for me, I mean, I just don't have that knowledge base at the moment.

But I did invest in one of those apps, and that can tell me what the plants are and I have been on a few foraging walks with my kids and we you know every time we encounter a new new looking plant we've been sort of, scanning it and seeing what it is and seeing what we can do with it and you know it's been really really interesting.

Well that's really great because it's not I mean obviously I'm a bit of an extremist but you know there was a study with mice that were sort of you know they're sort their guts are pretty sterile to start with for laboratory experiments.

And they put them all on a standard lab mouse chow.

And then they divided the group up and they just added one thing to one group and that was nettle.

And there was a huge change in their gut microbes.

So I think, you know, it's not that we should all be extremists, but maybe we just need to add one or two more ingredient yeah and i would love to do a study um just add nettle partly because in the 1500s there was a very well-known herbalist called john gerard and he would say if in doubt just add nettle yeah you know and you know basically like if you didn't quite know what to do with your patient or what to give them give them nettle because it's such a um it's such an interesting complex medicinal herb with so many different aspects to it, as well as being a great food.

Yeah.

I mean, you can do so much just with nettle.

Yeah.

So briefly, tell us how you use nettle.

Oh, gosh.

Well, you know, you can just steam it because as soon as you steam it, the little crystal spikes vanish.

So you could steam it and then just add a little bit of...

You know, salt and pepper, and I mean, if you're not doing the wild biome project, you could add a little bit of butter or creme fraiche, maybe a dash of nutmeg.

You can steam it, squeeze it, and then, you know, put it into pasta and make little raviolis, or add some chestnut flour and make dumplings.

It's actually using it like spinach.

Yeah, just like spinach.

People would use spinach.

Except don't eat it raw.

Mm-hmm.

Not in a salad.

Okay, fair do.

And the nettle seeds, I've got nettle seeds in a jar next door that I can sprinkle on things.

Yeah.

What do you think about nettle seeds?

What are the benefits?

Well, they're lovely.

If you toast them a little bit, they've got a sort of slightly nutty flavor, a bit like hemp seed or something.

But they're very high in fatty acids.

But they are stimulating to the thyroid.

So they help to get a sluggish thyroid sort of going.

And they're also really good for sad so if you make a little nettle tincture which is basically um you know crushing them and macerating them in alcohol for a while 50 strength vodka right if you're doing it at home um and then just taking a you know a little teaspoon of that no more than three times a day because otherwise it's a bit speedy okay um you know that will actually you that will really help to lift the spirits.

Oh, really?

But there's also, you know, it's also particularly good for the kidneys.

And I've had, you know, I have had a patient where she was under, you know, a nephrologist.

And had lost, you know, I can't remember what percentage it was, but a small percentage of her kidneys.

And they said that, you know, she'd never have fully functioning kidneys again, and put her on nettle seed, you know, with the full knowledge of the nephrologist.

I sent him research and everything.

And that was in February, and by September, she had 100% fully functioning kidneys again.

Amazing, amazing.

It's incredible.

It's quite high in magnesium as well, isn't it?

Yeah, it's also very high in vitamin C and iron and silica, which is why it was popular in things like nettle shampoo because it helps to make bones and hair and nails strong.

But the root is also used as an anti-inflammatory and particularly in enlarged prostate.

Wow, wow.

So there's so many uses and that's just one plant, not the 300 that you're obviously encountering.

So I think what we should do now is let's move on to what happened to your gut health over the course of the year so can you just tell us a little bit about what your gut health was like before you went into this um project before you started and how how healthy were you in general and how what was your gut health like well I would say that my my gut health was pretty healthy um Um, you know, I've, I've never had a lot of, I've, I've never had like IBS or, you know, problems like that.

Um, and, um, but it was certainly, you know, when I did the first test, it was certainly very high with the, um, bacteria associated with obesity and I was very overweight.

And that was something I had been struggling with for years, um, since my, um, late thirties when I came back to the UK.

And I didn't know at the time, but actually only discovered, um, toward, you know, at the end of the project, when I'd lost 31 kilos in the course of the year, completely unintentionally, I had tried every diet known to man and nothing had worked.

I'd just been steadily getting heavier and heavier and heavier.

But what I found on the wild food diet was I didn't have to think about food anymore.

I didn't restrict myself in any way.

I just ate anything I liked, but the only you know the only thing was it had to be wild and i just suddenly you know miraculously started to lose weight and lost 31 kilos over the course of the year now matthew you know um i think his total weight loss over the course of the year was like six kilos or something you know he lost he lost a bit he put it on you know he stayed pretty much the same and we were eating the same food so it wasn't that i was doing anything like radically yeah different and you weren't feeling like you were low in energy like this was a harmful weight loss you didn't feel no only in the summer i did because of course when you're inland in the summer um it's not a good place to be all the plants are doing flowers not much nutrition in those and i realized then that i was actually low in fats and going fishing sorted that out good but after that weight loss what i just what i realized was under my skin i had these very very painful lumps and some of which seem to attached a muscle.

And then I was diagnosed with lipoedema.

And lipoedema, of course, it's classically very, very difficult to lose any weight whatsoever because the fat changes.

So that became very interesting.

And that was actually almost pretty much at the time of the first study that came out that said that ketogenic type diets might help women with lipoedema where nothing else has worked.

Matt had diabetes so my my only health problem had really been the you know the lipoedema and the weight okay and and over so when you first started this what was the biggest change in your diet because you have always been a forager right so yes but that doesn't mean that you you live eating forage food because you have to put quite a bit of effort into it.

And so beforehand I had eaten well I mean I've always been a home cook so I wasn't buying processed foods I mean I think when my children were small and still at home some you know and I was working at the same time I'd sometimes resort to buying frozen foods just because it was easier with them when you know got home but pretty much cooking from scratch and you know normally I'd start the day with a vegetable stir fry and then lunch might be soup and you know piece of homemade sourdough or something and you know supper would be some meat or some fish with some more vegetables or a salad maybe some sweet potato or something you know so it wasn't, I mean I admit to you know you know the evenings when you'd have a glass of wine and some cheese.

But I wasn't, you know, I'm not a big snacker.

I've never had sugary foods in the house.

I don't have biscuits.

Yeah.

You know, some dark chocolate occasionally.

But it wasn't a bad diet.

Mm-hmm.

So a pretty good whole food diet with lots of plants in it, essentially, prior to going on this.

And then, you know, I think it was described as a relatively high-calorie diet on that first gut microbiome test that you had.

Well, that's what they implied.

They implied that it must have been a high-calorie.

I think my profile was wheat eater or something.

And I actually didn't eat very much wheat at all because it gives me indigestion and high calorie.

But I don't think it was high calorie at all because I would, you know, I was consciously aware of my weight.

And, you know, I would go on like 600 calorie diets and I'd actually put on weight.

Interesting.

I mean, so I was probably doing around 1,400 calories a day beforehand.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Interesting.

And what was interesting was that, you know, when I actually started to look at the, I think it was about the August, so about sort of eight, nine months into it, I started to actually look at what was the actual calorie intake.

Because we got to a point where a lot of the plants I was eating had actually been studied and analysed in the literature.

I've now got this huge database of nutritional information.

And I worked out that it was actually pretty difficult for me to get more than 1,000 calories a day in without feeling that I'd really stuffed myself.

Right, interesting.

And I thought, well, what's up with that?

Because I know that I've read a lot of studies on hunter-gatherers and all the rest of it.

And they always say that, you know, in fact, people used to eat more calories and so on.

When I started to look at the science, a lot of it was estimated.

There's actually very little actual nutritional analysis on the things that people are eating in the Hadza territory or the Dutonese territory.

I'm certainly not on all 300 species.

Yes.

So what I was finding was that the, you know, very often, you know, So before I even got to a thousand calories in that day, I'd actually be, you know, have, you know, quite a small plate of something and I wouldn't be able to finish.

And I think that was partly because there's so much more fiber, but also that my body stopped, you know, stopped being hungry when it said it had enough nutrients as opposed to calories.

And I do think that when it comes to, you know, leptin ghrelin and how that works, that a lot of it's got to do with the fact that our bodies can be, you know, our hunger can be overridden if we're not getting the nutrients, which means that you can have.

Helping of macaroni cheese and still feel hungry and then want to go nibble at the end of it and then have another second you know second helping of macaroni cheese or a third helping of macaroni cheese because there's so little nutrition in this that your body's going oh gosh I'm full and we've got to really stretch to get this in but I still am not nourished so what I was finding was that the food was incredibly nourishing and so you know I you know I stopped eating earlier yeah so the foraged food that you were having was more satiating so you didn't feel the same appetite that you had on the more western diet um yeah that's interesting and and of course when it comes to calories and things um you know tim specter's work has shown that you know different people can eat the same foods and and absorb more or less calories on with those foods quite dramatic differences between people um and different foods and that's all down to the the gut microbiome and what they're able to gleam from the foods.

So, you know, that was never taken into account when they were working out calories way back in the day, where they just used to, you know, burn food to work out how much energy was in it.

Nowadays, you know, we really need to be thinking about the composition of the gut microbiome and how that's perhaps influencing, you know, what you gleam.

And somebody who struggles to lose weight, often their body is way more efficient at gleaming calories from foods.

And they have more of the microbes that are going to get all those last calories than people who maintain slimmer weights.

And they, you know, they might lose a lot more of those nutrients and expel them more.

So, well, my body's extremely efficient about getting things out.

I mean, but, you know, lipoedema is really a hunter-gatherer set of genes.

Because if you think about it, You know, we were all much smaller when we were Indigenous people 12,000 years ago.

And we were much smaller.

And for women to menstruate, you have to reach a certain weight, normally around 45 kilos.

And, you know, certainly if you look at studies of people like the Duke-Clauncy, most of the women are sort of 43 to 45 kilos normally.

You know, so we would have been quite sort of borderline between being able to menstruate and not.

And there would have been periods where, you know, there was like not enough food around.

And maybe a lot of women just didn't menstruate for quite long periods.

But those who had the sort of lipoedema-type genes and were able to efficiently process their food and store it in a metabolically safe area on their bottoms and thighs, could still menstruate, could still sustain a pregnancy, could still breastfeed, which might be why all of the early paeolithic figures in Europe, But, you know, those stone goddesses, you know, they're not actually pregnant women.

They're women with big bottoms and thighs.

You know, they were these miraculous women who could produce light.

Yeah, amazing.

So it's not a bad thing.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, all right.

So you started off, so it was November 2020, which I have to say was a bit of a strange time of year to start your foraging journey in Scotland.

It seems to me like not a very abundant time of the year on the foraging diary.

Why November?

It wasn't my original plan.

I was going to be sensible and start in the spring.

But I'd already been preparing and saving up.

And I think it was just that, you know, we were going towards, we just had, you know, coronavirus and been locked in our rooms to go think about whether, you know, the world in general.

And we'd come out and November, it was almost like everything was back to normal.

Nobody had taken, you know, learned anything from it.

And there was all of this marketing about Black Friday.

And this consumer, you know, this high-pressure consumer environment.

And I just thought, well, you know, Black Friday is the sort of high mass day of consumerism.

It seems a really good day to reject it and start.

Good for you.

Good for you.

The one rebel in Scotland that didn't comply with Black Friday.

By getting the winter, the winter was the sort of scary bit.

And by getting that over, you know, it's like eating your veg first or last.

Getting the winter out of the way just felt like a really good thing to do.

Although, in fact, summer was actually more difficult.

Interesting.

Interesting.

So it's November time and you send off your first stool analysis.

And at that time, you come back with...

In fact, that was different, that stool analysis, to your others.

Because did you change companies or...

Well, I did one right at the beginning, which was with a lab in Germany that I'd been using before.

And then because of Brexit, all of a sudden your samples couldn't travel anymore.

So I had to switch to Biomes in London.

So the second one that I did, which was in March, was with this company in London.

And that then was consistent all the way through.

And that's interesting because depending on how they do their microbiome analysis, of course, there may be differences between labs.

And certainly, you know, that could even account for some of the differences between the samples.

But when you had that initial sample taken, you were dominated by a bacteria called Ruminococcus, which is a resistant starch metabolizer.

And it's a high producer of short-chain fatty acids, which I go on about all the time, which are really beneficial for us.

So that's quite good.

You actually had, at that stage, you had good anti-inflammatory properties in your gut and you had good protection from heart disease and a lot of chronic diseases like diabetes and things.

And so that it was deemed that the types of bacteria in your gut would be protective of course what I should point out is that these studies these microbiome analysis were essentially analysis of the species they weren't analysis of the function of the species and and you know that's where with metabolomics.

And, you know, with the emergence of metabolomics, which basically will look into the function and what these species are all doing in there, that's going to change things a little bit more.

So I think, you know, down the line, repeating these, if we get access to metabolomics in the future, then we'll be able to, rather than infer what the production of short-chain fatty acids and B vitamins and these kind of things actually are in your gut, we hopefully will have more accurate information as to what's actually happening.

Um so so we've got we've got the population of microbes in there it seems to be a relatively anti-inflammatory population um you've got a very low production of well they they think because you have a low number of species that will produce tmao tmao is a very inflammatory chemical protein that is derived from microbe metabolism of proteins, mainly meats and fish.

And this TMAO is actually associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.

And at that stage, you had quite low levels.

And I think you were predominantly vegetarian at that stage?

I certainly was not eating massive amounts of meat and fish.

sure.

But you also, there's a bunch of bacteria in the gut that are producing essentially all the B vitamins and the vitamin K.

And at that stage, you didn't have a huge number of the producers of the B vitamins and the vitamin K in your gut.

So they extrapolated that your production of B vitamins and vitamin K would likely be slightly low at that microbiome analysis.

And you had very few lactobacilli.

Lactobacilli are the bacteria that we get in fermented foods.

Have you eaten fermented foods at that stage?

No, I certainly did.

Which is interesting because you're quite low in lactobacilli.

So I wonder if they're just not sticking in your gut you know some of the other species are perhaps just you know they're just not native to my yeah they like to be silly are not yeah they're not the main players in there and of course remembering this is a snapshot so when you took this microbiome analysis you know it could have been um in a few days where you hadn't had much in the way of fermented foods i don't know um so the again you know you might see a slightly different picture if you know a few days later you'd have eaten a ton of different things.

So that's the trouble with these little snapshots.

But essentially, you know, it looks like a fairly decent bunch of microbes in your gut at that stage.

But very high in firmicutes.

Yeah, very high in firmicutes.

And quite low in bacterioides.

Uh-huh.

And, you know, I mean, we used to think that that ratio of firmicutes to bacterioides was very important.

But of course, there's lots of very beneficial microbes in the firmicutes phyla and lots of, you know, there's beneficial and harmful microbes in each of those phyla.

So the ratio, I think scientists are moving away from that now, that whole ratio of those two microorganisms.

But that higher firmicutes to bacteriologies ratio does seem to be more in common with people that are more overweight.

But it's also more common with people who have diabetes and things, or at least in some studies.

Again, you know, there are some studies that have actually refuted that.

So that ratio, as I say, probably have to take that with a bit of a pinch of salt.

There's some really interesting levels of some of the more beneficial strains.

So some of these strains we know are particularly beneficial to us.

So, for example, fecalibacterium.

Fecalibacterium is another bacteria that essentially comes about from eating lots of vegetables, plants.

And fecalibacterium is associated with a lower risk of things like breast cancer.

So Fecalibacterium prausnitzi I talk about a lot because that's you know people that have high levels of this bacteria tend to have a lower likelihood of breast cancer and they tend to do better with their breast cancer treatments if they were to get breast cancer and at that stage your Fecalibacterium prausnitzi was around about eight percent and to be healthy they really want them up at 11 so you're you're still slightly down on your f your fecalibacterium at that stage, And your bifidobacterium species, which bifido are a really, really beneficial species that we often get from early on in life.

And we have lower levels in adulthood and it declines a little bit more as we get really older.

And bifido is associated with a good, healthy gut.

And at that stage, you had decent levels of bifidobacterium, 5.43% in your gut.

So that was quite good your acromantia which is one of these guys that is a good guy and a bad guy.

And probably for a lot of microbes that is the case, you probably want a sort of medium level of these microbes too many and they might start overwhelming other microbe species and damaging the ecosystem a little bit and too few perhaps you're not getting all the beneficial effects from them.

And acomancia is a mucin dweller.

So it sort of dwells in the mucus layer.

And although it eats mucus, it actually stimulates the growth of more mucus.

So it's really good at bolstering that barrier there.

And it seems to be very important for our metabolism.

So acomancia is found in people who have more normal weight, for example, and it's associated with a lower risk of diabetes and things like this but but high levels of akkomancia are actually associated with conditions like parkinson's and neurodegenerative disorders so you know it's one of these guys that we want somewhere in the middle um and your akkomancia at that stage was a little on the low side actually um.

At around about 1%.

And roseburi is another interesting species, a good sort of butyrate, short-chain fatty acid-producing species.

Again, you know, comes about from metabolism of plants, nuts, things like this.

And at that stage, your roseburi was a little low as well, at 0.26%.

So what's interesting is just seeing how these levels change throughout the experiment that you did.

So the next time you had your microbiome analysis done was March 2021.

So you've essentially just gone through the whole winter period and you come out the other side of that.

And at that point, the diet is starting to change from a winter diet to, you know, there's greens appearing, there's seaweeds appearing, you know, the food is changing.

And so what were you eating at that stage in March 2021?

Lots of young seaweeds and shellfish and lots of young shoots plants high in oxalates and, you know, fresh green growth, basically.

And by that stage, also getting very, very low on nuts that had been stored and lasted over the winter.

So we're getting very low on nuts.

It wasn't quite eggs yet.

Birds don't really start nesting that early.

Yeah, so mainly seaweeds and shellfish and fish.

You know, probably some venison or pigeon, and the young leafy greens.

So lots of wild garlic, lots of young sorrel, young dock, those sorts of things.

Okay, all right.

And so we look at what happens then to these levels of microbes.

At that stage, in March 2021, there's a massive leap in your acromantia, a really big change in acromantia.

So whatever you're eating, shoot-wise and everything, it's obviously really suiting the Acomansia bacteria because they're thriving.

You've now got up to 8%.

You've gone from 1% to over 8% on your Acomansia.

And what else is happening?

You have rocked your bifido species quite dramatically.

And that's probably because you've dropped dairy.

Because you would get lots of bifido through having dairy.

So your cheeses and your, if you were having any yogurts and things like that, you would probably get your bifidots.

And of course, your foraging diet didn't contain any dairy.

And your fecalibacterium dropped.

And again, you know, you're, although you're eating lots of shrubs and plants, you're perhaps not getting the other vegetables that you were getting on your previous diet.

So perhaps not the right types of vegetables for the fecali bacterium.

Although actually in March 21, it's still relatively high and it drops more dramatically in July.

So maybe it's suiting them at that stage, but not further on.

And your rosperia increases a tiny amount by March 2021.

So you've got a little bit of an increase in rosperia, but it's still relatively low levels there.

And looking at the diversity score, because although you are getting a big diversity of plant species in your foraging diet, your diversity score wasn't massively high.

Yeah, that was really interesting.

It didn't change a lot.

No, it didn't.

And it didn't change much, you know, throughout the whole of your experiment.

Your diversity score was around 5 to 10.

And it is interesting.

And I do wonder whether part of that is, you know, what species your gut will allow to settle.

Because, you know, you may just not be holding on to some of these species that you're encountering.

Because I would have imagined that with a foraging diet, you're encountering, you're closer to the earth, you're probably encountering an awful lot of species, with the types of foods that you're gathering.

But my colony is not letting in newcomers.

Perhaps.

Perhaps.

Who knows?

The firmicutes came down dramatically, though, from just under 80 to 1.27.

That was a big drop.

So there was a big switch then, wasn't there?

Because you went from being predominantly ruminococcus to predominantly eubacterium.

And interestingly, they categorized you as a grain lover in that March 2021, which I thought was really funny because you're not really having any of those traditional grains.

It wasn't going to be any grains.

Yeah, no grains at all.

But maybe the grasses and the other things were, I don't know.

Well, that's not the time of year to be grasses.

Okay, so it was all shrubs and fresh succulents.

Yeah, it was mainly, you know, alliums, you know, some things in the onion and garlic family.

Polygonaceae, which is the buckwheat family, but it's, you know, docks and sorrels.

And there's also, you know, purslane.

And seaweeds, of course.

Interesting.

But you had a lot more probiotics, a lot more of these beneficial species in your gut.

And interestingly, your lactobacilli went up compared to previously.

And that's despite losing the dairy, which is interesting, because I associated the lactobacilli with the dairy there.

So you got an upsurge in your lactobacilli.

And very interestingly, your B vitamin production is deemed to be likely to be better with this profile of bacteria.

And as was your vitamin K production, supposedly better with that.

And that wouldn't surprise me because seaweeds are at their highest production of B vitamins in around March, April.

Okay.

All right.

So that's interesting.

And then in terms of short-chain fatty acids, you've got a lot of the butyrate producers in your gut.

So that's very beneficial as well.

You need a lot of short-chain fatty acids.

Um so that was march if we move on to july 2021 you're still in that um eubacterium dominant bacteria um again you've got a little bit more on the firmicute side at this stage um and your average your microbiome diversity is average still and you're still coming up as a grain lover at this stage in July 21.

Interestingly...

And I dropped from a tight size 18 to a flexible 14 by that stage.

Right, goodness.

And interestingly, when we look at individual species, there was still zero bifidobacteria.

Again, that probably may correlate with the lack of dairy again.

Your acromantia stays relatively high.

Your rose buria is low at this stage and your fecali bacterium has dropped quite substantially.

Um, And what are you eating in July 2021?

By July, a lot of things had run out.

So I was quite low in fats, probably for a little bit at that point, which drove me mackerel fishing because I actually started to get a little bit of sort of fatigue in the summer.

And my hair felt thin.

I felt sort of fatigued and low in energy.

And as soon as I started eating more mackerel and fats, that improved dramatically.

But then also, you know, the early part of the year was characterized by no fruit.

I mean, I'd had some very, you know, you get these very sour, feral apples, sort of crab apple species that I'd cut and dried, which makes them easier to eat, that I'd eaten a little bit over the winter.

But then there was no fruit at all until June when suddenly little wild strawberries come out.

So at the end of June and into July, you've suddenly got the advent of a little bit of sugar in the diet, which was, of course, out of season before then.

Okay.

All right.

Interestingly.

Right.

So that's July.

And then if we fast forward to September, you've obviously had more in the way of fruits by this sort of stage.

Yes fruits and fats because of course you know in from july to september most of the greens have died back in land so in order to get green vegetables i would have to go down to the coast and pick the um the succulents from the marsh okay you know these salt marshes so you're eating things like samphire and sea blight and sea purslane sea arrow grass um and that would be very you know very mineral rich um and you know probably you know relatively salty um and a very different profile to the inland plants that i was eating yeah and in your microbiome type changes slightly here and you're you're more in keeping with what they call western gourmand which is higher in bacteroides but i suspect that's probably more to do with the the higher fruit intake and things.

You've got plenty of probiotics, lots of lactobacilli.

Your bifido species are recovering and they're going up.

Your acomancias are coming down slightly but still maintaining.

And your fecalibacterium is...

Just staying low at this stage, but your rosabria species are climbing again.

And your vitamin production is good or is deemed to be likely to be good with this profile of bacteria.

And your short-chain fatty acid production is deemed to be likely to be average at this stage.

And interestingly, they're classifying your microbiome at this stage as being in keeping with a North American um microbiome which is low in fiber um and low in unprocessed foods which is really interesting isn't it because you know you wouldn't have had anything oh it's incredible isn't it so much fiber so so isn't that interesting despite that really high fiber diet and that microbiome analysis classified you as having a low to average fiber intake yeah I mean I take it I do take it with a little bit of a pinch of salt.

Yeah.

I mean, when we did the follow-up, we had a person on it who had an incredibly.

You know, healthy set of blood results and ate lots of fermented foods and home cooking and things and yet had none of the 100 good bacteria in their gut whatsoever.

Wow.

But they were born and brought up in Poland.

Yeah.

So perhaps their microbiome was a little bit different Yeah, absolutely, There are so many nuances to this.

And, you know, you've come at this with a completely unique set of microbes that have been, you know, fashioned over your lifetime, you know, starting off in Africa and then coming to the UK.

And, you know, you'll have encountered very different species.

So, you know, it is it's very interesting how this looks.

And, you know, what, as I say, I keep coming back to the fact that whilst it's very interesting to see all these microbes, what we don't know is what they're actually all doing.

And I think it's going to be much more interesting when we can really figure out how functional they are and what the function of your microbiome is.

Because, you know, some people have that very low diversity of species in their gut, but they're perfectly fit and healthy and they don't have any disease and they don't have any abnormalities in their gut health.

So, you know, it doesn't go that, you know, you have to have that very diverse species of bacteria.

We just don't know what a healthy gut microbiome is yet.

So by November, so this is you coming up to the end of your year um at this stage again there's very little change in the diversity of species um you're back to being a grain lover again in terms of your microbiome type um and still not one grain yeah um with the predominance of that you you bacterium um and lots of resistant starch um and fibers um plenty of probiotics um your acromantia is nice and high again uh um is well yeah is persistently high at this stage um your faecalibacterium um is has climbed up a bit um and your uh rosburia is climbing so that's gone up to nice healthy levels um and presumably you've had a lot more nuts in the the october.

Mushrooms and nuts that will really help that climb your bifido species is lower again, and your diet fiber was deemed to be average and your short chain fatty acid butyrate.

Was relatively low at that stage in terms of your production there or deemed to be and you're back to fairly average and above average vitamin production so that's maintained and.

You know, it's quite an abundant time in the calendar.

Yeah, there's lots of mushrooms, which are interesting because there has been some work on the prebiotic effect of some of the mushroom species that were very close to the wild ones I was eating, you know, and some of them will push one bacteria, you know, up and others down.

And then the next day you might be eating a different species, which actually reverses that whole thing as well.

And, you know, you said earlier about these being a snapshot, it'd be interesting to see how much variety there was if you could do a test sort of, you know, almost every day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, one, you know, I know that occasionally I could see something that seemed to react very specifically to certain foods.

And that was the oxalabacter, which in the spring went up by like 1,100% exactly at the time that I had about a month's worth of vegetables that were high oxalates.

And that I thought was really interesting because to me, what it said was that, you know, well, when your diet suddenly increases in something like oxalates, instead of it being like, oh gosh, you know, here we have a problem and need to exclude oxalates from the diet.

All that happened was that my gut responded and produced that one particular bacteria and I spotted it of course because it's called oxalobacter and we're talking about oxalates you know there's many more that I don't know about that may well have had significantly, more closer ties to specific foods yeah it's really interesting and there were some there were some unusual species in there as well you've got alder crintia which is a soy metabolizer more predominant in vegetarians and you had a decent number of those species, and there was another interesting species that you had a little bit more of if I can find it here, Um, where is that species?

Barnacella, which is another rare species.

And what's interesting about Barnacella is it seems to protect you from a type of enterococcus that we now know is resistant to a commonly used antibiotic called vancomycin.

So that's got to be a good thing having that in your gut and it's also one that they think helps people to respond to certain cancer treatments, immunotherapies so it's a good one to have of all these rare species so it's a handy one, and you've got doria doria is a good species because it helps to produce lots of acetate and acetate's another short chain fatty acids and it helps to protect you from things like inflammatory bowel conditions, like Crohn's.

So you've got lots of those.

So yeah, it's very interesting.

And so can we move on to March 22?

Because although you stopped that foraging diet in November 21.

You still did the microbiome analysis in March 22.

Yeah, I wanted to see what happened when I went back to eating a normal diet.

And you've got to remember, a normal diet for me is, You know, I buy a box of organic vegetables and not one of the ones where you can't tell them what's in it.

So not lots of root vegetables, but, you know, things that I've chosen.

So I get a delivery of organic vegetables once a week.

And then apart from that, I'm eating fish and mainly still venison and things because I don't actually ever eat supermarket meat from there.

Um, you know, the meat ethics of the industry and that.

So, um, I just really introduced at this stage, um, modern vegetables and then occasionally again, occasional alcohol, occasional cheese and occasional, um, carbs.

But again, it would be, you know, homemade sourdough or, So no processed foods or anything again, but just those, you know, small changes back in.

Okay.

And a curry.

Yeah.

Nice.

I would definitely add back a curry as well.

Okay, good.

And at this stage, so, you know, your diversity is much the same.

You're still a grain lover.

You've still got that predominance of eubacterium, which is actually, so I don't think you went entirely back to your original diet.

Because looking at how that changed, you know, you held on to those eubacterium species and you've got quite an anti-inflammatory looking microbiome still with a predominance of lots of these very beneficial species, these probiotics.

You're still in that average range of fiber fermenters and your short chain fatty acid production is deemed to be low at this stage.

And your B vitamin production is still deemed to be high, but you're probably still foraging your seaweeds at this stage, are you?

Well, I'd actually wanted to really see what the difference was.

So I wasn't having a lot of forage foods again because I wanted to see what would happen.

And I had put weight on again, you know, very, very quickly.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and what I found since is that as long as I stay off carbohydrates, I can keep my weight stable after the end of the, you know, so I've done, I've done periods of three months.

I did three months in 2023 and three months and 25 and started this year eating exclusively wild food again.

And again, I saw that, you know, um, really, you know, effortless weight loss and then maintaining it at the end, I can only do if I eat no carbohydrates whatsoever.

Yeah, interesting.

So you're very, very sensitive to that.

Interesting.

And you're obviously cleaving all of the calories from it when you eat it.

You've got a very efficient microbiome.

Okay.

So really interesting to follow that all the way through.

In terms of information, um it's fascinating to see how these little microorganisms change but of course as you say without doing these tests daily we don't know how much fluctuation there is even on a on a daily basis with these species um but very interesting to see what's you know what how your microbiome has responded, you know, what the diversity of species looks like.

And just to see how your body was responding to that change.

We mentioned gut health briefly, and you obviously mentioned your general health and your weight.

And, you know, was there any other changes that you noticed when you moved to the foraging diet?

So obviously it suited you in terms of keeping your weight down.

Did it suit your gut?

How was your gut when you were on the foraging diet?

I think it was slower.

Despite the fact that there was a lot more fiber, I think because there was more meat, I was processing everything slower.

Okay.

So, you know, bowel movements would sometimes just be once every two days.

Right.

Okay.

And I didn't seem to, my body didn't seem to be unhappy about that, but it was just something that I noticed.

And that's still within the realms of a normal bowel movement, you know, as far as we're classifying them in the medical profession.

So, yeah, that would still be classified as a normal bowel movement frequency.

And any gut symptoms at all, any indigestion, bloating, heartburn?

No, in fact, the opposite of bloating.

I didn't have any bloating at all and my belly felt a lot flatter.

And I also felt, this is a very hard feeling to describe, but since then, a couple of people who've done this with me have said exactly the same thing.

There's a certain lightness that you feel in the body which is nothing to do with weight.

But there's a a lightness in the body a lightness of um you know a spirit that goes with it as well, and you know certainly when i did it again this year i remember sort of you know because it is hard work trying to fit this do you know this in with modern life as well particularly when you're working and busy you know it's just so much easier not to have to plan ahead and think ahead particularly if you're a bit sort of um you know um i tend to sort of go into hyper focus about things and i haven't planned ahead and then you're hungry you know um but i remember you know at the beginning of it i was sort of like mentally i was like oh gosh okay now day one here we go again you know and then but within the within two days my body was going like yay we're doing this again I know exactly what to do with it.

I love this.

My mind was still being grumpy about giving up coffee and stuff like that.

You know, I was aware of this sort of difference in dichotomy.

And some of the people who'd done it with me in 23 and then were repeating it in 25 said exactly the same thing.

There's this like, oh, you know, this body recognition of it.

So, yeah.

So, I mean, that's what happened.

You know, at the end of the year, I had these two sets of gut results and wanted to get a sort of professional opinion.

But couldn't really find anybody interested, even though I was offering to pay for an opinion.

And people were like, well, you know, you could just be two weird people.

You know, it doesn't constitute science, just the anecdotal story of two people.

So it had to then become a study, didn't it?

So we had 24 people do it in 2023.

Wow.

12 did it for a month and 12 did it for three months.

Okay.

And then this year we had 100 people doing it.

Wow.

We started off with 40 doing it for three months and 60 doing it for one month.

And we had 86 complete.

Wow.

And this time we managed to take, with the three-monthers, we managed to take a stool sample once every month.

Now, at the moment, those stool samples are all in storage because these studies have been entirely self-funded and crowdfunded.

Right.

So we have yet to raise the £11,000 to pay for the laboratory to process 250 vials.

Vials but you know this is essential um research this is so interesting and yeah we need to help we need to help monica here because if there's anybody out there that has a spare 11 000 pounds this is a really good thing to plow your money into because monica is really forwarding microbiome science here um and you know this could really help to develop very interesting um you know strategies for, you know, diet, weight loss, you know, there's really interesting information going to come out of this.

So it's been taken up by the University of Bradford, and we're in the last processes of applying for a grant.

If we get it, we'll basically, we'll have a cross-disciplinary team at the University of Bradford with me doing this for the next two years.

Wow.

But unfortunately, you know, when you apply for a UK government grant, they won't back fund anything.

So we still need to find, you know, we still need to get these.

Yeah, we still need to find some money.

And it'll all be, you know, open source and open data.

But around the microbiome, we're also collecting lots of statistics.

We're seeing massive decreases in high blood pressure, you know, really leveling out of blood sugar when people have been wearing these continuous glucose monitors.

Thank you.

You're seeing, you know, we get them to wear them for the week before they start and then the week that they've started.

And the grafts are quite incredible because they're really, you know, peaky and high and zigzaggy.

And then from the day they start eating wild food, everything smooths out, calms down.

Brilliant so we're going to learn a lot from this yeah fantastic i think this is really brilliant work um so well done that's a massive effort all of this and um really really interesting study but i would urge everybody out there to read uh the wilderness cure by monica wild a superb book and you know you learn a lot in that book about the passing of the seasons all the varieties of herbs and plants that you can forage and pick in the UK and how they nourish you and how they affect you.

Really, really interesting and just a great observation of life, you know, just.

Actually seeing life and, you know, taking it all in every day.

Um, I think you must naturally just be an incredibly mindful person, um, to have, you know, to have produced such an observant, you know, catalogue of, of, you know, what happens day to day in this world.

Um, and, you know, it's beautiful to read because of that.

Um, so fantastic, Monica, really interesting story and i think you know we have to get you back as well to discuss what happens with this this next bit of your research um and and how you're then going to you know process these next results and and what the results will be and what they'll show so so i'll be really really intrigued when you get the results back from these group studies well thank you and the first paper's um been peer-reviewed and it's in in the process of publication at the moment so we should hear any day now as to being published.

Excellent.

Right.

Well, I'm going to finish there.

And I'm hopefully going to do another podcast with Monica to discuss more on the herbal side.

But that's us for today.

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Thanks, Mo.

Thanks.

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Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Microbiomedics Podcast.

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