Lisa MacFarlane - The Gut Stuff : an empowering guide to your gut and its microbes.

(other than your gut ;) )

As Director of the Department of Twin Research at Kings College London I have come across many thousands of twins over the years. None are like the Mac twins! Alana and Lisa have an amazing infectious enthusiasm, intelligence and passion for research, and disseminating that science to the public. They quickly became my go-to twin guinea pigs to road-test new research projects.

I met them around 10 years ago when they answered my call to participate on an epigenetic research project where I was looking at why identical twins could often look identical but be quite different in many ways. They ended up being a great case study in my book, Identically Different with their different personalities and gut problems. They then eagerly volunteered for more studies and went on to being the very first participants in a pilot study for our novel research project into the gut microbiome and nutrition. This study involved having all kinds of biopsies, plenty of poo samples and eating several weeks of junk food. Luckily they were performing at the Edinburgh festival where this was readily available. They survived this ordeal followed by four weeks of healthy vegetarian high-fibre food. Their results showed us that we could alter the gut microbes with diet and allowed us to start the big study in hundreds more twins and open up the whole field.

The research evolved into the worlds largest personalised nutrition study with the help of a company called ZOE called the PREDICT study. The twins were, once again, the first guinea pigs and had to say how they reacted differently to the identical foods, blue muffins (and prosecco). They made the point brilliantly of how unique all of us are. They both were fascinated by the science of the trillions of microbes living in our gut that are essential to our immunity and overall health and how looking after them through a diverse and varied diet could help prevent many modern health conditions. As identical twins they are used to sharing all their genes, but suddenly they have something that is unique to them the microbes in their gut. Through their participation in the research, they never stopped asking ever tougher and more intelligent questions about the science of the microbiome and, most importantly, they showed a unique talent not just for processing complicated scientific concepts but for translating them to a non-scientific audience in a fun and highly informative manner.

I was not surprised when they went on to found the incredibly successful The Gut Stuff, a platform to empower gut health for everyone.

This book is their next step in their efforts to make microbes, the science of gut health and nutrition available for everyone and show that science does not have to be boring. Through their ability to attract and talk to the best experts in the field they have managed to summarise a wealth of scientific knowledge and different viewpoints to educate a young audience on what they need to do to maintain and enhance their health. I was asked on a nutrition panel recently what single factor is the most important in changing nutrition? I replied, educating everybody, even at school. As my own books, The Diet Myth and Spoon-Fed underline, there is a real need for better nutritional health that demystifies food and nutrition. Alana and Lisas book deserves top place in the list of books every young and not-so young person should read, because as they themselves say, Gut health is serious shit. Enjoy.

Tim Spector

Professor of Genetic Epidemiology, Kings College London

Author of Spoon-Fed (2020) and The Diet Myth (2016).

Lets face it, talking about the gut aint sexy. Just googling gut brings up a rather disturbing mosaic of beer bellies, intestinal diagrams and, the main reason for our misconceptions, perfectly manicured hands cupping toned, soft stomachs. Its no wonder were all confused.

So many of us have digestive issues at any given time, but wed rather talk about ANYTHING else than our gurgling midriff and toilet dashing. So, from this sentence on, this is where that STOPS. You are now entering an open poo chat forum and you wanna know why? Because its important, really important. Hippocrates saw it many moons ago when he said:

all disease begins in the gut

For some reason weve chosen to bury that knowledge. So, get your little archaeological spades and hats out, as were about to discover what Hippocrates was on about for the good of our health. Look, nutrition is COMPLEX. Even the experts say so and, trust us, we were not experts. We had done every fad diet under the sun, including the cabbage soup diet pre-Magaluf 2005 (remember that?), and grew up in Scotland eating deep-fried pizza and chips, plus all of Edinburghs supply of yum yums. We only knew what kale was because we used to feed it to the guinea pig on his birthday. That all flip-reversed when we volunteered to be part of the TwinsUK research at Kings College London.

Being identical twins, we have a passion (teetering on obsession) for finding out whats different about us and to do this we looked inside ourselves, as there isnt much thats different on the outside. Twins are a great constant for medical research, and we became the chief guinea pigs for the British Gut Project. We discovered that despite having 100% of the same DNA, our guts share only 3040% of the same microbiota, which could explain why our bodies behave so differently. And so our gut journey began, and now yours will, too.

Gut health is mainlining its way into public consciousness and there are lots of cool brands and products coming out which claim to help. And while some definitely do, as the category and interest grows, the cowboys start to ride into town peddling detoxes and tummy teas. Couple this with the science being pretty new (and at times conflicting) it makes for a difficult world to navigate, so KNOWLEDGE is POWER.

Weve grown an expert team of scientists, dietitians, nutritionists and doctors to keep us all on the right side of the tracks a lot of whom youll meet in these pages. Unfortunately, there isnt (and probably never will be) a magic bullet for good gut health, mainly because its so personalised. But were here to arm you with the FACTS, so you can make decisions that are right for you, and *disclaimer*, its not elitist, inaccessible or expensive.

Whether youre here because youre struggling with digestive issues, youve heard lots of chatter about the gut recently and want to know what all the fuss is about or just for the polyphenLOLs (youll get that joke soon), welcome to the Gut Gang.

weve always had guts so why are we all just talking about the gut now?