BBC 6分钟英语学习 个性化饮食是保持健康的最佳方式吗？

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BBC Learning English. Hello. This is six minute English from BBC Learning English.

I'm Sam, and I knew in recent years, new diets with names like Vegan Casso and Paleo have become very popular.

Are you a vegetarian meal? Do you follow any particular diet?

Well, I eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables and only a little meat from time to time.

Well, while many diets claim to improve health or help you lose weight, recent research shows that what counts is not what you eat, but how your body reacts.

Yes, and that reaction doesn't happen where you might think, not in the brain or tongue or even the stomach, but in the gut.

Another name for the intestines, the long tube inside your body which digests food.

Inside everyone s got on millions of microbes, tiny living organisms too small to see with us a microscope.

Some of them are good for some bad.

Microbes help digest food, but they influence our bodies more than we know.

Think of them as chemical factories that cause our individual reaction to the food we eat.

This mix of gut microbes is unique and different for everyone, even identical twins, and it's the reason why some doctors now recommend a personalized diet, one that perfectly fits your own unique combination of microbes.

We'll hear more soon. But 1st, I have a question for union, and it's about the gut, the tube, which includes the large and small intestine.

It's very long. But how long, exactly is the average adults got?

Is it A? Three and a half meters?

B Five and a half meters, or C Seven and a half meters?

Well, everybody is different, of course, but I'll say on average, the gut is B five and a half meters long.

I'll reveal the answer later in the program.

Among the 1st to investigate gut microbes was Doctor Tim Spectre, author of the best selling book, the Diet Myth.

He wanted to check whether the dietary advice he had heard and believed, advice like eat little and often, or avoid fat, was really true.

Listen to Doctor Specter explain how he started to doubt some of this advice food myths.

He calls them to BBC radio for program The Life Scientific.

All these so called myths that I believed, whether it was about calories, about fats, when to eat, how to eat, were based on flimsy or no evidence, very old, very warm quality, and had been repeated so much that people didn't think to question them.

One of the food myths Doctor Specter questioned was counting calories, the units which measure the amount of energy food provides.

He discovered that much of the dietary advice he had heard was either incorrect or based on flimsy evidence.

If evidence is flimsy, it's weak and unconvincing.

As doctor specter questioned these food myths, he remembered an earlier study involving identical twins, pairs of brothers or sisters, with the same jeans.

It was the surprising differences in weight between one twin and another that made Doctor Specter realize that no two people have the same gut.

Even identical twins. Guts are different.

But as he told BBC Radio for the Life Scientific, the discovery came in a very smelly way.

By asking his volunteers to send samples of their poo in the post.

We collected lots of these samples sequence them, and then looked at twins where one was overweight and one was skinny, and we found in every case, the skinnyer twin had a more diverse microbiome, greater numbers of different species.

And they also, nearly all also had high numbers of a couple of microbes that just stuck out of the crowd.

And one was called Christian Senella, and the other ones called Akamancia.

Although genetically identical, one twin was overweight, while the other twin was skinny or very thin, because the weight difference could not be explained genetically, doctor specter suspected the microbes in the skinnier twins gut held the answer.

The more diverse someone's microbes, the better their gut was at digesting food, regulating fat and maintaining health.

Two microbes, kristin, sonella and Akmansia, were especially effective.

Doctor specter says these microbes stuck out of the crowd, meaning they were easy to notice for their positive effect.

And since everyone s microbes are different, it follows that a personalized diet, which selects the friendliest food for your gut, is best, right?

And all this talk of eating is making

me hungry. So tell me, sam, was my answer to your question?

Right? Ah, yes. I asked about the length of the gut in the average adult.

I said it was five and a half meters, which was the correct answer.

Well done, you that took guts.

Which is the 2nd meaning of the word courage.

OK, let's recap the vocabulary we've learned, starting with gut, an informal word for the intestines, the tube, which digests food from the stomach.

Microbes are microscopic organisms living inside the body.

A calorie is a unit measuring how much energy food provides.

If an argument or evidence is flimsy, it's weak and hard to believe.

A skinny person is very thin.

And finally, if something sticks out of the crowd, it's noticeable in a good way.

Unfortunately, our 6 min are up. But remember, look after your gut, and your gut will look after you.

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