BBC sounds music radio podcasts.
Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My castaway this week is the scientist, Professor Tim Spector.
He's challenged long standing ideas about our diet and how it affects our health through his extensive research into the gut microbiome, the microscopic world inside each of us.
It's diverse, unique and intimately involved in the great medical mysteries of our age.
Rather like Tim Seavey.
He's professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College London and the founder of the Twins UK registry, one of the richest collections of genetic data in the world.
He's a pioneer of a food revolution, producing several bestselling books and a tech entrepreneur.
His Covid tracking app, allowing millions of us to record our health and symptoms, earned him an OBE during the pandemic.
Health and food tracking versions now have 4 million subscribers around the world.
He was born into a medical family and credits his mother's adventurous spirit with nurturing his aptitude for taking calculated risks in life and at work.
He says, when you change subjects, it's really risky.
You have to learn a new language and you have to get accepted by your peers and convince people to give you money without a track record.
But I like throwing myself in.
Professor Tim Spector, welcome to Desert Island Discs.
Hello.
So, Tim, let's start with the gut microbiome then.