Lead Nutritional Scientist: Seed Oils Are Not Bad For You! Eating This Twice A Day Will Help Menopause! The Alarming Link Between Chewing & Belly Fat!

0:00:04 If you go on social media, seed oils are toxic, seed oils are going to give you Alzheimer’s,
0:00:09 seed oils are going to give you cancer, but I’ve done lots of research and there is absolutely
0:00:12 no evidence to show seed oils are harmful.
0:00:16 Actually, they’re beneficial for our health and I’ll come back to that, but the problem
0:00:21 is that there is so much misinformation out there about how we eat and how it affects
0:00:22 our health.
0:00:24 So let’s go into all of that.
0:00:27 Dr. Sarah Berry is a renowned nutrition scientist and professor.
0:00:32 With over 20 years of research, her work has reshaped how we think about food, metabolism
0:00:33 and gut health.
0:00:35 Dr. Sarah Berry, we have a lot to get through.
0:00:36 Yes.
0:00:37 So let’s start with the food matrix.
0:00:41 That’s so important because you can have two foods with identical labelling, same nutrients
0:00:46 and calorie value, but can have entirely different impacts in terms of how you metabolise
0:00:50 our food and how it impacts downstream health effects depending on how that food has been
0:00:51 processed.
0:00:53 Now, we also know the timing of when we eat is really important.
0:00:57 For example, when we found that snacking after nine o’clock was associated with unfavourable
0:01:00 health outcomes, the worst kind of fat around your belly, for example.
0:01:03 This was even if you were snacking on healthy snacks.
0:01:04 Really?
0:01:09 We also know on average if you change the speed in which you eat your food by 20%, you reduce
0:01:10 your calorie intake by about 15%.
0:01:15 But where it gets really interesting is there’s evidence to show if you chew your food 40 times
0:01:18 versus 15 times, it can result in…
0:01:19 And then there’s the menopause.
0:01:23 We’ve conducted lots of research, and one of the most exciting things is that there
0:01:27 is principles which can reduce symptoms by about 35%.
0:01:31 And so they are…
0:01:33 This has always blown my mind a little bit.
0:01:38 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven’t yet subscribed to the show.
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0:01:58 we’ll continue to do what we do.
0:02:01 Thank you so much.
0:02:07 Dr. Sarah Berry, can you give me a little bit of an overview over what you’ve spent the
0:02:11 last sort of 25 years of your career focusing on and understanding?
0:02:18 Yeah, so I’ve spent 25 years starting out in quite a specific area, looking at how diet
0:02:20 impacts our cardiometabolic health.
0:02:25 So by this, I mean lots of factors related to cardiovascular disease, like type 2 diabetes,
0:02:28 our cholesterol, our blood pressure, our inflammation.
0:02:34 And then more recently, I’ve been looking at how actually we piece together all the complexity
0:02:39 of who we are, what we eat, how we eat, into how that actually impacts how we respond to
0:02:43 food and the helpfulness of the food.
0:02:47 Most of my work’s been done through running clinical trials, so randomized controlled
0:02:52 clinical trials where I recruit various people, get them to eat various things, do loads and
0:02:57 loads of different measurements and look at how a food or a nutrient or a diet might impact
0:02:58 a particular health outcome.
0:03:04 And how many of these individual pieces of our sort of health and lifestyle, are you
0:03:06 trying to piece together to form this picture?
0:03:08 What are those pieces?
0:03:13 The key pieces are who you are, so that’s one of the key pieces.
0:03:19 So by that, I mean your genetics, your microbiome, your age, your sex, your menopause status,
0:03:21 all of those kind of things.
0:03:23 The other is the food that you eat.
0:03:29 And when we think about food, we need to think about it beyond the traditional way that we
0:03:32 thought about food in terms of nutrients, you know, back-to-pack labelling, fat, protein,
0:03:37 fiber carbohydrate, but actually thinking about food in terms of the fact that on average,
0:03:42 each food has 70,000 different chemicals and these are contained within a very complex
0:03:46 food structure, which we call food matrix, that modulates the impact that those chemicals
0:03:47 and nutrients have.
0:03:50 So that’s the second thing that we need to think about.
0:03:54 So we’ve got who you are, the food that you’re eating, but the complexity of that food, and
0:03:56 then how you eat your food.
0:04:01 And by how you eat your food, I’m thinking about your lifestyle, I’m thinking about,
0:04:06 are you jet lagged, how much sleep did you have last night, you know, what’s the order
0:04:09 in which you’re eating your food within a meal or over the day?
0:04:11 How stressed are you feeling?
0:04:13 When did you do physical activity?
0:04:18 All of that also impacts how you will respond to a food.
0:04:22 And then I think the last piece of the puzzle is so important that as nutritional scientists,
0:04:27 I don’t think we think about enough, why do you make the diet choices that you make?
0:04:29 So why do you choose to have that for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner?
0:04:31 Is it because it’s part of your culture?
0:04:33 Is it because that’s how you’re just feeling emotionally?
0:04:37 Is it because you’re sitting with friends and it’s part of that social experience?
0:04:41 I think we’re at a really exciting time in nutritional research because we’re now able
0:04:45 to collect data at a scale, breadth, depth and precision that we’ve never been able to
0:04:50 before, that’s allowing us to put together all of those pieces of the puzzle to start
0:04:52 to see a clearer picture.
0:04:53 So let’s go into all of that.
0:04:59 Let’s start with the subject of the food matrix, which is a term I hadn’t actually heard before
0:05:00 until today.
0:05:04 What is the food matrix and why do I need to know about that?
0:05:10 So the food matrix simply put is the structure of food and it’s really important because
0:05:16 we know that food is so much more than just the nutrients and chemicals it contains.
0:05:20 So we know that food contains nutrients that people are very familiar with, like protein,
0:05:22 fat, fiber, carbohydrate.
0:05:26 We know that food also contains thousands of other chemicals, many of these we call bioactives
0:05:32 that you’ll have heard of, like polyphenols, vitamins, minerals, etc.
0:05:37 But they’re all encapsulated within the structure of a food to think of an apple versus apple
0:05:39 puree versus apple juice.
0:05:44 They’re all coming from the same food, but they have a different structure and the reason
0:05:50 it’s important is because we know that food structure modulates the helpfulness of the
0:05:55 chemicals and nutrients within the food and it’s really, really relevant now.
0:06:00 It’s really relevant now because our food landscape has changed almost unrecognisably
0:06:02 to 50, 100, 200 years ago.
0:06:07 We’re now eating a lot of food where the food matrix, the structure of the food has changed
0:06:12 and this is because we use multiple different processing techniques.
0:06:19 So in simple terms, if I were to zoom in on a piece of food on a microscope, the way that
0:06:25 the molecule of the food is put together is now different to what it used to be and that’s
0:06:27 having an impact on my health.
0:06:32 So in simple terms, it’s that we are changing often through processing the structure of
0:06:33 the food.
0:06:36 Now, by processing, it could be our own processing.
0:06:39 When we chew a food, we change the structure.
0:06:43 Take a nut for example, you have a whole nut, you chew it, you break up the nut, it goes
0:06:46 into your gastrointestinal tract, it’s broken down further.
0:06:51 We also change it using manual industrial techniques as well.
0:06:58 So we use techniques like grinding or we might use pasteurisation for dairy or extrusion
0:06:59 for some carbohydrate-rich foods.
0:07:02 We use all of these different techniques that also change the food matrix.
0:07:04 For better or for worse?
0:07:06 It’s a double-edged sword.
0:07:07 Right.
0:07:11 And I think this is what we need to remember, that everyone’s demonising at the moment,
0:07:17 it’s older processed food, it’s killing the nation, 60% of our energy is coming from
0:07:18 older processed food.
0:07:24 Yes, we are eating too much unhealthy food, much of which has been heavily processed,
0:07:28 but processing can also be used to our benefit.
0:07:30 And we have to think, why do we even process food in the first place?
0:07:33 Well, we process it to make it edible.
0:07:36 I don’t want to go and eat a rice grain that’s not being cooked.
0:07:38 We make it safe.
0:07:42 I want to drink pasteurised milk because I know it’s safer.
0:07:44 We want to make it stable.
0:07:49 I think how long a can can last for frozen vegetables versus fresh.
0:07:51 So you’re saving food waste.
0:07:54 We want to make it taste good and we want to make it convenient.
0:07:58 So there’s all of these different reasons that we use food processing.
0:08:04 But when we think about the healthfulness of a food, we need to think about it in terms
0:08:10 of the processing techniques that have been used, as well as the nutrient composition.
0:08:12 We can’t look at them in isolation, in my opinion.
0:08:15 And this is what I’ve done a lot of research looking into.
0:08:19 And what is processing gone bad?
0:08:26 I think processing gone bad is when you’ve changed the nutrient profile of a food such
0:08:33 that it is unhealthy, so in simple terms, it’s too much saturated fat, too much salt,
0:08:40 too little fiber, too little bioactive, like polyphenols, a food that is very energy-dense.
0:08:42 So you eat it really, really quickly.
0:08:43 So you’re eating too many calories.
0:08:47 You’re eating it before your hunger signals have got your brain to say, “Well, Stephen,
0:08:48 you’ve had enough.”
0:08:54 And there’s great research that has been looking at how processing can affect your eating rate,
0:08:58 the energy-density of food, the nutrient profile of a food.
0:08:59 And that’s where it can go wrong.
0:09:05 But where it can go right is you can improve all of those things I’ve said, the stability,
0:09:07 the safety of the food.
0:09:14 You can also increase what we call bi-accessibility, so the availability of some of the nutrients
0:09:15 within a food, as well.
0:09:16 Okay.
0:09:22 So I’ve got some snacks over in the corner of the room here, which I guess have been
0:09:28 processed differently to have a different impact on me as the consumer.
0:09:30 Gosh, these look delicious.
0:09:32 Oh, I hope they’re salt and vinegar pringles.
0:09:34 How are you going to eat them?
0:09:37 Oh, my gosh.
0:09:42 So I’ve got some mixed nuts here, and I’ve got some cookies, some little pieces of chocolate,
0:09:45 and some crisps.
0:09:50 So you were talking about this processing something so that I eat it faster, and that
0:09:54 it doesn’t, like, sort of say-shape me or make me feel hungry.
0:09:55 Crisps.
0:09:59 It’s a combination of crisp lovers.
0:10:02 When you were saying that about something that makes you eat fast and not realise that
0:10:05 you’ve even eaten it all, crisps were the first thing that came to mind for me.
0:10:06 I love a crisp.
0:10:07 You love a crisp.
0:10:08 We all love a crisp.
0:10:14 So I think all of these first three foods, the crisps, the chocolate, the cookies, you
0:10:19 know, if compared to what would be a healthy food, they’ve all got less fiber.
0:10:25 They’ve all got, well, certainly that the chocolate and the cookie’s got more sugar.
0:10:31 They won’t have all of the wonderful bioactives in them, and then with the crisps, depending
0:10:36 on the type of crisps, it’s probably quite high in salt.
0:10:42 But the chances are with those three is that they are quite energy-dense, so they have
0:10:49 quite a lot of calories per gram, which is partly because of the processing techniques.
0:10:55 Yet if you take a whole food like a nut, now they’re actually very energy-dense, so they’re
0:11:02 very high in fat, they’re high in calories, but actually because they’re in their original
0:11:08 food matrix, how your body handles them is quite different to if, for example, they had
0:11:09 been processed.
0:11:14 You mentioned something about my brain takes a little while to figure out that I’ve started
0:11:15 eating.
0:11:16 Yep.
0:11:20 So if I started smashing these crisps down now, how long would it take my brain to realise
0:11:24 that I’d started eating to sort of catch up and make me feel hungry?
0:11:28 Yeah, so there’s lots of different mechanisms that impact how full we feel, how hungry we
0:11:30 feel related to a food.
0:11:34 There’s different hormones that are released from different areas of our gut, for example,
0:11:38 that feedback signals to say either you’re full or you’re hungry.
0:11:43 On average, I would say it takes about ten to twenty minutes for the fullness to really
0:11:45 properly kick in.
0:11:50 Now you could easily have got through those, well, I could easily have got through all
0:11:54 of these in under that twenty minutes.
0:11:58 I wasn’t aware that there was a delay, but it does make sense because there’s certain
0:12:03 foods that I used to eat like Pringles and snacks and crisps and things like that where
0:12:07 I feel like I could eat two tubes of the thing before my body even realised what was going
0:12:08 on.
0:12:14 And are they in some way designed to encourage that speed of eating?
0:12:19 So there are many people who will say the food industry has specifically designed these
0:12:26 to make them firstly what we call hyperpalatable, so to have the right mix of fat, sugar, you
0:12:35 know, carbohydrate, etc. to make them really tasty, and in this case salt as well.
0:12:38 I don’t think the food industry is out there to get us.
0:12:41 I think that what the food industry were doing fifty years ago versus what they’re doing
0:12:46 now is quite different, but some people will say I’m very naive, I do believe the food
0:12:50 industry ultimately want to produce food that’s safe but also healthy for us.
0:12:54 That’s probably an unpopular opinion, but based on my interactions with the food industry
0:12:55 I believe that.
0:13:02 However, I do believe that these crisps are there, have been made to be flavoursome, to
0:13:08 be palatable to you, so that you do enjoy them now whether that’s that you then go and
0:13:15 overeat them, I think is yes a byproduct of that.
0:13:20 Now it doesn’t take twenty minutes for all of the fullness signals to kick in because
0:13:24 as soon as you start chewing something you start to release different hormones and different
0:13:28 sensory characteristics of the food will also trigger some sort of fullness.
0:13:33 But what we do know is that you have more of these fullness receptors saying hey you’re
0:13:40 full lower down in your gastrointestinal tract and so if you can get food to the lower gastrointestinal
0:13:45 tract that’s when it says hey Stephen you’re full now and these heavily processed snacks
0:13:50 that you’ve got here would be typically absorbed higher up the gastrointestinal tract because
0:13:55 kind of the hard work’s been done and yet when you’ve got something like a whole grain
0:13:59 or a nut typically that would be absorbed lower down the gastrointestinal tract where
0:14:05 you’ve got more of these fullness signals so giving you that greater feeling of fullness.
0:14:09 My girlfriend has said to me for many many a year that I need to eat slower and I thought
0:14:14 it was like a spiritual thing that she’s into to do with like giving the food gratitude
0:14:19 etc etc but upon reading your work and having this conversation today now I’m starting to
0:14:25 believe that she was right all along unsurprisingly once again and that there is a scientific
0:14:29 basis for slowing down how fast I eat.
0:14:33 Absolutely we now know that eating rate’s important there’s some fantastic work that’s
0:14:39 being done by a professor Ciaran Ford who’s dedicated many years into researching this
0:14:44 and looking at how changing the structure and texture of a food can modulate your eating
0:14:52 rate and how also your eating rate can modulate how you metabolize the food and how many calories
0:14:58 you go on to eat and so it’s a great example you know I talked about all of these different
0:15:02 pieces of the puzzle that’s one of those pieces so when we talk about how you eat changing
0:15:06 your eating rate so how quickly you have your breakfast your lunch or dinner or any of these
0:15:13 snacks will also without you consciously thinking about it change how many calories you eat
0:15:16 might change how quickly you metabolize the food as well.
0:15:18 What’s the sort of knock on effects there?
0:15:23 So the research that’s been done by Ciaran Ford shows that on average if you change the
0:15:32 speed in which you eat your food by about 20% you reduce your calorie intake by about 15%
0:15:37 and that’s due to where you’re releasing your hunger hormones, how many fullness hormones
0:15:43 you’re releasing etc so it’s a really simple strategy and we see this play out as well even
0:15:48 in our own evidence when we look in our zodiac predict studies that fast eaters vs slow eaters
0:15:52 we see that once we’re just for lots of other confounders there’s a difference of 120 calories
0:15:58 between what fast eaters have over a day versus slow eaters with the fast eaters eating more
0:16:03 calories compared to slow eaters and there’s even been clinical trials where they get groups
0:16:10 of individuals and say okay slow down the rate at which you eat your food over the next
0:16:14 you know 3, 4, 5 weeks they have another group they say just eat at your normal rate.
0:16:18 Those people who are intentionally slowing down the rate at which they eat their food
0:16:22 lose more weight than those people who continue to eat at their normal rate.
0:16:27 See I always made this like weird unfounded evolutionary argument to her I was like well
0:16:34 you know in the wild you’ve got to eat what you can so people eat quick but we’re not
0:16:37 in the world anymore and the food choices that we have are drastically different now
0:16:42 so yeah and also the food that is available to many of us is the kind of food that can
0:16:47 be eaten really quickly so there’s some great research that’s being conducted that shows
0:16:54 that heavily processed soft textured type food can be eaten 50% more quickly than the
0:16:59 unprocessed harder textured equivalent so the kind of food that we’re eating now is
0:17:04 quite different so you’re eating it really quickly you’re overeating because your hunger
0:17:07 signals haven’t got there but it’s that rate at which you’re eating.
0:17:12 What’s an example of a soft textured food versus like a hard textured food?
0:17:17 So we can use an example from a study that was actually conducted in 1977 and this was
0:17:22 published in the Lancet it was one of the first nutrition studies published in the Lancet
0:17:27 and it’s one of the first studies to show the importance of the food matrix and it kind
0:17:31 of got buried for many years and it’s a study by the scientist called Haber where he fed
0:17:38 individuals whole apples he fed individuals the equivalent amount of carbohydrate from
0:17:44 apple puree it was exactly the same i.e. same nutrients same fibers same everything else
0:17:51 in it all that’s different is the apples are hard the puree is soft and what he found was
0:17:56 that those people who were given the puree even though they were given exactly the same
0:18:02 amount of calories ate that puree or rather drank that puree three to four times more
0:18:06 quickly than when they had the apples the equivalent amount of calories so they were
0:18:12 eating the same amount of calories but three to four times more quickly that’s like three hundred
0:18:17 percent four hundred percent faster okay they felt less full so when they measured their fullness
0:18:22 and they monitored that for quite a few hours so going up to quite a few hours those that were
0:18:28 having the apples continued to feel full for longer those that having the puree didn’t feel full
0:18:34 as long and what also happened interestingly is those that were having the puree had what we call
0:18:39 a blood sugar dip so about two to four hours after having a high carbohydrate meal we know that some
0:18:44 people have a dip in their circulating blood sugar and we know from our own so we predict research
0:18:48 that actually this can really increase your hunger levels yeah and so we know from our research if
0:18:54 you are a dipper I’m a dipper hence I get hungry quite often so in about two hours I’m going to be
0:19:00 if you’re a dipper you know your your blood glucose is going below your baseline levels
0:19:07 and so you get hungry you go on to eat 180 calories on average more at your next meal because of that
0:19:13 and so I mean this research from 1977 I think is fascinating it’s that first research really
0:19:18 demonstrating the importance of food matrix and then since then I’ve now over the last 10 years
0:19:24 done lots of studies with nuts with oats for example that demonstrate you can have two foods
0:19:30 that have identical backpack labelling identical nutrients identical calorie value if you were
0:19:35 to look at the backpack labelling but can have entirely different impacts in terms of how much
0:19:41 energy you absorb how you metabolize that food how it impacts your hunger how it impacts downstream
0:19:46 health effects and you’ve done some research on walnuts right so we’ve done work on walnuts but
0:19:52 particularly on almonds so we’ve done lots of work with almonds using as a kind of proof in
0:19:57 principle of the importance of the food matrix now you just took a bite of that and I could hear the
0:20:01 crunch the reason I could hear the crunch is because in almonds like most nuts like many
0:20:10 plant-based products products there is a very rigid cell wall okay so that almond that you’ve
0:20:15 you’re holding there has thousands and thousands and thousands of cells these cells are tiny they’re
0:20:20 about 50 microns okay you can’t see them with the human eye I can show you a micrograph
0:20:27 but there’s thousands in there now each of those cells it’s smaller than a grain of sand
0:20:35 and each of those cells is encapsulate cell walls is encapsulating the fat so we know that in
0:20:39 most of these nuts it’s about 50 percent they’re about 50 fat hence people say oh my gosh I can’t
0:20:45 eat nuts they’re high fat they’re high calorie now in all of those nuts the fats encapsulated
0:20:53 in this rigid cell wall when you bit that you fractured some of those cells when you swallow it
0:20:59 you chewed it you chewed it a little bit I assume a little bit yeah yeah I didn’t swallow it when
0:21:04 people chew it we know from these lovely chewing spit studies or mastication studies that we do
0:21:11 that at the point at which you swallow a nut the particles i.e. the size of the bits that you’re
0:21:16 swallowing that you’ve chewed are about maybe half a millimeter to one millimeter in size
0:21:25 now given that the cell within of a almond nut is about 50 microns that means when you’re swallowing
0:21:31 within that what we call the macro particle you’ve still got thousands of cells they’re intact
0:21:37 where you’ve got this lovely cell wall containing all of this fat and so you’re swallowing these
0:21:43 intact cells containing and encapsulating the fat so they’re what we call very low by accessibility
0:21:49 they’re not very accessible to us this fat now what happens is it passes through your gastrointestinal
0:21:55 tract some of the enzymes can break down the cells a little bit but actually a lot just comes out the
0:21:59 other end so I don’t know whether you’ve ever eaten a burger nuts and looked at your poo after
0:22:09 none of your business i’m joking go and do that but you should see some almond particles really
0:22:13 you know like when I’m you know being a mum when I’ve I’ve looked at a lot of poo in my life through
0:22:21 my work but also through being a mum I bet you can see whole nut particles in the poo so nuts
0:22:26 they just is it they just don’t break down fully so they break down partially so you break down about
0:22:33 10 percent in the mouth before you swallow so about 10 percent of the calories become available
0:22:39 because the calories are contained from the fat etc and then you probably break down about another
0:22:44 60 to 70 percent as it passes through your stomach your small intestine your large intestine
0:22:48 okay but you have loads of material arriving at your colon which is your large intestine that’s
0:22:54 undigested which is good for two reasons one because you’re giving all of this food to your
0:22:58 microbiome which we know is great for your health your microbiome’s having a party with these nuts
0:23:03 but also if you are worried about eating nuts because of their high calorie value
0:23:08 actually 20 to 30 percent of the calories are just coming out the other end but where it gets
0:23:13 really interesting is if we then take exactly that nut that you’re holding there and if I was to
0:23:19 industrially grind it so that I broke all of those cells walls yeah so we’re breaking it down to
0:23:27 less than 50 microns so that you’re releasing all of the fat so it becomes 100 percent by accessible
0:23:33 i.e you absorb 100 percent of it but they could have two identical backup pack labels yeah because
0:23:39 they’re the same ingredient all that’s happened is you’ve ground that nut to such an extent that
0:23:46 you’ve released everything and so having that in its whole form is beneficial because if you are
0:23:51 concerned about energy intake it’s reducing the energy it’s providing this amazing food for your
0:23:59 gut microbiome it’s changing also how your blood changes metabolically in that about eight hours
0:24:04 after eating it and this is what i’ve done lots of work on looking at how your blood fat increases
0:24:09 and decreases in that immediate period after eating either ground nuts or whole nuts but once you
0:24:15 grind it i’m not saying it’s necessarily bad because the upside of that is all of the other
0:24:19 good nutrients contained within that cell like the vitamin e and some of the other components
0:24:25 also become available so it’s this double-edged sword interesting but that’s what i think is
0:24:32 so fascinating about processing and about food matrix and why we have to move beyond thinking
0:24:37 about food just in terms of the nutrients because you can have two foods with identical
0:24:41 backpack labelling that have different effects and we’ve seen the same with oats we’ve been doing
0:24:49 studies as well where we feed people large oats so kind of you know like the steel cut sort of
0:24:56 old-fashioned porridge or you feed people finely ground oats and so we’ve done clinical trials
0:25:02 where on one occasion people come in and they’ll have 50 grams carbohydrate for breakfast of these
0:25:07 large oats then they’ll come in another day and they’ll have exactly the same oats but where we
0:25:11 ground them literally we’ve got students just grinding them down so they’re more like a powder
0:25:17 and the difference in the metabolic response in that following six hours after having either the
0:25:24 large traditional oats or these finely ground oats is enormous and that’s because of gut absorption
0:25:32 speed yes so with the nuts what we’re seeing here is a difference in the amount as well as the
0:25:38 speed with the oats what we’re seeing is a difference in the speed so we’re seeing seeing a difference
0:25:45 in the rate because we know that the food matrix impacts the amount i with the nuts the rate i with
0:25:52 the oats and as well as where the foods absorbed in the gut and so you see about a 40 percent difference
0:25:59 in the postprandial glucose response so this is the increase in circulating blood glucose after
0:26:06 you’ve had these oats we see about a 50 percent higher response from the ground oats versus the
0:26:13 large oats and that has subsequent impacts on hunger hormones fullness hormones insulin release
0:26:18 etc etc and what role does fiber play in this because fiber is becoming quite popular now they’re
0:26:23 like putting it in drinks and stuff like that and there’s some candy in america when we’re recording
0:26:30 over in uh new york which had like it said like 15 grams of fiber added to this like candy so
0:26:34 five is a really interesting one and it’s a really interesting one because we know we’re not getting
0:26:40 enough fiber so we should be getting at least 30 grams of fiber in the uk and it’s similar in the
0:26:45 us we get on average about 20 grams of fiber 95 percent of us are not having enough fiber fiber
0:26:52 is the one nutrient that we know consistently is associated with beneficial health effects reduce
0:26:56 reduction in many cancers reduction in cardiovascular disease reduction in levels
0:27:02 of obesity type 2 diabetes etc you know it’s an amazing nutrient fiber and we don’t get enough of
0:27:07 it just to pause there then why is it so good for us because i mean it sounds like a super
0:27:12 molecule the way you just described it so it’s good for us for many different reasons and there’s
0:27:15 loads and loads of different types of fiber and the different types of fiber are good for us for
0:27:20 slightly different reasons really simply put we’ve got soluble fiber and that’s great for us
0:27:25 because it impacts things like cholesterol absorption as well as other factors related
0:27:31 to how quickly we metabolize food etc then you’ve got insoluble fiber which is the kind of fiber
0:27:36 that for example are in those nuts because fiber in those nuts is actually the cell wall so most
0:27:42 cell walls of plants are just fiber that’s great for us because it’s food for our microbiome it
0:27:47 helps bulk out our stalls so it reduces our transit time how quickly the our poo basically
0:27:53 passes to our colon reduce the risk of colon cancer and so forth but largely because it is
0:27:57 the food upon which our microbiomes have their party produce all of these wonderful molecules
0:28:03 that we know impact so much related to our health but we don’t get enough of it and we don’t get
0:28:07 enough of it because we’re not eating the right types of food that we have in high amounts so
0:28:12 having any kind of fiber is going to improve our health having fiber that’s added artificially
0:28:17 back into food is going to be better than having no fibers so the kind of bars that
0:28:23 you’re talking about that say are added fiber great having fiber though from the whole food
0:28:29 is always going to be better and so with nuts fiber is essentially the cell walls of the nuts
0:28:35 so it’s having that role in reducing that bi-accessibility that we talk about at slowing
0:28:42 those nuts down so that’s always going to be better having that fiber in the whole food
0:28:47 in its original structure in the way nature intended but having any kind of fiber is better
0:28:52 than having none in a nation or you know many nations where we’re not having enough
0:28:58 if we can get some in our diet even if it is processed fiber it’s better than no fiber in my
0:29:06 opinion one of the big revelations in my household has been just getting some of these bad snacks
0:29:13 just out the house and replacing it with healthier whole snacks and I say that because the sort of
0:29:18 the very definition the very like sort of use case where we snack is when we typically don’t have a
0:29:24 lot of time where the hunger kind of crept up on us in between a meal and so we make fast decisions
0:29:29 it’s not a very considered decision and I was reading that there’s been some studies done
0:29:34 where they took sort of two groups and gave them typical snacks versus healthy snacks and
0:29:39 they found a pretty significant reduction in cardiovascular disease yeah so this is one of
0:29:46 my studies okay and we looked at how changing people’s snacks can impact their health and the
0:29:51 reason we’re interested in this is because we’re a nation of snackers in the UK as in many countries
0:29:58 so we know that about 25 percent of our energy comes from snacks that’s phenomenal and so
0:30:06 what we wanted to do is look at if we do a really simple snack swap can we improve people’s health
0:30:14 and so we asked people to change 20 of their energy from either having typical UK snacks
0:30:21 or having 20 of their energy from almond nuts for six weeks and then we looked at various health
0:30:26 outcomes at the beginning of that six weeks and then at the end of that six weeks we said keep
0:30:31 everything else the same we provided all of these snacks to them we provided the typical UK snacks
0:30:37 we spent a lot of time designing these so we did lots of research where we looked in the UK
0:30:41 and it’s the set very similar in the US what are the typical snacks so basically we designed these
0:30:48 muffins that ultimately were having a bit of a potato chip or crisp a bit of a chocolate biscuit
0:30:52 a bit of a cake just like imagine all put in one muffin I mean we didn’t go and get those and just
0:30:58 stick them in one muffin but we worked out what’s the nutrient profile in the UK in the US that
0:31:03 comes from snacks and then we designed a snack product that was quite highly processed that
0:31:07 reflected that nutrient profile so it’s quite high in saturated fat high in sugar high in
0:31:12 refined carbohydrate low in fiber people had to eat 20 percent of their energy from these muffins
0:31:20 which my kids loved or 20 percent from the almond nuts at the end of that we measured lots of health
0:31:25 outcomes one of which was a particular measure that we do to look at people’s vascular function
0:31:29 so their blood vessel function it’s a measure called flow mediated dilation it tells us in
0:31:34 really simple terms kind of how healthy the blood vessels are and what we found was the
0:31:41 improvement in blood vessel function following having almond nuts versus having typical UK
0:31:46 snacks equated to a 30 percent reduction in cardiovascular disease that’s crazy and in
0:31:53 what period of time six weeks in six weeks and do you know what I think’s really interesting
0:32:00 about this is it’s one simple single dietary strategy and snacks are under our own control
0:32:06 typically what I have as a snack isn’t determined by my fussy kids what I have as a snack quite
0:32:11 often isn’t determined where I am at that point in time because I can bring my snacks with me
0:32:16 it’s a really simple single dietary strategy that can have a big size effect and I think that that’s
0:32:20 really important it is really important though Stephen at this point that I do say that I have
0:32:26 actually had funding from the almond board of California and they did fund that study although
0:32:32 the way we conduct our RCTs the funders have no impact over the study design or you know they don’t
0:32:36 get to see the all data or all the paper before we’re publishing it but I just think it’s always
0:32:43 important to declare conflicts of interest we’ve seen this though play out in other studies with
0:32:48 other nuts or other snacks substitutes so it’s not unique just to almonds it’s a great illustrator
0:32:53 of how changing our snacks can improve our health and we we really are a nation of snackers
0:32:58 you highlighted one of the stats there that in the UK and in the US about 25 percent of our
0:33:03 energy comes from snacks 75 percent of the energy that’s coming from those snacks is coming from
0:33:09 unhealthy snacks this was taken from this podcast in mediterranean countries only 14 percent of
0:33:15 energy comes from snacks which is half of the UK and 85 percent of british people report snacking
0:33:22 compared to 10 percent in France and in the UK we have 2.5 to 3 snacks per day which translates to
0:33:29 six or seven eating events a day and this has massive impacts on our glucose spikes and drops
0:33:32 throughout the day causing metabolic chaos and that’s part of what I was thinking as I was as
0:33:39 I was thinking about this is if I am eating that muffin that you made which resembles the sort of
0:33:46 typical british composition of a snack it’s not necessarily just that that snack is going to
0:33:51 impact me it’s that my next food choice because I ate that snack is going to be different because
0:33:55 I’m on that I might be on a glucose roller coaster here so I might end up making a worse food choice
0:34:02 thereafter which then might impact my maybe my sleep because I’ve got a little bit of sugar in me
0:34:08 when I’m settling down to go to sleep and is there the sort of not downstream domino effect
0:34:14 because of that one snack choice so I wouldn’t say that you’ve made a one bad snack choice and
0:34:20 that’s it your day’s over damn it you know your stuff I think that you highlight an important
0:34:26 point though that what we choose as a meal does have knock-on effects on what might happen later
0:34:31 in the day so for example if you have a really refined carbohydrate breakfast or snack then
0:34:36 you’re more likely to have a blood sugar dip which we know from our research is more likely to make
0:34:42 you more hungry eat more calories have lower mood have lower energy and be less alert but I think
0:34:49 you know snacking can be used to our advantage snacking can be used to our advantage because
0:34:54 we know it accounts for such a huge proportion of our energy intake because we know on average
0:35:00 that you know seventy seventy five percent the snacks that we do company in the UK in the US
0:35:05 are not helpful snacks and because we know that actually just transitioning from those to healthy
0:35:12 snacks can have a big impact but I think it’s really important to be thinking about not just
0:35:16 the type of snacks you’re having but the time of day that you’re having the snacks and we published
0:35:21 some research recently where we looked in a thousand individuals at people snacking habits
0:35:25 because it’s not actually been looked at much I mean you think everyone snacks you think there
0:35:30 would be loads of science out there about snacking there’s lots of science out there about the
0:35:35 different you know foods that we might snack on but not really much looking at snacking habits
0:35:39 and there’s a lot of controversy out there about whether we should be
0:35:46 grazers and we are a nation of grazers you know we well I certainly graze but many people we know
0:35:50 like you said you know eighty to ninety percent of people do have multiple eating events throughout
0:35:56 the day are you taking these away from you for self-control I am a little bit yeah I think the
0:36:02 smell of the chocolate and the cookies is testing me and in January I’m not trying to be tested
0:36:10 there we go um and what we have never really fully understood is is snacking per se bad are you
0:36:16 having multiple eating events so eating six times a day which we nearly do in the UK and the US
0:36:22 or is it about the type of food we’re snacking on so should we revert back to having the three
0:36:27 main meals the breakfast the lunch the dinner or is it okay to have multiple meals as long as
0:36:32 it’s healthy food so we looked at this in our cohort of a thousand individuals where we take
0:36:36 lots of measures related to what they’re eating when they’re eating how they’re eating it as well
0:36:42 as lots of different health outcomes and what we found was that the frequency of eating within
0:36:48 reason was not a problem so if people were grazing having multiple eating events as long as they were
0:36:54 eating healthy foods it didn’t matter having multiple eating events so snacking per se wasn’t
0:36:58 a problem as long as they were healthy foods okay because there’s been a long I guess raging
0:37:02 debate about how many meals you should have a day some people just eat one meal a day some people
0:37:07 probably five or six meals a day and you’re saying it doesn’t necessarily matter as long as what you’re
0:37:14 eating is healthy yeah I mean I will always as a cautious scientist caveat it within reason but our
0:37:20 research showed people having six eating events a day I you know six different occasions that they’re
0:37:25 eating food or three eating events as long as they were eating or snacking on healthy foods
0:37:30 it did not impact their health outcomes and this is I guess controlled for extreme cases where
0:37:34 someone’s maybe eating at 1 a.m. in the morning or 2 a.m. in the morning yeah so we also looked at
0:37:39 timing because I think that’s something that we haven’t given enough attention to in nutrition
0:37:43 science and it’s a really exciting new area of research that we’re starting to understand the
0:37:49 timing of when we eat is really important and what we found was interestingly 30 percent of
0:37:55 people were snacking after nine at night and we found that if you snack late at night I feel attacked
0:38:01 and this is a lot in line with you know other published research from very tightly controlled
0:38:07 clinical trials we found that if you snack late at night that that was associated with unfavorable
0:38:13 health outcomes so worse adiposity so worse kind of fat around your belly for example
0:38:18 higher levels of inflammation worse levels of blood lipids so you know cholesterol that sort
0:38:26 of thing and we found that this was even if you were snacking on healthy snacks really and this
0:38:30 isn’t especially surprising because there’s this whole new area in nutrition called crono
0:38:35 nutrition which is all about the timing of eating and we now are really starting to understand that
0:38:42 every cell in our body has its little body has a clock every cell has a clock and that clock is
0:38:49 shaped by when we eat as well as the light day cycle and if we’re eating out of sync with those
0:38:54 clocks those millions and trillions of clocks in our body we know that we process the food
0:38:58 slightly differently we metabolize it slightly differently and it may have a different impact
0:39:02 on our health and that’s what our research showed as well so eating after nine o’clock
0:39:09 isn’t great for your health just to double down on that I have had a long-standing hypothesis
0:39:15 that when I eat later at night it is making it is basically increasing my belly fat now I don’t
0:39:20 have any science to support this but there’s a and also the way that I feel when I wake up is
0:39:26 radically different if I’ve eaten close to my sleep time so I had this weird hypothesis that
0:39:29 I’m basically putting food into the machine and then I’m like turning the machine off
0:39:35 while it’s processing so it’s kind of like not processed it properly yeah I mean that’s kind
0:39:42 of a simple terms what’s sort of happening you know our body needs to rest overnight just like
0:39:48 our mind does our cells our metabolism needs to rest overnight and if you’re not giving your body
0:39:54 your cells your metabolism you’ve got microbiome etc that time to rest things get disturbed a little
0:39:59 bit and what’s really interesting is you said that you’ll feel different the next day if you eat
0:40:04 later at night there’s some really fascinating research that came out about one or two years ago
0:40:11 where they looked at giving exactly the same calories and foods over the day within the same
0:40:19 time period but in one group of individuals having most of the calories earlier and in another group
0:40:26 having most of them later in the day now those that were having them later in the day woke up
0:40:31 feeling more hungry which is kind of like counter-intuitive isn’t it but it fits in with what you’ve
0:40:37 just said yet those people who are eating the calories earlier in the day woke up feeling less
0:40:44 hungry and this is why as well the evidence shows early time restricted eating so time
0:40:47 restricted eating where you’re eating within a particular time window those people who are
0:40:53 practicing earlier in the day tend to do better in terms of the health outcomes whether it’s
0:40:57 weight inflammation cholesterol than those practicing later time restricted eating when
0:41:02 they have their last eating event later in the day and that’s because they’re eating in
0:41:08 in in time with their body clocks with these millions and billions of little cell clocks
0:41:16 I have had a weird observation which is sometimes sort of quite rare these days I have to wake up
0:41:21 super early to get on a flight and it means that I’m disrupting my sleep maybe getting up at four
0:41:27 or five in the morning and for some bizarre reason if I’m if I wake up at say four in the morning
0:41:35 to go and get a flight I am starving but if I woke up at nine that same day I would not be I would
0:41:40 probably not get hungry till about 2 p.m. and I’ve never managed to sort of really figure out why
0:41:46 disrupting my sleep causes me to be ridiculously hungry whereas typically I don’t honestly eat
0:41:52 breakfast I typically about midday or 2 p.m. so I think there’s probably a lot going on there
0:41:57 it’s getting a little bit outside my expertise but I can certainly comment from work that we’ve done
0:42:03 and I’m familiar with so what we know is that sleep duration sleep efficiency is what we also
0:42:09 call sleep midpoint so the midpoint at which you sleep impacts your hunger levels we know that your
0:42:18 hunger and your fullness hormones change as you sleep so we know that short sleepers people who
0:42:23 you know are getting up too early so when you’re getting up for your flight then your hunger and
0:42:29 fullness hormones might be perturbed and we know that short sleepers or if you’ve had a poor night
0:42:35 sleep you tend to wake up more hungry than if you’ve had a good night’s sleep this isn’t from my
0:42:40 own research I always have to caveat that but this is what some of the research is showing but
0:42:46 that also if you’ve had a poor night’s sleep you reach for less healthy food and there’s a study
0:42:53 that was conducted at Kings College London by my colleagues called the slumber study and this really
0:42:59 nicely illustrates how just changing how much you sleep can change your dietary choices and in the
0:43:03 slumber study they asked people who were short sleepers to practice sleep hygiene they gave them
0:43:09 no dietary advice they just said practice good sleep hygiene I you know no screens late at night
0:43:16 no physical activity caffeine alcohol etc late at night darkened room and then they just monitored
0:43:20 lots of different things in these individuals and what they found was that those who were able to
0:43:28 extend their sleep actually made healthier choices such that they reduced without being told to their
0:43:37 intake of free sugar by about 10 grams oh really without being given any advice so they slept better
0:43:41 they ate less sugar they made the decision to eat less sugar without being told to
0:43:48 that correlates it’s been such a revelation I think in my my life over the last I’d say
0:43:54 two to three years is realizing the downstream impact of sleep and a bad night’s sleep because
0:43:58 it was one of the things that I think growing up especially as an entrepreneur when you’re
0:44:02 like consuming a lot of like hustle printer you know culture and it’s all like sacrifice
0:44:08 to sleep work seven days that you assume is um take it or leave it like it like you assume it’s
0:44:13 often the first thing you think that you can sacrifice in the pursuit of productivity sleep
0:44:18 yeah well this is what I thought growing up and then in the last I think sorry all I think all
0:44:25 20 30 yeah I will think that yeah and yeah and anyone that’s like has I think probably
0:44:32 an involuntary amount of I say involuntary but I mean just because of the decisions they’ve made
0:44:39 amount of professional pressure or like shift workers or anybody or even parents I guess um
0:44:47 they probably see sleep is second due to some other kind of priority in their life and when I
0:44:52 shifted that and I made adjustments to my calendar and my schedule to try and prioritize sleep the
0:44:57 downstream impact of it has been profound in a way that I could never measure or articulate fully
0:45:02 but just everything seems to be better so like my relationships with my partner um my ability to
0:45:10 think straight um my motivation to go to the gym that day um the work that I do everything so it’s
0:45:15 I’ve just been this big sort of radical adjustment where I now see sleep as actually the the
0:45:20 starting point for all these other choices that I make good or bad um and that’s kind
0:45:25 of what your work is highlighting yeah I think it’s that we have to think of these four pillars
0:45:30 together of health we can’t look at diet on its own can’t look at sleep on its own can’t look at
0:45:35 stress on its own we can’t look at physical activity on its own so if we want to improve
0:45:43 our health through diet I think we must be looking our sleep habits which we can to a certain extent
0:45:47 control not always I know some people have to work shifts some people don’t have a choice
0:45:52 they’re woken up by their kids etc we need to look at our stress I know that’s one of the
0:45:57 hardest things to change um we need to look at our physical activity and our diet and they are
0:46:03 also interconnected and the predict studies that were done at zoe found that sleep affected
0:46:10 metabolic responses as much as the macronutrient content of the meal what is what is that what
0:46:17 is that saying so this is some research that we published where we looked at people when they’d
0:46:21 had a good night’s sleep and we looked at people when they’d had a bad night’s sleep
0:46:28 and we looked at their post meal post-prandial glucose response so that basically means after
0:46:33 having your breakfast that’s got some carbohydrate in it how much does your blood glucose increase
0:46:39 we call this the post-prandial glucose response because post-prandial is greek for post meal
0:46:47 and so it’s a term we use a lot in the science and we looked at individuals post meal glucose
0:46:50 response when they’d had a good night’s sleep and when they’d had a bad night’s sleep and what we
0:46:54 found was within the same individual if they’d had a bad night’s sleep their post meal glucose
0:47:01 response so after breakfast was a lot higher than if they’d had a good night’s sleep so what this
0:47:07 shows I think quite nicely if we think back to what you said about how you wake up more hungry
0:47:11 when you’ve not had enough sleep we know that people make poorer dietary choices for example
0:47:16 from the slumber study and then we know that the metabolic responses to those are worse it just
0:47:21 shows how you’re kind of creating this perfect storm and how you can’t think of it in isolation
0:47:25 because firstly you’re waking up and you’re like bloody hell I’m hungry secondly it’s like
0:47:30 I’m not having that healthy breakfast I want that pano-shockler or you know whatever that’s
0:47:35 you know giving you that quick fix and then you have it and you’re going to have this massive
0:47:40 blood sugar peak compared to if you’d had a good night’s sleep and and made a healthy choice for
0:47:46 less hungry etc etc so it’s like creating this perfect storm and it’s all started with your sleep
0:47:51 and that’s why I don’t think we can look at things in isolation anymore which is how I have
0:47:56 spent the previous 20 years of my research looking at things in isolation but that’s because I’ve not
0:48:00 been had the luxury of being able to collect the kind of data that we’re now collecting
0:48:06 I get a lot of messages from parents so uh because I’m not one yet I don’t fully understand
0:48:12 what it is to be a parent and the demands of parenthood so I’m going to defer to you on this
0:48:18 because my children never slept they never slept they did obviously but oh my lord
0:48:22 how did you how’d you survive that as a parent like what’s the was there any strategies or
0:48:26 tactics you put in place to defend against exactly what you just described the downstream
0:48:33 consequences of sleep deprivation no because the first four years of my children’s lives
0:48:40 I was also I lost my father when my daughter a few weeks after my daughter was born my sister and I
0:48:46 became full-time carers for my mother who lived around the corner I took a career break looked
0:48:51 after my mum with my sister had two young children they weren’t sleeping I had to show up I had to
0:48:58 show up to help my sister look after my mum it was about survival I didn’t think about what I ate
0:49:04 when I ate that was irrelevant it was about survival to be there for my mum to be there for my kids
0:49:10 and whether it was because of sleep deprivation was also so bad that it was just like driving
0:49:14 bad choices I don’t know but there’s points in time in anyone’s life that we go through that are
0:49:23 about survival aren’t there and I think everything goes out of the window and I’m not saying it should
0:49:30 but I think that when you’re in the depths of whether it’s sleep deprivation because your
0:49:35 children keeping your wake or what I was going through you know my mother had a degenerative
0:49:44 neurological condition and seeing someone daily deteriorate like that what you’re doing physical
0:49:49 activity wise well I didn’t have time to do that what you’re eating quite often doesn’t become a
0:49:54 priority now it’s probably a time it should be even more of a priority because we know that what
0:50:00 you eat impacts your mental health you know there’s great research now showing how important it is
0:50:05 but when you’re in that fog of whether it’s that you’re depressed or you’re dealing with you know
0:50:09 trauma or whatever I think food is one of the last things that you think about making a priority
0:50:16 and I think it’s okay you know when we talk about the health situation in the US and the UK
0:50:22 with obesity on the rise and things like that people are now pointing at things like as MPEC
0:50:27 as the cure for that but when you speak about the role there that stress and our lifestyles are
0:50:31 having on us and I was thinking about some of the stats that have emerged around anxiety and young
0:50:37 people and then being more in depression rates globally maybe there’s something else that we
0:50:42 should be thinking about which is like the mental health mindfulness piece of how that overlays with
0:50:48 food choices and because you know even the food the ultra processed unhealthy foods that are being
0:50:57 attacked a lot these days I mean to some degree they are a consequence also of demand I’m absolutely
0:51:01 so they wouldn’t be making these things if people didn’t want them and didn’t buy them
0:51:06 so maybe if we focused more on some of the mindfulness mental health challenges we have in
0:51:13 society people would have more of a greater ability to make better choices themselves as well because
0:51:21 I certainly know in my life that if I’m highly stressed or if things are difficult then my ability
0:51:26 to make better food choices is significantly impaired. Yeah absolutely and you know again this is what
0:51:33 the research shows the sleep the stress it impacts your ability to make choices about lots of things
0:51:39 but equally your food choices you know what you’re talking about I think is so complex it’s where
0:51:42 where’s the responsibility for the government where’s the responsibility for the food industry
0:51:47 where’s the responsibility for us as individuals where’s the responsibility for schools for example
0:51:52 for us as parents educating our children we need to take into account all of those different
0:52:01 areas in order to improve the foods that we’re eating there is a problem that these three dishes so
0:52:09 the chocolate the biscuits the crisps they are more tasty or rather our taste buds our brains are
0:52:15 tricking us into thinking they’re more palatable and that’s the problem do we say to our children
0:52:19 you can never ever have them now I’ve certainly never taken that approach I think it’s all about
0:52:25 balance and enabling people to make the choices that they make but I recognize if I’m sitting there
0:52:30 in the evening I’m a bit stressed I’ve got a work deadline I don’t want to eat nuts I want to eat
0:52:34 those biscuits or those crisps and I want a glass of wine with it I know that’s not the
0:52:41 right decision I know it’s 10 o’clock at night but in the moment that’s the choice I probably will
0:52:50 make do you get frustrated with yourself because you you know more about nutrition than most people
0:52:58 on planet earth yet you still find yourself making at times suboptimal nutritional choices
0:53:06 no I don’t because I think that it’s really quite simple when we think about the food that we eat
0:53:12 I think we’re making it so complicated and I think that do you know what if we eat a good amount of
0:53:17 fruits vegetables pulses if we try not to eat too much heavily processed foods if we try and get a
0:53:23 bit of diversity in our diet we’re doing okay so what if I go and have you know a bar of chocolate
0:53:29 as long as I’m not doing it all day every day and I think this kind of health optimization
0:53:38 around diet I think is taking away the pleasure of food and you know I often say if a food is too
0:53:43 healthy to be enjoyed it’s just not healthy at all food is there to bring us joy it’s to bring us
0:53:48 pleasure it’s part of our emotions it’s part of our culture it’s part of you know our social
0:53:55 connections and I worry that now there’s a certain proportion of society so hyper focused
0:54:04 on that one percent gain in terms of the food that they’re eating that they forget all of that
0:54:09 pleasure so I think I have quite a balanced approach because I know that ultimately if you
0:54:17 get the foundations right the rest will follow but that makes up 95 percent of what makes a
0:54:22 food or a diet and that’s how we need to think about what we’re healthy what do you think of diets
0:54:29 um because there’s so many bloody diets isn’t there I think that
0:54:39 there’s so much Nutribolex out there Nutribolex there is so much misinformation out there
0:54:45 what you see on social media versus what the evidence shows is like night and day
0:54:51 I mean seriously and so when I think about diets my view on diets
0:54:58 I mean there are some that there’s some good evidence you know eat planty eat 30 plants are we
0:55:03 yeah that’s great um go on a low calorie diet to lose weight great but how are you going to
0:55:08 maintain that weight that’s a whole other question great for losing not for maintenance
0:55:16 um then you’ve got the alkaline diet I mean I don’t understand that eat alkaline
0:55:22 foods but your stomach is acidic so I’ve got no idea how that works the blood type diet
0:55:28 I don’t actually know what half of these diets do because I do not understand the physiological
0:55:35 theory behind them and so do you know what’s those even I think if it works for you as an individual
0:55:43 fine do it but if it works for you at the expense of the pleasure of food at the expense of enjoying
0:55:48 life to the fullness that’s what I think is a shame like time-restricted eating I think there’s
0:55:53 great evidence around time-restricted eating now much of it comes from very tightly and
0:55:58 metabolically controlled studies you know that are done in clinic where people you know eat within
0:56:02 a five or six hour window so they have their first meal at 10 their last meal at four in the
0:56:07 evening reduces inflammation reduces body weight improves blood cholesterol etc etc etc
0:56:15 I don’t want to only eat six hours a day I want to have dinner with my family I want to have dinner
0:56:20 with my friends I want to go to the pub in the evening not every evening I want to live life
0:56:28 so what can we do that takes that principle of that diet but we still benefit from it
0:56:33 and this is what’s great again about the research that we’re doing at Zoe we’ve done this study
0:56:39 called the big if study the big intermittent fasting study we had 150,000 people sign up
0:56:44 and we said look we want to see if what we find in tightly controlled clinical studies plays out
0:56:49 in the real world because we always have to think how does all of this evidence play out in the real
0:56:55 world does it matter and we said just limit your eating window so the time from your first to your
0:57:00 last meal to 10 hours so that means if you’re having your first meal at 10 you’re having in the
0:57:05 morning you’re having your last meal at eight in the evening that’s correct isn’t it sure
0:57:09 my pillow and a quarter frame cannot do maths
0:57:16 that’s quite doable for most people I can have my breakfast at 10 I can finish my last meal
0:57:21 at eight I mean yeah I do like munching on my chocolate late at night I could probably
0:57:27 still live a happy enough life doing that and we found people could do it we found as well
0:57:31 that people who practiced it within two weeks they felt better they had better energy better mood
0:57:37 you know they were feeling a lot better they also lost weight many people wanted to do this
0:57:41 because they wanted to lose weight and we actually see from evidence that people practicing time
0:57:46 restricted eating even if they’re told not to change their calorie intake just by limiting
0:57:51 their eating window on average reduce their energy intake by about 300 calories on average
0:57:57 there’s been a big debate around this conversation around fasting and calorie restriction and some
0:58:02 people say that it’s basically the same thing and that you’ve kind of proven that to some degree
0:58:08 so we know that in most instances if you practice time restricted eating you unintentionally reduce
0:58:13 your energy intake and the data shows that on average from the studies that publish is about
0:58:20 300 calories obviously depends on the duration the reduction in body weight also we know is
0:58:26 dependent on the eating window so the smaller the eating window the greater the reduction in body
0:58:31 weight but there have been some studies that actually control the amount of calories that
0:58:37 people eat but have some people having a bigger eating window some in a smaller eating window
0:58:43 and what these studies have shown that if you have the same amount of calories but you change the
0:58:48 period and time in which you’re eating your food there is an additional benefit or metabolic health
0:58:55 there is a benefit in terms of blood lipids in terms of inflammation independent of calories
0:59:02 okay so time restricted eating has some benefit independent of calories consumption
0:59:10 yes but the bulk of the benefit is due to uh reduction in calories so there’s some benefit
0:59:14 independent to calorie restriction but the bulk of the benefit that we see is due to
0:59:19 a subconscious or unintentional reduction in calories and I think this is when we’re
0:59:24 thinking about diets I think we need to think about how easy is it to implement is there any
0:59:31 evidence behind it and 99% there isn’t for the ones that there is evidence like time restricted
0:59:37 eating can we do it in a way that still enables us to live our life that’s sustainable and the
0:59:41 sustainable point I think is really important because there’s now some new evidence emerging
0:59:49 around consistency and the importance of consistent eating patterns and I think this is fascinating
0:59:54 so there’s research showing that if one day you’re having three meals and then the next day
0:59:57 you’re having nine meals and the next day you’re having six meals and the next day you’re having
1:00:04 four meals that troubles your body it’s like whoa hold on I’m used to having you know four
1:00:09 eating events a day and this is important to bear in mind when we think about snacking if you’re
1:00:14 typically a snacker then find carry on snacking as long as it’s unhealthy food and as long as you
1:00:19 have your last snack before nine at night if you’re not a snacker having me just vouch for the great
1:00:23 benefits of snacking don’t start snacking because you don’t want to be inconsistent
1:00:29 and this new evidence emerging around the consistency of eating and there’s some research
1:00:33 done actually quite some time ago that started this idea I think is really fascinating so try
1:00:39 and have a consistent eating pattern same applies to sleep try and go to bed at the same time get
1:00:43 up at the same time we’ve done some work around social jet lag I don’t know if you’ve heard of
1:00:49 that term I think I’ve heard of it what does it mean so social jet lag is where you have an
1:00:56 inconsistent sleeping pattern throughout the week so for example for many maybe 20 year olds
1:01:01 or students they might go to bed at a sensible time in the week and go partying and crazy at the
1:01:06 weekend or for someone like myself I go to bed late at night because I’m late night working
1:01:13 parenting etc and then at the weekend I catch up so if you have more than about a one and a half hour
1:01:20 increase or decrease in sleep between your work days or weekend days etc that’s called social
1:01:26 jet lag this is a bit like jet lag going from one country to the other and what we know is and
1:01:30 we’ve published on this from our own Zoe in particular research people who experience social
1:01:36 jet lag so have this inconsistent sleeping pattern make poorer dietary choices they have more
1:01:42 inflammation they have a different gut microbiome composition that might be because of the dietary
1:01:46 choices but again it just plays into this whole idea that we’re talking about that we can’t just
1:01:52 think about the food and isolation we need to think about how we’re eating our lifestyle etc
1:01:57 what else is on your Nutribolex list what things bring to mind that a lot of people believe I mean
1:02:05 there’s a big debate raging at the moment about seed oils because we had a incoming American
1:02:10 I guess he’s a politician and RFK junior say recently seed oils are one of the most unhealthy
1:02:15 ingredients that we have in foods and the reason they’re in foods is because they’re heavily
1:02:19 subsidized they’re very cheap but they are associated with all kinds of very serious
1:02:24 illnesses including body-wide inflammation which affects all of our health it’s one of the worst
1:02:30 things you can eat and it’s almost impossible to avoid if you eat any processed foods sorry I’m
1:02:37 having to laugh this is like Nutribolex beyond Nutribolex but please that’s basically he said
1:02:41 if you need processed foods you’re going to be eating seed oils and he advocates for replacing
1:02:46 seed oils with beef tallow which is in the UK is referred to as tripping which is pure beef fat
1:02:54 and is a saturated fat and he’s actually selling t-shirts um RFK junior at the moment that say
1:03:03 make frying oil tallow again so what so seed oils what is this weird debate that I’ve seen
1:03:07 raging on on my Instagram about seed oils I’ve like managed to avoid it like I’ve just not
1:03:11 paid attention to it but I see the word seed oils all of a sudden everywhere okay so seed oils I think
1:03:19 is at the top of the Nutribolex list it blows my mind what you’ve just read me it seriously
1:03:25 blows my mind I’ve done lots of research on seed oils so I can talk from my own research as well as
1:03:32 all the evidence spaces out there there is absolutely no evidence that is credible evidence
1:03:36 when interpreted in the correct way to show seed oils are harmful
1:03:44 what is a seed oil so a seed oil is an oil from a seed so the most common seed oils in the UK
1:03:49 is rapeseed oil which is also known as canola oil in the US and many other countries followed by
1:03:55 sunflower oil the most common seed oils in the US are soybean oil followed by rapeseed or canola
1:04:03 oil followed by sunflower seed oil and there’s about three or four arguments that people use
1:04:09 to say that seed oils are bad for us and if you go on to social media I mean this is a perfect
1:04:15 example of night and day between scientific evidence and what’s on social media if you go
1:04:19 on social media seed oils are toxic seed oils are going to give you Alzheimer’s seed oils are going
1:04:27 to give you cancer seed oils are going to kill you you look at the evidence it’s totally the reverse
1:04:34 now you can have sensible boring scientists like me say seed oils are really good for you
1:04:39 you could put that as one of your assets or whatever you call it or adverse for this
1:04:45 so we could say seed oils are really good for you Stephen or I could tell you
1:04:49 seed oils are toxic they’re going to kill you everyone’s trying to kill us with seed oils
1:04:56 what’s going to get more clicks probably the toxic seed oil exactly and so the sensible science
1:05:02 there’s no silver bullet there’s no like you know crazy inflammatory argument the sensible
1:05:08 science isn’t going to get the clicks so unfortunately the voices of reason and often it comes from
1:05:12 boring academics like myself not saying other academics are boring but sensible academics
1:05:17 like myself that give the you know the balance we we don’t get a voice we’re not being heard
1:05:21 which is one of the reasons that you know I wanted to come on
1:05:25 this show because of the misinformation and we have to get the voice of reason out there
1:05:30 we have to get the voice of reason so things like that to do with seed oils and not what’s
1:05:38 dominating the headlines so what people say in terms of seed oils is firstly our intake of
1:05:44 seed oils has increased a hundredfold the last 20 30 40 50 years and with that increase in seed oil
1:05:51 intake so has cancer increased so has cardiovascular disease increased so has obesity increased
1:05:58 so has Alzheimer’s etc etc so it must be to do the seed oils well what else has changed in that
1:06:04 50 years we’re more sedentary we loads of these other it’s heavily processed foods that got all
1:06:10 of these other ingredients in you know the sugar the this the that so much else has changed
1:06:15 you know you can’t put it all down to the fact that at that point in time seed oils are also
1:06:22 changing we also know that about 60 percent of the seed oil that we eat is actually in these
1:06:27 heavily processed unhealthy foods so it’s the first argument they say and you see these beautiful
1:06:31 figures that they put out where you see on one axis the intake of seed oil you see on the other
1:06:39 axis you know over time you’ll see for example like rates of cancer and you see rates of cancer
1:06:44 rates of cardiovascular disease going up linearly with the intake of seed oil but we have to think
1:06:49 what else has changed in that time the other arguments that they use are theoretical arguments
1:06:56 based on biochemical pathways and I spend an hour teaching this to our undergraduates and I’m not
1:07:04 going to bore you with that biochemical but they talk about the ratio of a particular fatty acid
1:07:12 which is omega 6 which is found in high levels of seed oils and omega 3 which is another fatty acid
1:07:18 and they talk about how having lots of seed oils changes this ratio makes this pro-inflammatory
1:07:28 state because it increases a particular downstream chemicals etc etc what we know from kind of
1:07:35 theoretical biochemical pathways and enzymes etc doesn’t actually play out in humans we’re so
1:07:40 clever we have all of these mechanisms in place to control inflammation to control
1:07:48 oxidative stress to control downstream impacts of foods and so this argument that is also used to
1:07:55 say that omega 6 fatty acids so the main fact that’s found in many of these seed oils is pro-inflammatory
1:08:01 is not supported by any evidence it’s not supported by tightly controlled clinical trials
1:08:09 if anything it’s shown to be anti-inflammatory that levels of inflammatory circulating molecules
1:08:17 actually reduce and yet they use this kind of theoretical argument or what they’ve seen in a
1:08:23 petri dish for example or in a test tube so where is this narrative come from where did it originate
1:08:27 from that seed oils were toxic was it just one of those things that just snowballed I think it’s
1:08:36 one of those things that snowballed and I think it does fit in with the whole argument that people
1:08:41 are using against old processed food it does fit in with other other narratives that are going on
1:08:48 I think some people can be very clever and cherry picking research so there’s a study called the
1:08:53 Sydney Heart Study and in this study this was done in the 70s and this is a study that’s used
1:09:03 often to advocate for the toxic effects of seed oils and in this study males that had had a heart
1:09:14 event or a heart attack of sorts were randomly allocated to either increase their omega 6 so
1:09:21 this particular type of fatty acid that we is in seed oils in their diet by having lots of
1:09:26 seed oil or they were asked to just follow their normal diet which is quite high in saturated
1:09:33 fat and what they found is those that increased their seed oil intake went on to have worst health
1:09:41 outcomes now the problem with that is is that in those days the majority of seed oils underwent an
1:09:47 industrial process called partial hydrogenation and partial hydrogenation produces a very harmful
1:09:54 fat called trans fats you might have heard of trans fats and so they were eating the seed oil
1:10:01 in the form of a margarine or fat spread that had undergone partial hydrogenation and therefore was
1:10:05 full of trans fats trans fats increase cholesterol trans fats increase inflammation trans fats are
1:10:11 bad for us that’s why they are not in our food supply anymore and so of course that seed oil
1:10:16 is going to cause worse health outcomes but it’s not how seed oil is consumed now and so it’s that
1:10:22 clever cherry picking of evidence that often supports a lot of the nutribolics that’s out there
1:10:29 yeah and you know people you know with all these studies out there and with some studies having less
1:10:38 rigor and studies that aren’t don’t have sort of the randomized control element or what’s the other
1:10:44 term for a study where they do they look at like 50 studies at once so they’re matter analysis so
1:10:49 we do randomized controlled trials so these will be trials where there’s always a control arm will
1:10:55 randomly allocate some people to an intervention like seed oils and some people to a control could
1:11:00 be saturated fat could be beef tallow that’s been done and then we look at different health outcomes
1:11:05 we follow them over a period of time or it could be that I ask you for a month to have seed oils
1:11:09 and then next month have beef tallow for example and then we’ll look at different health outcomes
1:11:14 compare how you respond to one versus the other and then what we do as scientists is if there’s
1:11:19 enough of these clinical trials these randomized controlled trials we put them all together into
1:11:24 what’s called a meta analysis and we look what does the meta analysis show so for example for
1:11:31 seed oils there’s meta analysis for example of about 42 randomized controlled trials where
1:11:38 they can play seed oils to other fats showing consistently that there is no harmful benefit
1:11:42 that actually there’s a reduction in cardiovascular disease because the particular fat that’s in
1:11:48 seed oil has a really potent cholesterol lowering effect so it’s actually beneficial for our health
1:11:55 yet beef tallow is full of saturated fat is full of palmitic acid which is a particular
1:12:00 type of saturated fat that we know is bad for us there has been studies and these studies were
1:12:06 done many years ago when beef tallow was actually used comparing seed oils with beef tallow seed
1:12:11 oils always came out better seed oils always reduced cholesterol compared to beef tallow reduced
1:12:17 inflammation etc reduced cardiovascular risk factors you’re very passionate about this I am
1:12:23 because I’ve researched as a research active scientist where I’ve run randomized controlled
1:12:28 trials and I tell you what you sweat blood and tears I love my research but it’s
1:12:33 blimmin hard work doing a clinical trial you know getting ethical approval recruiting people
1:12:38 changing people’s diet running dietary studies is really hard because it’s not a case of giving
1:12:42 them a pill if I’m going to give you seed oil I’ve got to think well how am I going to do that
1:12:47 what am I what instead of what what am I taking out of your diet to give you that how am I going
1:12:51 to make sure the rest of your diet is controlled so once you’ve run studies yourself and you’ve
1:12:57 sweated that blood and tears and then you see this neutral bollocks this misinformation out there
1:13:04 it’s really bloody frustrating but it’s a good thing that people like yourself are leaning into
1:13:11 the mediums now of like podcasting because it’s worth saying that as it relates to the sort of
1:13:18 transfer of information it’s typically people who have either a platform or who are great public
1:13:22 speakers or great salespeople that are ultimately going to like resonate the most reach the furthest
1:13:27 with their information irrespective of whether that information is is credible so it’s good to
1:13:34 see more and more people that are in the research now sort of stepping away from the research laboratory
1:13:38 and coming into environments where they can provide counteracting information and as someone
1:13:43 that’s on my own journey to figure to sort of weave through all of this information to find
1:13:49 out what’s right for me it’s difficult and for a lot of people it’s super difficult I mean the
1:13:55 way that I kind of my own framework for this is I listen to things and then I don’t necessarily
1:14:04 trust one source to be true but I I almost like weight the authority experience and the rigor
1:14:09 behind how they’ve arrived at that information and then I guess I perform my own meta-analysis
1:14:14 across lots of different people that I speak to and guests and information that I get to find the
1:14:20 sweet spots where the sweet spot for me is many people have said it that I think have a lot of
1:14:29 sort of rigor and authority and experience in that subject matter so then I accept it to be true
1:14:33 whereas I’m not going to go on Instagram and see a real pop-up and it says that I don’t know
1:14:37 should put in sugar in your eyeballs is good and I’m not going to crack on with it just because
1:14:43 the person’s got charisma and I think in the world we live in where there is now this decentralization
1:14:48 of information which has its upsides and its downsides we all need to have our own decision
1:14:55 framework to decide what is true but I think yours is more rigorous than most yes many people get
1:15:04 their information from one source many people trust one source and you’re right that our academics
1:15:09 we’re rarely given a platform yeah and this is what I valued most actually about what I’ve done
1:15:14 at Zowie well being able to do the kind of trials that we’re doing but being able to have a platform
1:15:19 not just for me but for us to invite other credible scientists onto the Zowie podcast
1:15:24 or for me to come on to this kind of podcast we’re not trained as academics how to communicate
1:15:31 we’re trained how to you know run good studies in my case you know run clinical trials interpret
1:15:37 the evidence evaluate the evidence critique the evidence and you know I’m self-taught to present
1:15:43 the evidence to other academics but we’re not taught to communicate it to the general public so
1:15:48 for me it’s been a journey working at Zowie of trying to communicate really complex stuff
1:15:53 like I would have loved to have spent an hour telling you about the biochemical pathway of why
1:16:01 um seed oils don’t impact inflammation but I know that really you’re not interested the listeners
1:16:06 aren’t interested but you know I’m hoping that by informing them that I’ve done these studies and
1:16:11 that these are the results there’s trust that actually what we found is true but we’re the
1:16:17 smallest voice out there the research active scientists partly because of time you know I’m
1:16:24 I’m still in you know running trials running uh you know different interventions but also
1:16:34 I think many of the big platforms aren’t giving us the opportunity necessarily because
1:16:39 we haven’t got the most exciting things to say because at the end of the day
1:16:44 you know we’ll present the evidence we’ll present it with caveats we’ll present it with caution
1:16:51 and you know I will always say on as I were to students I’m teaching what I’m telling you now
1:16:56 is based on what the evidence shows now in 10 years time I might be totally wrong
1:17:01 all of these trials showing seed oils are fine I might be wrong in 10 years time
1:17:07 I mean I doubt it because there’s enough research but as scientists that’s something else you know
1:17:13 we always caveat with and I think sometimes that’s difficult for the general public maybe
1:17:20 I mean I might be doing a disservice I don’t know that you have the non-active site or non-active
1:17:25 influences science influences I don’t know what you call them they speak with such certainty
1:17:30 now I will if it’s my study so I’ll talk with certainty over the seed or study because I’ve
1:17:34 done them I’ve been there in the lab analyzing it or I’ll speak with certainty over snacking data
1:17:41 because I’ve you know sweated blood and tears over you know running the stats etc but I won’t
1:17:46 talk with certainty about anything else that I haven’t done myself and yet you have other people
1:17:50 talk with such certainty and I think that’s what instills confidence in maybe listeners
1:17:56 and that’s why they get more viewers if you’ve been thinking of starting your own business I
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1:18:52 a lot of NutriBollocks around dairy right yep I think the prevailing NutriBollocks is that dairy is
1:18:59 bad for you yep so there’s not lots of NutriBollocks around dairy and it’s related to the NutriBollocks
1:19:08 also around saturated fat so as a whole we know saturated fat is bad for us dairy contributes to
1:19:15 most of the saturated fat intake in the UK so therefore we could say all dairy’s bad for us
1:19:22 but no there is a diverse food group you’ve got cheese you’ve got yogurt you’ve got butter you’ve
1:19:27 got milk and how they impact our health is vastly different depending on whether it’s a liquid or
1:19:34 solid it’s fermented it’s non-fermented etc etc and grouping them all together is as ridiculous as
1:19:42 grouping all these snacks together in terms of the health effects and what we now know is that some
1:19:50 dairy is actually good for us so some dairy like cheese like yogurt and I don’t mean this really
1:19:55 kind of heavily sweetened sugary yogurt I mean like your Greek yoghurt your cafes those sorts of
1:20:00 things your plain yoghurt they’ve undergone a process called fermentation and that changes the
1:20:05 food matrix so again we’re coming back to that whole importance of the structure of the food
1:20:12 and by changing the food matrix changes how our body handles it how our bodies how the
1:20:16 health effect of that cheese we don’t fully understand how there’s some great research
1:20:23 being undertaken at Reading University really diving into this but what we know is if you have
1:20:28 cheese within reason if you have yogurt within reason it does not increase your cholesterol
1:20:34 despite being high in saturated fat now I have to caution that I’m not saying people should go and
1:20:40 have you know 300 grams of cheese every day but within normal kind of intakes of a few portions
1:20:46 a day it does not increase people’s cholesterol having cheese or having you know good yogurt
1:20:52 but on the other hand we do know does increase your cholesterol now if you’re having a kind of
1:20:57 level that you would maybe just putting on a bit of toast I wouldn’t worry so much but we do know
1:21:03 that if you were to compare cheese versus butter which has almost the same fat composition
1:21:08 and this has been shown in randomized controlled trials the butter will increase your cholesterol
1:21:16 but the cheese will not and nuts a lot of people say that nuts cause weight gain no the evidence
1:21:27 does not support that so we know that people who consume nuts based on the totality of the evidence
1:21:32 do not gain weight we know this from epidemiological data i.e. people who consume more nuts
1:21:38 tend to quite often have a lower BMI now that could be confounded by the fact that
1:21:44 not consumers and only about 10% in the UK and even less about 7% in the US even consume nuts
1:21:49 not consumers tend to have a healthier overall diet so there is that confounding but clinical trials
1:21:55 show that if you add nuts to your tyres ours included you do not gain weight now that might be
1:22:00 partly because of the mechanisms that we’ve talked about to do with the food matrix that 20 to 30%
1:22:06 of the calories are being excreted so the backpack labelling shows that per portion of nut is 170
1:22:11 calories but actually on average you only absorb 130 calories so lots of it’s coming out it might
1:22:17 be because you know they’re feeding the microbiome that’s helping you know reduce adiposity it’s also
1:22:23 nuts are satiating so they make you feel more full they also blunt your blood sugar response
1:22:28 they have so many other benefits that counterbalance any potential for weight gain
1:22:32 and is there anything else on the NutriBollocks list that is worth highlighting
1:22:37 i would say that i think there’s still lots of confusion around saturated fat
1:22:44 and around cholesterol so cholesterol i went and did a blood test and the doctor said to me that
1:22:49 one of my cholesterol was a little bit on the higher side this was last year
1:22:56 so is it the HDL cholesterol i don’t know the way that i experienced it was there’s this good
1:23:01 cholesterol and this bad cholesterol and like my bad one was like a little bit you know behave
1:23:06 like it’s getting a little bit into the region where he might have more of a stern talk with me
1:23:11 that was last year i think i’ve done better this year but what is cholesterol and my simplified
1:23:19 explanation of it is that is that flawed in some way a good bad no it’s always a little bit more
1:23:25 nuanced a little bit more complex but there are two ways that we can look at cholesterol we can
1:23:30 look at cholesterol in terms of the cholesterol that we eat right and that’s where i think there’s
1:23:34 a lot of misinformation and we can look at cholesterol in terms of the cholesterol that our
1:23:39 body produces so our liver is constantly churning out cholesterol when the liver churns out cholesterol
1:23:44 it packages cholesterol in to do two different kind of packages or two different types of parcels
1:23:51 and the labelling so to say on these parcels determines the health effects of that cholesterol
1:23:58 so you’ve got your HDL cholesterol which we call our good cholesterol you’ve got your LDL
1:24:03 cholesterol which we call your bad cholesterol because L is bad H is good again they’re actually
1:24:09 the same in terms of the cholesterol but it’s the label that’s on the parcel the label in terms of
1:24:16 which is directing where they go which is different so in really simple terms LDL is
1:24:22 directed posted to your peripheral tissues to your blood vessels where it can be taken up
1:24:27 and in the right environment where there’s inflammation also stress etc can result in
1:24:33 atherosclerosis which is that kind of furring of the arteries which over time can build up and can
1:24:41 lead to you know heart attack etc etc HDL in very simple terms has a label on it that actually
1:24:47 enables the reverse cholesterol transport so actually almost kind of cleans up some of the
1:24:52 cholesterol this is kind of in very simple terms so if any lipidologists are listening
1:24:57 they might be a bit frustrated but in very simple terms and kind of brings it back to the liver
1:25:03 for disposal so that’s why it’s considered good what we know is that the amount of LDL cholesterol
1:25:08 that’s circulating is really important in terms of our cardiovascular disease risk there are some
1:25:14 kind of cholesterol deniers and I know you’ve had on your show a cholesterol denier I don’t believe
1:25:19 in the evidence he presents I think that the totality of the evidence is very very clear that
1:25:23 as your LDL cholesterol increases your risk of cardiovascular disease your risk of all
1:25:31 cause mortality increases where there is misinformation is around dietary cholesterol
1:25:37 that there was this perception years ago that if you have foods high in dietary cholesterol like eggs
1:25:43 that it will increase your circulating cholesterol and therefore increase your risk of heart disease
1:25:48 and therefore there was a limit years ago put on how many eggs we should eat how much cholesterol we
1:25:58 should consume we now know within certain limits so within the limits that we typically eat our
1:26:02 food containing cholesterol that dietary cholesterol does not impact our circulating
1:26:08 cholesterol obviously it extremes it does but if you’re having one to two eggs a day that’s an
1:26:13 intake of cholesterol that’s not going to negatively for most people impact your circulating levels of
1:26:22 this LDL bad cholesterol if you’re having 10 eggs a day then I would be worried okay okay but yeah
1:26:29 cholesterol’s another area of neutropolix and then you know on this whole area of cholesterol heart
1:26:36 disease I think a really frustrating area of neutropolix is saturated fat so we’ll talk about
1:26:40 saturated fats just so I’m super clear on the cholesterol point what foods have really high
1:26:46 levels of cholesterol LDL circulating cholesterol in them okay so you’ve got dietary cholesterol
1:26:53 which is just the cholesterol that’s in the food yeah and that has very little impact on circulating
1:26:59 cholesterol okay then you have cholesterol that the liver produces and the liver produces that from
1:27:07 scratch and it’s how diet impacts the liver production that determines how diet impacts our
1:27:15 circulating cholesterol so saturated fat increases the production of cholesterol by our liver and
1:27:21 reduces the removal of cholesterol by our liver highly refined carbohydrates can also increase
1:27:27 the production of cholesterol by our liver so when we’re thinking about how diet impacts our
1:27:34 cholesterol particularly our LDL’s our bad cholesterol we don’t need to worry so much about
1:27:38 dietary cholesterol i.e. how much cholesterol is in a food because unless it’s extreme it will
1:27:43 have a minimal impact we need to think about how much saturated fat for example we’re having
1:27:47 because that’s one of the main dietary determinants of our cholesterol level okay and what is a
1:27:55 saturated fat so versus like a normal fat like is that good and bad fats yes okay all of the
1:28:01 fats that we eat or 98% of the fat that we eat comes in the form of a molecule called triglyceride
1:28:12 and a triglyceride has within it three fatty acids and it’s the mix of these fatty acids that determine
1:28:19 the health properties of that triglyceride the melt profile of that triglyceride etc etc
1:28:25 and there’s lots of different types of fatty acids so you’re probably familiar with amino acids
1:28:30 which are types of protein and in the way that amino acids are what make up protein
1:28:36 fatty acids are what make up a fat and the quality of that fat and we typically
1:28:43 separate them into three main classes saturated mono unsaturated and polyunsaturated
1:28:50 and you might have heard of those terms yeah loosely yeah and saturated fatty acids differ
1:28:57 in terms of their biochemistry and i won’t bore you with that to mono and polyunsaturated fatty
1:29:04 acids they also differ in terms of their melt profiles so like how hard they are or liquid
1:29:11 they are most tend to be hard hence why most hard fats like butter you know most animal fats which
1:29:17 are hard at room temperature tend to be high in saturated fats mono and polyunsaturated fatty acids
1:29:22 differ from saturated fatty acids in terms of their biochemistry in terms of their melt profile they
1:29:28 tend to be liquid and polyunsaturated fatty acids are a very special type of fatty acid because
1:29:33 they’re actually essential for us our body can’t make them and so they’re essential fatty acids
1:29:39 and one of those is omega six which is the fatty acid found in seed oils which is what people say
1:29:48 is why seed oils are bad for us which hopefully we debunk that and saturated fat as a whole we know
1:29:52 is linked increased risk of cardiovascular disease increased risk of all cause mortality
1:29:59 but there’s lots of people that say you know we’ve got it wrong as nutritional scientists we
1:30:03 don’t know what we’re talking about it because actually there’s this meta analysis that showed
1:30:08 that actually saturated fat isn’t bad for us and that’s because when we think about the health
1:30:15 effects of food we have to always think of that instead of what so there was some work that was
1:30:20 carried out looking at hundreds and hundreds of different clinical trials where they’ve replaced
1:30:25 saturated fat in the diet with carbohydrates or trans fats or polyunsaturated fats or
1:30:33 monounsaturated fats and what this research showed is that if you replace saturated fats with whole
1:30:39 grain carbohydrates you have an improvement in health if you replace saturated fats with poly
1:30:44 or monounsaturated fats you have an improvement in health if you replace saturated fats with
1:30:52 refined carbohydrates there’s no difference so you could take that study and you could say
1:30:57 and this is of hundreds of different studies and say saturated fats are really bad for us
1:31:02 because we know that if you replace them with whole grain or poly or monounsaturated fats
1:31:07 you have a beneficial effect or I could take the same analysis and say oh saturated fats
1:31:14 are fine nutritionists have got it all wrong because actually there’s no detrimental effect if you
1:31:19 compare it with refined carbohydrates and this is exactly what happened when this meta analysis
1:31:25 came out about probably about 15 years ago I remember looking at the headlines of two different
1:31:30 papers I won’t say what the papers are but one I would say it’s a little bit more evidence based
1:31:37 and one is a good example of clickbait headlines they had totally different headlines one said
1:31:43 nutrition scientists have got it all wrong we’ve been lied to saturated fats are fine the other said
1:31:49 research again consistently shows saturated fats are detrimental to our health obviously that one’s
1:31:55 right and they’re talking about the same study talking about the same study because it’s that
1:32:00 instead of what and that’s really important when we think about the health effects the other thing
1:32:04 that does complicate things a little bit with saturated fats is there’s lots of different types
1:32:08 of saturated fats we know that the type of saturated fat matters but we know the food
1:32:14 matrix that is in matters and the dairy is a great example so you have cheese and butter exactly the
1:32:20 same or almost identical fat composition two entirely different effects on our cholesterol
1:32:25 so it is a little bit more nuanced than saying all saturated fats bad it depends on the type
1:32:29 in the food it’s in and what types of food have saturated fats that have a
1:32:36 less than healthy food matrix so I would say the type of saturated fats that we want to
1:32:43 avoid are the saturated fats that are found in most animal products except fermented dairy
1:32:49 except cheese except yogurt so beef tallow I would say the evidence consistently shows
1:32:55 it’s not favorable for our health lard butter and large amounts
1:33:02 you know and then the meat that’s the fat that’s intrinsic to the meat takes salami you can see
1:33:08 the fat in there take steak for example you know cut off the visible bits of the fat it’s okay in
1:33:14 small amounts I’m not saying we should avoid it totally but if you have the option of kind of
1:33:20 cutting off trimming the fat then I would and then there are some tropical oils that are very
1:33:26 high in saturated fat palm oil for example coconut oil although the jury’s out on the health effects
1:33:31 of coconut oil but palm oil for example is very high in saturated fat we know it increases our
1:33:36 cholesterol if you had to give me some principles for eating based on everything we’ve talked about
1:33:43 today just like and I had to force you to just give me five principles for eating what would those
1:33:57 five principles be five okay I would say first and foremost find food or dietary pattern that you
1:34:05 enjoy that brings you pleasure cookies okay but we are not these aren’t exclusive to each other
1:34:14 Stephen okay that’s really important these are not exclusive okay so a dietary pattern
1:34:24 that brings you pleasure because because food is there to be enjoyed and it will be a sustainable
1:34:30 dietary pattern and because we know that consistency and sustainability is really important in how you
1:34:41 eat okay second I would say think about how you eat think about how fast you’re eating slow down
1:34:52 chew more chew more don’t eat late at night try and eat within a 10 or 12 hour eating window
1:34:56 and just on this chew more point you were before we started recording you you were
1:35:00 saying that you wouldn’t mind if I chewed some nuts and spat them out so you could look at them
1:35:10 why does chewing more have an impact again just so I can I’m clear so chewing can impact
1:35:17 how you break the food down yeah obviously but we also know chewing impacts your hunger
1:35:23 and your fullness signals so there’s some evidence to show if you chew your food 40 times versus 15
1:35:31 times it can result in a difference in how full that food makes you feel okay so the chewing effect
1:35:37 is sending some kind of signal yep yep to my brain yep again this isn’t an area that I have
1:35:42 expertise in but that’s what the evidence is showing so as well as your gut sending signals
1:35:46 to your brain receptors on your gut saying whether you’re full there’s something going on when
1:35:54 you’re chewing your food as well that’s important okay and chewing your food also changes the rate
1:36:00 therefore at which you’re eating so it changes your eating speed okay makes sense so on that
1:36:05 second point I’ve got slow down chew more don’t eat late at night and eat within a 10 to 12 hour
1:36:13 eating window 10 12 hour eating window then the third would be go back to basics yep have a good
1:36:20 amount of fiber have a good amount of healthy oils that’s your olive oils and your olive oil
1:36:25 there I say it’s seed oils but olive oil I would say is the king or queen of the oils
1:36:35 and you know have that balance plate rather than obsessing over a single food
1:36:44 okay number four don’t think of food in isolation okay think about your diet in relation to
1:36:49 or alongside your sleep your stress your physical activity
1:36:56 and number five can you remind me of what I’ve I’ve done yes so I’m 48 I’m in the depths of
1:37:02 very menopause I’m one of those like 90 percent of people that have brain fog and memory loss
1:37:09 so number one was food that brings you pleasure which is sustainable and allows you to be consistent
1:37:13 number two is really thinking about how you eat so slowing down chewing more not eating late at
1:37:19 night and trying to have a shorter eating window of 10 to 12 hours number three was go back to basics
1:37:25 which is high fiber whole grains fruits healthy oils and overall just a balanced plate and number
1:37:31 four is don’t think of your nutrition in isolation so think of it in the context of your exercise
1:37:36 your sleep and all of these other lifestyle factors and number five don’t deny yourself
1:37:44 anything think think about what you can add in rather than what you take away don’t deny yourself
1:37:55 anything so cookies are still on the menu occasionally yes you mentioned the perimenopause
1:38:00 you said you’re in perimenopause currently how does that factor into everything we’ve talked about
1:38:07 today and what is the because I’ve got this graph here I’d found about the menopause transition
1:38:11 which talks about how different sort of things are happening inside the body you’ve probably
1:38:15 seen this quite a few times before which I’ll put on the screen and link below for anybody but
1:38:21 what is the relationship between my diet and my menopause journey is there anything to be aware
1:38:27 of there is I mean that you know that the menopause has a huge impact on how we respond to food
1:38:32 it has a huge impact generally on all of these pillars of health that we’ve talked about our
1:38:38 sleep our stress our physical activity you know and diet and I think it’s something we’re talking
1:38:45 about a lot more now and we should be talking about it a lot more now you know 50 the population at
1:38:52 some point are going to go through the menopause and it’s a transitional period of great disturbance
1:38:58 great disruption and of great burden to many women and we’ve conducted lots of research
1:39:07 at Zoe on the menopause and what we know is that prior to the menopause which is basically
1:39:14 the point one year after your last menstrual cycle you have this perimenopausal transition period
1:39:18 where your estrogen and other hormones are fluctuating day to day so it’s like this roller
1:39:23 coaster which I think your graph shows really nicely you’ve got this roller coaster of hormones
1:39:31 and so what’s happening is is your estrogen isn’t just slowly declining as you reach perimenopause
1:39:34 so that transitional period before your menopause but you’re on this roller coaster
1:39:45 and it becomes more regulated after the menopause but you’re still in that point where you’re having
1:39:52 less estrogen so less of the hormone that we know has such wide reaching effects and the reason
1:39:58 that the perimenopause transition as well as postmenopause period in a woman’s life is so important
1:40:04 is because estrogen the hormone that fluctuates during the perimenopause and then reduces and
1:40:10 declines in postmenopause has effects all over our body nearly every cell in our body has estrogen
1:40:18 receptors so our brain our blood vessels nearly everywhere so this roller coaster of estrogen
1:40:23 during the perimenopausal phase and also the reduction postmenopausally has far reaching
1:40:29 health effects so for example postmenopausally women are five times greater risk of having a
1:40:34 heart attack now some of that’s due to age but it’s also due to the loss in estrogen women are
1:40:39 five times more likely to have abdominal obesity which is fat around the tummy and that’s because
1:40:47 of estrogen’s role in fat tissue deposition so where fat tissue is deposited we see in our own
1:40:53 zoopridic research three menopause women are doing well compared to men in terms of many of these
1:40:57 what we call intermediary risk factors of cardiovascular disease blood pressure cholesterol
1:41:02 glucose insulin etc as soon as they hit the menopause suddenly they catch up with men and it
1:41:07 gets worse and so suddenly their blood pressure is higher than men or their cholesterol is the same
1:41:14 level as men so we see this as well in our zoopridic research that postmenopausally and perimenopausally
1:41:19 people’s cholesterol and their bad cholesterol their LDL cholesterol increases by 25 percent
1:41:27 and this is all related to the wide-reaching role that estrogen has in our body we also see the
1:41:34 estrogen impacts and therefore the perimenopause and postmenopause how we metabolize food so we see
1:41:40 bigger excursions in postmil glucose and postmil fat after the menopause again it’s all linked to
1:41:49 the role that estrogen plays in our metabolism and then I think what’s most important to be aware of
1:41:55 regarding the perimenopause and postmenopause phase is the symptoms that women experience
1:42:04 and we’ve done some research in 70 000 individuals where we’ve looked at how prevalent these symptoms
1:42:11 are we see that 99 percent of perimenopausal women experience at least one menopausal symptom
1:42:18 we see that 66 percent of perimenopausal women have 12 symptoms or more and this has a huge
1:42:24 burden we know from other surveys 10 percent of women leave the workforce during the perimenopause
1:42:28 and postmenopausal phase because of the burden that these symptoms have on their quality of life
1:42:36 and what age does this typically occur the perimenopausal symptoms so typically people become
1:42:44 menopausal as in postmenopausal stop the menstrual cycles at 51 the menopausal transition period can
1:42:50 be anything from two to ten years typically people would say maybe around the ages of 47
1:42:57 many women start to experience perimenopausal symptoms and these include symptoms like brain
1:43:07 fog, anxiety, memory loss, irritability, low libido, change in metabolism and now I’m in that
1:43:12 perimenopausal phase and I’ve forgotten all of the others but there’s about 50 symptoms that are
1:43:18 recognized and we see in our own research that the amount of women experiencing symptoms is really
1:43:23 high so we see that 85 percent of women are saying they have brain fog they have anxiety
1:43:29 they have memory loss it’s really high the amount of women experiencing these symptoms
1:43:38 and what’s really interesting is we know yes HRT so hormone replacement therapy or MHT
1:43:47 can help reduce many of these symptoms but we also know that diet can help as well and I think
1:43:52 actually one of the most interesting things from our research looking at menopause and symptoms
1:43:56 is that typically when we think of menopausal symptoms we think about hot flushes
1:44:00 and if I was to ask you actually I wish I’d have asked you before I said that but if I was
1:44:05 to ask you if you were to think of a menopause symptom what would come to your mind first?
1:44:08 I would say hot flushes because that seems to be
1:44:13 the only time that people talk about hot flushes is when they’re talking about menopause in my
1:44:20 world and then I’d say brain fog yep and what’s really interesting is hot flushes are one of
1:44:25 the least common symptoms about 40 percent of women in our research have hot flushes 85 percent
1:44:35 have brain fog 85 percent have all of the other brain related symptoms and yet typically we always
1:44:39 think about hot flushes and this is because there just hasn’t been loads of research on
1:44:44 menopause and so I think what’s really exciting is there is now a lot more research on menopause
1:44:49 so I think the future is really exciting but I think what comes with this is yet more
1:44:56 Nutribolex and that’s because I think there’s this whole area of what we call menowashing
1:45:02 I don’t know if you’ve heard of menowashing stick menno for menopause in front of any product
1:45:08 you can charge 10 times as much I could call this a menopause tea it’s actually Yorkshire tea
1:45:13 and it’s a very good cup of tea I could call this a menno tea and charge 10 times as much for that
1:45:19 teabag because without any evidence because women are desperate 45 percent of women say
1:45:24 their symptoms are so burdensome they’ll try anything 10 percent leaving the workforce
1:45:30 because of their symptoms and so we have to be really careful that we are only selling
1:45:37 evidence-based supplements for which there isn’t much evidence at the moment and I think
1:45:42 that the evidence that an overall healthier dietary pattern can reduce symptoms is the
1:45:47 best way forward for now alongside for those who choose to hormone replacement therapy
1:45:53 a recent survey showed that 30 percent of menopause women are trying herbal remedies 30 percent
1:45:59 are trying vitamins and 51 percent are trying any kind of dietary therapy as an alternative to HRT
1:46:04 that was in iNews which kind of supports what you’re saying that there’s lots of people searching
1:46:09 for because I think from the experiences that I’ve had with people talking to me about menopause
1:46:14 it seems to be an incredibly confusing period of life where you can’t make sense of what’s
1:46:19 happening and all the old rules of just you know hit the gym and eat a bit healthier seem to go out
1:46:23 the window because there’s something deeper at play in your body so it’s not that you’re not
1:46:29 eating right or it’s not that you’re not sleeping right it’s a deeper hormonal fluctuation that
1:46:32 you’ve actually never experienced before so of course you’re going to be really confused and
1:46:40 quite easily gaslit as well I imagine because you know I’ve had someone say to me that they
1:46:43 felt like they were going crazy and then people started thinking they were just like kind of
1:46:50 going crazy a little bit um yeah I think you know fortunately I think it’s changing yeah but
1:46:55 historically we didn’t talk about it you know I vaguely remember my mum saying I’m really hot
1:47:01 I’m having hot flush but we didn’t talk about menopause we didn’t talk about periods we just
1:47:07 didn’t talk about it in that you know when I was growing up and unfortunately my mother’s no longer
1:47:14 alive so I don’t really know what she did go through and I want to talk about it people are
1:47:18 talking about it we have people at Divina McCall who are amazing because they’re getting women
1:47:24 talking about it so we’re no longer ashamed so I think the tide is really turning but menopause
1:47:30 is this perfect storm because you have these burdensome symptoms and then you have alongside it
1:47:33 which I don’t think we talk about enough is these health effects that I talked about
1:47:39 so women going through the menopause aren’t sleeping I mean my sleep is all over the place
1:47:44 honestly when I get a good night’s sleep Steven I feel like superwoman it I’m almost it reminds me
1:47:50 of the state I’m in at the moment is like how I was when I had kids where you know I’m getting
1:47:56 four or five hours sleep then I wake up if I’m lucky I might get back to sleep so you’ve got women
1:48:01 they’re not getting enough sleep you’ve got women who often are feeling a bit depressed or anxious
1:48:07 or you know are losing their confidence because of their brain fog because of their memory loss
1:48:13 because of you know their anxiety you’ve got the hormones changing your body composition
1:48:19 suddenly you’re eating and doing everything the same but all the facts being directed to your tummy
1:48:27 your hunger signals are mucked up your desire to eat different food changes and we see this again
1:48:31 in our own research that postmenopause women tend to eat a lot more sugary foods than premenopause
1:48:37 women so you’ve got this perfect storm of things going on and then in amongst that do you really
1:48:41 want to do some physical activity are you really motivated to start eating healthier
1:48:46 and you know when you’re exhausted and it goes back again to that importance of sleep and that
1:48:52 interaction of sleep with our food choices and how we respond to food there’s so many things to
1:48:57 think about and I think it’s really tough in that perian postmenopausal phase when your body’s
1:49:02 changing when you’re tired when you’re feeling a bit rubbish to also take control of your diet
1:49:07 but it’s the most important time because it’s when your cholesterol increases it’s when your
1:49:13 blood pressure increases it’s when all of this fat tissue around your belly is releasing harmful
1:49:18 inflammatory chemicals etc so it’s when unfortunately we really do need to take stock
1:49:23 of our physical activity of what we’re eating and our stress levels but it’s probably one of the
1:49:29 most challenging times to do it as well you must be incredibly stressed through that period but
1:49:33 also just thinking about your relationships if you if you’re in a relationship in a heterosexual
1:49:38 marriage with a with a husband who isn’t going through that at that period of their life and
1:49:47 you said there was a libido issue that’s symptomatic of menopause as well to navigate all of that
1:49:53 and for the people around you to understand what’s going on in your head must be incredibly
1:50:02 stressful incredibly stressful I’m I like I’m very um I feel very I don’t know what the
1:50:10 right words are here but I feel very sympathetic because I can’t imagine I don’t think there’s
1:50:16 a point in the man’s life where we go through such a profound change in our hormones in such a
1:50:23 confusing way all of a sudden so it’s like but I think Stephen if we raise awareness so that
1:50:31 men are aware and they can support their partners and you know libido for you know it’s an example
1:50:36 we see in our own research whilst it might not be the most common women rate it as the most
1:50:42 burdensome really so we monitor not just the prevalence so how common the symptoms are we
1:50:47 also ask people how much impacts their quality of life and the perian postmenopausal women rate
1:50:54 that as their what their symptom that has the most burden on their life because if I’m not
1:51:00 slept and I’m not feeling sexy I’m not going to I’m independent of whether there’s like a
1:51:05 chemical impact on my hormone levels that causes my low level of libido I’m not trying
1:51:10 to have sex if I want to go to sleep I want to go to sleep yeah exactly so even if you know and
1:51:16 especially I don’t feel good I don’t feel sexy probably my mood might be altered and yeah your
1:51:22 tummy’s suddenly grown yeah it’s not going to be so what did what what advice do you give to those
1:51:27 the women going through that you said that you’re on hormone replacement therapy yourself previously
1:51:31 and that’s had a I guess a positive impact on your menopause journey
1:51:39 yes I still sleep really badly yeah I don’t think HRT is the answer for everyone and some people
1:51:45 can’t take it if they’re contraindicated with certain risk related to cancer and some people
1:51:50 choose not to take it and it certainly doesn’t solve everything I do think the evidence is very
1:51:57 compelling for reduction in many symptoms I think the evidence is compelling or increasing and
1:52:03 building for the beneficial effects that also has on some of these health effects that happen
1:52:11 drawing menopause like blood pressure cholesterol tummy fat so I’ve chosen to take it for both health
1:52:20 and for symptoms but there’s reasonable evidence now showing that diet can help reduce symptoms
1:52:26 there isn’t a one size fits all there isn’t a silver bullet but an overall healthier dietary
1:52:33 pattern I believe can reduce menopause symptoms this comes from other published research as well
1:52:39 as our own research that we’ve done at ZOE where we’ve looked in a subgroup of individuals over
1:52:44 12 to 18 week period and looked at those who transitioned to a healthier diet they’re actually
1:52:48 following the ZOE program but the underlying principles are the same for all individuals
1:52:54 to follow a healthy diet so increased plant diversity increased fiber a very kind of Mediterranean
1:52:59 style diet and what we see in those people who are improving their diet they have a 35 percent
1:53:05 reduction in symptoms now that’s huge I do have to caveat that to say though that there wasn’t a
1:53:14 control arm so it’s not a clinical an rcts we call it it’s a study where we followed people
1:53:20 at one point in time and collected data another point in time what we now need to do is repeat this
1:53:25 with a control arm to see if we see the same size effect but there are other studies that have
1:53:29 in a randomized control trial ask people to follow the Mediterranean diet or control diet and they
1:53:36 see a similar magnitude of around 30 percent reduction in symptoms which is huge and promising
1:53:42 I think but I think where we have to be really careful with menopause because we are desperate
1:53:46 because we’re struggling I think we’re really susceptible to marketing to this menow washing
1:53:52 and I think there are so many supplements that are being sold as the silver bullet you know
1:53:58 and I see it on social media and I think firstly okay if it works for you great if you can afford
1:54:05 it great but what worries me is people who are spending a lot of money that they could be using
1:54:12 for a healthy dietary pattern or you know a gym membership or whatever on a supplement that there
1:54:18 is no evidence to support and the evidence is very very weak except for a supplement called
1:54:23 soy isoflavones there is very weak evidence that any other supplements will work consistently
1:54:31 they might work for some people but consistently soy isoflavones yeah so soy isoflavones are a
1:54:37 particular chemical that are found in some foods it’s a chemical that has a structure very similar
1:54:44 to estrogen so actually binds to the estrogen receptors in the body which is why it has a
1:54:49 beneficial effects on many symptoms now soy isoflavones are consumed in quite small amounts
1:54:55 in the UK in the US we consume probably about one milligram a day on average in the far east like
1:54:59 China they consume about 70 milligrams a day as part of the natural diet so in those kind of
1:55:04 countries they actually have a really low prevalence of menopause symptoms compared to us they still
1:55:11 have menopause symptoms but it’s a bit lower than us what we know is that if you supplement people
1:55:17 with soy isoflavones for the vast majority of people but not everyone it will reduce
1:55:22 symptoms a little bit not totally but it can reduce symptoms and is your underlying health
1:55:28 a predictive factor of the amount of symptoms you’ll experience if I was if I’m obese and then I go
1:55:35 into perimenopause are my symptoms going to be more significant so that’s a good question we’ve
1:55:41 looked at how living with obesity can impact your symptoms and we do see that if you’re living with
1:55:48 obesity you have a higher prevalent number of symptoms okay we see that if you have an unhealthy
1:55:53 diet to start with you have a higher number of symptoms we see that if you have low physical
1:55:59 activity you smoke etc yes it’s associated with higher symptoms this is all association
1:56:04 data though it doesn’t show causality and it’s really important to say that for quite a while I
1:56:09 ignored my gut I ignored the role it plays when it comes to my overall health and it wasn’t until
1:56:14 the team from zoe came onto my podcast that I realized I couldn’t ignore it anymore I was so
1:56:19 impressed by professor tim specter and professor sarah burry that I ended up investing in zoe
1:56:24 and they’re now a sponsor of this podcast they helped me to view my gut as the gateway to better
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1:56:57 head to zoe.com now we take our time when it comes to hiring a flight story because I fundamentally
1:57:01 believe the success of a business is directly linked to how good you are at hiring and better
1:57:06 hiring starts with smarter insights linkedin who’s a sponsor of this podcast has some of the strongest
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1:57:43 opportunities find your next great hire on linkedin and start today by posting your job for free
1:57:50 just by visiting linkedin.com/doac what is the most important thing we should have talked about
1:57:56 that we haven’t talked about professor that’s my formal way to address me
1:58:07 I think we’ve covered an awful lot and I think the thing that I would emphasize
1:58:12 when people are thinking about their health thinking about their diet is firstly find what
1:58:20 works for you find something you enjoy but I think I would say be really really careful of
1:58:27 the misinformation that’s out there really careful and I would say also if you’re going to make a
1:58:33 change make sure it has a big enough size impact to warrant the change you’re making
1:58:40 because there’s a lot of advocates for this health optimization you know make this change
1:58:45 you know we’ll have this impact well if you’re making a change that disrupts your life significantly
1:58:50 but only has a one percent impact on whatever health outcome you’re interested in whether it’s
1:58:57 your cholesterol your overall energy or whatever is it really worth disrupting your life that much
1:59:03 for that small change and I think that’s really important I hear so many times when I’m talking
1:59:08 to other mums at school gate or that sort of thing oh my gosh I read this and I’m going to do this
1:59:11 and you know it’s going to be really hard but they’ve said it will help with this
1:59:18 and it’s like oh you’re taking away pleasure and actually what is the gain
1:59:24 and if the world is to move forward in a way that is positive in your estimation
1:59:31 how does the world change and improve as it relates to all the subjects we’ve talked about today
1:59:34 what is that change you wish to see in the world in which you operate
1:59:45 I would love to see a world where scientists food industry and policymakers work together
1:59:57 I’d love to see a world where we encourage evidence-based science but scientists aren’t scared of working
2:00:02 with food industry for example a lot of people think the food industry is bad like it’s this
2:00:07 sort of evil guy who sat in this boardroom who’s just counting money and just pushing whatever
2:00:12 these little innocent children will put in their mouths and to make them addicted and give them
2:00:18 neurodivergence and all kinds of other issues potentially a lot of people feel that the food
2:00:22 industry has become this sort of singular entity people think about in the sort of conspiracy
2:00:26 theory internet and you kind of imagine it is like a guy in a boardroom in a suit who’s just
2:00:35 like cackling and laughing and stuff like that I think that I can’t comment on their motivations
2:00:41 for profit I don’t think I’m informed enough to comment on that but I do believe that the food
2:00:49 industry needs to work with academia in order to solve the problem of the kind of foods that are
2:00:54 out there we need impact from government though as well we need impact from policymakers we need
2:00:59 to go back to grassroots we need to be educating our children how to cook we need to be giving
2:01:03 healthy school meals we need to be educating them in schools what is a healthy meal what isn’t a
2:01:09 healthy meal what is a healthy food but I think that something that’s so important is this current
2:01:17 state of fear I think I think we’re in a perilous state at the moment of there are some
2:01:25 people making a lot of noise in the media about scientists working with industry how
2:01:32 any research funded by industry is therefore bias it’s corrupt can’t be trusted that’s certainly
2:01:37 not my experience it’s not what I have ever seen from any other colleagues taking money from food
2:01:42 industry in order to do studies we as nutrition scientists need to do studies we need to run
2:01:47 clinical trials in order to look at how we can improve their food to make it healthier
2:01:55 the amount of funding we get from independent government bodies it’s tiny to get funding the
2:02:01 amount of time we have to spend this academics right in grants to be rejected rejected because
2:02:07 the government invests so little in nutrition research we need to be able to get funding
2:02:14 to be able to run studies to answer important questions the money and the experience I’ve had
2:02:21 from those around me when we receive funding from research from when we receive funding from industry
2:02:27 there is very limited involvement that they are allowed to have with what we do and the
2:02:35 university ensure that we conduct the research we do the analysis we publish the paper the industry
2:02:42 funders cannot get involved in that process so I still see it as independent now there is discussion
2:02:47 about are they setting the agenda of that research you know there’s something we could talk about for
2:02:52 days and days but I think this narrative that’s out there that just because the study is being
2:02:58 funded by the food industry is biased is wrong and I think it’s unhelpful and it’s putting
2:03:05 these exposés that certain media personalities are putting forward that if an academic has taken
2:03:12 money from a food industry that therefore they they cannot be advising us on food they cannot be
2:03:17 trusted for their research I think that that’s a real problem for us as nutrition scientists
2:03:25 because it’s creating a time of fear yeah I mean of course so yeah when you explain it through
2:03:29 how these how these studies get funded then it makes a ton of sense and actually part of what
2:03:33 I was thinking is the government should be doing a little bit more to fund these kinds of studies
2:03:38 because I can’t I don’t really believe that we’re going to get the food industry to work together
2:03:43 because again thinking about incentives if there’s one serial company here and the other here
2:03:48 and they say there’s ten of them yeah how can you get all of them to agree to take
2:03:52 yeah the two that don’t win and then they keep their jobs their companies are successful they
2:03:57 get the pats on the back so when we think about health interventions that the government have
2:04:03 made over the years that have been super effective they’ve come from like policy smoking is a good
2:04:07 example that I always think about like the change in smoking in our society because
2:04:12 they made they banned smoking indoors and put things on the packaging and just changed the
2:04:16 sort of social narrative and all smoking companies tobacco companies had to sort of comply at once
2:04:22 so that’s why I think all three have to work together the government need to take big responsibility
2:04:32 now yeah and but I think that there has to be an acceptance that academics scientists
2:04:37 can work with food industry and it doesn’t mean that you’re corrupt or corrupt or our results
2:04:43 are biased in any way we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a
2:04:47 question for the next guest not knowing who they’re leaving it for and the question that’s been left
2:04:53 for you is what is something that you believe that smart people you care about disagree with
2:05:01 do you know what I believe I believe that life can be simple that actually all that matters is
2:05:12 that you have good relationships that you’re finding joy in life and that we shouldn’t over
2:05:20 complicate things and if on my gravestone I have written Sarah was a nice person I would be very
2:05:29 happy with that but a lot of the clever people I interactive I think wouldn’t agree that that’s
2:05:35 necessarily a good achievement in life but I see that as a great achievement
2:05:41 what do you think they might want written on their gravestone instead
2:05:50 you’re smacking nervously I am is it they’re too obsessed with like impact and ego and those
2:05:54 kinds of things it’s what you’re saying I don’t know because the people that I care about I don’t
2:06:03 think are egotistical I think we live in a society certainly in a society where we’re
2:06:09 mixing with successful people where there is a lot of ambition where there is a lot of
2:06:18 emphasis put on your achievements where there’s a lot of striving for the next goal striving for
2:06:28 the next achievement and maybe it’s having had four years where I took a career break where I was
2:06:34 caring for my mum and together with the rest of my family we looked after my mum we kept her at
2:06:41 home through a degenerative neurological condition and seeing someone change seeing someone lose the
2:06:47 power to talk lose the power to eat lose the power to interact lose the power to do everything that
2:06:57 we take for granted I think has enabled me to not sweat the small stuff it’s enabled me to find joy
2:07:07 in most things pleasure in most things and not strive for things that may be in the past I would
2:07:16 have perspective I think it’s given me a perspective now don’t get me wrong you know I you know I was
2:07:21 nervous before coming on here so I sweated about that and you know I’m not saying that I’m always
2:07:28 like horizontally laid back by any means but I think it’s given me a perspective on what matters
2:07:36 to me yeah and what matters to me and I think the greatest achievement in my whole life has been
2:07:41 actually not becoming professor which I’m incredibly proud of I’m from a working-class
2:07:46 family you know I was the first person in our family to ever go to university my mum and dad
2:07:52 didn’t have the privilege of staying at school beyond 14 and I mean it saddens me that they
2:08:00 haven’t seen this success saddens me very much and whilst the pride I felt yesterday at the ceremony
2:08:04 was phenomenal actually what I’m most proud of is the four years that I cared for my mum
2:08:15 and to me that’s what matters and so that’s why when I’m with lots of smart people and I think
2:08:21 they’re doing amazing things I don’t have the same perspective sometimes I probably don’t care
2:08:26 as much it’s almost I’m having fun and you know what and I think I said this at the beginning
2:08:33 I’m so privileged I get to do my hobby every day I love what I do I’m not doing this necessarily
2:08:38 because I’m such a selfless person that I want to improve everyone’s health yes if that’s a
2:08:47 by-product great but I get up and I love what I do I’m so excited by the science that we do
2:08:53 and what drives me to do it is having been through that situation of realising how
2:09:00 delicate life is so just seize the moment enjoy what you’re doing at that point in time thank
2:09:06 you so much professor congratulations thank you didn’t realize it was uh you had the ceremony
2:09:10 yesterday that’s an incredible achievement I know that we’re not we’re not prioritising
2:09:16 the the achievements as much anymore but um it’s an incredible yeah it’s no it’s an incredible
2:09:20 thing and it’s a it’s a credit to the work that you’ve done and how you’ve done it over the last
2:09:24 25 years and the broader impact I think you’ve had on so many millions of people’s lives now
2:09:28 through now the content you produce but also all of the research that you’ve done firsthand so
2:09:32 thank you so much for doing the work that you thank you for illuminating so many of these subjects
2:09:37 to me today I actually said a message to my team before saying that I’ve had lots of conversations
2:09:42 about nutrition and stuff but the the primary research you’ve done and the research you’re
2:09:49 continuing to do is so much of it’s completely new to me and that’s quite hard when when I sit
2:09:54 here doing this every day so it’s been an absolute joy speaking to you and also not just from the
2:09:58 information standpoint but from the broader philosophical idea of how to want you to approach
2:10:04 their life and how one can approach their life has been incredibly inspiring so thank you thank you
2:10:09 it’s been a real pleasure to talk about so many things I’m passionate about we shall do it again
2:10:17 sometime thank you do you know that 80 percent of New Year’s resolutions fail by February it’s
2:10:22 because we focus too much on the end goal and we forget the small daily actions that actually move
2:10:27 us forward those actions that are easy to do are also easy not to do in life it’s easy to save a
2:10:32 dollar so it’s also easy not to making one small improvement each day one tiny step in the right
2:10:38 direction has a big difference over time and that is the one percent mindset which is why we created
2:10:43 the one percent diary a 90 day journal designed to help you stay consistent and focus on the small
2:10:49 wins and make real progress over time it also gives you access to the one percent community a space
2:10:53 where you can stay accountable motivated inspired along with many others on the same journey we
2:10:59 launched the one percent diary in November and it sold out so now we’re doing a second drop
2:11:15 head to the diary dot com to grab yours before it sells out again i’ll put the link below
2:11:17 you
2:11:20 you
2:11:22 you
2:11:24 you
2:11:26 (upbeat music)
2:11:29 (upbeat music)