Lead Nutritional Scientist: Alarming Truth About Eating After 9pm! Link Between Chewing & Belly Fat!

if you go on social media seedor are toxic seedor are going to give you Alzheimer's seedor are going to give you cancer but I've done lots of research and there is absolutely no evidence to show seed alls are harmful actually they're beneficial for our health and I'll come back to that but the problem is that there is so much misinformation out there about what we eat how we eat and how it affects our health so let's go into all of that Dr Sarah Barry is a renowned nutrition scientist and Professor with over 20 years of

research her work has reshaped how we think about food metabolism and gut health Dr Sarah Berry we have a lot to get through yes so let's start with the food Matrix that's so important because you can have two foods with identical labeling same nutrients and calorie value can have entirely different impacts in terms of how you metabolize our food and how it impacts Downstream health effects depending on how that food has been processed now we also know the timing of when we eat is really important for example we found that snacking after 9:00 was associated

with unfavorable Health outcomes the worst kind of fat around your belly for example this was even if you were snacking on healthy snacks really and we also know that on average if you change the speed in which you eat your food by 20% you reduce your calorie intake by about 15% but where it gets really interesting is there's evidence to show if you chew your food 40 times versus 15 times it can result in and then there's the menopause we've conducted lots of research and one of the most exciting things is that there is principles

which can reduce symptoms by about 35% and so they are this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show so could I ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my

team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guest that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much [Music] Dr Sarah Berry can you give me a little bit of an overview over what You' spent the last s of 25 years of your career focusing on and understanding yeah so I've spent 25 years starting out in quite specific area looking at how diet impacts our cardiometabolic health so by this I mean lots of

factors related to cardiovascular disease like type 2 diabetes our cholesterol our blood pressure our inflammation and then uh more recently I've been looking at how actually we piece together all the complexity of who we are what we eat how we eat um into how that actually impacts how we respond to food and the helpfulness of a food um most of my work's been done through running clinical trials so randomized control clinical trials where I recruit various people get them to eat various things do loads and loads of different measurements and look at how a food

or a nutrient or a diet might impact a particular Health outcome and how many of these individual pieces of our sort of health and lifestyle are you trying to piece together to form this picture what are those pieces the key pieces are who you are MH so that's one of the key pieces so by that I mean your genetics your microbiome your age your sex your menopause status all of those kind of things the other is the food that you eat and when we think about food we need to think about it beyond the traditional

way that we thought about food in terms of nutrients you know backup pack labeling fat protein fiber carbohydrate but actually thinking about food in terms of the fact that on average each food has 70,000 different chemicals and these are contained within a very complex food structure which we call Food Matrix that modulates the impact that those chemicals and nutrients have so that's the second thing that we need to think about so we've got who you are the food that you're eating but the complexity of that food and then how you eat your food and by

how you eat your food I'm thinking about your lifestyle while I'm thinking about are you jetlagged how much sleep did you have last night you know what's the order in which you're eating your food within a meal or over the day how stressed are you feeling um when did you do physical activity all of that also impacts how you will respond to a food and then I think the last piece of the puzzle is so important that as nutritional scientists I don't think we think about enough why do you make the diet of choices that

you make so why do you choose to have that for breakfast for lunch for dinner is it because it's part of your culture is it because that's how you're just feeling emotion is it because you're sitting with friends and it's part of that social experience MH I think we're at a really exciting time in nutritional research because we're now able to collect data at a scale breadth depth and precision that we've never been able to before that's allowing us to put together all of those pieces of the puzzle to start to see a clearer picture

so let's go into all of that let's start with um the subject of the food Matrix which is a a term I hadn't actually heard before um in today what is the food Matrix and why why do I need to know about that so the food Matrix simply puts the structure of food and it's really important because we know that food is so much more than just the nutrients and chemicals it contains so we know that food contains nutrients that people are very familiar with like protein fat fiber carbohydrate we know that food also contains

thousands of other chemicals many of these we call bioactives that you have heard of like polyphenols you know vitam minerals Etc but they're all encapsulated within the structure of a food so think of an apple versus Apple puree versus apple juice they're all coming from the same food but they have a different structure and the reason it's important is because we know that food structure modulates the healthfulness of the chemicals and nutrients within the food and it's really really relevant now it's really relevant now because our food landscape has changed almost unrecognized ibly to 50

100 200 years ago we're now eating a lot of food where the food Matrix the structure of the food has changed and this is because we use multiple different processing techniques so in simple terms if I were to zoom in on a piece of food on a microscope y the way that the the molecule of the food is put together is now different to what it used to be and that's having an impact on my health so in simple terms it's that we are changing often through processing the structure of the food now by processing

it could be our own processing when we chew a food we change the structure take a nut for example you have a whole nut you chew it you break up the nut it goes into your gastrointestinal tract it's broken down further we also change it using manual industrial techniques as well so we use techniques like grinding or we might use posterization for dairy or you know Extrusion for some carbohydrate rich foods we all of these different techniques that also change the food Matrix For Better or For Worse it's a double-edged sword right and I think

this is what we need to remember that everyone's demonizing at the moment Ultra processed food you know it's killing the nation 60% of our energy is coming from a processed food yes we are eating too much unhealthy food much of which has been heavily processed but processing can also be used to our benefit and we have to think why do we even process food in the first place well we process it to make edible mhm I don't want to go and eat a rice grain that's not been cooked we make it safe I want to

drink pasteurized milk because I know it's safer we want to make it stable I think how long a can can last and frozen vegetables versus fresh so you're saving food waste we want to make it taste good mhm um and we want to make it convenient so there's all of these different reasons that we use food processing but when we think about the healthfulness of a food we need to think about it in terms of the processing techniques that have been used as well as the nutrient composition we can't look at them in isolation in

my opinion and this is what I've done a lot of research looking into and what has processing gone bad I think processing gone bad is when you've change the nutrient profile of a food such that it is unhealthy so in simple terms it's too much saturated fat too much salt um too little fiber too little bioactives like polyphenols a food that is very energy dense so you eat it really really quickly so you're eating too many calories you're eating it before your hunger signals have got to your brain say w Stephen you've had enough and

there's great research that has been looking at how processing can affect your eating rate the energy density of food the nutrient profile of a food and that's where it can go wrong but where it can go right is you can improve all of those things I've said the stability the safety of the food you can also um increase the what we call BI accessibility so the availability of some of the nutrients within a food as well okay so I've got some snacks over in the corner of the room here which um I guess have been

processed differently mhm to have a different impact on on me as the consumer gosh these look delicious oh I hope they're salt and vinegar Pringles you're going to eat them look at this oh my gosh um so I've got some mixed nuts here and I've got some cookies some little pieces of chocolate and uh some crisps so you were talking about this processing something so that I eat it faster and that it doesn't like sort of satiate me or make me feel hungry crisps We're a nation of crisp lovers um when you saying that about

something that makes you eat fast and not realize that you've even eaten all crisps were the first thing that came to mind for me I love a crisp you love a crisp we all love a crisp so I think all of these first three foods the crisps the chocolate the cookies you know if compared to what would be a healthy food they've all got less fiber MH they've all got well certainly the the um chocolate and the cookie it's got more sugar um they won't have all of the wonderful bioactives in them um um and

then with the crisps depending on the type of crisp is probably quite high in in salt but the chances are with those three is that they are quite energy dense so they have quite a lot of calories per gram which is partly because of uh the processing techniques yet if you take a whole food like a nut yeah now they're actually very energy dense so they're very high in fat they're high in calories but actually because they're in their original food Matrix how your body handles them is quite different to if for example they had

been processed you you mentioned something about my brain takes a little while to figure out that I've started eating yep so if I started smashing these crisps down now how long would it take my brain to realize that I'd started eating to sort of catch up and make me feel hungry yeah so there's Lo lots of different mechanisms that impact how full we feel how hungry we feel related to a food there's different hormones that are released from different areas of our gut for example that feedback signals to say either you're full or you're hungry

on average I would say it takes about 10 to 20 minutes for the fullness to really properly kick in now you could easily have got through those well I could easily have got through all of these before under that 20 minutes I wasn't aware that there was a delay but it does make sense because there's certain foods that I used to eat like like Pringles and snacks and crisps and things like that where I feel like I could eat two Tu tubes of the thing before my body even um realize what was going on and

are they in some way designed to encourage that speed of eating and so there are many people who will say the food industry has specifically designed these to make them firstly what we call hyper palatable so to have the right mix of fat sugar you know carbohydrate Etc to make them really tasty and in this case salt as well um I don't think the food industry is out there to get us I think that what the food industry were doing 50 years ago versus what they're doing now is quite different but some people say I'm

very naive I do believe the food industry ultimately want to produce food that's safe but also healthy for us that's probably an unpopular opinion but based on my interactions with the food industry I believe that however I do believe that these crisps are there have been made to be flavorsome to be palatable to you so that you do enjoy them now whether that's that you then go and overeat them I think is yes a byproduct of that um now it's not it doesn't take 20 minutes for all of the fullness signals to kick in because

as soon as you start chewing something you start to release different hormones and different sensory characteristics of the food will also trigger some sort of fullness but what we do do know is that you have more of these fullness receptors saying hey you're full lower down in your gastrointestinal tract and so if you can get food to the lower gastrointestinal tract that's when it says hey Steph you're full now and these heavily processed snacks that you've got here would be typically absorbed higher up the gastrointes because kind of the hard work's been done and yet

when you've got something like a whole grain or a nut typically that would be absorbed lower down the gastrointestinal stress tra where you got more of these fullness signals so giving you that greater feeling of fullness my girlfriend has said to me for many many a year that I need to eat slower Y and I thought it was like a spiritual thing that she's into um to do with like giving the food gratitude etc etc but upon reading your work and having this conversation today now I'm starting to believe that she was right all along

unsurprisingly once again um and that there is a a a scientific basis for slowing down how fast I eat absolutely we now know that eating rate is important there's some fantastic work that's being done by a professor kieren Ford who's dedicated many years into researching this and looking at how changing the structure and texture of your food can modulate your eating rate and how also your eating rate can modulate um how you metabolize the food and how many calories you go on to eat and so it's a great example you know I talked about all

of these different pieces of the puzzle that's one of those pieces so when we talk about how you eat changing your eating rate so how quickly you have your breakfast your lunch or dinner or any of these snacks will also Without You consciously thinking about it change how many calories you eat might change how quickly you metabolize the food as well what's the sort of KnockOn effects there so the research that's been done by Ken Ford shows that on average if you change the speed in which you eat your food by about 20% you reduce

your calories intake by about 15% and that's due to where you're releasing your hunger hormones how many fullness hormones you're releasing Etc so it's a really simple strategy and we see this play out as well even in our own evidence when we look in our zor predict studies that fast eaters versus slow eaters we see that once we're just for lots of other confounders there's a difference of 120 calories between What fast eaters have over a day versus slow eaters with the fast eaters eating more calories compared the slow eaters and there's even been clinical

trials where they get groups of individuals and say okay slow down the rate at which you eat your food over the next you know three four five weeks they have another group they say just eat at your normal rate those people who are intentionally slowing down the rate at which they eat their food lose more weight than those people who continue to eat at their normal rate see I always made this like weird unfounded evolutionary argument to her I was like well you know in the wild you got to eat what you can so people

eat quick but um we're not in the world anymore and the food choices that we have are drastically different now so yeah and also the food that is available to many of us is the kind of food that can be eaten really quickly so there's some great research that's been conducted that shows that heavily processed soft textured type food can be eaten 50% more quickly than the unprocessed harder textured equivalent so the kind of food that we're eating now is quite different so you're eating it really quickly you're overeating because your hunger signals haven't got

there but it's that rate at which you're eating what's an example of a soft textured food versus like a hard textured food so we can use an example from a study that was actually conducted in 1977 and this was published in the Lan it was one of the first nutrition studies published um in the lanet and it's one of the first studies to show the importance of the food Matrix and it kind of got buried for many years and this a study by uh the scientist called habber where he fed individuals whole apples MH he

fed individuals the equivalent amount of carbohydrate from Apple puree it was exactly the same I.E same nutrients same fiber same everything else in it all that's different is the apples are hard the puree is soft and what he found was that those people who were given the puree even though they were given exactly the same amount of calories ate that puree or rather drank that puree three to four times more quickly than when they had the apples the equivalent amount of calories so they were eating the same amount of calories but three to four times

more quickly that's like 300% 400% faster okay they felt less full so when they measured their fullness and they monitored that for quite a few hours so going up to quite a few hours those that were having the apples continued to feel full for longer those were having the puree didn't feel full as long and what also happened interestingly is those that were having the puree had what we call a blood sugar dip so about 2 to four hours after having a high carbohydrate meal we know that some people have a dip in their circulating

blood sugar and we know from our own zo predict research that actually this can really increase your hunger levels yeah and so we know from our research if you are a Dipper I'm a Dipper hence I get hungry quite often so in about two hours I'm going to be eating one of these if you're a Dipper you know your your blood gluc is going below your Baseline levels and so you get hungry you go on to eat 180 calories on average more at your next meal because of that and so I mean this research from

1977 I think is fascinating it's that first research really demonstrating the importance of food Matrix and then since then I've now over the last 10 years done lots of studies with nuts with oats for example that demonstrate you can have two foods that have identical backpack labeling identical nutrients ident identical calorie value if you were to look at the back of Lo but can have entirely different impacts in terms of how much energy you absorb how you metabolize that food how it impacts your hunger how it impacts Downstream health effects and you've done some research

on walnuts right so we've done work on walnuts but particularly on almonds so we've done lots of work with almonds using it as a kind of proof and principle of the importance of the food Matrix now you just took a bite of that and I could hear the crunch the reason I could hear the crunches cuz in almonds like most nuts like many plant-based projects uh products um there is a very um rigid cell wall okay so that almond that you you're holding there has thousands and thousands and thousands of cells these cells are tiny

they're about 50 microns okay you can't see them with the human eye I can show you a micrograph okay um but there's thousands in there now each of those cells is smaller than a grain of sand and each of those cells is encapsulate cell walls is encapsulating the fat so we know that in most of these nuts it's about 50% they're about 50% fat hence people say my gosh I can't eat nuts they're high fat they're high calorie now in all of those nuts the fats encapsulated in this rigid cell wall when you bit that

you fractured some of those cell walls when you swallow it you chewed it you chewed it a little bit I assume a little bit yeah yeah I didn't swallow it when people chew it we know from these lovely chew and spit studies or mastication studies that we do that at the point at which you swallow a knut the particles I the size of the bits that you're swallowing that you've you've chewed are about maybe half a millim to 1 mm in size now given that the cell within or of a alut is about 50 microns

that means when you're swallowing within that what we call a macro particle you got thousands of cells they're intact where you've got this lovely cell wall containing all of this fat and so you're swallowing these intact cells containing encapsulating the fat so they're what we call very low by accessibility they're not very accessible to us this fat now what happens as this passes through your gastrointestinal tract some of the enzymes can break down the cells a little bit but actually a lot just comes out the other end so I don't know whether you've ever eaten

a bag of nuts and to your poo after none of your business I'm joking okay go and do that but you should see some Alma particles you know like when I'm you know being a mom when I've I've looked at a lot of PE in my life through my work but also through being a mom you can see whole nut particles in the Poo so nuts they just is it they just don't break down fully so they break down partially so you break down about 10% in the mouth before you swallow so about 10% of

the calories become available because the calories are contained from the fat Etc and then you probably break down about another 60 to 70% as it passes through your stomach your small intestine your large intestine okay but you have loads of material arriving at your colon which is your large intestine that's undigested which is good for two reasons one because you're giving all of this food to your microbiome which we know is great for your health your microbiome is having a party with these nuts but also if you are worried about eating nuts because of their

high calorie value actually 20 to 30% of the calories are just coming out the other end but where it gets really interesting is if we then take exactly that nut that you're holding there and if I was to industrially grind it so that I broke all of those cells walls yeah so we're breaking it down to less than 50 microns so that you're releasing all of the fat so it becomes 100% bi accessible either you absorb 100% % of it but they could have two identical back aack labels yeah because if they're the same ingredient

all that's happened is you've ground that nut to such an extent that you've released everything and so having that in its whole form is beneficial because if you are concerned about energy intake it's reducing the energy it's providing this amazing food for your G microbiome it's changing also how you your blood changes metabolically in that about 8 hours after eating it and this is what I've done lots of work on looking at how your blood fat increases and decreases in that immediate period after eating either ground nuts or whole nuts but once you grind it

I'm not saying it's necessarily bad because the upside of that is all of the other good nutrients contained within that cell like the vitamin E and some of the other components also become available so it's this double-edged sword interesting but that's what I think is so fascinating about processing and about food Matrix and why we have to move Beyond thinking about food just in terms of the nutrients because you can have two foods with identical backpack labeling that have different effects and we've seen the same with oats we've been doing studies as well where we

feed people um large oats so kind of you know like the steel cck sort of old-fashioned porridge or you feed people finally ground oats and so we've done clinical trials where on one occasion people come in and they'll have 50 gr carbohydrate for breakfast of these large oats then they'll come in another day and they'll have exactly the same oats but where we ground them literally we've got students just grinding them down so they're more like a powder and the difference in the metabolic response in that following six hours after having either the large traditional

oats or these finy ground oats is enormous and that's because of gut absorption speed yes so with the nuts what we're seeing here is a difference in the amount as well as the speed with the oats what we're seeing is a difference in the speed so we're see seeing a difference in the rate because we know that the food Matrix impacts the amount I with the nuts the rate are with the oats and as well as where the foods absorbed in the gut and so you see about a 40% difference in the post pangal glucose

response this is the increase in circul blood glucose after you've had these oats we see about a 50% higher response from the ground oats versus the laros and that has subsequent impacts on hunger hormones fullness hormones insulin release etc etc and what role does fiber play in this because fiber is becoming quite popular now they're like putting it in drinks and stuff like that and I I there was some candy in America when we were recording over in uh New York which had like it said like 15 grams of fiber added to this like candy

so fiber is a really interesting one and it's a really interesting one because we know we're not getting enough fiber M so we should be getting at least 30 grams of fiber in the UK and it's similar in the US we get on average about 20 grams of fiber 95% of us are not having enough fiber fiber is the one nutrient that we know consistently is associated with beneficial health effects reduce reduction in many cancers reduction in cardiovascular disease reduction in levels of obesity type 2 diabetes Etc you know it's an amazing nutrient fiber and

we don't get enough of it just to pause there then why is it so good for us because I mean it sounds like a super molecule the way you just described it so it's good for us for many different reasons and there's loads and loads of different types of fiber and the different types of fiber are good for us for slightly different reasons really simply put we've got soluble fiber and that's great for us because it impacts things like cholesterol absorption as well as other factors related to how quickly we metabolize food Etc then you've

got uh insoluble fiber which is the kind of fiber that for example are in those nuts because fiber in those nuts is actually the cell wall so most cell walls of plants are just fiber that's great for us because it's fued for our microbiome it helps bulk out our store so reduces our Transit time how quickly the our poo basically passes to our colon reduce the risk of colon cancer and so forth but largely because it is the food upon which our microbiom have their party produce all of these wonderful molecules that we no impact

so much related to our health but we don't get enough of it and we don't get enough of it because we're not eating the right types of food that we have in high amounts so having any kind of fiber is going to improve our health having fiber that's added artificially back into food is going to be better than having no fiber so the kind of bars that you're talking about that say are added fiber great having fiber though from the whole food is always going to be better and so with nuts fiber is essentially the

the cell walls of the nuts so it's having that role in reducing that bio accessibility that we talk about at slowing those nuts down so that's always going to be better having that fiber in the whole food in its original structure in the way nature intended but having any kind of fiber is better than having none and in a nation or or you know many nations where we're not having enough if we can get some in our diet even if it is processed fiber it's better than fiber in my opinion one of the um big

revelations in my household has been just getting some of these bad snacks just out the house and replacing it with um healthier whole snacks and I say that because the sort of the very definition the very like sort of use case where we snack is when we typically don't have a lot of time where hunger kind of crept up on us in between a meal um and so we make fast decisions it's not a very considered decision um and I was reading that there's been some studies done where they took sort of two groups and

gave them typical snacks versus healthy snacks and they found a pretty significant reduction in cardiovascular disease yeah so this is one of my studies okay um and we looked at how changing people's snacks can impact their health and the reason we're interested in this is because we're a nation of snackers in the UK as in many countries so we know that about 25% of our energy comes from snacks that's phenomenal and so what we wanted to do is look at if we do a really simple snack swap can we improve People's Health and so we

ask people to change 20% of their energy from either having typical UK snacks MH or having 20% of their energy from alond nuts for 6 weeks and then we looked at various Health outcomes at the beginning of that six weeks and then at the end of that six weeks we said keep everything else the same we provided all of these snacks to them we provided the typical UK snacks we spent a lot of time designing these so we did lots of research where we looked in the UK and it's the very similar in the US

what are the typical snacks so basically we designed these muffins that ultimately were having a bit of a potato chip or crisp a bit of a chocolate biscuit a bit of a cake just like imagine all put in one muffin I mean we didn't go and get those and just stick them in one muffin but we worked out what's the nutrient profile in the UK in the us that comes from snacks and then we designed a snack product that was quite highly processed that reflected that nutrient profile so it's quite high in saturated fat high

in sugar high in refined carbohydrate low in fiber people had to eat 20% of their energy from these muffins which my kids loved um or 20% from the almond nuts at the end of that we measured lots of health outcomes one of which was a particular measure that we do to look at people's vascular function so their blood vessel function it's a measure called flow Medi dilation it tells us in really simple terms kind of how healthy the blood vessels are and what we found was the Improvement in blood vessel function following having almond nuts

versus having typical UK snacks equated to a 30% reduction in cardiovascular disease that's crazy and in what period of time six weeks in six weeks and do you know what I think's really interesting about this is it's one simple single dietary strategy and snacks are under our own control typically I what I have as a snack isn't determined by my fussy kids what high have as a snack quite often isn't determined where I am at that point in time because I can bring my snacks with me it's a really simple single diet strategy that can

have a big size effect and I think that that's really important it is really important though Stephen at this point that I do say that I have actually had funding from the alma board of California and they did fund uh that study although the way we conduct our RCT the funders have no impact over the study design or you know they don't get to see the all data or or the paper before we're publishing it but I just think it's always important to declare conflicts of interest we've seen this though play out in other studies

with other nuts or other snack substitutes so it's not unique just to almonds it's a great illustrator of how changing our snacks can improve our health and we we really are a nation of snackers um you highlighted one of the stats there that in the UK and in the US about 25% of our energy comes from snacks 75% of the energy that's coming from those snacks is coming from unhealthy snacks this was taken from The Zo podcast uh in mediteran in Mediterranean countries only 14% of energy comes from snacks which is half of the UK

and 85% of British people report snacking compared to 10% in France and in the UK we have 2.5 to three snacks per day which translates to six or seven eating events a day um and this has massive impact and our glucose spikes and drops throughout the day causing metabolic chaos and that's part of what I was thinking as I was as I was thinking about this is um if I'm eating that muffin that you made which resembles the sort of typical British composition of a snack it's not necessarily just that That Snack is going to

impact me it's that my next Food choice because I ate that snack is going to be different because I'm on that I might be on a glucose roller coaster here so I might end up making a worse food Choice thereafter which then might impact my maybe my sleep because I've got a little bit of sugar in me when I'm settling down to go to sleep and is there the sort of not Downstream domino effect because of that one snack choice so I wouldn't say that you've made a one bad snack choice and that's it your

day's over damn it you know you're stuffed I think that you highlight an important point though that what we choose as a meal does have knock on effects on what might happen later in the day so for example if you have a really refined carbohydrate breakfast or snack then you're more likely to have a blood sugar dip which we know from our research is more likely to make you um more hungry eat more calories have lower mood have lower energy and be less alert but I think you know snacking can be used to our advantage

snacking can be used to our advantage because we know it accounts for such a huge proportion of our energy intake because we know on average that you know 70 75% snacks that we do come eat in the UK and the US are not helpful snacks and because we know that actually just transitioning from those to healthy snacks can have a big impact but I think it's really important to be thinking about not just the type of snacks you're having but the time of day that you're having the snacks and we published some research recently where

we looked in a thousand individuals at people's snacking habits because it's not actually been looked at much I mean you think everyone snacks you think there'd be loads of science out there about snacking there's lots of science out there about the different you know foods that we might snack on but not really much looking at snacking habits and there's a lot of controversy out there about whether we should be grazers and we are a nation of grazers you know we well I certainly graze but many people we know like you said you know 80 to

90% of people do have multiple eating events throughout the day are you taking these away from you for self-control I am a little bit Yeah I think uh the the smell of the chocolate and the cookies is testing me and in Janu I'm not trying to be tested there we go um and what we have never really fully understood is is snacking per se bad are you having multiple eating events so eating six times a day which we nearly do in the UK and the us or is it about the type of food we're snacking

on so should we revert back to having the three main meals the breakfast the lunch the dinner or is it okay to have multiple meals as long as it's healthy food so we looked at this in our cohort of a thousand individuals where we taken lots of measures related to what they're eating when they're eating how they're eating it as well as lots of different Health outcomes and what we found was that the frequency of eating within reason was not a problem so if people were grazing having multiple eating events as long as they were

eating healthy foods it didn't matter having multiple eating events so snacking per se wasn't a problem as long as they were healthy foods okay cuz there's been a long I guess raging debate about how many meals you should have a day some people just eat one meal a day some people probably five or six meals a day and you're saying it doesn't necessarily matter as long as what you're eating is healthy yeah I mean I will always as a cautious scientist cave it within reason but our research showed people having six eating events a day

I you know six different occasions that they're eating food or three eating events as long as they were eating or snacking on healthy foods it did not impact their health outcome and this is I guess controlled for extreme cases where someone's maybe eating at 1:00 a.m. in the morning or 2: a.m. in the morning yeah so we also looked at timing because I think that's something that we haven't given enough attention to in nutrition science and it's a really exciting new area of research that we're starting to understand the timing of when we eat is

really important and what we found was interestingly 30% of people were snacking after 9 at night and we found that if you snack late at night I feel attacked and this is a l in line with you know other published research from very tightly controlled clinical trials we found that if you snack late at night that that was associated with unfavorable Health outcomes so uh worse adosi so worse kind of fat around your belly for example um higher levels of inflammation worse levels of blood lipid so you know cholesterol that sort of thing and we

found that this was even if you were snacking on healthy snacks really and this isn't especially surprising because there's this whole new area in nutrition called chronon nutrition which is all about the timing of eating and we now are really starting to understand that every cell in our body has its little body clock has a clock every cell has a clock and that clock is shaped by when we eat as well as the light day cycle and if we're eating out of sink with those clocks those millions and trillions of clocks in our body we

know that we process the food slightly differently we metabolize it slightly differently and it may have a different impact on our health and that's what our research showed as well so eating after 9:00 isn't great for your health just a double down on that I have had a long-standing hypothesis that when I eat later at night it is making is it is basically increasing my belly fat now I I don't have any science to support this but there's a and also the way that I feel when I wake up is radically different if I've eaten

close to my sleep time so I had this weird hypothesis that I'm basically putting food into the machine and then I'm like turning the machine off while it's processing so it's kind of like not processed it properly yeah I mean that's kind of a simple terms what's sort of happening okay you know our body needs to rest overnight just like our mind does ourselves our metabolism needs to rest overnight and if you're not giving your body your cells your metabolism your got microbiome Etc that time to rest things get Disturbed a little bit and what's

really interesting is you said that you'll feel different the next day if you eat late at night there's some really fascinating research that came out about one or two years ago where they looked at giving exactly the same calories and Foods over the day within the same time period but on in one group of individuals having most of the calories earlier and in another group having most of them later in the day now those that were having them later in the day woke up feeling more hungry which is kind of like counterintuitive isn't it but

it fits in with what you just said yet those people who are eating the calories earlier in the day woke up feeling less hungry and this is why as well the evidence shows early Tim restricted eating so time restricted eating where you're eating within a particular time window those people who are practicing earlier in the day tend to do better in terms of the health outcomes whether it's weight inflammation cholesterol than those practicing later time restrict eating when they have their last eating event later in the day and that's cuz they're eating in in in

time with their body clocks with these millions and billions of little cell clocks I have um had a weird observation which is sometimes sort of quite rare these days I have to wake up super early to get on a flight and it means that I'm disrupting my sleep maybe getting up at 4:00 or 5 in the morning and for some bizarre reason if I'm if I wake up at say 4: in the morning morning to go and get a flight I am starving but if I woke up at 9: that same day I would not

be I would probably not get hungry till about 2: p.m. and I've never managed to sort of really figure out why disrupting my sleep causes me to be ridiculously hungry whereas typically I don't honestly eat breakfast I typically eat about midday or 2 p.m. so I think that's probably a lot going on there it's getting a little bit outside my of expertise but I can certainly comment from work that we've done and I'm familiar with so what we know is that sleep duration sleep efficiency what we also call Sleep midpoint so the midpoint in which

you sleep impacts your hunger levels we know that your hunger and your fullness hormones change as you sleep so we know that short sleepers people who you know are getting up too early so when you're getting up for your flight then your hunger and fullness hormones might be perturbed and we know that short sleepers or if you've had a a poor night's sleep you tend to wake up more hungry than if you've had a good night's sleep this isn't from my own research I always have to cavey at that but this is what some of

the research is showing but that also if you've had a poor night's sleep You Reach For Less healthy food and there's a study that was conducted at Kings College London by my colleagues called the Slumber study um and this really nicely illustrates how just changing how much you sleep can change your dietry choices and in the Slumber study they asked people who were short sleepers to practice sleep hygiene they gave them no dietry advice they just said practice good sleep hygiene I you know no screens late at night no physical activity caffeine alcohol Etc late

at night dark and room and then they just monitored lots of different things in these individuals and what they found was that those who were able to extend their sleep actually made healthier choices such that they reduced jued without being told to their intake of free Sugar by about 10 G oh really without being given any advice so they slept better they atat less sugar they made the decision to eat less sugar without being told to that correlates it's it's been such a revelation I think in my my life over the last I'd say two

to three years is realizing the downstream impact of sleep and a bad night's sleep cuz it was one of the things that I think growing up especially you as an entrepreneur when you're like consuming a lot of like hustle preneur you know culture and it's all like sacrific to sleep work seven days that you assume is um take it or leave it like it like you assume it's often the first thing you think that you can sacrifice in the pursuit of productivity yeah well this is what I I thought growing up and then in the

last I so all I think all 20 30 olds think that yeah and do you not think yeah and anyone that's like has I think probably an involuntary amount of I say involuntary but I mean just because of the decisions they've made amount of professional pressure or like shift workers or anybody or even parents I guess um they probably see sleep as second due to some other kind of priority in their life and when I shifted that and I I made adjustments to my calendar and my schedule to try and prioritize sleep the downstream impact

of it has been profound in a way that I could never measure or articulate fully but just everything seems to be better so like my relationships with my partner um my ability to think straight um my motivation to go to the gym that day um the work that I do everything so it's there's been this big sort of radical adjustment where I now see sleep as actually the the starting point for all these other choices that I make good or bad um and that's kind of what your work is highlighting yeah I think it's that

we have to think of these four pillars together of Health we can't look at diet on its own can't look at sleep on its own can't look at stress on its own we can't look at physical activity on its own so if we want to improve our health through diet I think we must be looking our sleep habits which we can to a certain extent control not always I know some people have to work shift some people don't have a choice they're woken up by their kids Etc we need to look at our stress I

know that's one of the hardest things to change um we need to look at our physical activity and our diet and they are all so interconnected and the predict studies that were done at Zoe found that sleep affected metabolic responses as much as the macronutrient content of the meal what is what is that what is that saying so this is some research that we published where we looked at people when they'd had a good night's sleep and we looked at people when they'd had a bad night's sleep and we looked at their post meal post

prandial glucose response so that basically means after having your breakfast that's got some carbohydrate in it how much does your blood glucose increase we call this the post frangel glucose response because post prangel is Greek for postmeal and so it's a term we use a lot in the science and we looked at um individuals postmeal glucose response when they'd had a good night's sleep and when they'd had a bad night's sleep and what we found was within the same individual if they'd had a bad night sleep their postmeal glucose response so after breakfast was a

lot higher than if they'd had a good night's sleep so what this shows I think quite nicely if we think back to what you said about how you wake up more hungry when you've not had enough sleep we know that people make poor dietary choices for example from the Slumber study and then we know that the metabolic responses to those are worse it just shows how you're kind of creating this perfect storm and how you can't think of it in isolation CU firstly you're waking up and you're like bloody hell I'm hungry secondly it's like

I'm not having that healthy breakfast I want that Pano shocate or you know whatever that's you giving you that quick fix and then you have it and you're going to have this massive blood sugar pee compared to if you'd had a good night's sleep and and made a healthy choice we less hungry etc etc so it's like creating this perfect storm and it's all started with your sleep MH and that's why I don't think we can look at things in isolation anymore which is how I have spent the previous 20 years of my research looking

at things in isolation but that's cuz I've not been had the luxury of being able to collect the kind of data that we're now collecting I get a lot of messages from parents so uh because I'm not one yet I don't fully understand what it is to be a parent and the demands of Parenthood so I'm going to defer to you on this cuz the parents my children never slept they never slept they did obviously but oh my Lord how did you how did you survive that as a parent like what's the was there any

strategies or tactics you put in place to defend against exactly what you just described the downstream cont quences of sleep deprivation no because the first four years of my children's lives uh I was also I lost my father when my um daughter a few weeks after my daughter was born uh my sister and I became full-time carers for my mother who lived around the corner um I took a career break looked after my mom with my sister had two young children they weren't sleeping I had to show up I had to show up to help

my sister look after my mom it was about survival I didn't think about what I ate when I ate that was irrelevant it was about survival to be there for my mom to be there for my kids and whether it was because asleep deprivation was also so bad that it was just like driving bad choices I don't know but there's points in time in anyone's life that we go through that are about survival aren't there and I think everything goes out of the window and I'm not saying it should but I think that when when

you're in the depths of whether it's sleep deprivation because your children keeping you awake or what I was going through you know my mother had a de generative neurological condition and seeing someone daily deterior deteriorate like that what you're doing physical activity wise well I didn't have time to do that what you're eating quite often doesn't become a priority now it's probably a time it should be even more of a priority because we know that what you eat impacts your mental health you know there's great research now showing how important it is but when you're

in that fug of whether it's that you're depressed or you're dealing with you know trauma or whatever I think food is one of the last things that you think about making a priority and I think it's okay you know when we talk about the health situation in the US and the UK with obesity On The Rise and things like that we you people are now pointing at things like a zmek as the cure for that but when you speak about the role there that stress and our life styles are having on us and I was

thinking about some of the stats that have emerged around anxiety and young people and them being more um in depression rates globally um maybe there's something else that we should be thinking about which is like the mental health mindfulness piece of how that overlays with food choices and because you know even the food the ultr processed unhealthy foods that are being attacked a lot these days I mean to some degree they are a consequence also of demand oh absolutely so they wouldn't be making these things if people didn't want them no and didn't buy them

so maybe if we focused more on some of the mindfulness mental health challenges we have in society people would have more of a um a greater ability to make better choices themselves as well because I certainly know in my life that if I'm highly stressed or if things are difficult then my ability to make better food choices is significantly impaired yeah absolutely I you know again this is what the research shows the Sleep the stress it impacts your ability to make choices about lots of things but equally your food choices you know what you're talking

about I think is so complex it's where where's the responsibility for the government where's the responsibility for the food industry where's the responsibility for us as individuals where's the responsibility for schools for example or for us as parents educating our children we need to take into account all of those different um areas in order to improve the foods that we're eating there is a problem that these three dishes so the chocolate the biscuits the crisps they are more tasty or rather our taste buds our brains are tricking us into thinking they're more palatable and that's

a problem do we say to our children you can never ever have them now I've certainly never taken that approach I think it's all about balance and enabling people to make the choices that they make but I recognize if I'm sitting there in the evening I'm a I'm a bit stressed I've got a work deadline I don't want to eat nuts I want to eat those biscuits or those crisps and I want a glass of wine with it I know that's not the right decision I know it's 10:00 at night but in the moment that's

the choice I probably will make do you get frustrated with yourself because you you know more about nutrition than most people on planet Earth yet you still find yourself making at at times suboptimal nutritional choices no I don't because I think that it's really quite simple when we think about the food that we eat I think we're making it so complicated and I think that do you know what if we eat a good amount of fruits vegetables pulses if we try not to eat too much heavily processed foods if we try and get a bit

of diversity in our diet we're doing okay so what if I go and have you know bared chocolate as long as I'm not doing all day every day mhm and I think this kind of Health optimization around diet I think is taking away the pleasure of food and you know I often say if a food is too healthy to be enjoyed it's just not healthy at all food is there to bring us joy it's to bring us pleasure it's part of our emotions it's part of our culture it's part of you know our social connections

MH and I worry that now there's a certain proportion of society so hyperfocused on that 1% gain in terms of the food that they're eating that they forget all of that pleasure so I think I have quite a balanced approach because I know that ultimately if you get the foundations right the rest will follow but that makes up 95% of what makes a food or a diet and that's how we need to think about what we healthy what do you think of diets um because there's so many bloody diets as there I think that there's

so much neutrols out there Nutrabolics there is so much misinformation out there what you see on social media versus what the evidence shows is like night and day I mean seriously and so when I think about diet my view on diets I mean there are some that there's some good evidence you know eat plant eat 30 plants a week yeah that's great um go on a low calorie diet to lose weight great but how are you going to maintain that weight that's a whole other question great for losing not for maintenance um then you've got

the alkaline diet I mean I I don't understand that eat alkaline foods but your stomach is acidic so got no idea how that works the blood type diet I don't actually know what half of these diets do because I do not understand the physiological theory behind them and so do you know what though Stephen I think if it works for you as an individual fine do it but if it works for you at the expense of the pleasure of food at the expense of enjoying life to the fullness that's what I think is a shame

like Tim restricted eating I think there's great evidence around time restricted eating now much of it comes from very tightly metabolically controlled studies you know that are done Clinic where people you know eat within a five or six hour window so they have their first meal at 10: their last meal at 4 in the evening reduces inflammation reduces body weight improves blood cholesterol etc etc etc I don't want to only eat six hours a day I want to have dinner with my family I want to have dinner with my friends I want to go to

the PB in the evening not every evening I want to live life so what can we do that takes that principle of that diet but we still benefit from it and this is what's great again about the research that we're doing at zo we've done this study called the bigf study the big intermittent fasting study we had 150,000 people sign up and we said look we want to see if what we find in tightly controlled clinical studies plays out in the real world because we always have to think how does all of this evidence play

out in the real world does it matter and we said just limit your eating window so the time from your first to your last meal to 10 hours so that means if you're having your first meal at 10: you're having in the morning you're having your last meal at 8 in the evening MH that's correct isn't it sure my paral cannot do maths um that's quite doable for most people I can have my breakfast at 10:00 I can finish my last meal at 8 I mean yeah I do like munching on my chocolate late at

night I could probably still live a happy enough life doing that and we found people could do it we found as well that people who practiced it within two weeks they felt better they had better energy better mood um you know they were feeling a lot better they also lost weight many people wanted to do this because they wanted to lose weight and we actually see from evidence that people practicing time restricted eating even if they're told not to change their calorie intake just by limiting the eating window on average reduce the energy intake by

about 300 calories on average there's been a big debate around this um conversation around fasting calorie restriction and some people say that it's basically the same thing and that you've kind of proven that to some degree so we know that in most instances if you practice time restricted eating you unintentionally reduce your energy intake and the data shows that on average from the studies that published is about 300 calories obviously depends on the duration the reduction in body weight also we know is dependent on the eating window so the smaller the eating window the greater

the reduction and body weight but there have been some studies that actually control the amount of calories that people eat but have some people having it in a bigger eating window some in a smaller eating window and what these Studies have shown that if you have the same amount of calories but you change the period in time in which you're eating your food there is an additional benefit on metabolic Health there is a benefit in terms of blood lipids in terms of inflammation independent of calories Okay so Tim restricted eating has some benefit independent of

calories consumption yes but the bulk of the benefit is due to uh a reduction in calories so there's some benefit independent calorie restriction but the bulk of the benefit that we see is due to a subconscious or unintentional reduction in calories and I think this is when we're thinking about diets I think we need to think about how easy is it to implement is there any evidence behind it and 99% there isn't for the ones that there is evidence like Tim restricted eating can we do it in a way that still enables us to live

our life that's sustainable and the sustainable point I think is really important because there's now some new evidence emerging around consistency MH and the importance of consistent eating patterns and I think this is fascinating so there's research showing that if one day you're having three meals and then the next day you're having nine Mees and the next day say you're having six meals and the next day you're having four meals that troubles your body it's like whoa hold on I'm used to having you know four eating events a day and this is important to bear

in mind when we think about snacking if you're typically a snacker then fine carry on snacking as long as it's on healthy food and as long as you have your last snack before 9: at night if you're not a snacker having me just vouched for the great benefits of snacking don't start snacking because you don't want to be inconsistent and this new evidence emerging around the consistency of eating and there's some research done actually quite some time ago that started this idea I think is really fascinating so try and have a consistent eating pattern same

applies to sleep try and go to bed at the same time get up at the same time we've done some work uh around social jet lag don't know if you've heard of that term uh I think I've heard of it what does it mean so social jet lag is where you have an inconsistent sleeping pattern throughout the week so for example for many maybe 20-year old or students they might go to bed at a sensible time in the week and go parting and crazy at the weekend or for someone like myself I go to bed

late at night because I'm late night working parenting Etc and then at the weekend I catch up so if you have more than about a one and a half hour uh increase or decrease in sleep between your work days or weekend days Etc that's called social jet lag MH so it's a bit like jet lag going from one country to the other and what we know is and we've published on this from our own zo predict research people who experience social jet lag so have this inconsistent sleeping pattern make poor dietary choices they have more

inflammation they have a different gut microbiome composition now it might be because of the dietary choices but again it just plays into this whole idea that we're talking about that we can't just think about the food in isolation we need to think about how we're eating out our lifestyle Etc what else is on your Nutrabolics list what things bring to mind that a lot of people believe I mean there's a big debate raging at the moment about seed oils because we had uh incoming um American I guess he's a politician um RFK Jr say recently

seed oils are one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods and the reason they're in Foods is because they're heavily subsidized they're very cheap but they are associated with all kinds of very serious illnesses including body-wide inflammation which affects all of our health it's one of the worst things you can eat it's almost impossible to avoid if you eat any processed food sorry I'm laugh to laugh this is like Nutrabolics Beyond Nutrabolics but please I that's basically it he said if you're eating any processed food you're going to be eating seed oils

and he advocates for replacing seed oils with beef Tallow which is in the UK is referred to as dripping which is pure beef fat and is a saturated fat and he's actually selling T-shirts um RFK Jr at the moment that say make frying oil Tallow again so what so seed oils what is this weird debate that I've seen raging on on my Instagram about seed oils I've like managed to avoid it like I've just not paid attention to it but I see the word seed oils all of a sudden everywhere okay so seed oils I

think is at the top of the neutr bolics list I I it blows my mind what you've just read me it seriously blows mind I've done lots of research on seed oils so I can talk from my own research as well as all the evidence spaces out there there is absolutely no evidence that is credible evidence when interpreted in the correct way to show seed oils are harmful what is a seed oil so a seed oil is an oil from a seed so the most common seed oils in the UK is rape seed oil which

is also known as canola oil in the US and many other countries followed by sunflow oil the most common seed oils in the US are soybean oil followed by rape seed or oil followed by sunflower seed oil and there's about three or four arguments that people use to say that seedor are bad for us and if you go on social media I mean this is a perfect example of Night and Day between scientific evidence and what's on social media if you go on social media seedor are toxic seedor are going to give you Alzheimer's seedor

are going to give you cancer seedar are going to kill you you look at the evidence it's totally the reverse now you can have sensible boring scientists like me say seedor is a really good for you you could put that as one of your assets or whatever you call it or adverts for this m so we could say seedor are really good for you Steven or I could tell you seedles are toxic they're going to kill you everyone's trying to kill us with seedles what's going to get more clicks probably the toxic seed oil narrative

and so the sensible science there's no Silver Bullet there's no like you know crazy inflammatory argument the sensible science isn't going to get the click so unfortunately the voices of reason and often it comes from boring academics like myself not saying other academics are boring but sensible academics like myself that give the you know the balance we we don't get a voice we're not being heard which is one of the reasons that you know I wanted to come on this show because of the misinformation and we have to get the voice of reason out there

we have to get the voice of reason so things like that to do with seed alls are not what's dominating the headlines so what people say in terms of seedor is firstly our intake of seedor has increased 100 fold the last 20 30 40 50 years and with that increase in seed oil intake so has cancer increased so has cardiovascular disease increased so has obesity increased so has Alzheimer's etc etc so must be to do the SE oils well what else has changed in that 50 years we're more sedent we eat loads of these other

it's heavily processed foods that got all of these other ingredients in you know the sugar the this the that so much else has changed you know you can't put it all down to the fact that at that point in time seed oils were also changing we also know that about 60% of the seed oil that we eat is actually in these heavily processed unhealthy Foods so it's the first argument they say and you see these beautiful figures that they put out where you see on one axis the intake of cedor you see on the other

axis um you know uh o over time you'll see uh for example like rates of cancer and you see rates of cancer or rates of cardiovascular disease going up lineally with the intake of seed oil but we have to think what else has changed in that time the other arguments that they use are theoretical arguments based on biochemical Pathways and I spend an hour teaching this to our undergrad and I'm not going to bore you with that biochemical part but they talk about the ratio of um a particular fatty acid which is Omega 6 which

is found in high levels in seed oils and omega-3 which is another fatty acid and they talk about how having lots of seedles changes this ratio makes uh this pro-inflammatory state because it increases a particular Downstream chemicals etc etc what we know from kind of theoretical biochemical Pathways and enzymes Etc doesn't actually play out in humans we're so clever we have all of these mechanisms in place to control inflammation to control oxidative stress to control Downstream impacts of foods and so this argument that is also used to say that Omega six fatty acids so the

main fat that's found in many of these seed ORS is pro-inflammatory is not supported by any evidence it's not supported by tightly controlled clinical trials if anything it's shown to be anti-inflammatory that levels of in inflammatory um circulating Mo molecules actually reduce and yet they use this kind of theoretical argument or what they've seen in a Petri dish for example or in a test tube so where is this narrative come from where where did it originate from that seed oils were were toxic was it just one of those things that just snowball I think it's

one of those things that snowball and I think it does fit in with the whole uh argument that people are using against old processed food it does fit in with other other narratives that are going on I think some people can be very clever in cherry-picking research so there's a study called the Sydney har study and in this study this was done in the 70s and this is a study that's used often to advocate for the toxic effects of seed oils and in this study uh males that had had a heart event or a heart

attack of sorts uh were uh randomly allocated to either increase um their omega-6 so this particular type of fatty acid that we is in seed oils um in their diet by having lots of seed oil MH or they were asked to just follow their normal diet which is quite high in saturated fat and what they found is those that increased their seed oil intake went on to have worse Health outcomes now the problem with that is is that in those days the majority of seed oils underwent an industrial process called partial hydrogenation and partial hydrogenation

produces a very harmful fat called trans fats you might have heard of trans heard of the word yeah and so they were eating this seed oil in the form of a margarine or fat spread that had undergone partial hydrogenation and therefore was full of trans fats trans fats increase cholesterol trans fats increase inflammation trans fats are bad fast that's why they are not in our food supply anymore and so of course that seed oil was going to cause worse Health outcomes but it's not how seed oil is consumed now and so it's that clever cherry

picking of evidence that often supports a lot of the neutr bolics that's out there yeah and you know people you know with all these studies out there and with some studies having less rigor and studies that aren't don't have sort of the randomized control element or what's the other term for a study where they do um they look at like 50 studies at once so they're met analysis we do randomized control trials so these will be trials where there's always a control arm will randomly allocate some people to an intervention like seed oils and some

people to control could be saturated fat could be beef Tallow that's been done and then we look at different Health outcomes we follow them over a period of time or it could be that I ask you for a month to have seed oils and then next month have beef Tallow for example and then we'll look at different Health outcomes compare how you responded to one versus the other and then what we do as scientists is if there's enough of these clinical trials these randomized control trials we put them all together into what's called a metaanalysis

and we look what does the metaanalysis show so for example for seedor there's met analysis for example of um about 42 uh randomized control trials where they comp seed oils to other fats showing consistently that there is no harmful benefit that actually there's a reduction in cardiovascular disease because the particular fat that's in seed oil has a really potent cholesterol lowering effect so it's actually beneficial for our health yet beef Tallow is full of saturated Fair it's full of ptic acid which is a particular type of saturated fat that we know is bad for us

there has been studies and these studies were done many years ago when uh beef Tallow was actually used comparing seedor with beef Tallow seedor always were came out better seedor always reduce cholesterol compared to beef Tallow reduced inflammation Etc reduced cardiovascular risk factors you're very passionate about this I am because I've researched I as a research active scientist where I've run randomized control Charles and I tell you what you sweat Blood and Tears I love my research but it's bleming hard work doing a clinical trial you know getting ethical approval recruiting people changing people's diet

running dietary studies is really hard because it's not a case of giving them a pill if I'm going to give you seedor I've got to think well how am I going to do that what am I what instead of what what am I taking out of your diet to give you that how am I going to make sure the rest of your diet is control so once you run studies yourself and you sweat at that blood and tears and then you see this nutriol this misinformation out there it's really bloody frustrating but it's a good

thing that people like yourself are leaning into the mediums now of like podcasting because it's worth saying that as it relates to the sort of transfer of information it's typically people who have either a platform or who are great public speakers or great sales people that are ultimately going to like resonate the most reach the furthest with their information irrespective of whether that information is is credible so it's good to see more and more people that are are in the research now sort of stepping away from the research laboratory and coming into environments where they

can provide counteracting information and as someone that's on my own Journey To Figure to sort of weave through all of this information to find out what's right for me um it's difficult and for a lot of people it's super difficult I mean the way that I kind of my own framework for this is I listen to things and then I don't don't necessarily trust one source to be true but I I I almost like wait the authority experience and the rigor behind how they've arrived that information and then I guess I perform my own meta

analysis across lots of different people that I speak to and guests and information that I get to find the sweet spots where the sweet spot for me is many people have said it that I think have a lot of sort of rigor and authority and um uh experience in that subject matter so then I accept it to be true whereas I'm not going to go on Instagram and see a real popup in it says that I don't know putting sugar in your eyeballs is good and I'm not going to crack on with it just because

the person's got Charisma and I think in the world we live in where there is now this decentralization of information which has its upsides and its downsides we all need to have our own decision framework um set aside what is true but I think yours is more rigorous than most so many people get their information from One Source many people trust one source and you're right that as academics we're rarely given a platform yeah and this is what I valued most actually about what I've done at Zoe well being able to do the kind of

trials that we're doing but being able to have a platform not just for me but for us to invite other credible scientists onto the Zoe podcast or for me to come on to this kind of podcast we're not trained as academics how to communicate we're trained how to you know run good studies in my case you know run clinical trials interpret the evidence evaluate the evidence critique the evidence and you know I'm selftaught to present the evidence to other academics but we're not taught to communicate it to the general public so for me it's been

a journey working at Zoe of trying to communicate really complex stuff like I would have loved to have spent an hour telling you about the biochemical pathway of why um seed oil don't impact inflammation yeah but I know that really you're not interested the listeners aren't interested but you know I'm hoping that by informing them that I've done these studies and that these are the results there's trust that actually what we found is true but we're the smallest voice out there the research active scientists partly because of time you know I'm I'm still in you

know running trials running uh you know different interventions but also I think many of the big platforms aren't giving us the opportunity necessarily because we haven't got the most exciting things to say because at the end of the day you know we'll present the evidence we'll present it with caveat we'll present it with caution and you know I will always say on as I were to students I'm teaching what I'm telling you now is based on what the evidence shows now in 10 years time I might be totally wrong MH all of these trials showing

seedor are fine I might be wrong in 10 years time I mean I doubt it I doubt it because there's enough research but as scientists that's something else you know we we always caveat with and I think sometimes that's difficult for the general public maybe I mean I might be doing a disservice I don't know that you have the nonactive SC or or non-active influencers science influencers I don't know what you call them that speak with such certainty now I will if it's my study so I'll talk with certainty over the seedor study because I've

done them I've been there in the lab analyzing it or I'll speak with certainty over snacking data because I've you know sweat Blood and Tears over you know running the stats Etc but I won't talk with certainty about anything else that I haven't done myself and yet you have other people talk with such certainty and I think that's what instills confidence in maybe listeners and that's why they get more viewers if you you've been thinking of starting your own business I want to take a moment to nudge you into action this is the month to

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feel if a year from now you're still in the same spot the time is now to take that leap and sign up for your1 per month trial at shopify.com Bartlet that's shopify.com Bartlet there's a lot of neutr bolics Around Da right yep um I think the prevailing Nutrabolics is that Dair is bad for you yep so there's not lots of Nutrabolics around Dairy and it's related to the Nutrabolics also around saturated fat so as a whole we know saturated fat is bad for us Dairy contributes to most of the saturated fat intake in the UK

so therefore we could say all Dair is bad for us but no Dairy is a diverse food group you've got cheese you've got yogurt you've got butter you've got milk and how they impact our health is vastly different depending on whether it's a liquid a solid it's fermented it's non-fermented etc etc and grouping them all together is as ridiculous as grouping all these snacks together in terms of their health effects and what we now know is that some Dairy is actually good for us so some Dairy like cheese like yogurt and I don't mean this

really kind of heavily sweetened sugary yogurt I mean like your Greek yogurt shafe those sorts of things you're playing yogur they've undergone a process called fermentation and that changes the food Matrix so again we're coming back to that whole importance of the structure of the food and by changing the food Matrix changes how our body handles it how our bodies how the health effect of their cheese we don't fully understand how there's some great research being undertaken at Reading university really diving into this uh but what we know is if you have cheese within reason

if you have yogurt within reason it does not increase your cholesterol despite being high and saturated fat now have to caution that I'm not saying people should go and have you know 300 grams of cheese every day but within normal kind of intakes of a few portions a day it does not increase people's cholesterol having cheese or having you know good uh yogurt butter on the other hand we do know does increase your cholesterol now if you're having at the kind of level that you would maybe just putting on a bit of toast I wouldn't

worry so much but we do know that if you were to compare cheese versus butter which has almost the same fat composition and this has been shown in randomized control trials the butter will increase your cholesterol but the cheese will not and nuts a lot of people say that nuts cause weight gain no the evidence does not support that so we know that um people who consume nuts based on the totality of the evidence do not gain weight we know this from epidemiological data I.E people who consume more nuts um tend to quite often have

a lower BMI now that could be confounded by the fact that nut consumers and only about 10% in the UK and even less about 7% in the US even consume USS not consumers tend to have a healthier overall diet so there is that confounding but clinical trials show that if you add nuts your diet are included you do not gain weight now that might be partly because of the mechanisms that we've talked about to do with the food Matrix that 20 to 30% of the calories are being excreted so the backup pack labeling shows that

per portion of n is 170 calories but actually on average you only absorb 130 calories so lots of it's coming out it might be because you know they're feeding the microbiome that's helping you know reduce adiposity it's also nuts a satiating so they make you feel more full they also blunt your blood sugar response they have so many other benefits that counterbalance any potential for weight game and is there anything else on the Nutrabolics list um that is worth highlighting I would say that I think there's still lots of confusion around saturated fat okay and

around cholesterol so cholesterol I went and did a blood test and uh the doctor said to me that one of my cholesterol was a little bit on the higher side this was last year so and think it was the is it the HDL cholesterol I don't know the way that I experienced it was there's this good cholesterol and this bad cholesterol and like my bad one was like a little bit you know behave like it's getting a little bit into the region where he might have more of a Stern talk with me that was last

year I think I've done better this year but what is cholesterol and my simplified explanation of it is that is that flawed in some way good bad no it's always a little bit more nuanced a little bit more complex um but there are two ways that we can look at cholesterol we can look at cholesterol in terms of the cholesterol that we eat right and that's where I think there's a lot of misinformation and we can look at cholesterol in terms of the cholesterol that our body produces so our liver is constantly churning out cholesterol

when the liver CHS out cholesterol it packages cholesterol into to do two different kind of packages or two different types of parcels and the labeling so to say on these Parcels determines the health effects of that cholesterol so you've got your HDL cholesterol which we call our good cholesterol you've got your LDL cholesterol which we call your bad cholesterol okay so L is bad yes H is good okay they're actually the same in terms of the cholesterol but it's the label that's on the parcel the label in terms of which is directing where they go

which is different so in really simple terms LDL is directed um posted to your peripheral tissues to your blood vessels where it can be taken up and in the right um environment where there's inflammation Ox stress Etc can result in atherosclerosis which is that kind of furring of the arteries uh which over time can build up and can lead to you know heart attack etc etc okay HDL in very simple terms has a label on it that actually enables the reverse cholesterol transport so actually almost kind of cleans up some of the cholesterol this is

kind of in very simple terms so if any lipidologists are listening they might be a bit frustrated uh but in very simple terms and kind of brings it back to the liver for disposal okay so that's why it's considered good what we know is that the amount of LDL cholesterol that's circulating is really important in terms of our cardiovascular disease risk there are some cholesterol deniers and I know you've had on your show a cholesterol denier I don't believe in the evidence he presents I think that the totality of the evidence is very very clear

that as your LDL cholesterol increases your risk of cardiovascular disease your risk of all cause mortality increases where there is misinformation is around dietary cholesterol that there was this perception years ago that if you have foods high in dietary cholesterol like eggs yeah that it will increase your circulating cholesterol and therefore increase your risk of heart disease and therefore there was a limit years ago put on how many eggs we should eat how much cholesterol we should consume we now know within certain limits So within the limits that we typically eat our food containing cholesterol

that dietary cholesterol does not impact our circula cholesterol obviously at extremes it does but if you're having one to two eggs a day that's an intake of cholesterol that's not going to negatively for most people impact your circulating levels of this LDL bad cholesterol if you're having 10 eggs a day then I would be worried okay okay but yeah cholesterol is another area of neutrols and then you know on this whole area of cholesterol heart disease I think a really frustrating area of neutri bolics is saturated fat so we'll talk about saturated fats just so

I'm I'm super clear on the cholesterol Point what foods have really high levels of cholest L the circulating cholesterol in them okay so you've got dietary cholesterol which is just the cholesterol that's in the food yeah and that has very little impact on circulating cholesterol okay then you have cholesterol that the liver produces and the liver produces that from scratch and it's di how diet impacts the liver production that determines how diet impacts our circulating cholesterol so saturated fat increases the production of cholesterol by our liver and reduces the removal of cholesterol by our liver

highly refined carbohydrates can also increase the production of cholesterol by our liver so when we're thinking about how diet impacts our cholesterol particularly our LDL so our bad cholesterol we don't need to F worry so much about dietary cholesterol I how much cholesterol is in a food Because unless it's extreme it will have a minimal impact we need to think about how much saturated fat for example we're having because that's one of the main dietary determents of our cholesterol level okay and what is a saturated fat so versus like a normal fat like is there

good and bad fats yes they good and bad fats all of the fats that we eat or 98% of the fat that we eat comes in the form of a molecule called triglyceride and a triglyceride has within it Three fatty acids and it's the mix of these fatty acids that determine the um Health properties of that triglyceride the Melt profile of that trde etc etc and there's lots of different types of fatty acids so you're probably familiar with amino acids which are types of protein MH and in the way that amino acids are what make

up protein fatty acids are what make up a fat and the quality of that fat and we typically uh separate them into three main classes saturated monounsaturated and polyunsaturated and you might have heard of those terms yeah Loosely yeah and saturated fatty acids differ in terms of their biochemistry and I W bore you with that um two mono and polyunsaturated fatty acids they also differ in terms of their melt profiles so like how hard they are or liquid they are most tend to be hard hence why most hard fats like butter you know most animal

fats which are hard at room temperature tend to be high in saturated fats mono and polyunsaturated fatty acids differ from saturated fatty acids in terms of their biochemistry in terms of their melt profile they tend to be liquid um and polyunsaturated fatty acids are a very special type of fatty acid because they're actually essential for us our body can't make them and so they're essential fatty acids and one of those is omega-6 which is the fatty acid found in sedol which is what people say is why seedor are bad for us which hopefully we debunk

there and saturated fat as a whole we know is linked to increased risk of cardiovascular disease increased risk of or cause mortality but there's lots of people that say you know we've got it wrong as nutritional scientists we don't know what we're talking about it because actually there's this metaanalysis that showed that actually saturated fat isn't bad for us and that's because when we think about the health effects of food we have to always think of that instead of what so there was some work that was carried out looking at hundreds and hundreds of different

clinical trials where they've replaced saturated fat in the diet with carbohydrates or trans fat or polyunsaturated fats or mon unsaturated fats and what this research showed is that if you replace saturated fats with whole grain carbohydrates you have an improvement in health if you replace saturated fats with poly or monounsaturated fats you have an improvement in health if you replace saturated fats with refined carbohydrates there's no difference so you could take that study and you could say and this is of hundreds of different studies and say saturated fats are really bad for us because we

know that if you replace them with whole grain or poly oron unsaturated fats you have a beneficial effect or I could take the same analysis and say oh saturated fats are fine nutritionists have got it all wrong because actually there's no detrimental effect if you compare it with refined carbohydrates and this is exactly what happened when this metaanalysis came out about probably about 15 years ago I remember looking at the headlines of two different papers I won't say what the papers are but one I would say is a little bit more evidence-based and one is

a good example of clickbait headlines they had totally different headlines one said nutrition scientists have got it all wrong we've been lied to saturated fats are fine the other said research again consistently shows saturated fats are detrimental to our health obviously that one's right and they're talking about the same study talking about the same study because it's the instead of what and that's really important when we think about the health effects the other thing that does complicate things a little bit of saturated fats is there's lots of different types of saturated fats we know that

the type of saturated fat matters but we know the food Matrix that it is in that matters and the dairy is a great example so you have cheese and butter exactly the same or almost identical fat composition to entirely different effects on our cholesterol so it is a little bit more Nuance than saying all saturated fats bad it depends on the type and the food it's in and what types of food have um saturated fats that have a less than healthy food Matrix so I would say the type of saturated fats that we want to

avoid are the saturated fats that are found in most animal products except fermented dairy except cheese except yogurt so beef Tallow I would say the evidence consistently shows is not favorable for our health lard mhm butter in large amounts um you know and then the meat that's the the fat that's intrinsic to the meat takes salami you can see the fat in there take steak for example you know cut off the visible bits of the fat it's okay in small amounts I'm not saying we should avoid it totally but if you have the option of

kind of cutting off trimming the fat then I would and then there are some tropical oils that are very high in saturated fat palm oil for example coconut oil although the JW is out on the health effects of coconut oil but palmo for example is very high in saturated fat we know it increases our cholesterol if you had to give me some principles for eating based on everything we've talked about today just like and I and I had to force you to just give me five principles for eating what would those five principles be five

okay I would say first and foremost find food or dietry pattern that you enjoy that brings you pleasure cookies okay but we are not these aren't exclusive to each other Stephen okay okay fine that brings me pleasure okay that's really important these are not exclusive okay so a dietary pattern that brings you pleasure because because food is there to be enjoyed and it will be a sustainable dietary pattern and because we know that consistency and sustainability is really important in how you eat okay second I would say think about how you eat think about how

fast you're eating slow down chew more chew more don't eat late at night try and eat within a 10 or 12 hour eating window and just on this t point you were before we started recording you you were saying that you wouldn't mind if I chewed some nuts and spat them out so you could look look at them um why does chewing more have a impact again just so I can I'm clear so chewing uh can impact how you break the food down yeah obviously uh but we also know chewing impacts your hunger and your

fullness signals so there's some evidence to show if you chew your food 40 times versus 15 times it can result in a difference in how full that food makes you feel okay so the chewing effect is sending some kind of signal yep yep to my brain yep again this isn't an area that I I have expertise in but that's what the evidence is showing so as well as your gut sending signals to your brain receptors on your gut saying whether you're full there's something going on when you're chewing your food as well that's important okay

um and chewing your food also changes the rate therefore at which you're eating so it changes your eating speed ah okay makes sense so on that second Point I've got slow down two more don't eat late at night and eat within a 10 to 12 hour eating window 10 12 hour eating window then the third would be Go Back to Basics yep have a good amount of fiber have a good amount of healthy oils that's your olive oils in your olive oil D I say it seed oils but olive oil I would say is the

king and queen of the oils um and you know have that balanced plate rather than obsessing over a single food okay number four don't think of food in isolation Okay think about your diet in relation to or alongside your sleep your stress your physical activity and number five can you remind me of what I've I've done yes so I'm 48 I'm in the depth of per menopause I'm one of those like 90% of people that have brain fog and memory loss so number one uh was food that brings you pleasure which is sustainable and allows

you to be consistent number two is really thinking about how you eat so slowing down chewing more not eating late at night and trying to have a a a shorter eating window of 10 to 12 hours number three was Go Back to Basics which is high fiber whole grains fruits healthy oils and overall just a balanced play and number four is don't think of your nutrition in isolation so think of it in the context of your exercise your sleep and all of these other lifestyle factors and number five don't deny yourself anything think think about

what you can add in rather than what you take away don't deny yourself anything so cookies are still on the menu occasionally yes you mentioned the um per menopause you said you're in per menopause currently how does that factor into everything we've talked about today and what is the because I've got this graph here that I'd found um about the menopause transition which talks about how different sort of things are happening inside the body you've probably seen this quite a few times before which I'll put on the screen and link below for anybody but what

is the relationship between my diet and my menopause journey is there anything to be aware of there is I mean that you know the menopause has a huge impact on how we respond to food it has a huge impact generally on all of these pillars of Health that we've talked about our sleep our stress our physical activity you know and diet and I think it's something we're talking about a lot more now and we should be talking about it a lot more now you know 50% of the population at some point are going to go

through the menopause and it's a transitional period of great disturbance great disruption and of great burden to many women and we've conducted lots of research uh at Z on the menopause and what we know is that prior to uh the menopause which is basically the point one year after your last menstrual cycle you have this per menopausal transition period where your estrogen and other hormones are fluctuating dayto day so it's like this roller coaster which I think your graph shows really nicely you've got this roller coaster of hormones and so what's happening is is your

estrogen isn't just slowly declining as you reach per menopause so that transitional period before your menopause but you're on this roller coaster um and it becomes more regulated after the menopause but you're still in that point where you're having less estrogen so less of the hormone that we know has such wide reaching effects and the reason that the per menopause transition as well as postmenopause period in a women's life is so important is because estrogen the hormone that fluctuates during the per menopause and then reduces and declines in postmenopause has effects all over our body

nearly every cell in our body has estrogen receptors so our brain um our blood vessels nearly everywhere so this roller coaster of estrogen during the per menopausal phase and also the reduction postmenopausally has far-reaching uh health effects so for example postmenopausally women are five times greater risk of having a heart attack now some of that's due to age but it's also due to the loss in estrogen women are five times more likely to have abdominal obesity which is fat around the tummy and that's because of estrogen's role in uh fat tissue deposition so where fat

tissue is deposited we see in our own Zer predict research Prem menopause women are doing well compared to men in terms of many of these what we call intermediary risk factors of cardiovascular disease blood pressure cholesterol glucose insulin Etc as soon as they hit the menopause suddenly they catch up with men and it gets worse and so suddenly their blood pressure is higher than men or their cholesterol is the same level as men so we see this as well in our zoedic research that postmenopausally and per menopausal people's cholesterol and their bad cholesterol their LDL

cholesterol increases by 25% and this is all related to the wide reaching role estrogen has in our body we also see the estrogen impacts and therefore the per menopause and postmenopause how we metabolize food so we see bigger excursions in postmill glucose and postmill fat after the menopause again it's all linked to the role that estrogen plays uh in our metabolism and then I think what's most important to be aware of regarding the per menopause and postmenopause phase is is the symptoms that women experience and we've done some research in 70,000 individuals where we've looked

at how prevalent these symptoms are we see that 99% of per menopause or women experience at least one menopausal symptom we see that 66% of per menopausal women have 12 symptoms or more and this has a huge burden we know from other surveys 10% of women leave the workforce during the per menopause and post-menopausal phase because of the burden that these symptoms have on their quality of life and what age does this typically occur the per menopausal symptoms so uh typically people become menopausal as in postmenopausal stop their menstrual cycles at 51 the menopausal transition

period can be anything from 2 to 10 years typically people would say maybe around the ages of 47 many women start to experience p menopausal uh symptoms and these include symptoms like brain fog anxiety memory loss irritability low libido change in metabolism um and now I'm in that PO menopausal phase and I've forgotten all of the others but there's about 50 symptoms that are recognized and we see in our own research that the amount of women experiencing symptoms is really high so we see that 85% of women are saying they have brain fog they have

anxiety they have memory loss it it's really high the amount of women experiencing these symptoms and what's really interesting is we know yes HRT so hormone replacement therapy therapy or MHT um uh can help reduce many of these symptoms but we also know that diet can help as well and I think actually see one of the most interesting things from our research looking at menopause and symptoms is that typically when we think of menopausal symptoms we think about hot flushes mhm and if I was to ask you actually I wished I'd have asked you before

I said that but if I was to ask you to if you were to think of a menopause symptom what would come to your mind first I would say hot flushes because that seems to be um the only time that people talk about hot flushes is when they're talking about menopause in my world and then I'd say brain fog yep and what's really interesting is hot flushers are the one of the least common symptoms about 40% of women in our research have hot flushes 85% have uh brain fog 85% have all of the other brain

related um uh symptoms and yet typically we always think about hot flushes and this is because there just hasn't been loads of research on menopause and so I think what's really exciting is there is now a lot more research on menopause so I think the future is really exciting but I think what comes with this is yet more neutrols MH and that's because I think there's this whole area of what we call menow washing I don't have you heard of menow i't stick menow for menopause in front of any product you can charge 10 times

as much I could call this a menopause tea it's actually Yorkshire Tea and it's a very good cup of tea I could call this meno tea and charge 10 times as much for that tea bag without any evidence because women are desperate 45% of women say their symptoms are so burdensome they'll try anything 10% leaving the workforce because of their symptoms and so we have to be really careful that we are only selling evidence-based supplements for which there isn't much evidence at the moment and I think that the evidence that an overall healthier dietary pattern

can reduce symptoms is the best way forward for now alongside for those who choose to hormone replacement therapy a recent survey showed that 30% of menopause women are trying herbal REM remedies 30% are trying vitamins and 51% are trying any kind of dietary therapy as an alternative to HRT that was in I news which kind of supports what you're saying that there's lots of people searching for because I think from the experiences that I've had with people talking to me about menopause it seems to be an incredibly confusing period of life where you can't make

sense of what's happening and all the old rules of just you know hit the gym and eat a bit healthier seem to go out the window because there's something deeper at play in your body so it's not that you're not eating right or it's not that you're not sleeping right it's a deeper hormonal fluctuation that you've actually never experienced before so of course you're going to be really confused and um quite easily uh gas lit as well I imagine because you know I've had someone say to me that they felt like they were going crazy

and then people started thinking they were just like kind of going crazy a little bit um yeah I think you know fortunately I think it's changing yeah but historically we didn't talk about it you know I vaguely remember my mom saying I'm really hot I'm having hot flush but we didn't talk about menopause we didn't talk about periods we just didn't talk about it in that you know when I was growing up and unfortunately my mother's no longer alive so I don't really know what she did go through and I want to talk about it

people are talking about it we have people like deina MCO who are amazing because they're getting women talking about it so we're no longer ashamed so I think the tide is really turning but menopause is this perfect storm because you have these burdensome symptoms and then you have alongside it which I don't think we talk about enough is these health effects that I talked about so women going for the menopause aren't sleeping I mean my sleep is all over the place honestly when I get a good night's sleep Stephen I feel like superwoman it it

I'm almost it reminds me the state I'm in at the moment is like how I was when I had kids where you know I'm getting four or five hours sleep then I wake up if I'm lucky I might get back to sleep so you've got women they're not getting enough sleep you've got women who often are feeling a bit depressed or anxious or you know losing their confidence because of their brain fog because of their memory loss because of you know their anxiety you've got the hormones changing your body composition suddenly you're eating and doing

everything the same but all the fats being directed to your tummy your hunger signals are mocked up your um desire to eat different food changes and we see this again in our own research that postmenopause women tend to eat a lot more sugary Foods than Prem menopause so you've got this perfect storm of things going on and then in amongst that do you really want to do some physical activity are you really motivated to start eating healthier and you know when you're exhausted and it goes back again to that importance of sleep and that interaction

of sleep with our food choices and how we respond to food there's so many things to think and I think it's really tough in that Perry and postmenopausal phase when your body's changing when you're tired when you're feeling a bit rubbish to also take control of your diet but it's the most important time because it's when your cholesterol increases it's when your blood pressure increases it's when all of this fat tissue around your belly is releasing harmful inflammatory chemicals Etc so it's when unfortunately we really do need to take stock of our physical activity of

what we're eating and our stress levels m but it's probably one of the most challenging times to do it as well you must be incredibly stressed through that period but also just thinking about your relationships if you if you're in a relationship in a heterosexual marriage with a with a husband who isn't going through that at that period of their life and you said there was a libido um issue that's symptomatic of menopause as well to navigate all of that and for the people around you to understand what's going on in your head must be

incredibly stressful incredibly stressful I'm I like I'm very um I feel very I don't know what the right words are here but I feel very um sympathetic because I can't imagine I don't think there's a point in the man's life where we go through such a profound change in our um hormones in such a confusing way all of a all of a sudden so it's like but I think Stephen if we raise awareness so that men are aware and they can support their partners and you know liido for you know as an example we see

in our own research whilst it might not be the most common women rate it as the most burdensome really so we monitor not just the prevalence so how common the symptoms are we also ask people how much impacts their quality of life and the per and postmenopausal women rate that as their what their symptom that has the most burden on their life because if I'm not slept and I'm not feeling sexy I'm not going to I'm independent of whether there's like a chemical impact on my hormone levels that causes my lowering of libido I'm not

trying to have sex you want to go to sleep I want to go to sleep yeah exactly so even if you know and especially I don't feel good I don't feel sexy I'm probably my mood might be altered and yeah you're tummy suddenly grow yeah it's not going to be so what do what advice do you give to those the women been going through that you said that you're on hormone replacement therapy yourself previously um and that's had a I guess a positive impact on your menopause Journey yes I still sleep really badly yeah um

I don't think HRT is the answer for everyone and some people can't take it if they're contraindicated with certain risk related to cancer um and some people choose not to take it and it certainly doesn't solve everything uh I do think the evidence is very compelling for reduction in many Sy sys I think the evidence is compelling um or increasing and building for the beneficial effects it also has on some of these health effects that happen during menopause like blood pressure cholesterol uh tummy fat so I've chosen to take it for both health and for

symptoms but there's reasonable evidence now showing that diet can help reduce symptoms there isn't a one siiz fix it's all there isn't a silver bullet but an overall healthier dietary pattern I believe can reduce menopause symptoms this comes from other published research as well as our own research that we've done at zoi where we've looked in a subgroup of individuals over 12 to 18 week period and looked at those who transition to a healthier diet they're actually following The Zo program but the underlying principles are the same for all individuals to follow a healthy diet

so increase plant diversity increase fiber a very kind of Mediterranean style diet and what we see in those people who are improving their diet they have a 35% reduction in symptoms now that's huge I do have to caveat that to say though that there wasn't a control arm so it's not a clinical an rcts we call it it's a a a study where we followed people at one point in time and collected data another point in time what we now need to do is repeat this with a control arm to see if we see the

same size effect but there are other studies that have in a randomized control trial asked people to follow the Mediterranean diet or control diet and they see a similar magnitude of around 30% reduction in symptoms which is huge and promising I think but I think where we have to be really careful with menopause because we are desperate because we're struggling I think we're really susceptible to marketing to this menow washing and I think there are so many supplements that are being sold as the Silver Bullet you know and I see it on social media and

I think firstly okay if it works for you great if you can afford it great but what worries me is people who are spending a lot of money that they could be using for a healthy dietary pattern or you know a gym membership or whatever on a supplement that there is no evidence of support and the evidence is very very weak except for a supplement called soy eyes of flavones there is very weak evidence that any other supplements will work consistently they might work for some people but consistently soy isoflavones yeah so soy isoflavones are

a particular chemical that are found in some foods it's a chemical that has a structure very similar to estrogen so actually binds to the estrogen receptors in the body which is why it has a beneficial effects on many symptoms now soy of Flavin are consumed in quite small amounts in the UK and the us we consume probably about one milligram a day on average in the Far East like China they consume about 70 milligrams a day as part of the natural diet so in those kind of countries they actually have a really low prevalence of

menopause symptoms compared to us they still have menopause symptoms but it's a bit lower than us what we know is that if you supplement people with soy ofl vones for the vast majority of people but not everyone it will reduce symptoms a little bit not totally but it can reduce symptoms and is your underlying how Health a predictive factor of the amount of symptoms you'll experience if I was if I'm obese and then I go into per menopause are my symptoms going to be more significant so that's a good question we've looked at how living

with obesity can impact your symptoms and we do see that if you're living with obesity you have a higher prevalent uh number of symptoms okay we see that if you have an unhealthy diet to start with you have a higher number of symptoms we see that if you have low physical activity you smoke Etc yes it's associated with higher symptoms this is all Association data though it doesn't show causality and it's really important to say that for quite a while I ignored my gut I ignored the role it plays when it comes to my overall

health and it wasn't until the team from Zoe came onto my podcast that I realized I couldn't ignore it anymore I was so impressed by Professor Tim Spectre and Professor Sarah Berry that I ended up investing in Zoe and they're now a sponsor of this podcast they help me to view my gut as the gateway to Better Health that when in balance my microbiome could strengthen my immunity elevate my mood and fight off disease which I now know to be true I trust zoee because they have one of the largest microbiome databases in the world

and when you sign up you'll get one of the most scientifically Advanced atome test kits on the planet and a personalized nutrition program to help you make smarter food choices and because you're one of my listeners use code Steven 10 for 10% off your membership head to zoe.com now we take our time when it comes to hiring at flight story because I fundamentally believe the success of a business is directly linked to how good you are at hiring and better hiring starts with smarter insights LinkedIn who's a sponsor of this podcast has some of the

strongest hiring data available to help you identify the best candidates for your business their platform will even pair you with those who match what you're looking for which might lie outside of the job description and More in their unique skills and interests because these days hiring isn't just about finding the most qualified person but also finding the one whose experience abilities and interests align with your company's Mission and it goes beyond candidates who are applying for jobs too in any given week 171 million members who aren't actively seeking jobs are open to New Opportunities find

your next great hire on LinkedIn and start today by posting your job for free just by visiting linkedin.com doac what is the most important thing we should have talked about that we haven't talked about Professor that's my formal way to trust me I think we've covered an awful lot and I think the thing that I would emphasize when people are thinking about their health thinking about their diet is firstly find what works for you MH find something you enjoy but I think I would say be really really careful of the misinformation that's out there really

careful and I would say also if you're going to make a change make sure it has a big enough size impact to Warrant the change you're making because there's a lot of advocates for this health optimization you know make this change and it will have this impact well if you're making a change that disrupts your life significantly but only has a 1% impact on whatever Health outcome you're interest in whether it's your cholesterol your own all energy or whatever is it really worth disrupting your life that much for that small change and I think that's

really important I hear so many times when I'm talking to other moms at schoolgate or that sort of thing oh my gosh I read this and I'm going to do this and you know it's going to be really hard but they've said it will help with this and it's like oh you're taking way pleasure and actually what is the gain and if the world is to move forward in a way that is positive in your estimation how does the world change and improve as it relates to all the subjects we've talked about today what is

that change you wish to see in the world in which you operate I would love to see a world where scientists food industry and policy makers work together I'd love to see a world where we encourage evidence-based science but scientists aren't scared of working with food industry for example a lot of people think the food industry is bad like it's this sort of evil guy who sat in this boardroom who's just counting money and just pushing whatever these little innocent children will put in their mouths and to make them addicted and give them neurod Divergence

and all kinds of other issues potentially a lot of people feel that a lot of this the food industry has become this sort of singular entity people think about in the sort of conspiracy theory internet and you kind of imagine it is like a guy in a boardroom in a suit who's just like cackling and laughing and and stuff like that um I think that I can't comment on their motivations for profit um I don't think I'm informed enough to comment on that but I do believe that the food industry needs to work with Academia

in order to solve the problem of the kind of foods that are out there we need impact from government though as well we need impact from policy makers we need to go back to Grassroots we need to be educating our children how to cook we need to be giving healthy School meals we need to be educating them in schools what is a healthy meal what isn't a healthy meal what is a healthy food but I think that something that's so important is this current state of fear I think I think we're in a perilous State

at the moment of there are some people making a lot of noise on in the media about scientists working with industry how any research funded by industry is there bias it's corrupt can't be trusted that's certainly not my experience it's not what I have ever seen from any other colleagues taking money from food industry in order to do studies we as nutrition scientists need to do studies we need to run clinical trials in order to look at how we can improve the a few to make it healthier the amount of funding we get from independent

government bodies it's tiny to get funding the amount of time we have to spend this academics writing grants to be rejected and rejected because the government invests so little in nutrition research we need to be able to get funding to be able to run studies to answer important questions the money and the experience I've had from those around me when we receive funding from research from when we receive funding from industry there is very limited involvement that they are allowed to have with what we do and the university ensure that we conduct the research we

do the analysis we publish the paper the industry funders cannot get involved in that process so I still see it as independent now there is discussion about are they setting the agenda of that research you know there's something we could talk about for days and days but I think this narrative that's out there that just because of studies being funded by the food industry is biased is wrong and I think it's unhelpful and it's putting these exposes that certain media p personalities are putting forward that if an academic has taken money from a food industry

that therefore they they cannot be advising us on food they cannot be trusted for their research I think that that's a real problem for us as nutrition scientists because it's creating a time of fear MH yeah I mean of course so yeah when you explain it through how these how these studies get funded then it makes a ton of sense and actually part of what I was thinking is the government should be doing a little bit more to fund these kinds of studies because I can't I don't really believe that you're going to get the

food industry to work together because again thinking about incentives if there's one serial company here and the other here and say there's 10 of them um how can you get all of them to agree to take yeah the two that don't win and then they keep their jobs companies are successful they get pats on the back so when we think about health interventions that the government have made over the years that been super effective they've come from like policy smoking is a good example that I always think about like the change in smoking in our

society because they made they banned smoking indoors and put things on the packaging and just change the sort of social narrative and all smoking companies tobacco companies had to sort of comply at once so and that's why I think all three have to work together government need to take big responsibility M now yeah and but I think that there has to be an acceptance that academics scientists can work with food industry and it doesn't mean that you're corrupt or corrup or are results of bias in any way we have a closing tradition on this podcast

where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question that's been left for you is what is something that you believe that smart people you care about disagree with do you know what I believe I believe that life can be simple that actually all that matters is that you have good relationships that you're finding joy in life and that we shouldn't over complicate things and if on my gravestone I have written Sarah was a nice person I would be very happy with that but a

lot of the clever people are interactive I think wouldn't agree that that's necessarily a good achievement in life but I see that as a great achievement what do you think they might want written on their gravestone instead you're smacking nervously I am is it that too obsessed with like impact and ego and those kinds of things is that what you're saying I don't know because the people I care about I don't think are egotistical I think we live in a society certainly in a society where we're mixing with successful people where there is a lot

of ambition where there is a lot of um emphasis put on your achievements where there's a lot of striving for the next goal striving for the next achievement and and maybe it's having had four years where I took a career break where I was care of my mom and together with the rest of my family we looked after my mom we kept her at home through a degenerative neurological condition and seeing someone change seeing someone lose the power to talk lose the power to eat lose the power to interact lose the power to do everything

that we take for granted I think has enabled me to not sweat the small stuff has enabled me to find joy in most things pleasure in most things and not strive for things that maybe in the past I would have perspective I think it's given me a perspective now don't get me wrong you know I you know I was nervous before coming on here so I sweated about that and you know I'm not saying that I'm always like like horizontally laid back by any means but I think it's given me a perspective on what matters

to me yeah and what matters to me and I think the greatest achievement in my whole life has been actually not becoming Professor which I'm incredibly proud of I'm from a workingclass family you know I was the first person in our family to ever go to university my mom and dad didn't have the privilege of staying at school Beyond 14 and I mean it saddens that they haven't seen this success saddens me very much and whilst The Pride I felt yesterday at the ceremony was phenomenal actually what I'm most proud of is the four years

that I cared for my mom and to me that's what matters and so that's why when I'm with lots of smart people and I think they're doing amazing things I don't have the same perspective sometimes I've probably don't care as much as long as I'm having fun and do you know what and I think I said this at the beginning I'm so privileged I get to do my hobby every day I love what I do I'm not doing this necessarily because I'm such a a selfless person that I want to improve everyone's Health yes if

that's a byproduct great but I get up and I love what I do I'm so excited by the science that we do and what drives me to do it is having been through that situation of realizing how delicate life is so just use the moment enjoy what you're doing at that point in time thank you so much um Professor congratulations on the professor didn't realize it was uh you other ceremony yesterday that's an incredible achievement I know that we're not we're not prioritizing the the achievements as much anymore but um incredible yeah it's it's incredible

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 25 years and the broader impact I think you've had on so many millions of people's lives now through now the content you produce but also all of the research that you've done firsthand so thank you so much for doing the work that you do thank you for uh Illuminating so many of these subjects to me today I actually said a message to my team before saying that um I've had lots of conversations about nutrition and

stuff but the the primary research you've done and the research you're continuing to do is so much of it it's completely new to me and that's quite hard when when I sit here doing this every day so it's been a an absolute Joy speaking to you and also not just from the information standpoint but from the broader philosophical idea of how one should approach their life and how one can approach their life has been incredibly inspiring so thank you thank you it's been a real pleasure to talk about so many things I'm passionate about we

shall do it again sometime thank you do you know that 80% of New Year's resolutions fail by February it's because we focus too much on the end goal and we forget the small daily actions that actually move us forward those actions that are easy to do are also easy not to do in life it's easy to save a dollar so it's also easy not to making one small Improvement each day one tiny step in the right direction has a big difference over time and that is the 1% mindset which is why we created the 1%

diary a 90day journal designed to help you stay consistent and focus on the small wins and make real progress over time it also gives you access to the 1% Community a space where you can stay accountable motivated inspired along with many others on the same Journey we launched the 1% diary in November and it sold out so now we're doing a second drop head Toth diary.com to grab yours before it sells out again I'll put the link below [Music] a [Music]