Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Leading Nutritional Scientist: Seed Oils Are Not Bad For You! Eating This Twice A Day Will Help Menopause! The Alarming Link Between Chewing & Belly Fat! About this episode Are seed oils dangerous? Is fasting the only way to lose weight? Is the carnivore diet the best way to eat? When health and diet advice has become a minefield, Dr Sarah Berry cuts through noise
Dr Sarah Berry is a Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at King's College London and Chief Scientist at ZOE. She is also the lead nutritional scientist on the PREDICT program, the world’s largest in-depth nutritional research programme.
In this conversation, Dr Sarah and Steven discuss topics such as, the dangers of late night snacking, the link between chewing and belly fat, how menopause affects your diet, and the truth about seed oils.
00:00 Intro
02:04 Two Decades Studying the Impact of Food on Our Health
04:52 What Is the Food Matrix and How Does It Affect Our Health?
07:03 Why Do We Need Processed Food?
08:15 When Is Processed Food Bad?
11:09 How Long Does It Take for My Brain to Realize I’m Eating?
11:54 Does the Food Industry Engineer Food to Be Highly Palatable?
14:04 The Importance of Eating Slowly
19:43 Research on Almonds and Why They Don’t Fully Break Down
26:15 The Role of Fiber in Diet and Health
29:00 Cardiovascular Disease and the Link to Unhealthy Snacks
32:51 Is There a Knock-On Effect From Having One Snack?
36:55 Does It Matter How Often We Eat?
39:05 Is Eating at Night Bad for You?
43:45 Sleep Is the Pinnacle
48:01 How to Handle Sleep When You’re a Parent
50:13 Stress and Its Effect on Eating
52:44 Sarah Still Makes Bad Choices
54:21 What Does Sarah Think of Diets?
57:52 Sarah’s Thoughts on Fasting and Calorie Restriction
1:00:44 What Is Social Jet Lag?
1:01:52 The Seed Oils Debate
1:17:53 Ads
1:18:46 The Lies About Dairy
1:21:10 Myths About Nuts
1:22:28 Other Lies We Are Told
1:22:40 What Is Cholesterol?
1:27:46 What Is a Saturated Fat?
1:32:26 What Foods Contain Saturated Fats?
1:33:32 Sarah’s Principles for Eating
1:34:53 Why Does Chewing More Have an Impact?
1:37:52 Menopause and Diet
1:42:29 When Do Perimenopausal Symptoms Occur?
1:45:48 The Confusion and Gaslighting Around Menopause
1:51:05 Advice for Women Going Through Menopause
1:55:21 Does Health Affect the Level of Symptoms in Menopause?
1:56:03 Ads
1:57:49 What Haven’t We Talked About?
2:00:32 How Can We Make the World Better?
2:04:41 Guest’s Last Question
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Transcript 23,352 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 If you go on social media, sea doors are toxic. Sea doors are going to give you Alzheimer's. Sea doors are going to give you cancer. But I've done lots of research and there is absolutely no evidence to show sea doors 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.
0:22 Steven Bartlett? So let's go into all of that.
0:24 Speaker 00 Dr. Sarah Berry is a renowned nutrition scientist and professor.
0:27 Steven Bartlett? 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.
0:35 Speaker 00 Yes.
0:35 Steven Bartlett? So let's start with the food matrix.
0:37 Speaker 00 That's so important because you can have two foods with identical blabbering, same nutrients and calorie value, but 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 that the timing of when we eat is really important. For example, we found that snacking after nine o'clock 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.
1:03 Steven Bartlett? Really?
1:04 Speaker 00 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...
1:31 Steven Bartlett? This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this 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 guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.
2:03 Steven Bartlett? Dr Sarah Berry, can you give me a little bit of an overview over what you've spent the last sort of 25 years of your career focusing on and understanding?
2:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I've spent 25 years, starting out in quite a specific area, looking at how diet impacts our cardio metabolic health. So by this I mean lots of factors related cardiovascular disease, like type 2 diabetes, our cholesterol, our blood pressure, our inflammation. And then 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, into how that actually impacts how we respond to food and the helpfulness of a food. Most of my work's been done through running clinical trials, so randomised controlled clinical trials where I recruit various people, get them to eat various things, do loads and loads of different measurements and look
2:53 Speaker 00 at how a food or a nutrient or a diet might impact a particular health outcome.
2:58 Steven Bartlett? 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?
3:08 Speaker 00 The key pieces are who you are. 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, backpack labelling, fat, protein, fibre, 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,
3:51 Speaker 00 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, I'm thinking about, are you jet lagged? 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? When did you do physical activity? All of that also impacts how you will respond to 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 dietary 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 emotionally? Is it because you're sitting with friends and it's
4:35 Speaker 00 part of that social experience?
4:37 Steven Bartlett? Mm hmm.
4:37 Speaker 00 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.
4:52 Steven Bartlett? So let's go into all of that. Let's start with the subject of the food matrix, which is a term I hadn't actually heard before until today. What is the food matrix and why do I need to know about that?
5:04 Speaker 00 So the food matrix, simply put, is 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, fibre, 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, vitamins, minerals, et cetera. But they're all encapsulated within the structure of a food. To think of an apple versus apple puree versus apple juice, they're all coming from the same food.
5:40 Steven Bartlett? Mm hmm.
5:41 Speaker 00 But they have a different structure. And the reason it's important is because we know that food structure modulates the helpfulness 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 unrecognizably 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.
6:11 Steven Bartlett? So.
6:13 Steven Bartlett? In simple terms, if I were to zoom in on a piece of food on a microscope.
6:18 Speaker 00 Yep.
6:18 Steven Bartlett? The way that 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.
6:27 Speaker 00 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 natic 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 pasteurisation for dairy, or, you know, extrusion for some carbohydrate rich foods. We use all of these different techniques that also change the food matrix.
7:03 Steven Bartlett? For better or for worse?
7:04 Speaker 00 It's a double edged sword.
7:06 Steven Bartlett? Right.
7:07 Speaker 00 And I think this is what we need to remember, that everyone's demonising at the moment. Old processed food, you know, it's killing the nation. Sixty percent of our energy is coming from old 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? Or we process it to make it edible? I don't want to go and eat a rice grain that's not been cooked. We make it safe. I want to drink pasteurised 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.
7:53 Speaker 00 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.
8:15 Steven Bartlett? And what is processing gone bad?
8:19 Speaker 00 I think processing gone bad is when you've changed the nutrient profile of a food such that it is unhealthy, so in simple terms, it's too much saturated fat, too much salt, too little fibre, 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 your brain to say, whoa, 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.
8:59 Speaker 00 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 increase the, what we call bioaccessibility, so the availability of some of the nutrients within a food as well.
9:16 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so I've got some snacks over in the corner of the room here, which I guess have been processed differently to have a different impact on, on me as the consumer. Gosh, these look delicious.
9:30 Speaker 00 Oh, I hope they're salt and vinegar pringles.
9:33 Steven Bartlett? You're gonna eat them? Look at this, oh my gosh. So I've got some mixed nuts here, and I've got some cookies, some little pieces of chocolate and 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. When you were saying that about something that makes you eat fast and not realise that you've even eaten, crisps were the first thing that came to mind for me.
10:05 Speaker 00 I love a crisp.
10:06 Steven Bartlett? You love a crisp, we all love a crisp.
10:08 Speaker 00 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 fibre, they've all got, well, certainly the chocolate and the cookie's got more sugar.
10:25 Speaker 00 Um. They won't have all of the wonderful bioactives in them. Um. And then with the crisps, depending on the type of crisps, it's probably quite high in cer- 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.
10:45 Steven Bartlett? Hmm.
10:46 Speaker 00 Which is partly because of uh the processing techniques. Yeah, if you take a whole food like a nut.
10:52 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
10:53 Speaker 00 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.
11:09 Steven Bartlett? You you mentioned something about my brain takes a little while to figure out that I've started eating.
11:15 Speaker 00 Yep.
11:15 Steven Bartlett? So if I started s- smashing these crisps down now.
11:18 Speaker 00 Yep.
11:19 Steven Bartlett? How long would it take my brain to realise that I'd started eating to sort of catch up and make me feel hungry?
11:24 Speaker 00 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 ten to twenty minutes for the fullness to really properly kick in.
11:45 Steven Bartlett? Mm hmm.
11:45 Speaker 00 Now, you could easily have got through those. Well, I could easily have got through all of these
11:51 Steven Bartlett? Mm hmm.
11:51 Speaker 00 in under that twenty minutes.
11:54 Steven Bartlett? 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 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 realised what was going on. And are they in some way designed to encourage that speed of eating and?
12:14 Speaker 00 So there are many people who will say the food industry has specifically designed these to make them firstly what we call hyperpalatable, so to have the right mix of fat, sugar, you know, carbohydrate, et cetera, to make them really tasty, and in this case, salt as well. Um.
12:35 Speaker 00 I don't think the food industry is out there to get us. I think that what the food industry were doing fifty years ago versus what they're doing now is quite different. But some people will 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 flavoursome, 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. Now, it's not, it doesn't take twenty minutes for all of the fullness signals to kick in.
13:20 Speaker 00 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 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, Stephen, you're full now. And these heavily processed snacks that you've got here would be typically absorbed higher up the gastrointestinal tract. 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 tract, where you've got more of these fullness signals, so giving you that greater feeling of fullness.
14:04 Steven Bartlett? My girlfriend has said to me for many, many a year that I need to eat slower.
14:08 Speaker 00 Yep.
14:08 Steven Bartlett? And I thought it was like a spiritual thing that she's into, to do with like giving the food gratitude, et cetera, et cetera. 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. And that there is a scientific basis for slowing down how fast I eat.
14:29 Speaker 00 Absolutely. We now know that eating rate's important. There's some fantastic work that's being done by a professor, Karen Ford, who's dedicated many years into researching this and looking at how changing the structure and texture of a food can modulate your eating rate. And how also your eating rate can modulate how you metabolise 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, your dinner, or any of these snacks, will also, without you consciously thinking about it,
15:11 Speaker 00 change how many calories you eat, might change how quickly you metabolise the food as well.
15:16 Steven Bartlett? What's the sort of knock-on effects there?
15:18 Speaker 00 So, the research that's been done by Karen Ford shows that, on average, if you change the speed in which you eat your food by about 20%, you reduce your calorie intake by about 15%. And that's due to where you're releasing your hunger hormones, how many fullness hormones you're releasing, et cetera. 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 Zoe Predict studies, at 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 to the slow eaters.
16:00 Speaker 00 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 that 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.
16:23 Steven Bartlett? See, I always made this like weird unfounded evolutionary argument to her. I was like, well, you know, in the wild, you've got to eat what you can, so people eat quick. But we're not in the wild anymore and the food choices that we have are drastically different now, so.
16:38 Speaker 00 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.
17:07 Steven Bartlett? What's an example of a soft textured food versus like a hard textured food?
17:12 Speaker 00 So we can use an example from a study that was actually conducted in nineteen seventy seven, and this was published in The Lancet. It was one of the first nutrition studies published in The Lancet. 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 it's a study by a scientist called Haber, where he fed individuals whole apples. He fed individuals the equivalent amount of carbohydrate from apple puree. It was exactly the same, i.e. same nutrients, same fibre, 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
17:55 Speaker 00 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.
18:10 Steven Bartlett? That's like three hundred percent, four hundred percent faster.
18:15 Speaker 00 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 who 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 two 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 so we predict research that actually this can really increase your hunger levels.
18:47 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
18:47 Speaker 00 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 glucose is going below your baseline levels. And so you get hungry, you go on to eat a hundred and eighty calories on average more at your next meal because of that. And so, I mean, this research from nineteen seventy seven, I think is fascinating. It's our first research really demonstrating the importance of food matrix. And then since then, I've now, over the last ten years, done lots of studies with nuts, with oats, for example, that demonstrate you can have two foods that have identical backpack labelling. Identical nutrients, identical calorie value, if you were to look at the back of a leg,
19:31 Speaker 00 but can have entirely different impacts in terms of how much energy you absorb, how you metabolise that food, how it impacts your hunger, how it impacts downstream health effects.
19:42 Steven Bartlett? And you've done some research on walnuts, right?
19:44 Speaker 00 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 in 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 crunch is because in almonds, like most nuts, like many plant-based products, there is a very rigid cell wall, okay? So that almond that 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.
20:22 Speaker 00 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, oh my gosh, I can't eat nuts, they're high fat, they're high calorie. Now, in all of those nuts, the fat's 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?
20:56 Steven Bartlett? A little bit. Yeah, yeah, I didn't swallow it.
20:59 Speaker 00 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 nut, the particles, i.e. the size of the bits that you're swallowing, that you've chewed, are about maybe half a millimetre to one millimetre in size. Now, given that this cell within, of an almond nut is about 50 microns, that means when you're swallowing, within that, what we call the macro particle, you've still 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.
21:41 Speaker 00 So they're what we call very low by accessibility, they're not very accessible to us, this fat. Now what happens is this passes through your gastro and chestinal 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 looked at your poo after.
21:59 Steven Bartlett? None of your business. I'm joking.
22:01 Speaker 00 Go and do that.
22:04 Speaker 00 But you should see some almond particles.
22:08 Steven Bartlett? Really?
22:09 Speaker 00 You know, like when I'm, you know, being a mum, when I've, I've looked at a lot of poo in my life through my work, but also through being a mum.
22:15 Steven Bartlett? I bet.
22:16 Speaker 00 You can see whole nut particles in the poo.
22:20 Steven Bartlett? So nuts, they just, is it, they just don't break down fully?
22:24 Speaker 00 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, et cetera. And then you probably break down about another 60 to 70% as it passes through your stomach, your small intestine and 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's 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.
23:08 Speaker 00 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, yep. So we're breaking it down to less than 50 microns. So that you're releasing all of the fat. So it becomes 100% bioaccessible, i.e. you absorb 100% of it. But they could have two identical backpack labels.
23:33 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
23:33 Speaker 00 Because they're the same ingredient. All that's happened is you've ground that nut to such an extent that you've released everything.
23:42 Speaker 00 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 gut microbiome, it's changing also how you, your blood changes metabolically in that about eight 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.
24:23 Steven Bartlett? Interesting.
24:24 Speaker 00 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 labelling that have different effects. And we've seen the same with oats. We've been doing studies as well where we feed people large oats, so kind of, you know, like the steel cut sort of old fashioned porridge, or you feed people finely ground oats. And so we've done clinical trials where on one occasion people come in and they'll have 50 grams carbohydrate for breakfast of these large oats, then they'll come in another day and they'll have exactly the same oats,
25:06 Speaker 00 but where we've 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 finely ground oats is enormous.
25:21 Steven Bartlett? And that's because of gut absorption speed?
25:25 Speaker 00 Yes. So with the nuts, what we're seeing here is a difference in the amount.
25:32 Speaker 00 As well as the speed, with the oats, what we're seeing is a difference in the speed. So we're seeing a difference in the rate. Because we know that the food matrix impacts the amount, i.e. with the nuts, the rate, i.e. with the oats, and as well as where the food's absorbed in the gut. And so you see about a forty percent difference in the postprandial glucose response. So this is the increase in circulating blood glucose after you've had these oats. We see about a fifty percent higher response from the ground oats versus the large oats. And that has subsequent impacts on hunger hormones, fullness hormones, insulin release, et cetera, et cetera.
26:15 Steven Bartlett? And what role does fibre play in this? Because fibre's becoming quite popular now. They're like putting it in drinks and stuff like that. And there was some candy in America when we were recording over in New York, which had like, it said like fifteen grams of fibre added to this like candy.
26:30 Speaker 00 So fibre's a really interesting one. And it's a really interesting one because we know we're not getting enough fibre. So we should be getting at least thirty grams of fibre in the UK. And it's similar in the US, we get on average about twenty grams of fibre. Ninety-five percent of us are not having enough fibre. Fibre 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 two diabetes, et cetera. You know, it's an amazing nutrient, fibre, and we don't get enough of it.
27:02 Steven Bartlett? 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.
27:09 Speaker 00 So it's good for us for many different reasons. And there's loads and loads of different types of fibre. And the different types of fibre are good for us for slightly different reasons. Really simply put, we've got soluble fibre. And that's great for us because it impacts things like cholesterol absorption, as well as other factors related to how quickly we metabolise food, et cetera. Then you've got insoluble fibre, which is the kind of fibre that, for example, are in those nuts. Because fibre in those nuts is actually the cell wall. So most cell walls of plants are just fibre. That's great for us because it's food for our microbiome. It helps bulk out our store, so reduces our transit time, how quickly the, our poo basically passes to our colon, reduces the risk of colon cancer and so forth.
27:52 Speaker 00 But largely because it is the food upon which our microbiomes have their party, produce all of these wonderful molecules that we know 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 fibre is going to improve our health. Having fibre that's added artificially back into food is going to be better than having no fibre. So the kind of bars that you're talking about that say are added fibre, great. Having fibre though from the whole food is always going to be better. And so with nuts, fibre is essentially the cell walls of the nuts. So it's having that role in reducing that bioaccessibility that we talk about at slowing those nuts down.
28:37 Speaker 00 So that's always going to be better, having that fibre in the whole food, in its original structure, in the way nature intended. But having any kind of fibre is better than having none. And in a nation or, you know, many nations where we're not having enough, if we can get some in our diet, even if it is processed fibre, it's better than no fibre, in my opinion.
29:00 Steven Bartlett? 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.
29:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, so this is one of my studies.
29:39 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
29:40 Speaker 00 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 twenty five percent 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 asked people to change twenty percent of their energy from either having typical UK snacks. Or having twenty percent of their energy from almond nuts for six 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.
30:25 Speaker 00 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 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 fibre.
31:09 Speaker 00 People had to eat twenty percent of their energy from these muffins, which my kids loved.
31:16 Speaker 00 Or twenty percent 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 mediated 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 thirty percent reduction in cardiovascular disease.
31:45 Steven Bartlett? That's crazy. In what period of time?
31:48 Speaker 00 Six weeks.
31:48 Steven Bartlett? In six weeks?
31:49 Speaker 00 And do you know what I think's really interesting about this is it's one simple, single dietary strategy.
31:58 Speaker 00 And snacks are under our own control, typically. What I have as a snack isn't determined by my fussy kids. What I 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 dietary 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 Almond Board of California. And they did fund that study, although the way we conduct our RCTs, the funders have no impact over the study design. Or, you know, they don't get to see the raw data or the paper before we're publishing it. But I just think it's always important to declare conflicts of interest.
32:39 Speaker 00 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.
32:52 Steven Bartlett? And we really are a nation of snackers. You highlighted one of the stats there that in the UK and in the US, about 25% of our energy comes from snacks. Seventy-five percent of the energy that's coming from those snacks is coming from unhealthy snacks. This was taken from the dessert podcast. 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 3 snacks per day, which translates to six or seven eating events a day. And this has massive impacts on our glucose spikes and drops throughout the day, causing metabolic chaos. And that's part of what I was thinking as I was thinking about this is,
33:35 Steven Bartlett? 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?
34:11 Speaker 00 So I wouldn't say that you've made 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 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.
34:53 Speaker 00 Because we know on average that, you know, seventy, seventy five percent of the snacks that we do commonly 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 of people snacking habits. Because it's not actually been looked at much. I mean, you'd think everyone snacks. You'd think that 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.
35:35 Speaker 00 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, eighty to ninety percent of people do have multiple eating events throughout the day. Are you taking these away from you for self-control?
35:54 Steven Bartlett? I am a little bit, yeah. I think the smell of the chocolate and the cookies is testing me. And in January, I'm not trying to be tested. There we go.
36:03 Speaker 00 And what we have never really fully understood is, is snacking per se bad, i.e. having multiple eating events? So eating six times a day, which we nearly do in the UK and the US.
36:18 Speaker 00 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'd 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.
36:56 Steven Bartlett? Okay, because 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?
37:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, I will always, as a cautious scientist, caveat it within reason. But our research showed people having six eating events a day, i.e. 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 outcomes.
37:28 Steven Bartlett? And this is, I guess, controlled for extreme cases where someone's maybe eating at 1am in the morning or 2am in the morning?
37:33 Speaker 00 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 nine at night. And we found that if you snack late at night-
37:55 Steven Bartlett? I feel attacked.
37:57 Speaker 00 And this is a lot 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 worse adiposity, so worse kind of fat around your belly, for example, and higher levels of inflammation, worse levels of blood lipids, so you know, cholesterol, that sort of thing. And we found that this was even if you were snacking on healthy snacks.
38:24 Steven Bartlett? Really?
38:25 Speaker 00 And this isn't especially surprising because there's this whole new area in nutrition called chrononutrition, 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 sync 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 nine o'clock isn't great for your health.
39:05 Steven Bartlett? Just to double down on that, I have had a longstanding hypothesis that when I eat later at night, it is making, it is basically increasing my belly fat. Now, 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.
39:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, that's kind of a simple terms, what's sort of happening. You know, our body needs to rest overnight, just like our mind does. Our cells, our metabolism needs to rest overnight. And if you're not giving your body, your cells, your metabolism, you've got microbiome, et cetera, 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 in, in one group of individuals having most of the calories earlier
40:18 Speaker 00 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.
40:36 Speaker 00 Woke up feeling less hungry. And this is why as well, the evidence shows early time restricted eating. So time restricted eating, where you're eating within a particular time window. Those people who are practising earlier in the day tend to do better in terms of the health outcomes, whether it's weight, inflammation, cholesterol, than those practising later time restricted eating, when they have their last eating event later in the day. And that's because they're eating in in time with their body clocks, with these millions and billions of little cell clocks.
41:10 Steven Bartlett? I have 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 four or five in the morning. And for some bizarre reason, if I'm, if I wake up at, say, four in the morning to go and get a flight, I am starving. But if I woke up at nine that same day, I would not be, I would probably not get hungry till about two 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 two P M.
41:50 Speaker 00 So I think there's probably a lot going on there. It's getting a little bit outside my 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 at 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 poor night's sleep, you tend to wake up more hungry than if you've had a good night's sleep.
42:35 Speaker 00 This isn't from my own research, I always have to caveat 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 King's College, London, by my colleagues called the Slumber Study. And this really nicely illustrates how just changing how much you sleep can change your dietary choices. And in the slumber study, they asked people who were short sleepers to practise sleep hygiene. They gave them no dietary advice. They just said practise good sleep hygiene, i.e. you know, no screens late at night, no physical activity, caffeine, alcohol, et cetera, late at night, dark and dream. And then they just monitored lots of different things in these individuals. And what they found was that those who were
43:20 Speaker 00 able to extend their sleep actually made healthier choices, such that they reduced, without being told to, their intake of free sugar by about 10 grams.
43:31 Steven Bartlett? Oh, really?
43:32 Speaker 00 Without being given any advice.
43:34 Steven Bartlett? So they slept better, they ate less sugar. They made the decision to eat less sugar.
43:40 Speaker 00 Without being told to.
43:41 Steven Bartlett? Hmm, that correlates. It's been such a revelation, I think, in my my life over the last, I'd say, two to three years, is realising the downstream impact of sleep and a bad night's sleep. Because it was one of the things I think, growing up, especially as an entrepreneur, when you're like consuming a lot of like hustle printer, you know, culture, and it's all like, sacrifice the sleep work seven days, that you assume is take it or leave it. Like, you assume it's often the first thing you think that you can sacrifice in the pursuit of productivity.
44:13 Speaker 00 Sleep.
44:13 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. Well, this is what I thought growing up. And then in the last couple of years.
44:17 Speaker 00 I think, sorry, all I think all 20, 30 years think that.
44:20 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
44:21 Speaker 00 Do you not think?
44:21 Steven Bartlett? 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. They...
44:43 Steven Bartlett? Probably see sleep as secondary 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 prioritise 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. My ability to think straight. My motivation to go to the gym that day. The work that I do, everything. So it's I've this been this big sort of radical adjustment where I now see sleep as actually. The the the starting point for all these other choices that I make, good or bad. And that's kind of what your work is highlighting.
45:22 Speaker 00 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 shifts, some people don't have a choice, they're woken up by their kids, et cetera. We need to look at our stress. I know that's one of the hardest things to change. We need to look at our physical activity and our diet, and they are all so interconnected.
46:00 Steven Bartlett? 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?
46:11 Speaker 00 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, postprandial 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 postprandial glucose response. Because postprandial is Greek for post meal, and so it's a term we use a lot in the science. And we looked at individuals. Post meal. 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's sleep.
46:53 Speaker 00 Their post meal 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 poorer 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. Because firstly, you're waking up and you're like, bloody hell, I'm hungry. Secondly, it's like, oh, I'm not having that healthy breakfast. I want that panachocla or, you know, whatever that's, you know, giving you that quick fix. And then you have it and you're going to have
47:34 Speaker 00 this massive blood sugar peak compared to if you'd had a good night's sleep and, and made a healthy choice, were less hungry, et cetera, et cetera. So it's like creating this perfect storm. And it's all started with your sleep.
47:48 Speaker 00 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 because I've not been, had the luxury of being able to collect the kind of data that we're now collecting.
48:01 Steven Bartlett? 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.
48:12 Speaker 00 My children never slept.
48:14 Steven Bartlett? They never slept.
48:15 Speaker 00 They did, obviously, but, oh, my lord.
48:18 Steven Bartlett? 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 consequences of sleep deprivation?
48:28 Speaker 00 No, because the first four years of my children's lives, 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 mum 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 mum. 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 mum, to be there for my kids. And whether it was because of sleep deprivation was also so bad that it was just like driving
49:10 Speaker 00 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 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 degenerative neurological condition and seeing someone daily deteriorate deteriorate like that.
49:43 Speaker 00 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 fog of whether it's that you're depressed or you're dealing with, you know, trauma, whatever, I think food is one of the last things that you think about making a priority. And I think it's okay.
50:12 Steven Bartlett? You know, when we talk about the health situation in the US and the UK with obesity on the rise and things like that, people are now pointing at things like a ZenPEC as the cure for that. But when you speak about the role there that stress and our lifestyles are having on us. And I was thinking about some of the stats that have emerged around anxiety in young people and them being more and depression rates globally. 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 ultra processed unhealthy foods that are being attacked a lot these days.
50:52 Steven Bartlett? I mean, to some degree, they are a consequence also of demand.
50:56 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely.
50:57 Steven Bartlett? So they wouldn't be making these things if people didn't want them 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 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.
51:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, absolutely. 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'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 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?
52:05 Speaker 00 Or rather, our taste buds, our brains are tricking us into thinking they're more palatable.
52:13 Speaker 00 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 recognise if I'm sitting there in the evening, I'm a bit stressed, I've got a work deadline. I don't want to eat nuts. I want to eat 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 o'clock at night, but in the moment,
52:40 Speaker 00 that's the choice I probably will make.
52:44 Steven Bartlett? Do you get frustrated with yourself because you know more about nutrition than most people on planet Earth? Yet you still find yourself making, at times, suboptimal nutritional choices?
52:58 Speaker 00 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, a bar of chocolate? As long as I'm not doing it all day, every day. And I think this kind of health optimisation around diet.
53:33 Speaker 00 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. And I worry that now there's a certain proportion of society so hyper-focused on that one percent 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 ninety five percent
54:16 Speaker 00 of what makes a food or a diet, and that's how we need to think about what we eat healthy.
54:21 Steven Bartlett? What do you think of diets?
54:24 Steven Bartlett? Because there's so many bloody diets, isn't there?
54:28 Speaker 00 I think that
54:33 Speaker 00 there's so much nutribolics out there.
54:36 Steven Bartlett? Nutribolics.
54:36 Speaker 00 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 diets, my view on diets, I mean, there are some that there's some good evidence, you know, eat planty, eat thirty plants a week, yeah, that's great. 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.
55:10 Speaker 00 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.
55:23 Speaker 00 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 time restricted eating, I think there's great evidence around time restricted eating.
55:52 Speaker 00 Now, much of it comes from very tightly metabolically controlled studies, you know, that are done in 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 four in the evening. Reduces inflammation, reduces body weight, improves blood cholesterol, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
56:09 Speaker 00 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 pub in the evening, not every evening. I want to live life.
56:22 Speaker 00 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 Zoe. We've done this study called the BIGIF 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 eight in the evening.
57:03 Steven Bartlett? Mm hmm.
57:03 Speaker 00 That's correct, isn't it?
57:05 Steven Bartlett? Sure.
57:07 Speaker 00 My perimenopausal brain cannot do maths.
57:11 Speaker 00 That's quite doable for most people.
57:13 Steven Bartlett? Mm hmm.
57:13 Speaker 00 I can have my breakfast at 10. I can finish my last meal at eight. I mean, yeah, I do like munching on my chocolate later 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 practised it within two weeks, they felt better, they had better energy, better mood. 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 practising time restricted eating, even if they're told not to change their calorie intake, just by limiting their eating window, on average, reduce their energy intake by about 300 calories on average.
57:51 Steven Bartlett? There's been a big debate around this, conversation around fasting and calorie restriction. And some people say that it's basically the same thing. And you've kind of proven that to some degree.
58:02 Speaker 00 So we know that in most instances, if you practise time restricted eating, you unintentionally reduce your energy intake. And the data shows that on average, from the studies that are published, it's 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 in body weight. But there have been some studies that actually control the amount of calories that people eat, but have some people having 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
58:43 Speaker 00 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.
58:52 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
58:53 Speaker 00 Independent of calories.
58:55 Steven Bartlett? Of calories. Okay. So time restricted eating has some benefit independent of calories consumption?
59:02 Speaker 00 Yes, but the bulk of the benefit is due to a reduction in calories. So there's some benefit independent to 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 time 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. And the importance of consistent eating patterns.
59:48 Speaker 00 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 meals and the next day you're having six meals and the next day you're having four meals.
1:00:00 Speaker 00 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 nine at night. If you're not a snacker, having me just vouch 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 around social jet lag. I don't know if you've heard of that term?
1:00:44 Steven Bartlett? Uh, I think I've heard of it. What does it mean?
1:00:46 Speaker 00 So social jet lag is where you have an inconsistent sleeping pattern throughout the week. So for example, for many, maybe twenty year olds or students, they might go to bed at a sensible time in the week and go partying and crazy at the weekend. Or for someone like myself, I go to bed late at night because I'm late night working, parenting, et cetera. And then at the weekend I catch up. So if you have more than about a one and a half hour
1:01:15 Speaker 00 increase or decrease in sleep between your workdays or weekend days, et cetera, that's called social jet lag. 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 Zoe Pritchard research, people who experience social jet lag, so have this inconsistent sleeping pattern, make poorer 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, our lifestyle, et cetera.
1:01:52 Steven Bartlett? What else is on your Nutrabolics list? What things spring 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 a incoming American, I guess he's a politician, RFK Junior 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 subsidised, they're very cheap, or 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 and it's almost impossible to avoid. If you eat any processed foods..."
1:02:29 Speaker 00 Sorry, I'm having to laugh. This is like Nutribolics beyond Nutribolics, but please...
1:02:34 Steven Bartlett? I mean, that's basically, he said, "If you're eating any processed foods, you're going to be eating seed oils." And he advocates for replacing seed oils with beef tallow, which in the UK is referred to as tripping, which is pure beef fat and is a saturated fat. And he's actually selling T-shirts, RFK Junior, at the moment that say, "Make frying oil tallow again." So, so seed oils. And 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.
1:03:10 Speaker 00 Okay, so seed oils, I think, is at the top of the Nutribolics list. It blows my mind what you've just read me. It seriously blows my mind. I've done lots of research on seed oils, so I can talk from my own research as well as all the evidence faces out there. There is absolutely no evidence, that is credible evidence, when interpreted in the correct way, to show seed oils are harmful.
1:03:37 Steven Bartlett? What is a seed oil?
1:03:39 Speaker 00 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 sunflower oil. The most common seed oils in the US are soybean oil, followed by rape seed or canola oil, followed by sunflower seed oil. And there's about three or four arguments that people use to say that seed oils are bad for us. And if you go on to 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, "Seed oils are toxic, seed oils are going to give you Alzheimer's, seed oils are going to give you cancer, seed oils are gonna kill you."
1:04:23 Speaker 00 You look at the evidence, it's totally the reverse. Now, you can have sensible, boring scientists like me say seed oils are really good for you. You could put that as one of your assets or whatever you call it, or adverts for this. So we could say seed oils are really good for you, Stephen. Or I could tell you, seed oils are toxic, they're gonna kill you. Everyone's trying to kill us with seed oils. What's gonna get more clicks?
1:04:50 Steven Bartlett? Probably the toxic seed oil narrative.
1:04:54 Speaker 00 And so the sensible science, there's no silver bullet. There's no like, you know, crazy inflammatory argument. The sensible science isn't gonna get the clicks. 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 oils and not what's dominating the headlines. So what people say in terms of seed oils is firstly, our intake of seed oils has increased a hundredfold
1:05:39 Speaker 00 the last twenty, thirty, forty, fifty 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, et cetera, et cetera. So it must be to do with the seed oils. Well, what else has changed in that fifty years? We're more sedentary, we eat loads of these other, these 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 sixty percent of the seed oil that we eat is actually in these heavily processed and unhealthy foods.
1:06:24 Speaker 00 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 seed oil, you see on the other axis, you know, over time you'll see, for example, like rates of cancer. And you see rates of cancer or rates of cardiovascular disease going up linearly with the intake of seed oil. But we have to think what else has changed in that time.
1:06:47 Speaker 00 The other arguments that they use are theoretical arguments based on biochemical pathways. And I spend an hour teaching this to undergraduates and I'm not going to bore you with that biochemical pathway. But they talk about the ratio of a particular fatty acid, which is omega six, which is found in high levels in seed oils. And omega three, which is another fatty acid. And they talk about how having lots of seed oils changes this ratio, makes this pro-inflammatory state. Because it increases a particular downstream chemicals, et cetera, et cetera. What we know from kind of theoretical biochemical pathways and enzymes, et cetera.
1:07:32 Speaker 00 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 oils 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 inflammatory circulating molecules actually reduce. And yet they use this kind of theoretical argument.
1:08:16 Speaker 00 Or what they've seen in a petri dish, for example, or in a test tube.
1:08:20 Steven Bartlett? So where has this narrative come from? Where did it originate from that seed oils were were toxic? Was it just one of those things that just snowballed?
1:08:27 Speaker 00 I think it's one of those things that snowballed. And I think it does fit in with the whole argument that people are using against ultra-processed food. It does fit in with other narratives that are going on. I think some people can be very clever and cherry picking research. So there's a study called the Sydney Heart Study. And in this study, this was done in the seventies. And this is a study that's used often to advocate for the toxic effects of seed oils. And in this study, males that had had a heart event or a heart attack of sorts. Were randomly allocated to either increase their.
1:09:13 Speaker 00 Omega six, so this particular type of fatty acid that we is in seed oils. In their diet by having lots of seed oil. 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 fats.
1:09:51 Steven Bartlett? Heard of the word, yeah.
1:09:52 Speaker 00 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 for us. 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 nutribollocks that's out there.
1:10:24 Steven Bartlett? 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, they look at like fifty studies at once?
1:10:42 Speaker 00 So they're meta analysis. So we do randomized control trials. So these will be trials where there's always a control arm. We'll randomly allocate some people to an intervention like seed oils and some people to a 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 meta analysis.
1:11:21 Speaker 00 And we look, what does the meta analysis show? So for example, for seed oils, there's meta analysis, for example, of about forty two. Randomised controlled trials where they can play 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 fat, is full of palmitic 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 beef tallow was actually used, comparing seed oils with beef tallow.
1:12:06 Speaker 00 Seed oils always were, came out better. Seed oils always reduce cholesterol compared to beef tallow, reduced inflammation, et cetera, reduced cardiovascular risk factors.
1:12:15 Steven Bartlett? You're very passionate about this.
1:12:16 Speaker 00 I am, because I've researched, as a research active scientist, where I've run randomised controlled trials, and I tell you what, you sweat blood and tears. I love my research, but it's blimmin' 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 seed oil, I've got to think, well, how am I going to do that? What am I, 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's controlled? So once you've run studies yourself and you've sweated that blood and tears, and then you see this nutribolics, this misinformation out there, it's really bloody frustrating.
1:12:59 Steven Bartlett? Well, 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 salespeople that are ultimately going to like resonate the most, reach the furthest with their information, irrespective of whether that information is credible. So it's good to see more and more people that are in the research now sort of stepping away from their 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.
1:13:45 Steven Bartlett? 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 necessarily trust one source to be true. But I I I almost like wait the
1:14:02 Steven Bartlett? authority, experience and the rigor behind how they've arrived that that information.
1:14:07 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:14:07 Steven Bartlett? And then I guess I perform my own meta-analysis across lots of different people that I speak to and guess 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 pop up and 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 to decide what is true.
1:14:51 Speaker 00 But I think yours is more rigorous than most.
1:14:54 Steven Bartlett? Yes.
1:14:54 Speaker 00 Many people get their information from one source. Many people trust one source and
1:15:02 Speaker 00 you're right that us academics, we're rarely given a platform.
1:15:06 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:15:07 Speaker 00 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 i- in my case, you know, run clinical trials, interpret the evidence, evaluate the evidence, critique the evidence. And, you know, I'm self-taught 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.
1:15:49 Speaker 00 Like, I would have loved to have spent an hour telling you about the biochemical pathway of why seed oils don't impact inflammation.
1:15:58 Speaker 00 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, 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
1:16:42 Speaker 00 caveats, we'll present it with caution. And, you know, I will always say on, as I would 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. All of these trials showing seedles 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 non-active site 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
1:17:26 Speaker 00 study, so I'll talk with certainty over the seedle 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, sweated 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.
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1:18:47 Steven Bartlett? There's a lot of nutribolics around dairy, right?
1:18:48 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:18:50 Steven Bartlett? I think the prevailing nutribolics is that dairy is bad for you.
1:18:53 Speaker 00 Yep. So there's lots of nutribolics around dairy and it's related to the nutribolics 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 dairy 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, et cetera, et cetera. And grouping them all together is as ridiculous as grouping all
1:19:34 Speaker 00 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,
1:19:48 Speaker 00 Like yogurt, and I don't mean this really kind of heavily sweet and sugary yogurt. I mean like your Greek yogurts, your cafes, those sorts of things, your plain yogurts. 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 that cheese. We don't fully understand how. There's some great research being undertaken at Reading University, really diving into this. 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 in saturated fat.
1:20:30 Speaker 00 Now, have to caution that I'm not saying people should go and have, you know, three hundred 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 yogurt. Butter, on the other hand, we do know does increase your cholesterol. Now, if you're having it at the kind of level that you would maybe just putting it 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.
1:21:10 Steven Bartlett? And nuts. A lot of people say that nuts cause weight gain.
1:21:15 Speaker 00 No, the evidence does not support that. So we know that 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 tend to quite often have a lower BMI. Now, that could be confounded by the fact that nut consumers, and only about ten percent in the UK, and even less, about seven percent in the US even consume nuts. Nut consumers tend to have a healthier overall diet. So there is that confounding, but clinical trials show that if you add nuts to your diet, ours 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,
1:21:59 Speaker 00 that twenty to thirty percent of the calories are being excreted. So the backpack labeling shows that per portion of nut is a hundred and seventy calories. But actually, on average, you only absorb one hundred and thirty 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 are 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 gain.
1:22:28 Steven Bartlett? And is there anything else on the nutribolics list that is worth highlighting?
1:22:33 Speaker 00 I would say that I think there's still lots of confusion around saturated fat and around cholesterol.
1:22:40 Steven Bartlett? So cholesterol, I went and did a blood test and the doctor said to me that one of my cholesterol was a little bit on the higher side. This was last year. So it was the, is it the HDL cholesterol? I don't, 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?
1:23:16 Speaker 00 No, it's always a little bit more nuanced, a little bit more complex. But there are two ways that we can look at cholesterol. We can look at cholesterol in terms of the cholesterol that we eat.
1:23:29 Steven Bartlett? Right.
1:23:29 Speaker 00 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 churns out cholesterol, it packages cholesterol into two different kinds of packages or two different types of parcels. And the labelling, 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.
1:24:00 Steven Bartlett? Because L is bad, H is good again.
1:24:02 Speaker 00 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, posted to your peripheral tissues, to your blood vessels, where it can be taken up and in the right environment where there's inflammation or stress, et cetera, can result in atherosclerosis, which is that kind of furring of the arteries, which over time can build up and can lead to a, you know, heart attack, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. HDL in very simple terms has a label on it that actually enables the reverse cholesterol
1:24:44 Speaker 00 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, 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.
1:25:26 Speaker 00 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 circulating cholesterol. Obviously, at extremes it does, but if you're having one to two eggs a day, that's an intake
1:26:08 Speaker 00 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's another area of nutraceuticals. And then, you know, on this whole area of cholesterol, heart disease, I think a really frustrating area of nutraceuticals is saturated fat.
1:26:35 Steven Bartlett? So we'll talk about saturated fats, just so I'm super clear on the cholesterol point. What foods have really high levels of cholesterol, the circulating cholesterol in them?
1:26:43 Speaker 00 Okay, so you've got dietary cholesterol, which is just the cholesterol that's in the food.
1:26:50 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:26:50 Speaker 00 And that has very little impact on circulating cholesterol.
1:26:54 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:26:54 Speaker 00 Then you have cholesterol that the liver produces, and the liver produces that from scratch. And it's 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 LDLs, our bad cholesterol, we don't need to worry so much about dietary cholesterol, i.e. how much cholesterol's in a food, because unless it's extreme, it will have a minimal impact.
1:27:39 Speaker 00 We need to think about how much saturated fat, for example, we're having, because that's one of the main dietary determinants of our cholesterol level.
1:27:46 Steven Bartlett? Okay, and what is a saturated fat?
1:27:49 Speaker 00 So.
1:27:50 Steven Bartlett? Versus like a normal fat, like is there good and bad fats?
1:27:53 Speaker 00 Yes, there are 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 a triglyceride.
1:28:03 Speaker 00 And a triglyceride has within it three fatty acids. And it's the mix of these fatty acids that determine the health properties of that triglyceride, the melt profile of that triglyceride, et cetera, et cetera. And there's lots of different types of fatty acids. So you're probably familiar with amino acids, which are types of protein. 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 separate them into three main classes: saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. And you might have heard of those terms?
1:28:45 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, loosely, yeah.
1:28:47 Speaker 00 And saturated fatty acids differ in terms of their biochemistry, and I won't bore you with that. 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.
1:29:23 Steven Bartlett? Hmm.
1:29:24 Speaker 00 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 six, which is the fatty acid found in seed oils, which is what people say is why seed oils are bad for us, which hopefully we debunk that. And saturated fat as a whole, we know, is linked to increased risk of cardiovascular disease, increased risk of all-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 meta-analysis that showed that actually saturated fat isn't bad for us.
1:30:07 Speaker 00 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 fats or polyunsaturated fats or monounsaturated 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.
1:30:50 Speaker 00 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 polyomino saturated 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 meta-analysis 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 it's a little bit more evidence based and one is a good example of clickbait headlines.
1:31:33 Speaker 00 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.
1:31:49 Steven Bartlett? And they're talking about the same study?
1:31:52 Speaker 00 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 with 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's in matters and the dairy is a great example. So you have cheese and butter, exactly the same or almost identical fat composition, two entirely different effects on our cholesterol. So it is a little bit more nuanced than saying all saturated fats bad. It depends on the type and the food it's in.
1:32:26 Steven Bartlett? And what types of food have saturated fats that have a less than healthy food matrix?
1:32:33 Speaker 00 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 favourable for our health. Lard, butter in large amounts.
1:32:57 Speaker 00 Um, you know, and then the meat that's, the, the fat that's intrinsic to the meat, take 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 jury's out on the health effects of coconut oil. But palm oil, for example, is very high in saturated fat. We know it increases our cholesterol.
1:33:32 Steven Bartlett? 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?
1:33:47 Speaker 00 Five, okay.
1:33:50 Speaker 00 I would say first and foremost, find food or dietary pattern that you enjoy.
1:33:59 Speaker 00 That brings you pleasure.
1:34:00 Steven Bartlett? Cookies.
1:34:01 Speaker 00 Okay, but we are not, these aren't exclusive to each other, Stephen, okay?
1:34:06 Steven Bartlett? Brings me pleasure.
1:34:09 Speaker 00 That's really important. These are not exclusive. Okay, so a, a dietary pattern that brings you pleasure.
1:34:17 Steven Bartlett? Because?
1:34:19 Speaker 00 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.
1:34:31 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:34:33 Speaker 00 Second, I would say, think about how you eat.
1:34:38 Speaker 00 Think about how fast you're eating.
1:34:40 Steven Bartlett? Slow down.
1:34:42 Speaker 00 Chew more.
1:34:43 Steven Bartlett? Chew more.
1:34:45 Speaker 00 Don't eat late at night.
1:34:49 Speaker 00 Try and eat within a ten or twelve hour eating window.
1:34:52 Steven Bartlett? And just on this chew more point, you were, before we started recording, you were saying that you wouldn't mind if I chewed some nuts and spat them out so you could look, look at them. And why does chewing more have an impact again, just so I can, I'm clear?
1:35:06 Speaker 00 So chewing can impact how you break the food down.
1:35:12 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:35:13 Speaker 00 Obviously, but we also know chewing impacts your hunger and your fullness signals. So there's some evidence to show if you chew your food forty times versus fifteen times, it can result in a difference in how full that food makes you feel.
1:35:29 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so the chewing effect is sending some kind of signal.
1:35:32 Speaker 00 Yep, yep.
1:35:33 Steven Bartlett? To my brain.
1:35:34 Speaker 00 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.
1:35:49 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:35:50 Speaker 00 And chewing your food also changes the rate therefore at which you're eating. So it changes your eating speed.
1:35:58 Steven Bartlett? Ah, okay, makes sense. So on that second point, I've got slow down, chew more, don't eat late at night.
1:36:04 Speaker 00 And eat within a ten to twelve hour eating window.
1:36:07 Steven Bartlett? Ten to twelve hour eating window.
1:36:09 Speaker 00 Then the third would be go back to basics.
1:36:12 Steven Bartlett? Yep.
1:36:13 Speaker 00 Have a good amount of fibre, have a good amount of healthy oils.
1:36:18 Steven Bartlett? That's your olive oils and your?
1:36:19 Speaker 00 Olive oil, dare I say it's seed oils, but olive oil I would say is the king and queen of the oils.
1:36:28 Speaker 00 And, you know, have that balanced plate rather than obsessing over a single food.
1:36:36 Steven Bartlett? Okay. Number four?
1:36:39 Speaker 00 Don't think of food in isolation.
1:36:42 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:36:42 Speaker 00 Think about your diet in relation to or alongside your sleep, your stress, your physical activity.
1:36:51 Steven Bartlett? And number five?
1:36:52 Speaker 00 Can you remind me of what I've I've done?
1:36:54 Steven Bartlett? Yes.
1:36:55 Speaker 00 I'm forty eight, I'm in the depths of perimenopause. I'm one of those like ninety percent of people that have brain fog and memory loss.
1:37:02 Steven Bartlett? So number one 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 shorter eating window of ten to twelve hours. Number three was go back to basics, which is high fibre, whole grains, fruits, healthy oils and overall just a balanced plate. 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?
1:37:35 Speaker 00 Don't deny yourself anything. Think about what you can add in rather than what you take away.
1:37:43 Steven Bartlett? Don't deny yourself anything. So cookies are still on the menu.
1:37:50 Speaker 00 Occasionally, yes.
1:37:52 Steven Bartlett? You mentioned the perimenopause. You said you're in perimenopause 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 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?
1:38:22 Speaker 00 There is, I mean, you know, the 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, fifty percent 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 at Zoe on the menopause.
1:39:01 Speaker 00 And what we know is that prior to the menopause, which is basically the point one year after your last menstrual cycle, you have this perimenopausal transition period where your estrogen and other hormones are fluctuating day to day. So it's like this roller coaster, which I think your graph shows really nicely.
1:39:20 Steven Bartlett? Yep.
1:39:21 Speaker 00 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 perimenopause. 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 perimenopause transition as well as postmenopause period in a woman's life is so important is because estrogen, the hormone that fluctuates during the perimenopause and then reduces and declines in postmenopause
1:40:06 Speaker 00 has effects all over our body. Nearly every cell in our body has estrogen receptors. So our brain, our blood vessels, nearly everywhere. So this roller coaster of estrogen during the perimenopausal phase and also the reduction postmenopausally has far reaching health effects. So for example, postmenopausally, women are five times more at greater risk of having a heart attack. Now, some of that's due to age, but it's also due to the loss of 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 fat tissue deposition, so where fat tissue is deposited.
1:40:46 Speaker 00 We see in our own ZOE predict research, pre-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, et cetera. 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 ZOE predict research that post-menopausally and perimenopausally, people's cholesterol and their bad cholesterol, their LDL cholesterol increases by 25%. And this is all related to the wide-reaching role that estrogen has in our body. We also see that estrogen impacts and therefore the perimenopause and post-menopause, how
1:41:31 Speaker 00 we metabolise food. So we see bigger excursions in post-meal glucose and post-meal fat after the menopause. Again, it's all linked to the role that estrogen plays in our metabolism. And then I think what's most important to be aware of regarding the perimenopause and post-menopause phase 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 perimenopausal women experience at least one menopausal symptom.
1:42:11 Speaker 00 We see that 66% of perimenopausal 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 perimenopause and post-menopausal phase because of the burden that these symptoms have on their quality of life.
1:42:29 Steven Bartlett? And what age does this typically occur, the perimenopausal symptoms?
1:42:34 Speaker 00 So typically, people become menopausal, as in post-menopausal stop their menstrual cycles at 51. The menopausal transition period can be anything from two to 10 years. Typically, people would say maybe around the ages of 47. Many women start to experience perimenopausal symptoms. And these include symptoms like brain fog, anxiety, memory loss, irritability, low libido, change in metabolism. And now I'm in that perimenopausal phase and have forgotten all of the others, but there's about fifty symptoms that are recognised. And we see in our own research that the amount of women experiencing symptoms is really high.
1:43:18 Speaker 00 So we see that eighty-five per cent 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, can help reduce many of these symptoms. But we also know that diet can help as well. And I think actually, Stephen, 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. And if I was to ask you, actually, I wished I'd have asked you before I said that, but
1:44:00 Speaker 00 if I was to ask you, if you were to think of a menopause symptom, what would come to your mind first?
1:44:05 Steven Bartlett? I would say hot flushes, because that seems to be 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.
1:44:15 Speaker 00 Yep. And what's really interesting is hot flushes are that one of the least common symptoms. About forty per cent of women in our research have hot flushes. Eighty-five per cent have brain fog. Eighty-five per cent have all of the other brain-related 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's really exciting. But I think what comes with this is yet more nutribolux. And that's because I think there's this whole area of what we call menno washing. I don't know, have you heard of menno washing?
1:44:59 Speaker 00 Stick menno for menopause in front of any product you can charge ten 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 menoty and charge ten times as much for that tea bag.
1:45:14 Steven Bartlett? Because people.
1:45:15 Speaker 00 Without any evidence, because women are desperate, forty five percent of women say their symptoms are so burdensome, they'll try anything. Ten percent 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.
1:45:48 Steven Bartlett? A recent survey showed that thirty percent of menopause women are trying herbal remedies, thirty percent are trying vitamins and fifty one percent are trying any kind of dietary therapy as an alternative to HRT. That was in iNews, 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
1:46:34 Steven Bartlett? quite easily gaslit 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.
1:46:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think, you know, fortunately, I think it's changing.
1:46:50 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:46:50 Speaker 00 But historically, we didn't talk about it. You know, I vaguely remember my mum 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 Davina McCall, 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,
1:47:32 Speaker 00 is these health effects that I talked about. So women going through 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 of 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, are are 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.
1:48:17 Speaker 00 But all the fat's being directed to your tummy. Your hunger signals are marked up. Your um desire to eat different food changes. And we see this again in our own research, that postmenopausal women tend to eat a lot more sugary foods than premenopausal women. 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 about. And I think it's really tough in that perineum 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.
1:49:02 Speaker 00 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, et cetera. 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. But it's probably one of the most challenging times to do it as well.
1:49:27 Steven Bartlett? You must be incredibly stressed through that period, but also just thinking about your relationships, if you're in a relationship, in a heterosexual marriage with a husband who isn't going through that at that period of their life. And you said there was a libido 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 very, I feel very, I don't know what the right words are here, but I feel very sympathetic because I can't imagine, I don't think there's a point in
1:50:10 Steven Bartlett? the man's life where we go through such a profound change in our hormones in such a confusing way, all of a sudden. So it's like.
1:50:21 Speaker 00 But I think Stephen, if we raise awareness so that men are aware and they can support their partners. And libido, as an example, we see in our own research, whilst it might not be the most common, women rate it as the most burdensome.
1:50:37 Steven Bartlett? Really?
1:50:38 Speaker 00 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 perimenopausal women rate that as their symptom that has the most burden on their life.
1:50:53 Steven Bartlett? Because if I'm not slept and I'm not feeling sexy, I'm not gonna, 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.
1:51:05 Speaker 00 You want to go to sleep?
1:51:07 Steven Bartlett? I want to go to sleep, yeah, exactly. So even if, you know, and especially if I don't feel good, I don't feel sexy, my mood might be altered and I'm tired.
1:51:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, your tummy's suddenly grown.
1:51:18 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, it's not gonna be. So what do, what advice do you give to those, the women going through that? You said that you were on hormone replacement therapy yourself previously. And that's had, I guess, a positive impact on your menopause journey.
1:51:32 Speaker 00 Yes, I still sleep really badly.
1:51:34 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:51:35 Speaker 00 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. 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 symptoms. 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.
1:52:20 Speaker 00 There isn't a one size fits 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 Zoe, where we've looked in a subgroup of individuals over 12 to 18 week period and looked at those who transitioned to a healthier diet. They're actually following the Zoe program, but the underlying principles are the same for all individuals to follow a healthy diet, so increased plant diversity, increased fibre, a very kind of Mediterranean style diet. And what we see in those people who are improving their diet, they have 35% reduction in symptoms. Now, that's huge.
1:53:02 Speaker 00 I do have to caveat that to say though, that there wasn't a control arm. So it's not a clinical, uh, uh, an RCT, as we call it. It's a, a, a study where we followed people at one point in time and collected data at 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 a controlled diet, and they see a similar magnitude of around 30% reduction in symptoms, which is huge and promising, I think.
1:53:37 Speaker 00 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 meno washing. And I think there are so many supplements that are being sold, it's 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 healthier dietary pattern, or, you know, a gym membership or whatever, on a supplement that there is no evidence to support. And the evidence is very, very weak, except for a supplement called soy isoflavones. There
1:54:19 Speaker 00 is very weak evidence that any other supplements will work consistently. They might work for some people, but consistently.
1:54:26 Steven Bartlett? Soy isoflavones?
1:54:28 Speaker 00 Yep. 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 it actually binds to the estrogen receptors in the body, which is why it has a beneficial effects on many symptoms. Now soy isoflavones 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 70mg a day as part of their 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
1:55:10 Speaker 00 you supplement people with soy isoflavones, for the vast majority of people, but not everyone, it will reduce symptoms a little bit. Not totally, but it can reduce symptoms.
1:55:21 Steven Bartlett? And is your underlying health a predictive factor of the amount of symptoms you'll experience? If I was, if I'm obese and then I go into perimenopause, are my symptoms going to be more significant?
1:55:34 Speaker 00 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 number of symptoms. 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 high symptoms. This is all association data, though. It doesn't show causality, and it's really important to say that.
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1:57:49 Steven Bartlett? What is the most important thing we should have talked about that we haven't talked about, Professor?
1:57:54 Speaker 00 That's my formal way to trust me.
1:57:59 Speaker 00 I think we've covered an awful lot. And I think the thing that I would emphasise when people are thinking about their health, thinking about their diet, is firstly, find what works for you. Find something you enjoy. But I think I would say be really, really careful of the misinformation that's out there. Really careful.
1:58:25 Speaker 00 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 optimisation. 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 interested in, whether it's your cholesterol or your overall 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 mums at school gate 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
1:59:09 Speaker 00 really hard, but they've said it will help with this. And it's like, oh, you're taking away pleasure and actually, what is the gain?
1:59:18 Steven Bartlett? 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?
1:59:35 Speaker 00 I would love to see a world where scientists, food industry and policymakers 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.
1:59:59 Steven Bartlett? 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 neurodivergence 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.
2:00:29 Speaker 00 I think that...
2:00:34 Speaker 00 I can't comment on their motivations for profit.
2:00:36 Steven Bartlett? Mm hmm.
2:00:37 Speaker 00 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.
2:00:44 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
2:00:44 Speaker 00 In order to solve the problem of the kind of foods that are out there. We need impact from government though as well.
2:00:51 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
2:00:52 Speaker 00 We need impact from policymakers. 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
2:01:19 Speaker 00 people making a lot of noise on, in the media about scientists working with industry. How any research funded by industry is therefore biased, is 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 food, to make it healthier. The amount of funding we get from independent government bodies is tiny. To get funding, the amount of time we have to spend as academics writing grants to be rejected and rejected because the government invests so little in nutrition research.
2:02:05 Speaker 00 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.
2:02:37 Steven Bartlett? Mm hmm.
2:02:38 Speaker 00 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 a study is 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 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.
2:03:21 Steven Bartlett? Um hum. 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 cereal company here and the other here, and they say there's ten of them.
2:03:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, how can you get all of them to agree to take?
2:03:48 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, the two that don't win, and then they keep their jobs, their companies are successful, they get a pat on the back. So when we think about health interventions that the government have made over the years that have been super effective. They've come from black 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 changed the sort of social narrative. And all smoking companies, tobacco companies had to sort of comply at once.
2:04:17 Speaker 00 And that's why I think all three have to work together. Government need to take big responsibility now.
2:04:24 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
2:04:24 Speaker 00 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.
2:04:35 Steven Bartlett? You're corrupt.
2:04:36 Speaker 00 We're corrupt or our results are biased in any way.
2:04:41 Steven Bartlett? 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?
2:04:54 Speaker 00 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 overcomplicate 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 I interact with, I think, wouldn't agree that that's necessarily a good achievement in life. But I see that as a great achievement.
2:05:38 Steven Bartlett? What do you think they might want written on their gravestone instead?
2:05:44 Steven Bartlett? You're smirking nervously.
2:05:45 Speaker 00 I am.
2:05:47 Steven Bartlett? Is it they're too obsessed with like, impact and ego and those kinds of things? Is that what you're saying?
2:05:52 Speaker 00 I don't know, because the people that 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 emphasis put on your achievements, where there's a lot of striving for the next goal, striving for the next achievement. And maybe it's having had four years where I took a career break, where I was caring for my mum, and together with the rest of my family, we looked after my mum, we kept
2:06:34 Speaker 00 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...
2:07:05 Speaker 00 Things that maybe in the past I would have.
2:07:08 Steven Bartlett? Hmm, perspective.
2:07:10 Speaker 00 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 horizontally laid back by any means. But I think it's given me a perspective on what matters to me.
2:07:28 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
2:07:29 Speaker 00 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 working class family. You know, I was the first person in our family to ever go to university. My mum and dad didn't have the privilege of staying at school beyond fourteen. And I mean, it saddens me that they hadn't seen this success. It 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 mum.
2:08:07 Speaker 00 And to me, that's what matters.
2:08:11 Speaker 00 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 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 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 realising how delicate life is. So just seize the moment.
2:08:56 Speaker 00 Enjoy what you're doing at that point in time.
2:09:00 Steven Bartlett? Thank you so much, Professor. Congratulations on the Professor. Didn't realise it was, you had the ceremony yesterday. That's an incredible achievement. I know that we're not, we're not prioritising the, the achievements as much anymore, but it's incredible. Yeah, it's no, 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 illuminating so many of these subjects to me today. I actually said a message to my team before saying that I've had lots of conversations about nutrition and stuff, but the, the primary research you've done and the research you're
2:09:42 Steven Bartlett? continuing to do is so much of it's completely new to me. And that's quite hard when, when I sit here doing this every day.
2:09:50 Speaker 00 Thank you.
2:09:50 Steven Bartlett? It's been 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.
2:10:03 Speaker 00 Thank you. It's been a real pleasure to talk about so many things I'm passionate about.
2:10:08 Steven Bartlett? We shall do it again sometime. Thank you.
2:10:14 Steven Bartlett? 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 90-day 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.
2:10:59 Steven Bartlett? Head to thediary.com to grab yours before it sells out again. I'll put the link below.
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