Dr. Sarah Berry
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
But out of those, our current analysis, although we're still kind of crunching some of the numbers, we showed that having a healthier diet is the single biggest change outside of taking HRT that you can do to reduce your symptoms. But we do need to point out that this is data from what we call longitudinal data, where we follow people up over a period of time. We don't have a control group.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
It's not a kind of randomized control trial. So we can't say that this is conclusively causal evidence that changing your diet absolutely causes this amount of change.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So we looked at diet in a number of ways. We first calculated an overall diet score. And this is what we often do as nutritional scientists just to see, is there something going on? And there's different diet scores out there. There's scores like the Mediterranean diet score. There's scores like the PDI, which is the plant dietary index score.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And there's a score called the HEI, the healthy eating index, which is basically a measure of how well we're adhering to kind of dietary guidelines, for example, in the US. So we looked at a few different scores.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
They're all kind of the same in terms of that they are roughly encouraging, you know, very much high fiber, plant based, whole foods, low in ultra processed foods, low in refined carbohydrates in general. And what we found was that for every few point increase in these diet scores, you were seeing a reduction in symptoms.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Now, some of the symptoms were reduced to a greater extent than other symptoms. So there's some symptoms that diet seemed to have a bigger impact. So particularly the psychological symptoms, diet seem to have the biggest impact. So these symptoms are, for example, the mood swings, the irritability, the anxiety, as well as some of the other cognitive conditions like memory loss.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Oh, and now I'm forgetting. Every time I say the word memory loss, my memory loss part of my brain comes in. But that's where we seem to have the biggest impact for improving diet. What we also did is we did a deep dive into looking at individual dietary components.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And when we think about perimenopause, often people think about hot flashes, hot flushes, night sweats. That's the least common symptom. So as you said, one of our most common symptom was this weight gain and slowed metabolism. So there's different things going on here. We need to step back and firstly think, well, what is the role of oestrogen in our body?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So having seen that on average, if you're following a healthy diet, you experience about a 35% reduction in your symptoms, which is a huge, this is on average across all of the different symptoms, but some being greater than the other. We also saw that that reduction was of the same size, whether you were taking HRT or not, because this is something people often ask.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Again, because we had such a big cohort, we could adjust for lots of different variables. We could adjust, does this differ depending on whether you're on HRT or not on HRT? Those on HRT are obviously coming from a lower starting point in terms of how many symptoms they have and how burdensome the symptoms are.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
But what we found was that even if you're taking HRT, you still get this big improvement in symptoms when you follow this overall healthier diet. And then when we started to drill down into individual components, and we haven't published this yet, this is quite new analysis. What we found was that there were some foods that were associated with reduction in quite a number of symptoms.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So we saw, for example, seeds and nuts. They were associated with a lot lower prevalence of symptoms. We see that fruits and vegetables as well were associated with lower prevalence of symptoms. And we saw that some dairy products, so for example, the fermented dairy products like the whole yogurts and cheeses were also associated with lower prevalence. symptoms.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And then conversely, we saw that some of the starchy refined foods. So starchy, refined carbohydrate foods like white breads, white rice, white pasta are associated with greater symptoms and that some of the quite heavily processed foods that are high in sugar or high in kind of saturated fat were associated with more prevalence of symptoms.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So nothing kind of surprising in terms of it's kind of just going in a direction of a healthier dietary pattern. The strongest association was the seeds and the nuts. which I think is really interesting. But I wouldn't say there was a silver bullet as such that came out. But we're still crunching some of the numbers. This isn't published yet, this data.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
The role of oestrogen is to impact a whole wide range of different processes, different physiological processes, different neurological processes in our body. We actually have oestrogen receptors over nearly every single cell in our body nearly. So oestrogen impacts so many different processes in our body.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Yeah. So having done all of this work, looking at how many symptoms people had and the impact that they had on their quality of life, we started to learn what was really important. What were the most troublesome symptoms? And we started to also reflect and look at what questionnaires are out there. The questionnaires that are out there are developed in the 70s, for example.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So they're 30, 50 years old. They're using quite what I think is inaccessible language. I mean, they ask Questions like, what is your excitability levels? Now, as a female, if I was asked that, I would probably want to punch my GP, my doctor, for asking me that. You know, they were developed at a time where things were very different for women.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And so what we wanted to do is we wanted to develop a questionnaire that was informed by our science, that covered the most prevalent symptoms, that was user friendly, that used modern language, but that also assessed the impact that the symptoms were having on their quality of life. And so we developed this questionnaire and it's got 20 questions.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
These are what we find are the most common symptoms. So 20 different symptoms that we ask about. And then for each symptom, people tell us from a scale of zero to five, how much it impacts their quality of life. And then out of that, they get a score of 100 because you've got the 20 symptoms and the grading of five. And that grading of five, I think, is really important because
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
rather than just adding up the number of symptoms, because you could kind of have an endless number of symptoms, you know, because the oestrogen affects so much, as I said earlier, of our body, it's important to recognise what's the overall burden that menopause is having on you. And that's what that scale of zero to 100 gives to us.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And so, for example, if you're having really problematic sleep issues because of the menopause, that can affect everything. The next day can affect what you're eating, how much physical activity, your mood, your anxiety, your interactions with other people, your work, for example. If, however, you're experiencing problems with your hair and skin, which is a very common symptom,
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And this is why when you go through the menopause transition, which involves the loss of oestrogen, then you have such wide reaching impacts across your body. One of the things that oestrogen does, it has quite an important role in how and where we deposit fat. So where we deposit adipose tissue cells, these are fat tissue cells.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
It's unlikely probably for most people to have the same level of impact on your quality of life as just not sleeping due to menopause. So that's why we wanted to specifically look at what's the overall impact it has on your quality of life. So the Menoscale calculator gives you a score out of 100. It's available online. It's free to access for everyone.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And what's really important is it allows you to track your symptoms. And I think this is key because there's nothing out there that people can quickly access that returns a number that allows them to track their symptoms. And so, again, you know, when I think back to my own experience, a couple of years ago, when I started on the perimenopausal transition, I went to see my family doctor.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And they said, right, before you start taking HRT, track your symptoms, then we'll start you on HRT, then you track your symptoms. There was no way of tracking it. They told me I could go and look at this green scale, which asks me all of these, what I think using these outdated language. On a piece of paper, I was having to write down how I was feeling.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
The bit paper got lost in my kid's homework or something or somewhere at some point. And so the purpose of this is to create something that allows women to track, allows women to track in a consistent way by asking the same questions and as frequently as they want to. So what it means is it enables women to be able to work out what works for them.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So if they're put on HRT, so hormone replacement therapy, they contract to say, okay, is it helping? If they decide to make a dietary change, What's helping? Is it helping? How much is it helping? And because they're getting this score out of 100, what we also play back to individuals is how their score compares to an average person of their age, and depending on whether they're on HRT or not.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And then we also play back other information about what their most common symptoms are and how that compares to the general population. So by completing this Menos scale, women can be empowered to understand how menopause is impacting them and if any changes they're making are helping.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
There's also a consent box to tick when they do it to say that if they're happy to, they can share the data back with scientists, i.e. me and my team. So there's a kind of double benefit that they also become a community scientist because they share their data back with us, which enables us
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And really simply put, what happens is, is when you've got a good amount of oestrogen, so your premenopausal, the oestrogen kind of directs the fat around your hips. So we typically say, premenopause women have this pear shape look. So they have their fat around their bottom and their hips.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
I'd like to caveat with I'm not an expert in lean muscle mass area. I'm very quick to point out what I'm not an expert in rather than what I am an expert in. From what we have researched and what I know, I would totally agree with you that it's such an important age as you enter perimenopause and postmenopause. It's such an important age to maintain muscle mass.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
It's such an important age to be doing weight-bearing exercises to maintain bone mineral density because we know that also reduces during the menopause. And maintaining muscle mass is important, in my opinion, for peri- and post-menopausal women for a number of reasons, some of those that you've mentioned. but also to maintain insulin sensitivity.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And what we've seen very clearly with a paper that we published back in 2022, that people's insulin sensitivity, if you're peri or postmenopausal, is different if you're premenopausal. And so the more you can maintain your muscle mass, the more insulin sensitive you might be able to maintain. And we looked at people's post-meal sugar responses.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So we looked at their, what I call the postprandial glycemic response. So this is the circulating level of glucose after having a meal in that kind of two to three hours after you have a meal. And we looked at this in both pre-peri and post-menopausal women. We gave, it was about 700 individuals were given a standardized meal. that contained a really high carbohydrate load.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So it had about 80 grams of carbohydrate. And then we measured over the next four hours how their blood glucose changed in response to that meal. And what we found is the peri and the postmenopausal women had a lot higher blood glucose response to that standardized meal compared to the premenopausal women. Now, we do expect insulin sensitivity and muscle mass to change anyway as part of aging.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And because we know that menopause is an age-related event, what we wanted to do is think, okay, is there a way that we can see, is this due to age or is it due to oestrogen? Is it due to the menopause? So because we had quite a large cohort, we were able to take a subgroup of individuals and we were able to age match them.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So what we did is we took people who were aged the same, but half of who were peri or post and half of who were pre-menopausal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And what we found is even when we age match these individuals, that postprandial glucose response, so that increase in circulating glucose from the carbohydrate in the meal was still significantly higher in the peri- and postmenopausal women compared to the premenopausal women, showing that you're having this change in your insulin sensitivity in the way that your body is processing the glucose.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Now, as your oestrogen declines during the peri and postmenopause, you've no longer got that kind of protective effect of oestrogen driving the fat to sit there. It's then repositioned around your belly. What we know is that a fat around the belly, which we call visceral fat, and we call it visceral adiposity, if you have too much fat around the belly,
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So this also ties back to what we talked about right at the beginning to do with metabolism. as well as how this might be related to changes also potentially in lean muscle mass.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
I don't know how it would necessarily relate to the symptoms if we think about things like kind of brain fog, etc. We know that if you have very exaggerated, repeated, excessive
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
excursions so i mean increases and decreases in blood glucose that's related to all various kind of health outcomes so we know that if your blood glucose is elevated consistently and also you know you have these huge peaks and troughs we know that that is related over a long period of time to increased risk of type 2 diabetes obesity and cardiovascular disease we also know if you have big dips
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
in your blood glucose. And we've looked at this in peri and postmenopausal women. And we see that about 25% of them have these dips two to four hours after consuming carbohydrate rich meal. We know that if you have a dip or what we call a dipper, that that drives greater hunger, greater energy intake.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So people who are dippers tend to eat about two to 300 more calories over a day than people who aren't dippers. So that just shows how your blood glucose is controlling things like your hunger levels. We see that dippers have less energy. They feel less alert, etc.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So it's impacting kind of how they're feeling at a given point in time, but we know it also might increase your long-term disease risk. Whether it's worse post-menopausally versus pre-menopausal, we don't know yet. But what we do know is that these excursions, these peaks and troughs are more exaggerated in peri- and post-menopausal women compared to pre-menopausal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And you know, this is something we've looked at quite a lot in Zoe is at the dips because people think about it as kind of these hills and they don't think about it as the roller coasters. The roller coasters includes not just the peaks, but the dips.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And we've done quite a lot of work looking at who has dips, how big are the dips, how do they relate to how we're feeling, our hunger, our energy, our mood, and also does it vary day to day? And so we've got some really interesting data that we've just recently published showing that if you have a breakfast, for example, it causes you to have a dip that day.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So you have your breakfast, it causes a dip about two hours after the breakfast. you will go on to eat about 100 to 200 more calories that day than if the next day you select a breakfast that doesn't cause a dip. So in simple terms, going back to what you said, if you can prevent the roller coaster, so you can just go on a nice...
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
car ride along some undulating hills rather than having this roller coaster then you can reduce your energy intake um potentially as well as hopefully you know impact other health aspects the only thing i would say drew is i think that there's a lot of attention at the moment on post-prandial glycaemia on blood sugar. And I think we need to be really careful when we talk about it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And I always want to emphasize this, that it's a normal physiological response to have an increase in circulating blood glucose after a meal. We don't want to flatline. We don't need to be hyper-focused on it. It's one piece of a huge, huge puzzle. But I think the data that I've talked about today is just a nice way of demonstrating that we are seeing differences in how we metabolize food
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
in our metabolic health, in our postpartum responses. But I think we need to be cautious generally as a kind of health community, not to overemphasize just glucose as being something that we need to focus on singularly.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
We know that that's associated with really unfavorable metabolic effects. It's involved with inflammation. It's involved in insulin resistance, et cetera. It's metabolically very active, but in a quite harmful way.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Yeah, so Drew, I can actually give you an example for myself as someone... I can tell you what I used to have for breakfast before I wore a continuous glucose monitor and what I had for breakfast after I wore a continuous glucose monitor as an example. So typically for breakfast, I would have white bread. So that's refined carbohydrate.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And I might have some butter on it and maybe some jam or Nutella, for example. This is despite being a nutrition scientist for 25 years. It's what I enjoyed. Or I might have a pastry like a pan of chocolate or, you know, a croissant. I would feel by mid-morning absolutely rubbish. I would feel ravenous with hunger. I would feel irritable.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
I'd feel a little bit shaky because I was getting, which I didn't realize, low blood sugar. And I'd feel really grumpy as well. And I then wore continuous glucose monitor. I wore continuous glucose monitor about, must've been about four years ago.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And we actually know that postmenopausal and perimenopausal women are five times more likely to have that central visceral adiposity, so that fat around the belly compared to premenopausal women. So that's one thing that's happening. But what we also know is in addition to that, oestrogen's impacting lots of other areas. It's impacting our brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
This is having been a nutrition scientist for over 20 years by then, having been measuring people's circulating blood glucose, blood fat for many years, because my main focus previously was on postprandial metabolism. And it's the first time I wore it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And I had this eureka moment that, my gosh, whenever I feel grumpy in the day, whenever I'm ravenous in the day, whenever I'm getting kind of slight shakes, it's because I'm having a low blood sugar dip. Now, I should have thought of that as a nutrition scientist, but I'm too busy doing the science to think of myself now. So I changed my breakfast. I changed from these refined carbohydrates.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So the refined cereals, the refined, the white bread, the pastries, for example. And I made sure I was having a combination of nutrients that I know will be good for preventing this big peak, but also more importantly for me, the dips. This is making sure I was getting plenty of protein. plenty of good quality fats and plenty of fiber. So what I now have for breakfast is I have Greek yogurt.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
I have full fat Greek yogurt because we know that the saturated fat that's in fermented dairy, i.e. yogurt and cheese, doesn't raise cholesterol like other saturated fat. I have that mixed with nuts and seeds. So they're rich in fiber, they're rich in polyphenols, they're rich in protein, etc. And they're rich in healthy oils as well. And I might drizzle a bit of honey on, for example, on top.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
There's lots of other options you could go for as well. You know, you can have whole grain bread, you can have eggs with it, you can have avocado with it, etc., I think the key is to make sure that you're not having just a carbohydrate hit because it starts that rollercoaster off in the morning.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So it's making sure you're having healthy fats, healthy oils, and plenty of fiber in whatever way you like it personally.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Wow, that's a big question. There's lots that we know, but there's a hell of a lot we don't know. And this is the case, I think, generally in nutrition research, because it's a relatively young science, nutrition research, despite the fact that we all eat and we've always all eaten.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
It's only the last 50 years that I think we're really focusing and understanding the importance of diet on our health. And so we've got a lot of catching up to do. The same with the microbiome. It's actually in its relative infancy in terms of the microbiome as an area of scientific discovery. We're evolving our understanding very quickly.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
What we do know, and again, from our own research, but also published research, there's very, very strong associations between the microbiome and different health outcomes. There's very strong associations between the microbiome and diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So we published some work a couple of years ago in Nature Medicine, where we looked at how the micro composition is related to a whole host of different health measures. So these are kind of intermediary risk measures like blood pressure, like inflammation, like blood cholesterol, like insulin sensitivity, for example.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And we saw that there was a very close association between the different microbiome, so different species with these health measures. And we actually developed a microbiome signature where we found that there were some species that were associated with favorable measures of health, i.e. lower blood pressure, lower blood lipids.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So it's impacting our perception of hunger and fullness. And there's some evidence now emerging that actually food that would have kept us full when we were premenopausal
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And then there was another signature of species, so another group of species that were associated with worse levels of health, i.e. higher inflammation, higher blood pressure. And what we found is those species that were associated with favourable measures of health were also associated with favourable measures of diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And those conversely associated with unfavourable measures of health were associated with a poor diet. Now, this is association data. It's not showing causality. It doesn't show, okay, can you modify the microbiome through diet to change your health outcomes? This is where we're focusing our attention now.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And this is where many other researchers are focusing their attention, kind of trying to piece together that chain that you have. And I think that there's good evidence emerging now that if you can use diet to change the microbiome, that that will have knock-on effects in changing health.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And we certainly know from our own ZOE research as well, that by delivering personalized advice to individuals based on their microbiome of what dietary changes they should make to improve their microbiome, we see these changes coming out in their microbiome. So we know that we can deliver targeted dietary advice that will modify their microbiome.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Now, whether that is directly impacting their health is the next part of the chain that we need to show. But what we know from a study published this year, again, in Nature Medicine, it's from a randomized control trial that we ran where we randomly allocated people to either follow the ZOE programs, the personalized nutrition program, or follow the US dietary guidelines.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
isn't keeping us quite so full now because it's impacting our hunger this is new area of research you know we don't know conclusively yet but it's quite interesting what's coming out regarding and we hear anecdotally people say this you know i'm 47 i'm perimenopausal lots of my friends are talking about this they say oh but i'm eating exactly what i used to eat but i'm still hungry all the time it's changing our perception and
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
We found those following the personalized program that's very much focused around changing the microbiome that that resulted a change in microbiome composition and it did result also in a change in many health outcomes as well. Now, how it relates to menopause and aging, again, is something that not many people are looking at.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
There has been some research that's shown that postmenopausal women have a microbiome composition that's quite similar to an average male and that premenopausal women have a microbiome composition that's different to the average male and different to a postmenopausal woman. We also looked at this in our ZOE predictor research and we found something similar.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
We found that peri- and postmenopausal women have a different microbiome composition to premenopausal women. And what we saw was that there were some specific species that were increased in postmenopausal women.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And these species were the ones that we'd identified with our previous research as part of this kind of microbiome signature that we developed to be the ones associated with higher inflammation, higher blood pressure, higher cholesterol, etc., So they seem to have these species that I'm very loosely going to call bad bugs. Any microbiologist would probably hate me using that term.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
But the postmenopausal women seem to have more of these kind of bad bugs and premenopausal more of these good bugs. And then some real exciting research that we've only got the data from on last week, it's not published yet, is in our huge cohort, so these 70,000 women, we've also tried to look at how the menopause is related to symptoms.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
sorry, the microbiome is related to symptoms in the peri- and postmenopausal women. And so again, in this group, we see that there's a difference in the microbiome composition depending on whether you're pre- or postmenopausal. But what we also see is that you can partially predict how many and the burden of symptoms that women have based on the microbiome composition.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So what that says in simple terms that there seems to be something interesting going on where the microbiome is associated with these symptoms. Now, what we don't know is, is it actually just a byproduct that we know that diet changes the microbiome? We know that diet is related to symptoms, or is there actually a direct effect of the microbiome on reducing our symptoms?
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
That's what we're going to be analyzing over the next few months.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So I'm going to give you five tips that I cannot claim to be my tips. These are the tips that as a team we've built at ZOE together with my close colleague, Professor Tim Spector, and also Dr. Federica Amati. And these five tips are firstly, 30 plants per week. So it's the diversity of different plants. Try and have 30 different types of of plants per week.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And the reason is, is because we know that nearly every food has about 72,000 different chemicals that all interact with each other or have different roles. We want to get a diversity of these different chemicals. So that's the first thing, 30 plants, diversity. Second thing is fermented food. So there's good evidence to show that fermented food can modulate our microbiome.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Fermented food tends to be high in microbes. So by fermented food, it's most cheeses, kefir, yogurt, kimchi, kombucha, sauerkraut as well. So trying to get some fermented food, if you can, each day. Great way is a bit of kefir yogurt, if you like that, or having some fermented cheese. Third thing is eat the rainbow. This kind of feeds a little bit into that 30 and diversity.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
We've then got the fact that most, and again, we see 85% of women have sleep disturbances if they're perimenopausal. So you've got people not sleeping well. When you don't sleep well, we know that the reward centers in your brain are heightened. So what happens is, is the next day after you've had a bad night's sleep, your brain needs a quick fix. It needs a dopamine hit.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
But try and make sure when you're getting a diversity, you're getting lots of different colors. And the reason is, is because the pigmentation in plant-based foods... carries lots of wonderful attributes. So many of the bioactives as we call them, so the chemicals in foods that we know have wonderful biological properties in improving our health are colored.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And so if you can eat a variety of these, then you're going to get a variety of these bioactives. And these typically are polyphenols, although it's not only polyphenols. So polyphenols have different colors. Some are red, some are yellow, et cetera. But if you're eating a diversity of the rainbow, then you're going to get a diversity of these plant-based bioactives.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
The other thing is rest your gut. And there's really good evidence now, I think, to support having a period of time when you're not eating. Now, I don't mean fasting for three days and starving yourself. What I mean is not constantly eating food for like 16, 17 hours a day.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
What we know is that from, again, our own research and also published research, people eating late into the night and not allowing their body and their gut to rest, we know that they're at higher risk of many cardiometabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes. They tend to be overweight. They tend to have higher inflammation, blood pressure, etc.,
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So resting your gut by giving it maybe a 12 or if you're happy to a 14 hour period where you're not eating each day. So if you're giving a 12 hour period, that just means having your last meal at eight o'clock and your first meal at eight o'clock the next morning. If you're comfortable going to 14 hours, maybe just have your last meal at seven and don't have your breakfast till nine.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
It's got to work for you. And we've done this wonderful study called the Big If Study, the Big Intermittent Fasting Study, where we ask people, to change to eating in a 10-hour window, so fasting for 14 hours. Most people found it quite easy to do. You don't need to go to extreme. Then the fifth one is reduce your intake of unhealthy, heavily processed foods.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
We're eating too much of these kinds of foods. You can also call them ultra-processed foods. 50 to 60% of our diet on average in the UK and the US is coming from these unhealthy, heavily processed foods. We are eating an enormous amount. I mean, if I could give you one single thing, if I had to take a kind of punt on one, it would be reduce your ultra processed foods and the rest would follow.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Just one thing I want to pick up on that. It is really hard to change our diet. And I don't think we should underestimate how hard it is. It's hard because our food landscape is pitted against us. You know, if I'm out and about and I want to get a healthy snack or I want to get, you know, a healthy lunch, it's actually very difficult. And it's difficult also to change diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And so it's driving you to go and select foods that we know aren't very healthy. The refined carbohydrates, the pastries, the white bread, etc. And then what we also know is if you've had a bad night's sleep, your blood glucose response following a bad night's sleep is more unfavorable compared to if you've had a good night's sleep.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
You know, the diets that we were brought up with, the kind of foods that we're used to cooking with, it takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of brain space, and I don't think we should underestimate that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
I think the important thing is to say, try and just do something simple, because it's only by doing something simple that's easily implementable that you're going to actually have a long-term success.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
effect because it's only that that you can sustain and so something that we've been doing quite a lot of research on in my work at King's College London is looking at snacking and we know that on average 20 to 25 percent of our energy comes from snacks so they are a simple single strategy that we can implement to improve our health and we recently conducted a study at King's where we
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
It was a randomized controlled trial. Half the people consumed typical UK, US snacks. Half the people were randomly allocated instead to consume almond nuts. What we found was those that, and nothing else changed. We said, do absolutely everything else, eat all your other meals the same, do the same physical activity, et cetera.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Just by changing the snacks that people were eating reduced their blood lipids, improved their insulin sensitivity, reduced all these other kind of unhealthy aspects related to their long-term health. And when we equate that to the long-term risk of cardiovascular disease, changing from typical US-UK snacks to nuts reduce the risk, the estimated risk of cardiovascular disease by 30%.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And I think that's really powerful. So yes, I agree with you. It's hard to make dietary change, but you know what you can do. Find a simple, single strategy that works for you. And that's just an example of one of the kind of things you could do.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Okay, yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
But we energy matched. So it was a proper controlled trial. So both groups had exact 20% of their energy, either from these pre-provided snacks to represent the typical US and UK snack, or 20% from almonds. And they were asked to eat them all. And so if they were starting to feel full, then they adjusted what they ate at their next meal, i.e. whatever their main meal or lunch was, for example.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
But they had to eat all of these snacks. And we still saw that huge difference.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So that just shows how you've got all of these different things kind of intersecting. And then you've got things like anxiety, depression, low mood. Now, I don't know about you, Drew, but when I'm feeling fed up, the last thing I want to do is exercise. The last thing I want to do is think about eating a really healthy diet or not having that glass of red wine in the evening.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
I think that many practitioners need to get better training in the metaphors in diet. You know, in the UK, our family physicians will have a matter of less than 10 hours of training in diet and nutrition. They have apparently, as I've heard, it might have changed recently. two to three hours on the menopause. So I think firstly, they need to be better trained in understanding the menopause.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
I think that unless a woman is going through it, or is being very conscious in trying to teach themselves about it, then I don't think that it's easy to really understand what an individual experience is. So whether it's your physician or whether it's your husband, your partner, your friends, I think there needs to be a greater understanding of just how much it does impact women.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
In terms of hormone replacement therapy, I'm not a medical doctor. I'm a research doctor. So it's really important I caveat that I can tell you what I believe based on the evidence that's out there. And I believe that the evidence for hormone replacement therapy, if delivered
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
transdermally, so using like the gel or patches, if given at least within 10 years or even five years of people becoming menopausal, but preferably starting at the first stages of perimenopause, that there are benefits in terms of symptoms. We know that. That's, I think, irrefutable. Everyone differs in terms of how effective the hormone replacement therapy is. Some people have huge benefits.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Some people don't have a huge benefit. but on average, people will benefit. What we see from our data, and I think there's a growing body of evidence around this, but it's not conclusive yet. What we see in our data is if individuals are taking HRT, they do have lower risk of these intermediary risk factors. They have
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So you've got like this perfect storm of symptoms, lack of sleep, the estrogen driving your fat tissues to be in different areas. And all of this culminates in weight gain. And all of this culminates in different ways in how you metabolize food and your metabolism.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
In our data, lower blood pressure, lower visceral adiposity, lower bad cholesterol, the LDL cholesterol, lower inflammation, better insulin sensitivity. These are all risk factors for chronic disease.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
We cannot say conclusively yet whether taking HRT will reduce our risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, et cetera, because we haven't been studying it long enough in the way that it should be delivered. In the past, hormone replacement therapy was given orally as a tablet, which we know is metabolized very differently to how transdermally, so with the patches or the gel, it's metabolized.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
We know if it's given orally, for many women, it might not have the same favorable effects in terms of these intermediary risk factors because of how it's metabolized by the liver. In the UK, I don't know what it's like in the US. HRT is given transdermally now. It's not given orally because we know that it can have an unfavorable effect if it's given orally.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And so based on what evidence there is for transdermal, so the application to the skin HRT, I would say that there are discussions that every practitioner should have with a perimenopausal or postmenopausal women.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
as long as it's within 10 years of them becoming postmenopausal, about how it's going to improve their symptoms and about how it may impact some of these other cardiovascular risk factors. It's not licensed in the UK for prevention of cardiovascular disease. So I'm saying this with a note of caution and just telling you based on the results that we received.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
have here i take hrt that's my personal choice it's benefited me there needs to be those conversations healthcare practitioners need to be really well educated in how menopause impacts not just symptoms but their disease risk and what can be done whether it is hormone replacement therapy or whether it's alternative therapies i think what we haven't touched on though drew
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
and which I think is really important, is the whole area of these other therapies that people try, supplements. In the UK, we use this term called menowashing. I don't know if you've heard of it before.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
The reason I just want to touch on it before we finish is because something that I feel very passionate about is people being misguided. I think everyone should try different things, try what works for them. But I really worry about the amount of what I call nutra nonsense out there, nonsense related to nutrition. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone thinks they know better, whether they're,
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Even in science, or they just happen to have read some article that some famous model wrote that made her look as beautiful as she does, or goodness knows what. Everyone has an opinion. And because of this, there is so much neutral nonsense out there. and people are being misguided, and the menopause, given that it's a huge market now, it's a multi-billion pound dollar market.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
I worry, and I don't want people to be taken advantage of, and I think this is what people need to be mindful of. If you put menno in front of something, can we call it menno washing? You can charge five, 10 times as much.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
You can get a basic multivitamin mineral, stick menno, blah, blah, blah in front of it, charge loads more because peri and postmenopausal women who are suffering these symptoms, we're desperate. We want to do anything we can. HRT is one possible solution. But in addition to that, there can be some other solutions. But we need to make sure there's sufficient evidence for this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And in my opinion, apart from the evidence around soy isoflavones, I don't believe there's sufficient evidence for nearly all of the supplements out there to say that they benefit menopause symptoms. What I will say, though, Drew, and I think this is really important, we all respond so differently to everything. And it might be that...
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Something is working for your best friend and they feel amazing. Well, great. If they can afford it, go buy it if it's making them feel great. But it might not work for you. And I think it's to be really open minded that just because it works for one person doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work for you.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
and to be a little bit careful about some of the claims that are out there related to some of these supplements. If I was to recommend a supplement, the only supplement I'd recommend would be soy isoflavones. These are chemicals that are found in soy-based products.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
They have oestrogen-like properties because the structure of these chemicals is similar to oestrogen, so they bind to our oestrogen receptors. So what we know is populations like China and Japan who have a really high intake of soy isoflavones, they have a lower symptom burden. They have a lower prevalence of symptoms.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
What we do know, though, is the type of soy isoflavone and the amount is really important. And my colleague, Professor Wendy Hall, has done some great analysis on this where she's looked at all of the different studies. And what we know is that there's a particular type of soy isoflavone called genistein.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And that if your supplement has genistein at or above 15 milligrams per day, that's where we seem to see a consistent beneficial effect. If, however, it has a lower amount than that, it's unlikely for the majority of people. to have a big effect. And then there's one last really interesting element to this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
We know that also how you respond to soy isoflavones differs from one person to the other, and this is where the microbiome comes in, and I think is really exciting. So we have species in our gut, in our microbiome, that metabolize these soy isoflavones, and they can metabolize them to a really active form that binds really strongly to the receptors.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And these bacteria are called equol producers because from the soy isoflavone, they produce another chemical called equol. And this particular chemical is a really strong estrogen-like compound. It binds to the estrogen receptor really strongly. What we know is if you're an equol producer,
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So if you metabolize the soy isoflavones to Equal and you're supplemented with soy isoflavones, you have a 75% greater reduction in symptoms than if you're not an Equal producer. And the reason I want to mention that Drew is because that takes me back to my point a few minutes ago that everyone will respond differently. So for example,
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
If I went and started taking soy isoflavones and I'm not an equal producer, but my best friend started taking soy isoflavones and she had the gut microbiome species that enable her to produce equal, she is going to see a huge benefit. I'm not going to see such a big benefit. But that means that I shouldn't be advising her not to take it just because it doesn't work for me.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things we looked at, and this is in 70,000 women who we asked them lots of questions about their menopause symptoms, the impact they were having on their quality of life. And then we also collected lots of health data. So we collected data on their microbiome, their blood glucose responses to food, their BMI, their health history, etc.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So it's just giving that kind of, yes, let's be really cautious about menna washing. Yes, there's good evidence for soy isoflavones, but still there is this huge variability. What works for one person might not work for another person.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Give whatever you want to try, but be careful not to compromise on other areas of your life if you're kind of burning massive holes in your pocket with the money that you're spending on them.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Absolutely. And you know what, there's hundreds of studies, actually, randomized controlled trials looking at different supplements. Some show that there is a benefit from this particular supplement. Some show there isn't a benefit.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
The weight of the evidence, apart from soy isoflavones, I think shows specifically for menopause symptoms, there is no strong evidence to show any particular supplement exists. is really beneficial. And whilst you're absolutely right, there will be benefits to many of these supplements for other areas of people's life, like fish oil.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
There's great benefits in terms of inflammation, in terms of cardiovascular disease, et cetera. So, yes, that would benefit postmenopausal women at a time that they're increased risk of that. But in terms of symptoms, i.e., you know, preventing the weight gain or reducing the sleep problems, etc., I don't think there's strong enough evidence for many of these symptoms.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
But you can try and see how you get on. But just be careful spending 10 times as much just because it's got menno on the label. You know what? I was in our local supermarket last week and there's a whole area for menopause skincare and hair care. I mean, it blows my mind that, and it's a hell of a lot more expensive than the normal skincare or haircare.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Yes, we know skin and hair changes in menopause, but how we can be marketing an entirely different skin product on it, it's just... I might be missing something really obvious here, but it blows my mind that people, I almost feel being tricked into spending twice as much because it's got the meadow in front of it. So save your money, people. Save it for gym membership.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And then we looked at how do people's symptoms differ according to lots of these other factors. And what we found was that people, as their BMI increased, so as their body mass index, so they would be predicted to therefore have more adipose tissue, more fat tissue, as that increased, their menopause symptoms got worse. And it was kind of in a stepwise progression.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Yeah, thank you, Drew. So absolutely follow our podcast as well as your own podcast. We have some really great, insightful guests on, great scientists talking about all sorts of areas. But we do do quite a lot of focus around menopause and really diving into different areas related to women's health and menopause.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So for anyone that was interested in this episode, go listen to the Zoe Science and Nutrition podcast. We also have loads of resources on the Zoe webpages. So if you go to Zoe.com, you'll see loads of resources. And if you go to Zoe.com forward slash Menoscale, you can access our Menoscale. I'd love as many people as possible to start using our Menoscale.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
selfishly because i want people's data as a scientist but um selflessly because i believe it's really powerful for women to be able to start to have agency over their own change i'm also on instagram on dr sarah berry um i'm a bit of a typical academic i don't post as often as i should um but when i have a new paper out i do post on it um but on our web pages you can sign up through the men of scale as well to receive email alerts from us about new research coming out um
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And also all of our research is up there on our website. You can actually go into some of the individual papers that we've published if you want to be really geeky and do a deep dive.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Oh, thank you, Drew. It's been lovely to chat to you and great to share to your audience our research. So thank you.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So every time their BMI went up by a few points, so did their menopause symptoms go up. But this is what's really challenging. You know, ask a peri- or post-menopause or overweight woman will just go and lose weight and she'll probably throw her coffee at you. Because it's so challenging. So you're in this kind of vicious cycle where the...
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
living with obesity or living with being overweight is making your symptoms worse those symptoms for most people are then going to make it harder for people to lose weight and so i do think there has to be an element of being kind to ourselves as well as peri and postmenopausal women that look it is harder it is tougher it is a perfect storm the odds are stacked against you but having said that
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
there is still hope. There are still things we can do about it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So there's two core areas we've been looking at at ZOE. One is we've been looking at the relationship between menopause and health, so disease. So we've been doing some deep dives into looking at how menopause is related to disease risk factors like blood pressure, like post-meal glucose responses, etc., And that's a study we published a couple of years ago.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Estrogen. Estrogen loss, estrogen decline, estrogen fluctuations. But not estrogen only affecting our body weight and our metabolism, but affecting so many other areas that then interlink with this. You know, our metabolism, our body weight isn't just about how we metabolize food or what we're eating. It's so multifactorial and it's so interrelated to the other pillars of health.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And I'd love if we've got chance at some point to pick up on that, because I think it's great that we're talking about menopause more internationally. It's great that we're talking about symptoms. But what we mustn't forget is the impact that menopause also has on are disease risk related to metabolic diseases like cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes. But we can pick up on that later.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
The main research that we published recently over the last few weeks is some research that we have been collecting data on for about three years, where we've been asking women at a given point in time, What are your menopause symptoms? And then taking lots and lots of other measures. This is part of our Zoe Predict study, and this is a huge cohort of individuals.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
We have 200,000 individuals in total, some of whom we're following over a period of time. It's the largest in-depth nutrition and health study internationally. 70,000 of these individuals are perimenopausal women. We have about 30,000 that are perimenopausal and 40,000 that are postmenopausal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And this is really important because a lot of research looking at menopause and looking at diet or looking at other health kind of related factors or symptoms actually just look at postmenopausal, like how does this diet affect postmenopausal women? What we've done is we've got this huge 30,000 individual perimenopausal cohort and these 40,000 postmenopausal cohort.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And this is important because we know that the menopause transition period, i.e. when you're going from pre to postmenopausal is a really important time, particularly in terms of symptoms. And I'd love to just quickly pick up on that just in case anyone's not so familiar with these different terms.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
You don't go to bed one night and you're premenopausal and you wake up the next day and it's like, hey, I'm postmenopausal, great, it's all done. There's a transition period. And this transition period can last anywhere from two years to eight years for different individuals. On average, it probably lasts about three to four years, although it varies across different populations.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And during this transition period, this is when your oestrogen and other hormones start changing. But your oestrogen doesn't, again, just slowly decline in this lovely kind of linear way so that your body sort of gets used to it. It's like a hormonal roller coaster. It's like this chaotic time where your oestrogen is going up and down. It's fluctuating day to day.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
Then what happens is, is eventually the estrogen kind of settles off at a low level. And that's the stage at which typically your periods will stop and then We classify women as being postmenopausal when they're one year past their last menstrual cycle. So one year past their last period. But that kind of five years before them becoming postmenopausal is this stage of hormonal chaos.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
When you have these changes, these fluxes, et cetera, in oestrogen. So it's really important we look at symptoms in that perimenopausal phase, but really important we look at symptoms also postmenopausally. Because again, just because your oestrogen is no longer bouncing around, you do have very low oestrogen and it takes a while for your body to adjust to that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So symptoms still occur during the postmenopausal phase. So what we did is we collected data on these 70,000 individuals related to menopause and different exposures. So by exposures, what we mean is different factors that might be related to how people experience these different symptoms.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
And then we looked at how diet was related to it, how physical activity, how lots of different exposures, smoking, obesity, etc. And then in a subgroup of individuals of around 4,000 individuals, we followed them up over a period of time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
and we followed them up after they started to make changes to their diet they actually went on our zoe program which is a personalized nutrition program and we looked at how their symptoms changed over time and looked at how that related to the changes that they were making in their diet is it possible to extrapolate for our audience here what were some of the
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So our stress, our sleep, our physical activity, as well as what we eat. And we know that menopause impacts all of that. So we can deep dive a little bit into why. One thing just to pick up on, Drew, is actually it was over 80% of our women said that they were experiencing weight gain or slowed metabolism. Wow. That is huge.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
So we haven't done that specific analysis yet. We're sitting on this goldmine of data and we're only just starting to churn out some of the results. What we're doing is we're looking at each of the different exposures separately, looking at how they impact them. But the next stage is to look at that relative kind of weighting, what's most important, what's least important.
Dhru Purohit Show
Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry
What we know is that diet's playing a really big role. So when we look at the association between overall healthy dietary patterns, And symptoms, we see that that has a large role. We see that physical activity has some role, not as big as I thought it would have. We see that living with obesity has a role. We see that smoking has a role as well.
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!
If you go on social media, CEDAWs are toxic, CEDAWs are going to give you Alzheimer's, CEDAWs are going to give you cancer, but I've done lots of research and there is absolutely no evidence to show CEDAWs are harmful.
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!
You're overeating because your hunger signals haven't got there, but it's that rate at which you're eating.
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!
So we can use an example from a study that was actually conducted in 1977. 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 published. to show the importance of the food matrix. And it kind of got buried for many years. And it's a study by the scientist called Haber where he fed individuals whole apples.
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!
He fed individuals the equivalent amount of carbohydrate from apple puree. It was exactly the same, i.e. same nutrients, same fiber, same everything else in it. All that's different is the apples are hard, the puree is soft.
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!
And what he found was that those people who were given the puree, even though they were given exactly the same amount of calories, ate that puree, or rather drank that puree, three to four times more quickly than when they had the apples, the equivalent amount of calories. So they were eating the same amount of calories, but three to four times more quickly.
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!
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 that 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.
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!
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 story predict research that actually this can really increase your hunger levels. And so we know from our research, if you are a dipper, I'm a dipper, hence I get hungry quite often.
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!
So in about two hours, I'm going to be eating one of these. If you're a dipper, you know, your blood glucose is going below your baseline levels. And so you get hungry, you go on to eat 180 calories on average more at your next meal because of that. And so, I mean, this research from 1977, I think is fascinating. It's that first research really demonstrating the importance of food matrix.
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!
And then since then, I've now, over the last 10 years, done lots of studies with nuts, with oats, for example, that demonstrate you can have two foods that have identical backpack labeling, identical nutrients, identical calorie value, if you were to look at the backpack labeling, but can have entirely different impacts in terms of how much energy you absorb, how you metabolize that food, how it impacts your hunger, how it impacts downstream health effects.
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!
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...
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!
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.
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!
rigid cell wall okay so that almond that you've 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 um but there's thousands in there now each of those cells is smaller than a grain of sand
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!
And each of those cells is encapsulated, 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.
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!
When you swallow it, you chewed it a little bit, I assume.
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!
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.
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!
Now, given that this cell of an almond nut is about 50 microns, that means when you're swallowing, within that what we call a macroparticle, 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. So they're what we call very low by accessibility.
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!
They're not very accessible to us, this fat. Now, what happens is this passes through your gastrointestinal tract. Some of the enzymes can break down the cells a little bit. But actually a lot just comes out the other end. So I don't know whether you've ever eaten a bag of nuts and looked at your poo after.
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!
Yeah, so I've spent 25 years starting out in quite a specific area, looking at how diet impacts our cardiometabolic health. So by this, I mean lots of factors related to cardiovascular disease, like type 2 diabetes, our cholesterol, our blood pressure, our inflammation.
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!
Go and do that. But you should see some almond particles.
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!
You know, like when I'm, you know, being a mum, when I've looked at a lot of poo in my life through my work, but also through being a mum, you can see whole nut particles in the poo.
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!
So they break down partially. So you break down about 10% in the mouth before you swallow. So about 10% of the calories become available because the calories are contained from the fat, etc. And then you probably break down about another 60% to 70% as it passes through your stomach, your small intestine, your large intestine.
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!
But you have loads of material arriving at your colon, which is your large intestine, that's undigested, which is good for two reasons. One, because you're giving all of this food to your microbiome, which we know is great for your health. Your microbiome is having a party with these nuts.
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!
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.
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!
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, so we're breaking it down to less than 50 microns so that you're releasing all of the fat, right? So it becomes 100% bioaccessible, i.e. you absorb 100% of it.
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!
But they could have two identical backup pack labels 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. 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.
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!
It's changing also how 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 groundnuts or whole nuts. But once you grind it,
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!
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.
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!
But that's what I think is so fascinating about processing and about food matrix and why we have to move beyond thinking about food just in terms of the nutrients. Because you can have two foods with identical backpack labeling that have different effects. And we've seen the same with oats. We've been doing studies. as well, where we feed people large oats.
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!
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.
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!
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, but where we ground them.
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!
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.
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!
Yes. So with the nuts, what we're seeing here is a difference in the amount. as well as the speed. With the oats, what we're seeing is a difference in the speed. So we're 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.
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!
And so you see about a 40% 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 50% higher response from the ground oats versus the large oats. And that has subsequent impacts on hunger hormones, fullness hormones...
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!
So fibre is 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 30 grams of fibre. In the UK, and it's similar in the US, we get on average about 20 grams of fibre. 95% of us are not having enough fibre.
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!
Fibre is the one nutrient that we know consistently is associated with beneficial health effects, reduced reduction in many cancers, reduction in cardiovascular disease, reduction in levels of obesity, type 2 diabetes, etc., You know, it's an amazing nutrient fiber and we don't get enough of it.
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!
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, etc.
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!
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 at how a food or a nutrient or a diet might impact a particular health outcome.
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!
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.
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!
It helps bulk out our stool, so it reduces our transit time, how quickly our poo basically passes through our colon, reduces the risk of colon cancer and so forth. But largely because it is the food upon which our microbiomes have their part to produce all of these wonderful molecules that we know impact so much related to our health. But we don't get enough of it.
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!
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.
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!
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 bar accessibility that we talk about, at slowing those nuts down. So that's always going to be better, having that fibre in the whole food, in its original structure, in the way nature intended.
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!
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.
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!
Yeah. So this is one of my studies. Okay. And we looked at how changing people's snacks can impact their health. And the reason we're interested in this is because we're a nation of snackers in the UK, as in many countries. So we know that about 25% of our energy comes from from snacks. That's phenomenal.
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!
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 20% of their energy from either having typical UK snacks or having 20% 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.
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!
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?
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!
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.
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!
And then we designed a snack product that was quite highly processed that reflected that nutrient profile. So it's quite high in saturated fat, high in sugar, high in refined carbohydrate, low in fiber. People had to eat 20% of their energy from these muffins, which my kids loved, or 20% from the almond nuts.
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!
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.
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!
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 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!
And what we found was the improvement in blood vessel function following having almond nuts versus having typical UK snacks equated to a 30% reduction in cardiovascular disease.
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!
Six weeks.
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!
And do you know what I think's really... interesting about this is it's one simple single dietary strategy and snacks are under our own control typically 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
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!
And I think that that's really important. It is really important, though, Stephen, at this point, that I do say that I have actually had funding from the Alma Board of California, and they did fund 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.
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!
But I just think it's always important to declare conflicts of interest. We've seen this, though, play out in other studies with other nuts or other snack substitutes. So it's not unique just to almonds. It's a great illustrator of how changing our snacks can improve our health.
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!
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
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!
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.
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!
traditional way that we thought about food in terms of nutrients you know backpack labeling fat protein fiber carbohydrate but actually thinking about food in terms of the fact that on average each food has 70 000 different chemicals and these are contained within a very complex food structure which we call food matrix that modulates the impact that those chemicals and nutrients have
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!
Because we know on average that, you know, 70, 75% of the snacks that we do commonly eat in the UK and the US are not healthful 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.
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!
And we published some research recently where we looked in a thousand individuals at people's snacking habits, because it's not actually been looked at much. I mean, you'd think everyone snacks. You'd think there'd be loads of science out there about snacking.
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!
There's lots of science out there about the different, you know, foods that we might snack on, but not really much looking at snacking habits. And there's a lot of controversy out there about whether we should be grazers, and we are a nation of grazers. You know, we...
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!
Well, I certainly graze, but many people we know, like you said, 80 to 90% of people do have multiple eating events throughout the day. Are you taking these away from you for self-control?
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!
And what we have never really fully understood is, is snacking per se bad? Are you having multiple eating events? So eating six times a day, which we nearly do in the UK and the US. Or is it about the type of food we're snacking on? So should we revert back to having the three main meals, the breakfast, the lunch, the dinner? Or is it okay to have multiple meals as long as it's healthy food?
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!
So we looked at this in our cohort of 1,000 individuals where we take 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,
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!
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.
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!
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. 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.
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!
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.
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!
And we found that if you snack late at night... I feel attacked. 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 unfavourable health outcomes.
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!
So that's the second thing that we need to think about. So we've got who you are, the food that you're eating, but the complexity of that food, and then how you eat your food. And by how you eat your food, I'm thinking about your lifestyle. I'm thinking about, are you jet lagged? How much sleep did you have last night?
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!
So worse adiposity, so worse kind of fat around your belly, for example, 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.
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!
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.
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!
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. 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.
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!
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, your gut microbiome, et cetera, that time to rest, things get disturbed a little bit.
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!
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 and
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!
Dr. Sarah Berry is a renowned nutrition scientist and professor.
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!
But in one group of individuals having most of the calories earlier and in another group having most of them later in the day. Now, those that were having them later in the day woke up feeling more hungry, which is kind of like counterintuitive, isn't it? But it fits in with what you just said. Yet those people who were eating the calories earlier in the day woke up feeling less hungry.
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!
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 practicing earlier in the day tend to do better in terms of the health outcomes, whether it's weight, inflammation, cholesterol, than those practicing later time-restricted eating when they have their last eating event later in the day.
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!
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 a food. And then I think the last piece of the puzzle is so important that as nutritional scientists, I don't think we think about Why do you make the dietary choices that you make?
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!
And that's because they're eating in time with their body clocks, with these millions and billions of little cell clocks.
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!
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...
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!
And your fullness hormones change as you sleep. So we know that short sleepers, people who 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. This isn't from my own research.
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!
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.
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!
And in the slumber study, they asked people who were short sleepers to practice sleep hygiene. They gave them no dietary advice. They just said, practice good sleep hygiene. No screens late at night, no physical activity, caffeine, alcohol, et cetera, late at night, darkened room. And then they just monitored lots of different things in these individuals.
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!
And what they found was that those who were 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.
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!
Without being given any advice.
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!
Yeah, without being told to.
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!
But I think all 20, 30-year-olds think that.
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!
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 part of that social experience?
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!
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 at our sleep habits, which we can to a certain extent control. Not always.
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!
I know some people have to work shifts. Some people don't have a choice. They're woken up by their kids, etc. We need to look at our stress. I know that's one of the hardest things to change. We need to look at our physical activity and our diet. And they are all so interconnected.
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!
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.
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!
So this is some research that we published where we looked at people when they'd had a good night's sleep and we looked at people when they'd had a bad night's sleep. And we looked at their post-meal, post-prandial glucose response. So that basically means after having your breakfast, that's got some carbohydrate in it, how much does your blood glucose increase?
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!
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.
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!
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, their post-meal glucose response, so after breakfast, was a lot higher... than if they'd had a good night's sleep.
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!
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.
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!
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, I'm not having that healthy breakfast. I want that pano chocolate or, you know, whatever that's giving you that quick fix. And then you have it and you're going to have this massive depression.
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!
blood sugar peak compared to if you'd had a good night's sleep and and made a healthy choice for less hungry etc etc so it's like creating this perfect storm and it's all started with your sleep 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
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!
My children never slept.
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!
They did, obviously. But oh, my Lord.
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!
No, because the first four years of my children's lives, I lost my father when my daughter, a few weeks after my daughter was born, my sister and I became full-time carers for my mother who lived around the corner. 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.
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!
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 the sleep deprivation was also so bad that it was just like driving bad choices, I don't know. But there's points in time in anyone's life that we go through that are about survival, aren't there?
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!
And I think everything goes out of the window. And I'm not saying it should.
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!
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 like that, what you're doing physical activity-wise, well, I didn't have time to do that, what you're eating... quite often doesn't become a priority.
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!
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. 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 trauma or whatever, I think food is one of the last things that you think about making a priority. And I think it's okay.
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!
So the food matrix simply puts the structure of food. And it's really important because we know that food is so much more than just the nutrients and chemicals it contains. So we know that food contains nutrients that people are very familiar with, like protein, fat, fiber, carbohydrate. We know that food also contains thousands of other chemicals.
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!
Yeah, absolutely. Again, this is what the research shows, the sleep, the stress, it impacts everything. your ability to make choices about lots of things, but equally your food choices. You know, what you're talking about, I think, is so complex. It's where, where's the responsibility for the government? Where's the responsibility for the food industry?
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!
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
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!
areas in order to improve the foods that we're eating there is a problem that these three dishes so the chocolate the biscuits the crisps they are more tasty or rather our taste buds our brains are tricking us into thinking they're more palatable And that's a problem. Do we say to our children, you can never, ever have them? Now, I've certainly never taken that approach.
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!
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.
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!
But in the moment, that's the choice I probably will make.
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!
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.
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!
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 optimization around diet... I think is taking away the pleasure of food. And, you know, I often say for 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.
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!
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 that on that 1% gain in terms of the food that they're eating, that they forget all of that pleasure. So I think I have quite a balanced approach because I know that ultimately if you get the foundations right, the rest will follow.
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!
Many of these we call bioactives that you'll have heard of, like polyphenols, you know, vitamins, minerals, etc., 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, but they have a different structure. And the reason it's important is because we know that food structure modulates
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!
But that makes up 95% of what makes a food or a diet. And that's how we need to think about what we eat healthy.
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!
I think that there's so much nutribollocks out there.
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!
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 30 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?
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!
That's a whole other question. Great for losing, not for maintenance. Then you've got the alkaline diet. I mean, I don't understand that. Eat alkaline foods, but your stomach is acidic. So got no idea how that works. The blood type diet. I don't actually know what half of these diets do because I do not understand the physiological theory behind them. And so, do you know what though, Stephen?
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!
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.
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!
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. I don't want to only eat six hours a day.
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!
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. 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.
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!
We've done this study called the Big If Study, the Big Intermittent Fasting Study, where 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?
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!
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 in the morning, you're having your last meal at 8 in the evening. That's correct, isn't it? Sure. That's quite doable for most people. I can have my breakfast at 10. I can finish my last meal at 8.
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!
I mean, yeah, I do like munching on my chocolate late at night. I could probably still live a happy enough life doing that. And we found people could do it. We found as well that people who practiced it within two weeks, they felt better. They had better energy, better mood. You know, they were feeling a lot better. They also lost weight.
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!
Many people wanted to do this because they wanted to lose weight. And we actually see from evidence that people practicing time-restricted eating, even if they're told not to change their calorie intake, just by limiting their eating window, on average, reduce their energy intake by about 300 calories on average.
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!
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 so
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!
So we know that in most instances, if you practice time-restricted eating, you unintentionally reduce your energy intake. And the data shows that on average from the studies that 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.
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!
Yes.
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!
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 it in a bigger eating window, some in a smaller eating window.
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!
And what these studies have shown that if you have the same amount of calories, but you change the period in time in which you're eating your food, there is an additional benefit on metabolic health. There is a benefit in terms of blood lipids, in terms of inflammation, independent of calories.
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!
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.
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!
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. And I think this is fascinating.
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!
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, 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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
So social jet lag is where you have an inconsistent sleeping pattern throughout the week. So for example, for many, maybe 20 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, etc. And then at the weekend, I catch up.
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!
So if you have more than about a one and a half hour
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!
uh increase or decrease in sleep between your work days or weekend days etc that's called social jet lag this is 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 predict research people who experience social jet lag so have this inconsistent sleeping pattern make poorer dietary choices
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!
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, etc.
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!
That's so important because you can have two foods with identical labeling, same nutrients and calorie value, but can have entirely different impacts in terms of how you metabolize that food and how it impacts downstream health effects, depending on how that food has been processed. Now, we also know the timing of when we eat is really important.
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!
Sorry, I'm having to laugh. This is like NutriBollocks beyond NutriBollocks, but please.
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!
Okay, so seed oils I think is at the top of the Nutribollocks 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 bases out there there is absolutely no evidence that is credible evidence when interpreted in the correct way to show seed oils are harmful what is a seed oil
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!
So a seed oil is an oil from a seed. So the most common seed oils in the UK is rapeseed 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 rapeseed or canola oil, followed by sunflower seed oil.
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!
And there's about three or four arguments that people use to say that Cedars are bad for us. And if you go on social media, I mean, this is a perfect example of night and day between scientific evidence and what's on social media. If you go on social media, Cedars are toxic. Cedars are going to give you Alzheimer's. Cedars are going to give you cancer. Cedars are going to kill you.
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!
You look at the evidence, it's totally the reverse. Now, you can have sensible, boring scientists like me say, Seedles 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, Seedles are really good for you, Stephen. Or I could tell you, Seedles are toxic. They're going to kill you. Everyone's trying to kill us with Seedles.
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!
So in simple terms, it's that we are changing often through processing the structure of the food. Now, by processing, it could be our own processing. When we chew a food, we change the structure. Take a nut, for example, you have a whole nut, you chew it, you break up the nut, it goes into your gastrointestinal tract, it's broken down further.
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!
What's going to get more clicks?
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!
And so the sensible science, there's no silver bullet. There's no like, you know, crazy inflammatory argument. The sensible science isn't going to get the 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 don't get a voice.
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!
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 CEDAWs are not what's dominating the headlines.
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!
So what people say in terms of seed oils is, firstly, our intake of seed oils has increased 100-fold the last 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And with that increase in seed oil intake, so has cancer increased, so has cardiovascular disease increased, so has obesity increased, so has Alzheimer's, et cetera, et cetera. So it must be to do with the seed oils. Well, what else has changed in that 50 years?
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!
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 60% of the seed oil that we eat is
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!
is actually in these heavily processed unhealthy foods. So it's the first argument they say. And you see these beautiful figures that they put out where you see on one axis the intake of CEDAW. 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 CEDAW.
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!
But we have to think what else has changed in that time. The other arguments that they use are theoretical arguments based on biochemical pathways. And I spend an hour teaching this to our 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-6, which is found in high levels of seed oils.
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!
And omega-3, 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, etc., etc., etc. What we know from kind of theoretical biochemical pathways and enzymes, et cetera, doesn't actually play out in humans. We're so clever.
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!
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-6 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.
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!
We also change it using manual industrial techniques as well. So we use techniques like grinding or we might use pasteurization for dairy or, you know, extrusion for some carbohydrate-rich foods. We use all of these different techniques that also change the food matrix.
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!
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 or what they've seen in a Petri dish, for example, or in a test tube.
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!
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 all processed food. It does fit in with other narratives that are going on. I think some people can be very clever in cherry picking research. So there's a study called the Sydney Heart Study. And in this study, this was done in the 70s.
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!
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
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!
omega-6 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 worst health outcomes
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!
Now, the problem with that 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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
It's a double-edged sword.
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!
So they're meta-analysis. So we do randomised 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.
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!
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.
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!
And I think this is what we need to remember, that everyone's demonizing at the moment. Old processed food, you know, it's killing the nation. 60% 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?
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!
And we look, what does the meta-analysis show? So, for example, for CEDAWs, there's meta-analysis, for example, of about 42.
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!
Randomized control trials where they compare 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.
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!
It's 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. Seed oils always came out better. Seed oils always reduced cholesterol compared to beef tallow, reduced inflammation, etc., reduced cardiovascular risk factors.
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!
I am, because I've researched. As a research active scientist, where I've run randomised control 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.
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!
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 is controlled?
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!
So once you've run studies yourself and you've sweated that blood and tears, and then you see this Nutribolix, this misinformation out there, it's really bloody frustrating.
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!
But I think yours is more rigorous than most.
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!
So many people get their information from one source. Many people trust one source. And... You're right that as academics, we're rarely given a platform.
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!
Well, 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 pasteurized milk because I know it's safer. We want to make it stable. I think how long a can can last and frozen vegetables versus fresh. So you're saving food waste. We want to make it taste good and we want to make it convenient.
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!
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 onto this kind of podcast. We're not trained as academics how to communicate. We're trained how to communicate.
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!
you know, run good studies in my case, you know, run clinical trials, interpret the evidence, evaluate the evidence, critique the evidence. And, you know, I'm 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.
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!
Like I would have loved to have spent an hour telling you about the biochemical pathway of why... seed oils don't impact inflammation. But I know that really you're not interested, the listeners aren't interested, but 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.
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!
But we're the smallest voice out there. The research active scientists, partly because of time, I'm still in running trials now,
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!
running uh you know different interventions but also i think many of the big platforms aren't giving us the opportunity necessarily because we haven't got the most exciting things to say because at the end of the day you know we'll present the evidence we'll present it with caveats we'll present it with caution but
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!
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 seed holes 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.
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!
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 study so i'll talk with certainty over the seed or study because i've done them i've been there in the lab analyzing it
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!
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.
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!
Yep. So there's lots of neutral bollocks around dairy, and it's related to the neutral bollocks 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.
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!
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.
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!
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 these snacks together in terms of their health effects.
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!
And what we now know is that some dairy is actually good for us. So some dairy like cheese. like yoghurt, and I don't mean this really kind of heavily sweetened sugary yoghurt. I mean like your Greek yoghurts, your kaffirs, those sorts of things, your plain yoghurts. They've undergone a process called fermentation, and that changes the food matrix.
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!
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, the health effect changes. We don't fully understand how. There's some great research being undertaken at Reading University really diving into this.
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!
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. Now, I have to caution that I'm not saying people should go and have you know, 300 grams of cheese every day.
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!
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 on a bit of toast, I wouldn't worry so much. But we do know that if you were to compare cheese...
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!
versus butter, which has almost the same fat composition. And this has been shown in randomised control trials. The butter will increase your cholesterol, but the cheese will not.
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!
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.
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!
Now, that could be confounded by the fact that nut consumers, and only about 10% in the UK and even less, about 7% in the US, even consume 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, as included, you do not gain weight.
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!
Now, that might be partly because of the mechanisms that we've talked about to do with the food matrix, that 20% to 30% of the calories are being excreted. So the back-of-pack labeling shows that per portion of nut is 170 calories. But actually, on average, you only absorb 130 calories. So lots of it's coming out.
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!
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.
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!
I would say that I think there's still lots of confusion around saturated fat and around cholesterol.
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!
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.
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!
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. 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.
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!
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.
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!
Yes. They're actually the same in terms of the cholesterol, but it's the label that... 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 direction.
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!
environment where there's inflammation or stress etc 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 etc etc hdl in very simple terms has a label on it that actually enables the reverse cholesterol transport so actually almost kind of cleans up some of the cholesterol and
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!
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, it kind of brings it back to the liver for disposal. 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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
But if you're having one to two eggs a day, that's an intake of cholesterol that's not going to negatively, for most people, impact your circulating levels of this LDL bad cholesterol. If you're having 10 eggs a day, then I would be worried.
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!
But yeah, cholesterol is another area of neutropolics. And then, you know, on this whole area of cholesterol, heart disease, I think a really frustrating area of neutropolics is saturated fat.
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!
Okay, so you've got dietary cholesterol, which is just the cholesterol that's in the food.
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!
And that has very little impact on circulating cholesterol. Okay. Then you have cholesterol that the liver produces. And the liver produces that from scratch. Okay. 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.
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!
You're eating it before your hunger signals have got to 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.
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!
Highly refined carbohydrates can also increase the production of cholesterol by our liver. So when we're thinking about how diet impacts
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!
our cholesterol particularly our ldl so our bad cholesterol we don't need to worry so much about dietary cholesterol i.e how much cholesterol is in a food because unless it's extreme it will have a minimal impact we need to think about how much saturated fat for example we're having because that's one of the main dietary determinants of our cholesterol level okay and what is a saturated fat
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!
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 triglyceride. 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.
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!
We also know, 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.
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!
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
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!
a fat and the quality of that fat and we typically uh separate them into three main classes saturated monounsaturated and polyunsaturated and you might have heard of those terms yeah loosely yeah And saturated fatty acids differ in terms of their biochemistry, and I won't bore you with that, to mono and polyunsaturated fatty acids.
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!
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.
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!
mono and polyunsaturated fatty acids differ from saturated fatty acids in terms of their biochemistry in terms of their malt profile they tend to be liquid and polyunsaturated fatty acids are a very special type of fatty acid because they're actually essential for us our body can't make them and so they're essential fatty acids and one of those is omega-6 which is the fatty acid found in seed oils which is what people say is why seed oils are bad for us which hopefully we debunk that and
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!
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 and that's because when we think about the health effects of food we have to always think of that instead of what
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!
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 what we call bioaccessibility, so the availability of some of the nutrients within a food as well.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
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 polyammonium 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.
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!
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 probably about 15 years ago, I remember looking at the headlines of two different papers. I won't say what the papers are, but one I would say is a little bit more evidence-based and one is a good example of clickbait headlines.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
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 fat's bad. It depends on the type and the food it's in.
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!
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 it's not favorable for our health. Lard, butter in large amounts. And then the meat, the fat that's intrinsic to the meat. Take salami.
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!
You can see the fat in there. Take steak, for example. 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.
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!
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.
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!
I would say, first and foremost, find a food or dietary pattern that you enjoy, that brings you pleasure. Cookies.
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!
Okay, but these aren't exclusive to each other, Stephen, okay? Okay, fine.
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!
That's really important. These are not exclusive. Okay, so a dietary pattern that brings you pleasure.
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!
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.
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!
Second, I would say, think about how you eat. Think about how fast you're eating.
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!
Chew more.
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!
Don't eat late at night. Try and eat within a 10 or 12 hour eating window.
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!
So chewing can impact how you break the food down.
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!
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 40 times versus 15 times, it can result in a difference in how full that food makes you feel.
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!
Yep. Again, this isn't an area that I have expertise in, but that's what the evidence is showing. So as well as your gut sending signals to your brain, receptors on your gut saying whether you're full, there's something going on when you're chewing your food as well that's important. Okay. And chewing your food also changes the rate, therefore, at which you're eating.
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!
So it changes your eating speed.
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!
And eat within a 10 to 12 hour eating window.
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!
Then the third would be go back to basics.
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!
Have a good amount of fibre. Have a good amount of healthy oils.
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!
Dare I say it's seed oils. But olive oil, I would say, is the king or queen of the oils. And... You know, have that balanced plate rather than obsessing over a single food.
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!
Don't think of food in isolation. Okay. Think about your diet in relation to or alongside your sleep, your stress, your physical activity.
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!
Can you remind me of what I've done? I'm 48. I'm in the depths of perimenopause. I'm one of those like 90% of people that have brain fog and memory loss.
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!
Don't deny yourself anything. Think about what you can add in rather than what you take away.
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!
There is. I mean, you know, the menopause has a huge impact on how we respond to food. It has a huge impact generally on all of these pillars of health that we've talked about, our sleep, our stress, our physical activity, you know, and diet. And I think it's something we're talking about a lot more now. And we should be talking about it a lot more now.
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!
You know, 50% of the population at some point are going to go through the menopause. And it's a transitional period of great disturbance, great disruption and of great burden to many women. And we've conducted lots of research at Zoe on the menopause.
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!
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 oestrogen and other hormones are fluctuating day to day. So it's like this roller coaster, which I think your graph shows really nicely. You've got this roller coaster of hormones.
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!
And so what's happening is your oestrogen isn't just slowly declining as you reach perimenopause, so that transitional period before your menopause, but you're on this roller coaster. And it becomes more regulated after the menopause. But you're still in that point where you're having less oestrogen, so less of the hormone that we know has such wide-reaching effects.
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!
And the reason that the perimenopause transition as well as postmenopause period in a woman's life is so important is because oestrogen, the hormone that fluctuates during the perimenopause and then reduces and declines in postmenopause, It has effects all over our body. Nearly every cell in our body has oestrogen receptors. So our brain, our blood vessels, nearly everywhere.
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!
So this roller coaster of oestrogen during the perimenopausal phase and also the reduction postmenopausally has far reaching effects.
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!
health effects so for example postmenopausally women are five times greater risk of having a heart attack now some of that's due to age but it's also due to the loss in oestrogen women are five times more likely to have abdominal obesity which is fat around the tummy and that's because of oestrogen's role in fat tissue deposition so where fat tissue is deposited
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!
We see in our own ZOE predict research, premenopause, 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.
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!
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 postmenopausally 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 oestrogen has. in our body.
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!
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 has got more sugar. They won't have all of the wonderful bioactives in them. And then with the crisps, depending on the type of crisps, it's probably quite high in salt.
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!
We also see the oestrogen impacts and therefore the perimenopause and postmenopause, how we metabolize 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 oestrogen plays in our metabolism. And then I think what's most important
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!
To be aware of regarding the perimenopause and postmenopause 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. We see that 66% of perimenopausal women have 12 symptoms or more. And this has a huge burden.
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!
We know from other surveys, 10% of women leave the workforce during the perimenopause and postmenopausal phase because of the burden that these symptoms have on their quality of life.
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!
So typically people become menopausal, as in postmenopausal 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.
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!
And now I'm in that perimenopausal phase and I've forgotten all of the others, but there's about 50 symptoms that are recognised. And we see in our own research that the amount of women experiencing symptoms is really high. So we see that 85% of women are saying they have brain fog, they have anxiety, they have memory loss. It's really high, the amount of women experiencing these symptoms.
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!
And what's really interesting is we know, yes, HRT, so hormone replacement 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.
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!
And if I was to ask you, actually I wish I'd have asked you before I said that, but if I was to ask you, if you were to think of a menopause symptom, what would come to your mind first?
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!
Yep. And what's really interesting is hot flushes are one of the least common symptoms. About 40% of women in our research have hot flushes. 85% have brain fog. 85% 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.
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!
And so I think what's really exciting is there is now a lot more research on menopause. So I think the future is really exciting. But I think what comes with this is yet more Nutribullocks. And that's because I think there's this whole area of what we call menowashing. I don't know if you've heard of menowashing.
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!
Stick menow for menopause in front of any product. You can charge 10 times as much. I could call this a menopause tea. It's actually Yorkshire tea and it's a very good cup of tea. I could call this Menno tea and charge 10 times as much for that tea bag without any evidence because women are desperate. 45% of women say their symptoms are so burdensome they'll try anything.
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!
10% leaving the workforce because of their symptoms. And so we have to be really careful that we are only selling evidence-based supplements for which there isn't much evidence at the moment. And I think that the evidence that an overall healthier dietary pattern can reduce symptoms is the best way forward for now, alongside for those who choose to hormone replacement therapy.
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!
But the chances are with those three is that they are quite energy dense. So they have quite a lot of calories per gram, which is partly because of the processing techniques. Yet if you take a whole food like a nut, now they're actually very energy dense. So they're very high in fat. They're high in calories.
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!
Yeah, I think, you know, fortunately, I think it's changing. 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.
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!
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.
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!
But menopause is this perfect storm because you have these burdensome symptoms and then you have alongside it, which I don't think we talk about enough, is these health effects that I talked about. So women going 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.
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!
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.
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!
You've got women who often are feeling a bit depressed or anxious or, you know, 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, but all the fat's being directed to your tummy.
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!
your hunger signals are mucked up, your 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?
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!
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 peri- and postmenopausal phase, when your body's changing, when you're tired, when you're feeling a bit rubbish, to also take control of your diet.
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!
But it's the most important time because it's when your cholesterol increases. It's when your blood pressure increases. It's when all of this fat tissue around your belly is releasing harmful inflammatory chemicals, etc. So it's when, unfortunately, we really do need to take stock of our physical activity, of what we're eating and our stress levels.
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!
But it's probably one of the most challenging times to do it as well.
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!
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.
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!
But I think, Stephen, if we raise awareness so that men are aware and they can support their partners. And, you know, libido, you know, it's an example we see in our own research. Whilst it might not be the most common, women rate it as the most burdensome.
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!
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 peri- and postmenopausal women rate that as their symptom that has the most burden. on their life?
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!
Yes, I still sleep really badly. 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. I do think the evidence is very compelling for reduction in many symptoms.
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!
I think the evidence is compelling 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, tummy fat. So I've chosen to take it for both health and for symptoms. reduce symptoms.
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!
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
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!
who transition 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 fiber, 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.
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!
I do have to caveat that to say though, that there wasn't a control arm. So it's not a clinical, an RCTS, we call it. It's a 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.
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!
But there are other studies that have, in a randomized control trial, asked people to follow the Mediterranean diet or control diet, and they see a similar magnitude of around 30% reduction in symptoms, which is huge and promising, I think.
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!
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 menowashing. And I think there are so many supplements that are being sold as the silver bullet, you know, and I see it on social media. And I think firstly, okay, if it works for you, great. If you can afford it, great.
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!
Yeah, so there's lots of different mechanisms that impact how full we feel, how hungry we feel related to a food. There's different hormones that are released from different areas of our gut, for example, that feedback signals to say either you're full or you're hungry. On average, I would say it takes about 10 to 20 minutes for the fullness to really properly kick in.
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!
But what worries me is people who are spending a lot of money that they could be using to 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 is very weak evidence that any other supplements will work consistently.
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!
They might work for some people, but consistently.
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!
Yeah. So soy isoflavones are a particular chemical that are found in some foods. It's a chemical that has a structure very similar to oestrogen. So it actually binds to the oestrogen 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.
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!
We consume probably about one milligram a day on average. In the Far East, like China, they consume about 70 milligrams a day as part of the natural diet. So in those kind of countries, they actually have a really low prevalence of menopause symptoms compared to us. They still have menopause symptoms, but it's a bit lower than us.
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!
What we know is that if 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.
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!
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.
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!
This is all association data, though. It doesn't show causality. And it's really important to say that.
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!
Now, you could easily have got through those. Well, I could easily have got through all of these in under that 20 minutes.
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!
That's quite a formal way to address me. I think we've covered an awful lot. And I think the thing that I would emphasize when people are thinking about their health, thinking about their diet, is firstly, find what works for you. Find something you enjoy. But I think I would say be really, really careful of the misinformation that's out there. Really careful.
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!
And I would say also, if you're going to make a change, make sure it has a big enough size impact to warrant the change you're making. Because there's a lot of advocates for this health optimization. You know, make this change and it will have this impact.
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!
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, 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.
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!
I hear so many times when I'm talking to other mums at the 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 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?
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!
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.
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!
I think that. I can't comment on their motivations for profit. I don't think I'm informed enough to comment on that. But I do believe that the food industry needs to work with academia in order to solve the problem of the kind of foods that are out there. We need impact from government, though, as well. We need impact from policymakers. We need to go back to grassroots.
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!
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.
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!
I think we're in a perilous state at the moment of there are some people making a lot of noise in the media about scientists working with industry, how any research funded by industry is therefore dangerous. Bias. It's corrupt. Can't be trusted. That's certainly not my experience. It's not what I have ever seen from any other colleagues taking money from food industry in order to do studies.
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!
We as nutrition scientists need to do studies. We need to run clinical trials in order to look at how we can improve their 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.
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!
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, 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.
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!
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, etc. To make them really tasty and in this case salt as well. I don't think the food industry is out there to get us.
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!
We publish the paper. The industry funders cannot get involved in that process. So I still see it as independent. Now, there is discussion about are they setting the agenda of that research? You know, there's something we could talk about for days and days. But I think this narrative that's out there that just because a study is being funded by the food industry is biased is wrong.
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!
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 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.
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!
And that's why I think all three have to work together. Government need to take big responsibility now.
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!
But I think that there has to be an acceptance that academics, scientists, can work with food industry and it doesn't mean that we're corrupt or our results are biased in any way.
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!
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,
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!
wouldn't agree that that's necessarily a good achievement in life. But I see that as a great achievement.
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!
I am.
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!
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.
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!
I think that what the food industry were doing 50 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.
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!
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 her at home through a degenerative neurological condition.
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!
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. It's enabled me to find joy in most things, pleasure in most things, and not strive for things that maybe in the past I would have.
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!
I think it's given me a perspective. Now, don't get me wrong. 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.
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!
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 14. And, I mean, it saddens me that they hadn't seen this success.
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!
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. And to me, that's what matters. And so that's why when I'm with lots of smart people and I think they're doing amazing things... I don't have the same perspective sometimes. I probably don't care as much as long as I'm having fun.
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!
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.
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!
And what drives me to do it is having been through that situation of realising how delicate life is. So just seize the moment. Enjoy what you're doing at that point in time.
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!
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 by-product of that.
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!
We've conducted lots of research, and one of the most exciting things is that there is a principle which can reduce symptoms by about 35%. And so they are...
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!
um now it's not it doesn't take 20 minutes for all of the fullness signals to kick in because as soon as you start chewing something you start to release different hormones and different sensory characteristics of the food will also trigger some sort of fullness but what we do know is that you have more of these fullness receptors saying hey you're full lower down in your
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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
Absolutely. We now know that eating rate is important. There's some fantastic work that's being done by a professor, Kieran Ford, who's dedicated many years into researching this and looking at how changing the structure and texture of the food can modulate your eating rate and how also your eating rate can modulate how you metabolize the food and how many calories you go on to eat.
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!
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.
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!
So when we talk about how you eat, changing your eating rate, so how quickly you have your breakfast, your lunch or dinner or any of these snacks, will also, without you consciously thinking about it, change how many calories you eat, might change how quickly you metabolize the food as well.
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!
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, etc. So it's a really simple strategy.
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!
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 adjust 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 slow eaters.
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!
And there's even been clinical trials where they get groups of individuals and say, OK, slow down the rate at which you eat your food over the next, you know, three, four, five weeks. They have another group, they say, just eat at your normal rate.
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!
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.
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!
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.