Dr. Sarah Berry
speaker
566 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 18 Dec
Dr. Sarah Berry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
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.
Without being given any advice.
Yeah, without being told to.
But I think all 20, 30-year-olds think that.
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.
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.
So this is some research that we published where we looked at people when they'd had a good night's sleep and we looked at people when they'd had a bad night's sleep. And we looked at their post-meal, post-prandial glucose response. So that basically means after having your breakfast, that's got some carbohydrate in it, how much does your blood glucose increase?
We call this the postprandial glucose response because postprandial is Greek for post-meal, and so it's a term we use a lot in the science.
And we looked at individuals' post-meal glucose response when they'd had a good night's sleep and when they'd had a bad night's sleep, and what we found was within the same individual, if they'd had a bad night's sleep, their post-meal glucose response, so after breakfast, was a lot higher... than if they'd had a good night's sleep.
So what this shows, I think, quite nicely, if we think back to what you said about how you wake up more hungry when you've not had enough sleep, we know that people make poorer dietary choices, for example, from the slumber study, And then we know that the metabolic responses to those are worse.
It just shows how you're kind of creating this perfect storm and how you can't think of it in isolation. Because firstly, you're waking up and you're like, bloody hell, I'm hungry. Secondly, it's like, 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.
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
My children never slept.
They did, obviously. But oh, my Lord.
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.
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?
And I think everything goes out of the window. And I'm not saying it should.
But I think that when you're in the depths of whether it's sleep deprivation because your children keeping you awake or what I was going through, you know, my mother had a degenerative neurological condition, and seeing someone daily deteriorate like that, what you're doing physical activity-wise, well, I didn't have time to do that, what you're eating... quite often doesn't become a priority.
Now it's probably a time it should be even more of a priority because we know that what you eat impacts your mental health. 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.
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