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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
But I think yours is more rigorous than most.
So many people get their information from one source. Many people trust one source. And... You're right that as academics, we're rarely given a platform.
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.
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.
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.
But we're the smallest voice out there. The research active scientists, partly because of time, I'm still in running trials now,
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
No, the evidence does not support that. So we know that people who consume nuts... based on the totality of the evidence, do not gain weight. We know this from epidemiological data, i.e. people who consume more nuts tend to quite often have a lower BMI.
Now, that could be confounded by the fact that nut consumers, and only about 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.
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.
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