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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So it's making sure you're having healthy fats, healthy oils, and plenty of fiber in whatever way you like it personally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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