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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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.
Then you've got insoluble fibre, which is the kind of fibre that, for example, are in those nuts because fibre in those nuts is actually the cell wall. So most cell walls of plants are just fibre. That's great for us because it's food for our microbiome.
It helps bulk out our 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.
And we don't get enough of it because we're not eating the right types of food that we have in high amounts. So having any kind of fibre is going to improve our health. Having fibre that's added artificially back into food is going to be better than having no fibre. So the kind of bars that you're talking about that say are added fibre, great.
Having fibre, though, from the whole food is always going to be better. And so with nuts, fibre is essentially the cell walls of the nuts. So it's having that role... in reducing that 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.
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.
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.
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.
We said, keep everything else the same. We provided all of these snacks to them. We provided the typical UK snacks. We spent a lot of time designing these. So we did lots of research where we looked in the UK, and it's very similar in the US, what are the typical snacks?
So basically we designed these muffins that ultimately were having a bit of a potato chip or crisp, a bit of a chocolate biscuit, a bit of a cake, just like imagine all put in one muffin. I mean, we didn't go and get those and just stick them in one muffin, but we worked out what's the nutrient profile in the UK, in the US that comes from snacks.
And then we designed a snack product that was quite highly processed that reflected that nutrient profile. So it's quite high in saturated fat, high in sugar, high in refined carbohydrate, low in fiber. People had to eat 20% of their energy from these muffins, which my kids loved, or 20% from the almond nuts.
At the end of that, we measured lots of health outcomes, one of which was a particular measure that we do to look at people's vascular function, so their blood vessel function. It's a measure called flow-mediated dilation. It tells us in really simple terms kind of how healthy the blood vessels are.
And what we found was the improvement in blood vessel function following having almond nuts versus having typical UK snacks equated to a 30% reduction in cardiovascular disease.
Six weeks.
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
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.
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.
So I wouldn't say that you've made one bad snack choice and that's it. Your day's over, damn it, you know, you're stuffed. I think that you highlight an important point though that what we choose as a meal does have knock-on effects on what might happen later in the day. So for example, if you have a really refined carbohydrate breakfast or snack, then you're more likely to have a blood sugar dip
which we know from our research is more likely to make you more hungry, eat more calories, have lower mood, have lower energy and be less alert. But I think, you know, snacking can be used to our advantage. Snacking can be used to our advantage because we know it accounts for such a huge proportion of our energy intake.
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.
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