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 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.
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...
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?
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?
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
And that's because they're eating in time with their body clocks, with these millions and billions of little cell clocks.
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...
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.
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.
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