Begin Again with Davina McCall - How Lifestyle Impacts Brain Aging & Dementia With Brain Expert Kimberley Wilson

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

In this episode of Begin Again, Davina McCall sits down with the brilliant Kimberley Wilson — Chartered Psychologist, brain health expert, and author — for a powerful conversation about the science of the mind, and how we can all take better care of our brains. Kimberly unpacks the latest research around dementia, and challenges the idea that brain decline is just an inevitable part of aging. Instead, she offers practical, science-backed strategies that put the power back in our hands.  In this honest and enlightening discussion, Kimberley explains why what we eat, how we sleep, how we move — and how we feel — all play a vital role in protecting our minds. She talks candidly about the myths we’ve been told about memory, menopause, and mental wellbeing, and why it’s never too early — or too late — to start caring for our brains. This is a conversation about ownership, understanding, and the radical potential of prevention. Bringing clarity, calm, and compassion to a topic that affects us all — and her message is as inspiring as it is empowering. 📢 Drop a comment: How much focus do you put on Brain health & what’s your biggest takeaway?  Follow me here: www.instagram.com/beginagain https://www.tiktok.com/@beginagainpod   (00:00) Intro (01:28) Davina Introduction (03:36) Why Our Brains Are Always Hungry (10:12) Connecting Nutrition and Mental Health (11:23) The Rise of Dementia and Its Impact on Women (18:43) How Stress Affects the Body (22:29) Aging, Fear, and Self-Perception (26:03) Why Brain Health Depends on Nutrition (32:53) The Wonders of the Brain (37:11) Life 360 Ad (38:17) What Supplements Should You Be Taking? (44:24) The Importance of Exercise for Mental Health (49:44) The Vagus Nerve Explained (54:30) Emotions and Their Connection to the Body (1:00:15) How to Talk to Children About Their Bodies (1:04:34) The Truth About Fasting (1:11:06) How to Eat More Nutritiously (1:16:33) Final Thoughts and Key Takeaways Sponsored by: Life360 - https://www.life360.com/uk/  Download Life360 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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45% of global dementia cases can be prevented through this. Kimberly, it is a true joy to have you here to help us navigate our way to a healthier and longer life. If nutrition has an effect on physical health, why would we not assume the brain might suffer similar outcomes? In the UK and Willy around the world, I think we're all super worried about everything and stressed. What's going on? your organ underpinning our mental health is much more vulnerable than it could be.

Why is that? There's a huge nutritional insufficiency. We must fix this. Okay. Let's go through the supplements and the foods that are good for your brain. You need more omega-3, the B vitamins, and wow. The thing is, the nutritional choices are shaped to a huge and quite unconscious degree. Yes.

Buying ultra-processed food is cheaper. So how can you eat healthily? for less. But also the very best thing that you can do is at 57. This is the first time I've heard that. So today I'm talking to Kimberly Wilson. I love Kimberly because she's all about the brain, but also how important nutrition is to the brain, feeding our brains, but all the ways that we can feed our brains emotionally with exercise, with food, how we can help ourselves, that nothing, even demented isn't written in stone. We can do so many things to lower our risk of things like Alzheimer's.

And I think sometimes we think that that's taken out of our hands. So I can't wait to speak to Kimberly. If you want to get more great content like this, please could you just click the like and subscribe buttons because it means that we can continue to bring you amazing information. life-changing information. That's what we'd like to do. Kimberly, it is a true joy to have you here. Chartered psychologist and food fanatic, but who's married the two to help us navigate our way to a healthier life and longer life.

Hopefully, yes. Yeah. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about is the current mental health crisis that we feel that we feel like is hitting us in the UK and really around the world. I think if you look at anywhere. But is it? Are we, I think we're all super worried about everything and anxious and stressed. But is it about something that's actually concrete? Because I think we're stressed about health and work and the world.

But is it just because we're more aware of it? what's going on? What's happened to us? I mean, that's kind of a big argument that everybody's still having. And in a kind of very therapist response, I think it's a little bit of everything. I have my very personal opinion or my kind of bias opinion, which is if we're thinking about mental health as an emergent property of a brain, I think I our brain health is not as good as it could be for various reasons. I think like the literal organ underpinning our mental health is much more vulnerable than it could be.

Obviously, why is that? I think my position is that there's a huge nutritional insufficiency. We have terrible diets. And the way that we see our, so for example, we're seeing children with metabolic disease, children with type 2 diabetes, children with dental caries. If we can understand that nutrition has an effect on physical health and physical health outcomes, why would we not assume, believe, understand that the hungriest organ in the body with an incredibly high nutritional demand might suffer similar outcomes?

What's interesting about what you've just said to me is that I feel like at 57 that is the first time, I've thought of the brain as being hungry for nutritional. I've just thought that it just sits there. This is all the thing. These are the muscles that need the energy to move and I have to walk and my heart. But I've never, what food does my brain need? So much. So much food.

I'll try to be concise. So if we start with the fact that your brain is made of food. Obviously, all of you is made of food. But we sometimes forget that. I always say that because I think sometimes we forget. We tend to think of our bodies as, or nutrition just as calories. You know, just my body needs energy. Yes, that's sort of how I perceive it. But everything that is you is made from food. Everything, when you are being made. It's so mad. Like you're saying it, I'm going, I don't know where I've been the last. Right. So in the womb, you were made up of the bits of toast and chicken and beans that your mother was consuming. And John,

Walker, that label, unfortunately. Well, this is not, this is absolutely the point, right? Because if we know that, for example, that things like alcohol and nicotine and caffeine can affect development in pregnancy, then nutrition too. Yes, of course, yeah. So the brain is made of particular fats that have to come from the diet, omega-3 fats called DHA and EPA. And they are, if you think about the brain like a house, every second,

second or third brick is amygia three. So if you're not getting enough of those foods during pregnancy, what we see is babies born with smaller brains that are less well connected. We know that for sure, right? The World Health Organization calls iodine, iodine deficiency, the leading cause of preventable brain damage worldwide, right? The leading cause of preventable brain damage across the globe. Because iodine kickstarts development of your organs during pregnancy and the brain is one of the very first organs to start developing. In areas where there's low iodine consumption, population IQ can be suppressed by about 15 points permanently. And at its extreme, iodine deficiency used to be called cretanism.

Oh, so I just quickly want to ask you about IQ because I knew this from when my kids were at school, I don't know how I learned it, but so many people are of the impression that that if your IQ is this, you can raise it. That's not the case with IQ. You can raise it a little bit or it can go down a little bit, you know, either way. But your IQ is your IQ. Pretty much. But we think a big chunk of IQ is linked to literally the structure, the connectivity in the brain.

Right. And that is laid down in the womb. In the womb. And so we know about iodine, for example, but then there was a study in the UK which found that 67% of pregnant British women had mild to moderate iodine deficiency. So it's really well known around the world. The World Health Organisation says to make sure you've got enough iodine and yet most women in this country aren't getting enough.

But I've had three children and I didn't. This is the first time I've heard that. That is quite mad. We all know about folic acid. You take that beforehand. And this is it. So with folic acid and vitamin D, folic acid to reduce the risk of neural tube effects, absolutely.

But that's not the only nutrient that reduces the risk of neurotube defects. Koline is another nutrient found in egg yolks, which does the same thing. And in fact, we think perhaps they might kind of work together to support that. Nobody gets told about choline. When women eat or supplemented with choline during pregnancy, their children have better sustained attention at ages 7 and 11 because their brains have that much more connectivity. But Kimberly, you know what's so funny because, I mean, I just love talking to you.

It's so interesting. What is mad is that you're telling me this and I'm thinking, I didn't take it. I mean, I was actually eating quite well in pregnancy because I wanted to, interestingly. Of course. I wanted to eat better when I was pregnant than I did when I wasn't pregnant. I think that's nature, isn't it? Yeah. It's really motivating.

in time. Do that. But I'm sitting there going, oh, my God, I didn't do that. Which makes you feel anxious. This is so interesting. We learn all this stuff and then we think, oh my God. It's like one thing feeds the other. We get more information and more knowledge around something.

But actually it's because I think that we need these big organisations to take this information on better and listen to you and do something with it so that we need. don't have to feel anxious that we're not being taken care of, we know that our GPs or our hospitals or our midwives have got all the information about everything that will help us. And so we can then take our hands off the steering wheel. Yeah. No, I mean, that's exactly it. How frustrated do you get?

I'm just, you know, you know when they ask the Hulk, like, how do you do it? He's like, I'm always angry. I'm always angry. I'm always a little bit angry when I talk about this stuff. Do you work with the government in any way? I don't. No. I mean, all of my advocacy is kind of through my books. And that's why I started because when I tried to speak to the prison, speak to the governors. And everyone was listening. We really cared. I mean, it was seen as kind of superfluous. And, you know, they had bigger problems at that point perhaps. So it kind of went nowhere. And that's when I moved online.

fine. If I can't do anything here, then I can help my own patients. Well, that is brilliant. And I can go online. Yeah. But no, I haven't done any work with the government. I mean, this, this podcast, it's, it's called Begin Again. It's not aimed specifically at any age. It's about starting again. And I, I mean, I love talking about food because food is an area where you can make massive changes to your mental house. We've just been talking about that. And, um, But one of the huge areas I know for, in particular, obviously I'm like menopause, queen. I love talking about it. I loved educating about it.

Similarly to you, I'm so frustrated that we don't all learn about it as young women and men. Everybody needs to know about it. Half the population are going to go through it. No one can sidestep it. It's going to happen. But what I'm so interested about is dementia. And that is it true that more women than men get dementia? Yes.

So when it comes to something like Alzheimer's disease, which is the most common form of dementia, because dementia is an umbrella term. Women have twice the risk of men. So of every three dementia patients, two of them are women. Okay, so when I've been told about that, that more women than men get it, I've been told that it's because we live longer.

Is that true? No. It's not true. It's not true. And it's not true. Sorry, I love you. I didn't think of it's absolutely fine. It's absolutely fine.

What? It's not true for a few reasons. Yeah, right. So first of all, if that were the case, then we, if it's simply about aging, we would expect longer lived populations to have higher rates of outside disease. And that's not what we see. So places like Japan, places like Greece, who have an older population, Italy don't have like correlation with that kind of with dementia.

So for example, in the UK, dementia is our leading cause of death. I can't, how long has that been? Is that for years? No, not new. And even during COVID where it was still dementia. I'm pretty sure. No, we don't know that. We can check that and.

Perfect. because we think maybe cancer or heart disease or, you know, some secondary outcome of a fall. No, it's Alzheimer's disease. So that's in the UK, but somewhere like Greece, an older woman is more likely to die from a respiratory infection. So complications of a flu or pneumonia than she is from Alzheimer's, even though on average she will live longer. So it's not simply, what we can say from that is it's not simply about. our age. And then there's another interesting, very worrying trend, which is young onset dementia. So there's early onset dementia, which we do think seems to be genetically linked. But young

onset dementia, which is when you're being diagnosed at a younger age, tells us that it's not about age because dementia is typically an age-related condition. But if there's something going wrong. If we're getting diagnosed earlier, that means there's something going on with the health of our brains, that our brains are aging at an accelerated rate when our bodies aren't so much. So it's not simply about age. And having seen my father go through Alzheimer's, the one thing that you want to do for as long as you possibly can is preserve brain health because watching somebody go through that, it's not something I would want to experience. It's horrible.

And interesting, you said this terrible trend for younger people being diagnosed. When you're saying younger, how old do you mean? Because I think, isn't dementia's kind of 65 plus? It's the average age of diagnosis. But so it would you be considered younger if you were under 65? Yes. Okay. And there's more of that happening now.

It's growing. The number of people being diagnosed in their late 40s, 50s is increasing. Because I, you know, obviously, when we were talking about older people, you were saying it's more genetic. And obviously, my father had Alzheimer's, so it's something that I think about. But it's not just, you're, you're not just stuck with that. There are things that we can do. So much that there was so much that we can do.

The latest global commission on Alzheimer's disease says that 45%, nearly half, of global dementia cases can be prevented through changes in the environment and lifestyle. Wow. 45%. The 14 modifiable risk factors. Some of them aren't in our own individual hands, some of them about like air pollution and things like that. But other factors like you're taking care of things like hearing. So if you're hearing.

Hearing. This is so interesting. Yeah, sorry, carry on. No, no. If your hearing starts to go, people who don't get a hearing aid are more likely to develop dementia than people who do get a hearing aid. Similarly with eyesight. And we think that's because, essentially, like everything else in your body, your brain works on a use it or lose it principle, right? So if you don't keep working on your flexibility, your body says, we don't need to move in that range of motion anymore. Let's not bother maintaining it. We'll put the energy somewhere else. And similarly with your brain, if your brain isn't being, if those neurons aren't being stimulated and used, then your brain says,

well, we're not going to put the energy into maintaining them. We can use that energy elsewhere or just save it. And so when you lose your hearing, you're getting fewer inputs of stimulus from the environment. Your brain is being less challenged. And so it's kind of, it's like an empty warehouse, you know, kind of close the door and it starts to degrade. Because if you're not constantly using it and it's being constantly upkept, then you start to lose it. And the other potential association between hearing loss and dementia is the loss of socialisation.

Yes. Because we know that social connections are so important for our well-being. It helps to lower our stress. And I think I've seen people that find it hard. to hear, maybe in a big, busy restaurant or, and you kind of see them kind of leaning in and then you just see them kind of check out a bit, oh, I'll just, I'll just watch this conversation happening. I can imagine that. Really stressful. So that's interesting. So if somebody is thinking that they may be getting the beginning, I know as a person of like later midlife,

like I'm getting on now, that loss. of hearing is something that you don't want to admit to. It's a pride thing. And you don't want people to think that you're old. I mean, I know some people are really proud and don't mind getting old at all, but lots of people do. And it's about like not wanting to go to get checked. But wearing a hearing aid, does that make a difference? Yes. It does. Yes, because you're still going to give your brain that stimulation and you're still going to be able to stay connected with people and socialising and engaging and you're less likely to be isolated

and we know that loneliness is a big risk factor for dementia as well. Again, and we think that that's the stress of isolation because we're not meant to be isolated. We're kind of tribal network organisms. We need to be with other people in order to feel safe. And when we're alone, we feel vulnerable and that turns up our stress.

Which is, you just remind me, well, we just reminded me of another one of the reasons that we think women have twice the risk of dementia is that women tend to have higher rates of depression. And depression tends to be associated with chronic stress so that an additional stress burden throughout life, whether it is experiencing discrimination in the workplace or abusive relationships or the burden of taking care of older parents whilst also taking care of the kids,

all of that stuff can increase a woman's stress, as well as some hormone or things, increase her risk of depression and then that can increase her risk of with Alzheimer's. Be interested to talk to you about stress. Because stress is such a weird thing to measure. Like, I feel like I am a driven person. And I'm like, you think it, but I've done it four hours ago.

Do you know what I mean? I feel like you're a bit like that. Like, you know what I mean? Like we're kind of stress. But, and I pride myself in that. I've always pride myself in it. And someone mooted with me the other day. It's like, are you in a constant state of stress?

And I was like, is that not a good thing? Like, I feel like it's a good thing. Like I'm on it. But I'm not sure for my body now that it is. What is going on? So that's one of the very, very interesting things about stress is that partly it's about the kind of can we measure levels of cortisol and adrenaline in your blood? Yeah, and how do you do that?

But also the negative or how negatively you are affected by stress is impacted by your attitude to it. So it's not simply a thing about levels. It's also the psychology of it. Oh, wait. So I could have lots of cortisol in my body, but if I'm going, this is ace, if this is you on fire. Yeah.

So for example, if we were to take two people and set them, typically it's like a horrible math challenge to be done in front of an audience, right? The kind of thing that you get them to count backwards from a thousand in sevens, like something horrible that's going to just increase that stress. And if you can prime someone to, you know, feel embarrassed and anxious about it, or you can prime someone to be like, this is a challenge. Let me see what I can do. Or it's not too, it's not a big deal if I feel.

fail or we will see that this person has fewer negative consequences of the same level of increased stress compared to the person who's perceiving themselves as failing, perceiving themselves as being negatively judged, perceiving. So it's not just the stress itself. It's how we attend to it, what we think about it, our attitude to it, the meaning that we give to the stress. It's the same with burnout, right? So you can be working at a very, very high level again, you have two people working at a very high level. But if one person is being praised for their work, they have some autonomy over their work,

they feel that their work is in alignment with their values, the same objective level of work for someone who doesn't have as much power over their time, feels like they're not taken seriously in the workplace, doesn't feel they're being paid adequately for their efforts, that person is going to burn out, this person is going to feel motivated. So it might be the same objective level of stress. But the meaning associated with it changes our subjective experience of it. And so if it's not the actual kind of level of cortisol, it's how you deal with it.

How do you know if how you're dealing with it is bad? I mean, I actually can, I think I would probably be able to tell from what you've said. So then it's about changing thought patterns right around yourself. Don't be so hard on yourself. This is, I've got to just tell you as a younger person than me, this gets better. Like, this is, this is the benefit of getting older. When you were talking about doing the maths challenge in front of an audience, 10 years ago, that would have sent me into a cold sweat.

Today, I just think, if I fail, I fail. Well, this is it. That's what's interesting. But it's, it's, but that's not the same. story that people are getting. I meet people as young as 30 who are saying, I would, this is it for me. I don't want to get any older than this. It's, it's really interesting because age has become a fear. And a terror. An anxiety. A real terror. And longevity. You'd literally do anything. You'd cry genetically do this. Inject yourself with the blood of a teenager. Get vitamins and then get your iron and then, you know, you'd never

drink and you never have fun and you know it's like interesting how I feel happier in my own skin now than I ever have done before it's just a bit wrinklier yeah well and and that's when we talk about kind of menopause and how that's experienced across the globe in societies where aging is valued and looked well upon and women are are valued for their wisdom and their experience and what they can offer to the culture or to the society, they have fewer negative symptoms of menopause. Oh, wow. God. It's mind blowing, right? It's the way that we think about things. I'm telling this to my clients in therapy all the time, that it's not just the thing that happens to you. It's the story you tell yourself about it. That's what will impact how badly you're

affected by it, right? So if I, if I'm, I'm done. you know, I'm in love and my partner breaks up with me, I will have a markedly different experience of that breakup if I tell myself, it's because I'm unlovable, it's because I did something wrong, I'm going to be lonely forever, I'm going to, if I tell myself a story about my worthlessness, compared to if I tell myself a story about this is what happens to people, nobody ever gets married to their first love, this is heartbreaking, but at least I now have different options. I'm learning.

I can take what was good. Maybe just because it's ended doesn't mean it wasn't valuable. It doesn't mean that there wasn't something beautiful there that I can hold on to. I will have a completely different experience with that breakup. It will still hurt, but I will have a different experience of the breakup and myself, depending on the story I tell about it. I think really the self-perception is such an enormous thing. But, and obviously we can do a lot about talking to ourselves in a different way around problems that we're facing. So stress and things like that, we've learned that that's a big change.

I want to bring food into that now, nutrition. And how can, so like let's talk about supplements and dementia, for example. You've talked about omega-3s. I mean, should we what? Okay. Let's go through the supplements that are good for your brain, and let's go through the foods that provide those minerals and things like that. Yes, 100%. So there's a lovely study on this called Vitacog, which people can look up.

And what they did, which is why it's such an elegant study, was to take people who already had two big risk factors for dementia. So they were already older over the age of 70. And they already have a condition called MCI, mild cognitive impairment. So that's not Alzheimer's, but it's the type of kind of start. Yes, it's considered a risk factor for Alzheimer's. It's a slowing of cognitive abilities. You're not quite as sharp as you used to be a little bit more forgetful. Maybe you don't follow a complex conversation quite as well.

And so as I say, it doesn't always become Alzheimer's, but it's considered a risk factor. We want to watch out for people who have MCI. So two big risk factors. And what they did was, again, it was a placebo control trial of B vitamins. Going to give you some B vitamins for two years to take. And then we'll see you in two years time. We'll scan your brains and we'll give you some cognitive tests and then we'll see how you're doing compared to placebo. At the end of those two years, the people on the supplements on the B vitamins had a 30% average

slower rates of brain atrophy, brain loss, the shrinking of brain cells, compared to the people who were on the placebo. But only if they also had higher blood levels at the start of omega-3. Because omega-3 works with B-vitamins to protect the brain. So the people had higher blood levels of omega-3 and the B-vitamins had a 40% reduction in brain atrophy. And that's extraordinary because we don't have medications that are as effective. You know, the medications that have been licensed in the US and that Nice are saying we can't have them on the NHS here because the risk profile is too high. They don't give you that level of improvement or slowing of disease progression. And they have, you know, the side effects include brain swelling and brain bleeding.

This isn't the kind of... But I don't understand. If there's... is a clinical trial that proves that, that you're saying there is, and it shows that, why is the national health not just giving? I'm not national health bashing because I love the national health and we wouldn't want to be without it. But there just feels like a misfiring here that it's cheaper than these drugs, I would imagine, no side effects and we could all be healthier. So I think they would say that we haven't got enough evidence. We've got. We've need more placebo-controlled trials. The thing is, there's not so much incentive to do lots of placebo-controlled trials on non-patented products, a B-vitamine and a me. So it's really,

money. It's partly about how do we build up a body of evidence, right? And we build up a body of evidence by doing lots of expensive trials. And we only really want to do lots of expensive trials if we're going to get some money off the back end. It's worth investing in an expensive trial if I then get a very expensive drug at the end of it that I can recoup my investment on. So what we really need is philanthropists who've got squabillions of pounds, who literally don't care. To just invest in nutritional interventions where they're not going to get their money back, but they will change the world. Yes, where they can help build up a strong enough evidence base.

I'm going to start writing letters. So that Cochran will say, yes, thank you very much. And the nice will say, here you go, you're welcome. because at the moment we don't have that. So with something like Omega 3, for example, there aren't enough studies that indicate benefit for things like dementia, even though we have these kind of smaller individual trials. Where we do have good evidence,

but we still haven't done anything with it, is around premature birth. Can I just say something? I think we need to get you anger management. I mean, I feel so sorry for you. It's really hard. I just want you. you to know that if you ever need to call someone and just blow off some, I'm going to give

you my number. You do that. I just, you're about, you'll never go to guess what. It's hard. It's, sorry, finish what you were saying and then we could, yeah. And then I'm talking about my range. Yeah, great. So we have really good evidence from Cochran. So Cochran is this international group of researchers who collate all of the evidence, analyze it and then say, yes, this is strong enough evidence for us to make recommendations for public use. Yes. And Cochran, I want to say five years ago, published a review that said supplementing pregnant women with 200 milligrams of Amiga 3, reduced very early premature birth by 42%. I can't find a midwife who knows that. I've given talks to specialist perinatal services and they don't know that.

And that's years old research from the holy grail of research and recommendations. But why does it not get out there? Where are we going wrong? So in my first book, I... Quake, can we just talk about books? This is a good time. Thank you. First one.

That's the first one, yeah. So it's called How to Build a Healthy Brain. A little practical guide. Practical guide. How to do it? So how to do that. And then this one. newer, last year, two years ago, two years ago, unprocessed, what your diet is doing to your brain.

So there you go. Thank you. But it was in this book you would say back. That lots of things. We don't take nutrition really seriously or we didn't. So certainly psychology, psychiatry, have not taken nutrition seriously as an intervention. We haven't, you know, again, considered that the brain is an organ. You know, we think about the brain in terms of its outcomes and its manifestations.

We think about it in terms of mood or concentration or, you know, those sorts of more abstract things. The power of the brain is unreal. We don't think about it as a physical thing that is burning through 20% of your calories. Didn't know that. Yeah. So only 2% of your body weight, but a quillard. to 20% of your energy when your body is at rest, it's going all to your brain. Yeah.

So it's just, it has this huge metabolic rate, like constantly burning through energy. It needs food. It needs food. Interestingly as well, I've, I'm sorry, I keep, I want to get all this information at you. No, and I will just, otherwise. So, um, I'm, I was always kind of, um, trying to be as sugar-free as, you know, possible low sugar, and obviously processed sugar, obviously sweets, cakes, biscuits and things like that, I do avoid. But the brain needs glucose. The brain runs on glucose. Doesn't it? Yeah.

So if you stop everything, like fruit and, you know, carbs and everything, then your brain is just going, what am I supposed to work on? Well, exactly. So it will, so your brain runs on glucose because, so between glucose and fat, glucose burns more cleanly, essentially. You need more. You need more oxygen to burn fat as fuel. And your brain doesn't have much room. It has a very high metabolic rate. So, which I mean, it would run out of oxygen very quickly if it was running on fat and you don't want that. You don't want your brain to run out of oxygen. It would create too much, what's called reactive oxygen species, oxidants, basically. And when you get too many of those, they damage the very delicate brain tissue. So you don't want that happening either. So essentially, glucose is a

cleaner, better fuel for your brain. It will run on glucose preferentially. But yes, if you cut out all sources of glucose, starches, carbs of any kind, your body would start to have to try to make glucose by itself. It would either do that from breaking down the proteins that you were consuming, or if you weren't consuming enough protein, breaking down your body's own muscle. Isn't the body an incredible tool? Isn't the way that the brain seeks food? in other places if you're not giving it. Everything is interesting. So now, having spoken to you for a bit,

I totally get everything that you know about the body and the mind, how the two are just so deeply connected and they all need, I've just thought of the word, you're going to love me. Homeostasis. Beautiful.

Everything. Everything is working towards protecting your brain, right? Your brain is the only organ completely encased in bone, right? It's so delicate and so important. You know, when in utero, in the womb, the body will preferentially pull down particular nutrients from the mother's body to fuel the brain. Just for the brain. Just for the brain.

Do you know, you now had a brain tumour. Yes. And it was a colloid cyst. And it most likely started in my mother's womb. Isn't that mad? It is. I was like, what, when I, in utero even. So it's interesting, but you talking about, I was thinking,

I wonder if like that all the little something little started and then. Yeah, and it's so, I mean, it's extraordinary how you found out. Yeah, I mean, I'm just, but, you know, you keep talking about the brain and this amazing thing, and I keep thinking about Kevin, who's seen it. Yes. Like, bang. You know, absolutely mad. Have you seen pictures of your own brain?

Well, he's got video footage of it. and I keep asking to see it, but I think he's just... He wants to give you a bit of time. He's giving me a bit of time because I keep going, I'd love to see it. And he's like, let's... Yeah, I think so. But I would, hopefully I will. I really want...

I'll share it with you. I went to a talk, the MS Society, do an annual talk. And one of the speakers had a 3D print of his brain. Wow. And it was just the best thing, his actual brain to scale. I just thought it was the most amazing. Yeah, I mean, an MRI of a brain is mad. Yeah.

You cut through your eyes and your nose. You're like watching it slither through it. It's so crazy. None of us want to be that parent who's constantly texting their kids. Where are you? So I've partnered with Life 360 today who have the solution. For me, it's not just about keeping up with day-to-day plans. I've got a daughter on the other side of the world in Australia.

And with the time difference and everything, we are always playing phone tag, trying to find a good moment to call. But with Life 360, I can just check in with her without needing to pester her every five minutes and get peace of mind without being that mum. And it's not just the family halfway across the world. It's actually brilliant for everyday life. No more Ender's text checking if someone's on their way or waiting up because you don't know if they've made it home yet. Just open the app and see. Simple.

Plus, Life 360 works whether you're on iPhone or Android, and you can set up place alerts so you get a little nudge when someone arrives at their destination. I love that. If you want to make life easier and stress a bit less, download Life 360 today and Family Proof, Your Family. So supplements, we were just touching on supplements. What other supplements? So iodine, we're talking about the bees and the omega-3s. Need to go together.

Where can, is this all on your page? Do you talk about it? How do we find out? Everywhere. I talk about everywhere. I would stop people in the street. Instagram is probably the place to be and my podcast. So Instagram.

What's your podcast called? It's called Stronger Minds. Where I will talk about different kind of brain and mental health facts and science and information. I have a weekly news letter where I share fresh brain science every week. Great. So I'm trying to like wherever people are I'm trying to be. So, yes, so in terms of food, oily fish.

So your salmon, macral, anchovies, herring, trout. Everyone forgets about trout. It's delicious kippers, yes, they're herrings. So yes, it's a smoker. Yeah, it's a smoke. You can keep it in, it's absolutely fine. Let everybody see. Let everyone see that I didn't know that.

I might be wrong. I think it's her. No, I'm pretty sure it is. It tastes similar, but just it. just smokier, so I don't know. All of those delicious things. All of those delicious things. But so oily fish, really good.

It's quite interesting how sometimes with vitamins and minerals that you need to take one, but if you take this one as well, it'll sort of help you. The one I've learnt recently, I mean, I don't know if I'm right, I'm not a, it was vitamin D and K2. Everybody's talking about take those two together because it'll help you with your vitamin D. and how omega-3s and bees are good together. The bees work together. They help 9 and 12 work together to basically break down a compound called homocysteine into a safe,

which is kind of neurotoxic, into a safe amino acid. They work together to recycle it and make it safe for you. Is it, when do we take supplements and when do we eat food and what's better? We should always food first. Food first is the basic principle. So for example, there was a study that showed that people who ate a small bowl of leafy greens every day. So like a small cereal bowl. So what, wait, leafy greens.

I know that sounds really dense of me to say. No, no, not at all. No, not at all. Cale, spinach, watercress, rocket, lettuces, like the long, remain lettuces. Yes. But all lettuces will give you something. But the darker, the green, the better. Oh, okay.

Well, I didn't know that. Yeah. So things like the cavillone. Neroes that get really dark. Yes. Yes. Okay. Um, the better. But yes, all greens. All greens. And the, the more variety you have, the more variety of nutrients you get. Yes.

The brain needs a range of nutrients. So variety is the spice of life. Okay. Um, those people who had daily greens compared to people who ate less than a serving of greens a day had brains that were 11 years younger than the people who had 0.8 servings of green today. Wow. Right. Okay. And then there's a separate study that looked at those nutrients in brain samples found that the levels of those nutrients associated with leafy greens were 50% lower in the brains of people who died with Alzheimer's disease compared to the brains of people who died with healthy brains. So we think that these nutrients are particularly protective full of antioxidants. Like I said, those oxidants really damaged the brain. Your brain has its own

internal antioxidants or glutathione, but because it has such a high metabolic rate, it's always kind of throwing out these. Yeah, yeah. And so if you can give it an extra support with these other antioxidant compounds in your food, particularly food, because antioxidants as supplements can knock the immune system out of balance. Right. Which is what you do not want. No.

But through food, you're golden. And so we know oily fish, greens. Leafy greens. Leafy greens. And then I would say, is magnesium a thing? Magnetium is a thing. For the brain? So I, so the caveat and the kind of full disclosure here is that I do try to optimize my diet,

but I do also take a little, little cheeky something on the side. Because I take magnesium. I take magnesium. I take a B complex. I take my vitamin D and I take an amygic three. What I consider to be the best evidence to train supplements. This is going to sound so shallow. And we are going to start an absolute craze like of people running to the local health store.

I'm going to copy more because you're the brain health lady. I eat really well. I just copy researchers. Okay. Yeah. You copy researchers and they're doing it. Okay, I'm doing it too. I spoke to one of the leading brain researchers, Michael Crawford.

He's been talking about this stuff since the 70s. He will eat fish about four or five times. I did too. You know, and I just thought, well, if he's... I eat macral. I'll eat half a fillet of... mackerel out of the fridge as my snack. That is my mid-morning snack. Like, that's where I've got to. But because I love the taste, I'd rather eat that than a biscuit. Yeah. I love the taste of it.

Your brain loves you for it. Yeah. Well, I hope so. It's been through a lot. Did, um, can't give you any kind of recommendations about what to do post-surgery? No. No. No. I mean, it's been, um, it's, it's been interesting. Short, short-term memory loss is a really weird. one. I've had basically Alzheimer's in return. I was like a very advanced Alzheimer's patient that could feel herself getting better every day. It's been a, I mean, I'd love to talk to you about it one day. If you ever meet anybody that's going through short time, remember it might be nice. We could have a chat while I'm helping you with your anger issues. Thank you so much. It'll be a beautiful symbiotic, like exchange of knowledge. But, but.

Because of my dad, I think, I've felt since I found out, so maybe 12 years ago that he had Alzheimer's, I've been thinking a lot more about what can I do for myself. Can we just discuss exercise? Yes. Exercise is probably the strongest evidence base we have for protecting brain health long time. Every time you move, you're helping your brain a little bit. And I like the fact that you said every time you move because it's not just, I was talking to somebody this morning. it's not just going to the gym it's being active what does that look like

for a brain and what kind of activity helps so everything so we can split it into three so we can think about cardio strength training and mindfulness type exercises right cardio the same thing that it does for your heart in terms of keeping your blood pumping keeping your blood vessels flexible

and responsive that's what it does for your brain because you have 400 miles of blood vessels in your brain, feeding all of those really hungry cells who are burning through all of this energy. And so they need a constant, regular, reliable supply of oxygen, nutrients and glucose. That's what a stroke is, right? If that gets blocked and you can't get access to those cells

and those cells, the rest of your body has the capacity to store energy as a backup, that's what fact is. Your brain doesn't have a backup store of energy. Your brain cannot store energy. So we never want there to be an energy crisis for your brain. And obviously, cardio, oxygen loves it. I could feel, because I started walking the day after my operation, I was walking up and down the corridors, waving at everybody.

Because I wanted, I knew, actually not the day after, because I was in intensive care for three days, but the minute I could, I got up and was going because I could feel like that's what biologically I needed to do. Oxygenize my brain. And we see improvements in performance simply from that. So when there's more blood blowing to your brain, your brain cells are getting more oxygen, you have better memory performance. You have better concentration and focus. You have better processing speed from that simple kind of mechanical thing. And it might be, you know, it might be get off the tube. two stops early and walk to work like you're late or it might be but just do something something as

as short as four minutes can be sufficient it can be really really really really small doses can be really really helpful when it comes to resistance training so you know anything that's about building muscle that's lifting weights body weights push-ups kettlebells anything that's building muscle essentially the same chemicals that are released to build muscle growth factors cross-in-es into the bloodstream, up to the brain, do the same thing for your brain. They help improve the survival of the brain cells that you have and encourage the growth of new connections, strengthening your brain. So you will hold on to your brain volume the more exercise you do

because your brain starts to shrink. Yes. It starts to shrink from about your late 50s by about half a percent per year. And that's considered normal. I don't know. I find it terrifying. But walking, resistance training, they can reverse that age-related shrinking, particularly in the hippocamp. They can reverse it.

Wow, that's a beautiful study which had people walking. They started at five minutes, started at 15 minutes. And they increased their increments of walking by five minutes per week until they were doing 40 minutes three times a week. Right. And they increased their hippocampal volume. And the hippocampus is the part of the brain, which is a seat of memory, that long-term memory, pulling things back, remembering something that you did when you were 6, 15 last week. Increased hippocampal volume by 2%, which is effectively reversing brain aging. Wow.

Simply through walking. I mean, get a dog. Get a dog. A dog. Do you know what I mean? Start a walking group with friends. Yes. And that's social.

You know, join a club. Because loneliness is so bad for us, we know. And you were talking about, I was really interested that in exercise, you talked about mindfulness. And I was like, hang on a minute. How is mindfulness exercise? So if we think about things like yoga or your Tai Chi's kind of mindfulness-based activities, there are a couple of things that are kind of built into them, which are really helpful for your brain. So one is the stretching element, which by itself, we think when you stretch muscles, certainly in animal studies, you lower inflammation in the body. Wow. Can I just say you have given me great fuel for when I do, you know, I love exercise and I share sometimes

about exercising, but people don't want to stretch after because it's like, I've done the, I've done the session, I'm just going to go back to my life and just and oh, it's fine and I don't get the doms and it's fine and I'm actually quite flexible. So if actually the physical act of stretching is good for your brain. I'm going to say that. Kimberly told me. Superb. Yeah.

Superb. Yeah. And then the breathing. So when you're doing in a yoga class or in a mindfulness-based exercise, you're often breathing very slowly. You often elongate your exhalation. And what we see is a, again, a reduction in stress, improvements in stress, resilience. We see reductions in cortisol and sometimes activation of the vagus nerve.

So when you elongate your exhalation, you have to constrict through the back of the throat. And to say that the vagus nerve is this kind of long winding nerve that goes down from the base of the skull. And it goes through all of your major organs and rounds out in the gut. I'm hearing a lot about the vagus nerve. Yeah, it's the nerve du jour. It's like everyone's favorite nerve. Why? Because it's the, on one hand, it is the main structural component of the gut brain axis.

And we all really care about the gut brain axis. at the moment. So it's that bidirectional communication between your brain and your gut. But as I said, it goes through all of your major organs. But if you think about it like a motorway,

if you think about this nerve like a motorway, seven or eight of the nerves or the direction of traffic is upwards on the body to the brain. So it's not just your brain telling your body what to do. It's your brain receiving signals and information about what's happening in my body.

What's the state of nutrition? What's the state of nutrition? of stress? What's the state of distention? Is there injury so that your brain can coordinate a response? I always think like how am I feeling? What is my body feeling? And I always think, don't need to ask you know. Oh, I mean, we can talk about emotions. Yeah, like when you, when you know there's something not right, you hear people talk about that. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And they go, I know. Yeah. And it's so important. Your body is always, your brain is always receiving, like constantly,

information about what's happening in your body and having to make sense of it. And that's where it becomes really interesting when we think about emotions. So the other thing I want to say about the vagus nerve is that it's the off switch for your stress system, your fight or flight response. If you activate the vagus nerve,

if you get the vagus nerve working, it activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest system. Sorry. Wait, no, but I'd like to just keep on that for one more minute. How do you activate your vagus nerve? Yeah, so activate it's kind of tricky as a word. It's humming a thing.

Somebody keeps talking about vibration, music. This is what we think. So because of where it kind of goes down through the back of the throat and into the heart, there are a couple of ways that you can get in. One of those, and probably the main one and the best one is breathing. a long, slow breath. So partly because of that restriction that happens in the back of the throat when you have to slow down your breath and restrict your throat to kind of release less air. It's funny, I already feel, I've done one breath and I felt like, oh, that feels nice.

It suddenly you realise that you haven't breathed properly in about four days. But also you have stretch receptors in your lungs, which when they, so like bits of elastic almost, that when they stretch, they trigger. your parismpathetic nervous system as well. So when you take a deep breath in, it's an automatic biological mechanism. You can't fake it, twist it, deny it. As soon as you take a deep breath, that is happening and there's little communication happening with your heart and the way that your heart is shifted by the way that your lungs are filling up and that will help to calm you automatically. So, and then yes, the second one is like humming and whether you can, when we do, when

in studies where they do Vegas nurse stimulation, what they will do is use almost like a pacemaker or type of magnet that will vibrate on the nerve. So humming is an attempt to kind of recreate that kind of sensation. And I always wonder if those singing bowls,

you know, the sound, the vibration that you sometimes feel when there's a singing ball. I remember somebody put one here on my tummy once. It felt amazing. You know, it's... Anyway, that's interesting Vegas nerve. activation and how it's actually quite hard to activate in a way if it's not just happening naturally, if you know what I mean, to find a way to do that.

I'm not sure, because you were going to talk about something after we'd finished Vegas nerve. Emotions, how that links with what's happening in your body. Oh, thanks. So, and I love talking about this because we have such poor education. around emotions that, A, people just find them massively confusing and frightening and just want to avoid them as much as possible. How can I not feel this thing tends to be the kind of main question? But also, we really underestimate the ways that we, the ways that emotions are shaped and the ways that we can intervene to help regulate and understand them. So the kind of main,

it's called the theory of constructed emotion. The main idea is that, that emotions are your brain's way of making sense of what's happening in your body. Okay. Like giving meaning and sense to what's happening in your body. So, for example, if I say to you, you are standing on the edge of a cliff on a windy day. I'm already. All right, okay? You've got butterflies in your stomach.

Your heart is pounding. You got a little sweat on. What is your emotion? Fear. Okay. So you've interpreted, from the information I've given you, about the environment and probably your previous experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And from what your body is telling you that you're in a state of fear.

If I said, Davina, you are a highly experienced paraglider. You've done 400 jumps in your life. And these are the perfect conditions for a flight. Now what are you feeling? Excitement. Oh, wow. Right? That's mad.

So it's interesting because I, not in that context, but I've always used to say to people who are going to perform or do something or go on a stage, about probably 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, I realized that my abject terror about presenting the BAFTAs or some big event in front of my peers, the feelings were the same. Fear and terror were the same as excitement, you know. And I thought, I've got to stop using the word, I'm terrified, and start saying I'm excited. And it really made a difference. It's exactly the same sensation.

Yeah. But depending on the information from the current situation, your previous experience, your brain will knit them together in a different way. And so simply by changing the input of information that I gave you, you switched from fear to excitement. And that would change the way that you approached, you know. So anyone can do that. Anyone can do that. And it's about understanding what is happening in your body, right? So essentially, that feeling of terror or that, or the sensations of butterflies in your stomach and all of that sort of thing are on a fundamental level,

your body trying to prepare for challenge, right? Because all it knows, all that your brain and body know is that something is happening. We don't know what's going to be the outcome. That's the ambiguity of it. That's the unknown part of it. And because it's unknown, I can't predict exactly what you're going to need to get through this. It's kind of why your brain hates uncertainties, because it can't predict how it's going to survive. So it says, what can I do? The very best thing I can do is give you more energy. The very best thing that I can do is release more glucose into your bloodstream, more fats into your bloodstream to fuel your brain so that you can think quickly, increase that processing speed and fuel your muscles in case you need to find an escape

room. So that's all that's happening. All of that sensation is associated to your body saying, I know you're going to need energy for this. That's all I can do for you is give you energy. And then your brain has to work out what it does with those sensations. Do I tell you, turn that energy into fear, I'm threatened, I need to escape, I need to save myself, or do I turn that energy into excitement, joy, anticipation, challenge? And that is partly about your previous experience, but it is absolutely something you can learn. I love Kimberle-Is. Talking to you has made me just love my body and my brain so much. Good. No, I love that. I love that. Because I so often work with women who have such a mis and distrusting relationship with their bodies.

They, you know, they've been in a battle with their bodies since they were 13 when their mum put them on their first diet or whatever it is. They've been told that the body that they have is inadequate or undesirable or wrong or broken and they don't understand their bodies. And I will sit and I will tell people that, you know, when you crave sugar during a really stressful period. That's your body trying to take care of your brain. It's that same process of trying to ensure that you have enough energy, especially if you don't have anything else to rely on. It's your body doing its very best to protect you. God. And just having that little shift in frame

of how we think about our bodies can just ease some of the kind of hostility. Yeah. And I just think it's incredibly sad to be in a hostile. This is, this is you. Yeah. A, fighting yourself really. Always. Just a quick one. You just mentioned young girls coming in and hating their bodies and it can start or an older woman coming to see you but it all started as a young girl when her mother did. What is in terms of helping a woman love her body and herself?

What are the big no-noes as a parent, if there are any parents watching on how to talk to a young boy or young woman about their body shape and type. And okay, where to start. The very, very first thing, if I would just slightly steal that question for a moment, that I would want parents of young girls to know is that putting on weight is the trigger for puberty. And so don't panic. Because what will happen is that there'll be a young girl and she will have been, you know,

kind of wait a child, like a weight like child all of her life. And then sometime around 11, 12, 13, she suddenly becomes a bit more plump, right? And that so often I have seen that to be the point where the parents panic. And maybe, you know, the panic is driven externally. People are talking about childhood obesity and, you know, you don't want her to go down this road and but they panic. And then they say, we must fix this. We must change your body as quickly as possible. before this becomes a terrible thing. And all of a sudden, the young girl who has never had to think about her body at all, except to run and do pee and whatever, is now suddenly looking at herself and thinking,

This is a problem. This is a problem. Yeah. God, it's so sad, isn't it? And that is just the off-road for a happy relationship with your body. So I would, I'm planning a podcast around this various subjects. I would start there. What around parenting?

Around fat. Oh, great. That's such a good idea. Just about understanding it because we have such a pejorative relationship with it that we don't understand that when fat works, it's doing something really important for you. And actually there are ways in which, you know, well, fat is essential in lots of ways, but certain timings of fat, you know, we think that older women who have a little bit more body fat, it will protect them from falls and frailty. Totally. And if you, I mean, what I've just been, through. I was in bed basically for two and a half, three months. I lost so much muscle and fat. I'm

literally eating enormous quantities to try and get back, but it's very hard when you're older. So thank God I had a little bit of buffer, not a lot, enough, you know, and I'm rebuilding again. It's, it is true. You never know when something's going to happen and you're going to need that. Yeah, and it's just your body always trying to look after you. So I would start there, but then I would say, I would you wouldn't start with the women your children will look up to you as an example of how they talk to themselves

so always ensure that you're talking to yourself with kindness and compassion and love that you're not pointing to bits of yourself and going I hate that I don't know that's incredibly hard because of the way that we're socialised and I certainly grew up in the era where people were circling bits of women's body In magazines. On the front pages.

Circle of shame. And then looking at them and thinking, oh, is it terrible to have a sweat patch? Okay. Well, that means it's terrible to be human. So bad. All right. And to be constantly on guard for what someone else is thinking about your body. And I think the terrible thing about that is that it leads to self-objectification.

So instead of being in your body, feeling it, connecting with it, getting to know it. Listening. listening, being like, what do I fancy eating today? Well, that's going to be driven by, you know, what my body needs in part. You know, did I eat too much yesterday without moving very much? Or did I under eat and does my body want to, am I feeling particularly stressed? And my body, you know, that's part of the kind of, of the unconscious signaling that's coming from your body. The more that we begin to objectify ourselves, that we begin to look at ourselves from the outside,

as an object that is either attractive or unattractive, the right shape or the wrong shape, the more we disconnect from that communication with our bodies. And the more we just start doing things to our bodies, right? I should eat this. I should... Punishing. I should do this exercise, even if it's a type of exercise that my body doesn't like, that doesn't feel good for me. Physiologically. Yeah, right? You know, we all move in different ways. We all have different levels of flexibility. Some of us are more mobile than ever, you know, in terms of our ligaments. Some of us have more of a propensity to build strength and we might like that. We have to listen. But we really have to listen. We really have to listen. That's so true.

Another massive area that everybody's talking about and I get so confused about it because especially now that I'm trying to put weight back on, but they talk about it being brilliant. for your health, and is it good for your brain as fasting? I get so confused about fasting. It's like it feels... I think I think I have 11 caveats about fasting in this book, which I would just direct people to. Okay, so what?

In this book, how to build a healthy brain, there are 11 caveats. I think it's 11. About... About fast. About fasting in particular. So there are benefits to it, but there are... So chapter 8. Okay, great. Thank you. To fast or not to fast. So what we have when it comes to fasting. Yeah.

Is a lot of animal data. Mice, worms, dogs, rabbits, some primates, flies. But not human. We do have human data. Okay. But most of that is on men, as is so much research. It's so interesting. And so the theoretical benefits are things like increasing a process called autophagy, which is like your cells clean up process and how your body takes out the kind of metabolic waste. And what we want is for that to be working well. enough that you don't have this build-up of cells that either get old, they become what's called

senescent, which means they're old, but rather than dying, which is a process called apoptosis, which is where they kind of self-destruct, they just kind of sit back in the tissue and then pump out kind of toxic compounds. And we don't... So you want to get rid of those. You want to get rid of those. Yeah. So that, the theoretical, kind of mechanistic basis of fasting is that after a sudden, you know, you want to get rid of those. You want to get rid of that. period of time, you switch on processes that turn up that process. However, there are, it's very hard to get really good human data because people find it really difficult to fast. It's, you don't know whether the benefits that have been seen last, whether you need to fast forever. Also, it's very difficult in the

research to to understand what protocol people are talking about. Are you talking about an 186? Are you talking about every other day fasting? Are you talking about one meal a day? Are you talking about prolonged fasting? It all gets mushed together and it's not very clear. Yeah. And we're just confused about what's the best one. Like what should we be doing? But what's also true is that women's bodies are really acutely sensitive to energy availability and particularly carbohydrate availability because harbourhydrate availability feeds female hormone production. And so what can happen and have a colleague, Rini McGregor, who works around hypotheraic amenorrhea and women losing their periods from insufficient energy.

Right. I've heard about that. I had a friend of mine who wasn't eating a lot at school and her period stopped. And it's the thing about losing those hormones is that it's not just about periods. It's about bone density. It's about brain health. It's about kind of stress resilience. And what we don't have for my liking is enough evidence on the long-term safety profile for women of this intervention. So I struggled to say that it's something that should be recommended. People will experiment and I'm broadly libertarian, but I want people to have good information and I want them to be informed choices. So can I just put a proposal? to you.

Yes. What I was doing, I'm not going to talk about anybody else. This is my experience. What I was doing was I was stopping eating maybe at around seven or eight, which is easy for me. That's when I like to eat early in the evening, not snacking throughout the night, drinking just icy water, which I like, and then not eating in the morning until maybe I was doing 14 to 16 hours not eating.

Is that going to benefit more dovet of? in any way. Am I getting rid of anything bad doing that? No. Possibly, but we're not sure. I mean, that's not good enough for me. If I'm not eating breakfast for a possibly. I mean, that's the point.

We don't have really. Not really. We haven't got the research or the data. And the other issue is that often, and perhaps that's the case with you, but people who might start fasting or experimenting with fasting, when these things started, they started as calorie restriction with optimum nutrition,

what was called cron. So people were being very, very careful about making sure that even though they were taking on less energy, they were getting all of their nutrients. They were getting all of the required vitamins and minerals and sufficient protein. During the fast, during the day, during the eating period, whenever their eating period was. I'm not convinced that that's what people are doing now. Right? Yes.

That people are, they're not starting with a baseline optimal diet full of nutrients. They're starting on an average adult Western diet, which we already know is depleted in certain nutrients. We know that the higher your intake of what we might call ultra-processed foods or foods high in salt, fat and sugar, the higher your intake of those foods, the lower your nutritional status on a population level. Right. from my perspective, your brain needs lots of nutrients to be healthy and happy. So what happens when someone who's already on a nutritionally poor diet restricts the amount of food they're consuming? To me, that just says that their brain is getting even less. And so the idea that we might get good brain health outcomes simply from fasting without looking at nutritional composition and quality is a bit of a misnomer.

So I would be, I would start, what I would want people to be doing is optimising their diets. Let's start. Okay. So let's omega trees, bees. Five a day. Yeah. Five a day. We're not eating our fruit and vegetable.

Like we could start there. Yeah. If you could just start with your fibre day, 91% of Brits aren't getting enough fibre. When fibre is broken down in the body, it protects the brain. So how, how does fibre, um, Where do we get it from? Like things like whole wheats have got fiber, like whole grains, I mean. Yeah.

What's quite interesting, I learned this ages ago from, do you know Dr. Megan Lossie? I learned this from her about, so you could eat a bell pepper, but if you're making food, put three different colors of bell pepper and you're getting three different types of fiber. I love that idea that the more color you get, the different. The range of nutrients you're getting. The different range of fibres you're getting because all the different fibres do something different? Different fibres and different nutrients. So your gut microbes will also break down those colour compounds as well and they will give you different like buy products. So the reds will give you a different byproduct compared to the greens and the yellows.

So yeah. What do people who, you know, would argue that buying ultra-processed food is cheaper? It is. Yeah. So how can you eat healthily for less? So this I think is about two things. One is about those commercial incentives. That's the part that's outside of our hands. And a huge amount of our health is out of our hands. These are the environmental factors, the environmental conditions that shape our choices. It's called choice architecture. It's about how the environment shifts or nudges you in a particular. direction to the sorts of choices that you make. So for example, just the way that types of food might be displayed in the supermarket will affect which one you choose.

Just the way that they're priced next to each other will affect which one looks more appealing to you, the labelling, all of that stuff, the amount of times you see a particular advert. So our choices, and particularly our nutritional choices, are shaped to a huge and quite unconscious degree by the environment. And that's why I do think that there is a responsibility in a role for government to make it easier to make those healthful choices, whether that is about reducing the costs of fruit and vegetables. So much fruit and veggies wasted. Yes. Is there a way that we could subsidise it to make it easier and more accessible for people?

Is there a way that, you know, I know, Chris Van Tulligan disagrees with reformulation, but, you know, I think reformulations. but you know I think reformulation is But you know what I want with this podcast? I want to hear all opinions. So I'd love to hear your opinion. If it's different to Chris, that's that's... So I think reformulation, so making convenient food, because we do rely on convenience food, we are time poor.

So reformulating food so that they are more nutritious. Yes. The foods that we are already eating, can we make them more nutritious? That's, before we can overhaul the entire diet culture of the UK, will that just help people to eat more nutritiously? But I think that's also understanding that for my daughter did dietetics in Newcastle and she was up there and she realized that people find great comfort in the food that they love. And to say to somebody, oh, you can't eat that anymore, you've got to eat this,

which actually sends people into a depression because, but this is one of my greatest joys, my food. And so actually little changes that companies make of the food that people are already enjoying surely will be good for the business and good for the consumer. And if we could get them just doing a bit more fresh food like subsidised fruit and veg or there must be a way that we can actually make a big difference with some small changes. I think so. But what it takes, what it would take is a cultural shift. And cultural shifts do not come from individuals. It doesn't come from educating one school over here, one hospital over here. It has to come from top down.

And that's where we get into a bit of a pickle. I'm going to stop there. Can we all just give Kimberly a massive round of applause, please? Kimberly Wilson. I loved talking to Kimberly. I think I love it when somebody gets me to reframe the way I look at something. And she's reframed the way I look at. my brain, what it does, she has made me fall in love with my body all over again because of the

way that it works and the way that it's constantly telling me what it's needing and that I need to listen to that more. She's told me about, well, she's made me reframe the way I look at my brain and she's empowered me. She's empowered me. I believe that I can improve my brain health in quite a major way with some quite simple lifestyle choices and I feel really good about that.