Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #25 Eat Your Way to Better Health with Dale Pinnock

Episode Date: July 3, 2018

Dr Chatterjee talks to author, chef and nutritional medicine expert, Dale Pinnock aka ‘The Medicinal Chef’, about the various diets that he has tried and how we can eat to improve our heart health, anxiety, depression and type-2 diabetes. Show notes available at: drchatterjee.com/dale Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, my name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, medical doctor, author of The Four Pillar Plan and television presenter. I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier because when we feel better, we live more. I'm absolutely delighted to welcome onto the show today a guest who is very well qualified.

He's got a BSc in human nutrition. He's got a postgraduate diploma in nutritional medicine, but he's also a chef. It is none other than Dale Pinnock, who goes by the name of The Medicinal Chef. Dale, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Dale, I've been familiar with your work for a number of years now. You've written how many books now? Is it what, 12, 13? 13 books.

13 books, okay. And I've always been intrigued by your title, which is that of The Medicinal Chef. Yes. So I wonder if you could expand as to how you came up with that title and how it's relevant. Well, it's a deliberately provocative title, really, because I wanted people to think differently about food. I wanted them to think of it not as just a source of fuel, but as something that could actually be a valid part of the healthcare picture. You know, it has the capacity to make us better and to do us harm. And that's how I wanted people to start thinking about the food that they're eating.

So I kind of conjured up that title from that point of view. How old is that title now? Oh, crikey. That was probably about 2002 I came up with that. 2002, so we're looking at 16 years. So I would also make the case that you were a little bit ahead of your time in many ways because you, I'm sure, having been in this field for quite a long time now, you've seen that there's a burgeoning interest at the moment.

There's more and more people talking about food as medicine or lifestyle as medicine. Yet you were out there in 2002 coming up with that title, the medicinal chef. Even before that, even in the 90s, I was kind of into this in the late 90s as well. And back then, it was quite hard to actually find good healthy food and if you told people that you were you know that you're eating a healthy diet they'd look at you like you'd just fallen out the sky it was a very different

environment did you ever get any pushback on the title on the medicinal chef i haven't no that's the one thing i've not had any kind of pushback. I mean, yeah, you get the old people kind of bringing Lily the Pink references in again. But, you know, that's all a bit of fun. I can live with that. So, you know, I'd love to understand your journey. I mean, when did you start cooking? When did you start seeing, you know, the relationship between cooking, food and health? Was there a defining moment or is there something you've always been interested in?

There were defining moments. I mean, I've cooked since i was four years old as soon as me and my sister were old enough to know what a saucepan was my mum would hoik us into the kitchen and get us involved in preparing the family meal so i've always cooked always been familiar with it and then when i left school i did every job in the in the catering industry from pot wash through to head chef and running kitchens so i've always worked in that kind of environment but in terms of actually linking it to health that started when i was about 15 years old from the age of about 10 or 11 i started getting really bad acne and it was the year of leaving primary school to go up to secondary school that time in your life when you

start to kind of compare yourself in relation to your peers and i look like i've been shot in the face with a blunderbuss it was awful and i had like all the you know the dallasins and the um all the creams tetracycline and like the oral antibiotics the topical so you've been to your doctor you've taken all those topical creams taken all the antibiotics the only thing i didn't do was roaccutane i didn't go that far um just because i knew there was a lot of nasty side effects and nothing really made that much of a difference got to to 15 years old, sat around my friend's house one night feeling sorry for myself and his mum came out to me and she said, look, unless you change what's going on on the inside,

nothing will change on the outside. And she linked me to this book called Fit for Life. It's like a proper old school thing, you read it now and it's pretty strange. But obviously as a 15 year old boy, I was like, yeah, whatever. But I was so desperate at that time that I went home and I read this thing cover to cover in a couple of days. And that was where that aha moment kind of clicked in.

And I realised that we can actively engage in our own healthcare. So before that moment, let's just rewind back. So as a kid, you and your sister, you're fascinated about cooking. Did that come from you or did that come from your mum saying, right, I'm going to you need to learn how to cook that's from my mum definitely 100 and i was always a very enthusiastic eater so to be able to marry the two together and create the things that i enjoyed eating was i think that's fascinating particularly as we talk now in society how you know one of the things that we've lost is you know that basic human skill to be able to cook. And, you know, it's such a common thing that people are talking about. You know, we need to teach our children to cook again.

It needs to be a fundamental life skill that they learn. So you, you know, you had a mother who was very keen to promote that. As you learned to cook initially, was health part of the equation? Or was it just, I want to learn how to feed myself? Yeah, no, it was just because I was an enthusiastic eater. I loved good food. And I just wanted to be able to kind of prepare the things that I enjoyed eating. I wasn't health conscious at all until that moment, really.

I mean, I would be like making all sorts of weird burger concoctions, strange curries with God knows what in them. It wasn't a pretty sight often. with God knows what in them. It wasn't a pretty sight often. So, you know, even at 15, you know, I think back to myself at 15, I'm not sure how, you know,

how health orientated I was at that time, if I'm honest. You know, I think I was into working out. I think I used to buy Men's Health when it came out and I used to look at the workouts and try and do them all, all that kind of thing. But, you know, as a 15-year-old boy, you said something really key there. Well, you know, a teenager, really, that your friend's mother gave you a book that initially you were probably a little bit sceptical about

because, you know, what's what I eat got to do with my skin, right? But do you remember what it was in that book that you read that you thought, oh, I wonder if I can change my diet to improve my skin? I'm not sure if I can sort of recall like a specific chapter or whatever. I think it was just the general tone of it. And the general tone of it was that the modern diet is killing us in a million and one different ways. I mean, it's very sensationalist. I read it now.

It's not one I'd go out and recommend now, but it was the catalyst. We made a meme part with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. i think it was just the tone and the way that it was written it did kind of give me that that that wake-up call but that paired with the amount of pain that i was feeling like in terms of self-consciousness there was that that desire for a deep desire for change so what did you start to change i i changed things quite drastically overnight i went pretty much vegan straight away i'm not now but i i was vegan for the best part of 20 years on the basis of this and then moved over to you know quite a high raw food diet and and then i i must have read nearly a thousand books before i actually decided to go to university

and use myself as a guinea pig extensively i tried macrobiotic diets i tried you know the raw food diets um ayurvedic approaches to things i just tried everything i just experimented on myself because i i just wanted to experience all of these different things and and and just look for for keys in all of them and so you know this is a theme that i see quite a lot with people who are in the health space and trying to promote good health. And I'd probably include myself in that is that we've often done a lot of these things ourselves. We've often experimented with a whole variety of different approaches to find out what aspects of them work for us. When you were experimenting, what outcome were you looking for?

Was it all around your skin or were you also looking for more energy, you know, more, you know, better control of weight, all these kind of other factors? Or was it really, I don't like my skin, the medications aren't working for it, I want to get it better somehow? Initially, it was just to improve the quality of my skin. But one of the pleasant surprises that I found when I started to change my diet was that everything changed. I felt differently. I suddenly started to look at things differently. I mean, obviously, what I didn't realize then was I was nourishing my brain and my nervous system at a better level. So the way in which you perceive things and the way in which you actually make judgments based on your perceptions, all of that stuff changes when you start to nourish your body better so

everything started to improve so i guess i was kind of searching for that holy grail really and because they were you know i was still i was still young and i was reading about all these different approaches and me being the kind of person that i am i'm so inquisitive i can't just read something i need to experience it i need to know inside out out, upside down, back to front, left to right. So I would often use those diets on myself. So I could recall my own progress on them. And you know what I found in my my own experiences. I think that's one of the reasons Dale, you've you've been so successful, and your books have struck a chord with so many different people is that you have gone and experienced that. And can almost see it from you know the patient or the client or or the or the you know the member of the public's perspective on someone who might

be searching for better health yeah through their diet so i think that's i think that's really important did you see your skin improve when you change your diet yeah absolutely and if very quickly fairly quickly yeah yeah i mean for to start with i stopped looking gray that was one of the first things you know i stopped looking washed out and then you know i just know i would still i'd still get flare-ups and stuff now and again but the duration of them was less and the severity of them was uh was much less in comparison to what they used to be so i I did notice some improvements fairly quickly. You've tried a variety of different diets.

You were probably, I imagine, searching for which is the one that's going to suit me best. It's going to clear up my skin and then maybe more energy and better cognitive function, all these kind of things. You mentioned that you went vegan and you were vegan for 20 years yet you're not now i think that's that's something i want to sort of go into because vegan diets are all the rage at the moment you know they're getting a lot of traction on social media there's lots of documentaries that have come out uh about yeah vegan diets and they're proven to be very popular with certain sections of society having been a vegan for 20 years you've presumably made the choice not to be anymore i wonder if you

could just elaborate on that what you know why did you change you know what have you felt since you've stopped being vegan yeah i'd really love to understand that a little bit more i guess the the starting point is what is someone's reason for turning vegan in the first place if your reason for turning vegan in the first place is animal welfare and a certain group of ethical standpoints then there is no discussion you know that's purely an ethical decision and none of us can really kind of comment on that oh we all respect that right yeah but if you're kind of looking at it as being this health utopia that it's often pitched as, as like being the answer to absolutely everything, I mean, you'd live forever,

then you may end up slightly disappointed. I actually found initially, when I was in my 20s particular, I really, really thrived on it. You know, I felt wonderful. I looked wonderful. I had so much energy. My weight was always like an even keel. It suited me very, very well. Then I hit about 30 or 32 and all that changed.

I suddenly started ballooning. I was getting really bad inflammatory disorders and all sorts of issues. You know, I remember one time having CRP levels checked and it was like through the roof. So for those of you that are not familiar with that, CRP is a marker in our bloods of inflammation. It's not that specific. It can be many different conditions, many different things can cause your CRP to be up,

but it's just a marker of inflammation. Yeah, and so many things started to go wrong. And I was like, what on earth is going on? And then for the first time in the best part of 20 years, I started getting uncontrollable cravings for animal protein. And then I started to shift more towards like a paleo type diet-ish, a lower carbohydrate, higher protein, higher fat sort of diet. And I kind of got back to where I was before. You know, my weight normalised, my energy went through the roof. The first time I had some animal protein after all that time, it's like I went into orbit. It was crazy.

And, yeah, it just seemed the thing that suits me now. And I think we do go through different cycles in our life where our nutritional requirements change. Yeah, I think that stages such a key point and it's something i i write about extensively in my book the four pillar plan i talk about that you know our nutritional requirements may change throughout life a bodybuilder may have different nutritional requirements from a pregnant mother for example and it sounds that from what you're saying that in your 20s a vegan diet and i think we've got to clarify what sort of vegan diet it was because it was a whole food vegan whole food very good yeah so really what you would still consider now to be a healthy you know

whole food diet because it's very easy to be a junk food vegan oh yeah absolutely you know yeah exactly which all come under the vegan sort of, you know, they all qualify as vegan, yet they wouldn't necessarily be what we all consider to be healthy foods. You were having a healthy whole food vegan diet, and it seemed to suit you and your lifestyle in the context of what you were doing in your 20s. But there came a point when you didn't feel that it was so much,

so you start looking for oh yeah my my health was obviously declining and it was it was declining quite significantly and um it was yeah that was that was that was the key just making that that small change i mean obviously when i started kind of using all these different diets and experimenting with him i didn't have any formal training in nutrition then right at the start this was this was like right at the start of the journey. And now that I've kind of gone and got that formal training, I can start to fill in the blanks a lot more.

But interestingly, you've got a lot of benefit even without formal training. Oh, yeah, absolutely. The important thing is because the kind of work that you and I do and we're working with members of the public and we're working with people that often haven't got that kind of background in nutrition they may have read an article about something they may have read a book about something and start to do these things based on that it's our job to be able to guide them in as responsible a way as we can and I think if I've kind of experienced all of those diets the ins and the outs and have that understanding I'm in a

better position to guide them than someone who's never even looked at it, who's just in some sort of ivory tower wagging a finger. Yeah, I would absolutely agree. I would argue that you're in a better position than most because not only do you have the educational training, you've also got years of practical, real-life experience. And I think we lose that sometimes. There's such talk now about how we responsibly influence

on social media yes um and of course i agree with responsible influencing but at the same time i think we need to be very careful that you know one of the benefits of social media is that you know people can have all this accessible free information that's given to them in a way that they possibly couldn't 20 years ago if we start to police that you know we then end up in a very similar situation to what we used to have which is you can only get your nutritional information from one source yeah right whether the source was you know we can argue about that you know what people think of nutritional guidance but you know maybe the guidance that's put out for the general population doesn't suit an individual.

And so I think I don't mind so much this room where there are different people saying different things. I know it gets confusing for people, but I still think this is better than a situation where social media doesn't exist and we only get one narrative from one particular organisation. Yes, I agree 100 i think that's where you know yeah i do think it's a mixed blessing i mean the good thing about it

is the fact that it's got so many more people switched on to the fact that our diet is important exactly what we eat is actually has the the capacity to make real significant meaningful change in our lives i do sometimes take issue when these things are aesthetically driven you know it's like someone someone's got this lovely long flowing hair and a bikini body and they're sitting there with yoga pants and an avocado. And it's like, well, eat this and you can look like me. That ain't going to happen. That's not what it's about. But when there's kind of messaging that's actually inspiring people to make positive change to their lifestyle, that's a fantastic thing.

I mean, it is a bit bizarre that nutrition's kind of got weirdly entwined with fashion that's that's something that still confuses the life out of me i thought it would happen right when you were able to have met what did you train to be a chef was it again self-taught i didn't train to be a chef all my formal training has been in nutrition i i just worked every job in the um in the catering industry from pot wash right through to running kitchens i think there's a lot to be said for that dale you know i think we have put so much emphasis on formal training that some things like nutrition which can be intuitive in so many ways and for for years people um or cooking which has been just handed down through generations cooking is an art it's exactly and i think it's one of those things like you either have a flair for it or you don't.

With nutrition, it's a very academic subject. A biochemical pathway is a biochemical pathway, and it's influenced by a certain amount of variables, and you can kind of learn that, and you can kind of learn the nuances around that. But with cooking, sometimes you can teach people everything in the world, and it's just not their thing. So you have to kind of work with where they're at to try and try and fit the information and advice with you know where their capabilities lie at least it's like being able to draw or paint i see it very much as a as equally as creative as

as music or drawing or painting 100 percent del one thing i think you've done so incredibly well is marry up your personal experience with someone who had some health concerns who improved them through changing their diets with their own personal experience as a chef but then also you have gone out and got that nutrition training yeah and you've sort of blended it all together which is why i think your books have proved to be so popular so what i'm interested in is is you've written many different books in some of your recent books you have been very sort of condition specific you've spoken about how to eat for type 2 diabetes how to eat for anxiety and depression how to eat for heart disease i don't know i really

want to delve deep here because i'd love to understand we've got some general healthy eating principles yes which we can talk about that are probably applicable to everyone but then you've also managed to sort of delve into some specific conditions and sort of emphasized what additional things they might need to do or they might wish to try to help improve them and i wonder if you could just because there's a bit of a difference there generally healthy eating advice versus condition specific advice this is i mean this is where you can go down quite a fascinating rabbit hole fascinating for us to sometimes everyone glays over but it's the thing is as you rightly rightly said, there's certain things that will be applicable to everyone in terms of general principles for healthy eating.

You know, moving over to low glycemic carbohydrates, good quality protein sources, the composition of the meals, the type of fats that you include and the kind of fats you throw out. All of those kind of things are relevant to everyone. throw out all of those kind of things are relevant to everyone but when you're battling certain health issues or when you're having to self-manage particularly certain health issues there are certain dietary nuances that can become relevant to you so in the heart disease book for example there is a real key focus on the management of inflammation you know so we're talking about things like omega-3 omega-6 ratios because of, you know, PGE expression. So obviously, you know, to sort of backtrack on that, the essential fatty acids, omega-3 and omega-6, they're the metabolic building blocks for several different things in the body.

One of the main ones being prostaglandins, series 1, series 2 and series 3. Series 1 and 3 being natural anti-inflammatories that our body produces series two being one that switches inflammation on and the kind of fats that you eat can manipulate which group of prostaglandins get expressed at what rate and that then has a knock-on effect on the inflammatory response and really with cardiovascular disease when you kind of backtrack the whole pathophysiological process you know before that you get the foam cells before you get the fatty streak before you get any of those kind of arterial lesions the initial thing is inflammatory damage to the endothelium so you're kind of heading things off at the past there yeah i love this so let's let's just sort of um go in deep here but just for people listening just to be really

really clear we're talking about heart disease And we know that at the root cause of heart disease is a condition called chronic inflammation. Now, I know many of you listening to this probably already know this, but I know we're getting new listeners all the time to this podcast. So I think it's really important that I explain inflammation, we've got acute inflammation, which is a good thing. Okay, if we cut our cut our leg for example and it starts to bleed you know our body sends lots of inflammatory chemicals you know to the site to help to help us heal from that insult you know for a few days that area will be inflamed and everything will slowly return back down to normal when inflammation becomes problematic is when that acute inflammation can become chronic

and unresolved so every day we are insulting our body in such a way that our body thinks it's under attack and therefore it constantly releases markers of inflammation so dale's talking about you know inflammation as one of the big root causes of the development of heart disease and how we can manipulate certain things in our diet to switch off inflammation so dale you mentioned fats you mentioned omega-3 omega-6 fats i wonder if we could just sort of break it down for people listening what are those fats what foods are they found in and what you know can they possibly start doing in their life right now potentially to start you know reducing inflammation and therefore reduce their risk potentially of getting chronic inflammatory

conditions such as heart disease okay so the omega-3 fatty acids and the omega-6 fatty acids these are what are referred to as essential fatty acids meaning that we need to actually get them from our diet every single day our body can't manufacture them. You can almost view them as being a vitamin-like substance that's derived from certain fats that we find in our foods. The thing that we really need to be aware of, though, is our need for these, in terms of the amount of these different fatty acids, varies drastically. Omega-3 and omega-6, we need both every single day,

but our need for omega-6 is very, very tiny. When we, you know, that small amount that we need, it's involved in regulating certain neurological responses, for example, that we know that it's involved in neurotransmitter production. Very, very small, finite amount that we need. And the pathway that kind of deals with it and regulates it and prepares it and breaks it down can be very very easily saturated so if we take in more than we need every single day

it can't enter its normal healthy pathway that it's that it's needed for and it gets shuttled down a different pathway now i'll leave that i'll park that there for a second and go back to omega 3 omega 3 on the other hand we need a lot more of because it has such a ubiquitous function in the body it's involved in regulating the health of the cell membranes particularly the myelin sheath within the nervous system the health of the eyes it's involved in regulating certain aspects of what white blood cells do and a real key thing is it's the building blocks for these things that regulate inflammation same as the omega-6s and one of the key difference the key things we need

to focus on is how much of each we take in so the first thing that i say to people is reduce your omega-6 so one of the main things these fatty acids turn into are these communication compounds called prostaglandins okay prostaglandins will regulate several things like the pain response but the most prominent thing that they regulate is the inflammatory response three main types of prostaglandin a series one series two series three series one and series three actually reduce inflammation in the body they turn it down with series three doing it to quite an aggressive extent a series two prostaglandin on the other hand actually switches on and exacerbates the inflammatory response. Different fatty acids are metabolised to form different types of prostaglandin.

So you're saying the different fats that we take in with our mouth will actually influence different biochemical pathways. Absolutely, 100%. So the omega-3 fatty acids, omega-3 isn't just one substance, it's a family of fatty acids, but the ones that we need to worry about really are EPA and DHA, but there's also another one called ALA. So where do we get these omega-3 fats from? From oily fish. That's one of the best sources, because in oily fish, the EPA and the DHA are already preformed. EPA and DHA can feed directly into those pathways, into those pathways that form the prostaglandins. Now, EPA gets converted over into that very, very aggressively anti-inflammatory series 3 prostaglandin, and DHA can form the series 1 prostaglandin.

So the real take-home there, omega-3, anti-inflammatory. Now, omega-6, on the other hand, once we've taken in that small window, that tiny amount that we need that's actually involved in neurological health and that pathway's saturated, any excess that's there gets shuttled down. Another pathway turns into something called arachidonic acid. Arachidonic acid turns into series 2 prostaglandins, which switch on and exacerbate inflammation. Now, the type of fats that you're taking in on a day-to-day basis can influence to what degree these responses are taking place and can influence

what what which one of those pathways is more active than the other so one of the things that i say to people is tone down the omega-6 if you have things like margarine vegetable oil sunflower oil anything like that in your house what you need to do right now walk up to the cupboard where it's stored take it out open the bin drop it in there and never go near it again. Instead, move over to something like olive oil or now and again a little bit of coconut oil. But don't go mad with that either. That's a different set of problems. But olive oil, the most dominant fatty acid in there is omega-9. to move over to these, you know, quote-unquote heart-healthy vegetable oils because they didn't contain the saturated fat,

we created far more issues for ourselves because those oils are predominantly composed of omega-6 fatty acids. And because we've shifted over to those kinds of fats, we're taking in up to 23 times more omega-6 per day than we actually need in the UK. And omega-3, on the other hand, we're not getting anywhere near enough. So step one is reduce your the uk and omega-3 on the other hand we're not getting anywhere near enough so step one is reduce your intake of of the omega-6 step two is up the intake of the omega-3 by adding more oily fish to the diet and then even looking at um omega-3 supplementation as well when you do that what you're doing essentially is manipulating those

biochemical pathways you're influencing the expression of prostaglandins. Now, the knock-on effect there is you start to bring chronic inflammatory issues down. Yeah, and I've seen this in practice. When you start to change the flavour of the diet so it's more anti-inflammatory rather than pro-inflammatory, I've seen all kinds of problems, whether it's blood markers, but certainly people's well-being, even pain levels in people who've got arthritis or some forms of arthritis, their pain goes down.

It's just absolutely incredible. Dale, I'm interested. You were vegan for nearly 20 years. So during that time, you would not have had... My fatty acids were in a right state. That was one of the other markers that was really, really high. I was about 70% omega-6. Oh, so you measured this?

Oh, yeah, yeah. Was that on that blood spot, the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The one that Professor Gordon Bell at the University of Stirling, they do a lot of the testing with it. So you did that. You saw your ratio. Yeah.

That's incredible. And it was quite scary. So when you change and start to bring in that sort of more omega-3 rich fats, you know, more fatty fish into your diet compared to 20 years without, I appreciate you would have made other changes as well. So it's very hard to just say, I changed this and then I felt, you know, differently. But do you know, as you made those changes from being a healthy vegan to a healthy, you know, whole food um you know

eating healthy whole foods but with some healthy animal products in there what differences did you feel honestly i felt i felt like 10 years younger i think that's probably the best the best way to kind of energy yeah and also my my response to exercise changed drastically because i was always a skinny little run i couldn't put on any kind of muscle at all whatsoever. It didn't matter what I did. I mean, I was never really strong enough to kind of do a great deal of hard exercise either. But when I moved back over to this kind of diet, I started responding much better to exercise, you know, in terms of like muscle growth and shape. You know, and I was like, oh, my God, I've got deltoids.

For the first time in my life, there's a deltotoid so you felt a difference when you change your diet so guys i just want to add here that you know this topic can be quite emotional for people and as dale said right at the start if people are making choices for environmental reasons for ethical reasons you know i'm pretty sure dale's not saying anything about that at all he's sharing his own personal experience what he found and i've got, you know, I've seen this a lot with many of my patients, but there are people out there, you know, and Rich Royal is probably somebody who comes to mind. He's, you know, he's an ultra endurance athlete in America

who turned his life around when he went vegan. And he seems to be someone who thrives on a vegan diet. And so I just want to say that i don't believe there is one true diet for everyone different people seem to respond to different things and you know dale's sharing a personal experience but i will go into more about what you what you say in your books to help help the wider public so heart disease you've talked about you know switching off inflammation you've talked about omega-3s omega-6 fats and how we want to reduce maybe how much omega-6 we're taking in increase the amount of omega-3s which you would recommend come from fatty fish yeah what would you say to vegans or vegetarians who say yeah i i get it i

understand what you're saying but i just can't do it i don't want to have it supplement supplement that's derived from algae now that is um ep DHA. So you can still get those fats and you can still do the same thing. Still take the first step with reducing the omega-6 rich oils. So the oils that you cook with, just move over to a good quality olive oil because there's not really much omega-6 in there.

It's mostly omega-9, oleic acid. And take that supplement. You can achieve exactly the same end. Well, that's a great tip, Dale. What else was the heart disease book focus on another focus was on low glycemic diets now yeah this is this is another this is another one of these rabbit holes uh low glycemic diet one of the big problems that we have in in the western world now is that so much of our diet is is composed of like beige refined starchy carbohydrates you know i eat carbohydrates every day i'm not i'm not scared of carbs in the slightest but the type that we're eating and the amount that we're eating

i.e the macronutrient composition of our diet is skewed quite drastically and that's caused a whole slew of different problems but the issue with those kind of foods is that they release their energy very very quickly they raise our blood sugar very very fast and to you know quite a high degree now if your diet's generally good and you you get a big blood sugar spike the first thing your body does is just release insulin insulin binds to an insulin receptor glucose transporter opens on your cell the additional glucose comes in you use it as energy blood sugar goes back down to a normal rage bobs your uncle it's dealt with But if you're continually assaulting your blood sugar and continually carpet bombing it

with these kind of refined foods, then quite a lot of things start to break down over time. Now, obviously that initial response will still take place. You'll still secrete insulin, but increasing amounts of it, and your cells will start to take up this kind of excess glucose. But our cells have got a cut-off point.

If we have too much glucose in the cell, it can cause severe oxidative damage. So the cell will close its doors to glucose once it's full. If that happens and our blood sugar is still high, then quite a lot of other things start to go on. One of the first things that happens is that excess gets sent to the liver and gets converted over into something called triacylglycerol otherwise known as triglycerides which is a means for your body to store that energy for a rainy day now this is built into our genetics this is how we were designed to function you think when we were kind of living on the plains and all the

rest of it we had times of feast or famine so we had this ability to store energy for later for those times of famine but we never get into a time of famine in in the modern world i'm not here anymore is it well for certainly for us here in the west certainly yeah and we're kind of constantly stimulating the um you know that that response to feast so that excess sugar gets converted into triacylglycerol otherwise known as triglycerides now. Now, with diabetes and stuff, we can talk about that when we come to that. But in the context of cardiovascular health, why does this even matter? Well, several things. Firstly, the high glycemic diet where you're constantly pushing insulin up, you're stimulating an enzyme in the liver called HMG-CoA reductase.

Here we go, down the rabbit hole. in the liver called HMG-CoA reductase. Here we go, down the rabbit hole. HMG-CoA reductase is an enzyme, a very, very prominent enzyme in the manufacture of cholesterol. You know, it goes on... It's the enzyme that... One of the enzymes that Statsyndroids targets.

Statsyndroids, yeah, CoA reductase inhibitors, aren't they? They actually sort of knock that out. But, you know, it produces something called mevalonate and you get all these other different steps, the end product being cholesterol. But it's a really decisive enzyme. If this enzyme kicks in, you're going to be manufacturing cholesterol.

Insulin spikes stimulate HMG-CoA reductase. So your production of cholesterol goes up. Now, cholesterol isn't in and of itself this harmful substance. There's lots of finite differences. Lots of nuance there with cholesterol. There really is. And the thing is,

what we're starting to understand is, yes, there is this association between high LDL and low HDL being associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, but it's even more complex than that. It's all to do with the particle size. So with LDL,

you can get the very, very small, dense LDL particles, or you can get the large, buoyant ones. The large, buoyant ones, they just kind of bob along like sort of globulous clouds and don't really cause any problem to anyone. They sort of bounce around in the blood vessels without causing damage, but the small, dense ones are like little pellets that start to damage the blood vessel lining. Yeah, it starts to get...

Endothelium. Yeah, into the endothelium. So as soon as you get that endothelial damage, that's when you get that whole cascade of events that kick in that um eventually leads to an atheroma to the actual plaque within within the the vessel wall so that's one of the things that we know about high glycemic diets is that it does favor the production of the small dense ldl particle and guys i just want to clarify for people you know you may have heard of ldl ldl is what we typically call the bad cholesterol it's a very oversimplified way massively of looking at cholesterol and looking at ldl cholesterol um if you are currently getting you know cholesterol or

lipid panels done by your doctor certainly on the nhs you will only get total ldl you won't get a breakdown of how much of it is small dense how much if it is fluffy uh and potentially you know not quite as harmful well not harmful really and so i appreciate some of the things we're talking about you may not have access to with your doctor i hope that is going to change at some point in the near future but i think the the point is what dale's trying to make is you can influence this with your diet yes you can you can get in the driver's seat and if you if we eat foods that are lower in sugar but they're not going to spike our sugar as much so the low glycemic foods you're saying that's going to that can influence particle size so that's the first part of it then the second part i mean obviously using like the ldl and the hdl

cholesterol is just one substance. There's no good or bad cholesterol. Cholesterol is one single substance. But the HDL and the LDL refer to the carriers that the cholesterol is actually bound to. And I use the analogy of bus routes. One bus that takes people from town out to the surrounding villages and one bus route that picks people up from the surrounding villages and brings them back into town.

They're going in two different directions. And the idea always was that when HDL is raised, more cholesterol is taken from the peripheries and taken back to the liver, where it's broken down and recycled. So we know that there is benefit there, that when you've got a higher level of HDL in relation to LDL, the picture's slightly better.

Then obviously we've got the pyroxides and the rest of it before I spoke about excess glucose being converted into triglycerides one of the things that happens when triglycerides are raised is HDL goes down because the ability of HDL to actually bind to cholesterol to take it back to the liver for recycling, becomes impaired in the presence of raised triglycerides. So HDL expression starts to naturally go down. So you've got a double whammy approach. You've got a diet that's favouring small dense particle production, and you've got one that is naturally pushing down HDL. So that's simple change as well.

And also, going back to the omega-3, omega-3 can reduce triglycerides and raise hdl so you start to bring these two things together and you're starting to hit some quite some quite specific metabolic events you know you're you're reducing inflammatory load you're reducing triglycerides you're altering particle size and they're not particularly complex changes to make that's the beauty of it it's not a difficult like end to achieve it really is and i think the real take home for me is that if you are concerned about your cholesterol numbers let's say um and you know a lot of doctors are moving away from the exact numbers more looking at ratios so because we can tell a lot more when we look at a ratio of let's say your triglycerides to your hgl levels or you know or we can look at things like your total cholesterol

your ldl and how all these play and how all these sort of relate to each other so instead of looking at those individual levels we can look at those the balance in the body which is a i think a little bit more of a holistic way of looking at these things but they're all saying that the changes he recommends in his book on cardiovascular health is actually going to improve that lipid profile improve that cholesterol ratio i also want to just touch on the thing you said about insulin and you know insulin is a very important hormone we need insulin it does a very important job but there's many jobs in the body one of them is to direct where we store fat and how we store fat but one thing a

lot of people aren't realizing is even before the development of heart disease or the development of type 2 diabetes you know for many years before that you can have chronically raised insulin levels so your body is doing what it needs to do to adapt and it's just pushing up those insulin levels higher and higher we know that you know condition, which we call chronic hyperinsulinemia, that in itself has been associated with obesity. It's been associated with levels of VLDL, very low density lipoprotein. That's a particularly harmful form of cholesterol. You know, it helps, you know, that increased insulin will raise your blood pressure

because it increases salt and water retention. There are some studies showing an association between prolonged you know between chronically raised insulin and your risk of breast cancer so you know it's really interesting how you know just one thing that that diets that you're proposing to people to help them reduce their risk of heart disease actually you know because the human body's connected it's not going to just be heart disease, is it? It's going to affect other conditions as well. And the thing is, with, you know, the diet that's related to cardiovascular health

and the diet that would be relevant for someone with type 2 diabetes, they're very, very similar. And a lot of the pathways that they're influencing are very, very similar, because there tends to be a triad of issues, like centralised weight gain, type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes and raised cardiovascular disease risk markers and it's called metabolic syndrome and it's like you know

one of these these big scourges of the western world it's the same it's the same root causes right yeah but sometimes it manifests as cardiovascular disease sometimes it manifests as type 2 diabetes and some people it's both yeah some people it will manifest as polycystic ovarian syndrome yes absolutely and instead of treating these all as separate diseases you know which is often what we're doing in medicine these days we've got to you know go upstream a bit more and go actually what is going on at the root cause and for many of them it's pretty similar which is what you're willing to see so dale how does this approach change in your book let's say where you're trying to help people beat anxiety and depression i'm imagining there's a lot of crossover

but there's also going to be a few differences potentially or a different focus yeah there is there is a different focus i mean um, with things like cardiovascular health and type 2 diabetes, diet is a massive part of the intervention. With anxiety and depression, interlinked because it's a much more complex system in that respect. But diet and nutrition still does have a role to play because the brain and the nervous system is a physiological system and as such has its own nutritional requirements. But there is a focus around omega-3. One of the things that we know about omega-3 fatty acids is that they can actually maintain the health of neurotransmitter receptors and also proper functioning of neurotransmitter vesicles so obviously you know to backtrack a little bit on that with with the the cells in the nervous system they don't touch there's a tiny gap in between them like the synapse and electrical impulses are converted into chemical impulses

depending what the actual impulse is and the and the instruction that it's giving and that will turn into a chemical messenger that jumps the gap that chemical messenger being called a neurotransmitter those neurotransmitters are stored in small vesicles at the end of our one nerve ending comes to the edge of the membrane spits the the neurotransmitter out into the into the synapse and then the receptor for that neurotransmitter on the neighboring neuron detects it and then relays that signal so it's how brain cells are communicating with each other and you're saying that your diets can improve that omega-3 can improve receptor function so the uh the the ability for the for those receptors to actually detect what the neurotransmitter is telling them, but then also making sure that the vesicles that release that neurotransmitter

into the synaptic space are actually functioning properly as well. So that's one thing. But also we know that, I mean, this is more in longer-term neurological health, but that anti-inflammatory effect as well, like sort of long-term memory function, for example. Neuroinflammation has been linked to memory decline, even though that's a slight offshoot. But the point is there's lots of very, very broad roles

for omega-3 fatty acids in the nervous system. Also the myelin sheath. The myelin sheath, it's a specialised fatty coating that lines the neurons. All your nerves, yeah. Yeah, but it's presented along the nerve in little capsules and there's little gaps in between them where the electrical signal jumps,

so it accelerates the movement of the electrical impulse along the length of the neuron omega-3 fatty acids are vital for the maintenance of the myelin sheath so dha is one of the key components of the myelin sheath along with arachidonic acid which is one of the reasons people talk about omega-3s being very important for brain health for brain health exactly but they're also, exactly. But they also help to regulate the nodes of Ron VA, which are those little gaps between the myelin. It helps to make sure that they stay healthy

as well. So that's just one thing, the Omega 3. So it's quite interesting. Omega 3s actually are a prominent, they play a prominent role in your treatment or the dietary approach you would recommend for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and anxiety and depression. They are very ubiquitous, and this is the fascinating thing.

Because they're fundamental to the human body, right? Yeah, absolutely, because they're such an integral part of our membranes in every single cell, so that's the kind of level it gets down to. What are some of the other things for anxiety and depression? If someone's listening to this, and mental health problems are on the rise at the moment so there'll be many people listening who are suffering with anxiety or depression i wonder if we can go into maybe some specific foods that they might want to think about so obviously with the omega-3 we've got the oily fish but the other really important group of nutrients for the health of the nervous system particularly in anxiety and

depression are the b vitamins because the b vitamins are involved in neurotransmitter production you know things like gaba for example so that's a chemical that the brain produces that helps to calm things down okay and you're saying that b vitamins can help with that it can increase gaba as can magnesium you bring the two things together a good intake of B vitamins and magnesium what foods so whole grains whole grains so things like brown rice pearl barley lentils and pulses quinoa as well there's some reasonable B vitamin hitting those a lot of the green vegetables are very B vitamin rich asparagus all the leafy greens just getting really this is this is the beauty of all of this and like even though we can go into all of this kind of detail we can really backtrack and put this into a very very simple picture and yeah this is something we may get onto later we

can almost bring it down to three different things but what are those things let's do it now okay so you say there was i remember there was a question he said he would ask about one book if there was one book um yeah there was one book. Yeah, I said that. I was going to ask you that. And I am going to ask you that. Well, we could go into it now, you know, because I think, you know, you're so fardale. You know, you're giving people hints of how much there is in these books

and how much knowledge you've got and how much you're then putting them into real practical recipes, I think, that people can use and actually start cooking for their health, which I think is just absolutely fantastic. But you do have so many books, so if people want to, you know, people are interested in us, go, you know, I want to check out this Dale Penninger guy. I want to look up his books.

Where would they start? What would you recommend is the book that they start with? I think there's one called The Power of Three. The Power of Three. The Power of Three. Tell me about that. Do you want to know something funny? Especially considering the title of your book. Years ago, I pitched the title, The Three Pillars, to my publisher.

Did you? Yes, and they said no. Basically, with all of this, all of these kinds of things. Time and place. I know, I know. I mean, that was about five or six years ago now. You can boil it down to three main things. Because the question I get asked all the time,

and I just imagine you do, is with all of this conflicting information, what is the ideal diet? What's the perfect diet we should eat? And any of us that have got any kind of scruples should turn around and say, we haven't got a clue. We've got absolutely no idea.

But what we do know is a lot of the ways in which our modern diet is destroying our health. So if we do the opposite, we're probably hedging our bets. And all of this stuff we've been talking about is relevant to these three things and if you bring these three things into practice you're hedging your bets it's not going to be any kind of guarantee of being a perfect diet in any way shape or form but it's hedging your bets in a wise and informed way those three things are blood sugar balance fatty acid balance and nutrient density so we've talked about blood

sugar balance the influence that can have on you know things like triglycerides and you know different inflammatory responses fatty acid balance we spoke about that earlier on how that can influence chronic inflammation chronic inflammation is relevant to almost every degenerative disease heart health and brain health all these things with omega-3s and fatty acid balance yeah exactly and then the final thing micronutrient density, nutrient density. For a lot of people, we're in the ping and ding generation, do you know what I mean, where it's like ready meals and convenience foods. And this isn't trying to demonise anything or anyone or telling people they're wrong or daft or doing stupid things,

but just trying to get back to more fresh wholesome food cooked from scratch because of the micronutrient density so the vitamins and the minerals i mean because what we have to have to realize about micronutrients the the vitamins and the minerals and trace elements those kinds of things is that they are they're biochemical facilitators they either make something happen or they make something that makes something happen that's what that's what vitamins minerals and trace elements do so they either make something happen or they make something that makes something happen. That's what vitamins, minerals and trace elements do. So they either make something happen themselves or they're involved in making something that makes something happen. And we have a specific need for these nutrients.

And if those needs don't get met, both short and long term implications can be really quite severe. You bring those three things together. I love it. Think about how broad an effect that can have on people's health and it's a very very simple very simple steps to make so with a blood sugar balance we just move over to the the much lower glycemic high fiber whole carbohydrate sources so swap your white bread for brown swap your white pasta for brown swap your white rice for brown so that's the first thing.

The second thing is reduce overall portion size of those starchy carbohydrates. We need them. I'm not telling people to go out and do Atkins at all. But drop the amount to at least half. That's something that anyone can work with. And then make up the bulk of your meals with non-starchy vegetables. Bring some good quality protein in. And you've got a meal then that takes much longer to digest

it drip feeds blood sugar instead of carpet bombs it so that whole insulin curve isn't there that's the first thing change the kind of oil that you use to cook with so bin the nasty refined vegetable oils and just work with olive oil and then when you're doing really really high temperature stuff a little bit of coconut oil now and again is fine and then make sure that every meal you've got something fresh even if you're just snacking on some fruit between meals have it a good dense side salad is this for the micronutrients for the micronutrients yeah guys just a key point there you know we the the the conversation around food often gets polarized into being about fat versus carbs, which I think is a little bit myopic. But just a terminology check for you guys.

Macronutrients are when we're talking about fat, protein and carbohydrates. When we're talking about micronutrients, which Dale is talking about one of his three pillars, as it were, sort of about those vitamins and minerals and those trace elements that you get from that whole fresh food. And I guess it's something we're seeing a lot now aren't we dale you know the advent of highly processed food ready meals eating on the go quickly often these meals and these foods are energy dense but they're you know they're depletes of those micronutrients you know so we are you know what is it we're sort of overfed and undernourished

exactly yeah which is just remarkable and to think that you know we've got you know an obesity crisis we're taking on we you know we're storing too much energy yeah um yet we're we're missing micronutrients these you know we're just not getting enough so those are great tips there actually it remains me reminds me of i think not last september i think september before that at the royal society of medicine it was a food as medicine conference and you were invited there as a speaker you you gave a live cooking demo to the whole audience of doctors and i think there was a whole variety of health care professionals there and i think it was a i think it was a wild salmon dish from recollection actually with a coconut doll yeah yeah you you cooked to that and i thought i've got to have that so i managed to

find which room you were in to come and say hi i managed to you know help help myself to those leftovers which were absolutely fantastic and is that recipe one of your books by any chance um it's a combination of um three different different recipes yeah well it was superb so i can attest to the quality of that certainly for the taste buds the health benefits but also the taste buds all of that's got to come together because it does doesn't it yeah the thing is i mean you can have the healthiest diet in the world if it is as boring as anything if it's you know equated to reading the phone book in the rain then no one's going to stick to it so what would you say to those people who say

you know i get all that about healthy eating dale but you know what healthy eating just doesn't taste very good try my food and then you'll never say that again honestly it's the truth because i agree with you yeah i covered i covered it from the point of view as like an absolute foodie and a chef as well um and those two worlds have got come together food is a wonderful celebration of all things good i love a good meal you know it's good wine good conversation all of that stuff is food for the soul and we we should you could do both yes we shouldn't neglect that if you can understand how to bring those two worlds together you know so you're nourishing yourself physically but you're also nourishing yourself like emotionally and um you know i don't want to get all esoteric, but kind of spiritually as well.

I mean, all of these things are. Sharing a meal with a friend that you've not seen for five years. It's one of the best things ever. It's an important part of food, right? And I think we're missing that part of food in terms of how culturally relevant it is. It's something we do every day. How sharing a meal with friends has so many other benefits. Hel helps us enjoy the food, probably helps us eat a bit less. But there's just so much around food that we have just moved away from.

We've moved away from. We eat at our desks all the time. Although you look at a lot of the blue zones, that's one characteristic that they all share, whether it's the Okanawans, whether it's the Ikarians, they all share the meal. They all have that heightened sense of community and togetherness. Yeah, and Dale, one of the recommendations I make in my book, The Four-Pivot Plan, there's a chapter on this, on try and sit around a table at least once a day, if you can, in company to eat a meal. And it's something that was born out of my experience on those BBC documentaries, Doctor in the House, when I would go around these families around the country and I would see so many of them never ate a meal together and i found that when i made that recommendation

the knock-on effects yes with in terms of their diet but also their relationships and how people say i feel closer to my partner now because we're conversing we're getting to know things about each other that we used to just sit on our phones and do our emails whilst we're eating yeah right it's just incredible how far we've come from maybe just 30 40 years ago but they'll you know just to sort of finish off there's a couple of areas i want to touch on one is that you've got a brand new itv series coming out soon i mean this is a you know this is the second series you did this last year eat shop safe and I think the concept behind this is incredible to help families that want to eat healthier but are struggling,

whether it's financial reasons, whether someone's a fussy eater, they're sort of pressed for time. You know, the sort of things that people listening to this podcast are struggling with themselves. So what can people, you know, what are they going to learn if they watch this show?

And again, I'll put links in the show notes, you know, drchastity.com forward slash Dale. We'll put all these links there. What are people going to learn if they watch this show and again i'll put links in the show notes you know dr chastity.com forward slash dale we'll put all these links there what what are people going to learn so the the beauty of the show is that we're able to really give simple practical tips it's got to be the most simple recommendation that can make the biggest amount of difference and in every single one of those situations we found solutions we worked with the families with where they were at so none of it is kind of superficial that isn't applicable to anyone we worked with their own unique set of circumstances and showed them how they could work around it so if you're pressed for time for example you can batch cook if you have like a spare like half a day on a sunday

cook some of your favorite dishes but in four five six seven times the amount you normally would freeze them in individual portions, and then you've stockpiled your own healthy ready meals for the week or for the month. And they film you doing all this, and they're going to see all that. Yeah, we do all of that. For fussy eaters, we've had some great ones. I mean, on the last series, we had a little girl that wouldn't eat any vegetables. I mean, she was partial to a chicken curry or chicken di dippers or things like that so we started with a chicken curry it's like right

okay this is what we need to do it was just she had a barrier towards trying something new yeah you know when she finally did she she was great but that was her her thing she had this barrier so we made a curry but what i did was actually make what was essentially a very, very thick sweet potato soup. So garlic, red onions, sauteed down. Then the sweet potatoes went in, vegetable stock, pureed it up. Then added cumin, ground coriander, turmeric, a little bit of garam masala to that. And then cooked the chicken in that. So it looked and tasted a bit like a restaurant korma.

Wow. You know, a million miles away from a traditional korma. I don't want to kind of insult the culinary geniuses that can create those, but it was like a restaurant korma. Was she surprised? That she was happy to eat. And she was like, this carrot's lovely, isn't it?

And halfway through, it's like, you're eating sweet potatoes. And she was like, sweet potatoes taste like that? Yeah. It's like, you don't have to have a plate of steamed broccoli you know jazz it up give it some flavor bring it to life for the ones with a lack of skill in the kitchen or once one of my favorites is like when they're just really resistant to any kind of change they know they that they need to actually make improvements because their health is failing but they're just so resistant to to change and as we you know we we kind of touched on earlier they think that the healthy food is going to be really really boring so what we do there is like right what's your

favorite meal and if they say pizza it's like excellent let's make one wow it's also you know you who said you have to give up pizza i didn't say that it's like let's make one so what we do we go to the supermarket i mean sometimes we take them shopping as well go go around the supermarket and you get one of the ready-made um ready ready to go bread packet mixes like a multi-grain bread just add water to it roll it out and you've got like a nice whole wheat pizza base make it nice and thin maybe put some spinach on there some red onion a little bit of goat's cheese those kinds of things you're getting the same culinary experience you're getting to eat the food that you're already enjoying we're just showing you ways to give it a facelift i love it you're meeting people

where they're at as well you know you're not you're not coming in and saying this is the perfect diet you know what you're doing i get why you're doing it but we've got to switch you to this now you're meeting them where they're at, going, right, let's make what dish you are currently having a lot healthier and a lot tastier, which is just incredible. It also reminds me of something that Michael Pollan once said. And again, I may be slightly misquoting him, but he said something about you can eat whatever you want

as long as you make it. And his point was if you're going to eat a cake or an ice cream or a pizza, why not make it? Because he, I think, feels that by making it, you start to get that connection to the food. You start to probably put a lot better ingredients in it than if you bought it ready-made. You can control what's in there.

Exactly. And I've always kind of liked that one. You know, eat what you want as long as you make it yourself. And that's kind of what you say. You want to eat a pizza? Fine. Let's make a healthy pizza. And also just teaching them the distinctions of what's making it healthier in the first place.

Another popular one has been spaghetti bolognese. So it's like, okay, so we're going to use whole wheat spaghetti. We're just going to have slightly less of it. And we're going to bulk out the ragout with 50-50 the mints and red lentils. So we increase the fibre. It keeps you feeling fuller for longer. You're not going to snack, lowers blood sugar, yadda, yadda, yadda.

We give them all the information. You know what I'm loving about this is that it's practical, it's real life, because one thing I've realised over the last few years is that, you know, we talk about these perfect diets on social media. We talk about what, you know, what we'd ideally like everyone to be eating,

and I get that, and there's nothing wrong necessarily with promoting that, but I think also what you know what we'd ideally like everyone to be eating and and i get that there's nothing wrong necessarily we're promoting that but i think also you know some people really struggle with that they sort of look at what they're eating and they look at that and they go that is just so far removed from what i'm eating they don't feel it's relevant to them so i think what you're trying to do and i'm really looking forward to watching this series particularly now that you've told you know sort of a little bit about what's coming up, is how do you meet people where they're at, real-life people with busy lives, with real problems,

how do you then help them move towards a healthier diet? So, yeah, that's incredible. From my point of view, that's where the help is needed. I mean, for us, we've been converts for decades yeah um but i you know that's that's why i work the way that i do because you the only time you'll make meaningful change is when you actually deliver something that people will actually do you know the best diet is one that you actually stick. And there's no point telling a family of five that have got £50 to spend between them on food

that they've got to be living on biodynamic grass-fed unicorn and Himalayan wonga-wonga berries from Kensington High Street. I mean, it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. You've got to make sure it's practical for people. Yeah, it's just like, OK, what have you got in your local area? What shops are available to you? How can we make this go further? What tweaks can we make?

But then at the same time, don't just say, do this. Teach them why it matters. Yeah. And say, right, you see this ingredient? I've just swapped this for this for this reason, and that's going to help you because. I've swapped this for that. And that information is the stuff that changes lives.

Yeah, I agree. Dale, you know, I can't resonate with that enough. You know, once you explain to people why you're making those changes what it's going to do for them yeah i find they want to make those changes i i genuinely find that patients or you know clients or members of the public they want to make they want to feel as good as they can and once we help them and show them and say you know when you eat you eat a food like this, this is what's happening. This is what happens into your body, to your hormones, to your cells. Really? I didn't know that, doctor.

You know, I find that's a missing piece of not just telling them what they should be eating or certainly not telling, recommending or suggesting what they should be eating. Also explaining the why. I think that really, really helps. And that's sort of a nice segue there into the final thing I want to talk to you about, Dale, which is this new program that you've launched called Nutrition Coaching Monthly. Can you tell me a little bit about that and why you came up with it? Well, I was just getting dozens and dozens of emails week in, week out from people that were saying,

where can I get good quality information about nutrition? I want to learn more. I don't want to be a nutritionist. I don't want to go off and do a course. I just want to learn more for my own sake, for the sake of my family. It's something I'm really interested in. But, you know, just rely on Google or, you know, magazine articles or whatever. It's limited and they know that there's mixed quality.

They know that like some of the stuff is complete nonsense and some of it could be quite good. And it's how do they know whether they're on the right track or not. And one of the things that I'm very passionate about is teaching the subject and talking about the subject. I mean, once I get started, it's quite difficult to get me stopped. And it just kind of dawned on me that with the kind of technology that we've got available to us as well,

there's room to actually be able to deliver lectures as if I was standing there giving lectures to people, but deliver it online. So what we've built is this platform where every month there'll be a different lecture. And we go into detail. There is no mucking about, but it's delivered in a way. It's relevant for the layperson. It's not necessarily geared towards health professionals. It's for everyday people that want to learn more about nutrition.

So people listening to this right now who want to know a bit more about nutrition they can go and sign up for your course so it's just on my website it's done dale pinnett.com you'll see online programs on there and it's just just off of that that you can get onto it and it's it's delivered like um powerpoint presentation style with me with me teaching live so there's obviously like a live chat feature on there as well so whilst the the teaching is actually being delivered the students can sort of interact and ask questions. And it's an open classroom. It's like an open classroom, but it's just delivered online. That's the only difference.

It's like we've been chatting today. It's delivered in that kind of way where everything is explained from the ground up, from the grassroots. And already the people that are in there vary from high school students through to retirees, and they're all enjoying it, and no one's said, you've scared the life out of me. So it's at the right kind of level, but there is the detail in there. Then once the live session is finished, all of the recording automatically goes into an archive,

and that archive grows every single month. So you've got your own teaching library there. You can download all the slides and the transcript for the session. So people have got this reliable resource to learn more about nutrition and also learn recipes? No, it's not recipes. This is just the teaching about the subject, about the nutrition. Yeah, because I've got recipes in other things. It's a way for me to be able to teach the subject in a way that i've always wanted to do and at a level that people have been crying out

for for a long time so it's come from a from a need from people contacting you that's absolutely incredible guys you know like everything that we've spoken about today they're going to be in the show notes a link to dale's course we're going to put a direct link there at dr chastity.com forward slash dale so do check out the show notes after this podcast you can continue your reading continue your learning um dale that sounds exciting i wish you all the best with that dale just to finish up then the the point of this podcast or one of the points of this podcast is to help empower people to be architects of their own health i don't want to leave people with simple tips that they can apply immediately in their everyday life to help improve the way that they're feeling so i wonder if you

could leave my listeners with maybe four tips okay around anything you want i'm assuming it's going to be nutrition related don't run the scissors my four key tips that people can think about applying in their everyday life immediately. I think you might be able to guess what a couple of them might be from what we've been talking about. But the first one that I would say, and this is always my number one tip for anyone that's wanting to make changes, especially for people that are at the beginning of their journey where they've just made that decision that they want to make change in their life. Change one thing, okay? want to make change in their life change one thing okay if like you just wake up one morning it's like right if you've been living on takeaway pizzas and and beer and ready meals and then you

say like okay from tomorrow i'm just gonna be a whole food vegan and change everything the chances of that actually being successful are you know 0.3 probably because we are not wired like that some people are some people can just change everything overnight and do okay with it. So what I say, set yourself one challenge. And this could be as simple as like, okay, with every meal, I'm going to have a good quality side salad with it. Okay, I'm now going to snack on fruit between meals. Or I'm not going to have the chocolate bars in my desk drawer anymore.

So something that simple. One thing is once you've repeated that a few times and it becomes the norm, then you set your next one. Yeah, love it. So, okay, what's the next change that you can make? Whilst that might seem like slow progress, when you look back over the space of six or 12 months, your lifestyle would have changed quite drastically

because you've been making slow, consistent progress towards a better picture yeah there's very very few of us that can suddenly be like right that's it changing everything overnight you know a lot of people do it on january the first but on february the first but it's just it's just not practical when you change one thing and you're just making consistent slow adjustments to your habits then you've got a much better chance of actually sticking to those changes so change one thing yeah what's the next tip the next tip is um swap your white for brown okay so with the carbohydrate styles staples staples that are in our diet like um bread pasta rice those kind of things just swap over to the to the brown varieties over the white

because they're not refined. This means they're higher in fibre, so it keeps you feeling fuller for longer. It's good for digestive transit. It's good for feeding the bacterial colony that lives within the gut. Different types of fibre can have some miraculous effects on that. What would you say to those people listening who say,

Dale, look, i appreciate that but i've i've actually feel a lot better when i don't have you know even brown bread or brown pasta that's the thing and you know echoing everything that we that we that we spoke about if you if you if any of that doesn't work for you if if you don't feel good i mean i don't that's one of the things i learned when i you know when i was vegan and went back i was putting on lots of weight i'm quite carbohydrate sensitive but also if i've cut carbohydrates out completely then i'm no no use to man or beast i'm a nightmare to live with and i can't do anything in the gym or any kind of physical activity so these are just some general principles right so people can finding that balance yeah okay and the number three would be

ditch your vegetable oils. Yeah. Okay. So things like sunflower oil, vegetable oil, corn oil, soy oil, margarine, those kind of things. Throw them in the bin. Never buy them again. Just get a little bit of proper butter and use it sensibly. And the oil that you use for cooking, just go over to olive oil because it's not omega-6 dense. It's predominantly omega-9.

The omega-9 oleic acid has its own set of benefits as well that's great tip and final tip number four i would say is you know and this echoes what we said about about the show as well start where you're at and do what you're happy to do don't think that this don't put pressure on yourself or think that this is some kind of extreme expectation or something that you should be doing and you're not really enjoying yourself it's like when you feel good when you feel healthy you're going to absolutely love it you're going to you know you're going to it's just going to get better and better but the easiest segue into that is to actually start with the things that you're already willing

to do so if your favorite meal is pizza learn how to make a healthier one if your favorite meal is is chicken and chips then learn how to make a healthier one. If your favourite meal is chicken and chips, then learn how to make it better. Cook the chicken differently, have sweet potato wedges, throw some greens in there. When you're working with where you're already at, you're still giving yourself that pleasure. Food has to have pleasure attached with it. And we have to be happy doing what we're doing. Otherwise, it's just going to be utter, utter misery. You're going to hate it. You you're going to hate it you're not going to

stick to it and the chances of there being like rebound negative behaviors are very very very high don't look those those those those are fantastic and i think so many people listening who may have struggled before to make sustainable lifestyle change i think will really resonate with those and and guys if that's you i'd encourage you to try and put some of those into practice immediately dale i know often after after the podcast many people want to interact with me and you online where can they find you online so the website is just dale pinnock.com it's p-i-n-n-o-c-k and social media social media so on instagram it's the medicinal chef twitter is just dale underscore pinnock but i hardly ever go on there and Facebook is The Medicinal Chef Dale look I really appreciate

your time I know you're extremely busy particularly with the launch of this new course looking forward to the ITV show coming out imminently and yeah I hope you can join me again at some point in the future I'd love to yeah thanks for having me That concludes today's episode of the Feel Better Live More podcast.

Remember everything that Dale and I spoke about will be available on the show notes page on my website at drchastity.com forward slash Dale. So do take a look when you can so that you can continue your learning experience now that the podcast is over. Just a few things to mention. I'm absolutely committed to making this podcast the very best that it can be.

I really appreciate the love and support you give to it on social media. I'm actually running a survey so that I can understand what you all want more of in the future. What you think of the current format, what guests you want to see. You know, I want to know what's resonating, what guests you want to see. You know, I want to know what's resonating, what's not working as well as it might work. If you have two minutes in your day and can go to drchastity.com forward slash survey, I'd be incredibly grateful. It's just a series of questions that helps me better understand your views of the podcast. drchastity.com forward slash survey,

or you can access it via the show notes page, drchastity.com forward slash Dale. Guys, just to let you know, I've got a brand new book coming out at the end of the year called The Stress Solution, The Four Steps to Reset Your Body, Mind, Relationship and Purpose. I announced this publicly last week and absolutely delighted with how many of you

have chosen to pre-order the book so thank you very much for that lots of you are still asking me whether my book The Four Pivot Plan is available overseas it's available in a lot of countries now including the USA and Canada with a different title How to Make Disease Disappear remember links to all of these books are available on the show notes page. And finally, thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. I hope you enjoyed it. Please do take a screenshot of the page right now and share it on social media. Let me let Dale know what you're thinking and we will do our best to get back to you. Thanks for listening today. And I hope you can join me next week when the very next conversation in my podcast comes out.