Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #33 The Gut-Brain Connection and Why Diversity is Key with Miguel Toribio-Mateas

Episode Date: October 24, 2018

“Nutrition doesn’t need to be super-expensive, it can be cheap and cheerful but also very nutritious and wholesome.”   Our everyday food choices affect not only our gut health but also our brain health.  But how exactly does this work?  Nutritionist and clinical neuroscientist, Miguel Mateas explains it all, including the role of pre and probiotics. We discuss how long-term stress affects the gut and how eating a colourful diverse diet is so important for our overall health.  Miguel believes that diversity is important, not only with what we put into our mouths, but in all aspects of our lives – from our thoughts to our experiences.  He talks about the amazing benefits of olive oil and how to choose the best quality.  Miguel is witty and jolly as ever – I really enjoyed this conversation and hope you do too! My upcoming book, ‘The Stress Solution’ covers the gut-brain connection in great detail.  You can pre-order it on Amazon. Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/miguel 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.

When you have a gut that is happier because there's more diversity of the bacteria that live there, the bugs are more varied, there's more variety of them, the gut wall is working better, there's less permeability, there's less leaky gut. That actually leads to better health in the rest of the body, including the brain. 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. Hello and welcome to another episode of my Feel Better Live More podcast. My name is Rangan Chatterjee and I am your host. Today's conversation is all about food and brain health

and my guest today is a good friend of mine, Mr. Miguel Mateus. Now Miguel is a nutrition practitioner with over 10 years clinical experience who specializes in nutrition for brain health. He is also the chair for BANT, the British Association for Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine. He has completed a master's in clinical neuroscience at Roehampton University and was awarded a prestigious Santander Bank scholarship for doctoral research. As well as being a top level scientist, Miguel loves animals. He's got two Labradors and a cat and is a huge fan of house music. Miguel is a lot of fun to chat to. I really enjoyed my conversation with him and I think that you will too. Now before we get on to today's conversation,

I'm pleased to remind you about my ongoing partnership with Athletic Greens who are the sponsors of today's show. In order to support the time and expense it takes to put these podcasts out, I have taken on a sponsor whose vision is well aligned with my own to help people feel better so that they can get more out of life. Now, if you have listened to this podcast before, you will know that for me, the right nutrition is an essential ingredient to having a healthy and happy life. And whilst I absolutely prefer people to get their nutrition from eating foods, I recognize that for some of us that can be a little bit challenging. We can be busy, on the go, rushing around, and even with the best intentions,

on some days it can be a little bit tricky to cook a wholesome, nutritious meal or even eat as healthily as we would like to. If you feel that this may apply to you and you want to take something each morning as an insurance policy to make sure that you are meeting your nutritional needs, I can highly recommend Athletic Greens. recommend Athletic Greens. It is a super tasty whole food greens powder that you can take each morning and unlike most green supplements that I have tried in the past, it tastes fantastic. It's actually so much more than a green supplement because it includes vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, digestive enzymes and adaptogens. I know many of you have already told me that since taking Athletic Greens your energy has significantly improved. I really like what this company stands for and you know there's no question that it is one of the most nutrient-dense whole food supplements that I have come across. For listeners of this podcast if you go to athleticgreens.com forward slash live more, you will be able to

access a special offer where you get a free travel pack box containing 20 servings of Athletic Greens, which is worth around £70 or so with your first order. So do go and check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. Miguel, welcome to the podcast. Hi, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure. Miguel, you are someone who I've always respected. Your knowledge or expertise when it comes to food, but also when it comes to brain health,

has always impressed me. And I'm glad that we're going to have the opportunity to go deep today and hopefully give the listeners of my podcast some practical take-homes that they can apply in their everyday lives. Yeah, I hope so too. So, Miguel, you weren't born here in the UK, but you have ended up here. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yeah, so I came here in 94 with a student exchange and that was the second year of my first degree in business, so nothing to do with nutrition. And I went to France for a few months to do the third year there. So I did like one of those Erasmus degrees that you do one year in every country. And in 95, I came to stay. So I've been here for quite some time now.

I even have a British passport. I'm quite an Anglophile. So I've got dual nationality. And where did you grow up? I grew up in Madrid. So I was born in Madrid, right in the middle of Madrid as well. And from a very traditional Spanish family from the south, from the land of olive oil.

So if anybody wants to know about the Mediterranean diet and olive oil, I'm the man to ask because I've been born and bred with olive oil surrounding me. My mum is obsessed with olive oil, puts it in everywhere. And what did she tell you about olive oil growing up? Or did she tell you anything about it? Not necessarily. So she didn't preach me on the benefits about olive oil growing up? Or did she tell you anything about it? Not necessarily. So she didn't preach me on the benefits of olive oil, but she used it in cooking.

She used it hot, cold, on skin, on hair, on everywhere. So there wasn't this thing about being funny about using it if you heat it up or only use it in salads. But then again, in Spain, we have a bit of more variety of different olive oils. Like you go to the supermarket and you've got three or four different grades of olive oil. So people intuitively would know

that the extra virgin, really thick and green, they wouldn't use for frying. They would use something lighter. So like, you know, we've got the kind of like one variety here that is light and whatever, you know, like it's more yellow than green so they would use that one because it's it's it's not so um uh piquant at the end it's not so tangy at the end it doesn't have that so so the the the tangy ones for example what where would

you what would you use those you use them in salads in salad dressings so when things cold you would just you know pour them over for that extra flavour. Yeah exactly yeah but if my mum makes mayonnaise for example she wouldn't make it with she'll make it with an egg or with milk and that's a new way of doing it in Spain it's become really trendy because a couple of chefs do it with milk but traditionally it would be an egg, a couple of bits of garlic, some salt and loads of olive oil and the olive oil would be the yellow one. So you're getting loads of goodness in there. Your mayonnaise is ready made. Well, Miguel, I wanted to talk to you today about food and brain health. And I think olive oil is

probably as good a place to start as any, since you're born in Madrid, had a lot of olive oil growing up. I suspect we didn't know as much of the science around olive oil back then when you were growing up as we do now. Although I guess in some ways that doesn't matter because I think maybe in Spain they've known for many years that olive oil has a lot of health benefits. Yet we've now got a lot of science showing just why that is. Yeah. So there's lots of benefits to olive oil. Some of them account for the fact that it's what we like to talk about as a healthy fat. We've come to the point now that fat is not the enemy.

We're talking about fats as something useful in nutrition. For many years, we had the idea that because fats are calorific, they were bad for you because they had many calories compared to other foods that were not fatty. And now we talk about olive oil as being a healthy fat. But apart from that, for me, it's almost a pharmacological bit of nature because it's loaded with about 300 different compounds that are very powerful. You can call them antioxidants, for lack of a better word. nature because it's loaded with about 300 different compounds that are very powerful. You can call them antioxidants, for lack of a better word. There's this thing called hydroxy tyrosol that is so powerful that even the European Union has made it into this thing called a novel food because it's almost comparable to a drug in how strong it is. And that's one of the main bioactive substances in olive oil.

It's basically anti-inflammatory. It reduces the kind of effects of the wear and tear on the cardiovascular system, on the gut, on the brain. So if you look at the brain and how it needs a lot of fat because it's actually made of fat and water,

replenishing your body with healthy fats on a regular basis is going to have a really big impact. So that would be my go-to fat when people ask me, what do you like about, you know, Spanish food and, you know, and healthy fats? I would say olive oil is probably the best fat for me. Yeah. I think that's a great take home for people. I think, you know, no matter what nutrition philosophy you subscribe to, by and large, there is agreement that olive oil is good for us. Yeah, exactly. And is there anything people should be particularly looking out for when buying olive oil here in the UK? Yeah, I like to stick to olive oil that comes from one single country,

as opposed to olive oil that comes in a bottle that says from mixed countries, just because it tends to be better quality. It tends to be better assured. So I'm speaking from my experience. My mum and dad are from the south of Spain, where they make a living out of selling olives and making olive oil out of them. So they are from tiny little towns in this province called Jaén, which is basically 95% of the economy in Jaén is olive oil, basically. They've grown up with olives around them. And they've got these cooperatives where they have this quality assurance set by the Andalusian government.

And there's this denomination of origin and all of these kind of processes to ensure that the olive oil that you're getting is actually grown either organically or you know whichever whichever way it's actually advertised on the bottle if you're getting it from different countries then you're kind of like playing cards with how that may happen so you may get really good olive oil in Morocco or in Greece or in wherever. But if they have different quality standards, then you're mixing the quality standards as well. So I know the quality standards in Spain are really good.

So I'm really happy recommending that Spanish olive oil. Italian olive oil is really good. And Greek olive oil is excellent as well. So those three, if they come from a single country, they are great. If they start coming from a collection of various different countries, there's going to be 5% from Morocco, 5% from Croatia, 10% from Greece. It's kind of like a bit of a mishmash. It's a bit like a single origin coffee, right?

That's it, yeah. People are getting obsessed with coffee now, and where do these beans come from? Actually, I'm always looking at ingredient labels on everything i buy but that's one thing i've not done yet is look at does that olive oil come from a single country so that's a really great take home for me yeah is that's a that's a great way of actually looking see if i can improve the quality of the olive oil that i'm buying but i'm also guessing actually doing it that way is probably also better for the growers of the olive oil that I'm buying but I'm also guessing actually doing it that way is probably also better for the growers and the communities who are actually out there

growing the olives and actually making the olive oil exactly so you're thinking that that step ahead I think for me as well it's all about a relative point and what I say to people in my clinics when I speak to them one-to-one is the fact that if they're starting from not having any olive oil at all and all they've used is some cheap vegetable oil for cooking and they switch onto olive oil, it doesn't matter what they switch onto. Whether it comes from

a hundred different countries and it's processed because it's likely to be better than the cheap and nasty basics vegetable oil. So, you know, go on to whatever and then once you start, the cheap and nasty basics, vegetable oil. So, you know, go on to whatever. And then once you start getting the finesse and the knowledge, then you can start looking for single country and extra virgin and organic. But it doesn't need to be nutrition, doesn't need to be super expensive.

It can be cheap and cheerful, but also very nutritious and very wholesome. I think that's a great point, Miguel. And, you know, I think a lot of that will come from, no doubt, your many years of clinical experience because you still see clients, don't you? Yes. Regularly. And I think we've also, you know,

we've always got to be aware when we're talking about nutrition and we're talking about health, you know, that many people out there have got different income levels. They've got different starting points. And so we have to be very mindful of what their starting point is as you say if they're very used to cheap low quality vegetable oils any olive oil is likely to be exactly better than

what them than um what they're what they're currently doing yeah um and that makes me think you know if we bring it back to your clinic and actually seeing clients regularly, what are some of the things that you think people misunderstand about brain health and nutrition? Interestingly, I think I've seen a bit of an upsurge in people asking me about the brain from other organs. For example, the brain from other organs for example the brain from the gut right whereas years ago the two were disconnected and people say you know i've got migraines i want to come to see you can you do something for them or i've got a family of alzheimer's and i want to prevent it can you help me or i've got ibs or i've got gas you know whatever don't give it a label

no condition labels at all i've got something dodgy going on with my brain or i've got something dodgy going on with my gut can you help me whereas now i think the the media is uh really pushing the idea that the body's connected yeah well you're pushing the idea that what is connected not the media you've written you know books about it uh it's it's actually very mainstream an idea now that the systems in the body are actually connected they don't work in isolation so people actually read this they read your book they read papers and they think okay well i can actually work on my brain from the gut and this is what i'm doing my doctoral research on and also what I'm working for a European Union funded research program at South Bank University called LAFIC, the London Agri-Food Innovation Clinic. It's a program that's actually putting together some clinical trials to work out how, in this case, fermented foods, things like kefir and kombucha and yogurt and sauerkraut or kimchi or something like that, may actually help you think more clearly, stay happy and not get depressed,

these kind of mental health measures, improve your cognitive function, your memory, your focus, your attention, that kind of stuff. I think there's more of an understanding now in a growing number of people that that can happen. And if you work on your gut, upstream from the gut, you can actually get benefits in the brain. That's very exciting for me, obviously, because I'm researching the area.

So I get very geeky about it and I love it. But it's not just me now. I'm getting more and more people from the mainstream, from lay people who say, actually, I know about this because I read a blog by blah, blah, doctor from the States. So, you know, there's a big influence from people from the States writing about these things. You write about these things. Twitter, Instagram. It's really happening. I feel that I'm really privileged to be in that kind of area.

So you're seeing people come in asking about this. Yeah. In a way that they weren't. Yeah, exactly. And I think Kryan and Dinan, you've had Kryan on your podcast before. I love his work. I really respect his work. He's very social media kind of scientist as well.

I think there's now a new breed of scientists are actually on social media communicating with people, answering questions from my mum on Twitter or something, you know, as opposed to just being in a lab, being scientists. And that allows people to communicate with science in a different way. And I think that's really important, isn't it?

Science is all very well, but there's an art to communicating science so that actually it can really make a difference in people's lives. Because I think conventionally a lot of people have always switched off from that because it wasn't delivered to them in a format that they easily understood or easily made sense to them. I think that's something you're really good at, Miguel, is how do you translate that information. You've written some great research papers. And actually, for those people listening who want to read those papers,

I'm going to link to a lot of them in the show notes page for this podcast, which will be drchatterjee.com forward slash miguel m-i-g-u-e-l so if you go to that now or at the end of the show you'll see all the things that miguel and i have spoken about we we will definitely link to a lot of miguel's papers and there was one actually that you released earlier this year which is absolutely fantastic it was called harnessing the power of microbiome assessment Assessment Tools as Part of Neuroprotective Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine Interventions. It's a mouthful. It's a complicated title, but what's in that paper for the layperson?

Yeah, so basically I'm talking about this thing. So how do you measure? So this is the kind of thing. So I'm a clinician, but I'm a scientist, so I combine the two. And I'm also bonkers, so I like to be bonkers in my science life and my clinician's life. So, you know, I just like to put a bit of jazz into what I do. I'm also bonkers, so I like to be bonkers in my science life and my clinician's life. So, you know, I just like to put a bit of jazz into what I do.

I'm creative. So basically, this paper is just focusing on how you can actually measure these things. So when people come to me and they say, I want to work on my brain from my gut, that sounds really complex. How do you measure what you're doing? How do you know that it's working? So now there are a number of different things you can measure in your pool. So when you have a pool and you send it to a lab to be analysed, you can measure a number of different things. Some of them are less relevant. Some of them are more relevant. The one that is very well accepted is this thing called microbial diversity. You've had the king of microbial diversity talking here as well,

Tim Spector on your podcast. He talks about microbial diversity talking here as well Tim Spector on your podcast he talks about microbial diversity all the time so we know that some bacteria may stay or may not stay in the gut there's just been a big study this week talking about probiotics don't take them, they don't do anything, they don't stay in the gut well it's not big news we always know that probiotics whether you call them probiotics or live bacteria or whatever, from a yogurt or kefir or a supplement, they go through you and they come out the other end.

It's what they do while they are there. And some of them may not stay, but they may actually catalyze this. They may promote this process whereby the diversity of the bacteria in your gut actually increase. So your bacteria colonies in your gut are a bit like city, like London, with people from different origins, different skin colours and hairstyles and clothes. If everybody looked blonde and blue-eyed, it would be very boring. We like diversity. We need that spread of diversity, different physiognomies to look at different faces and hairstyles. What those probiotics may be doing is whether they are in a

food like sauerkraut or kimchi or kefir or yogurt or in a supplement capsule, they may be going through you, but they may be increasing that diversity. They may be facilitating that diversity. So they may be making people hold hands and stay together and change their hairstyle so you know they're kind of like doing things like that they're being they're being clever so i think i mean i think it's a brilliant point you make miguel and i i saw that big newspaper report when it came out the media were reporting that the probiotics don't work and it's just not true. Yes, they don't stay in the guts, but many of us who've been studying this for a while, we know that. They

exert their effects as they go through and they change the terrain, they change the environment. And I certainly still do, for some patients, use probiotics with patients. I don't know if you're still using them with clients. Yeah, I do use them. And the thing is that probiotics as a general term is like talking about vitamins. So you don't say take vitamins because vitamin A will do something completely different to vitamin D or vitamin E. So what you do,

and you have hundreds of different strains, which is the kind of like the more precise kind of end of the spectrum of a bacterium. And each of them may be doing different things. So one of them out of this family of a thousand different types may be helping depression. But if you take another one from the same family, that's not that little guy with a fancy name that nobody can pronounce. That's not that little guy with a fancy name that nobody can pronounce. It's not good for depression at all.

It may be good for IBS. So it's now for practitioners and scientists to start communicating to the lay people who are interested in this kind of stuff. What kind of supplements or foods may be reaching the ones that are good for depression or for better mood or cognition or attention or IBS, that kind of stuff. And that's, we're only touching the tip of the iceberg because it's so complex because when you put something in your mouth, it's always going to have an effect on a number of these systems in the body. Those probiotics that the scientists in that paper saying that probiotics don't work. We're just looking at something quite isolated. Do they come out the other end?

Do they colonize? Whereas, you know, we know that people can increase their well-being. They can feel better after drinking kefir or eating yogurt, for example. So we don't need to get very fancy. It can be very easy. Have a bit of yogurt every day. If you've never had it before because it was a novel food for you,

you'll benefit from it. Have a bit of, if you're on the yogurt already and want to be a bit more fancy, have some kefir that is super loaded with bacteria. You want to be super hipster, have kombucha.

Now it's like, you know, there's always degrees. I can imagine you drinking a kombucha actually. I make my own kombucha. Do you? I make my own kombucha, my kefir and water kefir. I've got a lab in the kitchen. Have you really?

It's complete bonkers. So you're just experimenting. I make my vinegar from kombucha as well. I do pickles. I'm not as bad as other people, but I make a few things. No, that's great. And I give it to my dogs as well. They like the grains, the water kefir grains,

which are just carbohydrates, basically. But there's some research coming up actually saying that those carbohydrates, this thing called exopolysaccharides, may be good for weight loss. So in the future, we may see that the grains have been made into a powder that you can add to food to help you with weight loss. So this is a very exciting area to be in. Yeah, and there's some great studies out there

in terms of what different bacteria can do i know when uh professor john crying was here with me and we spoke about gut health he was talking about a study that he conducted in his lab in cork i can't remember it exactly now but i think it was to do with some exam students just before you know i think they had an exam to take and one group were given a probiotic i think it was bifidobacterium longum b122 i think there was a specific strain and compared the group who took it compared to the group who didn't had lower stress levels it was really quite remarkable how you know you could be taking a bacteria through your mouth that would go to your gut yet that would change something in your stress levels and that and yeah that's been there

there are other studies which are suggesting similar type scenarios so i guess you know for people who are not familiar what is the link then between the gut and our brain? So there's a very basic link and the gut is connected with the brain through this cable. I like to call it like an internet cable, like a LAN cable. So you've got your Wi-Fi and you've got your LAN cable. You've got this LAN cable that's giving you very powerful connectivity with the brain that's not dependent on the modem going off or anything. You've got that physical cable connecting the gut and the brain that's not dependent on the modem going off or anything you've got that you know physical cable connecting the gut and the brain the cable actually originates in the adrenal glands these two little glands on top of the kidneys that are responsible for the

production of this cortisol and stress hormones adrenaline cortisol things that you produce when you need a quick burst of energy to get the bus or the train because you're missing it and you really need to leg it to get it. Once you're there, you calm down normally, unless you're completely stressed out all the time. That's a different matter. But that quick burst of energy that cortisol gives you is already a messenger to the brain and it's moving through this cable that goes all around the gut, connecting information from the gut to the brain. And the cable is called the vagus nerve. It's a physical cable that if you actually split somebody open, it's there. It's not something that you need to look for. It's

actually a really thick cable. And that goes from the adrenals all around the gut, like little bits of cable, like a net. And it ends up in a part of the brain called the amygdala and the amygdala processes emotions like fear, stress, anxiety, these kind of like primal emotions. So this having a gut feeling, what we talk about having a gut feeling or having a hunch or having an intuition that starts with butterflies in the stomach, it's actually your gut telling you that you've picked up a signal that something is going to happen that actually happens from the adrenals because you're producing that little bit of adrenaline or cortisol to get you moving but it's connecting that that that gut

feeling with the with the brain now the gut is like a tube but it's a tube that's a bit like a sausage skin. It's kind of like porous and it lets liquid out. The theory that Kryan and Dinan talk about as well is that this sausage skin can be permeable, too permeable, what has been called leaky gut traditionally. If you want to be very fancy and very scientific, you call it intestinal permeability. It's the same thing. Basically, by having a gut that is more permeable, you've got more chances of things leaking into

the other side of the sausage skin. That other side has the immune system or part of the immune system picking up signals to decide whether it needs to attack something or not. And if that becomes a bit of a question mark because you don't really know what's coming in, the immune system is sapping your energy anyway because it's very expensive to run.

It's a very expensive app to run on your mobile phone, kind of that is your body. But also it's creating this kind of uh communication molecules called free radicals it's increasing the amount of free radicals kind of like inflammation and these kind of things going on without getting too fancy but they don't just stay there they travel to the brain via the vagus nerve so again the vagus nerve is like a super uh lung cable communicating a broadband kind of uh cable uh bandwidth from the gut to the brain and it's picking up all these signals so if there is more of an upheaval going on in that gut wall that's going to be communicated to the brain and

if those free radicals that are, free radicals are these things that oxidate the body, they make you go rusty. One of them is very popular in my examples, which is peroxide. Peroxide is what you put in your hair to bleach it. If anybody's ever had bleached hair or highlights, do you know what happens if you leave it too long? Your hair goes like straw.

It really gets burned. But it's the same kind of compound that floats around in your body. It's used by the immune system. And it's not necessarily a bad thing because it helps your immune system kill bugs and keeps you happy and healthy. But it can also... There are communication molecules.

They tell different organs in the body that something is happening. And if too many of those peroxide bits end up in the brain they'll the brain will get too busy they'll it'll be thinking what the hell is going on there's too much noise here and that actually affects the quality of your thinking it can actually because it peroxide one of those free radicals can actually burn parts of the brain. Think about it that way. You can end up with parts of the brain actually getting damaged, which happens in certain neurodegenerative diseases, and it's part of the process. You know, free radicals is a big accepted theory.

They play a part in things like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and so on. So when you have a gut that is happier because there's more diversity of the bacteria that live there, the bugs are more varied, there's more variety of them, the gut wall is working better, there's less permeability, there's less leaky gut. That actually leads to better health in the rest of the body including the brain but particularly the brain because you need to think of the gut and the brain almost as the same organ

because they are connected through this big cable that is actually not connecting other parts of the body the gut is not connected with your big toe with a big cable like evolution that hasn't made you like that is not so important but the gut connected with the brain you need to think wow however we've ended up being humans like in 2018 this has been a very big part of our evolution process that this is bloody big cable connecting the gut and the brain so it must be important yeah absolutely so the vagus nerve and i love your analogy with a big thick broadband cable that's plugged in that's not going through you know you know erratic wi-fi

signals and that kind of thing i think that's really really paints a lovely picture that our gut is physically connected to our brain and you're right evolution must have done that for a reason it's not just the vagus nerve, though, is it, that communicates between the gut and the brain. There are multiple other pathways. Yeah, absolutely. And this is, it gets a bit fancy, but, you know, there are neuroendocrine pathways.

So what does that mean to, you know, in plain English? It means, again, different communication molecules. Some of them may be hormones. So this cortisol, for example, is one of those hormones. A thyroid hormone, for example, is another one. Sexual hormones. So all of those are going to play a role in your gut health. So some people will actually know that females, closer to their periods, they may be more bloated.

That comes from the gut, but it's actually caused by, you know, different levels of estrogens floating in the body. So that's a very big, you know, a very easy example. Cortisol. Cortisol is an interesting one because I was saying, cortisol helps you get out of bed in the morning. It helps you go and get the bus. And, you know, if you're going to miss it you make sure you don't miss it you're able to get the energy to to go and get it and the way

it does that it it does it in two ways so one of them is it releases sugar from your muscle and liver a tiny little bit of sugar only about an ounce of sugar in this four coal um glycogen and that is a cortisol knocks at the door of the muscle and the liver and says can you release some sugar because i need energy really quick then that's released really quickly and it's like an injection you get it you know this is this happens in the split second that you think oh the bus is coming and then you're there you go on the bus and then you you chill but if you think about your mortgage all the time and think oh my god i'm not to be able to make it this month. I'm going to have my house repossessed. And that's haunting you all the time.

Cortisol doesn't distinguish between or your adrenal glands don't distinguish between you missing the bus and your mortgage, even though your mortgage is not something you can see physically in there. It's like, you know, it's something intangible. And it keeps reducing cortisol all the time as if something is going to happen. You're in this fight or flight mode that in the beginning can be good to give you energy just in case you have to fight something. So another analogy that a lot of people use is there's a lion that's going to come and get you. You either leg it from the danger

or you fight the lion so you're going to need energy either way um when uh that happens for a long time because cortisol first knocks at the door of the muscle and the muscle says yes very friendly you know i'm going to release some sugar when When it keeps knocking at the door, what cortisol does, it breaks down the muscle. So it starts eating the muscle. So you end up with muscle being broken down for energy because muscle is made of protein and protein can be broken down

into sugar for energy. And think about the gut, it's muscle and connective tissue, but largely muscle. So if cortisol is being pushed chronically all the time really high cortisol all the time when you end up being stressed is with gastrointestinal permeability why because the muscle that is the wall in the gut becomes thinner and thinner and thinner and that leads to more permeability so we get into leaky gut by stress. And that's another big thing that I see all the time.

And you see it. It's actually documented in paper. So it's not random science. It's actually really well documented. Yeah, I think it's a great point to raise is that often when we talk about gut health, which is the complete buzzword now in all of health. Everybody's doing it.

Everybody has been doing it for years now. Everybody, you know. Yeah, exactly. For the last 20 years. But what's interesting about it is that often it's about the food that we eat. How do we improve our gut health with the food that we eat? And of course, that has a huge role. Yeah.

But as you well know, I'm very keen always to talk about the role that stress also plays on our overall health but also on our gut health because as you just beautifully explains you know if we are chronically stressed you know that stress if that stress reaction becomes long term in the body it can have a very damaging effect on multiple systems across the body whether it's your brain health whether it's your digestive health and yes it can cause this so-called leaky guts um by just being stressed and i think the lion analogy is great what i think i think in my first book the four-pillar plan i think i i put it you know in the past we'd been attacked by lions in the 21st century we're now being attacked by our lives um which really just to try and illustrate that point that the stress response is has you know evolved over millions of years and it's

exquisitely tuned to help us in those short moments of stress that we need it for um but if we're constantly stimulating that you know whether it's we've got deadlines email inboxes overflowing your instagram going pinging like mad yeah and we just go go go the whole time well that is a stress on the body and you know i've just spent a few months writing this new book on stress stress solution i really try and go into this in detail is that the impact that stress when it is not when it is long term the impact it has and then simple things that we can do about it so i guess miguel as you say you know chronic stress has a very damaging effect on our gut which can then damage our brain damage the brain yeah i guess well cortisol which is our

body's primary stress response hormone or one of them anyway, you know, cortisol in small amounts is very good for brain function. Exactly. So I don't want you to think of cortisol as the bad guy because otherwise you wouldn't be getting up in the morning if it wasn't for cortisol. You don't want to have flat cortisol in the morning because then you'd end up having chronic fatigue. So, you know, so it needs to be put into context you know that people actually do need these things yeah but i guess cortisol as a hormone itself can directly impact our brain yeah in the short term it improves its function long if it's if the cortisol is too much and for for a longer period of time it can be quite damaging to the hippocampus exactly and can

damage our memory and so this is this is where we can start to draw the link between chronic stress and poor brain function and poor memory, which I think we all know when we're chronically stressed and overwhelmed, our memory goes down a bit and our brain function goes down. But I guess there's also a mechanism by which chronic stress can damage the gut. And therefore, because the gut's not working well, our brain won't be working well. Yeah, so it's all connected. And these are tricky things to measure

because typically the way that science has been looking to measure these things is being very A to B kind of road. You want to measure the effect of A onto a specific system and it's a straight road from A to B, whereas there's so many other things involved that it's actually quite easy to make a wrong assumption. So one of the things that I'm measuring both at my work at Middlesex University,

my doctoral degree, and at the London Agri-Food Innovation Clinic, the LAFIC at Southbank, we're using these tools that are patient reported outcome measures fancy word basically to describe something that uh is a tool that i asked you it's like a mini questionnaire that i asked you to fill out in front of me or i asked you to answer some questions that are about how you feel today. One of them, you actually say what you want to report on. So it could be gut health. And that's

useful because you could say bloating, for example. So today I'm very bloated. How would you rate it from nothing to very bad? And you give me a point in the scale. It goes from zero to six. I don't want to get too technical. But then when I ask you again, after doing something, we can talk about what the something would be. Three months later you can, or a month later, you could say well actually I was really bad a month ago, but now I'm actually one point down

so I'm closer to being really well, which is zero. So really well is zero, really bad is six. There's another one that actually, because in Lafayette we're working with psychologists. So they are using a specific tool called Cyclops, which is the same thing, but it's related to mental health.

And it has questions about your mental health. It's the same, it's actually related to my mob. So it's the same scale, zero to six. And then it's very useful because you can actually connect it with parts of the body and with what you're doing one of my favorite things to do um and again there's no magic bullet there's no magic diet that works for everybody you need to individualize it for you and make it work for you but as a pattern as a starting point is a mediterranean diet i'm also drawn to it because i've grown up on it so you know i've seen it and my mom and dad are quite healthy eaters

i would say that they are naturally almost uh borderline ketogenic mediterranean diet my mom and dad because they hardly eat any bread or pasta maybe once a week or something, hardly any potatoes, loads of greens and tomatoes and salad and loads of fish. Not so much butter, like some people do on ketogenic diets, but it's very low carb anyway. Naturally low carb. Naturally low carb. They don't make an effort. My mum is 82. My dad is 85. They're past the point where they care you know they just they've always eaten like that and it's a very typical way of eating in the south

of spain as well so it's it's when people talk about the mediterranean diet and there's this mediterranean pyramid with loads of pasta and potato i laugh because i've not seen that in my family or in my extended family of, you know, cousins and so on. Miguel, I think this is really, really fascinating points. There's no question that, you know, in inverted commas, the Mediterranean diet has got a ton of research on it. You know, consistently it's associated with, you know,

really, really good health outcomes. It's probably one of the most well-studied diets. But the problem is, is that, you know know depending on what dietary tribe people belong to they interpret the mediterranean diet according to their preference so you know you are someone who grew up in the mediterranean you obviously sharing with what your parents you know their interpretation or not even their interpretation how they apply Mediterranean diets. Is it fair to say that there are many different ways to do a Mediterranean diet, depending on what part of the Mediterranean you live in?

Absolutely. And I think that's why in later years, you see more, particularly in scientific literature, a move towards referring to the Mediterranean diet as the Mediterranean diet pattern. Yeah. Because it's more technically correct. Because if you go to Italy and Spain, even at different areas within one country, so intra-country, Spain is not just all flamenco and beach, you know. We have high mountains, some of the highest mountains in Europe and some areas of Spain where they are completely covered in snow from about October until March.

And in those towns where they can be isolated in the snow, they're not going to be eating salad and tomatoes. They want to eat like, you know, big kind of chunky stews with loads of saturated fat. And they still not get cardiovascular disease at the levels that, you know, some people would say, oh, if you eat loads of saturated fat, you'll get cardiovascular disease at the levels that, you know, some people would say, oh, if you eat loads of saturated fat, you'll get cardiovascular disease.

They eat chorizo and black pudding and, you know, pork rind and things like that every day. But they also eat loads of chickpeas and they eat loads of bulbs, like leeks and onions, tons of leeks and onions in those areas. Foods which are great prebiotic foods

that feed our gut. So maybe just on that, I know sometimes people get confused with these terms. What is a prebiotic food? Yeah, so prebiotics, and it is tying beautifully with what we were talking about before.

I think we focus a lot on putting in probioticsics and in a way even though i wasn't pleased with this study you know that probiotics don't or how the media actually interpreted this study yeah yeah the probiotics don't stay don't bother with them well it's the wrong way to look at them because what you need to look is you've got your own colony of bacteria in your gut and you need to be feeding them. And unless you put your diet right first, for as many probiotics as you take, you could take the most expensive super duper probiotic capsule. If your diet is crap, you're not going to fix your gut.

You're not going to feel better gastrointestinally. gastrointestinally. On the other hand, if you follow a Mediterranean diet pattern that makes sense and it's not, you know, completely full of pasta or with no pasta, it needs to work for you, you know, whatever your preferences are. But if you follow a very varied and you talk about eating the rainbow, so an eat the rainbow kind of process where every day there is red and green and yellow. So you've got your red tomato and you've got your yellow pepper and you've got your lettuce maybe a couple of different types of lettuce one is purple and the other one is green so you've got naturally a rainbow on a plate without having to really think about it as if you were going to take an instagram picture you know it just happens because you put it out of a bag i cook like nigella style i cook

five minutes miguela style you know it's just like you know i it takes five minutes for me to cook and there's always loads of color in there it's my it's always before the eating a rainbow was kind of a you know made famous whoever made it you know whether it's you or anybody else eating a rainbow just happens in my house. It's happened in my house since my mom was feeding me as a child. There's always been three or four different colors on my plate, and I've always really paid attention to that. Those colors do two things.

One is a source of fiber. That's what people think about as prebiotic. Prebiotics feeds the probiotics. So prebiotics fit your bacteria in your gut and the fiber is something that you can see with the naked eye so it's something that when you chew it it feels like you know there's something in your mouth it could be fibrous for example like when a lake for example you know when you cook a lake and it's kind of like fibrous that's fiber that's very visible fibre.

So it can be more chunky or less chunky. If it's more chunky, it's insoluble. If it's less chunky and it dissolves into water, it's soluble. Like what? Like in onions, for example, in the end when they completely melt into nothing. So if you make an onion soup in the end, it'd just be completely soluble. be soluble fiber yeah and and what are some examples of insoluble soluble fiber you'd have something like uh tiger nuts for example are really well known for having giving you a lot of insoluble fiber is something that the bacteria will chomp at but they may not completely eat out

so it still provides roughage and goes through. Exactly, yeah. And I'm guessing you would recommend a combination of fibres. A combination of fibres, yeah. But you don't need to even think about what is going to give me what, because if you combine colours on your plate,

you'll always have a combination, because the pulp of the tomato will be different to the skin of the tomato. If you're eating the whole tomato, you have a combination of both. Miguel, I love this, because the pulp of the tomato will be different to the skin of the tomato. If you're eating the whole tomato, you have a combination of both. Miguel, I love this because the thing that is incredibly frustrating sometimes in the health messaging that goes out there in public these days is that it becomes quite complicated. And then people say, well, how many grams of this fibre do I need?

How much do I need of that fibre? And we start to move away from an intuitive way of eating. People make it too complicated. Yeah, I agree. I totally agree with you. Too complicated. We've become, I don't think those media headlines particularly help because they really try and, I'm not saying they try to polarise opinion,

but they often, they want to sort of myth bust. They always want to go, oh, we were wrong. This is it now. Now this is a solution. So, you know, often we've just come full circle by myth busting three or four different things. We've ended up to the starting point. And I love what you said, which is this whole thing of eating the rainbow. You were doing it as a kid. It was just it's just intuitive how your parents would feed you. You know, there would be color. I think that is a great take home point for anyone listening to this podcast. colour. I think that is a great take-home point for anyone listening to this podcast. You know, I'd probably argue if you want to do one thing, I'll ask you, if there's one thing that someone was going to do to improve their gut health, that would be close, I think. Yeah, eating a rainbow with olive oil as one of the colours, because if you look at olive oil,

that's green and thick, that's green in there. My mum and dad came from, you know, they grew in the middle of the Civil War. They had nothing. They are not like, you know, the marquee of Seville, you know. But still, it was ingrained in them, even in the face of scarcity of coming out of a civil war, that you needed to have a variety of different things on your plate. You know, you couldn't just have like, you know, one piece of protein and one piece of vegetable. It's like, for them, it's like inimaginable. You don't eat like that. Maybe that's the Mediterranean pattern.

Rather than how much pasta is there or how much whole grain is there, maybe it's to do with the diversity. And the diversity then reflects in the microbial diversity. So a lot of the science that you see, and I'm just about to publish another paper, I've reviewed the best part of 300 papers to write that one. Oh, wow. And it basically, in science for the last couple of years,

looking at microbial diversity in the Mediterranean diet particularly, very specifically looks at things like being a vegan or a vegetarian and a meat eater. As long as you've got diversity of foods in your food frequency questionnaire, so you've actually answered and there's a diversity index that is wide. So you basically said,

yes, I did have tomatoes and lettuce and carrots and bread of different types, not just one single thing every day. If the food diversity is wide, it doesn't matter whether you eat meat, because there's a lot of this going on as well. If you're a vegan, you do much better, or if you're a vegetarian, you do much better. What you may do initially, if you change from a really unhealthy diet where you're eating Doritos all the time, you know,

so if you go from Doritos to vegan, of course you're going to feel better. But in the longer run, the gut is plastic. It kind of, you know, it changes quite rapidly. It adapts, doesn't it? It adapts. So what really holds the answer for me

is the diversity. And that's why nothing is technically bad. I mean, you can have a little bit of something that you fancy every now and then, but you need to match it with your goals as well. Because I see a lot of this going on as well with some, you know, nutrition people saying, oh, it doesn't matter what you eat. It's all about like intuition. And well, yes, but if you need to lose three stone, if you're intuitively drawn to the cakes, it's not going to happen.

You know, so, you know, you need to match it with what you want to achieve as well. Yeah, I think talking about diversity and microbial diversity, which comes from having a diverse diet. You know, there's something I wrote about in my book, The Four-Pillar Plan, is, you know, the reality is, is that some people do very well on quite different diets. You know, some people do very well on quite different diets. You know, some people do very well on a vegan diet. Some do very well on a animal protein heavy, low carb type diets. But I find the diets that tend to do well, no matter what the label, no matter what label we give to it, is often encouraging good microbial diversity. You know, it's a lot of variety, a lot of different colours,

a lot of minimally processed foods, which actually are really great for our gut health, and very minimal, highly processed and refined foods. And that seems to be what holds all the great diets around the world, which seem to be associated with good health and longevity. It's pretty hard to make a case that any one of them... Maybe better than the other. Yeah, but it's also pretty hard to make a case that none of them don't have gut health at the core. They all seem to support good gut health.

Yeah, yeah. Which I find super interesting. And, you know, you mentioned eating the rainbow. And again, for listeners of this podcast, for people who've read my book, you'll know that I talk about this rainbow chart quite a lot that is free to download from my website. And again, I'll put a link in the show notes if for those of you who don't have it at drchastity.com forward slash Miguel, which will be the show notes page for this podcast episode. And I get families tweeting me all around the country you know pretty

much on a daily basis saying how much that rainbow chart has helped them as a family including their children make healthy choices because yes there were health benefits but it's also fun it's nice exactly to see these different colors there's a bit of vibrancy there you touched upon something there that i'm going to be a little bit more esoteric now as opposed to more scientific. I'm going to be the funky Miguel and actually say that diversity actually goes further than just dietary diversity.

Experience diversity in your life as well because we've been talking about how food actually makes you feel something. But what about the relationship between your thoughts and what you experience out of life and your gut health as well? So if you have a life that's more diverse in experiences and more rich in experiences, and you have a satisfying sexual life

and you have friendships that are gratifying and you meet different people who excite you in different ways, that's also playing a role in keeping your brain engaged. It's probably going to play a role in keeping you less stressed, and because you're going to be less stressed and less anxious. Probably, this is generalising, but it's likely to make you feel happier than if you do the same thing every day,

if you just sit in front of the telly every day, or you just go running every day but it's very fixed i think this what i tend to see is that when there is flexibility in the behavior we adapt better to whatever may come next because we are more flexible we are more plastic we can take things that life throws at us in a in a more gracious way than when we are really fixed on our ways it's like food neophobia for example which is you know when people don't like new foods they are so stuck on trying something new oh i couldn't do that i've never had it before as opposed to oh i'll give it a go you may like it or not like it but at least you've tried and it's an experience more that you can add to your repertoire that's just with food but you know

same thing with a friend or yeah doing something different going you know rather than going to the one cinema that you always go to go to a different cinema you know you may get a different experience out of it and i think all of that increases the the diversity of thoughts in your head which i think for me is as important as the diversity of my microbes because I'm easily bored. I think if I was growing up now, I'd be ADHD, you know, because I can, you know, I've seen something, I'm bored with it five minutes later, I want something new. So the only thing that doesn't bore me is neuroscience and nutrition,

all the rest, you know, I've seen it, it's fine, you know, whatever, five minutes ago. But, you know, this kind of increasing the diversity of your thoughts and your experiences, I find that we'll come to a point that we can measure the effect on health. At the moment, it's all very lax, very vague. But we're looking at how we interact from the body to the mind, but the mind is interacting with the body as well.

And I think this comes down to what you were saying right at the start, which is that the body is interconnected. Everything affects, you know, everything that we do affects other organs. You know, our gut health affects, we know our brain health affects maybe our skin health, our digestive health. But our thoughts also affect our health. Our thoughts can affect our gut health. We know that social stress, you know, can increase inflammation in your body. Just from being socially stressed, your number of inflammatory cytokines, which are these immune system messengers, can go up. isolation that can do the same thing and there's loads of studies done on isolation in patients of different conditions because that's the

time that a lot of scientists will want to know what happens if you're isolated and you've got cancer as opposed to having a circle of friends around you. It's very well reported that if you're isolated or frailty or kind of like you know in all that age if you've got a good social network around

you that's actually going to, a nice social network around you that's actually going a nice social network that's not an Instagram network that's going to stress you out because they send you messages all the time a real network that you can actually touch that's going to support you Yeah, Miguel, it's fascinating you're saying this

because it's really I'm glad we've sort of taken a 30,000 foot view here come a little bit out of food yes, food is important but it's one aspect of health and it's not you know it's not the only thing uh it's i think sometimes people overly focus on that at the expense of other things and i think absolutely and they make it more complicated than a bit of that balance yeah um and yeah you know why i know you know well because

i've been i've been calling you throughout the process, but I've just spent a few months writing this book on stress, The Stress Solution. And, you know, I've gotten through these four big pillars of stress in the modern world. And one of them is meaning and purpose. And I really try hard to make the case that even if you're doing everything else I ask you to do with your diet, with your lifestyle, if your day-to-day life has no meaning and purpose, if you've got no reason to get up in the morning, I think your life is inherently stressful. And it sort of echoes a little bit about what you're saying, which is these other experiences, the variety of experiences, how happy we are, how fulfilling our life is. In other ways, that also impacts our health, that impacts our brain health, but it also impacts our gut health. And I think we are

going to see a lot more science in that in the coming years. It's certainly something I see a lot in clinic. And I guess that leads me to my next question, Miguel, which is, I guess people come to see you for help with their food, I'm guessing, and and their nutrition but given how interconnected the body is do you find often in your consultations with your clients that you know you're not just talking about food you're also talking about stress management and other lifestyle factors absolutely and and also i always say the same thing i'm a bit like a broken record i mean if i was i've had been given a pound for the times that I've said this in clinic, I'd be a millionaire now.

Basically, when you go and have a massage, you pay somebody, you have a very nice massage, and you've received a service, you've received something that made you feel good, and you go home and you've had it. Could be a massage, could be a facial, could be, you know, whatever.

When you go and see a nutrition person they do your head in telling you everything that you didn't want to hear sometimes sometimes it's like you know giving you loads of information whichever way you look at it and then you go home and you need to do the hard work because we don't give you a tablet that you take it's not not a prescription. It could be a prescription because the model makes you think it's a prescription. I've given you a program to follow. But unless you follow it, then it doesn't work. When you open the fridge, you need to decide, do I pick up the rainbow salad or do I have the cheesecake?

And if you have the cheesecake and that's not what's going to allow you to reach your goals, then you won't reach them. So you may have paid me, but I don't assume the responsibility. I can only coach you and give you the information that's based on science and that matches your goals, basically. What I see more of lately

is that people get very confused because of different social media messages and very influencers you know who influence everything you know they have an opinion on everything on up their experts on everything i don't know how they do it because i'm not an expert on anything at all and i you know i never think i know anything about it well i think the best practitioners are those who know that they that their knowledge is always limited they can always learn more exactly yeah you know i one of the things i love about doing this podcast i get to talk to a lot of experts and i always glean something from them

always learn something new that i didn't know which is just fascinating for me i'm always looking to learn learn what i don't know and what i can improve on there's always a learning curve you never know everything there is to know about any subject but you know seemingly there's some people in there out there that that know about everything and you know, you get the client in front of you say, oh, I want to upregulate my pathway, blah, blah. Or my marker, blah, blah, is too low. And I've read this blog by Dr. blah, blah, blah. And I want to increase it. And I'm thinking, how the hell you do that?

I mean, I'm going to give you lettuce and broccoli, beetroot, and maybe a supplement if you need it. And, you know, we can do some blood tests or stool tests or whatever. But when you get to that degree of sophistication, I'm quite happy to assume some kind of, you know, be adventurous and say, okay, there's only been one study done in humans. Let's just try this because you're only going to be eating more broccoli or less broccoli or taking a supplement that's been shown to be safe. Fine.

Very limited harm. Exactly. Very limited harm exactly very limited harm or like fasting there's been this furore some people say oh there's no evidence i mean for god's sake there is loads of evidence but also if you're hungry eat it's not a competition you do it so you don't have breakfast you're starving by midday have something to eat it's not you don't need to prove anything to anybody it's not a competition no it's not like the guinness prove anything to anybody it's not a you know it's not like the guinness record to see who doesn't eat for the longest and i think that's that there's a really really important point here miguel isn't there that's you know people are consuming a lot of information on social media which can be a really good thing sometimes yeah

i really do media don't get me wrong likewise follow me on instagram by the way yeah you can tell us all your your handles and everything just a second but i think i think it's really important um that people do get this information from social media i think i think it's great but i think sometimes people are wanting the prescription you know that this is the this is the way to the way to do it yeah yeah and i really think and i i get it, guys, if that's anyone listening, that I think, you know, they want to be told what to eat. But I kind of feel that our job is really to help educate and inspire you. And then you kind of got to figure out what works for you, you know,

A, with your own dietary preferences, but also in the context of your life, your cultural norms, your friends network, your work patterns, you kind of got to figure out what works for you. You know, because we've got so many challenging things these days, like shift work for people, for example, that if you're a shift worker, and you hear this thing that I'm talking about time restricted eating, or people are saying, oh, you know, I skip breakfast and have a coffee and I don't eat till 12 o'clock that they'll be thinking, well, how does this apply for me if I'm doing night shift? So I kind of, you know, and I really had to until 12 o'clock, they'll be thinking, well, how does this apply for me if I'm doing night shifts? So I kind of, you know,

and I really had to think hard about this when I was writing my first book, Miguel, was I believe in personalised advice. You know, if someone comes to see me in clinic or in my GP practice, they'll get a personalised plan. But when you write a book that's for the general population it's very hard to personalize it's a spectrum and you need to pick up things that are good for you and not pick

up the things that are not good for you and not do the dr chatterjee's diet yeah exactly and that doesn't and the great thing is that dr it doesn't exist because i purposely created a program and created a template that i think can be personalized by everyone, no matter what their life circumstances, no matter whether they're vegan or hardcore paleo, right? They can still use the template that I outlined in my book. And I'm very proud of that actually, because I want to bring people together. I don't want, you know, everyone deserves good health. Everyone deserves the right to good quality health information. And, you know, I get why some of these fights happen on social media. I understand people feel very passionate about things.

A lot of people feel very let down of the information that they've been given and they found their way. So I understand it. But I certainly feel my role is to try and bring people together and try and actually show there's a lot of harmony here. There's a lot of things that we're saying that are the same. We don't need to fight as much. I couldn't agree more. I mean, because of the stuff that I do with the professional association that I'm a member of and chair of,

that's the British Association for Nutrition. Yeah, that new name is British Association for Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine, BANT. New name is British Association for Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine, BANT. And I've been at the forefront of kind of like loads of politic kind of words for years. You know, people low carb, not low carb, high fat, not high carb, you know, whatever. And it gets tiring. I think there's a lot of common ground that people should focus on. I don't go on social media to fight. I go on social media to share stuff that I find people will,

I believe people will find valuable. Science-based stuff that is not something completely alternative based on a mouse study. You know, it tends to be like human stuff that has been shown to work or not work and to engage in nourishing conversations because i'm i'm in this world for as long as i'm going to be here to have fun to you know to be jolly and to just you know uh benefit other people's lives as much as i can with my knowledge if i can and my support i'm not here to fight i'm a lover lover, not a fighter. You are, Miguel, and I love you for it.

I totally agree. We need to be, you know, sharing this information in a very kind and compassionate way. But also don't, you know, I would say you have got a lot of clinical experience. And the reason I bring that up

is because, you know, there's a lot of people out there on social media, really, and I appreciate everyone's trying to share a good message. But you know what? You don't get everything from science papers.

There is a lot to be learned from real life, seeing what works with real people in clinic. And I've got nearly 20 years experience of seeing patients now. That has as much value to me as a later science paper.

And I think that gets missed sometimes. People are really trying to go a lot about evidence-based medicine with a real misunderstanding of what evidence-based medicine actually means yes because it isn't just scientific evidence absolutely and that's the message that the guy who created evidence-based medicine as a model um david sackett professor david sackett they basically said it's about applying the best available scientific evidence to the patient and according to their personal values. So you come to me and say, my personal values are that I really want to eat a very low carb diet.

And I say to you, but there's no evidence for it. You cannot have it from me. Go to somebody else. That's not evidence based medicine. That's just basically saying I only want to serve people who are in my... Follow my philosophy. Exactly, yeah, who share my worldviews. And it's not about worldviews,

it's about helping the patient or the client. And if they come to you with a request, and it's reasonable, it's not like, oh, I want to grow an extra leg, you know, it's something within the realms of the possible within your scope of practice. I believe there's uh you know there's flexibility to to be to be used and and and compassion and understanding of what people

may want and to help them get there sometimes you need to bring them down to the real world because they may want to do things with pathways that have never been done you know they've read too many blogs they need to be brought down to reality. Sometimes they need to be given a bit of a push and say, well, maybe the only way you're going to be reaching your goals is by doing this, had you considered it and think out of the box. So yeah, clinical practice is an amazing thing

because every time you sit in front of somebody, it's a new experience. It's something that, you know, it's a new challenge. It's a new, it's never the same. It's never the same as it. Not one person is the same no scientific paper ever can tell you how to handle that exactly you know you've got a it's just you pick this up over time don't you an experience and also you see what works yeah and sometimes you see what works and you use it

and then the science comes out a bit later yeah and you go right that's why that works yeah um and so i find that super fascinating well look miguel just to close this you go right that's why that works yeah um and so i find that super fascinating well look miguel just to close this down i think that's been really interesting we've gone in all sorts of tangents so i hope that the um the listeners the listeners haven't got lost along the way well hopefully they've been sure i've tried to make this these podcast conversations as natural as possible you know unscripted just see where they end up. But I also like to bring it back down to practical interventions at the end. I love, you know, using this podcast as a way to inspire every listener to make some positive change in their life. And I wonder, you know,

I normally ask for four tips at the end because of my four pillars. I always ask my guests, you know, are there, you know, four of your best tips how someone can, you know, improve their gut health or improve their brain health? I wonder if you could elaborate on what those might be. Eat a rainbow, have loads of olive oil, chat to your friends, have a good sexual life. Those are my four pillars. Well, Miguel, that was short, snappy, to the point. I think there's really, really some good take-homes there for people. Miguel, I appreciate you're incredibly busy.

Thank you so much for joining me today. For people listening, you want to see more of Miguel's work. In fact, where can they find you on social media, Miguel? Yeah, so I'm just Miguel Mateas. So M-I-G-U-E-L-M-A-T-E-A-S. Miguel Mateas, all one one word in all social media channels Twitter Facebook

Instagram yeah I'm mostly on Instagram these days I find Twitter a bit too aggressive now tell me about it so yeah it's like walking down the street with people throwing things at you

sometimes exactly but I'm still on Twitter if you want to find me on Twitter I'm more on Instagram because I find it more creative I'm more visual well guys look

you know if you've enjoyed the episode please do tag me and Miguel on whatever platform you want let us know what you thought if you've enjoyed the episode please do tag me and Miguel on whatever platform you want let us know what you thought if you've got any questions for me or Miguel do let us know absolutely we would love to know I know Miguel is great at answering questions on social media and Miguel thank you for your time. Thank you for having me I really enjoyed it. That concludes today's episode of the Feel Better Live More podcast.

I certainly enjoyed my conversation with Miguel and I hope that you did too. Please do let Miguel and I know what you thought of this episode. As Miguel mentioned, he is mostly on Instagram these days with the handle MiguelMatteus. My handle is at DrChatterjee. And we would both love to hear from you, especially if you have any further questions relating to what we discussed on the show today. If you think the information shared today

would be of interest to some of your friends and family, please do consider sharing the podcast with them. You can help support the podcast by leaving a review on whichever podcast platform you are listening to this on now, such as Apple, Acast and Spotify, or by taking a screenshot on your phone right now and sharing it on your social media channels. Don't forget that there is a show notes page on my website for this episode, as well as every other episode of the podcast. My team and I put a lot of time and effort into creating this page. And for this week, it is drchastity.com forward slash Miguel, M-I-G-U-E-L.

You will find everything that Miguel and I discussed today, including links to articles that Miguel has written, papers that he has published, as well as further reading for those of you who wish to continue your learning experience about all things related to food and brain health. Do also check out Miguel's website, which is MiguelMatteus.com. And don't forget my second book, The Stress Solution, The Four Steps to Reset Your Body, Relationships, Mind and Purpose, is available to pre-order now in both the paperback version, as well as the audio book, which I will be narrating. For those of you new to the podcast, my first book, Before Pillar Plan, is available to buy all over the world now. So do consider picking up a copy. Just be aware that in

America and Canada, it has been released with a different title. It's called How to Make Disease Disappear. That's it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I will be back next week with my latest conversation. Remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better, you live more. I'll see you next time.