The Food Medic - S1 E5 - What to eat + When to eat

Episode Date: July 9, 2018

This week Hazel is chatting to Alan Flanagan, a lawyer and nutritionist based in Dublin, Ireland. They discuss topics such as low carbohydrate diets, dairy, diet and the circadian rhythm, and intermittent fasting. Alan can be found on instagram under @thenutritional_advocate. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Food Medic podcast. I'm Dr. Hazel Wallace, founder of the Food Medic. I'm a qualified doctor, personal trainer, blogger, and best-selling author of the books of Food Medic and the Food Medic for Life. I'm passionate about maximizing our health through how we live our lives, including the food that we eat, physical activity, and stress management. We will hear from leading experts in their field who will be sharing evidence-based advice on how we can live healthier lives and we will cut through the confusing information that we find online. I like to think of myself as one of the first of a new generation of doctors. Hello and welcome to the Food Medic podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Hazel Wallace, and today I'm

delighted to be joined by fellow Irish person, Alan Flanagan. Alan is a lawyer and nutritionist based in Dublin. In addition to his legal practice, Alan is currently finishing a Master's in Nutritional Medicine at the University of Surrey. Alan has a very logical, no-nonsense approach to nutrition, which he keeps sharp as a practising barrister. He brings together these skills to help translate the often complicated world of nutrition science and is dedicated to guiding healthcare professionals in evidence-based nutrition. Alan, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me.

It's really nice to have someone with a lovely Irish accent on the podcast. Very nice. Nostalgic. Yeah, absolutely. Now, I'm going to tell the story of how we met. So Alan and I actually met through Instagram over a debate surrounding a study on processed foods a couple of months ago. And after what was quite a heated discussion, we actually ended up having many conversations since around nutrition and public health. So this is why I invited Alan on, because I know he's extremely well researched in this field, but he's also not afraid to hold back. But first of all, your kind of skill set's very interesting. I don't

think many lawyers can kind of tend to go into the Masters of Nutrition. So can you first tell us how you fell into this? Yeah, it kind of evolved over the course of a few years, probably starting in around 2008 or 2009. Nutrition was always a really big hobby interest of mine, you know, the way you'd read a genre of fiction or something in your spare time. And I was always quite drawn to learning about it. But I started to become somewhat skeptical of the information that I was getting. Like a lot of people, I think when you first start to self-learn about this subject, you might find yourself gravitating to blogs or websites. I was reading some books as well, but they weren't academic texts. They were, you know, the subjective opinion of a particular

author. And I started to question the veracity of the information I was getting. And I logically just found myself gravitating towards reading primary research. And I would kind of scare a pub med and spend ages reading, fundamentally realized that this was a skill in and of its own right. And I was hooked, though, by my own self-learning to that point. And I wanted to pursue it at a higher level. And that's what led me to the MSc at Surrey. And here I am now about to submit my thesis in about a week or two. Oh my gosh, amazing. Yeah. So it's been a long journey, both of kind of self-learning and the development of what I consider a healthy obsession

and then formalizing that with an actual education path and we'll see what's available after the MSc. Yeah absolutely. Now recently there's been quite a bit of interest around saturated fat and low-carb diets or ketogenic diets and you have been super vocal in this conversation. I would love if you could kind of explain to the listeners a little bit about the principles of this diet and why it may not actually be optimal for health. Yeah, I think the first thing that it's helpful to perhaps understand when it comes to how different ideas in nutrition evolve, is that people love a story. And what we have now is a story-based paradigm in this low-carb, ketogenic camp. And they've come up with a narrative that seems to make sense to people.

So they start with dietary guidelines that were introduced in the late 70s in the US and early 80s in the UK. And they paint those diet guidelines as, well, people were told to go out and reduce their fat intake. And they started eating sugar in place of fat. And hey, presto, fast forward now and we have an epidemic of diet-induced disease. That narrative is so incorrect on so many levels that it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. So I think the question is loaded, and I think for people listening we should break it into a few parts. We'll deal with carbohydrate first. So this idea that carbohydrates are somehow uniquely responsible for the issues that we have, it's not new.

We did this with dietary fad in the 1980s and the late 70s. And it's just that the pendulum swings in nutrition are extreme. So now we're very much focused on carbohydrate. But the problem that I have with this very low carb approach is that it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And we have, more perhaps than any other food group, significant and overwhelming evidence of benefit to human health to consuming things like whole grains, legumes, oats, fruit, and these kind of food groups. Now, conflating those foods with Lucky Charm cereals and Cocoa

Pops and energy drinks is a bit of a reach, but that is what's being painted in people's minds. The problem that I have with the way that low-carb is being generally recommended is that it's advising people to cut out these foods as well. Different kind of tubers, all potatoes, it seems. Yeah, did you see that kind of, I mean, there's, I won't name and shame, but on the popular TV show, and they had compared... The truth about carbs. The truth about carbs, yeah. And there was not a shred of truth in that program for anyone that did see it.

And there's this really reductionist and frustrating comparative that's going on right now where every carbohydrate is being compared to teaspoons of sugar. That simply doesn't explain how we eat carbohydrates. You don't sit down and eat a potato on its own. We eat meals containing food that might have protein, it might have some added fats. And all of this influences digestion, influences how quickly we absorb it. But the bottom line is, we can look at and we have data about the kinds of foods that people have been consuming at a population level for the last 50 years, and nowhere has there been an increase in vegetable consumption, fibre consumption, whole grain consumption. If you go back to these guidelines that they like to blame for this epidemic, and you actually read them, and I don't think anyone in this paradigm has done

that, you'll see that, yes, it recommended reducing total fat. We'll come on to that in a minute. But it recommended people to reduce sugar consumption. Yes, in 1977, they said reduce sugar consumption, increase fiber intake, eat more vegetables, eat more whole grains. That didn't happen at a population level. The reasons why it didn't happen are almost nothing to do with nutrition per se. We're getting into the real upstream determinants industry, the kind of economies that have been generated around food. But this idea that in order to improve population health, we need to cut out carbohydrates as an entire food group, simply has no evidential support and is a fairly speculative reach given all of the research that we have now coming out about how important carbohydrates, particularly the indigestible

type known as fiber, are to our gut bacteria, the populations and the kinds of bacteria in our gut and how that influences our health. So I think that confusing a can of Coke with a chickpea doesn't really help the picture and it's not informing people and it's not helping people to genuinely improve their diet. So I see no reason why we shouldn't be recommending people to change the quality of their carbohydrates. And most of the research would support that diet quality can be a driver of diet quantity. If we want people to reduce overall intake, then simply getting them to modify the quality of their diet is a step to that end. How we do that's a different story. And then on to the fat part of this, which is for me a little more problematic. There was no doubt that in the early guidelines, there was of benefit to higher total fat diets.

The Mediterranean diet is currently getting a lot of press. It's a higher total fat diet. It's around 37 to 45 percent of energy coming from dietary fat. It's the kind of fats within it that matters. The composition of fats in the diet matter. Can you just talk a little bit about what fats are in the Mediterranean diet? Yeah, so primarily the types of fats in the Mediterranean diet or in any higher fat diet that is also associated with health outcomes are unsaturated fats. And there's two groups of that broad categorization, mono-unsaturated and poly-unsaturated and polyunsaturated. And they're the kinds of fats that we would find in oily fish, nuts, seeds, things like avocados and plant oils like olive oil, extra virgin olive oil or rapeseed oil. And consuming a higher fat diet when those fats and those foods form the basis for the fat intake is not an issue and in fact is probably protective against things like cardiovascular disease and diabetes. However, any of these diets are all lower in saturated fat intake, even if their total fat intake is higher. What I find very misleading from the low-carb groups is how

they're portraying and they publish papers with provocative titles like saturated fats do not clog the arteries, but then they cite the Mediterranean diet as their supporting research for that. That's highly misleading at a public health level to be, you know, creating essentially daily mail headlines that make people think they can put butter in their coffee and they can't and they shouldn't. A little bit of butter on the toast is fine. But this idea that we should be increasing saturated fat intake, it's a very

nefarious public health message. And I think this paradigm have a lot to answer for because they either know better and are deliberately misleading people, or they ought to know better. And in that case, they shouldn't be speaking as kind of voraciously about it the way they are. So to kind of bring this back for listeners, there's absolutely nothing wrong with a higher total fat intake. Dietary guidelines in America have recommended that. Dietary guidelines in the Nordic Nutrition Council 2012 recommendations have acknowledged that we've moved on. The science has moved on and as it has, so have public health recommendations. But the recommendations to maintain a lower saturated fat intake are still

valid and you see this across diabetes research you see this even and this is the the elephant in the room for them any well-designed trial using a ketogenic diet it may have 70 percent of daily energy coming from fat but it still only has 10 to 15 to 20%, you know, give or take 10 to 15% from saturated fat. So the majority of the fats in that diet setup are unsaturated. So I don't think people should be afraid of consuming fat anymore, but make sure that you're emphasizing things like whole eggs, nuts, avocado, plant oils like olive oil or rapeseed oil would be the two in particular that we seem to have good evidence for, and an array of nuts and seeds. I think it's also worth mentioning that even though it is technically a saturated fat food group, whole milk and cheese

and yogurt consumption is actually positively associated with health outcomes. So these are the nuances that we get into in nutrition now that we're looking more at foods, not isolated nutrients. And I think it's important that we move at a public health level to a food-based paradigm where we're telling people, eat these foods, not eat those. Eat these fats, not these. Eat these carbs, not these.

And certainly the Scandinavians have progressed to that model and I think we should follow. But just to finish on the low-carb ketogenic point, we have significant evidence of benefit now to population diets that are high in plant foods, high in vegetables, high in legumes, whole grains, etc. And yes, they may actually be also high in fat. People seem to forget conveniently that the other part of the Mediterranean diet is these types of carbohydrates. It's not a ketogenic diet. And what these people in this area are asking us to do, because they're pushing for this to be a population-wide intervention, they're asking

us to put our faith in something that is totally speculative. We've no long-term data on this. There was this myth about Inuit populations being robustly healthy. That was blown out of the water in a 2014 study in Canada, looking at these populations. Absolutely, on average, 15-year lower life expectancy than age-matched Danish and Icelandic controls. So, there's nothing healthy about spending your life consuming whale blubber. And this idea that we should invest our long-term health in a low-carb ketogenic diet has no support. And I would caution anyone listening to this paradigm to take what they're saying with a pinch of salt. Just to summarize what you've said, you don't need to cut out carbohydrates.

And when it comes to carbohydrates choose the best quality you can and again we know that you know there's a lot of evidence behind this and the mediterranean diet is actually largely plant focused in terms of lots of whole grains and you can eat potatoes the way your body teaspoons of sugar no no and you you pointed that out which is really important because how your body would metabolize a teaspoon of sugar would be very different to how it's going to deal with a potato because your potato comes wrapped in lots of fiber. There's other nutrients in there.

There's also going to be proteins and fats, not just carbohydrates in a potato. And you're eating it with some fish and some other veg and some olive oil or whatever. And suddenly the meal is the sum of its parts. And we need to start thinking from a top-down perspective with nutrition not necessarily an isolated component yeah okay so that's really important and again when it comes to fats you don't need to fear them but you don't need to put it into your coffee and just choose the best quality unsaturated fats like we covered before so that's going to be olive oils avococados, nuts, seeds, and oily fish. Okay, I think we covered that really well.

So we know what to eat, or we sort of know what we should be eating, but it's also important when we eat. And I know that you're really big into this area of research, which we call chrononutrition, which essentially looks at our diet and our circadian rhythm. And our circadian rhythm is essentially our body's internal clock um so for example we know that there's studies looking at night shift workers who sleep during the day and are awake at night and therefore eat at night tend to have an increased risk of health problems such as heart disease so can you explain to us why we think this is happening? We have rhythms in our body. Anyone who has been

jet lagged has experienced what happens when we disconnect from that. And we have also means of synchronizing these rhythms to our environment. So for people listening, our day is typically 24, it is 24 hours, but actually our circadian rhythms are a little longer than that. So in order for us to tie what's going on in our bodies to the phase of the day it is, we need external cues. The most potent is light. So getting outdoor light exposure, that's the primary thing. Your eyes pick up on different wavelengths of light, and then that actually communicates with the rest of your body to, for example, synchronize how well you digest food or even your body temperature and stuff like that. So the way that you digest and process and use the nutrients that you eat is under the control of this system. At the most basic level, the waking phase in humans is the daytime and the light phase. That's also our

active phase. And that's when all of the processes that are involved in digesting and utilizing the nutrients in the foods that we eat are at their best. Now, what's happened in the last, certainly 100 years, but a very accelerated curve in the last 50 years, is the increasing use of artificial light. And what that has done is create a different environment. People are simply staying up later because of artificial light. Television programs go on till whenever you want them to go on till. And what we have now is some interesting associations. So I mentioned jet lag for a reason. There's a term in the research now known as social jet lag. And what that's describing is the difference between someone's sleep timing if they were allowed sleep with no enforced waking. Like how long would you sleep on a weekend

versus how long you actually get to sleep during the week when you have an enforced waking time or perhaps you stay up later than you should watching TV. And the bigger the debt in your social jet lag, the more likely someone is to suffer cardiovascular disease and diabetes. So traditionally we've looked at this from shift work and very extreme examples, but now we can see it at a population level from less extreme disturbances. And what it's to do with very much is the time of day in which we eat with a particular emphasis

on energy intake later in the day. So when you look at shift work, you'll often see that they have, as you said, an increased risk of cardiometabolic disease. However, they don't actually consume any more energy intake than fixed day workers. So what that's suggesting to us is that the time that they're eating is a big factor determining the effects of that food. For example, there's research showing that even only a 200-250 calorie snack, if you eat it at 4am, that will increase your blood fats circulating to a greater extent than even a meal of kind of 600 calories eaten at a time earlier in obviously the kind of waking phase. So we think that what's going on is that when you consume food at a time earlier in obviously the kind of waking phase. So we think that what's going on is that when you consume food at a time when your body's internal signals are in a kind of rest and digest

mode, when you're in that mode, for example, your capacity to process carbohydrates is completely impaired. Your capacity to actually regulate the fat circulating in your blood is relatively impaired. So all these processes seem to be really aggravated by taking in food at these times. But it's important to note that it's not simply just 4 a.m. anymore, as in, like I said, traditionally it's been a focus on shift work. But actually now there's a lot of focus on energy intake past 8pm and eating within a close proximity to bedtime. Energy intake between, say, 8pm and midnight is a big variable. What you tend to see with that pattern also is people pushing kind of, you know, later into the day,

most of their calorie intake. So they might have a very light breakfast or none at all or snack during the day and the bulk of their energy intake comes later. In a very complicated area, keeping advice simple for people, it seems that the best thing to do for the way in which we digest and assimilate the food that we eat is to have the bulk or the biggest energy meal that one consumes during the day earlier in the day. Now, that doesn't mean to say breakfast. I'll always qualify this when I'm talking about circadian stuff. We've very arbitrary concepts of a breakfast, lunch and dinner. They're largely centered around our working day. So they're relatively imposed. When I say earlier in the day, I mean any time relatively prior to 3 p.m. And that's accounting for perhaps two meals in that time frame. But what it really means is that your biggest meal of the day should come

either in your first meal or your second meal. And that dinner should be as earlier timed as you can make it in a practical sense. I realize that with environments now and work, it's not always easy and some people are coming home at 9pm and stuff. But trying to factor that in, certainly for women's health, there's some very interesting associations between consuming dinner at say say, 7 p.m. and having that precipitate around a 13-hour fast before food's consumed the following day. And the strongest association there is with the reduced risk of breast cancer. And it's to do with,

there's very strong associations between circadian rhythm disruption and breast cancer. So it's interesting. But basically eating big amounts of energy late in the day is not ideal. Eating a bulk of your energy earlier in the day is much better. And maintaining a regular meal frequency, regular enough, trying not to have erratic meal patterns. So for me, for example, I typically, my breakfast, if you want to call it that in inverted commas, is anytime time between 10 and 11.

I don't get hungry in the morning. So I'll eat at like 11, 10 to 11, 2-ish, give or take. And then, you know, 7 p.m. dinner, give or take. That's just an example. Yeah. Following on from that, you and I have spoken at length about sleep and Matthew Walker's book, Why We Sleep. So what I'd like to know is what sleep hacks you have implemented into your routine to make sure that you get the most restful night's sleep. I know

I've got my own. Yeah. So the context for this is that I have had sleep problems my whole life and still do. And so when I say these things, this is in the context of me trying absolutely everything. It seems after Matt Walker's book comes out, you know, everyone's become a sleep expert. So I say this in terms of someone who does and still has relatively, you know, bouts of bad sleep. So take it with a pinch of salt. So the first and foremost is I started controlling my light environment. Blue light blocking glasses for me in the evening made a significant difference to the time it takes me to get to sleep. However, someone that doesn't really have bad sleep patterns may not necessarily want to take that step because people are concerned that the shades look a bit goofy.

I don't really care. So that's the first thing. The second is kind of like, I suppose, a 1B in a sense that in the morning, in the early part of the day, get as much outdoor light exposure as you possibly can, because that's what helps tee you up for a restful sleep later in the day, because you're giving your body that signal in the morning that it's light and it's the waking and active phase. In our climates, that's not always feasible. In the winter, I use a Philips Go Light Blue. It's a little light box. And for my first 30 minutes at the laptop in the morning, I'll have that on within arm's reach.

And you don't have to look into it, but it just shines on your face. And if you're in Ireland or the UK and it's November, December, and you're in work and it's 8.30 and it's still dark outside, average office lighting isn't light enough to give you that daytime signal. So these are really cheap and effective. They're very popular in Scandinavia means of getting that artificial light exposure that helps to regulate your circadian rhythm. So that's the first. Control your light environment, minimize blue light in the evening and get some in the morning, natural if you can. The second is room temperature. And this is a big one because your core body temperature is a part of your circadian rhythm. So when it's higher,

your body's internal signalings are basically daytime. So cooling your room some way, window open or air conditioning or something that allows it, give or take 16 to 18 degrees seems to be where it's at if you're using air con. If you're in these climates, just stick the window open and you'll definitely be cool enough. But that does make a big difference. And then third is more a mental approach. I'm one of these people that will wake at three or four in the morning solving all the world's problems on my own and not get back to sleep. And what has really helped stem that to a degree, or sometimes just nip it in the bud, is a word vomit before bed into a diary. There's no real structure to it. I do write down some, you know, three things I'm grateful for that day. Any random thoughts that I'm ruminating on, I'll just

word vomit on that. I'll write down a couple of things that I want to do the next day. So I'm not waking up thinking about those things I want to do the next day. And then I'll end it with a thought to end the day with. And I find that that act of closure really helps get to sleep quicker and also stop the midnight gremlins. So that's it. Light, temperature, and get all the crap that's in your head out of your head before you go to bed. Yeah. Okay. And to add to that, I mean, you have covered on it with a blue light exposure but just for people listening to kind of have a tech curfew like an hour to two hours before you go to bed like just don't be on your phone and that includes your kindle as well like anything that's emitting blue light yeah try to turn down the lights in your living room or have

just lamps going i think it's really important to have a sleep schedule and try to go to bed around about around it's so difficult but around about the same time every night so your body's like okay okay it's bedtime have a little routine have a bath maybe a cup of like non-caffeinated tea because caffeine is another thing which we often forget because i think the half-life of caffeine is something like seven hours so if you have that that by 3 p.m., if you're having a cup of coffee at 3 p.m., you might be struggling to fall asleep. But again, it depends on how quick or how fast you metabolize that. Another thing is if you do find yourself waking up in the night, instead of just rummaging around and trying to fall asleep and just thinking about things,

again, a brain dump with a journal or meditation um which we spoke about before it's really useful and i i find things like the calm app is quite useful because it has actually these like sleep stories some which are narrated by stephen fry who has the best yeah most relaxing relaxing absolutely and one thing which we i guess we kind of touched on but not eating too late because not only will that lead to kind of health risks in the future but it can disrupt your sleep because you're if you're digesting and x y and z it's going to be a little bit more difficult so hopefully that gives everyone a few tips one thing we did discuss is kind of you know trying to eat

within your daytime window but how is that different to intermittent fasting or time restricted feeding because i know they're very popular dietary patterns now and i just want to make sure that people know that we're not talking about any specific diet here so so intermittent fasting became popular in the last decade, perhaps. But most of the intermittent fasting styles that are out there, they might involve, for example, an entire day without food. So someone might have dinner at 7pm on a Monday and fast all the way to their dinner on a Tuesday, and then resume normally have dinner and then resume normally eating on the Wednesday. There's some more extreme ones where people eat on a Monday, don't eat at all on a Tuesday and normal eating on the Wednesday. There's some more extreme ones where

people eat on a Monday, don't eat at all on a Tuesday and eat again on a Wednesday. That's known as the alternate day fasting. It's been used in research a lot, but the compliance level, as you can imagine, is awful. So I think it's gone in the scrap heap. From that, though, things like 5-2 were developed because it was, well, we're getting great results with people. What happens if we just allow them have two, you know, 500 calories or 700 calories on the, quote, fasting days? And then you have ones that people skip breakfast and eat between 1 and 8 p.m. or something, an eight-hour feeding window. The difference between that and time-restricted feeding is that the fasting schedules exist independent of any circadian considerations. Time-restricted feeding as a concept emerged from circadian research, which the stuff we talked about

earlier in terms of when we eat being important, eating more of your energy earlier in the day being important, and these kind of things. But within that, what was noted from a lot of animal models was that if you just shorten their window of eating, you'd protect them from, you know, obesity and diet induced disease. I see people grossly overreaching with conclusions and recommendations for people to do based on rats. And I'm assuming most of your listeners are not rats. Let's hope so. If they are, congrats. There's a quantum leap in your evolution. So the bottom line is, why does time-restricted feeding perhaps work in people, in humans? There's two reasons. One is that by simply giving yourself a relative cut-off point,

it just minimizes the propensity to eat. So like I said, a big issue now is snack intake coming after 8 p.m. If you've said to yourself that your dinner is 7 p.m. every day and that's what you're committing to and that's your restriction on feeding, you're going to have a mechanism there in your head that's going to stop you at 8.30 being like, I'd love some popcorn and chocolate. So it's simply that cutoff point that reduces people's propensity to eat, particularly late in the evening. That said, time-restricted feeding may also have some real benefits if you're doing all of the sleep strategies that we were just talking about, and you're really kind of getting in sync with this idea of everything being cyclical in our rhythms, and during the day we're active, we're eating, we're digesting, we're absorbing, and during the night you're winding down, you're sleeping, you're fasting, and you're relaxing, then that appears to be really important for our health, that synchronization between our behavioral patterns and our circadian patterns. And time

restricted feeding essentially is giving your body distinct signals along those lines. So the waking phase is also the active phase, is also the light phase, is also the feeding phase. And that means that the nighttime is the inactive, sleeping, fasting, and rest phase. So it's about giving ourselves distinct signals and patterns. And that's where I think time-restricted feeding is different. It is different to intermittent fasting, but it's also where it may be more amenable for people because not everyone wants to go 18 hours without food. Certainly anyone with any sort of disordered

relationship with food should not be engaging in any fasting strategy. But there's nothing wrong with saying to yourself, I'm going to have an 11-hour window between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. That's really doable for everybody and it's not extreme. And there could be health benefits for it, but it's a little early to say now in terms of human research where we're at. It's still emerging. Yeah. And now moving forward, we're not only thinking about our own health, but also the planetary health. And as a result, a lot of people are moving away from consuming animal-based

products, and that includes dairy. But we're talking about an environmental standpoint, but it's causing a lot of confusion. And I'm getting a lot of people ask me whether dairy is actually harmful for human health. And there's a lot of confusion and I'm getting a lot of people ask me whether dairy is actually harmful for human health and there's a lot of theories and myths kind of buzzing around and I know I've heard you speak about this before so I was wondering if you could clarify is there any health risks with consuming dairy? Yeah yeah I think at the level of principle there is certainly environmental or ethical or moral considerations that can go into someone's decision to choose what or what not to eat. And they're perfectly valid. What's happening now

is that there are movements in nutrition that are trying to extend the kind of moral and ethical concerns to nutritional considerations. And there is, unfortunately, some really horrendous myths about dairy as a food group perpetuating now from populist documentaries on Netflix, antibiotic-containing milk, pus is the big one that's been doing the rounds, and it's just nonsense it's it's garbage and the problem with this is and i've put up posts uh about health benefits to dairy

and had people and i knew this was coming and i actually preempted it once as soon as you say anything positive about it people come out and assume that you're some sort of industry hack, you know, and you're sponsored by the dairy industry. Let's just talk some facts. One, dairy as a name is a very broad food group. Within that, we have some foods that we have some pretty good evidence of benefit to human health. And those foods would particularly be, and we mentioned this a little earlier, whole milk, cheeses, and yogurts. And there are reasons for that. And traditionally, we've looked at the lower fat varieties as beneficial, but the fat content in milk contains a kind of wrapper around it. And that has its own benefits for reducing blood cholesterol levels and improving health parameters. There's also some beneficial fatty acids in it. So in our gut, the bacteria in our gut, when we eat fiber, they create things called short-chain fatty acids,

and they're really beneficial both for our gut health but now some interesting research about how they influence mood and may have antidepressant effects. Dairy is one of the few if only food groups that provides a direct source of short chain fatty acids. So there are a range of benefits to dairy. When we look at the research both whole milk varieties and low-fat varieties are positively associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes in particular. So it's not that people have to choose the whole milk variety. It's important to qualify that those associations are there for both types. But for example, if we then take butter, which everyone has, you know, Time Magazine, Randy, butter is back argument. There's the bulletproof coffee craze, which for listeners is just the dumbest thing you could possibly do for your health.

So let's just be clear on that. But if we take cheese and butter, the same weight, the same saturated fat content, butter will have much greater negative effect on your blood cholesterol levels than cheese will. Part of that's because cheese is a fermented dairy product and fermented dairy products are really beneficial. Fermented dairy milk products like kefir, there's some really interesting research coming out about probiotic enriched milk, fermented milks or yogurts, their benefit for gut bacteria and again for mood and brain health. There's been these real insidious myths created about dairy recently. And I think it's important to kind of step back from that, recognize that it is a broad food group. And while there's nothing wrong with consuming yogurt to your heart's content, you probably would want to be moderate with your butter intake. Sure,

there are nuances that we can get around by recommending foods to people, not nutrients. But also, I think it's important to note that this doesn't negate or absolve us from considering the ethical issues around industry and production and all of these factors. The term I use is conscious carnivore. I think that we can, as anyone that has a diet that is inclusive of animal produce, does have still a moral responsibility to consider sores. So on the one level, this idea that recommending dairy

and being objective about the evidence that supports it as a healthy food group is somehow tied to just we'll run roughshod over the planet is not correct. Now we have actually talked quite at length and have covered so many topics so I'm really happy that we've got through all of that but what I'd love to do is what kind of what I finish every podcast with by asking every guest three healthy habits that they include in their lives and they would kind of encourage us to do so. Okay I think the first thing is that I think we've reached a critical mass with the pursuit of health being

you know associated with really crazy behaviors and all this discipline and commitment and I think that we need to scale back and start to orientate more towards empowering messages and stuff that people can actually do. And it's something that I'm a big believer in, you know, is, for example, I've always loved strength training, but I know people who hate the gym. Why would you go? So for me, there's three things in particular that would stand out. One is find exercise, a form of it that you actually like. And don't think that you have to do some form because it seems popular or other people do it. If running was the only option for exercise available, I just wouldn't do it because I hate running. I hate running too.

I hate it. I mean, I like going for a walk in the park. I love a walk. I don't want to run. So, find an exercise form that you really enjoy and just do that. And stick to that. Yeah, exactly. You could go trampolining

or get a hula hoop. I don't care. Just movement is important but it's about finding something that you enjoy and don't fit a square peg into a round hole and do not think you have to kill yourself. Like, again, with the idea of empowering messages in know, kids runs or even our own professional life, that really means you're going to have to pay it forward and go to bed an hour earlier. But I typically stretch that and I say go and try for 90 minutes more than you usually get. And the reason for that is that's roughly the duration of an average sleep cycle. So as I'm saying sleep more, I say sleep an extra sleep cycle. And if you're typically, you know, 1130 bedtime person, as most people, it seems on average in Ireland and the UK

are, try to aim for 10 o'clock. And that sounds extreme. And you think you're wasting 90 minutes by not watching Netflix, but you're probably adding quality years to your life in doing so. Absolutely. Just don't get the Netflix subscription. Yeah, just like you said, have your tech talks in the evening, you know, have a cutoff point. Like everything now is recordable. And bottom line is, like, is Love Island really that important? Like, probably not in the same thing. Just go to bed.

People are going to disagree with me. They are. Everyone wants to watch it live, so they're up to date and they can tweet about it. But do really give a lot of consideration now to an intervention that's free and could really be the difference maker in your health. So sleep an extra hour. And then the final one is try to engage in some sort of behavior that has you go to a kind of switch off, no mind state. Meditation is very popular at the minute. That's personally what I do. And it's made an enormous difference to my life since I introduced it in 2011. And it's different for different people,

though. People that are less heady, I think, may need something else. And, you know, just something that could be yoga for some people, for example. It could be just even carving out some period of time during the day or in the context of the week to just sit down and do nothing. But we're living in fairly fast-paced lives at the minute. There's a lot of demands on our life and our attention in particular. And the ability to be in just default mode, which is a mind-wandering state, is getting eroded by the day. So just creating that time. And I think if you have that balance of doing some sort of movement that you actually enjoy doing, sleeping a little more,

and also having time to literally just sit down and do nothing, you don't even have to meditate. It's just the idea of some sort of withdrawal for yourself. And I think when you add those three things up, really, there's not much more that I would add on to that for anybody. And I think you're doing pretty well if you're getting that. So, cheers sunrise.

You said, move a little bit every day, sleep a little bit more, 90 minutes extra to be exact. And chill out a little bit. So I think that's something we can all probably achieve if we really put our minds to it. Thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. Thank you for having me.

It's been really interesting. Before you go, can you tell everyone where we can find more of you? Literally as it stands, only on Instagram. I exist on no other social media channels. I will have a website coming out soon, but I don't really know what the timeline is on that because tech and me aren't friends.

So I'll figure that out. if you will find me on Instagram and the handle is at the nutritional underscore advocate okay amazing I'm sure we'll have the website up and running anyway but for in the meantime let's go to Instagram where everyone is anyway so yeah thank you everyone for listening and don't forget to pop a little review and rating. I would really, really appreciate it. The podcast is doing so well. And that's thanks to all of your amazing support. So thank you again. And I will see you next time. Thank you so much for tuning into the Food medic podcast please do subscribe so that you are the first to hear about any new episodes and if you are enjoying them please leave us a five-star rating and a review so that we can reach as many people as possible check out my website

thefoodmedic.co.uk where you can find tons of recipes and articles. Follow me on social media, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook at The Food Medic. And my new book, The Food Medic for Life, is out now, which is packed full of loads of recipes, nutritional advice, myth busting and feature pages on topics such as sleep and mindfulness. You can grab both my books on Amazon or in any good bookstore. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time. Thank you.