The Food Medic - S3 E1 - Sleep and Meditation with Michael Acton

Episode Date: July 9, 2019

Welcome back to a new season of The Food Medic Podcast! We are kicking off the season with a very special guest - co-founder of the sleep and meditation app CALM, Michael Acton.Prior to Calm, Michael was the founder of Mind Candy and creator of Moshi Monsters, the online world for children that grew to 80 Million registered users and expanded offline into books, toys, games, magazines, music and movies. Michael is also the founder of Firebox.com, Ping Pong Fight Club and Berwickstock music festival. In 2014 he was awarded an OBE for services to the Creative Industries. Hazel and Michael chat about how to mediate, the use of technology in meditation and mindfulness, the impact of disrupted sleep on our health and tips on how to improve your bedtime routine. As this is a new season, Dr Hazel will be ending the episode with a listener question. You can tweet, facebook or instagram message us with your questions with the hashtag #thefoodmedicpodcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Hello and a very big welcome back to the Food Medic podcast. I'm your host as always,

Dr. Hazel Wallace, a medical doctor and founder of The Food Medic, which is an educational platform sharing evidence-based advice on how you can live a healthier and happier life while cutting through the confusing information that we find online. In this podcast, we will hear from experts in the fields of nutrition, medicine, and other areas of healthcare, who will be sharing their invaluable experience and research with us. If you are new to the podcast and have never heard of myself or The Food Medic before, make sure to follow me on social media at The Food Medic on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and do have a browse of the website thefoodmedic.co.uk. I also have two best-selling books, The Food Medic and The Food Medic for Life, which are available to buy on Amazon and in all good bookstores.

Okay, so before we dive into today's episode, let's have a quick catch up. Where have you been? Where have I been? What's been going on? Well, in the last few months since you heard from me, I've been finishing my master's in clinical nutrition and public health at UCL. So I'm now at my final hurdle, my exams are done, and I'm about to start my research project which is very exciting and I can't wait to share the findings with you guys once I have that finished I also want to know what you guys have been up to let me know on social media as I feel like I've been completely out of the loop and I've locked myself away in the library the last few months so make sure to let me know also as this is a new season I'm going to be doing things slightly different and each week I'm going to be ending the episode with a listener question that you guys have sent in.

So you can tweet me, send me a Facebook message, Instagram message, or whatever way you want to reach me. Just make sure to use the hashtag The Food Medic Podcast. So this week's question is, is coffee bad for you? And if you're keen to find out the answer, make sure to stay tuned until the end of the show. Now, without further ado, let me introduce this week's guest. This episode is going to be pretty special because today I have the co-founder of the sleep and meditation app Calm, Michael Acton. Michael has long been fascinated by neuroscience, flow states and mental fitness. Learning to meditate had a profound impact on his life and he's passionate about spreading this simple but valuable skill

around the world. Personally, I'm a big fan of the app and I use it every day. Prior to CAM, Michael was founder of Mind Candy and creator of Moshi Monsters, the online world for children that grew to 80 million registered users, and expanded offline into books, toys, games, magazines, music, and even movies. In 2014, he was also awarded an OBE for his services to the creative industries. So Michael, welcome to the studio. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. So you haven't always been into mindfulness and meditation.

And I'm interested to know what was the trigger, if there was one, that put you on this path in your life and also in your career? I love startups. I love building companies that have an impact, hopefully, on millions of people around the world in a positive way. So my last company was Mind Candy. We created an online world for children called Moshi Monsters, where they would learn while playing games with their little monster. And before that, I ran Firebox, which was all about toys and gadgets and games. But you're right, I didn't really understand meditation or mindfulness. Like a lot of people, I was maybe a bit cynical towards it. I thought it was a bit weird and woo-woo and had religious connotations.

And when Mind Candy grew very fast and our game Moshi Monsters, it did incredibly well for many years, grew to about 80 million users. But then it hit a plateau and started to come down. And that was a pretty stressful time. We had to lay a lot of people off from the business, the revenues started coming down, really, really stressful. And I wasn't sleeping well. And I had headaches and I wasn't eating properly. And during that tough time, I went away. First time I'd ever done it on my own for a few weeks. And I read a lot of books, and I looked into the science behind meditation and mindfulness, and I started to practice it. And this light bulb went on. And I realized that it's actually neuroscience, it's an incredible way to rewire the human brain and cope with the complexities of 21st century life. So that was

the real kind of turning point for me. And I was very fortunate to have a really good friend called Alex Chu, who I'd known for years, we used to share a house in Soho together, worked on many projects, organized music festivals together. And Alex, ever since he was a teenager, had been meditating. So he was always kind of telling me to give it a go. And eventually I did. And so that was kind of the light bulb moment. Oh, wow. And how long has it been going now? We bought the domain name Calm.com a little over six years ago. So that was the point where we felt there was an opportunity to do something here. We both recognized that the world was becoming more stressful. And Calm is such a

beautiful, simple, universally understood word that we thought, wow, what a great brand we could build. But it took a few years for the product to kind of get shaped and built. And Alex moved to San Francisco and started putting the app together over there while I was still back here in London, running Mind Candy. And then, yeah, it's probably in the last few years that the company's hit a tipping point and has just started taking off like crazy. Yeah. How many users do you have now?

So we've grown to about 45 million downloads around the world. There's one new sign up every second, which is just crazy to think about it. And yeah, over one and a half million paying customers all over the world. So it's pretty extraordinary. Do you think that's a reflection of how stressed, you know, this kind of like we have a pandemic of stress in our lives? Yes. Yeah, I think it was the World Health Organization that said stress is the health epidemic of the 21st century. And it's the cause of so many problems, not just mental health

challenges, but physical as well. You know, some stress is good and healthy for us, but too much kind of turning on the cortisol and the adrenaline all the time takes such a toll on our bodies. And it just feels like, yeah, Western society has been getting more and more stressful. You know, we have technology and screens all around us. Our lives just don't seem to be getting any less intense. We lead always-on lifestyles. You know, we've been very close to this calm. We think there was sort of a tipping point about two years ago where people sort of en masse seemed to recognize this. And now there's just been this outpouring of

press attention around mental health. Celebrities have been talking about it and sharing their stories and their vulnerability. Politicians are addressing it. Schools are now starting to teach mindfulness. So it's gone from being something that we didn't really talk about. You know, mental health was kept in the shadows and not discussed to something many people seem to be coming forward and addressing. And I think it's such a wonderful, timely, important shift in society. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think you hit the nail on the head, though, when you said that when you first got into mindfulness or meditation, or even before that, you thought it was maybe a bit woo, I'm a bit out there, but, you know, connotations that you

maybe didn't align yourself with. And I think there's still quite a few people who are out there who are maybe really interested in it, want to get involved, but don't really know how. What advice would you give to people who haven't started their meditation journey just yet? Yes, it's not easy to sit down and clear the mind. And a lot of people think they are failing when they sit down and suddenly thoughts rush into their head. And the key thing to remember is that's perfectly normal. You know, one way to think about meditation is almost like strength training for the mind. We go to the gym and the resistance we put when we lift weights is the way of building up our muscles. And when we sit and try and meditate, it's perfectly normal for thoughts to enter our head.

But the practice is all about recognizing that. And the meditation we teach at Calm is based on your breath. That is the constant. That's something that we all do hundreds of millions of times in our life, but we barely think about. So you sit and a thought will come in and then you recognize it and you go back to your breath. And then another thought will come in and you do this again and again, returning to the constant. And the more you do it, the stronger your attention becomes. You become more aware of the rumblings and the ramblings

of your mind in everyday life. It increases your attention and your awareness and that's so valuable for everyday life. And I think the other thing people are scared about is that they think to do meditation properly they have to sit in a certain way or they have to go away to India or Nepal and practice for months or years at a time and it's actually a very simple practice a little and often and regularly is far better than long long stretches so even just you know taking a few mindful breaths every morning is is valuable at calm we developed something called the daily calm which has been incredibly popular and that's just a 10 minute meditation every morning taught by tamera levitt our mindfulness instructor and she ends every session with a different story

or motivation or inspiration that people really look forward to and it's uh again incredibly simple but it helps people develop the habit and make it something that they can dip into and establish every day yeah that's dip into and establish every day. Yeah, that's what I do every day. Oh, fantastic. But you guys have like also like courses that are like seven day or 21 day on the app also. Yes, so the Daily Calm is a great place to start. But then for people that want to go a little bit deeper, we have the seven days of calm. And then we have a 21 day program.

And then we have all sorts of other programs. And one popular area we launched last year was Calm Masterclass. And we work with experts on different aspects of life. So we have one on creativity with Elizabeth Gilbert. We've got one on breaking bad habits. We've got one that's just about to launch on sleeping. We did one recently on parenting parenting and all through a mindful lens and those have been really popular as well. Yeah, absolutely. And at the moment, screen time's getting a lot of negative press. And I think we're becoming increasingly aware that a lot of screen time isn't good for us. And the World Health Organization have, you know,

released a statement on this. And I don't think it will be much longer before we see it actually being put into recommendations, government recommendations on like how much we should be exposing ourself to screen time. What are your thoughts on this? And also, did you find it difficult launching an app which is supposed to remove the stress from your life? And actually, it's built on a device that's increasing your screen time? Indeed, it's built on a device that's increasing your screen time? Indeed, it's a great question and one we spend a lot of time thinking about because you know if these phones and technologies making us more stressed what a strange thing to come along and say here's an app on your phone to try and solve that and the way we answer it is that

you know mobile phones and technology is not necessarily a problem they are tools they're incredibly powerful tools and we can use them for us or against us and if we're mindless in the way we use our devices like most of us are myself included where where you know when you have a few spare moments you whip out your phone and you just start scrolling looking for that dopamine hit then it's no wonder that they make us anxious and depressed. But what meditation does and developing a practice is that it helps us become more mindful about how we use our devices on our phones. So we take them out when and how and where they can benefit us rather than doing it mindlessly and just getting caught in those

loops. Because phones are extraordinary. You know, we all have these incredibly powerful black boxes that we take with us everywhere. They can connect us with loved ones. They can help us navigate through maps. They can help us find jobs and on and on. But as I say, if you don't use them in a mindful way, they can cause us a lot of unnecessary stress. Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with you. I think I'd really struggle if I didn't have a phone, but it's our responsibility on how we use it and how we moderate our use. Exactly.

Yeah, and I think when it comes to using the app as well, it's not necessarily like you're staring at your phone the entire time. It's like using that as a guide through meditation. I've probably been meditating properly for about 18 months now. And I still use guided meditation because I struggle to do it by myself. I think some people think, oh, maybe that's not the right way to do it. But I think there's no right or wrong way of doing it. And using an app is a really great place to start.

Yes, I completely agree. It's for many people who are beginners and just learning this practice, it's a good starting point. I mean, probably the best way to learn would be with a teacher who could sit with you and help you and answer questions. But that doesn't scale very well. That's expensive. And there aren't enough teachers in the world to cope with the number of people that want to learn so an app is a wonderful way to to get started and there are many great ones out there you know hundreds and hundreds and in the app store calm i'm a little biased i think is the best but uh you know many different apps offer slightly different ways of learning and it's important people find a voice and a teacher that they really resonate with.

Yeah, that's true. It's like with anything as well, like yoga classes I find vary so much because it depends on who's teaching, the style of teaching, where you are. So yeah, take time to find what works for you, I guess. Absolutely. And you just mentioned that it's not just meditation

that's on the app. There's also masterclasses and there's also sleep stories, which I'm a really big fan of especially the ones that steven fry narrates because his voice is so good it's amazing blue gold is one of my favorites yeah he takes you through the lavender fields and the sleepy villages of of provence and uh been a huge hit i don't know if you've heard the new one by matthewughey. No. Oh my God, really? Yes, he recorded a sleep story called Wonder and it's become our most popular one.

And we've had so much amazing feedback on it. Oh my God. In fact, we have been getting a few complaints recently from husbands. Oh, really? Who have been saying, all my wife wants to do in bed these days is listen to Matthew's sleep story. Oh my God. Please get Tom Hardy on and I will be a convert.

I already am. Tom Hardy. All right, we'll add him to the list. We've got some amazing new ones coming. So, yeah, he could be great. Amazing. And from your analytics, how many people tap into that or use that as kind of to help them fall asleep?

Well, when we launched Sleep Stories about two years ago, it was a bit of an experiment. We love kind of testing things at Calm. It was, we weren't sure if it was the right thing to do because, you know, we started as a meditation app. And two years later, 125 million stories have been listened to now, which is just mind-blowing to think about it.

And it's actually started because we looked at the data in Calm and we noticed that when we looked at time zones around the world, there was this huge spike every evening about 10.30 and 11pm. And we realized that that was people listening to Tamara's voice to help them fall asleep, not really what meditation is designed for. So we thought, why don't we create stories to help people drift off. And we heard that so many people were watching Netflix or putting on a white noise machine or finding other ways to kind of stop their whirring mind,

thinking about all the crazy stuff that our minds think about when it has a chance to rest. And the stories are a beautiful way of engaging our conscious mind. And then very gently as the story kind of unfolds, we add in music and sound effects. The voice gets a little more soporific and soothing, the pacing between the words gets longer, the volume dips, and before you know it, you've fallen asleep. We think it's a much more natural and simple way of sleeping than, you know, taking a sleeping pill or knocking yourself out with a glass of whiskey.

Yeah, no, absolutely. The alcohol trick, it does help you fall asleep quicker, but then the quality of your sleep is disrupted. So I'm always like, don't use that. Very, very true. It's a false way of knocking yourself out. Absolutely. And how important do you think sleep is in the context of everything in terms of like improving your lifestyle and for you as an individual what kind of what have you kind of put into your practice to help improve your sleep well i think you know meditation is incredibly important but it's just one part of of living a healthy lifestyle dr chatterjee talks about this in his brilliant book the four pillars of health and uh yeah we see it very similarly so So you have your mental health, which is very important.

You have your physical health, you have sleep, and you have what you put in your body, your nutrition, and all these are entwined. So we think sleep is incredibly important. You know, talking about light bulb moments, I had a light bulb moment around sleep when I read Matthew Walker's book, Why We Sleep. Isn't it fantastic? It's so fantastic. It's so accessible as well, but really evidence-based. It's exactly, it's extraordinary. And he does it in such a way, as you say, that anyone can read it and just go, wow. So I'd highly recommend reading that. And I think it was a surprise to everyone, you know, who'd have thought a book about sleep would become a bestseller all around the world.

And just a few years ago, like meditation, sleep was seen as something that people didn't really take seriously. It wasn't that important. Yeah, it's like, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Exactly. And or people would like go into work and show off how little sleep they'd had. But when you get little sleep, you are as impaired and you are as kind of lacking in the ability to function as you are if you've had a bunch of drinks and you're hungover. And, you know, most people don't show off about how drunk they are at work. They hopefully keep that quiet. And then just all the things coming out showing how if you don't get enough sleep,

it's as dangerous to your health as smoking. It can lead to long-term effects such as, you know, Parkinson's, increasing risk and Alzheimer's, and short-term impacts such as increasing your susceptibility to colds and other problems so hugely hugely important something now that people are starting to take a lot more seriously yeah no I think it's it's really important so in terms of your sleep routine do you have like a set routine or because of your busy schedule is it just like you just try to do as much as you can when you can? Well, the thing is, I know all the theory.

I've read all the books and I wish I could say I did everything perfectly, but sadly not because we've got to be realistic. The real world is out there and we're all juggling a lot of different things from relationships to our work. And I travel a lot as well. So adjusting to different time zones is tricky. But I do try very carefully to have a regular sleep schedule. I think that's incredibly important. So the body likes it when we go to bed at a certain time and we wake up at a certain time. So I do that as much as possible. I try not to have my phone in bed with me. I used to. When I was running my other companies, the last thing I'd do at night was be tapping furiously out a few extra emails. And the number of nights I'd wake up in the middle of the night with the phone kind of stuck to my

face was many. So now I don't use my phone in bed. And the other thing that's very prevalent is people who wake up and the first thing they do is reach for their phone. It's so instinctive and such an addictive thing to do. But when you think about it, it's a little crazy. No, it's just on the weekend, I was actually doing a talk and it was in a room full of maybe 200 people. And I just asked, you know, show of hands how many people look at their phone first thing in the morning? And I think every single person hand shot up. Wow. Yeah.

That's extraordinary, isn't it? So, being conscious of that and trying to be aware of it and either putting the phone outside of the bedroom or putting on airplane mode, which I've started doing. And so, what I try and do, I don't do it every single day, but is not take it out of airplane

mode until I've left the house. And so you have that 30, 40 minutes in the morning to have a cup of tea, to take a shower, to kind of just come out of sleep, to think about what you were dreaming of, to think about, and your brain just enjoys that extra space. And I have a notebook by my bed and scribble down ideas. And it's so different to kind of being in the shower after just reading Donald Trump's latest tweet or thinking about an email that you've just read that you know you've got to reply to and suddenly the cortisol and the adrenaline is starting

and your day has begun. Having that little bit of space, I think, has been incredibly valuable. Yeah, no, 100%. I was tracking my heart rate for a little while throughout the week and on the weekends and noticed that my heart rate was lower on the weekends because I'm not getting loads of emails and I'm not really stressed about

where I need to go and it's interesting and what I've tried to do now is similar to you is not look at my phone until I've done my kind of morning routine and that like involves getting up making my bed doing my morning meditation show showering, that kind of thing. Do you have a morning routine actually? I do. And it's, as I say, I try and keep to it. I don't always manage it. So yeah, it's not looking at my phone until I've left the house. I try and make a cup of tea every morning if I can. I like green tea. I have, as I say, a notebook by my bed and I just love scribbling and writing things down and i think it's so valuable uh for a bunch of different reasons and i carry this little notebook that i have here in the studio everywhere in my back pocket and um it's a it's just it

allows you to get stuff that's just whirring around your head down on paper and then you don't need to think about it as much and you can put it into your to-do lists. But it's also just fun to journal, to doodle and the brain just starts to make interesting connections. So that's something I always try and do before leaving the house in the morning. I try and do exercise before my day starts. Even if I'm traveling and I can't get to a gym, just doing a few sit-ups or press-ups in my hotel room is better than nothing. So yeah, those are some of the things I try and start the day with. And then when I get to Calm HQ in San Francisco, we do the daily calm together as a team. And again, we don't manage to do it every single day or some of the team do it, not every single because sometimes there's meetings or whatever. But I just love the idea of starting the day

with a 10-minute meditation with the team. And then we all kind of are on the same level. And we look each other in the eye and we say good morning. And I think that's just a really healthy way to start the day. That's so nice. Just on that thought, so I work in the NHS. And as I'm sure you're aware, it's pretty stretched at the moment. And there's 1.5 million people working in the NHS and as I'm sure you're aware, it's pretty stretched at the moment. And there's 1.5 million people working in the NHS.

That's crazy numbers. And everyone has an incredibly difficult job and it's very stressful. And I'm always wondering how can we alleviate some of that stress? And obviously, we don't have the budgets that some, you know, bigger corporations and companies have. But do you think mindfulness could play a part in that? And have you seen this in practice, what companies are doing it and can we learn from them? Yes, I think mindfulness can be incredibly valuable. And again, the beauty about apps and digital therapeutics are that they scale very well. They don't need to cost a lot of money. So they can be

very simple solutions for not just doctors and nurses, but patients as well. And I think the beauty about developing a mindfulness practice is that it can help stave off downstream potential incidents. So a product like Calm is not for someone who has clinical depression or, you know, major mental health issues. There are professionals that should be dealing with patients in those instances. But for many other people, it's like going to the gym. It's like the gym for the mind. It's a really healthy practice to learn that can reduce our stress, that can help us make better decisions in life, that can improve our relationships and our sleep and so forth, that hopefully prevents bigger mental health issues in the future or even physical health issues.

So in the US, we're chatting to various healthcare providers and insurers to see if Calm can help with their patients. You know, healthcare in the US is a $3 trillion industry. So it's not easy to navigate. And we're having a lot of different conversations. But the science is going on at the moment. And early indicators are incredibly positive that this can be very beneficial for people. Yeah, the research is definitely growing in that area.

And it's not just for alleviating mental stress, but also we're seeing it integrated into the management of things like Irtel-Bell syndrome as well and other types of mental health disorders not just depression so I think it's really interesting and we're going to see a lot more research in that area in the coming years I imagine. Definitely there's a lot going on at the moment and CALM has a scientific advisory board and we're working with a number of universities in the u.s on various uh studies one that we're particularly interested in is to see if an app like calm can help cancer patients as they're going through their treatment whether developing a mindfulness practice while being treated for cancer can improve outcomes

and reduce the amount of suffering a patient has to go through during that. So there's so many exciting areas going on. And then in schools, you know, teaching the next generation these incredibly valuable skills to help them take control of their minds rather than being yanked around and so they understand their emotions better. So they can, yes, lead happier and healthier lives when they grow up and we're seeing mindfulness meditation being integrated into schools now not not everywhere but you know slowly and cam just announced or announced a couple of years ago that it's free for teachers

is that right yes yes so we saw this quote a few years ago by the dalai lama that said if every eight-year-old in the world was taught meditation, we could eradicate violence in a generation. And we thought about that and was like, wow, that's pretty profound. And if you want to change the world, one of the best places to start is with kids. So we thought, what could we do? And so we decided to make Calm free for every teacher in the world. And we now have tens and tens of thousands of teachers who start their school day with sometimes just 10 seconds of calming music, sometimes 10 minutes of daily calm. And the feedback we get is just incredible, how these kids are just becoming more compassionate, more empathetic, better students. There's a great documentary for anyone that wants to kind of learn

more about this called Room to Breathe, where they brought mindfulness into a school in San Francisco. And it reduced truancy rates, it reduced violence, it increased exam results. And again, that's only one sort of sample set. But luckily, there are many more studies going on with children and mindfulness at the moment. So I hope every school will begin their day with mindfulness. And I think it will be hugely valuable for the world. Yeah, so, so good to hear. And although you're a co-founder of like one of the biggest, if not the biggest meditation apps, you're also a very busy entrepreneur, let's be honest.

So what are the most important things in your life that help you stay calm? And what advice can you offer to any businessmen and women who are listening? So I think, again, I'm biased because I run calm, but sort of developing a meditation practice is really valuable and not being scared by it, you know, recognizing that it can just be as little as a few breaths every day. And what that can do is many, many benefits. But one is that it allows you in everyday life to respond to situations instead of what most of us do, reacting from the amygdala. You shift the power to the prefrontal cortex where we make better decisions. And that sounds quite subtle, but it's really, really valuable. You can still get angry if you want, but you're slightly more aware of when you're getting angry, you don't lose control

as much. So I think that's a really important, almost like a foundation of our brain, installing a software layer to help every other aspect of life improve. And then as we talked about earlier, there are sort of three other areas as well. So get enough sleep, physical exercise and moving is something I, as I say, try and do every single day. And then finally, something you know a huge amount is what we put in our bodies. And again, I just didn't really give that much thought, but it's so, so important to our health. So I'm trying to be much more conscious about what I eat now. I haven't gone fully plant-based, which is a big step, but I'm certainly eating a lot less meat than I used to, fewer sugary drinks. And I love Michael Pollan's advice. You know, when he says, eat food, not too much, mostly plants. I think that's a really good piece of

advice. Yeah, I think so too. And everything in moderation. Exactly. Well, I think that's all we've got time for today. But thank you so much again for giving up your busy, busy day to come in and speak to us today. This has been great. Thank you.

Really enjoyed it. Great. Thank you so much. Okay, guys, so that was Michael. I hope you learned a lot. I know I did. And it was a joy to have Michael in the studio today. Now, before I say goodbye, I'm going to answer today's question. So the question was, is coffee bad for you? And I guess, well, it depends. It depends on how much you're drinking,

how you take it. Are you having it with cream sugar? Are you having it short and black? If you're pregnant or breastfeeding, or if you're particularly susceptible to the effects of caffeine. So there's not just caffeine in coffee, there's also hundreds of other compounds in there, which we call polyphenols, which are essentially plant chemicals, and they have antioxidant properties. So evidence from epidemiological studies suggests that regular moderate coffee consumption, so that's about three to four cups a day, which I think is quite a lot, is associated with a reduction in multiple types of diseases, including certain forms of cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and even neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and also depression.

However, if you suffer from sleep issues or anxiety or if you find it causes unpleasant side effects like a racing heartbeat or gastric reflux you may want to limit your intake. Also there's things in coffee called tannins and they can block the absorption of iron so if you are having coffee try not to have it with your meals as it may impair the amount of iron you absorb from your food. And I have to mention if you are pregnant or breastfeeding you can consume coffee still but your safe coffee limit is about 200 milligrams a day which is about two cups. But actually there is also evidence to say that decaffeinated coffee may in some respect have similar benefits. So if

you're craving coffee you can also go for the decaf. So I guess in short, my answer is it depends. If you enjoy it, go for it. If you don't enjoy it, then don't feel like you're missing out. Thank you so much for tuning into the Food Medic podcast. Make sure to subscribe so that you are the first to hear about any new episodes. And if you are enjoying them, please leave a five star rating and a review so we can reach as many people as possible. I'll see you again next week where we're going to hear from dietitian Maeve Hannan and myself and Maeve are going to bust through all the myths that you guys have been sending through on nutrition.