The Food Medic - S3 E6 - “Is Butter A Carb?”

Episode Date: August 13, 2019

On this episode Dr Hazel is joined by registered dietitians Rosie Saunt and Helen West from The Rooted project. Rosie and Helen strive to be the most credible, non-judgemental and accessible source of nutrition information in the industry, drawing on the latest scientific thinking, at panel events and via social media communication. They have also recently published the ultimate mythbusting nutrition bible: ​Is Butter a Carb?On this episode they cover common diet myths, how to spot a fad diet, how to approach media headlines on nutrition research, vegan diets, carbs, gut health - and everything in between. This is a must listen for anyone feeling a bit confused about nutrition. P.S. If you want to submit your own question to the show all you got to do is ​tweet, facebook message or instagram DM me your questions with #thefoodmedicpodcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Hello, and welcome back to the Food Medic Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Hazel Wallace, founder of The Food Medic. On this podcast, I speak to some of the most respected and well-researched individuals in the nutrition and health space. If you're new to the podcast and have never heard of myself or The Food Medic before, then make sure to follow me on social media at The Food Medic on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and have a browse of the website thefoodmedic.co.uk. I also have two books, The Food Medic and The Food Medic for Life, which are available to buy on Amazon and from all good bookstores.

Now, this week, I'm delighted to be joined by Rosie and Helen from The Rooted Project. The Rooted Project is an award-winning enterprise co-founded when registered dietitians Rosie and Helen became tired of the Nutribollocks filling their social media feeds. They strive to be the most credible, non-judgmental, and accessible source of nutrition information in the industry, drawing on the latest scientific thinking at panel events and via social media communication. They have also recently published the ultimate myth-busting nutrition bible,

Is Butter a Carb? So the Ruder Project also run incredible events and an online book club. And if you don't follow them on Instagram, I highly recommend it as their posts are responsible and educational without being too confusing. Don't forget to keep listening to the end of the podcast for the answer to this week's listener question. So the question that was sent in is, is it true that small amounts of alcohol is better than no alcohol when it comes to your health? So if you're interested to find out the answer, stay tuned to the very end of the episode. And if you want to submit your own question to the show, all you got to do is tweet,

Facebook message or Instagram DM me your questions with the hashtag the food medic podcast. Okay, Helen and Rosie, welcome to the show. So I've known you guys for a little while now, but it'd be really great if you could give our listeners a little bit of background into who you are and what you do. Sure. Helen and I are both registered dietitians. And we set up a company called the Ruta Project a few years ago on the side to our normal nutrition jobs, sort of working in the NHS and also nutrition writing. We really felt there was a gap in the market in the wellness industry to link the public with evidence-based healthcare professionals. So that might be a professor from a university who's researching gut health, or it might be

other registered dietitians and what we ultimately do is put on panel events so themed nutrition panel events where you can come have a glass of wine listen to experts talk about nutrition but we also do ourselves lots of speaking and myth busting on social media we've got our book and what we're ultimately interested in is making the communication evidence-based nutrition accessible exciting and we try and do it in a creative way so it's not boring we hope no it's definitely not boring and actually that's how I came across you guys was going to an event um and how did you guys how did you guys meet we were internet friends um so no we were both dietitians that were doing a little bit of nutrition communication so i had a blog at the

time and rosie also had a blog didn't you was student dietitian at the time so we just kind of linked up on twitter i think originally and we're just talking about some of the issues within our industry and we realized we had a lot in common and we would like to kind of tackle those things together really um so we started working together quite early on really after we met yeah and formed the rooted project so nice and you guys have just released your debut book is better carb why was this book important for you guys to write and what makes it different to other kind of i don't want to diet, but like nutrition books on the market? So I think we decided to write the book originally because we just felt that we weren't getting asked all the time, what can I read? I want to learn more about the science of nutrition. I'm interested in nutrition. I want to kind of get a little bit more detail about why we know

what we know. As you know, there's lots of confusing and conflicting information out there about nutrition and lots of people talking with great authority about nutrition and giving completely conflicting advice so that was the main motivation behind the book yeah we just really felt that there wasn't that one book out there that covered the basics of nutrition so it's not necessarily a book although lots of professionals have been reading it as well for someone who knows loads it's perfect for that person who wants to learn a bit more, but we've tried to write it in a really non-judgmental way and obviously make it evidence-based.

I think we also found that even as healthcare professionals, when we're asked a nutrition question, we have to go away and think quite hard about it when we're doing the research, and it's very nuanced and complex. So if we're having to think very carefully, how are the public meant to wade through all of this information so that was another reason to write it yeah absolutely and to take a quote from your book eat like me look like me has become an unspoken mantra of the wellness industry what is the issue with people's like sharing anecdotal

advice on nutrition and can you offer any examples? So I guess the issue with nutrition, the industry in general, is that everybody eats, so everybody has their own ideas about food, their own experiences with food. And this can quite often lead to people talking with great confidence about things that have worked for them or things that they've tried. And obviously, there's nothing wrong with people sharing their experiences and their stories and all of those things things but i think where the problem lies is sort of twofold firstly when people align their diet with the way that they look so you know body diversity is normal people can eat the same foods or the same kind of diet and look completely different and that can lead to other problems with people kind of aligning health with purely

with thinness and not other aspects of their life and secondly it can lead to kind of people being quite dogmatic about food so believing that certain foods are bad or toxic or harmful when in fact you know some people might eat one particular way and it works fantastically for them but for somebody else that could be not health promoting at all or it could lead to an eating disorder or you know any other kind of different health problems that you can think of so I think the issue is not necessarily people sharing their stories, but it's potentially the way in which they share their stories and the inferences of those stories. And then also when people are making really bold claims about their health,

you know, obviously it occurs across a spectrum. Some people say, oh, I ate this way and I lost weight. But there are people out there saying things like, I ate this way and I cured my cancer. I ate this way, you know, and I fixed this chronic disease. So I think it's complicated. I don't think people should be afraid of sharing their stories about nutrition and things that they enjoy eating and things that they found helpful from a food perspective. But I think we need to be careful about the claims that we're making. And also, in the way that we're speaking about food and aligning that with our bodies particularly.

And I guess, like you said, it exists on a spectrum of like, I've been eating this and we're drinking this kombucha and I feel like my bloating is reduced or something. But then if someone's saying, you know, I'm drinking this instead of taking chemotherapy, for example, that's a completely different ballpark. Absolutely. And that's kind of where the lines are getting a little bit blurred but I don't think many people can actually see that that's happening or appreciate that food has the power because we all eat it we all consume it and we think it's harmless when it can cause harm absolutely and anecdotes can be extremely compelling absolutely especially when it comes to something like health and disease, because we can all relate to it in some shape or form. Exactly.

Why do you think it is that we get so sucked into nutrition nonsense in particular and fatty diets and, you know, like really well educated people fall into these traps. And how can we spot them? Or how can we spot who's not the right person to be listening to when it comes to these kind of things? So nutrition fads and trends have been around for centuries. The Victorians, for example, would swallow tapeworms for weight loss. So in one sense, it's not new that these fads are around that we fall into the traps. But we are living in this social media era where evidence-based nutrition information has to fight against fast-paced fake news, anecdotes, and pseudoscience. So misinformation can spread faster in this era of social media. But you mentioned that despite being intelligent people, we still fall into these traps.

And this is something that really interests us. And I think people shouldn't feel shamed or belittled for falling into the traps because there are actually really good reasons for falling off that path. For example, someone might feel really desperate because there have been gaps in the healthcare system that they feel aren't meeting their needs. There's something called confirmation bias. So people see what

they want to see when they're looking for information out there. Lots of people feel that there's the appeal to nature fallacy. So lots of people feel that just because something's natural, it must therefore be better for you, which isn't necessarily the case. So there are lots of reasons why we fall for these fads. think as well you know food's complicated health is complex you know it's not necessarily influenced by one single thing and i think quite often what we're looking for is just a simple fix something that is easy that takes out all of the noise you know we're all quite binary creatures as as human beings quite black and white in the way that we approach things and think about things.

So I think one of the reasons people get drawn in is because if you have lots of things going on in your life, say you feel a bit tired, or you know, you're burning the candle at both ends, and someone says, oh, just, you know, drink this drink, or take this tablet. It's such an easy thing to do that you can add into your life rather than actually looking at everything as a whole, and thinking about the bigger complex picture as well and so I think that's probably one of the main reasons that people get pulled in and then moving on to the things that Rosie says the red flags so red flags might be if let's say someone on social media is recommending a particular diet or a food or a supplement and they're very black and white about things they don't add any caveats so they don't express that there are any uncertainties and the science that this may not work for everyone and they're very black and white about things they don't add any caveats so they don't express

that there are any uncertainties in the science that this may not work for everyone they say it's my way or the highway i think also people need to feel empowered to ask questions so you don't have to be an expert in something to be able to ask someone for evidence. And really the burden of proof should be on that person, the person who's making these claims, to tell you how that's backed up, where the studies are, and how those studies, in layman's terms, prove what they're saying.

If they can't do that, if they're saying things like, oh, go and look up the research yourself, it should be clear, go and Google it yourself, then that might be a red flag. And it's important to remember that if something sounds extraordinary it needs extraordinary evidence to back it up yeah absolutely so my background is obviously medicine which is very black and white and clear-cut and we've got really nice randomized control trials and moving towards nutritional science now and after doing it for a year I feel like my only way to describe it is like gray and swiggly and blurry and it's so messy that I would

go as far as saying it's a harder science to unpick it's so funny how before doing that I looked at nutrition as and it's nutrition, it's just food. Like it's not difficult. And I think that's, we really underestimate how difficult it is as a science. But not only is it difficult in terms of how people portray it on social media and the stories that we share and things like that. Also the media like love a nutrition headline. Like last week, fruit juice was, you know, claimed to cause cancer.

And like these media headlines, I think a lot of people do read them with a healthy amount of skepticism. But how can we as individuals approach these studies? So I think one of the most important things to remember is what you said really is that nutrition is a messy science. so i think one of the most important things to remember is what you said really is that nutrition is a messy science and so unlike medicine we can't look to one single study i mean medics don't do this either but you know oversimplifying but you can't look to one single study to provide you all the answers you know so i think if you're looking at newspaper headlines and it's really black and

white it's saying that one thing causes one thing then immediately you need to be skeptical because as you know we use lots of different types of studies in nutrition and the main ones being observational studies so we look for patterns in populations over time and then pull out things that we might need to study further so if you're looking at a newspaper headline i guess the main thing is is this talking about a single study is this study in people is another really big question because quite often particularly with the crazy headlines they're looking at mice rather than people and then in the reporting i would never really rely on on the science reporting but in the in the quotes from the professionals within the article are they expressing some of the uncertainty and because that's the biggest thing in nutrition science is that that you have to be comfortable with kind of leaning into that

uncertainty and making sure that you're expressing that nuance in the way that you express your ideas about food so are those things happening but mostly I'd just be very skeptical of any kind of bold claims of one food causes one thing because as we know health is complex it's multifaceted so many different things influence health and I think sometimes as well we forget because wellness is quite a it's kind of a middle class thing isn't it it's kind of something that was people who are already doing pretty well on the health front like we all have generally have houses and roofs over our heads we have enough food to eat we're pretty well educated we're all doing quite well already on the on the food front and it's actually these things these like real basic things that actually

make the biggest difference to people's health and your socioeconomic status or the way that you fall sort of in terms of poverty and deprivation are the things that are going to have the biggest impact of all so if you're already doing okay i think you probably need to worry less about these kind of like you know fruit juice causes cancer kind of things and remember that disease and health is is influenced by lots and lots of different things. Yeah, absolutely. So let's go back to the book

because it aims to unpick fad from fact. Fact from fad? Fact from fiction. Yeah, you could say fact from fad. One of those things. So essentially, you guys cover so many different topics in the book, and it's a really good book, and I've read it cover to cover, so I can confirm that it's great. One of the topics that you cover is a calorie, a calorie, and this is a debate that's always

had on social media between the bro scientists of the world and also the actual scientists in the world. And I think for a lot of people this causes not distress but it's an ongoing debate and it'd be great to kind of have you you guys weigh into the conversation okay so a calorie is a calorie if we're thinking about the laws of physics so if you had a calorie sitting there and you managed to extract all of the energy that that calorie could provide in a lab, it would provide the amount of energy that a calorie provides. However, I think where the confusion comes from is when we start to eat food containing calories, food that comes in many different forms, containing many different

amounts of calories that is sometimes difficult to accurately estimate. Humans aren't well-oiled machines that can completely extract the amount of calories that are in a food or a meal. So say you eat a chocolate bar that has 150 calories. Helen's body may not extract 150 calories from that chocolate bar. My body might. And that's because our bodies are different physiologically. The way we digest food is different. I might have eaten the chocolate bar without anything else. Helen might have eaten that chocolate bar alongside a meal.

So all those different factors and the complexities of the human body mean that in that sense, a calorie isn't necessarily a calorie. But I'd say for just the general public out there, it's not really something we need to worry about. Focusing on calories in of itself won't give you the whole picture of how healthy a food is. There are other factors like the nutrients within within that food is it a whole food or has it gone through some sort of processing what's your relationship with that particular food when you're eating it i think most of the confusion comes you know this argument of is a calorie a calorie you know essentially a lot of it comes from people eating a particularly dietary pattern

and saying this dietary pattern is better than this one and you know look at this i ate this way and i lost weight and so if you're eating carbohydrates that might cause you to eat more calories or you know there's lots of different arguments about it but I think what it boils down to is that you know as Rosie says it's not it's not telling you anything about the food in front of you you know food is way more than calories it's you know it's got different balance of nutrients and we don't eat just calories in the same way we don't eat single foods we you know lots of a variety of foods over time in lots of different formats so yeah in terms of physics a calorie is a calorie but in terms of food 60 calories worth of broccoli is different to 60 calories worth of chocolate you know but I think

that's that's where the confusion comes in and people trying to sort of force people down this route of eat this way it's a confusing and difficult one and also our calorie needs vary a lot from person to person we don't all need to eat 2000 or 2500 calories per day and as well as your calorie needs varying from person to person your individual calorie needs will change over time yeah absolutely it kind of is similar to the whole nutrient wars like is fat or carbs superior and we kind of keep siloing these nutrients or calories and that's not how food comes food comes in a matrix and we forget about that and kind of try to isolate it and we know that even from studies that never really works we're definitely trying to get away

from that kind of reductionism absolutely now going vegan or following a plant-based diet is very much on trend now for many, many reasons. What would be your advice to someone who's considering doing it for purely health reasons? So they've read online that it's going to be better for their health. What would you say to them? I'd say to that person first of all anyone who's making any large change to your diet make sure that you're making that change based on good information. So did you watch a slightly scaremongering documentary the night before or are you making that change for a different reason? So just do a bit of research and investigation, maybe speak to your doctor. And once you've decided to make that change, take it at your own pace. Some people go vegan overnight, some people do it by step by step process. And you also don't need to go

completely vegan. I think maybe some people feel if they're making that change, they have to go the whole way. You could go vegetarian first. yeah yeah I think I think one of the things about vegan diets is that people feel that you know there is a lot of scaremongering out there about meat red meat particularly and cancer and things like that so I think you want to make sure that you're going vegan because you think it's a sustainable diet for you and it's going to improve the quality of your diet and you absolutely don't have to go vegan to have a healthy diet but if you do decide to go vegan it's just making sure that you're getting all the nutrients that you need because I think we automatically assume that a plant-based diet will be healthier but if you're not getting the nutrients that you need if you're not including enough iron enough iodine calcium in

your diet then you're putting yourself at risk so it's just remembering that the label isn't really what makes a diet healthy it's the pattern of eating and you know the nutrients that you're getting from your diet at a particular time so you can have a healthy vegan diet a healthy vegetarian diet a healthy omnivorous diet you know all of these diets can be healthy there's not one single way to eat to promote health so just making sure you're doing it for the right reasons and making sure that your diet's complete yeah the british dietetic association have quite a good fact sheet on vegetarian diets. So that includes some information on vegan diets. And also the Vegan Society work with dietitians and have some useful practical resources as well.

Yeah. Okay, cool. Now, one of the things we kind of mentioned briefly and then brushed over was carbohydrates, which is possibly one of the most misunderstood and potentially most controversial nutrients, particularly online. There are many advocates of the low carb movement suggest that carbs are not an essential nutrient and that cutting them out is something that we should all do. So essentially on a population level to improve our health. I know what my thoughts are on this, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. So I like you say it's a really controversial topic i think the really important thing to remember in this whole debate is i kind of i really understand why some people are quite angry in this debate and i think some people have had health conditions whereby they have

removed carbohydrates potentially against medical or dietetic advice in the past and found that they've had improvements to their health and i'm talking about people obviously that have a health condition, something like diabetes, that kind of thing. And we know now that low carb diets can be a safe and healthy way to help people manage their diabetes. But, and the big but is that has then morphed, again, it's this anecdote thing where that's then morphed into, well, this worked for me and this has improved my health. So that means that every single person out there should eat the way that I eat and should do this and carbohydrates are toxic and they're terrible. And again, it's that binary black and white thinking.

So of course, you can have a dietary pattern that is lowering carbohydrates and be perfectly healthy. It might help you control your health if you have a particular health condition. But carbs are, they're from plants. They have lots of nutrients attached to them, obviously whole grains. So I think

it's just really thinking about that no single food or nutrient is bad on its own and there's lots of different ways to eat to promote health so from a carb perspective I would definitely say carbs aren't bad they're not toxic some people might benefit from reducing them in their diets if they have a health condition and it helps them but that doesn't mean that they're bad for everybody no absolutely carbohydrates also carry lots of fiber and important nutrients that we can't get in other foods. So thinking about our gut microbiome and that area, which is growing and growing and growing at the moment, I think at the moment with a lot of research going on with ketogenic diets and low carbohydrate diets, we probably don't know how that's going to affect

our gut microbiome in 20, 30 years. And for those people as well, you have to think it's always about risk versus benefit. So for the people that have a health condition, if they know that they can better control their blood glucose, say diabetes, with a lower-carbohydrate diet, the risk of their diabetes far outweighs for them

the risk of the potential unknowns on their gut microbiome. And also carbohydrate diets don't always mean ketogenic diets so you can get a reasonable amount of fiber on some people in a lower carbohydrate diet so it's really individual and it's also about risk versus benefit so we can't prescribe single diets or you know macronutrient contents of diets at a population level for everybody. It just isn't going to be one practical or two beneficial. Yeah. And I think that's why people get annoyed because, you know, the eat well guide or eat well plate is very generic for that purpose, because you can't prescribe macronutrient ratios. And also we don't, majority of us don't need to eat in that way. We don't need to count our carbohydrates unless we are doing it for a medical reason and I think when we learn from these therapeutic diets for these individual populations then we we start to extrapolate it to the general population it just makes no sense

because we see fantastic results for those people yeah and which is great but I guess we just need to realize that not everyone needs to follow in that way and also foods not just for health purposes exactly now and actually one of the first rooted project talks that i went to with you guys was the gut health one with megan rossi's um was um professor wheeling on that panel as well and laura thomas oh yeah yes that was a really good one. That was what, like two years ago? Yeah. So long ago. So at that time, good health was trendy.

Now it's like exploded and you just need to walk into like any health food store and you see probiotics like stamped on everything. Do you think it's another fad or do you think maybe some of the

evidence-based principles we are learning from that we can start incorporating into our lives what advice can you provide to people to look after their gut health without getting too bogged down in the probiotics probiotics and all these labels exactly gut health is extremely complex and we're only really at the tip of the iceberg with regards to finding things out from a scientific point of view and you've mentioned things like probiotics and there are things like kombucha lots of things out there we can potentially buy and drink or eat to improve our gut health but we're not necessarily at the point from a

nutrition science point of view where we can categorically recommend or prescribe a therapeutic dose of something like kombucha to get a particular gut health benefit. I think if we really bring things back down to basics we're not getting enough fiber generally speaking in the country I think we're only really getting about 50% at a population level as much as we need so what everyone could do if they want to take some small steps to improve their gut health is try and increase the fiber in their diet so those are the carbohydrate foods the fiber is the part we can still eat but is indigestible and it's good for your gut bacteria that's what feeds them helps your stools move through your body and what you can do so some practical tips first of all if

you want to increase the fiber in your diet do it slowly if you do it too fast you could have a bit of gastro discomfort so some abdominal pain and bloating. I'm sure you're drinking enough water as well. And then we're focusing on what foods you could introduce in your diet to increase the fiber so first of all you can look at the back of the food packet and what would be high fiber is anything that's over six grams per hundred grams but you might if we're thinking about breakfast look at your cereal packet and see if it's a high fiber cereal or have porridge if you chuck some fruit or nuts onto that both those things will be providing some fiber as well so it's thinking about all those add-ons legumes and pulses things like chickpeas will provide fiber so you might want to have some

hummus and crude it as a snack or add some beans and lentils to a stew yeah this is just eating more plants just eat more plants eat more plants do it slowly yeah do it slowly yeah i think previously you know when i was a kid my idea of fiber was just either like either like all bran or weedabix and just put it into those categories now i'm learning that like peanut butter has fiber, which is revolutionary. Okay, cool. So one last question. There's so much debate as to what the best diet is. And in reality, no diet is perfect. But what do you think forms the basis of a good balanced diet?

So I think you mentioned this earlier and that, you know, food is more than nutrients. It's more than, you know, it's more than just fuel. So a balanced diet, I think, incorporates not just your physical needs, but your social, emotional needs as well. So from my perspective, it would be a variety of foods over time in a pattern that suits your needs, that it's social, it's celebratory, that it fits your cultural needs you know if you're thinking about the nutrient side of it just basing your your diet on you know whole foods is the main thing so lots of plants and whole meat products dairy that kind of thing nice you guys have a little infographic in your book yes yeah i love that in our balance chapter

and we're trying to get that made into a print actually which people can hang on their wall because lots of people seem to like it it's this sort of circle with segments and only maybe a quarter of it is nutrient based and the other parts show how balance is really a holistic outlook on your whole life it focuses a lot on things like food shouldn't cause you anxiety or guilt that it it should fit in with your, like I said, your cultural needs, that it should be variety over time in a pattern that fits your needs as well. That kind of thing. Yeah. Nice.

And for people who want to find out more from you guys, where can we find you? So you can find us on Instagram and Twitter at rooted underscore project or our website is therootedproject.co.uk and your book is available um at all good bookstores all good bookstores online on Amazon okay cool libraries is it in libraries yeah some people have been sending messages in Australian libraries I've had three people send me pictures of them in Australian libraries. That's so cool. My mother-in-law ordered it from her local library. Oh my

gosh, amazing. Thanks Maria. Shout out to Maria. Okay, cool. Well, thank you for joining us on the show. It's been really lovely to have you here. Thank you so much for having us. Okay guys, that was Helen and Rosie. I think we packed in a lot into that episode but I'm sure it answered lots of your questions and don't forget to check out the girls book and also

their events because they're incredible now let's get to this week's listener question the question was is it true that small amounts of alcohol is better than no alcohol when it comes to your health. Now there is some evidence to say that light to moderate consumption of alcohol which is about one drink per day small drink can reduce your risk of certain health conditions in particular heart disease and stroke. However a recent study published in the Lancet announced that no amount of alcohol is safe and that all risks outweigh any potential benefits. This was a really big study based on 175 countries looking at the risk of alcohol and 23 different health conditions ranging from breast cancer to tuberculosis. This review came under a little bit of scrutiny by many other scientists.

And while there is no doubt that heavy drinking is absolutely harmful for us, it is probably unlikely that very small amounts of alcohol are going to do us much harm. Also, we all drink from a different glass and prefer a different poison, as they say. So despite the study, I'm still hedging my bets that a little bit of wine isn't going to do me any harm with that said if you don't drink alcohol I wouldn't start drinking it for the potential heart health benefits okay guys hopefully that's cleared up some confusion and don't forget if you do have a question to please send it in and just use the hashtag the food medic podcast that's all from me and I'll see you again next time