The Therapy Edit - One Thing with Federica Amati on food for every life stage

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

In this Friday guest episode of The Therapy Edit, Anna chats to Dr Federica Amati about the power of food to make us healthier at every life stage from birth to retirement.Dr Federica Amati works as Head Nutritionist for personalised health company, ZOE. She works clinically as the Head of Nutrition Science for Well Founded Health. Alongside her research and nutrition work, Federica has written two books, Recipes for a Better Menopause and her new book Every Body Should Know This. Dr Fede’s approach focuses on improving overall dietary quality following the principles of evidence-based, personalised nutrition science for health and disease prevention throughout the lifecourse. Dr Federica Amati holds a PhD in Clinical Medicine Research from Imperial College London, has a masters in Public Health and is an Association for Nutrition (AfN) accredited Nutritionist.She is the Nutrition Topic Lead at Imperial College London School of Medicine, and has led research teams for the NIHR ARC and the WHO Collaborating Centre. She is a non-exec Assistant Director at the NNedProGlobal Institute for Food, Nutrition and Health, an award-winning interdisciplinary think-tank. Dr Amati studied Biomedical Sciences with Honors in Endocrine Pharmacology at the University of Edinburgh, her Master’s in Public Health at Imperial College London, her MSc in Global Health Nutrition from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and her PhD in Clinical Medicine Research from Imperial College London.Dr Amati is a frequent podcast and talk guest as well as a contributing expert for several media outlets including The Times, Financial Times How to Spend It, Vogue, Marie Claire, The Telegraph, The Guardian and Grazia about harnessing the power of our diet and microbiome for better health.

Hello and welcome to The Therapy Edit with me, psychotherapist, mum of three and author Anna Martha. Every Friday, I invite one guest to tell me the one thing they would most like to share with mums everywhere. So join with me as we hear this dose of wisdom. I hope you enjoy it. Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's guest episode of The Therapy Edit. I have an absolute treat in store for you today. We have already been chatting before we hit record.

And I'm so excited to introduce to you, Dr. Federica and Marti. Now, she works as head nutritionist for Zoe and the well-founded health. She's got loads of amazing, incredible kind of training and letters after her name. And there's nothing she doesn't know about the gut and nutrition, or at least as much as we know. and the way that she expresses it and talks about it just makes things so accessible and understandable for us, which I think is such a superpower. And alongside her research and nutrition work, Federica has written two books. The first one is recipes for a better menopause. And her new book, Everybody Should Know This, is out. I'm not sure exactly when

this episode is going out, but it's out on the 25th of April. And I'll be asking her a little bit about that in a moment. But her approach focuses on improving overall dietary quality following the principles of evidence-based personalized nutritional science for health and disease prevention. So helping us live well and live as best we can for the years that we are here. Dr. Amati is a frequent podcast and talk guest as well as a contributing expert for lots of different media outlets that you will recognize, including the Times, Mary Claire, the Telegraph, and Grazia. And her passion is all about harnessing the power of our diet and our microbiome for better health. So it's wonderful to have you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited

to talk to you today. Well, me too. I'm excited to hear what your one thing is. But first of all, I mean, tell us how you are. I always ask that. And I always say, don't worry, you can be as top line, boring, or as in-depth as you as you want. But how are you? I'm really well. I'm actually I'm quite tired. It's been an intense week with work, but I'm very happy the sun is shining today, which makes a massive difference. And I'm very excited. It's in the lead up to my book being published. It's such an exciting time just for it to needy actually be here. So yeah, and I just, I'm really happy that people like yourselves are inviting me to talk about the cool message of my book, which I think is really important and hopefully very helpful for a lot of

people. Yeah, absolutely. And what would you say you're that one kind of burning thing that you would love for everyone to know with all of your knowledge and all of those amazing words within your book? What's that one thing that you would love to impart with people here? I think the one thing I'd love for people to take away is the fact that food has the power to help us feel healthy and just feel great at every single life stage. So throughout our lives, food plays this pivotal role as a tool for us to improve our health, improve our mood and improve the way we connect with others as well. Huge. I mean, many of us, it's a relationship, isn't it? I mean, food is a relationship. And I think all of us can probably reflect back on how we have used and

viewed food over the years. I'm thinking of times when I've just literally eaten for sustenance. I mean, anything, just shove it in there so that I've got some energy to move forward. And then, you know, the more recent years where I've really started to read and understand, you know, through a lot of the resources like your book and podcast conversations that you've had and others have had, just really learning and understanding that food isn't just something that purely fuels us. It's so much more than that. Absolutely. So what would you say your kind of journey with that has been and where are you now? Well, I'm extremely lucky in that I'm Italian. So I grew up in a big Italian family and we moved to the UK when I was young. But our food culture came with us. I remember when we first moved to the UK. It was very hard to even find extra virgin olive oil in a supermarket. It was like not a thing. Yeah. And we used to just bring things in

suitcases. So we would pat. Amazing. Parmesan and extra virgin olive oil and durham wheat pastas and actually beans because in Italy and in the Mediterranean dietary culture, we have so many different types of legumes and we cook them all year round, different ones coming to season a different time. So we used to just pack our luggage. It would be so heavy with all this time. I've got customs on that big field day. Well, now they would. Back then, it was a bit more chilled. just, yeah, more chilled out. But like, yeah, so my, my relationship with food has always been one of, first of all, importance. So eating a meal together was like a complete non-negotiable in my household. So growing up, you know, when you're a teenager and you're like, mom, I want to go and see my friends, it was always yes, but around meal times. So I wasn't allowed to skip Sunday lunch. That was not a thing. So, you know, I think that importance of. food. The importance of sharing meals was instilled from a super young age and never questioned. And then also the importance of whole foods. My mum used to cook at home all the time and

make us amazing dishes. And we had this really great relationship with preparing food in the kitchen, eating it together as a family. And also really respecting seasonality. So I'll never forget that when we were sort of having lunches and friends, and I was quite young. And one of my friends said, oh, do you have any strawberries? And it was December. My mother was like, excuse me? What? No. So, you know, all of these things that together actually gave me a really good start. And my relationship with food continued to be really good throughout my childhood and my adolescence, which I realise I'm really lucky with that. A lot of my friends struggled with food and had a difficult relationship with it later and then now of course I didn't know I was

going to be nutritionist to start with I started up with biomedical sciences and pharmacology and I was very interested in the endocrine system I did endocrine pharmacology and actually public health and then I realized so much of what we strive to achieve with public health so reducing the risk of disease improving healthy life years so not just living longer but living longer with with healthy life, all of these things are critically underpinned by nutrition. And so, you know, it was quite late on in my academic career, actually, to suddenly think, oh, I'm doing this work and I'm really interested in public health and I want to, I want to improve health at a population level.

Like, what can we do to actually help entire groups of people move towards better health? and I guess quite quickly in that in that time I realized that so much was underpinned by the food we ate and that's when there was a real light bulb moment where I'd always wanted to work in some form of health care I wanted to be able to improve the health of others and my mom was a doctor so I definitely inherited some of that from her she still is actually working and when that light bulb went off I thought okay, this is actually how I think I can do this. But nutrition science, it has been a less solidly respected science in the health field for a long time. So I remember during my first master's, I was at Imperial College and I wanted to do some nutrition training. And Imperial College

to the day still doesn't offer postgraduate nutrition education. Yeah. So I had to go off and get it somewhere else sort of thing and it's interesting because it's just it's becoming now obviously much more respected as a specialty of its own and as a field that requires specialism into it but that and I've been on that journey with kind of that growth it's which it's just lucky lucky for me because of course in my time I've also now met plenty of nutritionists who were nutritionists like 20 years ago when it was really fringe um but But now it's like I'm more and more people are interested and more and more academic institutions are investing in nutrition education, which is really good.

And so, yeah, my journey has always been a positive one with food and always been a positive one with science. I've always loved science. And it's now come to this place that I'm in now, which I'm really lucky to be in where I'm a scientist that specialises in nutrition and I'm hopefully able to deliver advice that actually does improve the health of people, which is great. Yeah. But generally, the general decisions that we make to be nourishing and nurturing,

and as we were talking about before we hit record, was this is a massive part of our relationships with ourselves, how we're nurturing and nourishing ourselves. And many people are trying to address habits and going cold water swimming and doing stretching and journaling. When actually what you're nourishing yourself with. is is massive it's a massive piece of the piece of the pie and a way that you can really yeah just just respect and build yourself up so for the parent listening who is thinking oh my gosh

this is speaking right to me i am that that person that just i need a reset something something needs to change something needs to change around here but where would you recommend that they begin, what would you recommend that they do next? So I think there's a few ways to tackle it and it really depends on everyone's lifestyle and their habits and also how much mental space they have to make change. It's so important not to make nutrition and food are a joy of life and what we want to avoid is making that another burden, like another thing I have to worry about. So a lot of the message that is in my book is food is here to be our friend and this food is here to be this power that we can adopt for ourselves. I call it the only investment

that has a guaranteed return. You know, if you invest in your nutrition, if you invest in the food that you eat and making that time for yourself to prepare a nourishing meal, you are sure to feel better now and also to have good returns in the long term. And I think start with what feels best. So for some people, that can be just making breakfast, that one, meal a day that they know they can prepare at home and that they know they can use the ingredients they want to use. And whether that, whether you eat that at home or actually take it with you because you're not hungry yet and you want to eat it later. But maybe it's prioritizing that one meal and start with that. Start with that one meal. Make it the meal for you where you have

lots of your favorite foods and you also have lots of foods that are going to really set you up for the day, nourish you, make you feel great, give you that energy and that also give you like the satiety because, you know, especially women like myself, you like grew up through the 90s and early naughties, we were sort of told to just not eat too much ever. And being hungry was seen as like, not actually a problem. But being hungry is really distracting and it's not helpful. So setting yourself up with a really good first meal, whatever time that is for you, because it varies, means that you're much more likely to have an enjoyable day where you can focus on your work, you can focus on your family, you can focus on yourself and be free of that background

noise that hunger brings. So that's often breakfast is the winning first thing to change because it is something that most of us have more control over. And then, you know, from there, it's about building a shopping list or a shopping habit that includes loads of foods that are there to nourish you and include an abundance of different things that you can try and then find your favorites and work with those. So I always recommend things like keeping a fresh fruit bowl out on the side in the kitchen because you're much more likely to walk past and pick up an apple or a, you know, a satsuma or whatever's in season. It might be figs later in the year. But you're much more like to pick it up and have that on the go or take it with you if it's already out. Similarly with

nuts, nuts, if you're not allergic to nuts, they are so great for us and for our health. and it's another food that's been like wrongly demonized often people are worried that if they eat nuts you know they'll put on weight because they have too much fat or whatever and actually again plenty of studies to show that nuts are great for our health they're great for our metabolism and they're great for actually maintaining healthy body weight so having a nice kilner jar or some sort of whatever even just an old jam jar that's filled up with lots of different mixed nuts or your favorite nuts and just keep them on the side next to your fruit bowl so make your your what we do have control over is our food environment in our house yeah it's true don't let the food environment

that is outside which is currently not that great try not to let that into your house too much letting what you want what will nourish you and your family um so creating that food environment at home and also exposing our children to these foods making like these foods available to them as well. Maybe there's a cupboard in the kitchen where you can lay out their own little cutlery and bowls and plates and glasses, but also there's maybe a drawer in the kitchen that they can access that has some raisins and some, you know, different, but mine do have nuts, but they're old enough to like help themselves to all nuts and me not worry about them. So depending on what age they are, just lay out some things that are really easy for them to access and that

give them a healthy option and that's what their food environment is. And that's, and that's not to say, by the way, that there's always space to bake cupcakes together. And I have shreddies, which are like our preferred emergency cereal for, especially on the way to school. Like, they've had breakfast and they're suddenly like, I'm still hungry. And you're like, oh, we need to go. So grab a handful. So shredders and a cup.

Yeah. Exactly that. So it's not that, it's not about, as I said, it's, you can't take all ultra-process foods out of the equation. But just having that, build that food environment around you at home. that you'd love to see on the outside. So start at home. And I think those two things are a really good place to start.

And then you can build from there. The next thing I would say is actually carving out time in the day specifically to cook a meal together and share it together. And when you map out our day, so 24 hours, say eight hours of sleep, eight hours of workish, a bit more sometimes. But it shouldn't be that hard. to carve out one hour a day, but it is. So I know it's hard, but we should try and think about this and prioritize it. One hour a day to actually select the food you want to eat, prepare it,

cook it and eat it with your family. And often people spend two hours a day on Instagram, right? True. I mean, yes, it's probably when you look at your screen. We've got more times than we think we do. But those are really, really wonderful, tangible tips and actually all things that we've been kind of implementing over the last year or two. And I'm just known every meal that I make these days. And I eat with the kids now in the evenings. I will always put a tin or a handful of lentils or chickpeas. Or there will be something that goes in there that wasn't on the recipe.

And they're just like, what is this? I'm like, it's a kidney bean. Get used to it. And it's just one of those things that actually you can buy really cheaply. You know, dry lentils that you're shoving the slow cooker. they you get a huge amount for really little and just frozen vegetables as well is another one that we just add a handful and yeah and frozen berries do you know that's one thing they asked quite a lot it's it's so expensive to eat well and I'm like this is actually a myth

that has been almost propagated and I'm like no frozen food tinned food so there's a big difference between processed food it's been processed to be frozen It's been processed to be tinned, which is all it does is prolonged shelf life, but in a way that doesn't require like lots of additives. It's a processing. Processed food has a huge place in our kitchen, especially when we're being budget conscious. It's the ultra-processed food, which is not, you couldn't recreate it at home. And it's a sum of parts as opposed to made with whole food. That's where we need to cut down. But using tinned goods, using jarred goods, using frozen fruits and berries. absolutely like makes it so much easier and also especially with their pulses people often don't know what to do with them and having them jarred or tinned means they're already cooked so all you have to do is shaman if you want shaman give them a little bit of flavor use some spices use some herbs maybe a little salt and then you're good to go and so I think it's crucial that we start to really go into the supermarket and go into the

middle aisles and look at those bottom shelves where all the whole reds are all the lentils are they haven't made it to the like you know the big red signs and the buy one get one free but they are there and they are usually incredibly affordable and so nutritious you can get so a tin of lentils is high in protein high in iron high in fiber high in polyphenols like it is just brilliant a powerhouse you can make a very like a meatless sauce with it you can

you can actually blend it and make pancakes you can do all sorts of things yeah I mean I've stuck a lot of things into the pancakes I made the kids just there

they're open banana as a base but I've put butter beans in there I put carrot in the other day and he found a lump of carrot and he was like mummy what is this I think he's gone off them for a bit they've been

I've been yeah I've been found out but cauliflower blends very well into us, really. Especially when it's phrasing. Absolutely. So there are, thank you. It's just some really fantastic, kind of accessible and implementable tips. And I know that along with all of the incredibly, just excessively put knowledge in everybody should know this, it's, yeah, it's just going to be such a gift and an amazing resource to help us really understand how we can take our self-care.

or our relationships with ourselves and our families and our bodies and our food up to the next the next nurturing level. So thank you so much for giving us so generously the knowledge and just, yeah, the great tips on how we can do that. So thank you. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Therapy Edit. If you have enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and review for me. So if you need any resources at all, I have lots of videos and courses and everything from health anxiety to driving anxiety and people pleasing nail all on my website, anamatha.com. And also, don't forget my brand new book, Raising a Happier Mother is out now for you to enjoy

and benefit from. It's all about how to find balance, feel good and see your children flourish as a result. Speak to you soon. Thank you.