The Wellness Scoop - Caffeine, the untapped potential of plants and intermittent fasting with Michael Pollan

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

To kick off the new podcast, I’m joined by acclaimed author and journalist Michael Pollan. Michael is widely known for his work demystifying the food and agriculture industry and is now opening new frontiers in the highly controversial field of plant psychedelics, and their potential as tools for healing mental illnesses and disorders. We discuss: ·         What should you eat if you’re concerned about your health ·         Why cooking more automatically improves health and happiness ·         Understanding your relationship with caffeine ·         The health benefits of caffeine Each week I unpack a wellness trend with GP Gemma Newman. This week on Fact or Fad we’re looking at intermittent fasting.  More about Michael: ‘This Is Your Mind on Plants’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Your-Plants-Michael-Pollan/dp/0593296907  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Oh, hi there! I'm Norma, the unofficial mayor of the Town of Destiny. Speaking of, FanDuel's Kick of Destiny 3 is happening live Super Bowl Sunday. You should watch. It's gonna be a hoot! While you're at it, download FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on touchdowns, turnovers, heck, even total kicker points, don't you know? Anywho, enjoy your podcast or whatnot. Please play responsibly. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you,

please go to connectsontario.ca. Back in 2011, I was really ill. I'd gone from a history of art student, loving life, to sleeping for about 16 hours a day, having heart palpitations, chronic fatigue, constant headaches, horrible stomach issues. The list really does go on so I spent months in and out of different hospitals and eventually I was given a whole host of different drugs from steroids to beta blockers it was intense but I was confident I had no reason to doubt that the drugs wouldn't work and that I'd be back to myself in no time. And then they didn't work,

but I kept taking them. I remained optimistic. They'll work eventually. I even made a medication spreadsheet to ensure that I was as diligent as possible. But none of it actually worked. And I started to retreat from my friends, from my family. To be honest, I was really embarrassed. My self-esteem was dropping and I just felt like there was something really wrong with me. I'll never forget lying in bed, watching the Kardashians, eating pick and mix and peanut butter and jam with a spoon, continuously refreshing my Facebook page to see what my friends were doing, feeling just so dejected, so depressed, so unwell. And a few months later, I really did

hit rock bottom, both physically and mentally. I didn't know what I needed at that point, only that I needed something different, something new. I couldn't even figure out what words to put into Google. But I tried natural healing and something clicked. So I learned to cook and I started to write up these healthy delicious recipes on a website deliciouslyella.com. As I got better and better the site started to reach more and more people. It became a community from Facebook groups to supper clubs, a wellness app, food products, a restaurant and now this podcast. But nothing's really changed in some ways. Delicious Cielo has always been rooted in growing, in sharing knowledge, ideas, our fears, our successes and I know that we all want to lead a healthier and happier life and this drive that so

many of us have for this healthier happier life has really kick-started what can only be described as a wellness revolution. There are over 58 million hashtags on Instagram for wellness, the topic really has never ever been more prominent but and this does come with a but three in five of us feel that wellness is incredibly confusing. We have no idea what's clickbait and what's genuinely health enhancing. Who's an expert and who is let's be honest peddling absolute nonsense and, I am with you on this confusion. I have found it hard to navigate too. So welcome to Wellness Unpacked, our brand new podcast hosted by me, Ella Mills, author, entrepreneur and founder of Deliciously Ella. This series aims to do just as it says,

unpack the world of wellness with expert guests. And these guests will share with me and with you their three pieces of advice for a better life to help you feel healthier and happier. This is a show that is about progress. It is not about perfection. It's about helping you make small, simple, sustainable changes. And as part of that, I will also be testing out different wellness trends every single week. Think intermittent fasting, celery juice, collagen, ketogenic diets, CBD, basically you name it I'll try it. I'll unpick the trend separating fact from fad

with my friend and NHS GP Dr Gemma Newman. And with that let's get into the show. am so honored to have our first guest here today I cannot believe I'm going to tell you that our first guest is Michael Pollan now lots of you are going to know all about Michael but for those of you who don't Michael is an author and journalist who has been writing about the intersection between humans, health and the natural world for over 30 years now. Since 2001 Michael has written a phenomenal seven best-selling books including The Omnivore's Dilemma, This Is Your Mind on Plants and most recently How to Change Your Mind which you might have also seen is a newly released Netflix show and within that you might have noticed that his work has pivoted a little bit recently and he

started to explore things like plant-based psychedelics. How could these psychedelics be used to treat drug addiction, cancer, even things like eating disorders? We'll come on to that a little bit later today. So are you ready? This is interview one of Wellness Unpacked. Let's go. Well, Michael, welcome to the show. Honestly, you are a dream guest for the new show. Oh, thank you, Ella. And it's a real honor to have you. And we're going to start every interview of the show with the same question because we want to know a little bit more about you. So what does wellness mean to you? You know, I've never thought about defining

it. It's just one of those things we kind of know intuitively. But when I think about it, it has some quality of being in sync, your body and your mind in sync. Or you could look at it as the opposite of disease. It's ease and order, right? And the opposite, of course, is disease and disorder. So I guess that's how I think about it. That's a really nice kind of non-prescriptive, very gentle approach, which I love. And obviously, it's absolutely what you're known for. And before we get a little bit into your career and what you do and your advice for our listeners, I wanted to understand a little bit more, again, about you and what sparked your interest in health and well-being, our relationship to plants, to nature, to the

world around us. I know it started when you were quite young. Is that right? Yeah. I've been a gardener since I was about eight years old. I had a grandfather who was a wonderful gardener, and we connected over very little, actually. There was a lot of tension in the relationship. He thought I was a hippie. And he was a first-generation immigrant from Russia. And he really didn't understand my world. And I didn't really understand his world. But the common ground was his garden. He had this beautiful garden in Babylon, Long Island. And I loved being there, picking things. And it's where I was acquainted with the kind of miracle that you could plant a seed and, you know, a couple months later actually have something of value, something delicious.

And that's always stuck with me. And if you're interested in the relationship between people and plants, eventually you're going to look at food. Because this is the most profound way we use plants, to feed ourselves. We're utterly dependent on them. So I started some of my essays about gardening gradually turned into essays about agriculture. And it was the first time that I saw really big farming, industrial farming in Idaho, where we grow most of our potatoes. And I had just never seen a farm on this scale that automated, that chemically intensive. The farmer stayed

inside. He basically farmed from a bunker, a concrete bunker. And he had a series of screens, each one of which had another nine crop circles. A crop circle is 187 acres, about 90 hectares. And without going outside, he could adjust the pesticide, the water, the fertilizer. And I asked him about farming this way. And he said, well, it's much safer because I'm using pesticides that once I spray, I can't go in the fields for five days. They're that toxic. They're neurotoxins. And I asked, why do you use that pesticide? And he says, well, it prevents net necrosis. I said, what's net necrosis? Well, if you've ever sliced open a potato and you see that brown line, it's a purely cosmetic defect that's caused by a certain aphid.

And so we have to spray. And I said, well, is there any alternative? And he said, yeah, just don't grow russet Burbank potatoes. That's the one that gets this. And I was like, so? He said, well, McDonald's will only buy Russet Burbank potatoes. They want those very long French fries. And so I suddenly had this insight into that this is a system and that we're implicated because we like long French fries, apparently. But to get long French fries, the farmer has to do all these incredibly dangerous things. And of course, the people at the eating end of the food chain, probably McDonald's, don't even realize what's involved. No, and it's extraordinary. And in this education that you've given people,

there's so many quotes that you're famous for that you see absolutely everywhere, but one that I think you see a lot of the time. And I wondered if we could use this for an example to kind of share a bit more of the philosophy on this approach to eating that you're so famous for is eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Could you unpack that for us? So after I wrote my book on the agricultural system, everybody was asking me like, okay, you told me about how they made the potatoes and how they treat the chickens and everything, but what should I eat? And that finally, people care about their health. And so I set out to answer that simple question. So what should you

eat if you're concerned about your health? And I very quickly was able to boil it down to, well, eat food and real food. And it's really simple. And don't be confused by all those fad diets and all the information out there and all the health claims out there. But then I realized eat food didn't quite cover it because quantity is a big issue. We argue a lot about different kind of diets. The thing we don't talk about is we're all eating too much, basically. We get more calories than we need. And that leads to all sorts of problems, not just weight problems, but inflammation and all kinds of things. So I had to put in not too much to deal with that. And then the question of kinds of food and meat eating came up. And in a way, this is the most controversial part of that mantra, where I said mostly plants.

I didn't say all plants, but I said mostly plants. And that adverb mostly pissed off everybody on both sides of the meat, you know, so the vegetarians were like, why not all plants? And well, because meat is a perfectly nutritious food, um, but we eat way too much of it. And, and the carnivores are very upset that I didn't mention meat. And, um, but I stand by that. I think, uh, you know, I don't eat meat now. Um, I'll eat a little fish occasionally, but I think we eat altogether too much meat. But that's about ethics and the environment as much as health. I mean, meat can be a healthy food. I think it just shouldn't be at the center of the

plate. So mostly plants. So eat food. Now, eat food sounds really easy. Isn't it all food? And my argument is no. The market is full of what I call edible food-like substances. These are things that look like food, sometimes taste like food, but they're not really food. So you have to put a little bit of work into identifying the real food from the fake food. And so I came up with a bunch of algorithms for that. You know, one was don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. You know, I have a whole bunch of mnemonic devices to help you remember that. But the main thing is we eat too much processed food, or I should say ultra-processed food, right? I mean, there's a kind of food

processing that's pretty benign. You know, preservation, you know, making sauerkraut or kimchi or refining flour. All these kind of things are fine. It's kind of first-order processing. But there's the second-order processing, which is now called ultra-processing, where you're making complete foods ready to eat. And we now know, and there's been some research done since I wrote about this, that people who eat ultra-processed food tend to eat a lot more, I mean dramatically more,

and that this food, because of the way it's manufactured, doesn't offer you enough in the way of plants, for example, of fiber. It tends to be very quickly absorbed in the small intestines and it offers your microbiome very little to deal with. And one of the things we've learned in the last 20 years is you're not just feeding yourself, you're feeding a couple trillion microbes and you have to think of them too. Yeah, absolutely. I changed my diet completely 10 years ago and went to a plant-based, completely natural diet. And I will never forget how struck I was by when I started turning over the back of pack of things in supermarkets. And you, yeah, you just are relatively naive to it, I think, until there's a kind of the penny drops

and you start to peak an interest. And then even just a little bit of something is in almost everything. And it was a really shocking realization. And it, yeah, framed the whole, kind of my whole interest in health and wellbeing and all the work that you do. You've obviously shared a kind of unfathomable amount of advice with the world over the last few decades. And I think it's probably a really difficult question

in some ways, but we really want this podcast to give our listeners very tangible actions for their life. So I wondered if we could dissect the three piece of advice that you feel absolutely everybody would benefit from, the three things that truly would improve kind of our collective health and well-being. This is one that kind of follows from this distinction between real food and edible food like substances, and that is cook. Cooking is a really important part of the puzzle. You can't eat a bad diet if you're cooking yourself. You will not cook french fries every night. It's too much of a mess. It's too much of pain. You're not going to make dessert every night. You're not going to do all these things that you do when you can go to the market or go to a restaurant. And cooking automatically improves your diet. Whatever you make, be as indulgent as

you want. That's real food. And I know people have many, many reasons they feel they can't cook. They're intimidated or they didn't learn from their parents. And that's all true. But there's so many ways to learn how to cook now. I mean, beginning with YouTube, there's not a cooking question you can't get answered on YouTube with a very good demo. People say it takes time. And it does take time, but you're investing in your health and your happiness too. If you cook, you will eat with other people too. You're not going to just cook for yourself. It's a social act. It's a communal act. Cooking solves so many problems and it's one of the best investments of time to improve wellness that I can think of. Learning to cook was one of the most empowering things I ever did. And again, it was 10 years ago when I changed my diet.

So you didn't learn at home. So you had to teach yourself. Absolutely. And I realized so much of what I was buying was detrimental to my health. And I thought, okay, how do I do this in a way that's delicious? And it was so empowering. I know that's a giant mountain for some people to climb. But for me, I find it pleasurable. My favorite time of the day is my wife and I cook together. We share the work and it's not drudgery. And we do that, you know, five or six nights a week, you know, with great pleasure and seven nights during the pandemic. Of course, we had, you know, eons of time that we don't seem to have now again. Exactly. And that does help with cooking. But

as you said, it can be simple. And I think it's trying to just switch your mindset to make it something that's genuinely pleasurable and maybe sociable as well. So moving on to the second piece of advice, what would that be for our listeners? Savor. Savor whatever you're doing. Eating your food slowly, spending as much time eating it as it took to prepare. Whatever experience you're having, you're sitting in a garden, you're on the tube, savor it. We don't. We're constantly, to savor something is to be in the present, obviously. You have to be present to it to savor it. But our minds are usually 10 steps ahead. I know mine is. That's where I go. I'm always going to the next thing or the last thing.

So it's not something I mastered by any means, but I find that when I do it, I'm happiest. And so I make an effort to do it. Do you try and leave your phones in another room or away from the table when you're eating? Yes. Yes. I mean, having that little dog follow you around is like really terrible. I actually had a recent occasion to be at a place for five days without a phone or internet. I went to Tassajara, which is a Zen retreat in California. And it was astonishing, five days off media. It was liberating. I mean, it was weird. It took some getting used to. But it got to a point where I was just terrified of the moment driving out. It's a 14-mile road back to civilization. And at a certain point, I knew that the phone would start beeping again. And it was a very dark moment. But yeah, it's liberating. We should all have a period of the

day where our phone can't find us. I think that is very sage advice and something I need more of definitely in my life. It's hard. It's really a discipline. I think it's very important. I mean, this is one of the biggest changes in our lives in the last 15 years is that we feel naked if we don't have this computer next to us, this phone. And, you know, before smartphones, you either had it with you or you didn't have it with you. You didn't need it by your side.

And, but now we feel we must, but yet how do we get along for so long without it? So we can still, we can break that cord. Yeah. And it's also made it easy not to cook as well, because you can tap everything at the click of a button now. And the food shows up. Exactly. Which is an extraordinary change that I think is going to be increasingly powerful. So moving on to your third piece of advice for everyone. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit

superstore.ca to get started. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com. So this one I learned from my father, and now it sounds like an advertising cliche because it's been co-opted by Nike, but he was a great proponent of just do it.

He advised lots of people. He loved mentoring people. He had lots of young people who would come to him for advice. And he noticed they were usually paralyzed by some fear. There was something they wanted to do in their lives. They wanted to quit a job. They wanted to change careers. They wanted to buy a house. They wanted to get married. They wanted to have kids. And they were paralyzed by fear and playing out alternative scenarios and how it would work. And they couldn't come to a decision. And his advice invariably was do it. Just do it. And I know.

And he's pushed me over the cliff several times. You know, buying a house was one. And I've never regretted it. Those ideas you formulate as strong wishes or desires around changing your life, essentially, we waste a lot of time hesitating, imagining bad case scenarios. And my father did this professionally for people. He was a lawyer, but a very unusual kind of lawyer in that he liked advising people about their lives, not about their legal matters, although he would help them with that too. And my mother reminds me that it didn't always work out for all his clients, that there was the guy who quit his job to open a restaurant in Seattle and he crashed and burned. But whether he actually regrets it or not is another question because a dream deferred, you know, will always be with you. And even if the

dream fails, well, you gave it your best shot. And without doubt, you learn more from failures than from successes. So I don't know that he has any regrets. So anyway, that would be my third piece of advice. I think that's a particularly pertinent piece of advice, actually. And I think it's so easy to keep putting something off and not kind of taking the plunge. And actually, it moves me on really nicely to what I want to talk about next, which connects to your new book. And it's a really powerful conversation that you're opening up and maybe one that feels quite new to quite a lot of people about the truly potent power of plants.

And starting that off, I know you've written quite a lot about caffeine addiction. You gave up caffeine for about three months. How did you find that? Hard. Caffeine is, look, caffeine is a wonderful drug. I'm not against caffeine. I'm not a caffeine scold. I think there are more health benefits actually than detriments to it. But I gave it up to see, you can't really understand the power of a psychoactive in your life until you give it up. I mean, in a way, it was a dare on the part of a scientist who said, you're not going to understand your relationship to caffeine until you give it up. So I resolved to give it up for three months and it was really difficult. I went cold turkey,

which is not the way to do it, but for my purposes, it was the way to do it. You can taper off it fairly easily, but I felt I had days where I was walking around in a fog. I couldn't work. I couldn't concentrate. I didn't have headaches or flu-like symptoms as some people do, but I wasn't myself. And how weird is that to not feel yourself because of the absence of this foreign substance you take? It was a reminder of the power of this drug that we all take for granted and we're all involved with. 90% of people on earth use caffeine every day in some form. I know that people listening will be thinking, what are those top-line health benefits of caffeine and coffee? So could we pick up on that really quickly? Well, you know about the importance of antioxidants in the diet, something we normally get from plants. All plants produce

antioxidants. They need to, to protect themselves from the sun. The leading source of antioxidants in our diet today is coffee and tea. What does that tell us? It's not that they have so many antioxidants. It's like the only plants we're eating. And so we need antioxidants. We're not eating enough plants. So the ones you're getting in coffee and tea are really important. And the ones in green tea are particularly good. So that's one. There is research suggesting that coffee and tea, now, and I have to make this distinction, we don't know if it's the caffeine or the plant chemicals in coffee and tea. I'm guessing it's the plant chemicals more than the caffeine, are protective against several different

kinds of cancer, Parkinson's disease, dementia in general. It improves memory. And there's a lot of interesting research that suggests that if you study a subject and then have a cup of coffee or tea, you will do better on the test the next day because you will retain more of it. So it's a very good aid for memory. It helps with focus. It allows you to work harder. The one detrimental thing about caffeine is it does disturb your sleep. And it stays in your body for quite a long time. So it's wise to stop drinking coffee or tea by noon.

But it's also obviously completely socially acceptable. And that's what I really wanted to ask you about is obviously you've been really exploring psychoactives and this really potential potent power of plants yeah and i'm really interested in this continuum because obviously coffee is as you said it's incredibly powerful but it's completely socially acceptable it's something and it's not disruptive i mean in fact to the contrary it lubricates the working of society and the economy you know businesses love coffee you know and tea they give you, right? They give you free drugs and 20 minutes in which to enjoy it. Why are they doing that? It makes you a better worker.

So, yeah. So coffee and tea are not disruptive to society. Psychedelics, however, which I have been studying and writing about, are disruptive or can be. And they were in the 60s. And they were considered very disruptive. But we are learning, there is this renaissance of research in psychedelics, and we're learning that they're really important plant medicines, and that we should be thinking of them as aids to therapy. And they are healing people from depression, from anxiety, from obsessive-compulsive

disorder, from addictions of all kinds. I mean, it might seem counterintuitive that a drug could treat an addiction, but in fact, we have evidence now that psilocybin therapy, psilocybin is the chemical in magic mushrooms, can break smoking addictions, alcohol addictions, cocaine addictions. It's going to be trialed now, or it's about to be in treating eating disorders too. How amazing that these chemicals produced by plants and fungi can give people a kind of experience. Because it's not just the chemical, it's the kind of experience at occasions that shakes people out of these deep grooves, these destructive habits of both thought and behavior. So as a contribution to wellness and well-being, you know, we may be about to have

a very powerful new tool. It's absolutely fascinating. I actually know two people very well to whom it's been a kind of completely life-changing experience. And you can kind of palpably see the difference, which quite extraordinary and I guess to almost circle that right back to the beginning do you feel that almost that original quote eat food not too much mostly plants is indicative of the kind of total reframing of the way we're thinking about plants in general it's absolutely on our plate and understanding so much more about what we're eating it's not about 60% of our calories coming from ultra processed food anymore. But it's also about that shift in mindset on the power of plants and the kind of total

narrative that they can have such a kind of widely encompassing impact on our health, not just simply through broccoli. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, plants probably have a lot more to teach us yet that we don't know about. You know, think about how many psychoactives and food suck plants exist in the Amazon that we have yet to discover, yet we're burning down the Amazon. There are volumes of knowledge contained in these plants, and we are carelessly throwing them out.

So the work of preserving habitat in places like the Amazon, I mean, there may be future cures for cancer. There may be future cures for, you know, mental disorders. It's a high priority. I mean, I think we have to invest a lot more in botany and ethnobotany, the study of the human relationship with plants. Because traditional cultures all around the world know things about plants we don't know. Know healing plants, know psychoactive plants. And as we lose those cultures and we lose their languages, we're losing all that information. So as much as plants have given us, there's a lot more out there.

Yeah, absolutely. It almost seems to me a little bit that the kind of modern world, the speed, the busyness, So as much as plants have given us, there's a lot more out there. such obvious unlockers of our health, as you said, whether that's on this kind of much new frontier in terms of psychedelics and our mental health, but also on the most kind of obvious front of our just day-to-day physical health as well. Yeah. And, you know, look, I mean, the capitalist system does a lot better with inventing new chemicals that they can patent than finding plants that have old chemicals that work just as well or better. And so there's some disincentives too to doing this kind of work of exploration. But we owe it to ourselves and we owe it to the plants. Absolutely. Thank you. That was so interesting. I could have asked you a thousand questions. It's a great pleasure talking to you. Really appreciative of your time. Well, I loved that. I just feel so lucky to get to do what I do. And honestly,

that conversation with Michael was a real highlight of my year so far. And we're just moving from one fascinating conversation straight to the next. Welcome to our first ever Fact or Fad with Dr. Gemma Newman. The first trend that Gemma and I are going to be unpacking is intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting was your most requested topic for this section and I have to say I was a little bit surprised by the data and I think you might be too. But first of all here is Michael's top line on it. My wife and I tried it. I lost a lot of weight on it, more than I wanted to lose. So I stopped. Plus, I love breakfast. If you're thinking about it for weight loss, I mean, my anecdotal response is it seems to work. But the research is equivocal. So is it a fact or is it a fad? Let's find out

what Dr. Gemma Newman thinks. So Gemma, we're going to start with intermittent fasting. Could we start by actually just unpacking what it means? Yeah, so intermittent fasting is an eating pattern that includes hours or days of no or minimal food consumption without depriving yourself of essential nutrients. That's basically what it means. There's loads of different types out there. You've got the 5-2 diet where you're fasting for two days each week or minimal calories for two days each week. You've got the daily time-restricted eating, which is quite interesting actually because the time-restricted eating doesn't specify that you have to have reduced calories, but you just have to eat within a certain time window during the day and yeah there are so many different iterations of it it's a huge topic and

there's loads of animal studies on it quite a lot of human studies but nothing long term so yeah we could delve into that in quite a lot of depth actually. I want to make sure as well for each of these topics that we look at we look at how popular they are so I'm going to check the Instagram hashtags for each one so on this one just for context for everybody we've got 3.4 million hashtags for fasting and 4.9 million hashtags for intermittent fasting so there's 8.3 million hashtags it's a lot I didn't actually look at five two I'm sure that would absolutely ramp up the numbers as well so clearly this is a topic on a lot of our listeners minds do you think there's a lot of health benefit

there might be um I mean there's there's so much I can say basically there's there's two main researchers Dr. Sachin Panda at the Salk Institute he was the one that kind of created the phrase time-restricted eating and you've got Dr.. Walter Longo, who's a Nobel Prize-nominated scientist working out of Milan and California. He's done loads of work in animal studies, especially on intermittent fasting for things like longevity and for cancer and for all sorts of things.

So yes, there is a lot of interesting and emerging evidence for potential benefits, but the evidence is really mixed when it comes to actual humans living free range in the world and there's this recent study out of China that was published which showed disappointingly for a lot of these researchers that there weren't any additional benefits to fasting than simply caloric restriction it was a huge blow I I think, to actually read that for a lot of these researchers who are really delving into intermittent fasting to show that

the main benefits in this particular large, well-done trial was simply that people were eating less. It didn't matter when they ate less, they were just eating less. And that's the main driver of weight loss in the trial. So they weren't seeing those other metabolic benefits? No and that's I think that's where a lot of the science is really exciting you know a lot of the researchers are excited about the metabolic benefits of fasting over and above caloric restriction but actually it's just the calorie consumption that seems to be the most important thing. So as it stands, the only factual element we could potentially say about intermittent fasting is that it could be beneficial for weight loss. But outside of that, the reported benefits are

yet unknown and possibly not quite as good as we think they might be, or thought they might be. Yeah, I think that's a fair summary. And, you. And I don't want to do a disservice to all the researchers out there who found some amazing things, but we're yet to see, certainly for longevity, a lot of evidence that it really works for human health. I mean, Dr. Longo's research is fascinating. For example, he has done human research, which was a trial on his fasting mimicking diet in people who may have things like obesity or type 2 diabetes. And when they adhered to his diet plan for five days a month for three months, then they found that it reduced risk factors for long-term disease. So lowered their blood glucose, reduced their markers of inflammation, helped them to lose weight.

So, you know, these are kind of encouraging because if somebody can manage that way of eating every so often and they enjoy it, then great. It may have additional benefits, but it may not. And a lot of the studies we're seeing now show that it may not. And there are risks as well. And this is something that's important to say. You know, it could harm people who are frail or have anorexia or bulimia, or it could even induce disordered eating in a lot of people who are sort of becoming fixated on the timings and the time windows and what they should eat.

It's not good if you're recovering from surgery or, you know, you're on insulin or hypoglycemic medications. You have to be super careful. So, yeah, there are potential risks as well. So I've tried it over the last couple of weeks um and it's really I found it very interesting I'm quite prone to IBS style symptoms can get quite bloated and have quite a sensitive stomach and I did notice that as I got to like 14 15 hours every day for about a week I didn't have any of those symptoms which

was really interesting and I don't know if that was just giving my digestive system a pause for a little bit longer than I normally would but I found that very interesting I did feel like I had quite a lot of energy but by the time I got to about a week to 10 days in it became very very clear to me that this could be quite a dangerous diet it's for exactly the reasons that you just said which is that it feels incredibly dogmatic and you could see how quite quickly you could say I feel less bloated I feel more energized this is really amazing okay so I can't come out to dinner with you and I can't meet you for breakfast and I can't do this and I can't do that and quite quickly that as you said could trigger some quite unhealthy habits around food um and I was very very very aware of that and I've you know everything else I've tested

I've never felt that in quite such a way that's really interesting um and I think that's something to be aware of because disordered eating patterns are not talked about enough, certainly when it comes to intermittent fasting research and research on women as well. There's not enough data on how it affects the female body. Definitely. Do you think you would class it as a fact or a fad? I have to err on the side of fad for the sake of the recent research that I've read showing that caloric restriction is probably more significant but I don't want to discount it because I think there's a reason why it's been in our culture for so long and there are so many scientists that are so

passionate about it and that's it for me this is the end of the show and I just want to thank you guys so much for listening and coming on this journey of feeling well with me. I would absolutely love to hear from you. Please do rate it, review it, share it on social media. It makes all the difference. Plus, if you have a wellness trend you want us to put to the fact or fad test, or if there's someone you'd love me to interview, I really want to know because I want this podcast to be reflective of you and your wellness journey too so just let me know you can find the brand on social at deliciouslyella or email us podcast at deliciouslyella.com and just remember if you are going to make any big changes to your lifestyle it is always worth consulting your GP so huge thank you for listening. I cannot

wait to see you next week. We're going to be talking about behavioral change, healthy habits and mindful eating. And huge thank you to Curly Media who are partners in producing this podcast. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-b at l-i-b-s-y-n.com.