The Wellness Scoop - Five Pillars of Health

Episode Date: January 12, 2021

We take a look at the simple, every day practices that can transform our mental and physical health from what we eat to how we sleep, the role of exercise, water and moments of calm. We’re answering all the key questions on why your five-a-day matters, why gut health has such a big impact on our wellbeing, what mindfulness means and whether we really need eight hours of sleep. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hi and welcome to the Delicious Yellow podcast with me Ella Mills and for those of you who have been listening along since we started you may be as happy as I am to hear that my husband the CEO of Delicious Yellow my business partner and former co-host of the Delicious Yellow podcast is back in action. I am indeed and very excited to be so. So this year the Delicious Yellow podcast will once again be co-hosted by me and Matthew Mills. So wishing you all a happy new year, a happy Christmas. We are still recording at home because of coronavirus restrictions. So we're recording in our kitchen. Both the girls are napping.

So fingers crossed that stays the case while we keep going. And one of the things we want to do at the start of the podcast is start taking some of your questions because we get so many questions. And we hope that will be really helpful for everyone so I've got four questions for today but for your questions for next week please email us with any feedback anything you'd like to know to podcast at deliciousiella.com so the first question we had from one of our readers was what has been your biggest achievement of 2020 gosh it has to be Mills, our little girl who was born in October of 2020. She was definitely the brightest, brightest spark to what was at times a very difficult year.

But yeah, undoubtedly little May. I think we have a joint one. The biggest achievement of 2020. And then I suppose keeping the business going through what was an incredibly difficult year and to emerge out the other side of it, we're still in a really good shape and really exciting plans going forward. So I think keeping the business going in what was an utterly mad, mad year was another thing that I know we're super proud of. Yeah, absolutely. And watching Sky learn to walk and start talking and grow is just unbelievable she's now 17 months and may is about three months and they're just genuine heaven exhausting but heaven on earth so the second

question we had is what is the one piece of advice that you would give to feel healthier and happier this year gosh i would say well for me anyway they are waking up with purpose each day. They are living with gratitude in every part of what you do each day and then just remaining present. I think it's so easy to get so far ahead of yourself. And I just bring things back to today, trying to find the things I'm grateful for today and feeling a deep sense of purpose around those. That's typically when I'm in my happiest. I think for me the one piece of advice I'd give on top of that which I completely agree with is the importance of enjoying what you do I think especially in January I feel like it's particularly prevalent right now is that so often when people look at changing their health and their happiness and their lifestyle we start thinking about deprivation I'm going to stop

this I'm going to stop that I'm going to stop this, I'm going to stop that, I'm going to take this away. And instead of looking at it as a positive, I'm going to do more of this and finding the things you enjoy. And it's exactly what we're going to talk about today is that exercise, sleep, eating well, it all has an amazing impact on both our physical and mental health. But ultimately, for anything to be sustainable, it's got to be enjoyable, you've got to want to do it. and so stopping looking at things as a one-size-fits-all and starting to look at it what do I like so that you can actually incorporate these really healthy practices in your life so I love yoga that's what keeps me exercising I really really don't like vegetables like lettuce but I absolutely love rocket you know it's such a silly example, but you know, do what you like, what you look forward to and don't think of health and

happiness as a kind of chore, as a to-do list. Think of it as the things that you enjoy and getting to do more of that. And don't feel you need to emulate anyone in that. So if you love yoga, but hate HIIT classes and burpees, don't feel you need to do that and vice versa if that's the case for you so enjoy it so that it lasts the other question we had is how is life with two girls under two so it's been a very different experience for me between the two girls so my mum passed away about 15 months before Sky was born and I lived in a bit of a cloud of sadness after my mum had died and when Sky was born it felt like she literally transported everything that was sad that I was feeling

and turned it into happiness and she was just this absolute joy in my life and there was a deep intensity I think to those emotions whereas with May and this is kind of representative in her personality now as well she's just so chill and it's been an easier transition into two and a kind of less intense transition almost than it felt with having one but they're quite different in their personalities I mean May's only three months old but you can start to see their personalities emerging Skye's personality has definitely emerged she is boisterous and strong-willed and hilarious whereas May seems much kind of calmer and cooler and more relaxed. But it's just the best thing in the world.

I mean, it gives, I just mentioned purpose. I mean, my central purpose is the girls. And I just feel so lucky to have two such sweet little girls at home. It makes hard work and everything else we do feel completely worthwhile. Yeah, and I think one of the blessings of how much time we've all had to spend at home in the last year has been all the extra time with them. I definitely felt when Skye was born, I was back at work after about a month and I had lots of time with her, but I feel like I've had infinitely more time with both of them at the moment. And that has just been

magic. And as Matt said, May is really, really chill and she's really calm and so as a postpartum experience it's certainly been a lot easier this time around I think also knowing what to expect but it is just magic they keep us so busy but so much happier than I think we've ever ever been and the final question for today is how are the plans going for the delicious Cielo restaurant? They're going well so it's been a bit of a topsy-turvy ride so basically there was a change in planning laws in the UK which meant that we could change what was our cafe which is much more focused around takeaway food to where we could put in a full-service kitchen where we can do much more cooking on site so we're in the process of it now we're're just a couple of weeks

away from actually starting the building works. We've got various planning approvals done, outdoor seating licenses done, all these kind of technical bits that seem menial, but they take a long time to come by. But we're super, super excited about it. We've got the most amazing head chef who we're thrilled about. We've been doing lots of recipe testing with him, which is tasting incredible. And it's just going to be I think a much more elevated experience to what we've ever been able to do before from a cooking perspective in the site so we'll have a new takeaway window where we'll be serving smoothies and coffees and takeaway breakfast and lunch boxes but the main focus of it will be a sit-down restaurant and we are super super excited about it yeah it's gonna be it's been

a kind of dream of ours hasn't it since we started working together so seeing it actually take shape is just magic and as you said alan our head chef is genuine magic as well so it's gonna be really good and then this episode today i guess is a bit of a recap and a focus on our health as a general thing because obviously what we try and do on the delicious yellow podcast is get really stuck in to all kinds of different topics involving our mental health and our physical health and trying to help us all learn together to see what we can do to improve both of those aspects of our lives but sometimes we can get so deep into one topic that we stop looking at the whole picture and how it all comes together. And that's really what we

wanted to do today, partly because we've got something that we've just finally released, which brings it all together. And also because it is January and it's that time of year where we do often look at ways in which we could possibly improve our health this year. And we really feel like this is one of them. And, you know, so often, as I said, we look possibly improve our health this year and we really feel like this is one of them and you know so often as I said we look at changing our health as a negative instead of a positive and at Delicious Yellow we do believe so strongly that health is a joy and it should be fun and it should be about abundance and colour and deliciousness and how can we do that. So alongside the restaurant opening we've got some really exciting plans for 2021. And one of them is a whole new section of our app, which is about bringing together the

holistic view of health, which is what we really believe in at Delicious Yellow, that 360 approach. And it's been almost 10 years since my health changed back in mid-2011 and when I really wanted to start learning about health and nutrition. And I started looking at it from a food perspective. For those who aren't as familiar with why we started Delicious Yellow and why we do what we do, it was because back in 2011, I was a student. I was very healthy and out of nowhere I got very very ill was diagnosed with a condition that impacted the functioning of my autonomic nervous system so everything from my heart rate to circulation digestion blood pressure I had chronic fatigue I had chronic infections that put me on antibiotics including antibiotic drips for several years I had migraines I had

constant body pain you name it I basically had. And after several months and all kinds of different medications, I realized that that just wasn't fully working for me. And I became more interested in what else I could do to help my health. And I started looking at food first and I began changing my diet. And I guess coming back to what I was just saying, I realized so quickly that if I wanted to eat healthily and I wanted to nurture my body through what I was eating and eat more foods like broccolis and beans and nuts and seeds, I needed it to be delicious so that I wanted to do it day in, day out. And that's where Delicious Yellow came from. That's why I started the blog originally at deliciousyellow.com in 2012 to learn to cook and learn to make myself want to do this. And I loved that part of it. But

what I came to realize really quickly was that food was just one pillar. It was just one part of the picture. And it was so deeply connected in every way to the rest of my lifestyle. And that was stress management and tools for things like anxiety, as well as looking at sleep and relationships and basically every part of my every day. And when that came together, I realized that that created a much brighter picture, really. And so that really came to inform our thinking last year on what we do at Delicious Yellow and how we can help people most. And it felt that there were five pillars of that. There's food, you know, what we eat and how that impacts on our bodies, how we move our bodies, our exercise and what we enjoy there

and how to make that, again, a real part of our everyday. Mindfulness, and I know mindfulness can be a bit of a buzzword, not something people always relate to, but in that sense, it's about creating periods of calm in our day times where our body is able to go into more of a rest and digest setting and able to calm our nervous system down from the kind of natural stresses of everyday modern life especially again with all the influx of those stresses that 2020 brought on and then, hydration, making sure we really are having enough water, enough fluids every day, and sleep. And that those five things really made all the difference to our

health. And so in today's episode, what we want to do is, I guess, give you a highlights, an overview, a summary of why those five pillars matter, why it's worth looking at them, why it's worth tracking them in some ways on our app and our new MyTracker function in there, that holistic way of looking at your health and calculating your health across the week. And we're going to start with food and why food matters. As I said, food was my personal starting point. And it's an area that I'm completely fascinated by. My personal aim was to become a nutritionist back in 2012 when I became fascinated by this area. And I got 18 months into the degree and unfortunately had to pause it. Well, not unfortunately, it was because Delicious Yellows became so busy, it exploded, but I

went back to it to finish it at the beginning of 2020. And I've been so enjoying that. And I think really what we all know and what we're seeing time and time again is that the gut is such a huge part of that and it's actually a relatively new science and something that we're learning about every single day but it is absolutely fundamental but it's one of those kind of areas where I think it's naturals have lots of questions you know what is our gut microbiome what do all these microbes in our gut actually do? How unique are they to each of us? What is the difference depending on what we eat? How does that feed our gut microbes? Is there a one size fits all? Should we all be looking at different

things depending who we are? And are there a few kind of key rules and things that we should be looking out for? And one of the people that we spoke to about this, who is absolutely fascinating, is Tim Spector, who lots of you may well have heard of. He's an absolute leader in the area of gut health. And he's a professor of epidemiology at King's College. And he has some fascinating things to say about this. These guys produce thousands of chemicals, and about half the vitamins and nutrients that flow around in our bodies. They're important for our digestion, our immune system. These chemicals interact with our brains to make the difference between us being happy or sad. They can make us full or hungry. And they're really important for controlling allergies and the immune system and basically

keeping everything under control and the way to think about this microbiome is is not as a diffused set of nasty bugs sitting in your poo but actually as a virtual organ you know we've been thinking of our differences in base of our genetics and we're 99.5% similar. So we're all fifth cousins, basically. Everyone in London is probably on average a fifth cousin. But we're not when it comes to our gut microbes. We share only about 25% of our gut microbes with each other. So you can tell much more about someone from examining their gut microbes than you actually can from their DNA. And this is me as a geneticist.

Once you realize this individuality, even within the same family, even if you've grown up together or you've been with your spouse for 30 years eating the same foods, you're going to have a very different response to the same meal. And it starts to explain many of these mysteries that we've been looking at. And I think the best example is a really good study last year in California of 609 overweight Californians called the Diet FITS study. They all wanted them to lose a little bit of weight. They were slightly calorie restricted but not majorly it was a healthy diet and one was focusing on low fat and the other was on low carbs and this was supposed to be the definitive study to prove

that a low carb high fat diet better, as the new trend is. It's like a keto diet. Yeah, it was a sort of milder version of keto diet. It wasn't anything like as high levels of fat as that, which have to be over about 70%. And it turned out that both groups lost weight, as happens in most diets, but they both lost about five kilos. It was a complete draw.

So the paper said, oh, this is terrible. You know, we still can't decide what to do. But within each group, some people had lost 25 kilos and some people actually gained 10 kilos. So if you look to the individuals rather than the means, you store much more of an important story that if you could work out which diet was going to suit you you could be in that minus 25 category and avoid being in those people that that diet really didn't suit at all and we think you know these people did comply yeah and all the all the data in all the studies does show this enormous difference and at the moment everyone's just being told you're

useless you should feel guilty you know you're you don't have the willpower of someone else. And yet, you know, the reality of the biology is that we're all so different. The way we interact with food, even, you know, within the carbohydrates or within the fats, we might be responding differently to different types of them. So once you understand that, it sort of puts all the advice we get about food into a rather different perspective. And the idea that there is one size that fits all really no longer makes any sense. What determines the fact that two siblings or even two twins or, you know, a husband and wife or flatmates or something have such a different microbiome? We start life with a blank slate.

So we're born pretty much sterile. So we acquire all our gut microbes from day zero. And that's why every mammal has a natural birth that's very messy. The whole idea is that microbes enter the baby that way from the mother and that allows the baby to then colonize with the right microbes in their gut so they can then break down the rather complicated carbs and proteins in breast milk and that starts the whole process so for the first three years of life we're building up a this complex relationship of our gut microbes. But those first three years are quite crucial. And that's why we think that there's big differences in the first three years between babies born by cesarean section,

which is now about a third of the population. And breastfeeding, of course, is another way to introduce the microbes as well, which you don't get with normal formula feed. So everything is starting to make sense from a microbial point of view, what we know is healthy, natural birth, breastfeeding, and also not over-sterilizing that period of childhood, which we started in the 80s, sort of getting obsessed with spraying surfaces with detergents and wiping out all microbes, when in fact a healthy kid is someone who gets dirty and plays with animals and rolls around in the soil.

We shouldn't worry about our dog Austin licking Skye's face as he likes to do now. Absolutely, you should encourage it, probably. I mean, as long as you know where he's been. Oh, I don't know about that. More or less. Hasn't rolled around. It's a mystery to us all.

Hasn't rolled around with a dead badger or something but um in general studies show that your skin microbes are certainly a lot healthier if you've got a dog than if you don't have a dog so how do you define a healthy gut and what are the key things that we can do to actually get one we did a study with a citizen science project called the british gut project which teamed up with a citizen science project called the British Gut Project, which teamed up with the American Gut Project that we run, looked at 11,000 people's gut microbes. They all sent in their samples, called it the poo in the post study. And they filled in questionnaires about what they were eating. And it turned out that people who had the healthiest guts, which

is generally the most diverse, were the people eating more than 30 different types of plant in a week. And you say, whoa, 30 types of plant, who are you? You must work in a greengrocer's or something. But people forget what a plant is. A plant can be a nut, a seed, a grain. It can be a herb, a spice. And so it's actually not that hard as long as you don't have the same thing every day. What can we do to add to our microbiome? Firstly, have many plant-based diet, high in fibre, try and achieve as a goal 30 different types of plant we should have regular fermented foods and you know things like the three k's kefir kombucha kimchi a small amount regularly is what you need not rather than one big feast every every two weeks so a little shot of something as you leave the house is good. Then focus on

high polyphenol foods. So these used to be called antioxidants. These are chemicals that all plants have as defense mechanisms that they used to fight off the sunshine or infections or stop other animals eating them. And generally they're in the dark-coloured fruits and vegetables, so things like berries or red cabbage and things like this. And they're also in nuts, seeds. They're in foods like coffee, green tea, olive oil and red wine. So they're like rocket fuel for your gut microbes. The other thing to do is probably to not graze as much. So move away from this idea that we should be eating something

every two or three hours. Microbes actually like a period of fasting. So we always fast overnight unless you're up at the fridge at two in the morning. Most people are sleeping. And that's how the gut community comes out that cleans up our gut lining during that time. And instead of eating the food in your gut, they start to eat the mucus layer of your gut, which has sugars. It's actually quite sweet and tasty for them. And if they nibble away at it, it keeps it nice and clean.

Other things are good. So good night's sleep. There's some evidence in animals that exercise is also good for your gut microbes. Avoiding antibiotics. We use probably three times too many antibiotics. And a lot of people totally abuse them. And they can, in some people, wipe out your gut microbes.

In others, it's only a temporary effect. It's hard to know. And avoid highly processed foods. So avoid all the chemicals that we were talking about, artificial sweeteners, et cetera. And there's some evidence that actually sugar might be better for you

than actually these artificial sweeteners. So we now know that many of the other ingredients of fast foods or ultra processed foods are bad for the gut as well so artificial sweeteners everything that's in a diet coke a diet pepsi and many other foods now because as they're trying to reduce the sugar content they're replacing it with these chemicals, are not recognised by our microbes as a natural chemical and our body reacts and produces abnormal chemicals in response which can make us fatter and more likely to have diabetes. So I think sweeteners are really one of the biggest threats to the future as we're switching from sugar to these artificial compounds

which no one's bodies have seen before. They're often made from coal tar or some industrial waste byproduct. And so microbes have no clue what to do with them, and they struggle to break them down. But there's also emulsifiers, and there's various acids and enzymes and mixtures that go in these chemical processing that also probably play a negative role for our gut microbes. So when we were thinking about how we would bring all of this together, we started working on this in mid last year, so mid 2020.

And we started tracking ourselves, me in particular, how many plant-based foods per week we were eating to try and get to this goal of 30. And initially I thought it would be really, really difficult. It would be something that would be tough to do. But I think with just a tiny bit of planning, it is actually really, really easy to do. And I hope that by introducing this to our app

and utilizing it as part of our tracker, you'll start to see that just with a couple of small, what should hopefully feel like really manageable changes, it'll be something you'll be able to integrate too. Yeah, one of the things I noticed as I started to think about the 30 was just when I was cooking, I would just, you know, we make loads of one tray or one pot meals at home, obviously being quite busy with the girls and with work. And so it's just things like if I was doing a tray bake with roast potatoes, roast sweet potatoes, roast carrots, broccoli, mushrooms, say, I would then always add pumpkin seeds or pine nuts or sunflower seeds or black beans or chickpeas or something to the tray as well. And if you add two of those, again,

it's just all those little things I found really started to push our 30 into 40 into 50 and actually really made it a lot easier and I think one of the reasons why that is so important and Tim's book touching it briefly is is fiber and that fiber is actually just so incredibly essential and one of the people that speaks really well about fiber and one of the people who I think has explained it very clearly to our listeners in the past is Megan Rossi, who's a doctor and a leading researcher also at King's College on the nutritional therapies that are so influential on our gut health. What are the best types of fiber? What are the easiest things just to add into your everyday to be able to get that? Yeah. So any plant-based whole food, so whole grains, nuts, seeds,

all the veggies, all your fruits, legumes, all those sorts of things. And it's little tips that you can do, for example, on your breakfast. If you just get a handful of mixed seeds and just sprinkle them on your breakfast, in your porridge or whatever you're having, that's like an easy win to add an extra little boost of fiber. So when I was growing up in England, the big kind of buzzword for health as your daily checker was whether you were getting your five a day. So five portions of fruit and veg a day. The advice was then upgraded to 10 a day. So why is five a day so important? So the person who really answered this beautifully for us was Dr. Gemma Newman, who's a GP and a passionate believer in a plant-based lifestyle. And she had

a lot to say on it. It's funny that we say five portions because that's the government guideline, but there was actually a study done by Imperial not long ago. They looked at 95 studies and they pulled the data and they realised that if you have 10 portions of fruits or vegetables a day, then you actually reduce your risk of dying early by up to about a third. And they didn't find an upper limit of benefit at all. So basically, we know that the more fruits and vegetables we eat, the less likely we are to die early. Why? Well, they've got phytonutrients, antioxidants, vitamins, minerals.

And in fact, some of the phytonutrients we haven't even named yet. There are that many. And also, they tend to have a synergistic effect. So we're not going to necessarily even be able to quantify how much benefit we're getting from these substances and what is a phytonutrient it's a type of nutrient that only comes from plants and things like lycopene from tomatoes sulforaphane from cruciferous vegetables so if you think about kale and cauliflower and broccoli, those are called cruciferous vegetables. And they contain this amazing thing called sulforaphane, which helps the liver through phase two detoxification.

So it basically allows your body to kind of process the things that are going through the liver effectively. And what's amazing is that you get them from these particular vegetables. What does the fiber do? Why is that a good thing? Oh, it's amazing for so many reasons. Well, it stops you from getting constipated. So therefore, it reduces your risk of things like varicose veins and appendicitis and diverticulitis. But also more than that, what's amazing is that it helps to feed your beneficial gut microbes. So you've got these incredible microbes that serve you inside your gut and all over your body. And when you eat fiber-rich foods like fruits and vegetables

and whole grains and beans and lentils and chickpeas and oats, all these kinds of foods, they help them to produce short-chain fatty acids, things like butyrate and acetate and propionate. And these are hugely beneficial because they feed our beneficial gut bugs and they allow them to then make things like serotonin our feel-good neurotransmitter they help to modulate dopamine they help us to make that vitamins and minerals inside the gut from the bacteria that we're housing so having having a variety of plant foods is the best way of maintaining optimal health. And I think what's really interesting to see here is that, you know, one of the biggest misconceptions, which again, we touched on at the beginning of this episode, is that eating well

is about restriction, and it's about dieting or calorie counting. And actually what I think on a personal level, we completely believe is that it should be the polar opposite but also that's what the research shows is that again if you want to get anywhere near these 30 and you want to have all this fiber that we so desperately need you need to be eating in abundance and you need to be having three meals a day and snacks and really enjoying that and I think what's so interesting is that actually dieting yo-yo dieting, calorie counting restriction is actually obviously very negative for our mental health, but it's also really bad for our gut health and our physical health. And we shouldn't be scared of things like carbohydrates. It's absolutely

essential. You know, even 70% of our immune cells are within our gut. So from everything from our immune system and beyond, it really, really makes a huge difference. And here's a little bit more information again about why things like restrictive eating and yo-yo dieting can be really negative for our physical health and for our gut health. This is an ad from BetterHelp Online Therapy. We always hear about the red flags to avoid in relationships, but it's just as important to focus on the green flags. If you're not quite sure what they look like, therapy can help you identify those qualities so you can embody the green flag energy and find it in others. BetterHelp offers therapy 100% online, and sign-up only takes a few minutes.

Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. 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. Any sort of restrictive diet we know can affect our gut microbes because when we go on these diets,

often we actually have less dietary fiber, which is our gut bacteria's favorite food. And we can also tend to grab for things like the sugar-free products, which have a lot of different additives in it, which we think probably aren't very good for our gut microbes. So there's actually been some really interesting studies in animals where they've shown that through transplanting the poop sample of a mouse that's kind of yo-yo dieted into another mouse, the mouse who got that poop sample was more likely to gain weight. So we think that that yo-yo dieting does actually predispose us to, I guess, gaining weight faster, that regain cycle that happens in a lot of people who do dieting often. An important thing that not many people realize is actually, yeah, fiber is a type of carbohydrate and fiber is found in all our different plant-based foods. The really cool thing about dietary fiber is that humans actually can't digest it.

Its sole purpose is to feed the trillions of bacteria in your gut. So if you're cutting out these really important plant-based fiber sources, then actually you're starving your gut bacteria of their favorite food. And they're very powerful. If they are hungry, they will get hangry. And some studies have suggested they may start to eat away at the gut lining, particularly in the animal studies. So we want to feed them all the time.

So although those diets in the short term can help people lose weight, what we're seeing is actually in the long term, they're going to regain that weight. And they're at higher risk of things like heart disease, diabetes, et cetera. Because they're not looking after the body as a whole. It's solely a kind of aesthetic thing. Absolutely. And our gut microbes, again, do things like talk to our pancreas, which is involved in diabetes, talk to our heart. So if we're not feeding them, they can aggravate those sort of diseases. 70% of our immune cells actually

lay along that nine meter digestive tract. So if we want less sick days, we need to have good gut health. Of course, eating was really important, but obviously staying hydrated is really important. And it sounds so simple and so basic that I'm sure some of you are thinking, why are you telling me this? And I appreciate that completely. Actually, interestingly, on my nutritional therapy degree last year, I had to write an entire essay on the chemical composition of water, why the chemical composition of water was so important for human health. And it was

absolutely fascinating. And I won't bore you too much with the molecular structure of water and why the polar bonds and so on and so forth are so important for us. But just to say that actually the advice on water varies a little bit, you know, the World Health Organization recommends 2.2 litres a day for women and 2.9 for men. But of course, that changes with increased physical activities or hot temperatures, depending where in the world you are. In the UK, the NHS actually only recommend 1.2 litres of water a day. In the US, it's 1.9 litres. So, you know, we're taking two liters as a kind of rough aim, but obviously it's going to vary person to person. And actually about 20% of our fluid or

our water intake actually comes from what we eat. So again, being conscious of that range of fruit and veggies makes a big difference because things with a high water content really helps get that goal. So, you know, your cucumber, tomatoes, cantaloupe, broccoli, strawberries, spinach, watermelon, peaches, apples, and so on on and so forth but actually water really is the foundation of our health so there's a reason why those few litres really make a big difference on a simple level you know 60 to 70 percent of our body is actually just composed of water and it is truly involved in literally everything from regulating our body temperature to helping transport substances all around the body, keeping our heart healthy, breaking down our food. So our fats, our proteins, our carbohydrates into substances that can ultimately then become useful in terms of creating energy sources in the cells in the body.

You know, it's absolutely pivotal for brain function and so much more. I mean, literally every cell organ and tissue actually needs water to exist, to function. And so that little thing like filling up your cup from the sink actually really makes a massive difference to your life. As I said, everything, physical performance, helping digestion, headaches, you know, so on. So it really is something to be conscious of as you go through the day. As I said, it sounds simple. And I guess all the things we're talking about today are simple to some extent, but that's why I think they're beautiful. That's why they're amazing because actually they are all little things that we can do. We can add an extra portion of fruit or veg to our meals. We can have an extra glass of water.

We can try and go on a walk on a lunch break or maybe even take a meeting as a phone call on a walk. We can try and switch off Netflix that second earlier to get a little bit more sleep. We can try and have 10 minutes of calm, even if that is plugging into meditation on the train. It is just those little things. The water is the smallest of them all to some extent, but actually it can really have a big impact on your overall health. So particularly at the start of last year, when the pandemic hit, the first thing that I found dropped out of my life was exercise. I was so busy with work that I just genuinely didn't feel like I had time to do it each day. And the longer I went without doing it, I started to feel that I would

get more down, I would get more stressed. And when I started to introduce exercise back into my life, I noticed literally, it felt like an overnight improvement to my exercise back into my life I noticed literally it felt like an overnight improvement to my mental health my stress levels and when we were thinking about how we could best integrate this into our app and into our tracker I wanted to think about it in the way that would be the most accessible the most easy to do so it had to be a focus on activities that you would enjoy which is why we have lots of different types of exercise on the app and they have to be broken down into bite-sized chunks that you can easily fit into your life absolutely and actually interestingly exercise

was my second thing as well when I started to change my life my doctor actually put me on exercise rehabilitation program and it started with literally like one minute on a inclined rowing machine and built up but I've come to appreciate so much how much it impacts on my mental health and I think what's been interesting to understand about why exercise matters is that that's not just anecdotal exercise has such a fundamental impact on the body and it's interesting to understand just on a basic level what happens you know ask that question what happens to our body when we exercise and one of the people who put this question to is a fascinating guy whose area of expertise is really in mental health and the link between mental health and exercise he's got 15 years

of clinical experience in that space and it's Dr Brendan Stubbs who's a clinical academic physiotherapist at King's College. What actually happens in our brains and it's Dr Brendan Stubbs who's a clinical academic physiotherapist at King's College. What actually happens in our brains and our bodies when we exercise and why does it help? Sure that's a good question and there's a number of different answers to that and it's difficult to isolate any particular mechanism but I can give you an overview of some of the research which which independs that so whenever we exercise say if it's aerobic exercise where we're increasing our heart rate will so that's kind of running swimming running swimming brisk walking where you're getting your heart rate

up that will lead to increased blood flow to your brain and and the brain's a fantastic computer where there's lots of connections to various different parts within the brain and when you exercise you will get blood flow which increases movement and connectivity between different parts of the brain and you can also get new cells forming with exercise over time which is called neurogenesis and one of the areas which we're really excited about is looking at a particular area in the brain called the hippocampus which is really key for developing memories from short to long term and various thoughts feelings and emotions and there's good evidence when you look at people doing physical activity over time that it can

help protect this area from shrinking within the brain but even when you give exercises and intervention you can actually get cell regeneration this particular area of the brain as well. I think what's particularly interesting on something like exercise is how it impacts to such an extent both on our mental health and on our physical health which is why it's so incredibly important on our mental health we see how early intervention can have a big impact on things like depression and depressive thoughts on a day-to-day basis but that even just a one-off exercise session can have a phenomenally powerful impact on our brain and again this is something that

brendan speaks on really really eloquently this hippocampus region is really important for consolidating memories from short to long term and also thoughts feelings and emotions so if we look at dementia or if we look at depression the hippocampus often shrinks in these conditions as well and what we've been able to demonstrate in over 700 people is that exercise can increase this area in the hippocampus from people's baseline compared to a control condition so you can have a real powerful impact when you engage in aerobic exercise over a 12-week period to increase the volume within this key area in the brain that's implicated in various cognitive and mental health conditions as well. What's interesting what we said there is 12-week

period so actually this is something where you could start to see results actually relatively quickly. Absolutely. So you could, within a relatively short time frame, see improvements in this really key area within the brain. I should also bring it back to say that even within a one-off exercise session, you can have a powerful impact on your brain and also within various growth factors so earlier on i talked about um molecules which can help with brain growth such as bdnf yeah and a one-off exercise session for 30 minutes can increase the production of this bdnf which helps cell regeneration within your brain so just doing a one-off exercise can have a powerful neuroprotective effect on your brain as well that's also really interesting because one thing we've talked about a lot it sort of generally in all our conversations our podcast guests in all different areas is how people often feel like

they need an all-or-nothing approach you know they need to be exercising every day or they need to be eating healthily every day but actually what you're saying is that's you know what ideally going to be moving you know five times a week or so but actually even one time can have a powerful effect so if you're traveling you've got long hours some days that's okay if you try and get it in in between that will still have a tangible effect on your brain absolutely it will and these are really powerful molecules which can really protect your brain and also help your mental health as well so just that one off 20 minutes 30 minutes you can have a real stress reducing impact and protective effect on your brain and cognition so don't ever just think that a 30 minute session won't help your cognitive or mental health there's proven evidence that it

will and when you say cognitive so even if we take one step outside of mental health there's proven evidence that it will and when you say cognitive so even if we take one step outside of mental health issues for people who are feeling pretty good now but it the exercise will still have that powerful impact on their brain in terms of just kind of mental clarity for the day or kind of general cognitive ability yeah Yeah, absolutely. So there's really good evidence that that one-off session of exercise can improve people's cognition, concentration, attention as well. And if you look at brain scans, you can also see increases in connectivity between various areas within the brain as well. So just from that one-off exercise session, you can have powerful impacts on people who don't have any mental or cognitive health impact so it really is for everyone it really is for everyone absolutely everyone and any age any age no matter where you are if you're you know a young child

right up to the end of uh you know later on in life so a key question around exercise is is how much should you exercise is Is one really intense, long session a week, right? Or should we be breaking it up? And to get to the bottom of this, we spoke to Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman. Pretty much everybody has converged on this sort of baseline of, which is 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise, 75 minutes a week of vigorous exercise. So moderate is sort of, you know, you can talk while doing it. Vigorous is where it's kind of hard to really, you know, have a good conversation while you're doing vigorous exercise. So moderate is sort of, you know, you can talk while doing it. Vigorous is where it's kind of hard to really, you know, have a good conversation while you're doing vigorous exercise, but it's based on heart rate. And you should also do some weights, like maybe twice a

week. So those are what we consider sort of the baseline. And that's based on big, large epidemiological studies involving hundreds of thousands, millions of people really actually now, where you can look at the relative risk of death on the Y-axis against essentially how much dose of exercise on the X-axis. And if you engage in that kind of level of exercise, you can essentially reduce your relative risk after correcting for age by about approximately 50%. And then finally, how does exercise impact our physical health? There's almost no disease that's not helped prevent it or sometimes even treated by exercise. I mean, cardiovascular disease is probably the poster child. I mean, there's a reason we call

aerobic exercise cardio. It's really good for your entire circulatory system. It strengthens your heart. It helps you produce more capillaries and blood vessels throughout your body. So you actually lower blood pressure. And arguably, high blood pressure is the major cause of death in the world today. It decreases your levels of bad cholesterol. It's no secret that aerobic exercise is really important for your cardiovascular system. Turns out that physical activity is also really important for a number of cancers. Now, not all cancers, but there are quite a few studies which show that you can, for

example, women can decrease their likelihood of developing breast cancer by as much as 30 to 40. Some studies even suggest 50% by physical activity, by just moderate levels of physical activity. And that's partly because you reduce the amount of estrogen and progesterone that are circulating that are mitotic and can increase your chances of cancer. You can really vastly decrease the risk of colon cancer. And there's a whole series of mechanisms by which we think this occurs, partly by upregulating the immune system, partly by decreasing levels of glucose in the blood, partly by decreasing levels of inflammation in the body. There's no one single pathway, but there's numerous

pathways by which physical activity affects your cardiovascular system. It affects your vulnerability to cancer, metabolic disease, Alzheimer's. If you're concerned about Alzheimer's, by far the best way to prevent Alzheimer's is by being physically active. Nothing comes close, nothing. So in our exploration around health and wellness at Delicious Yellow over these years, I think food and exercise were two of the more obvious ones, but sleep was an emerging one

that I think Ella and I were absolutely fascinated by the insights of it. It was actually one of my favorite episodes that we ever recorded on the podcast was with someone called Matthew Walker, who runs the leading sleep clinic in the world, just outside of San Francisco. And he's just a fountain of knowledge on sleep. He wrote a really, really amazing bestselling book on it. And it really started to highlight the impacts that a lack of sleep can have. And I think that there's a slight tendency for it to be kind of cool to sleep less

when actually from everything he was telling us, it's quite the opposite. So we took a deep dive with him. And one of the key messages from Matthew Walker is quite simply, we're not sleeping enough. So to put that into context, in the 1940s, we were sleeping on average about 7.9 hours a night and in the UK that's now about 6.49 hours in the US it's 6.32 and in Japan it's just 6 hours and 22 minutes so it's really is actually a lot less and it doesn't sound like that much but from what we are beginning to understand actually each minute makes a huge difference you were such a good sleeper and have taught me a lot about how to sleep and therefore it was my first question is what is the optimum amount of sleep? How do we know what's actually right for us as individuals?

The range right now is seven to nine hours with a sweet spot of about eight for most people. There is a range. Some people can sleep even more than that. They may have, you know, a 10 hour, 11 hour need, maybe even 12 hour need. And how do you know what your need is? It's a very good question. So firstly, one of the things you can do is say, if I set an alarm and the alarm didn't go off, would I sleep past that time? Yeah. And if the answer is yes, you're not getting enough sleep. Because one thing I think you come across quite often is this idea that we should keep a pretty consistent sleep pattern where we're waking up around the same time every day.

Is that something that also benefits us a lot? It benefits us hugely. And I think if there was one tip I would give everyone for sleep, it is regularity. So go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday, the weekend, even if you've had a bad night of sleep, still wake up at the same time, go throughout the day, it's going to be a tough day, but get back into set in the evening because our bodies are designed to revolve around regularity. That's how we evolved. Regularity sort of will anchor your sleep and it will improve the quantity

and the quality of that sleep. So you're absolutely right. Regularity is king when it comes to sleep. And then I guess the second kind of key question that really helps inform our decision-making around sleep and trying to prioritize it is what actually happens to our body on a physical level? What happens to our brains? Why does it matter when we get less sleep? What we know is that once you get below seven hours of sleep a night, we can measure objective impairments in your brain and your body. So at seven hours or below, that's termed either partial sleep reduction, and then the less and less you go, you move towards total sleep deprivation. And one of the problems with a lack of sleep, and it is a real problem, is that you don't know how badly you're suffering when you're sleep deprived. So the analogy would be a drunk driver at a bar, you know, they've had a couple of pints

and they pick up their keys and they say, look, I'm fine to drive home. And your response is, no, I know subjectively you think you're fine to drive, but objectively you're not. And it's the same way with a lack of sleep. Your confidence in how well you think you're doing far exceeds actually your performance in terms of impairment, you're doing far exceeds actually your performance in terms of impairment, as well as your body's sort of decimation of physiological function as well. Every major disease that is killing us in the developed world has significant and many of them causal links to a lack of sleep. So I'll just give you two examples. The two most feared diseases throughout developed worlds, Alzheimer's disease and cancer, both have causal links. And for Alzheimer's disease, when you go into sleep at

night, particularly deep sleep, the brain has a sewage system and it's a cleansing process. And that sewage system kicks into high gear during deep sleep and it washes away all of the toxic metabolic byproducts that have been building up throughout the day. So it's essentially good night's sleep clean in that way. And one of the toxic proteins that it removes is something called beta amyloid, which is this protein that is linked to Alzheimer's disease. So every night that you're not getting enough sleep, you're increasing your risk for the development of that protein buildup and therefore increasing your risk for Alzheimer's disease. I'll tell you about one fascinating study.

There's a group of cells in your body, immune cells called natural killer cells. And you can think of them almost like the secret service agents of your immune system. They're very good at identifying dangerous, unwanted elements and eliminating them. And one of the things that they will destroy are cancer cells. And every day, all of us, we have cells that are cancerous in our bodies. But what stops those cancerous cells from becoming the disease that we call cancer is these natural killer cells. So they're a critical part of your immune system. If you take a group of individuals and you limit them to just four hours of sleep for one night,

you see a 70% drop and you limit them to just four hours of sleep for one night, you see a 70% drop in natural killer cell activity. That is an alarming state of immune deficiency. And it happens after just one bad night of sleep, essentially one short night of sleep. We've actually had to upend the question and ask, is there any process in your body or any operation of your mind that isn't wonderfully enhanced when you get sleep or demonstrably impaired when you don't get enough? And the answer seems to be no. And so I think in response to your question, you know, what is sleep or why do we need it?

Sleep is essentially your life support system. It is Mother Nature's best effort yet at immortality. And I think sleep is essentially the Swiss army knife of health. I think on top of sleep and eating well and exercising, what we've come to realize is this inextricable link basically between our mental health and our physical health. I don't think there's any expert or any scientist or any researcher or anyone who's just interested in this area who can find a clear separation almost between the two just everything we do has such a clear impact on the two together and one of the things that's just so clear is that

for so many reasons for our brain health for our gut health for our mental health, for our gut health, for our mental health, for anxiety, for all these sorts of kind of actually very common issues, we need some calm in our lives. And that I think has been so exacerbated in the last year, obviously, you know, 2020 was a really challenging year. Just look at the stats at the beginning of 2020, you know, about 47% ofp visits in the uk now involve mental health concerns you know depression is currently the leading cause of disability around the world and just in the uk one in 10 children now have a diagnosable mental health condition so it is really serious and i think what's interesting is that mindfulness can be such a buzzword i think it's some one of those words like wellness that sometimes people can kind of steer away from.

They don't feel it necessarily relates to them. But actually, when you look at the statistics, whether we call it mindfulness or not, we all need some more calm in our lives and finding the tools that help us get there. And what's interesting is we actually have 60 to 80,000 thoughts a day. So the capacity for negative thoughts and worries is huge. So it's really understandable and normal and relatable, again, to need these tools to help us control those thoughts and find a way to transition them into kind of slightly more positive to help us overall, as well as creating that calm that kind of calms our bodies on a physical level as well. And one of the people who speaks really well on that and who I really admire is Dr. Chatterjee and his works had a big focus on stress and actually stress, again, causes so many of our issues today. That's really why we need the mindfulness is that stress creates physical and mental problems within our bodies, within our brains that we really need to look at. If we think about stress, I think what we need to do is go back a

couple of million years ago to when we were evolving and when our stress response basically came about. So if we rewind two million years, for example, our stress response evolved to keep us safe. You know, it's a bit of a cliche now, but we would be, you know, let's say being attacked by a lion. In that instant, we had to kick in our stress responses so that we could run away from that lion and get to safety, right? That's a good thing. So what happens? Well, many things happen. One thing that happens is that sugar pours out of your liver, pours out of your muscles, and goes into your bloodstream. Why does it do that? It does that so you can run faster. That makes sense in the short term. If you're getting stressed day in, day out, every single day, that sugar pouring

into your bloodstream is no longer helpful. It's really harmful. It will cause weight gain. It could cause mood issues. It could even contribute to the development of something that's epidemic now, type 2 diabetes, just from stress. So, you know, type 2 diabetes, everyone talks about diet, which of course is a significant contributor, but it ain't just diet. You know, I've got some patients in my practice who I've managed to put their type 2 diabetes into remission, not by addressing their diet. The diet was actually already pretty good, yet they still had blood sugar issues. I figured out that they were really,

really stressed. And once I taught them some simple stress management techniques, I was able to get their blood sugar under control. So that's just one example with blood sugar, how something in the short term that's helpful becomes harmful in the long term. But another thing that's reaching, you know, that many people, not just middle-aged um people are suffering from now i see a lot of guys in their 20s coming in to see me with lack of libido it's a big problem one of the biggest causes of that when we think about stress and libido one of our primary stress response hormones is something called cortisol yeah right now cortisol is made from its precursor which is something called ldl. Now why that's important is this, LDL cholesterol then gets converted to cortisol when your body needs it.

But LDL cholesterol can also go down a different path. Instead of going to cortisol it can go to other hormones, what we call the sex steroid hormones such as estrogen, also the hormone testosterone. So normally if your system is in balance and you're not too stressed and you're getting on with your everyday life, LDL cholesterol gets partitioned off really nicely where it should do. A little bit goes to cortisol, a little bit goes to testosterone, a little bit goes to estrogen, et cetera, et cetera. That's brilliant. But if you're stressed and you're chronically stressed day in day out all basically all your body's resource is spent going down to cortisol so you have very little left to go down to

testosterone or oestrogen and why that's relevant is that in medicine we will often treat downstream symptoms so we all say oh you've got low testosterone we'll give you testosterone or like women for example who might be suffering from hormonal problems, often will consider giving them hormones. Again, these things have value. But more often than not, if you go upstream, you go, actually, if we can address the stress levels here, we might be able to impact the symptoms. And I'm finding that more and more. And so there are lots of different ways that we can be more mindful, whether that's simple breathing exercises, and really understanding how our breath can be such a powerful tool, whether that's tuning into our senses. body through activities that create a flow state like yoga, swimming, running, cooking, baking, knitting, crafting, you name it, those sorts of, again, kind of mindful activities, whether that's

meditation and using things like guided meditations. And one of the people who we're most inspired by in terms of bringing guided meditations into our lives is our friend Geelong Thupten, who's a Buddhist monk who speaks so beautifully about this. I think for many people, happiness is the result of what might or might not happen to them. You know, I will be happy when, I will be happy if, I can be happy because. So happiness for many people is a thing you get when the world suits you or does stuff for you that makes you feel all right. Whereas I see it the other way around. I see that you can train your mind in happiness and everything else comes from there. And it's a choice. It's something you can choose through learning how to be more at peace with your own thoughts and be less driven

by negative thoughts. And maybe you can choose to have a positive outlook, even in difficult situations. So happiness is a kind of mental independence. And how do you train that within yourself? Well, the method I'm using in my life and when I teach and in my book is obviously mindfulness. But you don't have to subscribe to a religion or anything like a system of training. You can just find ways within yourself to be in the present moment. It's actually quite easy to just learn to be present and learn to be not so controlled by your thoughts. Mindfulness is a great technique because it gives you methods which are tried and tested over the centuries. How kind of, first of all, central to happiness is presence And how does

meditation and mindfulness tap into that? I think it's true that happiness for most people is something in the future, like the next thing, then I'll be happy, I will be happy when it's always something like we're searching for it. And it's always in the future. And I think our minds are really addicted to being either in the past or the future. It's very hard for us to be present, maybe more now than ever, because we're so distracted. And that presence for you has been trained through meditation. Yes. And how long do you meditate for each day? And what do you think is the kind of,

maybe the minimum requirement that you do? I do a little session each day. I maybe do 20 minutes or something in the evening but actually i often encourage people just to do 10 minutes to start with once you start practicing the meditation every day it starts to build up inside you as a feeling of peace and happiness and you kind of want more of it so just talking about how it affects us on a physical level, I know you've done some work with different neuroscientists, especially someone at Yale. Could you give us a brief overview of how meditation affects the brain? Well, interestingly, meditation is a bit like taking your brain to a gym. If you take your body to the gym, you're

going to get muscles. So if you take your brain to the gym,'re going to get muscles so if you take your brain to the gym it's also going to change in a healthy way and this is all to do with neuroplasticity which is the fact that through training again and again our brain will change and those changes will last so one of the main things is that it stops the brain producing too much cortisol cortisol is that stress hormone that we go into whenever we're in the fight or flight stage so we experience fight or flight 50 or 60 times a day which we're not meant to we're not meant to we're meant to feel it when we're being chased by a lion but just having our phone ringing or an email coming through or traveling to work and going into a stressy state is like fight or flight

and our body produces too much cortisol. If you meditate, it gets the amygdala, which is the part of your brain that deals with that cortisol reaction, it gets the amygdala to be less overreactive. So it will start to calm down that cortisol. Also, the areas of our brain connected with focus, with empathy, with compassion, with happiness, become in better shape. It's literally

like going to the gym, you get a healthier brain. Mindfulness has definitely been the pillar that I suppose I had the most difficult time trying to implement into my life. But the key time for me, and Ella just talked about him, was we met, he's now a friend of ours, Geelong Tutan. And in the episode that we talked with him, it really, really hit and it stuck with me. And it now is absolutely a part of my every day. And I've noticed tangible benefits in myself and I cannot recommend it more. So one of the joke questions that I get asked a lot by people is they say, oh, come on, Ellen must go eat a cheeseburger every now and again, or she must go out and get

drunk every now and again. And one of the things that I can say hand on heart is that everything that you see with Ella and that she portrays with Deliciously Ella is absolutely fundamentally her. She is absolutely obsessed and loves and is fascinated with deep passion, the world of health and wellness. And as I've been on this journey with Ella over the last five and a half years, and I've become equally interested in it, we've really worked to try and condense the five things that we think are most important to true holistic health and wellness into this new, really exciting launch that we have on our app, which is our tracker. And what we've tried to do is to create five, hopefully manageable, achievable pillars that if you do each week, we genuinely believe will make you feel better. It's a big launch for us with these five pillars on the app. And we hope it's

something that's genuinely helpful, because that's the whole aim of Delicious Yellow. Yeah, I think sometimes we are openly nervous about doing anything that feels too prescriptive with Delicious Yellow. We feel like health and wellness can be way over prescriptive, and you're either wrong or you're right. And what we've really tried to do here is condense our genuine beliefs into these five simple pillars, which we really believe constitutes holistic health. One of the other challenges I found when I started working in the world of health and wellness is that to many people, it felt really inaccessible.

And that was why with our pillars, one, we wanted them to feel really, really accessible. But like with everything, with our app, we want to continue to make health and wellness affordable and accessible to people, which is why our app is simply priced. It's 99p a month or it's £9.99 a year. So each week, we're going to get a little bit deeper into each pillar. Next week, we're going to be speaking to a brilliant doctor all about the amazing benefits

of plant-based diet on all aspects of your life. And I think it's going to be a really good year for the podcast and we hope it's going to be really helpful. And as we said at the beginning, we really want to hear from you. We want to be able to answer your questions. We want to be a really good year for the podcast and we hope it's going to be really helpful and as we said at the beginning we really want to hear from you we want to be able to answer your questions we want to be able to give you information that genuinely really supports you and what your goals are and your aims are for this year and for your well-being so please get in touch with me it's podcast at deliciousiella.com and thrilled to have the co-host back again it's really lovely thank you for having me back i feel very honored no it's an honor to have the co-host back again. It's really lovely. Thank you for having me back. I feel very honoured.

No, it's an honour to have you here. And we will see you next Tuesday. Otherwise, again, if you like the podcast, if it's helpful, please do share it. It makes all the world of difference to us. Otherwise, have a lovely day. Have a lovely week. Happy 2021.

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