The Wellness Scoop - How to sleep well, reducing cravings and matcha versus coffee with Russell Foster

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

I’m joined by Russell Foster CBE, one of the most prominent sleep experts globally and professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford University. Russell’s research centres around sleep, the body clock and how the two profoundly affect our biology and our overall health and wellbeing. We discuss: Why sleep is important and how much we really need The link between cravings, hunger, and sleep Tools for improving sleep quality Why stress may be at the root of your sleep difficulties How fine-tuning your internal body clock supports optimal health Each week I unpack a wellness trend with GP Gemma Newman. This week on Fact or Fad we’re looking at matcha versus coffee, where should we get our caffeine from. More about Russell: ‘Life Time: The New Science of the Body Clock, and How it Can Revolutionize Your Sleep and Health’  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Time-Science-Revolutionize-Health/dp/0241529301 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.

Wellness. What on earth does it mean? And why would we need to unpack it? With over 58 million hashtags on Instagram, the topic has really never been more prominent. But, and there is a but here, three in five of us feel that wellness is incredibly confusing. We want to feel healthier, we want to feel happier, but we have no idea what's clickbait and what's genuinely health enhancing. Who's an expert and who's peddling absolute nonsense and look I am right here with you on this at times I've also found this world really hard to navigate. So welcome to Wellness Unpacked our new podcast hosted by me Ella Mills author entrepreneur and founder of Deliciously Ella. This series aims to do just as it states,

unpack the world of wellness with expert guests. These guests will be sharing with me and with you their three pieces of advice for a better life, to feel healthier and happier. This is a show and a conversation that's about progress it is not about perfection it's about helping you make small simple sustainable changes and within that I'm going to be testing out a different wellness trend every single week intermittent fasting celery juice, collagen, ketogenic diets, CBD, you name it, I'll try it. I'll then unpick the trend, separating fact from fad, with my friend and NHS GP, Dr Gemma Newman. And together we'll be equipping you with the tools that can genuinely make a difference to your life and well-being, and equally helping you potentially put to one side the trends that may make a difference to your life and well-being and equally helping you potentially put to one side

the trends that may make a little bit less difference. So are you ready for episode three? Our third guest is sleep scientist Russell Foster CBE. Russell is one of the most prominent sleep experts in the world and a professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford. Russell's research centres around sleep, the body clock and how the two affect our biology. And there have been some extraordinary developments in this area over the last few years. What I love about Russell is that he is making it his mission to take that complicated science and make it accessible for all of us in our everyday life so that we can make the most informed decisions about our sleep. So in this interview Russell and I are going to be discussing the cardinal rules for sleep,

some of which might actually surprise you and with his three pieces of advice we'll debunk a few myths along the way. I think you're going to get a lot from this episode. Well, hi, Russell, and thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really delighted to be here, Ella. Thank you. So my husband is obsessed with sleep, like completely obsessed with sleep for the last kind of four or five years. And so sleep and all the different component parts of sleep and why it matters and how we can have better sleep is kind of number one topic in

my household. So I've been looking forward to this. Well, it sounds as though you've married well. He'll be really pleased to hear that. So Russell, we kickstart every conversation with the same question, which is what does wellness mean to you? How do you interpret that word? Well, I suppose, depending how I feel when I first get out of bed in the morning, you know, do I feel chirpy or not? But seriously, I think that wellness to me means whether I've had a good night's sleep or not, because it will define how I'll function during the day. And indeed, I think a good night of sleep is a good metric of brain health generally. So yes, I would define wellness as a good sleep. Nice. I really like that. And I completely agree with you. I always feel like it's the cornerstone of health that

people, I know it's become a much bigger topic and I'm very excited to delve into that today, but it is the kind of, to me, it's the most obvious piece of our well-being that people kind of ignore or let go of. And actually, as you said, if I don't sleep well, I feel like I'm kind of set up for failure in my day to some extent. It is extraordinary. I mean, across the lifespan, it's 30% of our biology. You know, 30% of our time will be spent asleep. And yet, as a topic, it's been largely ignored. It's been marginalized. In fact, we have no sleep education or anything like that in our schools. And it's not even embedded within the workplace.

So it's a deeply ignored yet incredibly precious part of our biology. But would you agree with the sentiment that the narrative on that is changing? Because, I mean, it's a crazy stat that 30% of our life is spent asleep. And I think, you know, up until just a few years ago, when we thought about sleep, it was almost like sleep is for the weak, you know. Get as little of it as you need to get by. And what a waste of precious time. Whereas now I feel like we're seeing sleep as something. We're starting to have a mainstream conversation about the fact that sleep is actually critical to our mental and to our physical health.

Absolutely. I mean, people in the 80s used to come in and say, oh, I've done another all-nighter. And people used to clap them on the back. Now we appreciate that that is deeply unhelpful, both for themselves and the group that they're working with. So yes, I think attitudes are changing. The one problem, of course, is that we're now becoming aware of the importance of sleep, but that's generated quite a lot of anxiety. And so I suspect, you know, during our conversation, we'll unpack some of that. Absolutely. So let's dive into your first piece of advice. Every week, we love to ask our guests, we're so lucky to get to speak to such amazing experts, on the three pieces of advice they feel if our listeners kind of took on board, it could help improve their year. Well, I think it's really important to

understand the importance of sleep, both individually and at a societal level. So what does sleep provide us? Well, short term, it allows us to process information. It's quite extraordinary. If you want to come up with innovative solutions to complex problems, a night of sleep actually enhances your capability to do that. I think that's just so cool. It's not that the brain is shut down overnight. It's actually playing with information. It also is consolidating memory. So experiences that we've had during the day are parked and then integrated appropriately with our data bank, as it were, of memories. In addition, the clearance of toxins within the brain. So there's a misfolded protein called beta amyloid, which is associated with a buildup in the brain and a risk

of dementia and Alzheimer's. We now know that during sleep, we clear that really nasty folded protein. So there are just a few examples of the importance of sleep. And of course, we know that if we don't get sleep, we become more irritable, less empathetic. We find decision-making more complicated. What's also fascinating is that the tired brain remembers the negative experiences, but it forgets the positive ones. So our whole worldview when tired is predisposed to remembering negative experiences and then basing our decisions upon that. And then long-term sleep disruption has been associated with metabolic abnormalities. So increasing the risk of obesity and diabetes too. Risk of cancer. I mean, it's extraordinary that now night shift work has been

shown to have a higher rate of cancer, prostate cancer in men, colorectal cancer in women, and breast cancer. So really important stuff. In fact, the World Health Organization has said that night shift work is a probable carcinogen. So we've got metabolic abnormalities, increased cancer, and of course, the big one, I guess guess is depression and sort of severe psychiatric illness all promoted by poor sleep. So everyone be listening panicking I feel thinking oh my gosh that's quite terrifying actually we think so much about the big things in our life eating 10 portions of vegetables but actually our sleep is something that often we disregard. And as you're saying, it's actually so vitally important to a lot of the things a lot of us spend a lot of time worrying about as well. So what does that actually look like in our

day to day? How much sleep do you need to mitigate those processes? That's such an important question. And part of the reason for writing Lifetime was I was getting somewhat irritated by some of the advice that was being peddled by the sergeant majors of sleep. You must get eight hours, for example. Well, that's nonsense. The healthy sleep span is something between six hours and it may be as much as 10 or 11 hours in some people. And the key thing for not only sleep duration, but also sleep timing, is that you define what works for you

and then you stick to those behaviors. So for example, how do you know if you're not getting enough sleep? Well, it's sort of the thing that our grandparents sort of told us, which is if you're feeling tired and unable to be as productive as you'd like during the day, that's indicating you're not

getting enough sleep at night. If you need an alarm clock to get you up in the morning or something else, if you oversleep on free days, and particularly holidays, that can unmask your natural sleep pattern. If you find friends, family, colleagues saying you're showing altered behaviors, increased irritability, increased impulsivity. You're not being as reflective as you were, doing stupid and unreflective things. And, of course, if you're craving a mid-afternoon nap or coffee to keep you going, then these are all telling you you're not getting enough sleep. And so it's really listening to your own sleep needs

and ignoring the fact that some people are screaming at you, you must do this or that. There was a study published fairly recently suggesting that in the elderly, you must get seven hours of sleep and longer or shorter predisposed you to illness and early death. And the study, when you drill down, was profoundly flawed. There was no health information about the participants of that study. And of course, if you already have an illness, you're likely to sleep longer or shorter. And that simply wasn't known in the study. And so I think we have to be really quite cautious about what people are screaming at us and not override what our body is often telling us.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's so easy in this extraordinary kind of wealth of information that we have nowadays and, you know, an unteen number of experts to be drawn into thinking I've got to emulate this advice or this person and not actually listen to our own body, which is obviously the kind of wisest of them all. And I wanted to just unpick one more topic that you touched on there, which is something the kind of wisest of them all. And I wanted to just unpick one more topic that you touched on there, which is something, again, I think a lot of people could relate to, is this decrease in our sense of mood, in our irritability, in our snappiness, when we don't get enough sleep. Could you just explain a little bit more about how that works

and why we have those responses? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. And we don't precisely know. All we know is that if we don't get sleep, that our behaviors turn into something rather unpleasant. People are beginning to do fMRI, brain scans, on the tired brain and finding out which bits light up under certain circumstances. A very interesting study fairly recently showed that it asked people to

perform mathematical tasks while in the scanner, and it looked at the same person fully rested and tired. And you could see that the brain lighting up was terrific during the fully rested state, but after sleep deprivation, far fewer areas of the brain were lighting up. So perhaps part of the effect of tiredness is that we're not connecting the various areas of the brain, which are all normally integrated to come up with coherent responses to a complex world. And so what happens is that we get frustrated and we become irritable and we just can't get the right information out because the brain isn't appropriately connected. It's amazing. It just totally disregards that kind of keep pushing attitude, isn't it? Like work a bit longer, keep going a bit harder. Actually, rest is so incredibly powerful and so underrated. Absolutely. And what do you need in the workplace?

You need people who are empathetic. They can interact with each other. They're social. They can be creative. They can communicate. And these are all the faculties that disappear after poor sleep. moving to the state that if people come into work and they're chronically tired, they're almost regarded as badly as smokers because they're not only affecting their own health, but they're also affecting the health of the people that they're working with. So yes, I think that sort of whole machismo about sleep is, thank goodness, vanishing. Yeah, I totally second that. And am I right in saying as well, when you haven't had a lot of sleep, you crave less healthy foods as well? Yeah. Some great studies from the University of Chicago have shown that with shortened sleep, you start pumping out the hunger hormone ghrelin, and you reduce the release of the satiation hormone, leptin. And a study looked at healthy young males who had only four hours of sleep per night

compared to the controls who slept up to 10 hours if they wanted it. But after only one week, the ghrelin levels were up by nearly 30%. The leptin levels, the satiation hormones were down by 17%. Carbohydrate consumption went up by 35% to 40%. And it was also the craving for sugars. So we are as tired brains craving more carbs and particularly more sugars. I'm really quite obsessed with actually, I think that would be fair to say this dismantling this idea of willpower because I think you know certainly if I speak to kind of our community I think there's so many

people they want to live a healthier life they're listening to information and sometimes when they can't do it they feel it's their fault they feel really down on themselves they feel like they don't have willpower I think that's something that we hear a lot collectively and this is one of the reasons I'm so keen to kind of unpack all these topics is I'm so keen to express the fact that these simple tools like sleeping properly, that's what we need to be doing. If you haven't slept properly for a long period of time, it's not your fault that you, you know, don't really fancy a salad. And you're kind of much more keen on the kind of less healthy takeaway and you don't have the motivation to maybe go and exercise,

you know, that's not your fault. And I think understanding the physiological elements of that is just so, so, so important. Yes, absolutely. And the tired brain is often so tired that it can't tell how tired it is. So we're unaware that we're doing stupid and unreflective things. But I think that there is a certain level of individual responsibility. It's fine dealing with our own health and our own eating, for example. But if you are somebody who's driving a car or working on heavy machinery or something like that, and you know that you're doing it and you're tired, then there's some real risks. So for example, it's been estimated that about 100,000 people every year who are tired driving at night have microsleeps. And these are these uncontrollable falling asleep. You can't help yourself. You just fall asleep and

they result in accidents and usually serious accidents. And a more serious example of a microsleep was the pilot of an Air India aircraft who was landing the plane and was in the middle of landing the plane and simply fell asleep. And so the plane hit the deck and most of the people, passengers and crew were killed. And how do we know that this chap had fallen asleep in the middle of this landing? It's because the voice recorder in the cockpit had recorded him snoring. So whilst I think, yes, it's very difficult as individuals to try and make those judgments for ourselves, but we also do have to understand that if we're in the public domain, then we need to be extremely careful about the impact that our tiredness will have on other people.

It's extraordinary when you put it like that. So we are thinking about all of our own lives and trying to sleep better. What are the kind of cardinal rules of sleep? Well, first of all, define what your sleep is. So one shoe size does not fit all, and we do need to define what is good for us. But there are things that we can do throughout the day. So for example, get morning light. That sets the body clock to the light-dark cycle and the sleep-wake cycle. So morning light is very important for most of us.

Don't get anxious before you go to sleep. So try and wind down from the demands of working. And so have a proper transition, whether it be mindfulness, whether it be yoga or whatever. Don't fuel the waking day with endless cups of coffee, which will delay sleep onset at night. So that will be a few things immediately before we go to sleep. Avoid prescription sedatives. It's really important to appreciate that sleeping pills are not sleeping pills. They're sedatives. In fact, they can mask and disrupt some of the really important things going on within the brain that sleep is so important for, like memory consolidation, like the processing of information. And so when you speak to your GP, they will recommend short-term

sleeping tablet use, but never long-term. Same for alcohol. Many people who've had a day of fueling their activity with coffee then try and reverse it with alcohol at night. Alcohol is an extremely effective sedative, but again, it impairs many of the important things going on in the brain whilst we sleep. And in fact, it can disrupt sleep. Make sure, for example, the bedroom isn't too warm. Part of going to sleep involves a loss in core body temperature. And if the bedroom is too warm, we find it more difficult to lose that. Invest in good bed, mattresses, and define the sleeping space. So try and separate the workspace from

the sleeping space. It's been immensely difficult, of course, during COVID because bedrooms have become workrooms. But if you can get rid of those computers, smartphones, TVs, and all the rest of it, then that's really, really important. Don't take sleep apps too seriously. None of the sleep apps currently available are endorsed by any of the sleep federations. None of them are FDA approved. They're very useful for telling you roughly when you went to sleep and when you woke up and how many times you woke up in the night. But telling you you've had good sleep or bad sleep or lots of slow wave or lots of REM, you can't really calculate that from the current devices. So they're fine, but

don't take them too seriously. And many people do. I mean, one chap came up to me before lockdown and said, my app's telling me I don't get enough sleep. I don't get eight hours of sleep. Am I going to die? And I said, well, yes, I can guarantee you're going to die, but it may have nothing to do with the fact you're not going to get to sleep. So, you know, we've got to relax about it. Another thing that causes huge anxiety is if people wake up in the middle of the night. And it looks like the natural pattern of human sleep isn't this single consolidated block that we're told about. If you look at societies now without electric light, then there's a slow winding down towards sleep, maybe two hours. People will fall asleep and then after two, three hours, they'll wake up.

Then they'll go back to sleep again. They may wake up again. And so human sleep, like all mammals, is either biphasic, two episodes of sleep, or polyphasic, many episodes of sleep and then waking up. And most people don't know this. So they wake up in the middle of the night thinking, oh my goodness, that's the end of sleep. I might as well start drinking coffee and doing my emails. And in fact, if you stay relaxed, keep the lights low, do something that you find relaxing. You may want to leave the sleeping space, you may want to leave the bed and then return. But invariably, you will get back to sleep. Another cause of anxiety are the illuminated dials of your digital clock. People will wake up and they'll see the time and think,

oh my goodness, I've only got two hours before I need to get up. And then they'll never get back to sleep again. So I recommend covering the dials. In fact, what we're touching on, I think, is many examples of stress-inducing and anxiety-inducing things that interrupt sleep. And so most people don't have a sleep problem. They have an anxiety or stress issue, which is therefore disrupting their sleep. And so in many cases, it's very important to de-stress, to relax and find ways of then embracing the sleep that you get. Our sleep will change as we age, and it's very different between people, but it's all about enjoying the sleep that we get. Many elderly people sort of talk about, I wish I got the sleep that I had when I was 30. Well, you won't. The whole biology underpinning sleep has changed. But I know elderly people who've said, I've never had better

sleep in my life since I've retired. I don't have to worry about my job. I don't have to worry about the children. And it may well be that I'm not getting up until a bit later. In fact, a close family member, we were told firmly never to call before 11 o'clock in the morning. And it's all about enjoying the sleep that we get, embracing it, because it's so variable, so dynamic, and we need to de-stress and stop worrying about it. Very good advice. I know there'll be a lot of parents listening as well who are thrilled to hear that it's okay to be up in the middle of the night and go back to sleep. Yes. And while we're talking about young children and parents, one thing that I've also found quite frustrating is that, of course, as a society, we've moved very rapidly from the extended family to the nuclear

family, perhaps in just a couple of generations. And certainly when I was being brought up, my grandparents would be very much involved. And in previous generations, childcare was extended across the family. Sisters, aunts, you know, mothers would all contribute. Now, because of the nuclear family, childcare is the responsibility of the parents and usually just the mother. And we've never evolved to be animals that can solely look after our offspring. We've always depended upon extended care. And I wish we could get the message out that young mums shouldn't feel guilty about feeling tired. We've never evolved to solely look after our children. It's always been a distributed activity. And it's so important, I think, that individuals feel happy about reaching

out and also get in place that sort of support before the baby arrives in the household. I totally agree. I think there is this insurmountable, almost amount of pressure on young families and particularly on mothers in society today. And I certainly see that in our community all day, every day. I definitely felt that myself. And I think on top of all the nervousness and anxieties you have when you have small children, the nervousness that you're not getting enough sleep and how bad that is for your health. It really, you know, it's not a message you need to hear to some extent, except the fact that it is important in the longer term of your life. So I think that's a really important caveat to just kind of remove that pressure.

So Russell, I'd love to move on to our second piece of advice, which is the importance of appreciating our internal body clock. So can you explain to us what the body clock is? So we all have an internal representation of a day. We have a body clock. And the question is, why? Why do we have this internal day? And I think it's important to remember that we sit on a planet that revolves once every 24 hours. And that generates a light-dark cycle and a temperature cycle. And, of course, our evolutionary response has been to develop a period of rest in us. It's sleep and activity. And the states of consciousness and sleep are so profoundly different, they depend upon a different set of biology. And what our

clock does is anticipate these predictable changes and fine-tune our biology in advance of the changed conditions. So anticipating activity, waking up in the morning, our body clock is driving up core body temperature actually in the early hours of the morning prior to waking up. We're mobilizing glucose so we can, our muscles and our brain, you know, with increased activity, can utilize those resources. For our biology to work, we need to deliver the right materials, the right concentration, to the right tissues and organs at the right time of day. And it's the

timing for these activities delivered by our circadian system, our body clock, that is so critical for our ability to function optimally. It's a bit like an orchestra. You can think of a finely tuned biology would be all of the instruments playing in unison and working to produce a symphony. And if we don't do that, then all the members of the orchestra are playing slightly differently. And the whole thing becomes a cacophony in biology, in a sense, and of course, the sleep-wake cycle starts to fall apart. So we're very different organisms at midday and midnight. And that impacts upon many things that we either want to do

or indeed our treatments in terms of how effective our medicines become. And so within that, does it matter then to have a regularity in when you go to bed and when you wake up? Yes, I think part of the advice about getting good sleep and stabilizing the clock is you do the same thing more or less at the same time every day. So try and get up and go to bed at the same time, try and eat at the same time and keep that stability. And what messes with this 24-hour sleep cycle? Do things like stress mess with it? Yeah. And the problem, of course, if we are not getting the sleep that we need and the sleep is

misaligned with what we need to do, then we activate the stress axis. The classic example of this would be night shift workers. Night shift workers, the body clock of night shift workers, does not shift with the demands of working at night. And the consequence of that is your entire biology is saying you need to be asleep. And so to override that, individuals activate the stress axis. And stress is rather like the first gear in a car. You know, it gives you that wonderful acceleration. You can get away from trouble or you can start the car, you know, get it going.

But if you keep the engine in first gear, you're going to destroy it. And that's what sustained activation of the stress axis is like, you know, it's great short term, but long term, it's a real problem. What do we know about the stress hormones? Of course, they're increasing heart rate, they're throwing glucose into the circulation. And of course, all of these long term will predispose to health problems. The other thing, of course, is that high levels of cortisol will suppress the immune system, which is probably the mechanism why night shift workers and people who are chronically tired have higher rates of infection. And that's probably also the vulnerability to increased rates of cancer. So not sleeping has a big impact on your immune system then? Yeah, absolutely. Yes. And our immune system, of course, is being regulated by the circadian system, our clock. It's turned up during the day when we're moving around the

environment and likely to encounter pathogens either in the environment or from people. And then it's sort of quietened down a bit at night. And that's when we're sort of not moving around and we're less likely to encounter new pathogens. While we're talking about those changes in the immune system, it again flags up some issues for our night shift workers, our frontline staff, our nurses, for example, who are dealing with difficult situations, most recently with COVID-19, were being exposed to these pathogens at a time when their immune system was not up to really fighting them off. And so protective clothing became incredibly important at that time. And furthermore, as night shift workers, their circadian rhythms are disrupted,

which means that their vaccination generally is going to be less effective. Some very important studies have shown that sleep-wake disruption prior to a vaccination or immediately after vaccination will reduce the effectiveness of that vaccination. Another area where the clock and medications are important would be in anti-cancer drugs. So some very important studies, so for childhood leukemia, one study showed morning versus afternoon delivery of the chemotherapy. Afternoon was much more effective in long-term survival. And another study on ovarian cancer showed same drug, same concentration, different time. One group had 45% survival after five years. Another group had 10% survival after five years. And so these are really important differences. And at the moment, we're not

integrating that time information into when we deliver our drugs. It just really, to me, further highlights the fact that our bodies, our brains are so extraordinary and we really take them for granted, don't we? And one last question on the body clock actually on that is, does what we eat and when we eat it make a difference? Absolutely. So it's really fascinating that eating habits have changed hugely in our species. So before the Middle Ages, what, 1100 to 1500, the main meal of the day was breakfast. And there will be a light lunch and a very light supper.

As we get to the Middle Ages, the main meal had sort of switched to breakfast time and lunchtime with, again, a very light supper. And then with industrialization from the 1850s onwards, the main meal of the day became in the evening. And what's so fascinating is our biology hasn't caught up with this. If we eat the same amount of food, either in the morning or in the evening, our ability to process that food and get rid of the glucose appropriately is much more effective in the morning than it is in the evening, our ability to process that food and get rid of the glucose appropriately is much more effective in the morning than it is in the evening. And eating towards the end of the day, the food is much more likely to be turned into stored fat than it would be at the beginning of the day. Again, it goes back to this difference between our metabolism during sleep versus wake.

During sleep, we're not taking in calories and using them for our metabolism. We've got to mobilize those calories from reserves. Whereas during the day, we're taking in calories and using them up. So if we're starting to eat towards the end of the day, those calories are not going to be burnt up. They're going to be laid down to fat. So ideally, we should eat first thing in the morning and at lunchtime and have very light suppers. And where people have been given the same number of reduced calories to lose weight, concentrating them in the breakfast to lunchtime or lunchtime to evening, those individuals who had the morning lunchtime calorie intake lost more weight faster than those that had it lunchtime and evening. So if we can, we should revert back to that older pattern of concentrating our food intake during the first half of the day. Now, it's incredibly difficult, of course, because, you know,

we're rushing off, you know, to commute into work. We're probably having a sandwich at our desk. And then after a long day, we're commuting home and finally getting a family meal, which can be eight or maybe even nine o'clock in the evening. And that's about the worst thing we could possibly do. Wow. You had it here first. So I'd love to move on to the third piece of advice. 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. Well, a third piece of advice would be keep on kicking the door until they let you in. And this comes from personal experiences. But also I think the belief that if you want to drive change, if you want to drive innovation, you've got to disturb the status quo. And people are very resistant to change. And so in my own area, we were working on how the internal body clock is regulated by the light-dark cycle. And so how the internal day and the external day are aligned. And what we discovered was that there's another light sensor within the eye. We

have our rods and cones for vision, but there's a third light sensor, which is grabbing light for the regulation of internal time. Now, when we first proposed this, the vision community were completely horrified. One person, I remember giving a talk, quite a big talk, and somebody at the back stood up and I thought they were going to ask a question. And I sort of said, these data are consistent with the discovery of a new receptor within the eye. And this person just screamed, bullshit, and walked out. person got so angry in one seminar and said, do you really think that we've been studying the eye for 150 years and we have missed an entire light sensor within the eye? And of course, I was young and fairly confident. And I sort of said, yes, well, at least publicly. But it was unnerving. And the way you have to deal with it, at least in science. And I think in many walks of life is you keep

on accumulating more and more data. If you know your data are good to simply overwhelm the opposition. And that's the nature of science. It's actually, scientists are quite conservative with a small C. And they need overwhelming evidence before they change their minds. And that's both good and bad. One, it means that nonsense hopefully doesn't get into the science literature. But the problem is innovation can be stifled. So yes, I would strongly urge each of us, if you think you're right, and you know you've got the evidence that supports your views, you keep on kicking the door. And do you find that the slow nature of that evidence kind of taking hold, especially within the public realm, quite frustrating?

Because obviously, you know, everything we've talked about today, and, you know, we've really scratched the surface of your work, and obviously everyone who's interested in this should go and read your book and get much deeper into your work. But it feels to me that this is pivotal information, especially when we do effectively have a health crisis on our hands with the rise of diseases in the world today. And this is such, in some ways, basic information. In some ways, this is something that we could all go and regulate into our lives today. But most of us are really struggling to do it and we're not doing it.

And you sometimes find it quite frustrating that almost there could still be a debate about whether this is important. Yeah, I do. And I think the educational piece is so important. We're not giving any education in the school curriculum about the importance of sleep and circadian rhythms. And we have data where we've shown that if we've developed educational programs for teachers to teach their students and that we've been able to move those 20, 25% of children showing severe insomnia out of that severe range. So education works. And of course, if we give that education at the appropriate time, it travels with individuals. And so when they enter the workforce or they enter old age or whatever, they are aware of the importance of biological time and sleep and the fact that it changes. In the industrial sector, nothing currently is being done. So, for example, there was a study a few years ago showing that 57% of junior doctors had either had a crash or a near miss on the drive home.

And so why aren't we providing vigilance detectors for those night shift workers to detect head nod or the fact that the car is moving across lanes to wake them up, to stop them crashing. Knowing that night shift workers have higher rates of obesity, diabetes 2, cancer, and all the rest of it, why don't we institute higher frequency health checks in that sector to prevent these diseases becoming chronic while we still can? Again, higher rates of diabetes 2 and obesity, metabolic syndrome. What do we give our night shift workers to eat? High fat, high sugar. It would be so easy to provide protein-rich, easy-to-digest snacks throughout the night for our night shift workers. So there's things that we can do now, and we're not.

And so I think the educational piece, incidentally, not least in our medical professions. So in a five-year training, a junior doctor may get a couple of lectures on sleep, but it won't be the sorts of things that we've been talking about. It'll be measuring the electrical activity from the surface of the skull and relating that to changes in disease states. And so, yes, I think there's a very important educational piece and we've got to get it embedded across all sectors of society yeah i know it to me it feels very symbolic of the fact that as a culture we're not really that focused on prevention um and how important shifting that narrative is and there's one last question i have for you well two last questions the first one because i've been

really meaning to ask this and i haven't so far, is just to really understand the impact of high stress on disrupting sleep and whether that is a negative, because I think that is something that so many people struggle with today. And does getting your stress under control really matter for getting proper sleep? Getting stress under control is absolutely pivotal for getting good sleep. So many people don't have a sleep problem. They have an anxiety and a stress problem. And it's so important to deal with that. At the end of the day, winding down, mindfulness, yoga, whatever, to try and de-stress before you transition from all the pressures of the day into that wonderful time of bodily restoration at sleep time,

at night time. So yeah, these are really important issues. Fantastic. Well, thank you so, so much for your time. Really delighted to join you. There are so many things that I loved about what Russell had to say, but I really like his emphasis on the fact that there is no one size fits all it's this idea that sleep's like a shoe size it's all a little bit different most of us sit within a continuum but we're not necessarily going to be the same as our friend our colleague our partners

and we just need to do what's right for us and really start to tune into that and I think that's something that goes a long way beyond sleep and really into all facets of our well-being so So I hope you can take that with you as I'm going to take it with me and maybe take the pressure off a little bit. And moving on from that, we're going to dive into fact or fad, where every week Dr. Gemma Newman and I put to the test all kinds of wellness trends and see if they're a fact or maybe they're just a passing fad. And this week for our fact or fad we are looking at matcha versus coffee. Where do we get our caffeine from? A lot of you guys have been

asking for this one so I hope it's incredibly helpful. Apparently matcha can reduce stress, give you better skin, stop caffeine crashes and even make your teeth whiter. But do I have to quit my favourite morning coffee? Here's what Russell had to say on the topic. Certainly for matcha, we don't have really good randomised control trials yet. There is evidence that it could improve cognition, it's got increased antioxidant properties, it can increase calorie burn under certain circumstances but there hasn't as far as I'm aware been a back-to-back randomized control between caffeine and matcha.

So is it a fact that we need to swap coffee for matcha or is it a fad? Let's get into the science with Dr Gemma Newman. So Gemma every time I prep for these fact or fads I become quite obsessed with how many hashtags there are on them I feel like it measures how into this topic the wellness community is matcha 6.7 million hashtags on Instagram so that's a lot it's a hot topic yeah um give me your top line on it okay so well first up do you like matcha i've tried so many times i'll never forget i was in new york we were on a work trip it's quite a while ago back kind of 2018 2019 and i'd never liked it i always thought if i'm just completely honest i think i probably speak for some listeners here that it tasted a bit like grass but there was this bar it was so trendy

this really cool match i think it's called matcha full but there was this bar it was so trendy this really cool match I think it's called matcha full and it was like the most kind of wellness trendy instagrammable spot I've ever seen um somewhere in Soho I think it was in New York and it was so delicious I became completely addicted to it I made Matt walk there every single day with me to get a matcha and I was like that's it I figured it out I love matcha and I felt very very good on it I did feel better than coffee and I tried to come home and make it like that and I was back at grass you failed I failed so I'd say it's somewhere in the middle I've had some good ones when I do it it tastes like grass yeah I like matcha actually this is one of the things I really enjoy and for

me what makes it more tasty is if I have a little bit of frothy milk with it. So it feels like I'm having, you know, like a latte just to kind of take away that grossiness, I guess. And I love it because it gives it still gives you that sort of caffeine hit. They both do contain caffeine, but it gives it to you much more slowly. And it also contains L-theanine, which purportedly helps with stress, apparently increasing the alpha waves in your brain. And it also contains something, now I need to get this right, epigallocatechin gallate. Good job. Yes, very proud of that.

I think you should be. Yeah, so that's EGCG for short. And that's really great because it's an antioxidant. There's been some interesting studies to show it could help with reducing the amount of blood supply to tumors that grow. And it may have other kind of memory sort of benefits. Obviously, this is sort of not a stage of population level guidance by any stretch. But it shows that it's generally beneficial. So if you like it, it seems to be quite a good thing to have every day if you want.

And how does it compare to coffee? I know I've got lots of friends, one girlfriend in particular, who's always advocating I switch to matcha because she's convinced, and I do hear this a lot, that it gives you less of that kind of jittery anxious slightly on edge feeling that coffee can give you and I know it's but especially if we're feeling quite tired or stressed or run down and maybe haven't eaten or haven't eaten a balanced meal yet a couple of coffees later and we can feel like a little all over the shop certainly that's how I feel yeah is there any evidence to show that matcha does give you that kind of smoother sensation? Yes, it's supposed to.

I think because it crosses your sort of brain barrier a bit more slowly. So it reaches peak concentrations more slowly than coffee does. And, you know, you're right about some of the side effects of coffee. You know, that's something that a lot of people can't really handle. You know, increased heart rate, the jittery feeling, insomnia if they take it too close to bedtime, or sometimes any time of day if you're very sensitive to it, anxiety sometimes, especially if you have a lot of coffee and you're withdrawing from it. And these are unwanted side effects for some people from coffee, which you're less likely to get with matcha. I think with matcha, probably

the downsides would be that it's more expensive generally than coffee less widely available there is a sort of theoretical risk of liver toxicity if you have lots and lots of it because of the high amounts of this EGCG in it and what would count as a lot well yeah I haven't been able to read any studies to say like an upper limit But I think it's about being sensible that you wouldn't want to necessarily have 10 cups a day. But one would be absolutely fine or two. And there is also a risk of contaminants with matcha as well, because it's made essentially from pulverized green tea leaves. You're going to be having a higher concentration of the contaminants within those leaves potentially, like heavy metals, like lead and arsenic. So that's why you see, when you see matcha in the supermarket or in a posh coffee shop or something, they might say it's sort of organic or ceremonial

grade to try and limit your exposure to heavy metals. Right. And that can be why there's quite a big price discrepancy as well yeah exactly so if you want to get yourself a really good quality wine you're going to be forking out a lot more money than if you want to get you know reasonably decent coffee that is a very interesting one so would you say not to have really kind of general advice but perhaps if you are suffering quite a lot of stress at the moment and obviously coffee can kind of slightly exacerbate the sensations related to that. But looking at matcha could actually be quite sensible. Yeah, I think it could.

They both have their potential benefits. I personally am not a huge coffee fan. I don't like the way it feels in my mouth. I don't tend to make coffee at home. But people love it. And there are studies to say, you know, that similar benefits from matcha and coffee are the same, like they do have antioxidants and polyphenols in them. They may protect heart health as well, both of them by reducing the platelet aggregation. So what that means is it

helps prevent your arteries from clogging up and potentially reduces the risk of a heart attack. Again, you know, you don't necessarily sort of translate that to population-based guidance, but it's interesting to see those similar mechanisms in both drinks. And yeah, I think for those of us who are not huge coffee fans, but they like the taste of matcha and they can get a decent one, then yeah, it's a lovely alternative. Fantastic. But you don't need to quit your coffee. No. And drink matcha if you don't like it. 100%. You don't need to do that at all and it sounds to me like you're probably not going to be swapping that coffee anytime soon what do you think hella i love my coffee it's the biggest treat the sign of love in our house is to get up early before

the girls wake up go down make a coffee for the other one yeah that's our kind of like real love language is um bringing coffee in bed that you can drink before the girls wake up so unless I can crack making it really well myself which so far zero success at but there is a Japanese matcha bar just down the road which I'm convinced I need to go to because it has massive queues apparently it's the best matcha in London so I can circle back on that next time we meet um but yes for me I think I'll be sticking with my coffee and it's always so nice to hear that there are health benefits of doing that. There are and if you want to try a matcha at my house you'd be more than welcome. Thank you very much I need to try someone who can actually do it.

So what we're going to say do you reckon it's a fact or a fad? Somewhere in the middle potentially. I think so I think fact because for many people who may have side effects from coffee, they might actually benefit from having matcha instead. They may enjoy it and they may get some of the same benefits from it without having some of those side effects like jitteriness or insomnia. So yeah, I think it's a great option for people who don't like coffee. And if you enjoy it, go for it. So that's the end of the show. I hope you got a lot from it I am relieved that I don't have to give up my coffee although inspired to try

a bit more matcha and to stop watching Netflix at night which I've got into a naughty habit of recently going to sleep a little bit too late as always I would absolutely love to hear from you guys any feedback messages from you please do get in touch either at deliciouslyella on instagram podcast at deliciouslyella.com over email is there a fact or fad we need to try is there a guest we've got to have on the show do you have any feedback that we all need to hear about I would love to know if you've taken any of our experts advice and started to implement it into your life in a way that you're seeing a tangible benefit from.

I think that would be lovely to share. As always, if you're going to make any big changes to your lifestyle, it is always worth consulting a doctor. And on the topic of doctors, we're going to have Dr. Hazel Wallace, aka The Food Medic, here with us next week. Hazel and I are going to be doing a deep dive into women's health, the importance of understanding your cycle,

and why science is actually a little bit skewed in the favour of men. It is so eye-opening. And then in our Fact or Fad, we're going to be looking at one of the most intriguing, and let's be honest, controversial wellness trends out there. The supposed healing powers of celery juice. It's going to be a good one. I will see you back here next week. Thank you so much for listening and thank you to Curly Media, our partners in this production.

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