ZOE Science & Nutrition - 10 tips to help you live healthier: Part 2

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

In this special two-part episode, we’re taking a journey back through all of our episodes to bring you 10 actionable tips that will have a big impact on your nutritional health.  Here, in part two, we’ll find out why you should stop counting sheep and how fidgeting can boost your health. These are evidence-backed tips to help you live and eat healthier. If you want to uncover the right foods for your body, head to joinzoe.com/podcast and get 10% off your personalised nutrition program. Download our FREE guide — Top 10 Tips to Live Healthier: https://zoe.com/freeguide Timecodes: 00:00 Introduction 01:30 Which oil is best? 06:45 Plants and the microbiome 10:37 Move after eating 16:40 Give your gut a rest 23:20 Getting to sleep Resources from ZOE: Which oil is best? Plants and the microbiome Move after eating to manage blood sugar  Give your gut a rest  Getting good sleep Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here Episode transcripts are available here

Welcome to Zoe, Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. Welcome back to part two of our special two-part episode, where we uncover the 10 most impactful discoveries from our podcast that you can apply to your life. This episode is part two. So if you haven't already, do go back and listen to part one. Since launching Zoe Science and Nutrition back in April 2022, we've spoken to the world's top scientists and researchers, delving into everything from intermittent fasting to the inner workings of the gut microbiome. And as a gift to you for this holiday period, the Zoe team has listened to hundreds of hours of conversations

to uncover the top 10 most powerful ways to change your health. In part one, we learned simple, effective ways to improve your diet. We heard which organic products are worth looking into and why you should be wary of health claims on food packaging. Here in part two, we're exploring five more brilliant discoveries. I think you're going to be surprised by most of them. Listen on to find out how many plants you should try to eat each week, how fidgeting can boost your health,

and why counting sheep to help you sleep might not be such a good idea after all. Let's dive in. Tip number six. When it comes to the best cooking oil, go for extra virgin olive oil. Fat. It's a delicious part of our food with an awful reputation. From butter to avocado oil, chances are you'll have some negative associations when you think of fat. And that's because of a decades-long smear campaign that linked all fats to weight gain and heart disease. We now know this was wrong, but where does that leave us as consumers and food lovers? In our episode on fats and oils, Dr. Sarah Berry explored how fat affects our bodies

and whether all fats are created equal. I think a lot of us were brought up to feel that fat was fundamentally unhealthy. If we put aside those sort of special magic fats that we need to live and think about them, you know, the majority of things we're eating, like can fat ever be healthy? I think we've had this view, I think, you know, saturated fats are bad, unsaturated are good.

So can this be healthy? And is it as simple as sort of saturated versus unsaturated? Help us understand how we can figure this out. Yeah, so firstly, can fat be healthy? Absolutely. It's a really important component of our diet. And I think, you know, a lot of us are living with the remnants of this surgence of low-fat diets, low-fat products in the 80s and 90s. You know, I was a teenager growing up in the 90s. Everything on the shelves was, you know, proclaiming to be healthy because it's low fat. And, you know, we really need to move beyond this. The evidence in terms of not just obesity, but in terms of many different health outcomes ranging from cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes does not support any favourable effect of having a low fat diet over having a moderate fat diet. The number one question we had from our listeners was what are the best oils to cook with? It depends on what you're cooking, how you're cooking it and what temperatures and for how long. As a rule of thumb, an oil that has a lot of monounsaturated fatty acids. So this is, for example, oleic acid that is particularly

high in some types of sunflower oil and olive oil tends to be a very good oil to cook with. And the reason for that is because it's a very stable oil. Once you start adding polyunsaturated fatty acids, and remember, these are the ones that have more double bonds, and these double bonds are very easily oxidized, then what can happen is when you cook with an oil that has a lot of polyunsaturated fatty acids, and an example of this is rapeseed oil or some other variety of sunflower oil, what happens is those double bonds can become oxidized. And so you get that rancid taste.

And it's quite obvious. And I don't know whether you've ever tasted that, Jonathan, if you've used something that's highly polyunsaturated or even fish oil, if it's left out in the air or heated, you can taste it quite easily that it's got some kind of rancid off taste. So from a taste perspective, it's best to use a monounsaturated oil. So olive oil, sunflower oil, which I think is not used as much in the States, right? It tends to be in Europe. Is there anything else that fits into those categories that you put it at the top? So olive oil, you would need is not used as much in the States, right, as it tends to be in Europe. Is there anything else that fits into those categories that you put at the top?

So olive oil, you would need to use a hyalaic type of sunflower oil. And rapeseed oil is still a pretty good oil to use. Now in the US, one of the main oils that they use for cooking and one of their main oleic acids, so monounsaturated rich oils, is soybean oil. That's one of the most commonly consumed oil in the US. It's homegrown, so it's also good in terms of environmental impact because of it being a homegrown oil. So I would say olive oil would be the best one, and then in the US, soybean oil, and in the UK, high-leck sunflower oil. Now, something to bear in mind, though, is as with all fats, it's all about the UK, Hyaluronic Acid, Sunflower Oil. Now something to bear in mind though is as with all fats it's all about the taste, the functionality and I personally don't like to cook with olive oil because I find it too fragrant, I find the taste too strong and what's giving it this taste is all of these great

polyphenols. So I would choose to have an oil that works for me in terms of taste. Now if you like the taste then and I know you fry with olive oil yourself, Jonathan, a lot, then that's great. It is a healthier option. Extra virgin olive oil is minimally processed and contains lots of healthy compounds like polyphenols. And these could help lower your risk of heart disease, reduce inflammation and boost your gut health. Hi, I hope you're enjoying this episode as much as I am. And maybe you're listening while on the move to help you manage your blood sugar after you've eaten. Now I have a favor to ask.

Making this show takes a lot of time. We think it's well worth it, all in the name of improving your health. What I ask in return is this. Please send a link to this podcast to one person that you think would benefit. And if you haven't already, hit the follow button in your podcast player of choice. Thank you, and back to the show. Tip number seven. Eat a diverse range of plants every week. Our gut microbiomes are these amazing, busy communities of microorganisms.

And what we're learning is that they're crucial for our overall health, and not just when it comes to digestion. The gut microbiome, all those bacteria, also has a big influence on brain health and well-being. It's a very complex area though. So in this episode, I spoke to Professor Nicola Segata and Professor Tim Spector to dive into the underestimated microbiome. So starting with you, Tim, if I didn't have a gut microbiome, would I die? No, you'd have a pretty miserable life. Nicola, can I improve my gut microbiome? Yes, you can. There are several ways to do that,

and we are going to learn them. Fantastic. Tim, could altering my gut microbes prevent or even treat disease. Absolutely. Nicola, have you discovered gut bacteria that are linked to good health that weren't even known to science a year ago? Yes, many actually. It's amazing. We're definitely going to talk some more about that. So this is definitely a cutting edge podcast. Tim, do you see a future where everyone has their gut microbiome tested?

Absolutely. All right. And then finally, for each of you, what's the biggest myth that you often come across about the gut microbiome and sort of gut microbiome testing? I think that it's that you can diagnose specific diseases with it. And I think that's probably the commonest one. Most people think it's, they criticize it because it's not particularly good

at diagnosing a particular type of disease, whether it's diabetes or heart disease or cancer or whatever. And they're missing the point, really. It's a much better tool at understanding your general health, your immune health. Fantastic.

Yeah, for me, the myth is that the microbiome can tell you everything. It can tell you everything, but only when connected with the other health measures of your body. Got it. So it's, in both cases, you're saying it's giving you this really big insight, but it's not sufficient on its own. While it is a complicated area of science, there are a few easy steps you can take to improve your gut microbiome. That is boosting your levels of good bacteria and reducing your levels of bad bacteria.

First, try and eat a diverse range of whole plants. And we think at the moment, the optimum is around 30 plants. We're doing some other studies to see if that's still true now with these new tests. But 30 different plants a week is what people should aim for. Not a problem if you don't always make it, but aim to get it right up. Currently, people have about five on average, right? So there's a long way to go. Second is eat the rainbow, try and eat colorful plants because of the polyphenols, these defense chemicals in them, which our microbes eat and is a source of energy, which we didn't know that before. And that includes all kinds of bitter foods as well.

Extra virgin olive oil, for example, nuts, seeds, dark chocolate. There's a great challenge for your week. 30 plants in a rainbow of colors. Aim for a wide range of different fruit, veg, beans, whole grains, nuts, seeds, spices, and herbs. Actually, one of my personal favorites this month is a recipe that I found on my Zoe app, which is a mushroom stir fry, which has this fantastic variety of different plants and the whole thing I can make in 15 minutes. Tip number eight, move after eating.

If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you'll know that blood sugar is a big topic and the science in this area is evolving fast. Now, repeated big peaks in blood sugar levels after eating can cause inflammation and increase your risks of diseases like type 2 diabetes. Whereas big dips in your blood sugar after those peaks can make us feel moody and tired and crave all sorts of food that

aren't the best for our bodies. Slow and steady wins the race when it comes to blood sugar. It's natural for our blood sugar to go up and down, but not to have huge spikes and then huge dips. So how can we avoid these spikes and crashes? Well, that's exactly what our blood sugar episode explored. It featured Javier Gonzalez. He's a professor of nutrition and metabolism at the University of Bath. And his research focuses on the interaction between diet and exercise. Maybe we could just start with what is blood sugar and why should we care about it? Yeah. So blood sugar is a main fuel providing, especially our brain, with fuel throughout the day. And so when we're not eating, our brain is still using fuel and

we need to provide it with that sugar in some form. So when we wake up in the morning, most of that sugar is coming from our liver. Our liver is breaking down its stores of sugar, and it's also producing sugar as well, providing the brain with that important fuel. And then with other types of activities that we do throughout the day, things like our muscles will also need some of that sugar as fuel. It sounds pretty obvious, therefore it's very important. We all know if your brain stops working, everything else happens. But there's so many different processes in our bodies. Why do we care about blood sugar particularly? What is it that makes it such a big focus of your study, for example? Yeah, it's probably because we need to keep our blood sugar within a relatively tight range to maintain health. Too low and our brain doesn't have enough fuel and we can end up going into a coma. Whereas if we have too much

blood sugar, then that can cause damage to our blood vessels. So we need to keep it in a tight range. And for that reason, at least in most healthy people, we have a load of physiological processes that aim to keep that blood sugar within that tight range. Blood sugar is really important to understand because it gives us critical insights into our health. Our blood sugar levels can tell us if our muscles are working well and how our liver is functioning, for example. Food has a direct impact on our blood sugar levels.

If a meal has a lot of carbohydrates in it, especially carbohydrates that are rapidly digested, like bread or rice, we might see a big increase in blood sugar levels. And that's because our bodies are taking those carbs in and breaking them down into blood sugar. A key area of Javier's research is looking at how we can actually control our blood sugar levels through exercise. When we start any form of exercise, our muscles are increasing the amount of energy that they're using. So they

need energy to continue the exercise. And a large amount of that energy will be coming from the sugar in the blood. So the muscles will start taking up more sugar out of the bloodstream. And so logically, you can immediately imagine that that's going to help control our blood sugar levels. It's a slightly more complicated picture in that our liver will also start producing more sugar to try and provide more fuel to the muscle. But if we do that bout of exercise after we've eaten a meal, then compared to just resting, it will tend to lower our blood sugar levels quite dramatically, actually. So it's quite a potent effect. And actually, there's some really interesting recent research showing that

really light intensity exercise, basically fidgeting and moving your knee up and down, they were calling it soleus press-ups, which is the muscle in our calves. Just if you imagine bobbing your knee up and down, doing that after eating a meal could drastically lower the blood sugar response about that 30% after a meal. So it can be quite a profound effect. By 30%, just by like fidgeting my knees around?

Yeah, yeah. I always, unfortunately, eat my food whilst during Zoom meetings, which is unfortunate for Jonathan, who's normally having to watch me munch away. And then I sit there feeling like, oh my gosh, I'm always telling everyone go for a walk after you've eaten. But what you're telling me, Javier, is that I can just sit here and fidget, which is what I'm doing now, fidget my legs, and that's going to do the job. Exactly.

Well, I'm so glad I joined this podcast. That's phenomenal. Studies have shown just two minutes of walking every 20 minutes throughout the day lowers your blood sugar levels by about 50%, whereas this fidgeting of the knee lowers it by about 30%. So it's hugely effective, but the more muscle groups that you activate, the more effective it seems to be. So basically every 20 minutes you either go to the toilet or get up from your desk and go and make a cup of tea and you're on to a winner. That's really encouraging. Even low intensity movement after eating, like a short walk or household chores, can help to lower your blood sugar response. Let's round up with three quick mini tips from Javier on using exercise to

manage your blood sugar. Try to do something every day, no matter what it is, would be point number one. I'd say point number two is if that something can only be relatively low intensity, then try to do that after you've eaten a meal. And then point three would be if you're able to do higher intensity activity, then you should be able to get some longer lasting adaptations. I'd like to share something exciting. Back in March 2022, we started this podcast to uncover how the latest research can help us live longer and healthier lives. We've spoken to leading scientists around the world doing amazing research, and across hundreds of hours of conversations, they've revealed key insights that can help you to improve your health. If you don't have hundreds of hours to spare, no need to worry.

At the request of many of you, our team has created a guide that contains 10 of the most impactful discoveries from the podcast that you can apply to your life. And you can get it for free. Simply go to zoe.com slash free guide, or click the link in the show notes. And do let me know what you think of it. Okay, back to the show. Tip number nine, give your gut a rest. Believe it or not, there's such a thing as the warrior diet. And no, it doesn't mean eating red meat before going into battle. The warrior diet involves eating only raw fruit during the day before tucking into a huge feast at night. Then there's the 5-2 diet. That means for two days of

every week, you severely restrict your calorie intake. These diets are both types of intermittent fasting, which you've probably heard of because a lot of people are really evangelical about it. Intermittent fasting essentially means restricting the window of time when you're allowed to eat during the day. Proponents say it can result in everything from weight loss to disease prevention, even extending your life. Research certainly supports a number of health benefits, but there is little long-term science so far.

It's an exciting area that's full of potential, especially for the gut. For this episode, we spoke to Tim Spector and Gin Stevens, an author and big supporter of fasting. Does intermittent fasting lead to weight loss for everybody? Well, weight loss is multifactorial. I love that word because our bodies are complicated. So intermittent fasting is a great health strategy, but you might need to do some tweaking. For example, your gut health, what you're eating, other things, hormones, all of those play a role. Intermittent fasting has a lot of powerful things that it does in the body, but it doesn't fix every single problem you might be having.

But you can tweak it till it's easy and find your magical weight loss solution. Well, I don't want to use the word magical, but you can find your weight loss solution. And I told Jin she was allowed one sentence. I didn't realize she was really good at long sentences. I'll tighten this up from next episode. Tim, are the health benefits of intermittent fasting proven? Yes, although we don't know what goes on long term. So definitely short term. Are there risks from intermittent fasting? There are some risks, but minimal if you're fairly healthy and it doesn't last very long.

The thing to remember with intermittent fasting is that it is an emerging area of research. There's a lot we can't say conclusively, but there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic. It's all fairly new. So we've only recently moved from animal studies into humans. The size of the studies so far is actually really small. You know, 50 people is a big study. And of course, this means that we can't generalize it to everybody. We don't know how everybody's going to do well. And as we've always talking on these podcasts, everybody is different to some extent, and everyone's circumstances are different. But I think what it's showing is it has enormous potential for everyone, even just by tweaking their mealtimes just by 30 minutes. If they did that

over 10 or 20 years, could have dramatic effects. So I think it's really important we take it seriously. There don't seem to be much in the way of downsides and huge amounts of upsides. So yes, we're still accumulating evidence, but it's something that I think everyone can self-experiment with themselves. Well, Tim, giving up that dark chocolate at 10 o'clock is a big sacrifice from my side. So you've got to understand there is potentially a lot of emotional downsides. So I'm excited by the experiment, but I'm not yet sure that this is one I'm willing to commit to. Well, then if you give up your cornflakes in the morning, you can have all your chocolate in the evening. That's what I was going to say. You just shift your eating window,

the direction where you like, here's where I really want to be able to eat. I really want to have that. Maybe you could have it at 9 p.m. instead of 10, but you just nudge it this way, nudge it that way. Boom, you're doing it. We can think of these microbes as the cleaning crew, and they need time to go in and repair your gut. What happens when you're fasting is some microbes that don't live off food, but they live off the debris and the lining of the gut mucosa suddenly come to life. So when suddenly all that snacking's ended and Jonathan's finished his chocolate, thank God, move on, you know, and get all those other chocolate- chocolate eating microbes out of the way. And the cleaning

staff come out and there's some microbes like Accomansia that's well known because it has a name. It says Accomansia municifilia means I love mucus. So it loves the sugary lining of your gut. So it's going around tidying up your gut lining that you haven't rested properly. And if you don't give it a rest, you don't have enough time for these cleaning microbes really to come out of the woodwork and tidy up your gut and help it regenerate. What's interesting is that these same microbes that have this job are also seen to be crucial in preventing diabetes and obesity. So, Accomansia is one of these microbes that is stimulated when you go on a fast and is now a very trendy novel probiotic for helping your metabolic health and help you lose weight. So, I think we're just starting to understand

which microbes fit into these categories, but realizing that you're getting a whole new team come out if you give them enough time to come out of the woodwork, tidy up your gut, do all the repair work, and really you're in much better shape for the next time that chocolate bar comes down. It's a brilliant analogy. So it's sort of like you've put the trash out overnight and early in the morning. It's the overnight cleaners in an office that come in and make everything shiny again. You know, it's the offense team in American football versus the defense team. You know, it's giving them time to come out so that you've got the right team ready there to deal with your body and what it needs to do. And if you put it out of sync by eating the way we weren't intended to, by eating over 18

hours, it just simply doesn't have enough time to do its job. And I think what we're doing in this fasting is really extending the repair side of the body. And that's probably the general idea about why fasting is so good and why it has this huge potential in longevity. When it comes to your fasting period, not eating for around 12 to 14 hours, which can include sleeping, is a good start. As we mentioned in part one, regularly snacking late in the evening isn't good for your health. You can still drink black coffee, green tea, and water without breaking your fast, but it's best to avoid caffeine in the evening. And last but definitely not least, it's tip number 10, a surefire technique

to fall asleep. We've got a bit of a curveball for your 10th and final tip here. It's not exactly a nutrition tip, but it is certainly connected to your overall health. It's a technique to help you fall asleep. If you have insomnia or struggle with getting to sleep, you're going to want to give this one a try. We all know how great it feels to drift off to sleep and wake up feeling refreshed. We feel energetic and focused, ready to take on the day. But the long-term effects of bad sleep could be detrimental, and they can have a huge impact on health.

Alzheimer's disease, cancer, obesity, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes are all linked to poor sleep. For this episode, I spoke to sleep expert Professor Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley and founder of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He's also the author of Why We Sleep. One of the things you're really passionate about is what happens when people don't sleep enough. Right, Matt? Yeah.

So can you talk a bit about this? Because I think we do live in this world where because of electric light, because of digital devices, we no longer sort of run out of anything interesting to do after it gets dark and therefore clearly just sleep as much as our body wants. Most of us have to work quite hard, in fact, to get as much sleep as I think we would naturally do, apart from maybe my teenage son. He's just fine if I leave him alone. So what happens to people if they don't sleep enough? So downstairs in the body, we know that short sleep or insufficient sleep will change your

cardiovascular system for the worse. It will increase your blood pressure. It will increase the speeding contraction of your heart. And it will reduce, which is not a good thing, something called your heart rate variability. And so firstly, we see significant impacts on your cardiovascular system. And this is the reason why short sleep across the lifespan increases a whole collection of cardiovascular disease features, things such as atherosclerosis. And we published a paper on this recently that having just poor quality sleep and fragmented sleep increases inflammation and that inflammation then leads to the buildup of

plaques in your arteries and that leads to cardiovascular disease. The next thing we speak about is the immune system. There is a very intimate association between your sleep health and your immune health. For example, we know that individuals who, and we've done some of these experiments as well, if you limit someone to just four hours of sleep for one single night, there is a 70% drop in critical anti-cancer fighting immune cells called natural killer cells. And so that's quite a concerning state of immune deficiency after one short night of sleep. And that's just one night of short sleep. Yeah. And we also know that, for example, and we've just got the data through for COVID and

the same is true here, but if you are not getting sufficient sleep in the week before you get your flu shot, you will only produce 50% of the normal antibody response, therefore rendering that vaccination far less effective, if not not effective at all. I think the other big finding that's burst onto the scene, and I think it's probably the most exciting finding recently in sleep science, is the link between a lack of sleep and Alzheimer's disease. And we do a large amount of this. We have multiple large research programs looking at this at my sleep center. What we firstly understood is that people who don't sleep enough, who sleep six hours or less, or people with insomnia or people with a sleep disorder called sleep apnea, all of those people have a significantly higher risk of developing

Alzheimer's disease in later life. Matt and his team have been working with our scientists here at Zoe to research the links between sleep, nutrition, and health. The stuff that we're doing together, I mean, it's incredibly exciting because, you know, with a lot of the studies that we and other colleagues have done in the field, when we measure your sleep, we typically will measure your sleep for just a night in the laboratory because it's difficult to constantly track individual humans, you know, night after night after night, it's especially difficult to track large numbers of them from one night to the next, to the next, to the next. And then it's even harder to, in addition, be measuring lots of changes in their brain and their body as a consequence of that ongoing night-to-night sleep evaluation. Meaning that we know a lot, what we call cross-sectionally. So we just take a large group of people, we do one night of sleep recording,

we measure changes the next day, and we show that there's these associations. What that doesn't really tell you, however, is what is the consequence within an individual of variability in their sleep across weeks, if not months? And that's a fundamental question, because that's the way most of us live in our lives. So what I'm saying is that we've not really understood what inter-individual differences are within an individual over time, as their sleep fluctuates. What can we learn about that? And how does that relate to things such as the metabolic

system and their immune system and their gut microbiome? That's the type of work that we're able to do in the ZOE collaboration. One of the things that Matt and his team have found with our ZOE scientists is that breakfast with slightly higher amounts of fat and fiber, but lower amounts of sugar, are more likely to help you wake up and then stay awake throughout the day. So sleep is important for our health in all kinds of ways that we're still exploring. I don't know about you,

but that doesn't exactly help me get to sleep. In fact, it might keep me up at night. So how do we actually drift off? Matt has an amazing evidence-backed tip. What's the biggest myth about sleep that most people still believe? There are so many myths, but I think one of the fun myths that has been busted is that counting sheep will help you fall asleep. And there's a great study done here at UC Berkeley, and it wasn't done by me, it was

done by a colleague of mine. And what they found is that counting sheep not only didn't make you fall asleep any faster, it actually took you longer to fall asleep when you were counting sheep. But what they did find was something interesting. There is an alternative mental strategy. That strategy is taking yourself on a mental walk. And so think about a walk that you know really well. Maybe it's a walk in the woods or in the forest or a hike or a walk on the beach. And then try to really visualize that to the point of this is me leaving my front door. I'm walking down the steps off I go. And if you do it in granular detail and move yourself through it, the next thing you remember is your alarm going off the next morning

because you've fallen asleep. And it seems to be a quite effective tool. So that's one of the many, many myths that we can bust regarding sleep. So there you have it. Instead of counting sheep to fall asleep, take a mental walk down a really familiar route. Before you know it, you'll have drifted off to the land of not. And I've tried this a number of times and I keep falling asleep pretty fast, so I think it's working. And know as you do that, that a good night's sleep is going to have all kinds of great positive knock-on effects for your health. the episodes featured in today's show in their entirety. You'll find links to each of them in the show notes.

And if you want easy access to today's tips in the future, we've put them together in a handy guide, which you can download for free. Simply go to zoe.com slash podcast or follow the link in the show notes. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolfe. Zoe Science and Nutrition is produced by Yellow Hewins Martin, Richard Willen, and Tilly Fulford. See you next time.