Dr Federica Amati: What Alcohol is Really Doing to Your Body | GREAT MOMENTS

0:02Hello everyone, I'm Jamie Laying and this is Great Moments. in terms of chronic disease so we i get it you know smoking not good alcohol sure yeah not good not good and i want to ask about alcohol i want to get into that the other thing not moving not exercising we understand those are the sort of yeah ones they're the big hitters they're the what are the what are the hidden ones that we don't really know and what are the unhealthy food habits that we're not sure about as well okay i think they're the big hitters but how many people still smoke i would say a lot quite a lot and vaping not safe like is it better than smoking cigarettes sure should we do it no so so like it seems obvious but people still walk around smoking and vaping and so even though that's like the one well everyone knows that one it's like yeah but you know actually one of my friends but have you ever smoked in the past i did see my boyfriend smoked yes see there we go did i know what i know now no not so much and also like i'm not defending this at all actually um but since then the smoking ban has come in since then it feels like public health understanding of how bad smoking is has improved correct and it's true also that younger people are smoking less now so that statistically it's it's it's a trend which is great and drinking less alcohol and drinking less alcohol as well um but you know if you look at so dr helen o 'neill she's wonderful she runs hurtility which is a love her she's a dream so her her research that she did women actively trying to conceive smoking was quite high percentage you know so it's like we know it but we don't know enough we can still repeat it don't smoke and with alcohol drinking similarly it's one of the only things that we ingest which is a class one carcinogen what does that mean so it's labeled it's understood as directly causing cancer by itself.

1:51Very few things that we ingest are class one carcinogens, right? A handful, in fact. Alcohol is one of them. The second one is processed meat. So, you know, salamis, pastramis, those kinds of meats. The third one is betel nut, which is very hard. I've never seen it. I've never come across it in the UK, but it's a carcinogen. And the fourth one is Chinese saltfish. Again, I have not come across it, but it's a carcinogen. Those four things are the only things when you look at this quite terrifying graphic, which is put out by the WHO Cancer Research Group. Those are the only four ingestible things that cause cancer directly by themselves.

2:29And yet, alcohol is pervasive. It's everywhere. And we advertise it too. It's not just that it's available. We actually have alcohol adverts encouraging us to drink it. Now, on the flip side of that, That research shows that having a glass of red wine with your meal could be protective and some of the centenarians of the world. Do you believe that? Yeah, I do. Because the reason I believe that is because our body is very good at helping us stay alive. And I do believe that having a glass of red wine, but you know, a glass of red wine, no one drinks that. It's like this much. I think a glass of red wine with your family sitting down in the context of a Mediterranean diet brings us together.

3:14and is such a minor part of the other greatness that's part of that lifestyle that it probably just helps people come together and have a moment of like, cheers, great. So the binge drinking culture we have in the UK is literally killing us. Yeah, it's directly contributing to the cancers that we see. So especially liver and gastrointestinal tract, so esophagus, mouth, stomach and colon cancer directly. um and also one that i think is really not spoken enough about enough um is in post-menopausal women drinking alcohol is one of the biggest risk factors for breast cancer why so well it's it's again it's a carcinogen the exact mechanism as to why specifically breast cancer is something that i haven't i don't know why exactly that like so i know that there's a relationship there and there's a very obvious causative link if we had to like understand at cellular level why specifically breast cancer i don't know i'd have to think about it for a minute but it's such a it's a well-established relationship and a lot of women post-menopausally actually interestingly come to me and say i can't i don't tolerate alcohol anymore i don't know why i can't drink and i used to drink quite a lot so in some in some people like it's almost like their body rejects it which is good because the relationship it has with increasing risk each unit of alcohol increases breast cancer risk by a measurable amount in all the data analysis so i think you know if people i do get asked about alcohol drinking by the press because it's people love reading about it and do i do i drink do i have an occasional glass of red wine yeah i do i do when we have family around for dinner or maybe we're celebrating a birthday but genuinely that's the only time I will drink alcohol and I think when it's in a social context where it's part of the social gathering not the point of the social gathering because if you're going out for drinks you're going out for the drink and then who's there's their kind of thing it's just different um so I think that there is such a thing as maybe drinking um in a way that isn't going to be too detrimental to health but for those people who don't like drinking like there's no benefit to drinking right so if you cannot if you can live without drinking alcohol you're probably better off not drinking alcohol okay and and also with alcohol as well it's not only the sort of effects that it has physically or mentally as well it it shatters us and jamie if you look at so david another legend professor david nutt who got thrown out of parliament for saying that ecstasy was safer than alcohol.

5:55He was right. He did this beautiful study where he plotted the harm to health and the harm to society of each drug. And you have all the different drugs and you get, you know, right at the bottom, which is not harmful to anyone, is like mushrooms, just harmless. You know, people who take mushrooms don't really harm themselves. They don't really harm anyone else. And then you could go up and heroin and cocaine, pretty harmful to self, a little bit harmful to society, right? Then you go to alcohol and it's off the scale. It actually means alcohol is so harmful to society that it's the only reason that that access is so big it's just up there somewhere like completely off the scale why because it makes you aggressive it makes you aggressive like the amount of alcohol related incidents driving aggression rape that mean name it alcohol is not a good drug for society but is that because it's accessible i mean probably partly right still that doesn't but i think it's also just because alcohol does tend to cause aggression generally.

6:54More generally, it's a bit more of an aggressive drug. Can I ask you a big question? Do you think there's a synergy between this pandemic of mental health, anxiety, depression, all these different things? It's like a lava going through towns and cities throughout our country. Do you think there's a correlation between our diet? Yes, 100%, yeah. Really? Of course. I think it's really important that we think of human beings as a whole thing. So our mental health is not detached from our physical health. our mental health and our physical health depends on our environment so to we know that our environment is not supporting our health so it should be it's kind of no surprise that whilst our physical health is worsening our mental health will also worsen because we are one thing so you can't separate people into systems right if i said to you you know jimmy i've got really terrible backache well that backache will be impacting my sleep it will be impacting my mood because i'm not sleeping and i'm in pain it will impact how much i'm able to move which will then impact other things like we don't live in systems we live as in whole people and in the same way that our physical health is suffering our environment isn't set up for us to thrive our mental health is obviously going to going to suffer too you're right we separate everything it's yeah and it's We think, oh, it's my brain.

8:17I'm feeling depressed. No, it's everything. Everything's connected. It's everything. The patients that I looked at in my PhD, they were mental health service users. And when you look, I try to predict, how could you predict patient outcomes? Like, what is it about the people coming into the services that could help us understand whether they're likely to recover or not? That was my question. and the questions the answers were various but one of them is basically you can't take context away so if somebody comes into a mental health service and they they have no access to housing and they can't get nutritious food every day and they have lived a trauma then we can give the best cognitive behavioral therapy there is but then they'll they'll improve but they're not going to be undepressed they're not going to suddenly go below threshold because we've delivered a good service there's context context is always king right so whilst we try to like understand how to improve people's health and mental health is huge and it's such an important topic we have to understand that you we need to treat people as a whole so patient-centered care that's actually what my master's dissertation was in for public health patient-centered care predicts how well people will recover from an illness or feel better because when you address the entire person as a whole they're much more likely to be able to to feel better and to improve their health on the on the whole picture not just one thing so of course i'm not suggesting that if you cut your if you cut your wrist then yeah you just treat the cut but when we're talking about these issues that impact our quality of life, like mental health does, it's not only does diet impact the likelihood of us having mental health issues, but if you suffer with mental health, you're also going to make different dietary choices.

10:11Because cooking up a delicious meal that's really nutritious when you have severe depression is super hard. Because you don't have any energy, you don't want to do it. It's hard to get out of bed, let alone cook up a feast. So there's this really... One of the seminal trials on this is called the SMILES trial, and it was run by Professor Felice Jacker in Australia. And it took her ages to even get funding to recruit the patients for this because no one believed it would work. She wanted to see what happened if you had a group of patients with resistant depression. So these are patients who've had CBT.

10:45They've also got sometimes pharmacotherapy, so drugs. And she wanted to see if she could make a difference by changing their diets. and they ran the trial and it was randomized so she didn't know when she got the data and they analyzed it they didn't know which group was which and when she first ran it she thought they'd switched the groups by mistake because it was such a change get out of here seriously so she found that in her in this trial and i think it's been repeated now uh replicated rather she found that giving a mediterranean dietary intervention so um but very she also did an affordability study with this so she showed that the diet that she recommended these patients was actually more affordable than the diet that we were on to start with right so it was actually cheaper to eat this way the Mediterranean dietary intervention with a little bit of red meat because a lot of these patients would be 12 deficient she found that she could reduce severity of depression symptoms by up to 30 percent wow and these people were resistant so they had like really resistant depression so we know that we can improve mental health symptoms um and we also know that there's lots of um beautiful reviews done on things like mediterranean diet and likelihood of developing depression and likelihood of developing anxiety and if you have a mediterranean dietary pattern then you're less likely to develop these conditions so we know that it can help protect against mental health issues now having transient mental health problems is part of being human so So I think we also need to, you know, it's normal to have periods where you have issues with your mental health.

12:20But it's the resilience, it's the being able to recover, it's for it not to become a chronic mental health condition. That's what we want. And yeah, diet absolutely plays a part, not only in prevention, but also actually in curing it and making sure people can live a healthy life. I mean, people with severe mental health conditions like schizophrenia, their life expectancy is 20 years less. than people without. That's not because schizophrenia is killing them. That's not what it is. It's because their metabolic health, their diet, their physical activity, their social isolation is such that they lose 20 years of life.

12:58That is wild. You know, the two things go hand in hand and we can't, if someone is suffering, you need to treat the whole person, not just symptom.

13:11Okay, so many incredible insights there from Dr. Amati. She's amazing. Head nutritionist at Zoe. Now, what she said about alcohol, basically, if you can live without it, you'll be better off. I mean, it kind of makes you stop and think, doesn't it? It definitely made me stop and think. I also thought more about my diet, how important it is to take time to think about what I'm putting in my body so I can feel better both physically and, more importantly, mentally. Now, there are so many insights and practical tips in Dr. Frederica's full episode. Now, we're going to leave the link in the show description so you can click on that and go straight to it.

13:44And she's just one of the many incredible experts we've had in Great Company. So if you haven't already, go and check out the rest. Don't forget to follow and subscribe and we'll see you next week for a brand new episode of Great Company.