New Year Wellness Reset: The Simple Beverage Habit That Actually Supports Healthy Aging | Be Well Moments

0:00Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10It's the end of 2025, beginning of 2026. This is naturally the time when people cut things out. And I always find it quite an interesting period because it's like new year, new you. And there's so much pressure to live in this, you know, quotations optimized way. and people kind of cut the joy out, which also makes me believe that's why people don't sustain long-term goals. And so for people like starting this journey going into 2025, 2026, what advice would you give with all the noise that's going to be around them and all their goals that they're going to want to achieve, like how to stay aligned to healthy aging and actually keep the habit going?

0:55Sarah Ann Macklin:So much to unpack there. I'm going to try to boil it down very simply because this is something that everyone can do no matter where you stand. I say start with beverages. I'm not talking about beer or alcohol. I'm talking about what I call the Holy Trinity of beverages that we should all do more of. And the Holy Trinity of beverages is water, which hydration is the key to life itself. You know, we don't have water. we quickly desiccate, we dry up and we will not live a long time. Water and then tea, which has water in it, but then the polyphenols from tea and some of the dietary fibers from tea.

1:38Sarah Ann Macklin:If you have matcha, for example, you're having dietary fiber from the tea plant, that's good for the gut microbiome as well. And then coffee. It turns out coffee actually is very, very robust with polyphenols and also good for many different parts of your body. Like I want to move the conversation about caffeine aside for one second. Happy to talk about that. But the polyphenols from tea, the polyphenols from coffee, and just the inherent goodness of water. If somebody wants to actually clean up their act and kind of like get into a new state of being, there's a million ways you can do this, you know, and this is why people hire life coaches and nutritionists and, you know, get into programs.

2:18Sarah Ann Macklin:And those are all things that you can do. And everyone's got a different starting point. but I'd like to boil it down simple. I say, start with your beverages, make sure you drink plenty of water and then drink tea and coffee and alternate it with tea and coffee in order to be able to hydrate yourself and get those polyphenols in. Turns out that, and then you can fine tune those as well. With water, try to drink purified water, meaning some kind of filtered water because we're now beginning to realize that the contaminants in water, which include microplastics and heavy metals, those things will eventually compromise your health span.

2:54Sarah Ann Macklin:So we want to get the cleanest water you can. Simple way to do that, just avoid drinking water out of a plastic bottle. So we've all done it, right? I mean, for years, we were all being handed a plastic bottle of water on vacation. Now, no, don't do that anymore. Don't drink out of a plastic cup. And then I think tea, try not to use tea bags. use loose leaf tea like they do in Asia. And the little trick to get kind of the pro tip to actually get loose, use loose leaf tea is you have really hot boiling water. Just get a pinch of tea leaves and put them in a cup. Pour in the hot water, like boiling water, just after boiling, like take it off the heat and then use it.

3:41Sarah Ann Macklin:And what happens is the tea will properly be steeped and ready to drink when the leaves have soaked up enough fluid and they actually drift their way down to the bottom of the cup. When the leaves are at the bottom of the cup, you're ready to sip the tea and you can actually add more water to re-steep the tea like that two or three times and get more polyphenols out of it. Coffee, it turns out that the polyphenols in coffee are, anytime you're brewing coffee through grounds, you are extracting those polyphenols, the chlorogenic acid, many other things good for you. And what you want to do is find what is the best kind of like roast of coffee.

4:25Sarah Ann Macklin:Turns out that it's medium roast that gives you the highest polyphenols that are beneficial to you, right? And organic coffee actually has a higher level of the polyphenols compared to conventional coffee. So again, three simple beverages that most of us probably like, have to have water, tea, coffee. There's not a lot of controversy around those. There's no schools of thought about them. If you are sensitive to caffeine, decaf is okay. Just recognize that by removing the caffeine, you're also removing some of the polyphenols. You're not going to get them all, but you'll get still some. And even decaffeinated coffee or tea still has a little bit of caffeine left in it because it's impossible to remove the whole thing.

5:11Sarah Ann Macklin:The other little tidbit I would say about the beverages, if you wanted to start a new chapter, fresh, clean with these beverages, is don't add dairy milk to it. Plant milk is fine. Almond milk is fine if you like. But cow milk actually has dairy fat, which forms little soap bubbles around the polyphenols. So when you drink it, you're actually flushing through your gut, many of the polyphenols, about 80%. You're only absorbing about 20%. But plant-based milk won't form those little soap bubbles. And don't add sugar to it. I like my coffee straight. I never put sugar in my tea. and absolutely avoid artificial sweeteners, which although we're still figuring it out, does look like many of the common artificial sweeteners actually can damage your gut microbiome.

6:08Sarah Ann Macklin:Back to our conversation, you know, the gut, the brain, the overall body, the metabolism, we don't want to be hurting that. So if you want to actually start your new year with a new you, I think beverage is a simple way to actually that anybody can actually do. Yeah, I love that. And also, I see one of the biggest mistakes. Because hydration feels so simple, we overlook it more than we should. And then when we're dehydrated, our thirst mechanism switch on. So 2 % dehydration, we're already sending signals to say, I'm thirsty. But the problem that I see is that a lot of people get that mixed up with hunger signals.

6:47And so people end up turning to food instead of water to actually hydrate, which also means that that's just a healthy habit but like my the thing that helped me the most and then has helped the clients that I work with is just always keeping water in eyeline because the amount of times that people might become hyper focused on a task or they're busy running around it's just not in their train of thought and so I always say to people put it in front of your eyeline because you're basically creating a stimulus of a signal to tell your brain oh I should maybe drink water rather than like having to seek water out when it comes to your mind.

7:22So like that's such a, it's so simple, but I think it's one of the most important overlooked messages of health.

7:29Sarah Ann Macklin:It's a brilliant and simple tip that, you know, that we encounter all the time. And I will also tell you what's interesting about water. If you drink a little water at the beginning of your meal, you'll actually start to stretch your stomach a little bit because water takes space, right? Like if you've ever gone to a pet store to buy some fish, what do they do? They take a plastic bag and then they put some water in it and then before they catch the fish, put in your tank at home, right? So think about it. You put a little bit of water in your stomach by drinking water. Just take a few gulps in the beginning.

8:05Sarah Ann Macklin:You're starting to stretch your stomach like that plastic bag in the pet store. And that stretch of the stomach actually starts sending signals to your brain to say, oh, we're getting filled up. So you're also less likely to eat as much. You'll start to feel full a little bit sooner. So that can be a little tip to help you eat a little bit less, which can be also healthy. The other interesting thing about water, if you have cold water. Now, I know different cultures have different feelings about warm water, hot water versus cold water. Like in Asia, they never want you to drink cold water. But I will tell you that there is some wisdom in drinking cold water.

8:45Sarah Ann Macklin:Like I always put ice in my water. I like ice. I would never think you'd do that. Let me tell you why. This isn't why. I like cold water. But when you actually put, when you drink cold water into your stomach, guess what? Your stomach has got receptors that actually sense temperature. And so it senses that it's got really cold temperature in your core, right that's core your core temperatures down with some water and so what it does is that she turns on your brown fat to generate heat and when your brown fat is turned on the mitochondria are in this brown fat actually start burning to generate literally heat to warm you up from the inside out because you drank something cold that actually the brown fat in order to get that energy for the mitochondria to burn hot to create heat thermogenesis it actually draws fuel from harmful white fat.

9:39Sarah Ann Macklin:So your good fat burns down bad fat when you drink cold water. And this has actually been studied clinically with people drinking cold water. Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.