Fatty Liver Expert: Your Liver Is Filling With Fat Right Now - Dr David Unwin

31:37I've never heard that before. But it's a horrible thing to say to a patient, isn't it? What's Belson? Well, that's in World War II where they all starved. Oh, okay. So the point is you're saying to somebody with an obesity problem. It's their fault. Yes, you're blaming them. That's exactly the point. And that's what I did. And it's worse than that because I give them that advice and it just about never works. I did a horrible thing I used to say to them right so why don't you just have two tablespoons of all bran a day oh breakfast cereal yeah with skim milk and I would advise a few multivitamins and a couple of pints of skimmed milk a day that was my advice and then when it didn't work who do you think I blamed them yeah and this was all part of my epiphany, I never joined the dots that the failure was not theirs.

32:38It was mine. And that's horrible, isn't it? Imagine 25 years of I was blaming patients for their failure to lose weight and it was my failure because I didn't give them advice that worked. And if you keep giving the same advice to people and it doesn't work shouldn't I have questioned but is that happening in society overall how are we doing how are we doing with health how's it going it's a disaster isn't it so we need to do something different but for me for 25 years I did not believe that lifestyle was key and now I do and that's why I didn't I didn't think that the biscuits made that much difference obviously I knew basic nutrition so I made sure there's protein and there's iron and stuff I fundamentally believed that drugs is what I should be using medication and that lifestyle was a sort of add-on isn't that terrible i think this is so important because it really gets to what i believe the average person thinks as well yeah yeah um we were talking before we started recording about some of my friends they are there's there's two friends i mentioned one of them is a very very successful businessman um everybody knows who this person is and they asked me this weekend is pizza healthy and i just couldn't believe it's gobsmacking it's like oh what pizza i want because they were choose trying to choose between they usually have a big 12 inch pizza yeah for lunch and and he was asking me what's healthier steven uh nando's chicken or this 12 inch pizza he was gonna get and i literally looked at him like i was looking at a ghost i was like are you winding me up and he was genuinely serious he's almost 60 years old now and he doesn't know if a chicken breast is healthier than a 12 inch pizza and the other example that I mentioned to you before we started recording is a very famous Premier League football superstar legend who you would assume had gone through those sort of 15-20 years of being an academy player and then a pro athlete knows what has sugar in and what doesn't and he was asking me is a big spaghetti carbonara is that healthy is that health food because he said to me during his football years they were told always to carb load and again this it gave me a huge amount of empathy because it made me realize how even though there's podcasts like this where we talk so much about health and even though there's the internet now the this information is not getting through to the average person for some reason and they too i believe but think exactly what you just said that health is you know it's this sort of accessory where my fate is determined anyway and if i do this health stuff which is a bit of an inconvenience because these percy pigs taste great yeah um or these candies taste great, then I might be able to look a little bit better, a little bit more aesthetically pleasing.

35:37But my fate is determined. The simple point, yeah, nutrition, we're not teaching it. So there's only three macronutrients. There's only protein, fats, and carbohydrate. And yet your friends there haven't even got the three macronutrients. And they are successful, intelligent people so somewhere we're going badly wrong aren't we there is a another example that's really fun to mind to me which was you know i'm in dragon's den at the moment and someone came in and pitched a fruit snack business and it's basically dried out fruit pieces now i look at i'm loving this already yeah i looked at the back yes and it said in the range of 60 to 70 percent sugar because what they've done is they've taken exotic fruits like mangoes yeah dried them out and now you have this little chip which is this piece of mango 60 70 percent sugar so i'm looking at the back of this thing thinking this is candy this is basically candy thank you but i'm looking around and every because it because it uses the word fruit yes people have this sort of halo assumption that if the word fruit is on it fruit juice fruits it'll sell yeah and who and And also it's a sort of who cares about the consequence, but we'll make a pile of money selling dried up fruit and they miss what you read on the back.

36:58Yeah. They don't read. 67 % sugar. I was like, this is not healthy. Is that okay? How's that? You know, what if somebody had type 2? What for kids is, we'll just give them, yeah. And you've touched on another thing about what's going wrong. So when we look at my practice and this epidemic, And really, as I've said already, it's not an epidemic. It's a pandemic. It's everywhere. I go all over the world and obesity, type 2 diabetes, poor metabolic health. It's everywhere. It's everywhere. And I think one of the things, touching on what you just said, is so you wake up and you have your cereals for breakfast.

37:44Which you've got some here. Which we have some cereals there. and then you'll have, why don't you have a big glass of fresh orange juice as well? Great idea. And then, okay, that's your breakfast. But then on the way in, you have a little snack and people do. They buy a bar or some crisps or something like that. And then even at school, they might get a muffin mid-morning. That's fire enough. They might then have an apple. at lunchtime you're going to have some sandwiches and then you've eaten your sandwich so you'll I don't know you might have might have a cake or something or some ice cream then you'll go home and then it's time for you you know maybe your chips or your pizza what you've actually done is have sugar with your sugar with your sugar sugar sugar sugar sugar all day long there's hardly any protein going back then to those where was the protein to grow you you know and that that's the thing that that's changed over time that we are the snacking so i've i come across a lot of young people and their mother is saying i can't get him to eat any proper food he just eats snacks all day long and it won't i can't they can't get protein in them and some of them are actually thin kids they're not all fat let's talk about what you just said there and we can walk through the day using yes the food we have on this table now i just want to caution that we do have some people that are probably out walking their dog listening and can't see so we're gonna have to do a bit of a voiceover okay as to what's going on but yeah you said wake up in the morning you have your cereal yeah now cereal growing up i thought was a health food me too yeah me too how much sugar is in the average standard bowl of let's say frosted cereal well we can do this different way stephen this is actually like a test for you laid out here Oh, gosh, is that...

39:40Yeah, this is a test for you and I'll describe it. So what you've got, you've got a bowl of, we'll call them, they're cornflakes. Then you've got a potato, a baked potato. It isn't baked yet, but you could bake it if you want. You've got 150 grams, and this is boiled rice, so it's not dry, it's boiled rice. You've got a very ripe banana. and at the end there, you've got a delicious looking chocolate bar. Yeah. So you've got there some cubes of sugar and this is the test bit, you see, as to how I'm going to give you, we'll score you in the end. Okay. So what I'd like you to do is consider these relatively and each of those cubes of sugar represents a four gram teaspoon of sugar.

40:31Yeah. So if you could now just go along these and put beside each food what you believe to be the equivalent in terms of teaspoons of sugar, and then I'll give you a score and see how you do. And those are the answers, so I'm going to turn it down so you don't cheat. Okay, so I'm going to score them as I would have thought two years ago. Thank you, yes. Because two years, I've interviewed a lot of experts, so I'm generally quite shocked by all these things. But I'm going to score them as I would have thought when I was 31 years old two years ago. Yes, that's great. Cereal, honestly. Yeah. And there's no sugar on it.

41:06It's not a sugared cereal. It's just the dry flakes. I honestly didn't think there was sugar in that. Yeah. So if you had pushed me, I would have... Well, give it one, eh? I'll give it one. Thank you. But I didn't think there was sugar in that. One. Again, a potato, I didn't think there was any sugar in a potato. So even giving it one feels like I'm lying because I didn't think there was sugar in a potato. And I'll be honest, rice, I didn't think there was any sugar in rice. Okay. A banana, it tastes sweet. Yes. So my brain would have said one. Yeah. But this chocolate bar that's in front of me, I would have said, I'm going to say two.

41:44Okay. Two or, I'm going to say three. Right. I'm going to say three. I actually think it was two, but that's how much sugar I would have thought was in all of these things here. Cereal, a potato, white rice, a banana, and a chocolate bar. Right. To be fair, I still kind of do, but I know better. So now I'm going to give you the correct figure. Now, this is worked out from the glycemic load that we already discussed. So I explained about the glycemic load. And then, so in clinical practice, I had a problem. My problem was in 10 minutes, trying to explain to you how you could eat differently and why you should eat differently.

42:24And so I needed a way of quickly communicating with children, with old people, with a teacher, the consequences of dietary choices. So I came up with a new idea, which was, why don't we represent the glycemic load? and instead of using grams of glucose, which nobody understands, and what's glucose anyway, instead of doing that, we redid the calculations, redoing it for four gram teaspoons of sugar. And that's my teaspoon of sugar equivalent system. And I'm using that now to give you the correct answer. Okay. Right. So the cornflakes is one, two, four, five, six, seven and eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

43:25With no frosting? No frosting, no milk, nothing. The potato, obviously it depends on its size. That's quite a big one. So that one is one, two, three, four, and there's more. Five, six. Is nine. There they go. Nine. A equivalent of nine sugar cubes. Is that nine? Yeah. Right.

43:55I'm going to leave the rice till last. That chocolate bar is actually, you could do it for me, is seven and a half. So you can give it seven. Seven. Seven. Now, the banana depends on the size and how ripe it is. A ripe banana has more sugar in it, you probably know when you eat it. But let's say that banana is quite a ripe one. It looks quite ripe. Let's say that's six because it's a big banana. Oh, my gosh.

44:34Okay, then the final one, obviously, is going to be the killer, isn't it? I thought rice was healthy. Well, I suppose it depends. I thought white rice was really healthy. It depends. So, one, this is 150 grams of boiled rice. Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. So that's the winner. And I would say that's the single fact around the world. So my teaspoon of sugar, there we are. That's one of my teaspoon of sugar charts. So what you've got there is the food, the glycemic index, the serving size, and then the teaspoons of sugar there. So this is available. The Public Health Collaboration is a charity.

45:31I helped set up with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10 years ago. It's our 10th anniversary tomorrow. These infographics, they're actually far more than this. This is the seven more. They're available in 35 languages. Volunteers have translated this to go all over the world. It's not copyrighted. I want people to steal it, take it, use it. So the white rice fact, I would say, has astonished people all over the world and led to me becoming far better known. What about orange juice? A lot of parents, including my parents, gave me orange juice. And I used to think that orange juice was a health food. So I would literally, I'd go to the fridge, I'd open the Sunny Delight or whatever it was.

46:19Sunny Delight. And I would drink that. And I'd think I'm going to be strong and big and my body's going to love me. Well, let's, so there's a lot of sugar in orange juice. There's a lot of sugar in orange juice. And you've taken away all the, once you take it from the fruit, as it was meant to be, and you juice it, the sugar hit is fast. so what that does is if you think if we go back to insulin again so you you you drink the orange juice your blood sugar goes up rapidly so your body responds rapidly with insulin then you what happens your blood sugar falls but then you're kind of hungry again and that's what happened to me with the biscuits wasn't it i ate biscuits my blood sugar is up, then insulin comes in heavy and slow, but too much.

47:15Then I thought I was having a panic attack because I had low blood sugar. And what's the answer to that? More biscuits. And round you go. And that's how, without thinking, you'd start the day, starting the day with a sugary breakfast without enough protein in it is driving hunger. And then you wonder why you're ravenously hungry at 10 o 'clock. There was a few others that shocked me. One of them was, I was in Peru. And obviously Peru's quite famous for chocolate because of the cacao and all that stuff. And so we went to a chocolate making class and he told us to make dark chocolate, normal chocolate, and then white chocolate.

47:53And when I made the white chocolate, this guy got me this big glass cylinder and he goes, here's some white sugar. He goes, pour it in. So I get it and I pour some in and he goes, no, no, no, no, my friend, pour it in. And I pour it and pour it and pour it and pour it and pour it and pour it and pour it. And I'm not kidding you. I feel like, and I have to check the facts here. So community note me on the screen, Diary of SEO team. I feel like I poured into this huge glass cylinder 80 % of white sugar. Yes, it's true. Yeah. And then he said, put some syrup in. I was like, what? Syrup. This is white sugar.

48:30It was like some syrupy stuff, some oil stuff. And I was like, so white sugar, so white chocolate is like 80 % white sugar. Yeah. I've never eaten white chocolate since. Yeah. Ever. That's so important. So very often people think they're a chocoholic. That's really common that people say to me, I'm addicted to chocolate. If you look at, if you actually look at how much sugar there is in milk chocolate, you know, there's many teaspoons of sugar in milk chocolate. If you eat 90 % dark chocolate, there's only about two teaspoons of sugar in a bar. And what you find with the chocoholics is I say, well, if you're addicted to chocolate, why don't you get a bigger hit and have the dark chocolate?

49:17And they say, oh, I couldn't eat that. It's too bitter. What they're actually addicted to is the sugar. So I've done that. There is, for the folks at home, there is one of these sugar infographics on chocolate on that subject of chocolate because i want people to understand the consequences of what they do so just to illustrate this because i've just we've just looked up the stats right yeah i think this is this is this is what i saw i've just looked up the facts to make sure everything is true when i made that bar of white chocolate in peru yeah this was the total ingredients and this is how much sugar i they asked me to put into it i looked at it and thought okay so white chocolate is basically like 70 odd percent just pure white sugar yeah and nobody knows yes nobody knows exactly the other one i've got to be in my bonnet about is smoothies yes i have one too i thought smoothies were healthy Yeah, no.

50:17They're the, you know, I'm on X or Twitter quite a lot. And that's the kind of thing fills me with rage. And I have to take a photo with like my, look at the sugar. There was, yeah, it fills me with rage. I've got another thing. This is fun. I've got another, I've got a question. Right, Stephen. Why don't we, we could take all the blood out of me, right? There'd be five litres. We could bleed me out right now. there would be five liters of blood in me. Let's get it in a bucket, all right? Five liters of blood. How much sugar would be in that five liters of blood? I have no idea. But it's an interesting question, isn't it?

50:58Because it relates to the consequences of eating some of these things. So I would just like you to estimate. So if, let's say my blood sugar is normal. Yeah. If you have a normal blood sugar, I would like you to guess how much sugar is there in my entire blood system. One cup, like this. Thank you. No. The answer is this. Let me show you. That is all there is. You're joking. I am not. And you see immediately... One sugar cube. That's all. And I'll do it on Twitter for you, X. I can show you the calculations. So you see, if I have a banana and I have diabetes, there's too much sugar for me. You see, because glucose is, number one, vital, but number two, toxic if you have too much of it, the level of it in my blood is controlled minutely.

51:56Wow. It's controlled to this extent. And I think that single fact, you didn't know that, did you? No, I did not at all. And it immediately shows you how it's so easy to have more sugar than you actually need, given that. And if your insulin stops working. So for me, I've done an awful lot of this. So I monitor my blood sugar with a continuous glucose monitor and I get my blood sugar up on my phone. So I can check at any time what my blood sugar is and we'll do it in a minute and see. But you see, if I eat a banana, it doubles my blood sugar because I can't regulate my blood sugar. Because of the diabetes.

52:36Yeah. so a whole banana is far too much for me and will double my blood sugar because you see if i'm only supposed to have this much and i have that much gosh it's too much for me and i feel ill giving you know i go out into the world and i speak to the people that listen to the show and they're like taxi cab drivers it's a lot of taxi do you know i wonder i've got this bias towards thinking everybody that listens is a taxi i've got this bias towards thinking everybody that listens as a taxi cab driver because I really only spend my time in the office or in a taxi. So I get lots of feedback from these cab drivers.

53:11And the average person out there listening now, they don't know how to check if the food they are eating is good or not. Because the labels on these foods, I've got so obsessed by the marketing. And, you know, I was looking at this bag of sweets the other day and it said, made with real fruit juice. And they put it front and center and i yeah i was almost tricked so i can't imagine someone who like me who doesn't spend i can't imagine someone who doesn't spend their time interviewing health experts how easily the general public is being tricked so what is your advice in terms of spotting this stuff like what do i look at because right now i spend a lot of time looking at the sugar part yeah that's great there's different ways we can do this and obviously this is how i spend every clinic that's i'm in clinic yesterday, this is what I'm doing.

53:58I'm trying to help people understand. It's sometimes easier to talk about what maybe what you would eat rather than what you wouldn't eat. So for somebody with insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes, I would tend to say, well, why don't you base your meal on protein? So what have you got in the fridge? Could it be chicken? Could it be eggs? What would it be? So that's your protein. Have loads of it. Then I'm thinking, right, green veg. What green veg would you tolerate? What green veg could you buy? It might be frozen beans. Or it might be salad or whatever. And then I'm saying, how would you make that green veg tasty?

54:44Pour barbecue sauce on the top. Ah, no. Full fat mayo. Full fat mayo. or butter or olive oil or whatever. So that... I say barbecue sauce because when I looked at the back of mine, I had the shock horror of realizing that there's... It's a common one. 30 sugar cubes in a bottle, a standard bottle of barbecue sauce. It's just pouring sugar on top. It is, it is. You have to be so vigilant. And I think to do it successfully, I'm quite interested in the idea of, could you eat real food that's not in a packet? it's Russian roulette food out of packets. And yet I understand my patients north of Liverpool, you know, where are they going to buy the stuff?

55:26So I try and help them with, you could do it that way. If you're going to eat stuff out of packets, you have to wise up and you have to look at the carbohydrate content and bear in mind every four grams. That is broadly equivalent to sugar. So if something's got 100 grams of carbs in it, I've already said carbohydrate varies in how sugary it is, but it gives you an idea it's very sugary. So you see the error you made with the cornflakes is there's no sugar there, but it's all carbohydrate. And it's a very sugary carbohydrate. I think we need to just explain that for people, which is when I looked at those cornflakes, the question I asked you is they're not frosted, so there's no sugar on them.

56:14But what the body is doing is it's converting the carbs into glucose. Right. I've got a good way. So we have to think of starchy carbs as actually glucose molecules holding hands. Okay. And then digestion comes along and breaks down. They're not holding hands anymore. and they become free sugar again. Because we think if it's not sweet, it's not glucose. Exactly, exactly. I don't know whether when you went to school, was this thing where you chewed bread for ages and then you could see if it became sweet or it turned into sugar. It's a schoolboy experiment that's done a lot to prove that the amylase, the enzyme in spit, turns starch into sugar.

57:01But that's the point. Starch is soon-to-be sugar. It's glucose holding hands. Yeah. And when it holds hands, it's not sweet. But then when you digest it, it's no longer holding hands. And that is broadly what, and you're not alone because didn't I make that error? Isn't that what the lady in 2012, that's what she was so furious that I was making. So here we are, senior partner of a large practice, had forgotten that starch was sugar. and we come full circle because, and so many other people, patients say to me, Dr. Amin, I know not to have sugary things. I've given up sugar in my tea and coffee and I don't understand why my blood sugar is so high.

57:51People say that very often. And then, of course, we use the teaspoon of sugar equivalents or a continuous glucose monitor to really show them what's going on. Something that a lot of people have is bread. Yes. White bread. So I did some research and it said a single slice of white bread contains about 0.5 sugar cubes, but a full loaf can pack up to 12 cubes of sugar in it. That's true. But it doesn't include the fact that the wheat that makes the bread will turn into sugar as well. So on my teaspoon of sugar equivalent, even a small slice of brown bread is about three teaspoons of sugar. Is there a healthy bread?

58:36That's a really great question. And of course, it depends how well your insulin's working. So if you're young and you take a lot of exercise and your insulin's really good, then maybe brown bread is okay. If you're like me, though, with insulin resistance, it would have to be low-carb bread. So I wouldn't normally eat bread under any circumstances, but I might have low-carb bread. I did some research that said sprouted grain bread, never heard of that before, or 100 % whole grain rye are the healthiest options because they contain zero added sugar and high fiber. Right. I mean, what I'd say to people, again, it depends.

59:23How much exercise do you take? How do you know? Have you had your fasting insulin measured? Do you know if you're insulin resistant or not?

59:34If you're healthy, take lots of exercise. Sounds good. Fair enough. If you're beginning to develop a tummy, well, maybe not so good. And if you don't know, I'm a great one for experimenting. and that's where I come back again to consider buying a continuous glucose monitor. The thing you wear on, I've got one on me now and it tells my phone how is my blood sugar so I can experiment then. I could try your bread and within an hour I would know. This has had probably the single biggest impact on my office. Of all the products that I've tried that have given me productivity gains or cognitive boosts, I would say that exogenous ketones are in the top three most pivotal things that have given me a massive productivity gain.

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1:01:55Building an audience has fundamentally changed my life and I think it could change yours too. So I'm inviting you to give this new tool a shot and let me know what you think. All you have to do is search coach.stand.store now to get started am i wise to be looking at the back of packets i look at the back of everything i eat yes um and i'm building i guess a mental model of the different levels of carbohydrates and sugar content and fiber and all these other things and proteins etc but i always seem to zoom in on the sugar yes the added sugar ah right there is an error there okay so that's brilliant and you the The fact you're interested and trying is great because you'll learn so much more.

1:02:35Because, of course, the sugar is one thing, but you must also look at the carbohydrate content. Now, this is done differently in the United States from here, confusingly. Here, we talk about carbohydrate separately from fiber. so that in the UK, when it says carbohydrate, that turns into sugar. In the States, you've got the carbohydrate including fiber, so it makes it more complicated for you because you need to know how much of that carbohydrate you're going to absorb. Well, let's go back to the three macronutrients. So you should be interested in protein, how much you want. You want to be a muscly kind of guy, so you want your protein.

1:03:31The carbohydrate, well, why do you need that, I'm wondering. And then fats, well, you might need those for fat-soluble vitamins. So those are the three things so that you become more sophisticated. And if things have a lot of preservatives, if they have an awful lot of ingredients, I'm immediately suspicious. I think one of the things that people, that I've come to learn through interviewing people like yourself is that it's not just the direct consequence of having a big glucose spike or having high blood sugar. It's also the fact that when I eat things like Mars bars or the white rice here, I then get more hungry later.

1:04:09Exactly. Which means I eat even more sugar that same day and the next day and the next day. And of course, that's what my patients right back in 2013, it was the absence of hunger they found fascinating. And I did because I'd been hungry all my life because all my life I'd been carb heavy. And I didn't realise that the more carbs you eat, the hungrier you become. I don't know. Have you ever tried fasting? I bet you have. Oh my gosh, yeah. Right. I fast most days, to be honest. I haven't eaten today. What time are we? I don't know. 1 p.m. And during the Dragon's Den filming, I don't eat often until the evening.

1:04:46Great. So isn't that interesting? So I used to have a model, which was, that if I didn't eat, I was hungry, right? So if I didn't eat for even twice as long, I'd be twice as hungry. And it would rise exponentially until I went mad. And what's surprising that you must have found is as you fast, you don't become more hungry, do you? Yeah, that's crazy. Well, isn't that interesting? That actually you get, the more I eat, the hungrier I become. Same with when I'm on keto. Pardon? When I'm on keto. Yeah. I can't believe, I can't, it's like, hunger just vanishes and the other thing that the remarkable thing i love what are those cinnamon roll things i'd love those cinnamon rolls usually i love them and when i started doing the ketogenic diet which is very very very low carb i remember walking up to this cinnamon roll concession stand in cape town and looking at them and they were doing nothing to my brain there was no temptation i've had that so where's the great superpower yeah honestly i've had that with christmas cake It was my kryptonite.

1:05:50It was the kind of thing I was sneaking down when they'd all gone to bed and having more. And then one day you can look at it and you think it's not actually food. Your brain, that isn't food. Yeah, exactly. And I'm the same with buns as well. And all sorts of things that are a lifetime of, and they're no longer food. And it feels like a superpower because I can, I'm such a man. In fact, I throw this down as a challenge to men. Are you man enough to resist, you know, whatever it is? Let's do a challenge. Come back in a week and tell me you've not had any biscuits. It works. It works. What do you think of the ketogenic diet?

1:06:34Wow. That's a big question, isn't it? And don't you think we need to begin with what you want? So I think we need to begin with your goals and hope. Why would, is it, are you wanting to lose weight? Are you wanting to sort out type 2 diabetes? Or, I mean, George A. Reed, Dr. George A. Reed is a close friend. And nutritional psychiatry is really growing. And Ian Campbell in Edinburgh University is doing some amazing work with bipolar disorder and other things. So why are you doing it? So that's my first thing because I see it as there is a spectrum of carbohydrate that you're on. So I try and find out where are you now?

1:07:21And, you know, approximately where are you now? And then I'd say, well, could you give up bread or reduce it? And then I'd say, let's measure whatever parameter we want, which might be blood work or weight or whatever. Then we say, how are you doing? Are you happy now? Is this, is it? Or do you want, would you like to go a bit lower? And what I've discovered with my patients over 13 years is they tend to go lower over time because when they experiment, when they go keto, what they like is the brain thing. Oh gosh, yeah. And that's what I'm, that's right. So I would say to you now, because I'm interested, why would you go keto?

1:08:02What are you after? So I'm going to put the brain thing at the top of the list, which is just the clarity of thought. Obviously in my job, I have to sit here with very smart people like you. And I have to talk sometimes for three, four hours, whatever it might be. But also I'm on television a lot now when I'm speaking, you know, cameras, nine cameras rolling, BBC One. And I've got to think of something smart to say to this entrepreneur stood in front of me on that's pitching to me. And then also I'm in meetings, you know, I'll leave this conversation now and I'll go straight downstairs and I'll have two hours of straight meetings about very, very complicated things about buying companies.

1:08:32I'll be meeting founders, interviewing people. And what I've noticed profoundly because so much of my job centers on speaking and articulation is there is this wild, wild, wild variance that I hate. And what I mean by that is some days I'm on it, and some days I'm almost embarrassed by my inability to string a sentence together. Today, I'm almost testing myself now by trying to speak really, really fast and seeing if my brain is connected to my mouth. That's actually what I do. I try and see if it flows out. Today, I'm okay. But there are days where I'm stumbling over myself, and I go, what's causing this?

1:09:05What's the causal factor, and how do I prevent this? That's one. keto when i'm in keto i always sound like buster rhymes it always just yeah it always it's always uh it's always working and then i'd say the aesthetic stuff because i want to look good as well especially for you know my fiance so i want to be in shape i want to be and then i'd say the third is being strong and then the fourth is i want to live long exactly i want to have a long health span not just a long lifespan but i want to be able to do things as i age so you see your So that's exactly why I began this meeting with. You've got a clear idea about your preferred future.

1:09:42And it's fairly specific too. And the more specific you are, the more likely you are to be successful. And then you're noticing. Then afterwards comes the feedback. Do you think most people even have thought about this? No. I was just thinking about my listeners and I was thinking, they're listening right now. I wonder if they have written down their top four. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, what I'd love to do now is tell you something about my wife's work, because it relates to changing behavior fast. And that she won't mind. So we're back to Jen now, clever woman. She spent two years thinking about CBT and what was, what, this is a type of therapy, and what were the necessary parts of it and what was junk.

1:10:26And she reduced CBT down to something I'll teach you right now. All right? So off we go. Off we go. So the first thing is to think about your health goals. So to think about what in a year's time, if what you do is great, how does that look specifically? So I'll give you an example. You might think you'd like to lose weight, but that isn't specific enough. I want to know what difference would that make to you so you will do it now so if you said you wanted to be in shape yeah what i don't know what do you mean by that do you want to lose weight what do you tell me more um i want to be able to

1:11:22what i'm really i think scared of i'm just going to be completely honest yeah is I'm scared of having the same health profile as my dad. Ah, right. Because I've seen we have the same, you know, we have a lot of the same genetic profile. Yes. So I think a lot of us look at our parents and go, is that my future? Yes. Yeah. And to make it even more specific, I remember walking down some stairs. I've said this once before, but I remember walking down some stairs in Bali, long, steep set of stairs down to go whitewater rafting with my fiance. And I remember as I walked down those stairs, recalling that my dad loses, can't walk up a single flight of stairs without problems.

1:12:14And I remember thinking, oh, my dad wouldn't have been able to come whitewater rafting because we've got to walk back up these stairs. and so my dad would have lost out on one of the great joys of life which is doing enjoyable things with friends and people you love because his health is now in that regard is gone um so i've always thought of that and then generally like i i remember when i was younger my dad used to play like football with us and all these things and he's unable to do that now um and so i'm and because i've done this podcast so many times with health experts i realized that the decisions i make at 30, which is where I am now, exist on this really interesting, quite predictable curve of inevitable decline, however, not like inevitable loss of lifestyle.

1:13:03What I mean by that is I just have this picture in my head of all these graphs I've seen, where like your peak is around maybe 20, 30, and then you go in down, which we all accept. But how far you go down is determined by decisions you make right now. The decisions I make now will end me at 70, 80 years old in either the inability to walk or the ability to run. And it's all about what I do now. So let's just refine that. So I've got your goal now. So let's park your goal. Now, the next thing we've got is in the past, what have you done that's worked towards those goals? So you probably tell me some stuff you've done that's worked.

1:13:50Things like going to the gym? Yeah, yeah, anything. Anything quickly that you did that worked, that is a first, you know, helped that you did in your room of that worked. So tell me anything. So I said to myself one year that I was going to go to the gym every single day. Terrible idea. Because I got five months in and then I missed a day, then it was over. I said to myself another year, I think it was for 2017, that I'm going to get a six pack for summer. Terrible idea. because when summer came or I got the six pack. My question was what did work in the past, not what didn't work. So what has worked for you in the past?

1:14:21So those two incidents helped me change my idea. And the idea that I came up with was I set not a achievable thing as a goal, but consistency as the goal. Consistency became, for the last four years, this idea that my fitness goal is consistency means that every day I wake up, I get a shot at it. And if I fuck up today, then I've got another shot tomorrow. Right. Leave it there. That's good. So we did the goal and then we did the next thing. The next thing is resources. So it's what do you bring to the consultation that you've done in the past? Intelligence, resources, friends that will help. You come already with expertise in yourself.

1:15:05So it's not I'm not the expert to tell you what to do. You've already got some stuff. Then we go to the next thing. So if we had your goal at the beginning, which was the fitness and the so-and-so, today, what might be a small step towards your goal, a realistic small step towards the goals we've already established?

1:15:32so i can think of two good one of them is uh creating a social pact which again was one of the things that helped so we made a whatsapp group this is quite funny we made a whatsapp group we put 10 friends in it and we made a simple rule whoever's the least consistent every month is evicted and we invite a new friend in wow we've done that for four years i've not been evicted in four years which means that i'm doing enough i'm consistent enough over those four years to not be evicted every day when we work out it puts our workouts into the group chat and um every every week and every month um there's a winner and there's this league table and you get these little emoji medals and there's actually i won one year so i've got this physical massive gold belt on my bookshelf at home it says fitness blockchain world champion so i've done that for four years um so a social pack really helped me the sort of accountability to others yeah and the other the other honestly was just as i said a second ago when i set the goal of going to the gym every single day i set myself up for failure now i set myself the goal of consistency which means that i can do have bad days where i do 20 minutes or 15 minutes yesterday because i was finished dragon's den late drove down to london got home at 1am i did 18 minutes and reducing the size of success really helped me to keep my feeling of momentum.

1:16:53Brilliant. We're nearly at the end of your degree in psychology. Okay. And I'm going to pull it together. The final thing is, what would you notice for you when things are going well? What would you notice? So you've done some of these things. what is it you actually notice as in the benefit to me yes yeah what do you notice so if you do if tomorrow is a really good day yeah what might you notice at the end of it because you've much experience in this now what would you notice i mean the first thing that comes to mind is just how i feel yes i just feel do you mean emotionally or energetically great all of it emotionally i feel good about myself yeah um energetically i feel more energetic um and there is this um there is this element of identity in there where i have a an opinion of myself and who i think i am and i think i'm a healthy person and i think i'm someone that's in control and when i'm when i'm not going when i'm not performing the consistent behaviors that i want to i think i start to question that identity in a way that's that causes a lot of discomfort and say well you're not in control of your own life like how that's crazy so i think it links into self-esteem yeah it really so what we've just done we had the goals g yeah then we had your resources r yeah then we had increments what things had you done little things on the way and then finally i invited you to notice and reflect and that spells grin and that's jen's published grin model i just did it for you right there.

1:18:33And I could do it faster than that. I do it in nearly every surgery I do. Because what I'm trying to do is find out about you. And you didn't find out much about me in that process, did you? No. But I found out a lot of really useful stuff to you and it's motivational. And much better to do that than me tell you what to do. And I'm not a talking leaflet, but motivation, this is what Jen has taught me is key in everything we do. And the Grin model isn't bad. Clever woman. So what do we do with the Grin model? And so this is really helping me figure out how to change my behavior? Yes. How does one apply it?

1:19:12Or are you saying that everyone listening now should answer those four questions themselves? Yes, I do. Because otherwise, it's possible to spend a lot of time blaming yourself, you know, and particularly around if we're discussing weight problems and so on. You can spend a lot of time saying, I'm to blame, or I wish, or I shouldn't have. That, you know, after Christmas, everybody feels like this. But what is much better, rather than focusing, you're wasting energy if you start thinking about guilt and negative stuff. And what Jen's trying to do is getting you to engage in thinking about a better future.

1:19:56And what the whole of that five minutes was, engaging you in, first of all, the goal of a better future, then some resources towards your better future, then the first steps towards the better future, and then noticing what's good. Because I think in medicine, what we've done, how do you get a doctor's attention? You get a doctor's attention by saying, oh, it's so bad. It's so, so bad. My pain is so, so bad. And I realized I had trained my patients to think that moaning was how, you know, they got my attention. And if you do that, the result is a very miserable two-hour surgery. But if you can talk, even people having a terrible time have got hope if you can find it.

1:20:50They have goals if you can discuss them. And you could have somebody with a drug addiction or, You know, I see people dying, people also, every clinic I'm seeing sad stuff. But if you can also investigate hopes and good stuff, as a doctor, I'm so much more energetic, so much more hopeful. I'm having a great time. And I wasn't when I was 55. And that's the process. I bet there's so many people listening now that maybe they, you know, because they listen to this show and they've got the sort of basics, they go, do you know what? I understand this stuff and I'm making good progress, but I live with or love someone who I'm scared they're going down a slippery slope.

1:21:33Yes. And I don't know what to do. Do I intervene? Do I hide their sweets? Do I blame? What do I do? That is so hard, isn't it? That's so hard. I think you can. Why are you in that position to some degree? Yes. Yeah. So my first wife had a very severe addiction problem. So I lived with that for 12 years and she's unfortunately died now. So I lived with very, very serious addiction for 12 years. And what you're doing then is you're living with uncertainty, serious uncertainty. You never, you cannot say what you'll come home to. You have no idea, no idea. It brings chaos into your life. It's very, very hard.

1:22:20Addiction? Yes. Are you able to say what kind of addiction? Was it a food addiction or a drug addiction? It was, nearly everybody concerned has died now. So I don't know whether I can say or not, but it was very serious, multiple addictions, I will say that. And she died some years ago. And it doesn't, it actually wasn't food addiction. But it brings, I have so much sympathy with dealing, how hard it is to deal with uncertainty and not be able to, you love somebody and you can't do anything. It's very hard. There are things you can do. I think if you can engage people in that talking about goals, that can help.

1:23:10What we will do now is we'll change that conversation to the current Mrs. Unwin, which is what we laughingly say. This is Jen. So we've been together for 30 years now. And Jen's story is that she actually is an ultra-processed food addict, genuinely. And what that means is, neither of us understood what that was, even though she's a consultant psychologist. She didn't realize that she was an ultra-processed food addict. What she saw it as was a weight problem. And all her life, she's been boomerang dieting. So she'd be a big woman and then a little woman and a big woman. And I used to watch it all.

1:23:56What's going on? And then she would, there'd be tray bakes, like she's trying to lose weight and making tray bakes, saying it's for the children and then scoffing a lot herself. So then I'd, because I loved her, And I think blokes, we try and solve problems, don't we? We're like cavemen. I wanted to rescue her. So I'm either throwing the food away or I'm tackling her. And then we're having such arguments because she's defensive and cross. I couldn't understand with an intelligent woman what's going on. But then, this is only a few years ago, she understood for the first time. This is addiction.

1:24:41when you have intelligent people, highly, highly intelligent people, doing stuff that harms their health repeatedly, is this not like cigarettes? Is it not like alcohol? That is ultra-processed food addiction. And there's a patient I'd like to tell you about that explains it even more clearly. And this patient has consented for me to tell you because he wants to help the world. So, this is a guy who's a very successful guy. He's a wealthy person with a successful business. He's not stupid. He has type 2 diabetes. He's 55. He has type 2 diabetes. He's very much overweight. Unfortunately, he needs really serious surgery because both his knees have been so destroyed by his weight that he can hardly walk because he's in real agony.

1:25:38But his type 2 diabetes is so bad his blood sugar control is so bad the anaesthetist won't touch him so he's trapped he can't get the op because his blood sugar is high he can't run his business easily because he can't hardly walk so obviously what we do is we say you need to go low carb and it works for a bit and he loses some weight but then he gains the weight again and this goes on for four years while I see him so regularly every month. What's going on? What's going on? Oh, excuses, the grandchildren. I've got a holiday, Christmas, it goes on. Anyway, then his wife came to see me and she said, Dr.

1:26:23Min, I need to level with you. You need to understand what's going on. I find that my husband is getting up at four in the morning and eating bread out of the fridge. So what I do now, what I started doing was at the end of every day, I put all the bread in the bin if it hasn't been eaten that day. But then I discovered my husband was going in the bin to eat the bread. Then what she does, she's a very formidable woman, she started putting detergent, liquid detergent on any bread that goes in the bin. but he still eats it. He's getting up at four in the morning rummaging through the bin to eat the bread with the detergent on.

1:27:05So then she tries something else and she says this is the only thing that will stop my husband from eating bread if it's there. I spray bleach on the bread and leave the can of bleach by the bin so he knows don't even look. Okay, what I've described to you is addiction. This is an intelligent person. And imagine his self-esteem, how it was to live like that, concealing what he was doing and not telling his doctor, because I'm trying so hard for him for years. And he's so sweet to me now. And he often shakes my hand and gives me a hug. He said, you tried. You really tried. Anyway, my stories have a happy ending always.

1:27:50What I did for him in the end, he needed everything. So low carb. Then I got him using a continuous glucose monitor so that he would get feedback immediately and see that spike. And also, I could see the spikes as well because he had to come and show me his tracings. And on top of that, I did something unusual. I gave him a low dose of the new GLP-1 drugs. A Zempec? One of those. And the three together, he managed to not, he couldn't moderate, but he could abstain. And then he could do it. The Ozempic helped reduce the noise, the cravings in his head. The feedback from the CGM helped him know how he was doing.

1:28:40And the support he got from me and the low carb pulled together in all three. And he's had his operation now. So it's a happy story. But he's got maintenance. All his life he's going to have to sort that out. And it's a wonderful example because I think we trivialise this. We call it carb creep, like it doesn't matter. But there are many people listening to us right now and they know they're addicted to various foods. They know because when you ask them, they often burst into tears. often somebody will say, I've never told anybody in my entire life about, and bread is a common one. And if you're not addicted to bread, you can't imagine it.

1:29:25But if you are addicted to bread, they say, this sounds so stupid. I'm so embarrassed to tell you I can't control how I eat bread. So it's not great for your self-esteem, is it? But people might be addicted to many things. And And my wife's published many papers on this and written a book and this, that and the other. And she would say about 14 % of the population has some aspects of ultra-processed food addiction.

1:29:57And it kind of explains so much why are intelligent people eating foods they know do them harm. I've got another example. one of my patients with type 2 diabetes we got drug free remission hooray I've done that now 157 times so every one of them I'm cheering when it happens so this guy we did it drug free remission then he vanished for a while and came back with two dead toes and he had to have them amputated dead toes? yeah they started rotting because diabetes takes the blood supply, particularly from your toes. So we had to have surgery to have part of his foot removed. And so you call it carb creep and he ended up with half his foot taken off.

1:30:50That's not carb creep, something far more sinister. But I never give up. And unfortunately, the wounds took a long time to heal because he was sugary. So we do it all over again. I got him back into remission because this time he and his wife are really determined. But it's a struggle and he needs help and support to achieve that. He's not a foolish man. He's an intelligent man and yet various foods call to him, eat me, eat me, and it's very difficult for him to not. And that, I mean, that's a very extreme example. but many people with overweight and some who are not overweight are struggling with very very significant carb cravings and they really really uh struggle to control them for those people and i assume there's a lot of people and actually some people have seasons where they're in control they're out of control they're in control you know i've been there um what is step one today?

1:31:57So they're listening to you, they go, fuck, I don't want to lose my toes and all of these problems. What is step one now? Now, are we talking about for somebody with type 2 diabetes or somebody who can't control what they're eating? Someone that can't control what they're eating. Great, right. So step one, we just did it. I think step one is acknowledging that is your problem. Because if you're not honest about your problem, How are you ever going to sort it out? So the first thing is honesty. And that's very hard for people. All of us have made excuses. You know, me and my biscuits. I believed that it was easier for me to think that that was stress and a reasonable reaction to the stress of running a practice than it was to say, I've got, you know, biscuits for me, it took me a year to give them up.

1:32:49A year. How pathetic is that? that i was so driven it took me a whole year how did you give them up um i did it by weaning myself off a bit like methadone so i went from um i like chocolate ginger biscuits and then i went to digestive plain and then i went to oat biscuits and then eventually i went to almonds why didn't you just do it all at once i should have done and uh jen jen's a great believer in cold turkey like what is the thing, stop it. I wasn't man enough for that and it took me a whole year. So the first thing is be honest, truth, be honest with yourself even if you can't tell other people.

1:33:31Be honest with yourself. Is there an addictive potential there? Could that be? Does that fit? Number two, specifically, which foods is your problem? And be honest. Because if you're not honest, then number three is have a plan for abstinence. Because if you have got an addictive potential, it won't be one biscuit. and we all, who, you know, how many of us have said, I'm going to give up ice cream or biscuits or pizza or whatever it is. And then you have a shit day. You did. Or you have a drink or whatever you think tomorrow. Work stresses you out. Yeah, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. So it's very important to be specific about the food and then to have a plan for how you are going to do it.

1:34:31and another thing is sometimes it's helpful you know the people around you that love you maybe share with them that it's it's that it's important and that i need i might need some help please be tolerant with me like cigarettes please be tolerant if i'm short-tempered i'm going to try and do this thing because it's important the difficulty depends whether the person that loves you can be gentle or if they're heavy-handed if you confess this and then they police you judgmental yeah it doesn't help yeah what you're asking for is gentle support and tolerance i can think of a time of my life where i was with somebody yeah and i was they were so into their health yeah that it made me start to hide when i was eating bad i would exactly yeah thank you for that that's that's what happens and you see that people become deceitful so the if you police somebody you love the result is deceit i was hiding the wrappers of the things i was eating jen did that with me she would uh she she knew that i was monitoring so she starts hiding the wrappers or then i'd find them in the car and but then we have a situation that we can no longer to talk about it because so that if somebody if you're forcing somebody to become deceitful you have to back off a little bit yeah because that deceit then affects self-esteem and that can make them worse and you didn't want to make them worse and they're lonely because they can't share the bad days yeah it's really good i wonder please could we show jen's book at this point of Of course.

1:36:14So can I just explain the book? So this, this is Jen's book. And the most important thing is Jen doesn't make a penny out of this book. So it's fork in the road with the idea in your journey, which one are you going to pick? Do you see? So it's fork in the road. She doesn't make any money from this. Every penny goes to a charity that she's set up helping people with food addiction. It's available on Amazon. and self-published on Amazon. How much does this book cost? It's not a lot, is it? It's about£15. Oh, no, it's less. I think it might be£10. £10. OK, I'll tell you what I'll do. Yeah. I'll buy a thousand of them.

1:36:59Fabulous. And I'll put a link below in the comment section. And so all you've got to do is, if you've really enjoyed this conversation and you'd like to get Jen's book... A Fork in the Road. A fork in the road. Maybe we could even get some of them signed. Not all of them, because that'll break a hand. We could. But hopefully get a couple of them signed. Oh, that is brilliant. Click below and we'll send a thousand of them out. And that's just a thank you from me, to both you and Jen, but also to the community who tune in for these conversations. And it's so great that people can get such simple information that's so accessible and so rigorous in its scientific credentials in a way like this that could change some people's lives.

1:37:40Great. isn't that a wonderful thing you know a simple book like this which isn't long either so no it's not a big read could change some people's lives that's such a wonderful thing what are you doing uh just making myself a delicious coffee from the freezer from the freezer have you not heard about comtea no oh my gosh this is going to change your life i invested in this company called cometea last year and they're now one of the sponsors of this podcast because they've taken a pretty revolutionary approach to making coffee. Every coffee is precision brewed at 10 times the strength. And then they flash freeze it with liquid nitrogen to lock in the flavor and freshness.

1:38:21And then it's delivered to you on dry ice in these recyclable aluminium capsules, still frozen, like a little ice cube. All you have to do is pop the capsule out, add some hot water, and then you stir it and you are good to go. You can also make delicious iced coffee drinks as well. Just pour it in, stir it up. And for anyone that hasn't tried it, you can get$30 off your first order of Cometeer coffee if you go to cometeer.com slash Stephen. I've done almost 700 interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world. And one of the things you learn, which is unexpected, is that vulnerability is the doorway to connection.

1:39:05And after sitting here for two, three hours with a guest, I feel a deep sense of connection to them. And as they leave, what I get them to do is to write a question in the diary of a CEO. We've taken all of the questions from the diary of a CEO. We have put the question here on this card with the name of the person that wrote it. So you can sit at home as I do with my fiance and my colleagues at work and other people in my life. Whenever we get a minute, we play the Diary of a CEO conversation cards. And it is incredible what happens. These are great if you're in a romantic relationship and you want to connect your partner more.

1:39:40These are also great if you're in a team and you want to bond your team together. And I have to say they're also great for families that want to learn more about each other and that need a good excuse to spend some time in a digital world, in the analog environment, connecting human to human. It is remarkable what the right question at the right time can do. Go to thediary.com and you can get these conversation cards right now. You said something earlier on about the link between sort of your dietary choices and cancer. I've actually got a friend of mine who used to work for me, who is going through a cancer process at the moment.

1:40:16She's very, very young. She's actually younger than I am. Wow. And she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She's a really good friend of mine. And she was actually my manager for a couple of years. She's called Katie. She's very public about this. So she's posting her journey online so I can say her name. And I've been following her and she's, you know, she's removing a lot of the foods we've talked about today from her diet. So she's very front of mind for me at the moment. And I was looking at some of the stats around the link between our dietary choices and cancer outcomes, and I'm going to read them.

1:40:45Now, my team might cut some of them out, but I think they're worth hearing because hearing them, I think, is quite enlightening. A massive French study found that drinking just 100ml of sugary drinks per day, which could be, you know, a third of a can of soda, is associated with an almost 20 % increased risk of overall cancer. Women who consume two or more dietary drinks daily have over double the risk of early onset calorical cancer compared to those who drink less than one a week. high consumption of sugary sweetened beverages is linked to a 78 % high risk of estrogen dependent endometrial cancer in women drinking 20 ounces of sugar of sugary soda daily is linked to shortening your telomeres which are the protective caps on your dna equating to 4.6 years of extra biological aging which is a major risk fact for cancer high sugar intake causes chronic hypersulamemia.

1:41:46Chronic hyperinsulinemia. So that is what I'm saying when the insulin levels are high, which I explained at the beginning. Which can inhibit apoptosis, the natural process where damaged or cancerous cells self-destruct. Wow. Two more. Fructose is processed in the liver and converted into lipids, which are fats, which is what we were talking about earlier, which recent studies show certain tumors directly consumed to build their cell membranes. And lastly, diets high in added sugars chronically elevate C-reactive proteins called CRPs, an inflammation marker that is heavily correlated with tumor progression and metastasis.

1:42:27Yeah. So what I'd like to say, this is, that is so interesting and it brings to mind a really important point. We talk so much around the world about treating cancer. What about prevention? Because for your friend, that's a life sentence and she's living with uncertainty and fear. And when I tell patients they have cancer, you know, you feel it right here because you just took away so much. And it's interesting, do we try hard enough? If we know that, are we trying hard enough to prevent cancer? Because that's what we should be doing. Because we know a lot that I think after smoking, diet is the next commonest cause of cancer.

1:43:21And, you know, how serious does it have to get when you just gave all those references then? And I know that junk food is linked to all-cause mortality. It's linked to so many things. What are we prepared to sacrifice for enjoying, you know, treats and snacks? It's kind of, when you look at it like that, it's really bonkers, really bonkers. This sounds a bit crazy, but sometimes I imagine receiving the diagnosis. Yeah. And I do a bit of, I guess they might call it a premortem. A premortem, not a postmortem. where I imagine on that day the decisions I wish I would have made. And I'm not saying all cancer is linked to what we eat because that's not the case.

1:44:07But I'm imagining like the worst diagnosis I could ever be given and the doctor telling me that my lifestyle choices contributed to that over the last 5, 10, 15 years. And in that moment, is there any sugary drink that is worth it? There's just not, you would just wish with every bone in your body when you come home and tell your fiancé, your partner, your kids, that you've got this horrific diagnosis. You just wish that you had made a different decision. I also think that's a very good strategy for dealing with problems. You know, your life must be so complicated. I can't begin to imagine how many problems you're solving and the complications and the people you deal with.

1:44:47And yet all of them are as nothing against a cancer diagnosis, aren't they? So that you would look at the problems you have right now And you'd laugh. Yesterday, I was worried about the traffic or whatever. And I think it's a leveller. Mortality is a leveller. All my life, I've been obsessed with death. And it worries me. I can't sort out in my head, what does death mean? It really scared me when I was a child, the idea of death. But what it's given me is a drive to not waste time and to think about what's the best use of today. And you seem to have that kind of energy as well. The interesting thing about this idea of wasting time as well is through everything you've talked about today, we can both waste less time, but also have more time.

1:45:41And when I learned about the difference between lifespan and health span, that also added to this equation. People still live to 80 years old, but they're only healthy for like 30, 40 years. Yes. And that's a very, the idea of healthspan is very important because we know in the UK it's going down. Oh, is it? Yes. They're looking at that. Now, lifespan is hanging out there as sort of stuttering along, but healthspan is going down in the UK and it's worth thinking why that is. Well, I would hazard a guess it relates to all the things you've talked about today. In England, you're totally right. It says, In England, the situation is particularly alarming.

1:46:26Healthspan is actively declining, even as overall lifespan slowly creeps up. Recent 2024 to 2026 data from the Office of National Statistics, the ONS, and the Health Foundation paints a stark picture of the UK's widening sick years gap. Over the last decade, healthy life expectancy in the UK has fallen by roughly two years. As of the latest data, Men in the UK can expect to spend about 60 years in good health and women about 60 years of good health as well. Because overall life expectancy in England is rising, people are now spending roughly up to 23 years at the end of their lives with poor health and in sickness.

1:47:05This means the average person spends nearly a quarter of their life managing chronic illness and or disability. And that's exactly the point, isn't it? That's exactly the point. And it relates to another thing I'd like to tell you about as well. This is government figures. Every taxpayer in England pays an extra£7 ,000 tax per year for the consequences of ultra-processed food. Everybody's paying tax, extra tax,£7 ,000 a year. And this is because it's not just the cost of the drugs. the bigger cost is the people not paying tax themselves and not able to work because they're ill and that is that's two-thirds of the cost is the lack of revenue because so much of our population isn't well enough to work and that's very and a lot of it's young people too it's very serious i know i think about 30 40 of our listeners are in the united states so i've got some bad news for everybody in the united states as well how is it there the u.s currently holds a rather grim record, it has the largest health span to lifespan gap on earth.

1:48:18Despite the United States having lower overall life expectancy than almost all of its peer nations and premature death rate, that is nearly twice the average of comparable countries, its health span stats sit as the worst in the world. So if you're in the United States, as things stand, you will be sicker for longer. or have less health span. We're trying to catch up though, aren't we? We're doing our best in the UK. We're doing our best. We're doing our best to catch up. I have this piece of string here. Yes. Which is, I guess, a mechanism you use to figure out if people's waist and, I guess, fat levels are too high on their belly.

1:48:57I think it's bigger than that. So I'm interested in low-cost ways for people to find out, well, how are you doing? How are you doing? and so one recognised way looking at metabolic health is your waist should be less than half your height so if we have a piece of string which we have there i believe you're six foot one yes and you've you've marked halfway so half of that string should go around the fattest bit of your belly people come up to me all the time you know and they go oh my god you're so much taller than i thought yeah because they've only ever seen me sat down yeah my entire career is people watching So that's right.

1:49:34Cut it in half. Okay. And then let's see, will it go around your belly, yes or no? Okay, so I've cut the string in half. Yes. Which part of my belly? The fattest part. The fat part, okay. Yeah, so be honest about the fat part. Okay. Can I look? Yeah. You did it? Yeah. Is that... Are you squeezing in though? No, I'm not. Are you cheating? Let me see. I mean, it's not loose. Yeah, you've just done it. You've passed. Yeah, okay, thank you. it's so interesting that's so funny but that is a very interesting thing for you and as i say it's insulin resistance tends to put weight on your belly but you may have a very muscular abdomen let's pretend it's that you know yeah you're just about there you're just about there but it's a really simple test for everybody at home piece of string as long as you are tall cut it in half will it or will it not go around your middle okay so everybody at home go buy some string yeah i mean there's lots of other things you can do but that that's a simple way because you wait alone as i said it's where the fat is distributed it it's fat on your belly is more worrying than fat on your legs or on your arms really so so one of the things people always ask me about is supplementation um good bad and different yeah what's your point of view Right.

1:50:57So my point of view is, if you can, my gut reaction is to try and use diet to give you what you need, if you can. Which diet? A real food, lowish carbohydrate diet is my preferred thing with plenty of protein in there and healthy fats. I'm very interested in farming and regenerative agriculture and all that kind of thing and what I know is that the nutrient profile of crops grown today is not nearly as good as it was a hundred years ago so we have some problems and it's to do with the soil if you keep just adding nitrogen and harvesting crops those crops do not contain as much zinc or magnesium particularly and so the tragedy is that although my aim would be to have you healthy with a real food diet there are some things you cannot get in the diet now that your grandparents could and one of them is magnesium it's very very difficult to get enough magnesium in your diet without supplementation And as you get older, you absorb the magnesium less and less.

1:52:20Also, a lot of medication interferes with magnesium absorption, particularly drugs for acidity. So magnesium supplementation for most people. In myself, it was magic at getting rid of muscle cramps. I sleep a lot better. I think we also need to talk about magnesium, which magnesium? because it varies a hell of a lot. And this bit's embarrassing. It depends on your bowels. Okay. Right? Have you got fast or slow bowels? You don't need to tell me. If you tend to be a bit constipated, magnesium citrate is very good. It helps. It's more laxative. And you absorb some of it anyway. If your bowels are not a problem, and particularly if you're wanting better sleep or mood, magnesium glycinate or threonate actually crosses the blood-brain barrier but won't help with constipation.

1:53:24So that's a very quick thing on our magnesium. Have we got time for me to tell you about the first cow I ever bought? Go ahead. And it's relevant to magnesium. Go ahead. Right. So my wife and I, my wife Jen, we have this idea that if you love somebody, then gifts are, you should try and think, what would that person like? Don't buy somebody a present you would like. And it was Jen trying to get me to grow up. Right. And this is how she did it. So she said to me one day, right, get a coat and a pair of Wellingtons. I'm going to take you out. And she drove me into Lancashire. and there was a field of cows and she said, I have bought you any one of those cows because I'd always wanted a cow.

1:54:16And we had a field and she, how, what a woman is this? She knew I wanted, she went to the farmer in advance and prepaid for any cow and said, this field, I bought a cow, you just pick which one you like and he'll transport it home. How does this relate to magnesium, you're wondering? Well, it does because the farmer said you can have whichever cow you like, but I've lost 15 cows to a thing called the staggers this year. And you cannot have the cow unless you promise me you'll buy magnesium supplements because the grass is now so short of magnesium that cows die fitting if you don't give them a magnesium supplementation.

1:55:03But it's better than that. at the same time I had a patient that I couldn't work out why he was fitting I was really fond of this guy and I kept being called out and admitting him to intensive care fitting and we couldn't work out it wasn't a brain tumor why was he fitting and I expect you've joined the dots it was magnesium deficiency because of medication he was on and that's the first time I ever seriously thought about magnesium it's a most interesting subject very important and the modern diet is most people are magnesium deficient and the problem is you can't measure it so your blood magnesium the serum magnesium doesn't reflect what's going on because magnesium is mainly inside your cells so in the you have to get the intracellular magnesium level but do you know what it's just easier to try a magnesium supplement and see how you feel So do you take magnesium?

1:56:03I do, because the guests, the experts on my podcast have told me that magnesium is one of my five. For me, I've said to myself, I'll take five supplements a day. Five? Yeah, I'll take five. So vitamin D, because I'm inside all the time. Vitamin D. So yes, definitely. And I'm black. So that, you know. Well, that combined, but everybody, and particularly in the, most people just don't get enough sunshine. It'd be better if you could do it with sun. But yeah, vitamin D is very, very important. I take magnesium. Yeah. Because people like you have told me how important it is. Which magnesium do you take?

1:56:37That's a great question. I think it's citrate. Citrate. Right. But I actually think it varies depending on what my team get me. Yeah, yes, yeah. But that's good to know because I'll think about my bowels. Yeah. I take creatine. Yeah. There's this fiber supplement that I take because I did a couple of blood tests and they said that fiber would help, this particular fiber supplement would help reduce my LDL. Yep. Cholesterol. Yeah. and multivitamin. To cover everything. To cover everything. That's probably, I mean, that sounds okay, really. Yeah. I mean, one of the worries that, or one of the clinical things I find is honestly, if you ask people how many supplements they're taking, there's a carrier bag comes in and there's a blue one and a yellow one.

1:57:22And it's possible to over-supplement quite easily. Particularly maybe vitamin D, you can know various vitamins. You handed this as well. Oh, that's vitamin D. Yeah. Fine, fine. So I think that I would agree with you, basically. Mine's also going off my blood test results. So I've done two blood test results. Actually, I've done two blood test results in the last month. One with Function Health, who are a partner of ours, a sponsor of ours. And another one with Nico Health, which is actually a company that I've just invested a couple of million quid into, which is this health testing company. Have you heard about Nico?

1:58:01health nico health you walk in two hundred and ninety nine dollars whatever you lay down you get all of your your sort of blood tests done you get all of these incredible tests done on your body um they show like how you know how how good your circulation is from your like neck to your toes you stand in front of this scanner it takes like two thousand three thousand photos of your body tracks all of your moles tracks your heartbeat does all of these incredible things and then instead of waiting two weeks for the results you walk into a room and your entire body is on this screen yes and you can look at you know all these different parts of your body they do the blood tests at the very start and then literally like it felt like 20 minutes later i'm in a room i've got my blood test results back i can see my entire body they're going through my ldl my this my that the other they're showing my heartbeat they're showing every single mole on my body and it costs 299 pounds and you get the results then and i my alternative and this is me really plugging the alternative that i used to do every year was this honestly i'll be honest it was this 7 ,000 pound health screening where it would take me six, seven hours and I'd get the results back in two weeks.

1:59:07So what Nico have tried to do, it's actually a company started by the founder of Spotify, Daniel Ek. And yes, so I did my blood test the other day and both my function health test and my Nico health test said the same thing. And then I took those results and I processed them using some AI tools and said like, what am I deficient in? And one of the things I was deficient in was Omega-3. That was the other one. omega-3 vitamin d i had high ldl and so they said this fiber thing would be really good for you and yeah those are the main things otherwise i was great but yeah high ldl i think one just that makes me think of something when you're screening i think the important point is that you don't just scare people yeah that it has to be linked to what can you do about it so yes i've had a lot of experience of scared patients so gps we we're we worry about screening because what happens is people do that and then people get scared and use up loads of appointments in the health service trying to sort out so what what's good is if you do screening that relates to actionable points and then you help the people understand what they can do yeah and avoid leaving them as just worried exactly because that is for you you know if i can i might be able to tell you accurately you're going to die aged whatever of whatever but if you can't do anything about it you don't want to know yeah what you do want to know is what can i what can i take action on what can i you know it's about optimizing isn't it the things that i hate about the health checking process before nico was like i hated how expensive it was and that's quite it's quite a privileged thing to be able to get a health a full body health scan especially like so now you can do it for$2.99 but then it was I walked into a room straight away with a doctor yeah and the doctor sat me down beautiful screen of my body and was like do this this this this is fine this is fine and she was so nice about it but yeah I say that because I'm so passionate about it because I realize there's a certain privilege that people that are able to access private healthcare have that I think is really really unfair well obviously I I think that's unfair because I only work in the health service yeah the state self i don't do anything other i won't take private patients or because i think it it would be wrong and because don't you think health inequality is getting really bad yes exactly really bad and it kind of troubles me and also if you if you start in the uk and you go northwards it just gets worse and worse and the states is the same way it's not like the same nation oh my gosh you know if you go to california there's one kind of a thing and then you go elsewhere and it's not the same but hopefully this is changing um this is i i think social media helps because it didn't cost much does it to go on social media and find out things exactly and people like you who've um increasing increasingly loud voice across lots of podcasts and who are reaching millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of people and teaching them...

2:02:10I think what's difficult, though, is not to become confused. You know, because you have the newspaper saying eggs are good, eggs are bad. And then you have this expert who's saying this and another expert saying the other. I think what I've tried to do is base what I say on real world data. And that's different. So I'm very careful to take baseline data from my patients and then update it all the time. So the publications I've done are based on the real world, the health service in the north of the UK. I can't cherry pick my patients. I'm allocated my patients by the state. So I can't just pick wealthy people or people that will live longer.

2:03:00I'm allocated people and that's that. So part of what I do is proof of concept. because if you can achieve this in the north of england near liverpool and if other people can replicate it in australia new zealand north america maybe it's true perhaps dr david unwin we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question left for you yeah is i'm sure the guests will figure out who left this one um if humanity organized to make contact with a more intelligent species, who should represent humanity and why?

2:03:42Funny. God, that's a brilliant question. Who should...

2:03:51The first person, this is a person I'm going to nominate. What about David Attenborough? You know, he's 100 years old and he's spent so long thinking about the planet. And wouldn't he be a wonderful ambassador? And because I am passionate about biodiversity, I'm passionate about sustainable agriculture and sustainable food, I pick David Attenborough. I think that's a wonderful choice. I think the aliens would really like him. They would. They would. That's my answer. thank you so much for what you do. You're really remarkable in a way that's quite rare. And listen, I would know. Give me the feedback.

2:04:35I love feedback. No, you really are remarkable. You're really remarkable in a way that's very rare. And I don't say this to all of my guests, but you are for a variety of reasons. Okay, I'm going to give you all of the feedback. Thank you. The first, the most notable is you're a very kind human and the way that you speak is very nice to listen to. And again, rare. The other thing that I noticed is you're very, very, very natural and good at telling stories. And listen, why does this matter? Because the human brain, from what I've discovered from doing this podcast, is really orientated towards stories.

2:05:05Now you could sit here and say, banana bad. Or you could say, magnesium good. But I'll never forget the cow story. Yeah. You know, I'll never forget the cow story. I could have forgotten that magnesium good, magnesium bad. But the way that you tell these stories is so captivating that it enables me to learn in a way that is engaging. And that is rare, very, very rare. And the other is just your depth of experience, your humility, your willingness to admit when you were wrong, which means that I trust you so much with what you're telling me because you're saying, listen, I'm an imperfect human too.

2:05:36I've made mistakes both in myself, with my patients, and this is what I've learned from it. And the other thing is just your ability to simplify. It's remarkable. Listen, I sit here all day with super geniuses from this university in Harvard and Stanford and whatever else, and I'm struggling to understand what the hell they're talking about because they don't take a second to build the bridge between the science and the average person. And you do that so naturally. So I have no surprises. Coming from you, that means a great deal. No, it's a good deal. Thank you. It's just what 40 years in general practice does to you, because if you wish to be effective, and if you notice, as in the grin model, I'm watching your face, I'm watching an audience, and I'm reading how I'm doing, or you're getting bored, or I need to move on, or whatever.

2:06:23and that's what I do with patients. I watch very carefully. It's a rare skill. Coming from you, because you really do know, because you've had all sorts, so that means such a lot. It's a really rare skill, and actually, because it's so rare, I would just implore you to do more. And I know you're already doing so much, but it's so rare that you can have such a massive impact. Yeah. You know, so I really wish... We need to talk about how we... So I'm trying to get bigger on Twitter, So this will help me immensely. Well, how can the audience help? How can the audience help you with your mission? Well, at Low Carb GP on Twitter, please follow me on X, at Low Carb GP.

2:07:08The other thing that would help very much is to support the British charity that I set up, the Public Health Collaboration. It's our 10-year anniversary. we set up, these were clinicians who got together, 16 clinicians said, how are we doing rubbish? Can we do better? Can we give clearer public health advice? So it's called the Public Health Collaboration. So please, please support our charity. Go online, find out about it, come to our conferences. I'd also say notice each of us is on a journey. Be clear about your goals. Notice what works for you because that's what you're doing. And each of us see yourself as an experiment.

2:07:57Don't be frightened of experimenting. But if you're going to experiment, notice, Measure something. Measure something. And then you'll see how you're doing. And one thing I think that gives me hope is continuous glucose monitors. Because you're getting, you know, individualizing right there. How is my blood sugar? I can check mine in a minute and see how I'm doing. I think continuous glucose monitors. Which, by the way, are only$20,$30 on Amazon or a website. Yeah, I would think. you know what, if you loved your dad or you had somebody and it's Christmas and you could buy a useless ornament or something, they don't need it anyway, but would they be interested to find out about their blood sugar?

2:08:45You could maybe consider, you'd ask them first, but if they've got a mobile phone, they could try a continuous glucose monitor and find out. Have you tried one? I have, I have. And what did you learn? I mean, so much. Ah, well, did you? Yes, I learned that all these things I thought had no sugar in them have loads of sugar in them. Exactly. I had no idea about ketchup. And the point is, once you've seen it on your phone... You can't learn to see it. No. And I see them as the cavalry coming over the hill because we can't be fooled much longer. I'm just going to look at seeing what my blood sugar is right now.

2:09:25I did this one, yeah. So can I just show you? Oh, well. So what that is, that's somebody with type 2 diabetes, but look, my blood sugar is absolutely level. Wow. And that's good because you want it, but look how level it is. And that is because I don't eat stuff that puts up my blood sugar. If I was to have some of those, you'd get a spike. But that's feedback. It also means if I get very stressed, it puts up my blood sugar. Oh, really? And you've been so kind, I haven't been stressed. Oh, great. Thank God for that. So other podcasters are not as gentle and kind as you, and I get a horrible spike.

2:10:05So I was going to open. Here's some feedback for you, Stephen. So you and I have been together for a few hours, and my blood sugar, I felt safe. So you've done your job too, and there's some feedback for you. No spiking. I'll tell you a final story. A final story. Okay. So type 2 diabetes is brand new as a problem for pediatricians. What is a pediatrician? So a pediatrician is a doctor who specializes in the diseases of children, people under 16 years old. And the international problem is that children everywhere are now suffering from type 2 diabetes. okay but the pediatricians have had no training because it's a new disease so a large group of pediatricians sent for me and said please do a keynote and teach us what to do because they although they're specialists they haven't experienced in type 2 diabetes this is a new disease of children.

2:11:15What are we doing? What are we doing? Leave it at that. We didn't show the foie gras, but I'll eat some of that later. Dr. David Anwin, thank you. We're done. Fabulous. I enjoyed that.

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