Ep. 136 As A Woman, What & How Should I Be Eating?: Smart Snacking, Gut Health & Actually Useful Nutrition Advice with Professor Sarah Berry

0:28Hey, it's Adam Grant from WorkLife, a podcast from TED. software, you'll work smarter, not harder. Freshworks uncomplicates. Learn more at Freshworks.com.

1:00Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com. Post a job for free and get started today. Hi, friends. Grace from the Working Hard podcast here. When you're stretching every dollar, Alilla goes a long way, and Walmart Business is here to help. They make it easy to order what you need from tech and cleaning supplies to everyday essentials, all at low prices and with helpful tools like spend tracking and tax-exempt purchasing for eligible organizations. Because when your operations are smooth, your impact can be bigger. Visit business.warmart.com to get started.

1:43What is up? I'm Grace Beverley and welcome back to Working Hard, the podcast shared guidebook on how to improve your own life and achieve what you actually dreamed of doing. Because life's too short for boring podcasts and bad advice.

1:57I have got an incredible expert episode for you today one I have been excited about for so so long we are getting into a subject that I've spoken about again and again on this podcast one that has been massively under-researched ignored and sidelined women's health and more specifically today women's diets I feel like so many of us were brought up with calorie counting and carb cutting and developed pretty dangerous relationships with food as a result of that and then we had to unlearn that. And the mad thing about that is that so much of this advice isn't even based on research done on women.

2:30You'll know if you've listened to this podcast at all before that I love the stat. I actually hate the stat, but I love talking about the stat that 97 % of data we have on the human body as a worldwide knowledge science base is based only on the male body. So my guest today is Professor Sarah Berry. She is a world leading expert in nutritional science, professor at King's College London and the chief scientist at ZOE and the lead nutritional scientist on the PREDICT program, which is the world's largest in-depth nutritional research program. With over 20 years of research under her belt, Sarah has published more than 200 scientific papers exploring how our bodies respond to food, from blood sugar and fat metabolism to the gut microbiome, and crucially how those results can differ drastically between individuals, especially between men and women.

3:17In this episode I want to answer the question, as a woman what and how should I be eating and how can we move past this one-size-fits-all wellness culture? Something I am very much behind. Before we get into this episode why don't you go and follow the podcast on whatever app you're listening to it on. I know it's not something you might think of doing but it helps the podcast a huge huge amount and also means that you get the podcast exactly where you want it every single Monday to give you the weekly boost that you need.

3:54Professor Sarah Berry are you more working hard or hardly working right now? I would say that I'm hardly working and the reason is I was very much brought up by my father saying that if you find a job you enjoy you never work a day in your life and so I don't work I get to do my hobby every day I work bloody hard at my hobby but I have so much fun I just find it all so exciting so I would say hardly working oh I really love that and I am excited first to learn from your so-called hobby which is a very impressive hobby might I add um and to get some all of the information I've seen out there that you've kind of put out I find incredibly interesting and I feel like this our audience loves this type of thing so I'm very excited to get into everything around kind of diet as it relates to women and all of that.

4:49For anyone who isn't familiar with your work could you give us a little bit of background as to what you do? Yeah so I have two main roles I'm an academic at King's College London where I have been for over 25 years now so I'm a professor in diet and cardiometabolic disease in the Department of Nutrition and Dietetics. So I teach students, I do research, I conduct lots of randomised controlled trials. So these are like clinical trials looking at how diet impacts our cardiovascular health, our metabolic health, how different foods, nutrients, food structure, etc. impacts that. I'm also chief scientist at Zoe.

5:25Zoe is a science nutrition company. So I lead the fabulous science team there. And it's quite different to the work I do at King's, it's a little bit like research on steroids or research on fast forward. And we run a huge cohort study where we have hundreds of thousands of individuals that we're continuously monitoring that allows us to tease apart the complexity of who we are, how we live our lives and the complexity of food to look at how we respond to food, how we respond as individuals to different dietary interventions, etc. And what originally got you interested in kind of how different people, especially women, respond to different food?

6:06So I had spent probably the first 20 years of my career doing very small scale studies, very kind of mechanistic kind of trials where I would recruit 20 people, for example, and in a really tightly controlled way, I would feed them a particular food or nutrient. I would collect blood samples, you know, every 15 minutes or so over several hours. I'd then have them back in the lab, feed them something else and look at their responses to these foods or nutrients and see how they differed from one particular food or nutrient versus another. So I would take what we call the average, the mean. So I'd say, OK, on average, how do these 20 people respond to this food versus that food?

6:51But it became really apparent that actually looking at the average isn't terribly meaningful. actually we're so different depending on our age depending on our sex depending on so many other factors and then when I joined the team at Zoe it opened up this whole new exciting horizon where we can leverage all of these modern technologies these new way of doing research to actually understand at scale and breadth and depth and precision how people differ in terms of their responses to food and it's only by collecting data at that scale that we were able to do that so we were able to actually look at okay how does it matter according to your sex or your age you know or all of the different other parameters that are different between myself for example and you and I think it was that realization that we need to move beyond looking at the average because we are so different yeah and how you might respond to a food it's very very different to how I might respond to her food.

7:52Yeah absolutely and I know that on top of that kind of individualistic approach there's also been a huge historical data bias towards men and male bodies and understanding that we have a huge amount of data on them that we don't necessarily have on female bodies and kind of the the fact that because there was so much exclusion of females from trials especially prior to 1993 we obviously a lot of the data we have on the human body I think I heard a statistic that it was 97 % of data we have on the human body is based on the male body which is kind of crazy doesn't surprise me um how would you say that nutritional science has overlooked women so I think all research has overlooked women until recently so that statistic doesn't doesn't surprised me I've not heard that statistic before I think that until not that long ago which is quite shocking men were considered the norm so men were considered that's the normal physiology and then there was also the whole kind of safety issues about studying women so I don't know if you'll have heard of the thalidomide scandal as we call it where women of childbearing ages were receiving this drug it was a sedative and anti-sickness drug and they gave birth to children who had terrible deformities and this was in the 60s 70s and so there was a ban put on women of childbearing age being you know taking part in research and it's only recently that that's been lifted and so I think that compounded already this very biased view that men were normal their Her bodies were normal, ours were.

9:39But also it's really expensive to study women. And that's because we are complex in terms of, you know, the changes in our hormones during the menopause, the changes in our hormones during our cycles, our menstrual cycles as well. And so, you know, from my perspective, having run probably 30 to 35 randomised controlled trials in humans, nearly all of them have been in men. and they've all been in men because in my situation it's cheaper to study men and we live in a really competitive landscape in terms of funding and so when I'm applying for grant funding to study how this particular fat impacts cholesterol for example if I want to study women I have to recruit more individuals because I have to take into account what stage their menstrual cycles in when I'm taking their bloods I have to take into account are they pre peri or post menopausal and so when I'm in this competitive landscape desperate for the funding I'm going to do anything I am to reduce COGS unfortunately and you know in order to at least study it and so until recently all of my trials were also in men because of that so I think there's lots of different reasons for this and so that's why nutrition research as well as other health research you know has focused so much on men because they were considered the norm for safety reasons but also for financial reasons I think that's such an honest and open account of actually why that is and why it's actually it would be so easy to look at that statistic and be like right well we just got to make sure somehow that all studies from now are either 50 50 or biased towards women to be able to close this gap a little bit and actually I think your kind of explanation of it really shows how this needs to be that needs to be fixed probably on either a legislatory level or something comes in that allows I don't know more grants based on you know work on women or whatever it might be that's something to be positive about that yes there has been a historic problem I mean what blows my mind more than anything is the fact that it that men were just considered normal and we were absolutely we were considered atypical I think that's the worst if you look kind of back at all of the rationale that has been given in the past why women weren't studied but it is changing and many of the grant calls that go out that ask us as academics to apply for funding are specifically in the area of women's health now okay great many also request that you do have a 50 50 split it is really challenging though because it's like well how do i have a 50 50 split still study this and have enough people because you need a certain number of people you know in their different kind of categories for females and males to be able to actually see what we call a significant difference that we're looking for between a diet or intervention yeah but it is changing and I think we need to be encouraged and we need to just make sure that momentum of change continues and what would you say the biggest myths are that are still being sold to women about nutrition I would say the biggest myths around nutrition that are being to women are probably the biggest myths that are being sold to everyone rather than just women.

12:59So I think there's a lot of overcomplication of nutrition. So I think there's this real focus for a proportion of the population that I think are quite into their nutrition, into the health of optimisation. And whilst I think optimisation is great in terms of, you know, getting that extra 1%, I think the added effort and the added complexity, you have to add to your diet, to your lifestyle to achieve that is massive compared to the basic underlying principles of a healthy diet, healthy lifestyle, you know, get enough sleep, get some physical activity, have a generally healthy diet with plenty of fiber, diversity of fiber, diversity of fruits and vegetables, you know, low in salt, low saturated fat, low processed meat, it's a boring message.

13:48You know, everyone wants like, you know, a quick fix or take this supplement and you'll look 20 years younger well if it was out there I'd be on it well you do look very young so you might be on it I'm not um but and so I think that that's one of the things I think I find really frustrating you know talking to you know I'm a mum of two talking to the mums at the school gate they're like oh I just read about this I'm trying this and fine if you can afford it but it's that kind of mis-selling of like wow it's going to have this big impact or other people are like, oh, I'm stopping having this because I've read X, Y and Z.

14:23I mean, there's just so much nonsense out there. And you think, oh, you know, how are you going to live a happy life if you're depriving yourself of that? Or, oh, you know, time-restricted eating. Yes, we know that it helps, but you don't have to eat within a four-hour window. And the amount of people that are like, oh, I'm not going to eat after 3 o 'clock in the afternoon. You know, yes, it will have a little bit of a benefit, but for the majority of people, I don't know about you, but there's no way I'm stopping eating at 3 in the afternoon. neither and so i think that's what frustrates me a little bit is that the basic principles are basic right they're simple they get you 90 of the way now yes you can optimize for that final 10 but i think you need to optimize on features that don't impact your quality of life don't impact the pleasure of food food's there to bring us pleasure it's there to bring us joy you know it's part of our social connections as part of our culture it's part of our emotions our upbringing and I think sometimes striving for that last five or ten percent takes away that joy.

15:26Right and it sounds like from the way you're explaining it as well lots of people are striving for that last five or ten percent while perhaps negating the 90 percent of like just try and stick to somewhat whole and not entirely processed foods and you know making sure you are eating real foods and colorful foods and all of that. Yeah absolutely you know we sadly live in a broken food landscape, you go to the supermarket and the majority of the food is heavily processed. Many of it has lots of chemicals in it that perhaps we shouldn't be eating to excess. They don't look, you know, the food doesn't look like the original food, the structure that it came from.

16:06And we know that all negatively can impact our health. So it's really, really challenging. And I think we do have to acknowledge that it's really challenging to make healthy choices you know especially like for myself as a working mum got two kids holding down these two different jobs and at the end of the day I'll just grab something quick and easy and that's I think the biggest challenge that we're in this landscape that makes unhealthy food firstly we know it's cheaper so the unhealthy kind of heavily processed food is 50 % cheaper on average than really yep there's been lots of research published on this so there was a really interesting analysis that came out recently in a leading journal, Nature Food, where they've taken thousands of foods from the main supermarkets in the US and they'd looked at the, what we call the ultra-processed, the heavily processed versions within each food category.

16:56So for example, within breads or within cereals or within meats. And then they'd looked at the minimally processed, so the almost unprocessed equivalent, so the healthier versions. And on average, there was a 50 to 60 % price difference with the heavily processed being the 60 % cheaper than the minimally processed. And that's the biggest challenge that we face. And that's why, you know, 95 % of us in the UK, this is the worst in the US, don't get enough fibre, for example, because many of these really heavily processed foods, they're devoid of fibre, plus they have all of these other kind of nasties in them.

17:35But at the end of the day, you know, many of people are living on a budget. many people are worried about well now what's going on in America I mean worldwide everyone's worried you know but like there's choices that people are making in the UK that you'll be aware of over the over the winter of paying for heating or paying for food bills and so if that's 50 % cheaper to get these heavily processed unhealthy foods that are devoid of all of the key nutrients that we need to maintain good health. Unfortunately, it's about getting the fuel for many people, as in getting the energy in. Of course. And there are options there, even if they are worse options, whereas when it comes to heating and electricity, you can't really choose different options.

18:20I mean, you can eat on a lower budget, but I think it takes a lot of skill. So there's very healthy foods like frozen vegetables, pulses, they're so good for you, etc. But it takes a lot of skill, I think, for many people, if you're not used to cooking with these kind of foods, to learn how to cook with them. And I want to go on to more specific foods a little bit later in the podcast, but I actually think that's a really good point. And for anyone listening to this who is on a very tight budget and is trying to eat as healthily as possible, but as you say, is faced with this 50 % price discrepancy, what would you recommend that they go for when they're doing their weekly shop when it comes to getting the most affordable options, but for the best nutritional value?

19:02so I think shopping in bulk so some practical things like that shopping in bulk you know often makes many different products cheaper frozen tinned canned jarred food is often a lot cheaper and nutritionally often at least the same or sometimes even better so a lot of frozen vegetables for example has many of the vitamins and minerals in a more preserved state you know using quite cheap staples so using staples like potatoes like root vegetables like pulses for example pulses are so nutritionally good for us and yet they can actually be quite cheap you can buy them in jars you can store them you know for long periods of time those are the kind of things if we can make those part of the staple foundation of our dishes then I think that really brings the cost down Right, absolutely.

19:53And I want to speak a little bit about this kind of overall view of being a woman and eating food. And I would love to know from you an overview, I guess, of how being a woman affects things like your metabolism, your hunger and your energy. Yeah. So I would say that overall, many of the same principles apply for both women and men. But what we do know is that as our hormones change, particularly as you become peri and postmenopausal, but also they fluctuate, obviously, throughout your menstrual cycle. That does change many different factors in terms of how we metabolize food, how we feel in terms of our hunger, in terms of our fullness, etc.

20:43and we don't know lots about how this changes during the menstrual cycle. There is research going on in this area. It's something we're learning about, but again, because women have been understudied. What we do know is, in particular, when women are going through menopause, there's huge changes. So as women's oestrogen declines, which happens around the age of 45, up to about 55 in many women, so menopause is the point at which you stop having menstrual period. So menopause is basically meaning the pausing of your menstrual cycle. And typically that occurs on average about 51 years of age. And what we see there's big differences in metabolism.

21:24And I think this gives us really good insight into what's probably going on, you know, for women even younger as they're having these fluctuating hormones through their menstrual cycle. So we see, for example, how you process food is different. So we see that in postmenopausal women, they They have higher blood sugar responses to a carbohydrate-rich meal compared to a pre-menopausal woman. We see that they have higher blood fat responses, again, to a fat-containing meal than pre-menopausal women. We see that despite eating the same food often, women have higher levels of hunger, lower levels of fullness as well.

22:04And we also see that oestrogen in women also changes where fat is deposited. So up until the menopause, we're actually doing really well compared to women. So up until the menopause, women in general have a different distribution of body fat. So oestrogen directs body fat in women to the hip area. And yet in men who are lacking the oestrogen, they tend to have more body fat around the tummy area. So you will often hear of like apples and pears. when we lose estrogen during the menopause then what happens is is we distribute where redistribute where the fat is and we become more that apple distribution but what also happens is the protective effect that estrogen has when we're younger in terms of our cardiovascular disease risk and other chronic diseases also starts to disappear so up until the menopause women tend to have lower blood pressure lower cholesterol lower inflammation etc we're kind of doing really well compared to men once you hit the menopause suddenly these go up suddenly blood pressure goes up cholesterol goes up inflammation goes up etc and I think that's a really great insight to how hormones do affect us affect how we respond to food in terms of metabolism but also many of these chronic health factors as well and is there anything we can do in preparation for menopause to kind of ease the symptoms?

23:29So I think there's, when we talk about menopause, I think there's two broad areas that we need to think about. One is the health side, which is what I was just talking about. So the fact that all of these different health measures are related to what I call cardiometabolic disease. So cardiovascular disease and metabolic parameters, they change. And the basic kind of principles that we need to follow, the kind of principles that we should be following anyway so keeping our saturated fat though making sure we're physically active making sure we have plenty of fiber plenty of whole grains etc etc in terms of symptoms that's a whole other area in terms of the symptoms that many women talk about when they're going through the menopause so in that perimenopausal phase which is that few years leading up to the menopause but also postmenopausally.

24:16And that's an entirely different area. And what we see is that impacts women hugely. So we see in our own research, and this is in 70 ,000 individuals from our Zoe predict data, that about 99 % of women report having at least one symptom. We see that 66 % have 12 or more symptoms. And, you know, this significantly impacts women's quality of life. 10 % of women leave the workforce due to the menopause. That's, you know, a huge societal economic burden. You know, this is just in the UK. It accounts for billions of pounds of lost earnings. But it's when you also look at people's quality of life. So people say in our research that we've done, you know, 80 % of people having sleep disturbances, brain fog, memory loss, irritability, anxiety, depression, you know, the burden that that has on people's quality of life is huge.

25:13And yes, HRT, so hormone replacement therapy can help. But what our research shows is that diet can also help. So we've seen that there's a strong association between quality of diet and the burden of these symptoms. So people who have a healthier diet have less symptoms and also less severe symptoms. And we've also seen people following our Zoe programme. So this is a dietary program, they can actually experience about a 35 % reduction in their symptom burden, which, I mean, blew my mind when I saw that statistic, because I think diet's great, but I don't think it's the answer for everything.

25:53And that really surprised me.

26:07and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today.

26:29And as a woman generally, are there kind of best times to be eating certain things? I've seen a lot of different information out there. Yeah, so there's this whole area of what we call chrononutrition. So it's like timing of eating. And it's based on our growing understanding that nearly every cell in our body has its own kind of little light clock. So every cell has its clock ticking away. And that clock is controlled by the light-dark cycle outside, but also when we eat. And what we're now starting to understand for both men and women, that when you eat really matters. and there is some suggestion this might be more profound in women so what we know is that if you're eating late in the day so kind of out of sync with your body clock so to say for most people this can have detrimental health effects and so we know again from our own research about 30 percent of people are eating late in the day but by that i mean after nine o 'clock yeah i was gonna say what's what's the qualifier there's no clear cut off it's not like i like rules okay well i'm not going to say 8 59 p.m is fine but i know one isn't but what we know i would say based on current research eating after nine o 'clock is not associated with good health so we see that about 30 percent of people eat after nine o 'clock the later you're eating we think then it has a detrimental impact impact on people's health because you're eating out of sync with your body clock you're not giving your gut microbiome your gut a rest you're not giving all of these cells involved in metabolism that rest that they need and so we know that if you are a late eater you tend to have higher body fat particularly around the tummy you tend to have higher levels of inflammation you tend to have poorer metabolic control you tend to have higher cholesterol poor insulin sensitivity etc higher blood pressure.

28:21And so if we can start eating or finishing our last meal slightly earlier in the day, I think that would be really beneficial. And what we see is that one of the many things that's different depending on time of day is what we call our postprandial glycemic response. So this is basically your post-meal blood sugar response. If you have some carbohydrates, you have an increase in circulating blood glucose, which we can also call blood sugar. that peaks around 30 minutes after having that carbohydrate and returns to baseline around two hours after what we know is that for example estrogen can affect that so postmenopausal women have a higher blood sugar response we also know it changes throughout the day so we know that if you have your carbohydrates in the morning you tend to be what we call more insulin sensitive so you tend to have a lower blood sugar response compared to having them later in the day and this seems to be even more pronounced in women so it seems to be that for women that kind of time of day effect is even more pronounced so for women it might be even more important to be thinking about the time of day that you're eating and avoiding those carbohydrate rich snacks after nine o 'clock or 8 59 p.m yeah so it's i mean it's funny when you say that because i've been um very much on a journey of using nutrition to ease pcos symptoms um especially over the past few months i noticed a significant impact both if i have a heavy carb breakfast and if i have a have a heavy carb dinner which has put me in this hilarious position where i'm like how many carbs can i eat in the middle of the day so that i'm not like on a general low carb diet which doesn't work yeah but it's i find it so interesting because i think a few years ago if you told me that i would have ruled that out as some sort of fad like you know behavior and actually based on the fact that I know specifically I have insulin resistant PCOS so I will also face even more kind of impact to that but it's crazy especially the breakfast one the difference I notice if I do not what I've started doing now is making sure that my breakfast is always over 30 grams of protein and not super high carb it can have some carbs in it especially because I'm over 30 grams of protein but anything that is high carb low protein or low fats is going to make my blood sugar crazy for the rest of the day to the point that I'll you know get the shakes and get freezing and all of that and it's so interesting that you know actually what was funny was that doctors always thought I had hyperglycemia when I was younger they always thought I had that as blood sugar issues rather than actually being related to my hormone cycle which was really, really interesting to me.

31:04Yeah, I think this is something that with the growing use of continuous glucose monitors that most people can get access to, these are the monitors that you can put on your arm that continuously monitor your glucose. I think we're going to start to discover more and more about how cycle impacts your blood sugar responses. But I think that whole point that you make about what you're having for breakfast is really important for how it sets you up for the day. I think as well, we're really starting to see that and understand that and how having that balanced breakfast. Again, it's not rocket science.

31:38It's just don't just have carbohydrates. If you just have carbohydrates, you can have that big peak. But really important, you're going to have a big dip. So you said sometimes like the feeling cold or shaky or whatever. Often that's people having a dip in blood sugar. That happens about two to four hours after having carbohydrate rich meal. Not everyone's a dipper. So we see from our own research about 30 % of people have quite big dips. and having those dips is associated with feeling quite crap you feel hangry you know you might feel shaky you might have a bit of brain fog but also we know that it's also linked as well as with lower mood lower energy increased hunger that people tend to then eat a lot more over the rest of the day because you kind of tend to gorge to get you out of that dip of the roller coaster but then you end up having that peak and dip and our research has shown if you are a dipper you tend to have 300 more calories over a day than a non-dipper but what's really good is we've shown that if you are a dipper just choosing the right breakfast can prevent you from starting off on that roller coaster and it's so interesting because all the traditional breakfast kind of foods and suggestions are heavily high carbohydrates yeah i've had to stop having anything that would look like a normal person's breakfast i actually once posted my breakfast on my instagram story and people were responding being like this is a very strange breakfast like are you all right this feels like an offensive breakfast and I was like I now have normal meals for breakfast because it is simply impossible to get the nutritional values I need from I mean even eggs I'd have to have really quite a few eggs to hit my 30 grams of protein unless I was also having it with a protein shake or whatever it might be and um I find that really interesting and it just shows how much of food our kind of food choices have been influenced by marketing over the years and how this kind of view of certain breakfast cereals or pastries or toast or kind of whatever it might be without any protein or fats and how actually that's we have some pretty concrete evidence that that's not what we're meant to be eating first thing in the morning yeah and it's just about that balance of nutrients again it's that simple message and it's funny because I wore a continuous glucose monitor as part of the original research we were doing at Zoe's so about seven years ago and that's after you know 20 years in nutrition research 30 clinical trials where I'm doing all sorts of things to people taking bloods for everything and had never studied myself because we study other people not ourselves and I had that real eureka moment that I used to walk the kids home from school like half three so it'd be about two and a half hours after I'd have my lunch and I'd often feel a bit dizzy and a bit funny and and sometimes a bit shaky and I'd certainly shout the kids a lot and get annoyed with them and then when I was wearing my glucose watch I could see that that was always the time that I was getting this big dick after having my traditional lunch you know my white bread sandwiches my crisps etc and you know a bit of fruit etc and now that I change my lunch I don't get that and even as a nutrition scientist I should have known that but you start kind of putting that two and two together but actually also seeing what's going on inside your body in real time and understanding it yeah no absolutely and as a woman is there anything we really shouldn't be eating I don't believe there's anything that should be out of bands for women for children for men I think there's certainly lots of foods that should be limited but I think by denying ourselves something's just going to make ourselves want things more I do think that we need to avoid carbohydrate rich only foods that are very refined carbohydrates or limit them so I wouldn't say avoid actually I think we need to limit very refined carbohydrates i think we need to focus more on what we can add in rather than what we should not eat right yeah so adding in plenty of fiber this is the biggest problem it's a boring message yeah we need to be eating more fiber but interestingly i've actually found it since i've changed my diet a bit and focused on fiber and protein in order to reduce these blood sugar spikes i have actually found it so counterintuitive from the way i've quote unquote quote, dieted as I've grown up.

36:03You know, as a teenager, I tried lots of different fad diets and would really yo-yo between all of these different things. And actually, the message was always less. Like, the message was always restriction. It was always reduction. And actually, it's so funny thinking of this kind of protein and fiber rule because I'm trying to get more. So I might be having something and I'm like, oh, if I'm going to have that because that's carb-based, let me just make sure I have some protein with it. and that addition rule has been so funny in my mind I've been like oh I'm really being thrown because like my diet culture has always said yes and actually to be able to have positive impacts whilst also adding more good things onto my diet has both been a lot more maintainable and sustainable because I've not felt restricted through the process but also just been such a kind of flip of mindset from what I've been used to as just as a woman in diet culture society and kind of having been always told you know if you want positive results it has to be less of this yeah you know this is one of the myths that i still think perpetuates out there for women is you know calorie counting low fat food well if you've taken the fat out of the food firstly it's going to taste like crap but also what are you adding in to replace that fat the reason the fat in that food in the first place is because it's either important to the structure of the food it's important for the texture of the food it's important for the taste of the food or the function of the food and so often you know you see these low calorie low fat no sugar low salt but often by removing these other things are added in that are potentially worse for us in terms of our health or in terms of our weight and then the whole kind of calorie counting we know that yes reducing your calories in the short term works we know that if you calorie count you will lose some weight but will you keep it off and the evidence shows that 50 % of the weight that's weight loss achieved through calorie counting has always regained after after two years 70 % after five years and so it's not a sustainable way to lose weight because as soon as you start calorie counting and restricting your calorie intake your energy intake our bodies are so so clever there's all of these counter mechanisms and you know our bodies have evolved to survive famine they've not evolved to live in that food environment that's now out there of excess and so our bodies are so clever and say whoa hold on grace you're limiting calories whoa i have to preserve your body weight and so the hunger centers in your brain become heightened and so for all of the calories that you've restricted the hunger centers are going to be there saying seek out food seek out food seek out food now you can kind of battle against that for a certain period of time while you're you know trying to I don't know lose weight for a wedding or for your holiday but you can't long term are you getting married congratulations okay well it might work depending on your wedding is as long as it's not in two and a half years no it's in August okay um and you know it will work for a short-term thing because you know you could be hyper focused for example on your wedding so you can you can battle against these hunger signals in your brain that go grace come get me come get me you know for this food but also at the same time what's happening is is that your metabolism changes and so your resting metabolic rate simply put also goes down a little bit so your body kind of goes into preservation mode so you've got this perfect storm of increased hunger preservation of energy and yes you can kind of battle against that for a certain period of time but it's not sustainable and that's why as well calorie counting just doesn't work and that whole idea of denial I think it's never going to it's not sustainable for most people and that idea that you know like you said of adding stuff in adding in the healthy food and displacing the unhealthy food I think that that's the best way to improve your diet think about what can you add in that will then naturally displace something else.

40:11And how does gut health differ in women and why is that important to look at? So again this is something that we don't know lots about. I say that about a lot of things don't I? That's the role of a scientist. We always point out what we don't know rather than what we do know. But it's also because the whole area of gut health microbiome is an exploding area of knowledge and it's an exploding area of research so we're on a journey of discovery but you know in terms of gut health microbiome in women as well as generally you know women's health and women's responses to nutrition what we know is that our microbiome which is our trillions of bacteria that live in our gut that we know is like a whole kind of separate organ almost and we know that it's very closely related to lots and lots of different health outcomes and we're learning every week there's new studies coming out in this area.

41:07We know that in general, the microbiome composition in women is different to the microbiome composition in men. We don't quite understand why. We believe there's lots of impacts of hormones. So we know that estrogen can impact the composition of the microbiome. We also know that the microbiome has a role in some of our hormones, in metabolising some of our hormones, so to say. What's interesting is though that what we see is that after the menopause so where you get the sudden drop in estrogen the microbiome composition in women becomes quite similar to that in men so up until the menopause you've got quite different compositions suddenly it becomes quite similar which is interesting and i think that just shows you the impact that the hormones are potentially having on the microbiome but again it's something that we need to learn a lot more about and what should we be doing to keep our microbiome healthy?

42:01So what keeps our microbiome healthy generally keeps the rest of us healthy, partly because our microbiome has a big role to play in the rest of our health, but also because, again, the underlying principles of what is important for cancer, for cardiovascular disease, for the microbiome, for diabetes are the same. Most importantly is fibre, again. Fibre is what our microbes feed on. Also diversity of different fibres, because there's lots of different fibers out there fiber isn't just one single nutrient so to say and so having lots of different plant-based foods meals is really important having a diversity of different plants is really key having lots of what we call bioactive so you've probably heard of polyphenols which are these colorful pigments that you find in food so having like eating your rainbow we often say having making sure you're having yellows and greens and reds for example because these all have different polyphenols that we know impact our microbiome as well in a in a positive way and then limiting some of the foods that we know are not good for our microbiome and so these are many of the very heavily processed foods there's some evidence that sweeteners and some emulsifiers that are found in heavily processed foods may negatively impact our microbiome processor eds meats heavily processed carbohydrates etc as well what do you wish that all women knew about their bodies?

43:27I wish women knew that our bodies are so clever, that our bodies have evolved to be powerful, to adjust hour to hour, day to day, to what we're faced with, whether it's a physical demand, a food demand, etc. But also be kind that we haven't evolved to live in our current food landscape with the current stresses that we have and the current kind of built environment that many of us live in. So by that do you mean that like it's no wonder that with ultra-processed foods for example that we feel hungrier or we feel attracted to them or whatever it might be because we don't have the equipment to stop that?

44:14I think our bodies are really really clever but we are currently facing an environment in a landscape that we have not had time to evolve to face sure and so I think it's a real challenge so I think we have to be kind to ourselves that you know and also this whole world of social media that you see these beautiful people you know these perfect bodies these perfect lifestyles and that's also not how we are meant to look and and I think when you're faced with the challenges of what's in our supermarket of most households now have two working parents most children and most teenagers are not brought up to know how to cook healthy healthy meals and we live in this kind of fast-paced environment I think it's really really challenging yeah no I think I think that makes complete sense and I think when we think of how much our allocation of time has involved even since yeah say even just the industrial revolution or as you say when we changed mostly to to working parents um that there used to be this kind of time around meals and almost this ritual around meals and cooking and space for food that has obviously evolved you know from tv dinners to maximum convenience to like I still don't take a lunch break and all of those things that actually it's no wonder we're not performing optimally when it comes to our nutritional choices not just because the ultra processed foods but also like the way we're living our days isn't set up to set aside this time to cook and enjoy a meal yeah absolutely and how we're eating is so different and I think this is something we don't talk about enough and it's something that I'm absolutely fascinated by it's one of my newest exciting areas that I've been researching you know we we think a lot about what we eat not as much as we should or you know or it's challenging to given that the landscape but we don't think about how we and this has changed massively so by how we we mean you know the time of day that we're eating we mean the speed at which we're eating the order in which we're eating our food you know there's so many different parameters related to how we're eating our food you know how much we sleep impacts how we metabolize our food and we know that there's so many people now who are short sleepers this means getting less than six or seven hours of sleep if you've had a bad night's sleep then your post-meal glucose sugar response the next day is lots higher your ward centers in your brain are heightened so when you wake up you're going to have a worse metabolic response to a meal but also your reward centers are going to crave food that we know isn't as healthy for you and we don't think about that when we think about food or you know things like the speed that we're eating so you've said that you don't often have a lunch break many people might be still at their computer while they're having their lunch or their dinner and we know that eating rate is really important that if you're eating too quickly that that impacts your metabolic health but it also impacts the amount of energy that you consume as well so yeah energy and energy intake rate or and uh eating speed is a really interesting new area of research so is there any data in terms of how long we should be taking to eat so obviously it depends on the meal sure what we do know and this comes from some research that we've done is that about 30 percent of people are what we call fast eaters now most people kind of most people kind of know When I sit around the dining table with my family, my husband's guzzled his food before I've even taken my second mouthful.

47:59But maybe that's because I'm very aware of eating a place. My son's a bit more like me. My daughter's like my husband. So you kind of know because you can compare yourself to other people. So there's no kind of there's no set gram per minute cut off. But what we know is that the faster that you eat, the more calories that you consume. It takes a while for the fullness signals to hit your brain. but there's really fascinating research showing that if you can just slow down how fast you eat you can actually change subconsciously so without even thinking about it spontaneously how many calories you consume so if you can just uh reduce your eating rate by about 20 you change your energy intake by about 15 so let's say how long does it take you to have your lunch normally i i'd go down to about five minutes that's definitely a pass i don't even need to work out how many grams per minute that is yeah so let's say you were to change that by 20 percent so that's only adding on another minute or so that would show that if you were faced with like a buffet style meal so what we call ad libitum so that you just choose what you want that you would if you extended that reduce about your energy intake by about 15 so people need to slow down people need to put their knives and forks down between meals allow time for the hunger signals to come allow time for your stomach to expand and all of the amazing hormones that are telling us are full and so just to clarify on the data there if i'm eating the same meal so i i'm so sorry about this i always have a microwave lunch at the office and i also eat it in five minutes but just bear with me i'm a test subject what can i say um so if i have that meal if i ate that 20 slower even if it's the exact same caloric intake does that impact the way your body processes it or is it only that you usually choose more because you're not getting the hunger signals that's a really good question um and both things happen so firstly if you have your set meal and you change the speed that you're eating on set meal, so you're having exactly the same food, you're, by eating it more quickly, often people who eat more quickly have bigger bite sizes, have smaller number of chews, and that impacts how the food is being presented in your stomach.

50:30It impacts factors related to how your stomach kind of expands when you have that food, and it impacts feedback that's going to your brain to say how full you are. It also impacts rates of what we call gastric emptying, so stomach emptying into intestine. So it will impact your postprandial glucose, your post-meal blood sugar response. And we've seen this in our own studies, that people who are given exactly the same muffins, if they eat them more quickly, they have a higher post-meal blood sugar response, which we know if it's excessive and then followed by a dip isn't great for us. So that is what could happen just even though you're having exactly the same microwave meal.

51:12But if you were to have a buffet style lunch, because obviously you're going to finish that microwave meal, I assume. Yes, absolutely. But if you had a buffet-style lunch and I said, Grace, here's a plate, go fill it up, and I asked you to eat it slowly, so reduce the rate at which you're eating, you are less likely to go and select more calories. And the research shows that on average, people doing that will consume 15 % less calories. OK, good to know. I know I'll be practising at my lunchtime. The market's uncertain. Revenue's tied and hiring on hold. That's why results-driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving.

51:56Go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. post a job for free and get started today

52:21but I think these are all things that we can do okay we are talking about that 10 % optimization I know but these are things that we can do without looking at the back of back labeling or saying oh it says low calorie or it says low fat there's simple things that we can think about don't eat late at night if you can slow down the pace at which you're eating have a period of fast overnight so time-restricted eating is something that there's a growing body of evidence around you don't need to be limiting yourselves to like a six-hour eating window i.e having your breakfast at 10 and finishing at four in the afternoon the evidence shows even if you eat in a 10-hour or 12-hour window just having a 12 or 14-hour fast period overnight is sufficient in order to allow all the healthy metabolic processes all the kind of cleanup that needs to go on overnight to work and that again subconsciously without thinking about it you will naturally reduce your energy intake particularly if you practice what we call early time restricted eating which is where you start your meals a bit earlier in the day and finish a bit earlier in the day and I know you've briefly mentioned the order you eat your food in yeah um could you talk to us a little bit about that yeah so we did a study at Zoe where we gave people different breakfasts but we gave them exactly the same lunch.

53:40So in random order, we had people come in. On one day, they would have rice for breakfast. These weren't typical UK breakfasts, but this is research, so it's to illustrate a point. Another day, they had pasta or white bread, etc., etc. So we had these different kind of carbohydrate staples. And each day, they would come in and have a different one for breakfast, but they'd have exactly the same lunch. And what we found was that their blood sugar response to their lunch meal was partly shaped by what they'd had for breakfast, showing that what you're having previously, and this was after a four hour period, can shape how you're metabolizing and how you're responding to that subsequent meal.

54:21and again it's something we need to understand more about so this is just showing us that we can't again think of individual eating events i just start breakfast lunch and dinner in isolation that what we're having at other times of the day can impact it there's also research showing that the order in which you eat your food within a meal can impact your responses to food and there are certain influencers out there that talk about this a lot that you know have your fiber or your protein or your fat before your carbohydrates because it delays your stomach emptying etc which yes there's some research to show that personally I don't want to start segregating all my food and it's nice all mixed together yes I don't want to have my cheese and then have my biscuit 10 minutes later fair enough if someone wants to there is some evidence to show you know what that does but again that's probably a 0.05 percent overall impact on your helpfulness yet that makes that meal pretty blimmin' miserable.

55:19Right. And I know in your research you talk a lot about the food matrix. Could you talk to us about that? Yeah, so the food matrix, really simply put, is the structure of food. And in our current food landscape, it's becoming more and more relevant because so many of the foods in our supermarket, on our shelves at home, have the structure destroyed. And we know that the structure of the food has a really important role in modulating how healthy that food is. So when we think about food, we need to think beyond the simple nutrients. So we need to think beyond the classical way that as nutrition researchers and consumers, we've often thought about food, protein, fat, fiber, carbohydrate.

55:58We need to think that food contains on average about 20 ,000 to 25 ,000 different chemicals. So bioactors, all sorts of chemicals. And these chemicals and these nutrients are enwrapped, so captured within this magical food matrix. And it's that food matrix that modulates how those nutrients and how those chemicals impact our health. And it's part of the reason why food processing can have such a big impact on our health as well, in terms of how quickly we eat it, in terms of how much we digest from that food, but also where we digest it. And so what we know is if we destroy the food matrix, we change how much we digest, where we digest it, the rate at which we digest the food, all of which impacts our health.

56:45and I've done various studies where I've looked at this so for example I fed pupil whole almonds and looked at how feeding pupil whole almonds versus actually grinding those almonds down so you destroy the structure of the almonds so you break down all the cell walls and so everything inside the cell walls of the almonds is released and look at how that impacts how much energy we absorb and also how we process it. And what we see is that if you break down the structure of the almonds, so destroy the food matrix, you actually absorb the full nutrients within the nuts. If you eat the almonds as whole almonds, about 30 % of the calories actually just come out in the poo.

57:33And this is because in most plant foods they have quite rigid cell walls and these cell walls can be quite resistant to digestion so if you were to chew a nut the point at which you're about to swallow it would be about one millimeter particle so if I did what we call a chew and spit study which are the least glamorous of all of the studies I do I can handle blood I can handle poo but spits actually the worst thing so when we do chew and spit studies at the point at which you're about to swallow we'd ask you to spit it out and then we have this fancy machine that will measure the particle sizes and so So for nuts, for example, you would typically swallow about one millimetre particles.

58:10But within those one millimetre particles are thousands of cells that have the cell walls intact that are encapsulating the nutrients, like, for example, the fat. And some of it will be digested as it passes through your gastrointestinal tract, but a lot comes out in the poo. And so if you do have a portion of nuts, if you look at your poo, quite often you'll see the chunks of nuts. and so we know therefore what you see on the back of pack labeling for nuts for example is actually wrong so the back of pack labeling a portion of nuts will say it's 170 calories but actually we know on average you absorb probably only about 120 to 130 of those calories that the rest is just coming out and that's because of the matrix but it also changes your feelings of fullness your feelings of hunger the you know your change in in blood fat etc and then we see the change same for other foods so if we take wheat particles and we feed people large wheat particles or finely ground them so we're just literally grinding same backup labeling same ingredients same chemicals you have about 50 percent difference in terms of the blood sugar response the few hours after you have a huge difference in your hormone responses such as glp which affects your your fullness signals your insulin response so these examples with the wheat and the almonds are examples where you've got two foods, identical ingredients, identical nutrients, but actually how they impact our body is quite different.

59:39And which way was that 50 % discrepancy when it comes to wheat? So with the wheat, if it's finely ground, it's absorbed a lot more quickly. So you have a bigger increase in circulating blood glucose, then a bigger insulin response, but it's also absorbed higher up the gastrointestinal tract and lower down our gastrointestinal tract is a lot more densely populated with all of our fullness receptors and so if the food is more in its original structure original matrix it is digested further down typically the digestive tract so you get these greater feelings of fullness so when the wheat is finely ground what happens then is it's absorbed higher up so you get less feeling of fullness as well.

1:00:22And let's talk about snacking. Another one of my favourite topics. When should and shouldn't we be snacking? So we've done lots of research on snacking. And what our research shows is that if you're snacking late at night, that's a problem. Just like if you are eating late at night, we know that that's associated with poor metabolic health. I think snacking is a really interesting one because we know that about 20 to 25 percent of our energy in the UK and the US comes from snacks that's huge that's more than our breakfast and for many people that's more than the calories we even get for lunch but lots of people don't really think about snacking in the way that we might plan our breakfast or plan our lunch or plan our dinner and our research shows that there's about this 40 percent difference in terms of how healthy people's snacks are versus their dinner.

1:01:12So people that are having really healthy dinners, 40 % of them then have unhealthy snacks. It's a really simple single dietary strategy that we can harness to improve our health. Because one thing about snacking is it's typically under our self-control. So I don't know about you, but my dinner is typically dictated by what my fussy kids will eat or what my husband happens to be cooking that night. I don't have as much control over my dinner as I do my snacks because my snacks I eat in isolation it's up to my personal choice and given that they account for a quarter of our energy it's a really simple strategy we can use to actually improve the healthfulness of our diet assuming we eat the right foods at the right time so if we can avoid snacking after eight or nine o 'clock at night if we can make sure we're snacking on healthy foods we can have a really big impact on our health and we did this study a few years ago at King's College where we fed people either 20 % of their energy from typical UK US snacks so we designed these to reflect the typical snack profile in the UK so imagine a bit of a walker's crisp with a 50s digestive I like it well these people had to eat these for six weeks or we randomly allocated the other 50 people to have nuts as their snack so we had 50 people having nuts we had 50 people having the UK typical snack for six weeks 20 % of their energy at the beginning and the end of the six weeks we took lots of different measures related to their health what we found is those that were having nuts instead of the typical UK snacks had a really significant improvement in many health outcomes a significant reduction in cholesterol a significant improvement in their blood vessel function that equated to a 30 reduction in cardiovascular disease risk now that's huge we didn't ask them to change anything else we said carry on eating your normal breakfast lunch and dinner carry on your normal physical activity your normal sleep we don't want you to change anything else all you're doing is changing your snacks it's very interesting that's a huge benefit and so i think snacking is often demonized because we think of snacking as in oh my god people are constantly eating they're eating all of these bad foods but what our research shows also that we've done at zori the frequency of eating isn't so much the problem so having multiple eating events where you're having your breakfast lunch and dinner and multiple snacking events within reason obviously isn't the problem it's making sure you're snacking on healthy foods but also being consistent and this is another new area of research that's looked at consistency of eating and so if you are not a snacker so anyone listening to this who isn't a snacker don't start snacking unless you really want to if you are a snacker though try and be kind of consistent with your snacking habits and there's some fascinating research that has shown if you swap one day to to another with different frequencies of eating so one day you might have three meals the next day you might have three meals plus three snacks then the next day two meals and five snacks that that's actually not good for us that our body again is so clever knowing what's typical and kind of what to expect throughout the day that's really interesting i think also shows why when you're slightly out of your routine it might be a better routine or whatever it might be but you can still feel kind of off totally and like i mean you said you've just come back from the states you know jet lag things like that going across different time zones I mean, that just totally mucks up how, you know, we're responding to food when we're eating our food, etc.

1:04:54Very interesting. And I know that some of your latest research, you're working on a study about the rise of cancer in young people. Can you tell us anything about the early indicators as to what the reasonings are or what you're kind of learning in that study? Yeah, so this is a huge study that we've only just started. It's called PROSPECT. It's an international study funded by various cancer organisations and we're looking at the rise in early onset colorectal cancer. So we know that in people under 50 years of age, there's an increase year on year over the last 15, 20 years of early onset colorectal cancer and it's increasing each year as well.

1:05:36we don't fully understand why which is why we have this huge grant and what we're trying to do is firstly identify different risk factors that are associated with this increase in under 50 years of age there are some classical risk factors that we know still apply to early onset as well as late onset colorectal cancer so alcohol intake we know is particularly problematic we know that living with obesity is also associated with significant increased risk. We know that low physical activity is also associated with risk, smoking and diet. And we know that those five factors account for probably about 60 to 70 % of the risk for early onset colorectal cancer.

1:06:20So the good news is, is that these are all modifiable. Now, obviously, it's hard if you're smoking to give up. It's, you know no one's choosing to be overweight it's hard to to make these changes but I do think it is empowering to know that you can modify your risk and you know there's some really simple dietary strategies you can implement to reduce your risk for colon cancer so reducing processed red meat increasing your fiber intake increasing your whole grain intake reducing sugar sweetened beverages so fizzy sugary drinks these are really really important factors in reducing our risk of cancer.

1:06:58What our research is also looking at is what we call the exposome, which is all of the hundreds of different exposures that are out there. So things that we haven't traditionally thought about. So we know that microplastics might play a role. We know that environmental factors such as air pollution, water pollution might play a role. And so this is why we're bringing such a big research team together so we can look at all of these different factors. And we know that the microbiome so these trillions of bugs in our gut also we think play a really important role as well so again any kind of diet that's good for our gut good for our microbiome we also believe will reduce our risk of early onset colorectal cancer very interesting but you know it's really sad you see you know certainly now i'm a 48 year old woman and the amount of people that i'm now seeing who are diagnosed with this cancer in their 40s I'm seeing more of it than I've ever seen and this is just amongst friends or family and I think what's particularly difficult with colon cancer is at the point at which it presents which is typically blood in the stool pain in the back bloating tiredness etc is often when it's thought that it's quite advanced stage and that's what makes it you know well all cancers um tough but i think that makes it really difficult given that if it is detected very early it can often be quite a treatable cancer yeah yeah well looking forward to the kind of results on that and actually getting some i can imagine getting some answers on that huge increase is very very important and you know the uk has done an amazing job at points of bringing in great national screening programs in order to reduce that which I feel like is something that yeah the NHS has already always done really well so yeah I think as well part of the problem with cancer but many chronic diseases is I think many people don't realize the power that diet and lifestyle can have in reducing our risk and the power that diet and lifestyle can have an increasing risk and i think that we do our best at trying to educate people but i think that you know we all many people know what are the fundamentals of a basic healthy diet is but in the uk less than 0.1 percent of people follow the core seven uk dietary guidelines whoa less than one 0.1 percent whoa that's a crazy statistic what are those core seven Yeah, so underpinning them are, we have nutrient guidelines, so we should have less than a certain percent of our energy and saturated fat.

1:09:41We should have, you know, six grams of salt in our diet. And we should have less than a certain amount of sugar in our diet and more than 30 grams of fiber in our diet. But in addition to that, our eat well recommendations, which is about increasing fruits and vegetables, increasing intake of whole grain, etc. as well. And people just don't follow them. And it's not because many people don't know what constitutes a healthy diet. It's because the food landscape is very difficult. But I also think it's because people, many people don't realize what a huge role it plays in disease prevention. Yeah.

1:10:21And I think, you know, what I'm hopeful from this cancer research that we're doing, a huge part of it's going to be around doing some community studies in order to see how we can motivate people to make very simple dietary changes that we know have a big impact on their risk and see how we can do that so that people are really motivated to make those changes. So they're not sitting in that 0.1 % of people following dietary guidelines. Yeah, right. No, I'm totally with you. And I think one of the biggest things that I've learned from this episode that I hadn't truly thought about before was the fact that so many of us are focusing on this 10 % optimization without even having focused on that 90%.

1:11:03And actually, I think that it's so representative of the landscape we're in, particularly with social media and media in general and information transfer in general is the 10 % is probably catchier and easier to talk about because it's kind of they're sold as these quick tricks. So rather than just focusing on having a healthy, mainly whole foods diet, talking about, oh, well, if you eat your broccoli first before your carbs or whatever, it feels like a hack. Like it feels like something that's going to solve the rest of it versus the fact that actually if what's on your plate is not optimal, then the order you're eating it in is going to have minimal impact.

1:11:48Yeah, yeah. Totally. And I mean, you see there's people, these biohackers on Instagram who are called, and I don't want to promote any, so I'm not going to say, you know, so-and-so, the biohacker. And you see some of their feed. I mean, first, I think, what a miserable life to be living like that. as in yeah fun if you get to go to all these nice places but that you're literally thinking about every single morsel that enters your body that's on your body that your body is exposed to I mean we just can't our lives like right right but they're sexy messages you know you could have me there saying what I've said repeatedly throughout this podcast which is the boring message they're simple underlying basic principles I know that people don't want to hear that but it's the reality and you know i'm not going to say oh you know just go and have this it's a you know one shot wonder or yes there's foods that are kind of like you know can be part of a super diet but there's no super food as such there's no silver bullet but you know that's not going to get the clicks on social media yeah no that makes sense and before we finish could you tell me what you would say the best piece of advice is that you've ever been given and it can be about your expertise or it can just be in general so I would circle back to what I said right at the beginning about working hard hardly working that my dad bringing me up to always say if you can find a job you enjoy you never work a day in your life that the pleasure that I get having made that choice or being having the privilege to have a job that I enjoy is incredible and it's not just because I have a job that's successful I think this can be for anyone my dad was a policeman my mum was a secretary but they loved their jobs they didn't feel like they worked either right so I think I'd circle back to that but if you want a new one I would say another thing that I piece of advice that I was told as well again by my dad was that the more you know the less you think you know the less you know the more you think you know and I've spent most of my life thinking I know nothing I sit here and I think I don't know anything and so my advice would be if you sit like I do talking to people or in different situations thinking you know whether it's an imposter syndrome or thinking I don't know enough always remember that it's probably because actually you know so much you know what you actually really don't know yeah I love that I love that well thank you so much for coming on it's been incredibly interesting and I have learned a lot my pleasure thank you for having me