ZOE's best health tips of 2024 - Part 2

0:00Welcome to Zoe Science & Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.

0:14welcome back to our two-part recap of 2024 taking a look back at all the best nuggets of wisdom from zoe episodes this year in this jam-packed episode we'll hear how your second brain affects your mood why fasting doesn't actually have to be difficult and how to prevent the disease you probably don't know much about, but can lead to hospital time. Let's get into it. If you're anything like me, you've probably heard a lot about intermittent fasting, but maybe aren't completely sold on the idea. Well, this first episode might just change your mind. Intermittent fasting can spark some serious health benefits, but how to get started?

0:55In this episode, I talk with my Zoe co-founder, Professor Tim Spector, and Gin Stevens, an intermittent fasting advocate and best-selling author. It was the first time that I tried intermittent fasting and transparently, I absolutely hated it, Jen. And so I did follow, I did the required week, and I could not wait. The day I stopped, I was so happy. But before we get into that, I'd like to just start at the very beginning actually with you, Jen. Okay. What is intermittent fasting? The words sound so scary. The word fasting makes you think that you're going to like 40 days and 40 nights, wandering in the desert.

1:32But intermittent fasting, the word intermittent is key. You are having periods of fasting and periods of eating, which every single person who is listening or watching already does that. It's just changing the balance of that. You go to bed, you sleep, you wake up in the fasted state. Probably everyone listening has had fasted blood work before. So our bodies are already fasted every single day. If you live an intermittent fasting lifestyle, The difference is you just extend that period. Instead of most people having this much for your feeding time and this much for fasting, we just switch it.

2:06And so you're fasting for a longer period of the day, intentionally. And this is obviously on a 24-hour cycle, so very much focused on this idea there's a time of day when you should do things and a time of day when you shouldn't. And it seems like that's played in quite a lot into this idea of thinking about eating in particular parts of the day on a sort of regular 24-hour rhythm? Well, I would just like to point out that y 'all know from your research with Zoe, bio-individuality is a big component of what you're doing. It's the whole thing that y 'all are doing. And I think that also applies to circadian rhythm.

2:38You know, I work with intermittent fasters from all around the world who live intermittent fasting as a lifestyle. You know, I've worked with hundreds of thousands of members of my communities over the years. And you figure out what works for you over time. There are people who tend to have an earlier eating window or a midday eating window, but most of us tend to gravitate towards afternoon, evening, just as a practical way of living our lives. But we're not all the same. That said, within that, there's that variation. But I think what you're getting at is the fact that all humans have a circadian rhythm, which means their body has to do stuff, active stuff in a certain time, and then rest stuff in another time.

3:20And all our cells are geared up for that. So it's become clear that this eating needs to be done at the same time as your body is in sort of activity mode and not in total rest mode. And I think this is also being linked to the circadian rhythms of our gut microbes that are having to deal with the food you're eating if it's at weird times. And this also goes to this idea that shift workers and people who are doing stuff out of sync have poorer health because of it. So I think it's more and more we're realizing we have to go back to our origins. And this means eating in times when we would normally be active rather than very late at night particularly.

4:01Exactly. Yeah. But everybody figures that out over time. You find out where your body prefers, what just feels natural to you. The goal of eating 30 plants a week might sound like a big endeavor. But I wanted to tell you that it isn't actually that hard to achieve. Regular listeners to this podcast know that we often talk about eating 30 plants a week, and we stand by it so much that our gut health scientists actually created Daily 30, which is a gut supplement that makes it really easy to do. With just one scoop, you can add more than 30 plants to your daily diet and benefit from ingredients that support your digestion, your gut health, and energy.

4:40Plus, Daily 30 can actually help keep you feeling full. Daily 30 also features four grams of fiber, a nutrient that over 90 % of adults lack. If you follow Zoe on Instagram, you might have seen our post on a nutrition trend called fiber maxing. Fiber maxing, as you can probably guess, is when you max out your fiber intake. Now, plants are full of fiber, so eating over 30 different ones can help you do just that. Now, Zoe don't usually love nutrition trends, but what we love about the idea of fiber maxing is that it's a way to focus on abundance, not restriction, by eating a variety of plants that come in different textures and colors.

5:21If you want to try a bit of fiber maxing, simply sprinkle Daily 30 on your breakfast meals. I like it with my berries and yogurt every morning. Yes, berries are plants too, and a great source of fiber. Daily 30 also tastes great on salads, vegetable soup, avocado toast, hummus, the list runs on. And because we're Zoe, we ran a study on Daily 30. As shared in a previous podcast episode, when Zoe first developed it, we ran our own randomized controlled trial to check if a new class of supplements could actually work. The results exceeded our expectations and helped us create the formulation that we sell today.

5:57By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains four grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. Ready to start improving your diet this week? All it takes is a scoop to make every day a good gut day. Just go to zoe.com slash daily30 to start adding it to your meals and try the fiber maxing trend for yourself. And right now, we're offering our listeners a free Zoe tin and magnetic scoop with every order. So order yours today at zoe.com slash daily30. And in this episode, we also revealed a world exclusive.

6:37Our brilliant team of Zoe scientists completed the world's largest study of intermittent fasting. Could you tell us firstly about the study, what happened, and then what have we found? Yeah, the big if, it's not a question mark. It's IF, study of intermittent fasting. And it came out of a big health study we were running in the UK called the Zoe Health Study. And there were 246 ,000 people that were sort of eligible for this. We told them what it entailed, which was just monitoring what you eat for a week so we actually could document what the normal eating windows were. And then the idea was to eat within a 10-hour eating window, 14 hours of overnight fasting and 10 hours of eating, which isn't a very strict one, but it is one that has been shown across a range of animals and humans to be effective.

7:3237 ,000 of them completed the study. And how long did they have to do the fasting for? They did for two weeks. 27 ,000 were highly engaged and continued it for many more weeks after that, some of them up to about 16 weeks. And a proportion was still going. So we got people hooked on it. At baseline, they weren't too bad. Their eating window was about 11 hours. So for many people, they only shifted it by about one hour. The people that did complete it, they lost on average about 1.1 kilograms. That's just over a couple of pounds in weight. But importantly, we saw that people who, you know, reduced that eating window most changed most.

8:16And we got increases in energy levels of 22%. Mood improved by 11%. An interesting hunger, which most people thought would have gone up, actually slightly dropped. So hang on, you just want to make sure I got that right. You're saying that for the people who did this, even though they were eating in a shorter time than before, they were actually less hungry than they were before they restricted their eating. That's what they were reporting. Which sounds like counterintuitive. Very counterintuitive. When we looked at the people who weren't doing this consistently, so they were sort of having one day of doing it, another day not, we found that actually things reversed.

8:53Those people were more hungry and they had less energy. So clearly you do need some sort of stability to this to get these benefits. And we also saw the people that benefited most had an eating window that was largest at the beginning. Those people that maybe were eating over a 14-hour window, they benefited the most from this. And the people that were, you know, marginally near it when they started. It's been a bit of a shock to me because I was definitely brought up with this assumption that you have to have breakfast. It's really important before you go and do something else. So the other misconception we were brought up with is you've got to have food inside you before you undertake any activity.

9:32Otherwise, you know, whether it's walking to school or going for a jog or going on your bike, you've got to have carbs up there, you know, to be ready for it. And now we know that's not true. In fact, doing exercise when fasting can be beneficial for your health. So get out of bed and go for it. Tim also shared some of the science around time-restricted eating. That's the one thing that stood out of all the studies is, on average, you're getting reduced inflammation from giving your gut a rest. And you are improving your gut microbes. And this has this effect all across our body. And this is why it's important for energy and mood and our immune system in general.

10:13And small amounts of weight loss are a bit of a side effect for some people. They're not the main reason for doing this modest time-restricted eating, because it is very modest. You know, we're only shifting people, a lot of them just by one or two hours in a day. It's not a huge difference compared to these trials, which have often combined this with calorie restriction. This study was quite short-term, right? So it was two weeks, and I think one of the things we talk about all the time on Zoe is, like, you know, the only thing that really matters is, like, a long-term sustained change of life.

10:45So this is clearly like a test of something, as scientists often do, right, this sort of short term, to then learn about something long term. So if people had stuck to this shorter eating window, based upon all the other sciences out there, what health benefits might they expect? And you mentioned something about inflammation. Could you maybe help us understand that and elsewhere? What would that actually mean for someone? If they're listening to it, like, I want to make this as a permanent change to my life. If we see this reduction in inflammation, and we assume that's going to continue, no reason to think any otherwise, then you would see small changes across a wide area of health.

11:23So that means that your immune system is working better, that it's reacting better, that your gut microbes are in a better state, they're producing better chemicals. It means your mood is going to be heightened. You'll get less depression, less anxiety. You will feel more general energy, less tiredness. And you will have some small changes in perhaps your response to sugars, minor changes in your fat levels, reducing your risk of heart disease, etc., etc. So you won't suddenly change your risk in a few weeks from being high risk to low risk. It's not like the silver bullet that cures all ills and you're going to live for another decade, healthy life, just because of the time-restricted eating.

12:09Absolutely not. But if you multiply that small difference in inflammation over years. Right. That's when it adds up. Which is what we want people to do. There's no point doing this for three weeks and then stopping. You've got to find something that suits you and then do it for a long time. Realize how important it is to give your gut and your body a rest. and if you can just prune that you know there's inflammation levels down that'll have huge effects on your risk of virtually every disease one of the main takeaways of this episode that did really surprise me was you can and should tailor intermittent fasting to your own lifestyle and body now i've always been a fan of mushrooms mushroom stroganoff is a go-to weeknight meal for me, but I had no idea just how brilliant mushrooms are when it comes to our health.

13:00Turns out they could be a promising treatment for depression, and their chemicals might be protecting us from other diseases. For this mushroom tour, we chatted to Dr. Merlin Sheldrake, a biologist and the author of the best-selling book, Entangled Life, How Fungi Make Our World. If there were no fungi, would we be alive today? No. Do plants rely on fungi as much as we rely on gut bacteria? At least as much. Brilliant. Well, we're going to go into that in a bit more detail. Now, Tim, do all mushrooms have the same health benefits? No, but they're all good. Are dried mushrooms as good for our health as fresh mushrooms?

13:41Usually, and sometimes more. And finally, do psychedelic mushrooms have the potential to revolutionize medicine? Absolutely. It came as a surprise to me that mushrooms aren't plants. So what exactly are they? Fungi are a kingdom of life. So that's as broad a category as animals or plants. So there's lots of ways to be a fungus, just like there's lots of ways to be an animal, there's lots of ways to be a plant. But they're not plants and they're not animals. Mushrooms are the reproductive structures of a small group of, well, a large group, but a small, proportionally small group of fungi. So, mushrooms are the places where fungi produce spores, which help them disperse themselves over potentially large distances.

14:25So, when we think of mushrooms, we're just thinking of a small part of the overall life of a fungus, which is usually in the form of a network. Most fungi live most of their lives as networks of branching, fusing cells called mycelial networks. And so, that means I should think about mushrooms a bit like a fruit. So it's like a tomato or a pear within this thing that isn't a plant. It's analogous to the fruit of a plant, except that the tree, say the apple tree that produced the apples is underground and the mushrooms you see usually are sticking up through the ground and you're not able to see the rest of the tree.

15:01Why aren't they a plant? Because it feels like, you know, they're not an animal and then they're not a bacteria. So my very simple view of the world, they're a plant, aren't they? I think perhaps the most important difference is that plants, on the whole, photosynthesize. So they produce energy from the light coming from the sun and from carbon dioxide in the air. And it's a really fundamental process on the planet, photosynthesis. It's kind of like they're eating air and eating light to produce the energy they need to grow and do the things they do. Fungi don't photosynthesize. So like us, as animals, we have to find food in the world, ready-made, as it were, and put it inside us.

15:41Fungi have to find food in the world and consume it. They can't make their own energy-containing carbon compounds like plants do. For an ingredient that seems so unassuming, there are some really cutting-edge discoveries being made. Tim and Merlin shared how the humble mushroom can fight disease and protect our bodies. In Japan, there's a chemical from shiitake mushrooms, which is used very widely for treating cancer alongside more conventional cancer treatments, and also a compound from turkey tail, which is used very widely in quite conventional medical contexts. um so um yeah so the research the science is uh is unequally distributed and some of the reasons why those are not used so widely here is because it's not totally clear how they're working um although it seems to be very clear that they work so psychedelic mushrooms have these amazing potential effects from mental health and cancer but what about the edible kind what might they be doing for our health as well as being super tasty you know there's a lot of water in them so Once you've got rid of the water, they have huge amounts of protein, about 25 % protein, pretty good amounts of fiber as well.

16:52All these chemicals we've been talking about that have a whole variety of these effects. They're a source of selenium. They're actually a source of vitamin D. They sunbathe like humans. You mentioned this before. Is it really true that if you leave them out in the sun before eating, they have more vitamin D? It is. I mean, it depends slightly on the variety, but some of them are really good at converting natural steroids in them to vitamin D, which is a steroid. And basically, you can get half of your vitamin D amounts from eating portions of mushrooms. I think there's lots of things that fungi can do for us chemically that plants can't because they're so chemically ingenious, because they produce all these different compounds that do all these different things.

17:39In fact, lots of the chemicals that you'll get by eating a plant have originally been concentrated or even made by a fungus. So whether magical or not, mushrooms of all kinds really do seem to have these fantastic benefits for our bodies. Merlin and Tim left us with the key tip to eat mushrooms at least three times a week. When I want to liven up my cooking, I tend to reach for the cumin, or maybe the sumac, Or if I'm really honest, probably someone else does who's actually doing the cooking in my house. Spices are a staple in most kitchens. But spices are about more than just flavor. They're a form of medicine too.

18:19My guest for this episode was Kanchan Koya, a molecular biologist turned food scientist. The formal definition of a spice is that it's the root, the bark, the bud, the fruit, and the leaf, although that can get a little tricky sometimes because leaves are more herbs than spices, usually dried. Those parts of the plant, once dried, constitute a spice. They're often used in small amounts for flavoring in food and hopefully, as will inspire people today, also to boost the health properties of food. But yeah, that's traditionally sort of the formal definition of a spice. And this obviously started something that just tasted really nice in our food, right?

18:58But I think now, and this is where your own research sort of started, We understand they're high in these things called like polyphenols. Can you explain what those are? Yeah, so I would actually say that thousands of years ago when spices were first discovered, people did love how they made food taste. But actually, our ancestors also recognized that spices had additional properties, like the ability to preserve food in the absence of refrigeration thousands of years ago. So I think there was an understanding as evidenced by the fact that people waged wars and conquests were undertaken for the spice trade, that there was more to it than just flavor alone.

19:36But now we obviously have science catching up to some of that ancient kind of intuitive wisdom. So polyphenols are essentially a group of naturally occurring compounds that are highly prevalent in the plant kingdom. And for reasons that we'll hopefully discuss, really enriched in herbs and spices, highly concentrated. Phenols are just a type of chemical structure and polyphenols just means that a lot of these compounds have multiple phenolic kind of units. But if you want to just simplify it, they are essentially chemicals, phytochemicals found in the plant kingdom that happen to play a role in plants, but also have some beneficial effects in our bodies.

20:15And Kanchan, I always think that all of the chemicals that are in plants have magical functions because they're there to preserve the plant itself. So if we take seed oils, for example, they're enriched with so much vitamin E because it's a natural antioxidant, so it kind of protects the plant. And this is the same with polyphenols in plants. They're there as a natural defense for the plant itself. So we know that spices are fantastic flavor enhancers, and they contain these brilliant polyphenols. But how exactly do they work on our bodies to support our well-being? So I'm going to approach that question in two ways.

20:52One is I'm going to talk about the specific antioxidant potential of a lot of these polyphenols. So going back to this idea of oxidative stress, every time your cell divides, every time you undergo any cellular process, there is a production of free radicals. These are just radicals that have like a free oxygen on them that can then interact with proteins or DNA and sometimes cause damage. This is just a normal part of cellular metabolism. And polyphenols and spices can neutralize these free radicals. So they have this antioxidant capacity. So that's one way in which they help us when we ingest them.

21:30And the second way is actually something that we call hormesis in biology, which is a little bit of stress is good for you. So the exercise is a great example. When you look at the effects of exercise on the human body in the short term, you actually see a lot of things go up in the short term that seem like they wouldn't be a good idea. Like blood pressure goes up, a little bit of inflammation goes up and you think, well, that can't be good. But then what happens is once the stressor has been removed, you actually have greater cellular resilience. Now you have lower inflammation and lower blood pressure.

22:03So spice polyphenols. This is like what my trainer tells me all the time, like during the training session, it feels really painful and it hurts. But in the long run, you know, it's good for me, which is what I always tell myself as I'm in the middle of the session wondering why I've done this to myself. And you're saying there's something sort of similar with eating the sweet. Yes. So fasting is an example. In the short term, it can feel a little stressful and intense, but then long term, we know it can build some cellular resilience, help metabolic health, blood sugar control, that sort of thing.

22:31So spice polyphenols can be thought of as this short term stressor, which is why they work as this defense compound against predators. And in our bodies, they also act in this way. They actually act as a little bit of a stressor, which then activates our own cellular antioxidant pathways. So a great example would be, and I don't want to get too technical, but there's a pathway that is sort of the master regulator of antioxidant status called the NRF2 pathway. And a lot of these polyphenols will activate our own cellular repair pathways because they are creating a little bit of stress through this mechanism of hormesis, just like exercise or fasting.

23:12And I think the polyphenol research that's coming out now is fascinating. It's quite an exploding area of research, Jonathan, in the nutrition field. We know that people are having high polyphenol diets, whether it's from herbs or spices or other foods. So, for example, polyphenols are found in very heavily pigmented kind of berries and vegetables. It's polyphenols often give their colour to fruits and vegetables. This is that like sort of eat the rainbow. Yes, you know, the dark green leafy veg, the berries, you know, etc. There's so much research, isn't there, Kanshan coming out now showing that polyphenols are linked to all sorts of improvements in health, whether it be cancer, whether it be type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, you know, any inflammatory related disease.

23:54And I think this is because there's evidence emerging around polyphenols beyond oxidative stress around inflammation about blood sugar control. And we got creative in this episode. Kanshan actually brought in a spice box to show us. The spice box in India is really an integral part of our pharmacy, F-A-R-M pharmacy. And it's rooted in the ancient Indian medical system of Ayurveda, which growing up, I sort of rolled my eyes at and thought it wasn't serious science. And then only when I became a PhD student and my lab began to study curcumin and turmeric for breast cancer was I reminded that maybe some of this ancient wisdom is actually proving to be correct.

24:34I just want to be really clear here, right? Right. So you are not saying, hey, any of these spiders are replacement for like modern drugs. You're saying, however, there are some real properties in them and we can learn something from that. And I guess that in a lot of modern drugs are sort of refined versions of compounds that are available sort of in the natural world, aren't they? I think about aspirin is the thing that I remember learning about, you know, when I was a kid. Yeah, absolutely. So shikimic acid, which is the starting point in the synthesis of Tamiflu, which is one of our most successful antiviral drugs, actually comes from Star Anise, which is in my spice box.

25:10Amazing. So Kanchan, you just sort of pulled out a metal tin with, I think, what is that, sort of six or so compartments that look beautiful with different colors and things like that. It looks like bits of plant. Could you just talk us through what you've got in front of us? So I have two different varieties of cinnamon, star anise, cloves, ginger, and ground turmeric. Cloves are really interesting because they are thought to have some of the highest antioxidant potential amongst all spices. They're also thought to have some antiseptic and analgesic properties, which means that they can relieve topical pain.

25:47So if you've ever been to the dentist and they put clove oil on a painful tooth, that's because clove has some topical pain relieving properties. So there's actually science behind that. Yes. It's not a myth. No, it's not a myth. And when I have a sore throat, I just pop a whole clove in my mouth and just kind of keep it there like a lozenge almost. It's not the most lozengy or sweet taste. It's a little bit potent, but it really does seem to help. And does it alleviate the sore throat? Yes, I think so because of its topical pain relieving properties. At least in my N of 1 experiment. I don't know that there's been a trial looking at a whole clove popped in the mouth for a sore throat.