How to improve blood sugar control with exercise | Dr Javier Gonzalez and Dr Sarah Berry

if you imagine bobbing your knee up and down doing that after eating a meal could drastically lower the blood sugar response about that 30 after a meal so it can be quite a profound effect by 30 just by like fidgeting my knees around yeah yeah I always unfortunately eat my food whilst during Zoom meetings which is unfortunate for Jonathan who's normally having to watch me Munch away but what you're telling me Javier is that I can just sit here and Pitch it which is what I'm doing now fidget my legs and that's going to do the job exactly well I'm so glad I joined this podcast that that's phenomenal welcome to Zoe science and nutrition we're World leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health [Music] Javier and Sarah thank you so much for joining me today why don't we start as we always do with a quick fire round of questions from our listeners and the rules are the same as always please a yes a no or you if you absolutely have to a one sentence answer but no more than one sentence which we always know is difficult for a scientist have you uh are you ready to go yes yes brilliant all right all right starting with uh Javier can exercising improve my blood sugar control yes is it common to have a blood sugar crash after exercising no if I exercise before breakfast will that put too much stress on my body and potentially cause inflammation no should I therefore exercise before breakfast it depends you are allowed that sometimes I know this is a it's a tricky one if you can see Javier you can see he's sweating with like you're asking me to make this so simple it just doesn't seem right all right can exercise affect fats in your blood like cholesterol yes all right and and Sarah one for you lots of snacks are sold as energy boosts to get us through the day do they help you with your blood sugar it depends so have you Jade on social wants to know if it's true that a 30-minute walk is as good as 30 minute cardio for menopausal women well as always it it depends on a variety of factors I'm assuming that with cardio we're talking about more intense exercise and on that basis a 30-minute walk probably isn't as good as 30 minutes of cardio for overall health effects especially as we we're aging we need to maintain muscle mass we need to try and maintain our bone health as well and that's where more vigorous intensity exercise can really provide a benefit but having said that 30 minutes of walking has a whole load of health benefits especially for things like blood sugar control which we can get into later on brilliant well why don't we get into all of that and you know what I suggest is maybe we could just start with what is blood sugar and why should we care about it yeah so blood sugar is a main fuel providing especially our brain with fuel throughout the day and so when we're not eating our brain is still using Fuel and we need to provide it with that sugar in some form so when we wake up in the morning most of that sugar is coming from our liver our liver is breaking down its stores of sugar and it's also producing sugar as well providing the brain with that important Fuel and then with other types of activities that we do throughout the day things like our muscles will also need some of that sugar as fuel and so why you know that it sounds pretty obvious therefore it's very important we all know if your brain stops working everything else happens but why do we sort of there's so many different processes in our bodies why do we care about blood sugar particularly what is it that makes it such a big focus of your study for example yeah it's probably because we need to keep our blood sugar within a relatively tight range to maintain health too low and our brain doesn't have enough fuel and we can end up going into a coma um whereas if we have too much blood sugar then that can cause damage to our blood vessels so we need to keep it in a tight range and for that reason at least in most healthy people we have a load of physiological processes that aim to keep that blood sugar within that tight range and maybe you could actually talk through that maybe imagine like you know I wake up in the morning like what what happens or maybe even before I wake up you just talk me through what happens during a a typical day in terms of this sort of blood sugar control you're talking about yeah when when you wake up first thing in the morning you haven't had anything to eat for probably 10 to 12 hours your brain is still using glucose and at that time you've probably got about five grams of sugar in your blood your brain is using about that amount per hour and other tissues are using sugar as well so if if you weren't producing any sugar you'll you'd run out of sugar in your bloodstream certainly within an hour probably within about 30 minutes and so what happens is our liver is breaking down this stored sugar releasing it into the bloodstream to provide that sugar for the brain and the other tissues and it's also producing sugar from things like proteins and other sources um that's when you haven't eaten the next thing you might do in the day is maybe have some breakfast so that breakfast might have carbohydrate in it and so now we've got sugar appearing from our intestine as we've digested and absorbed that carbohydrate now we've got an extra source of sugar in the bloodstream and now the challenge is actually preventing the sugar from rising too high so one of the first things to happen is that we'll release a hormone called insulin and that insulin will cause our liver and our muscle to respond to try to buffer the glucose so the blood sugar so it doesn't rise too high so what happens with the liver is that it goes from producing glucose to starting to store glucose and the muscle also starts to take up sugar out of the bloodstream it does it slightly more slowly than the liver at first but then it speeds up and actually quite a lot of the sugar from the meal that you eat will end up in your muscle stored as something called glycogen in the storage form of sugar and Javier I want to stop there for a minute just because this is a complicated picture that you're describing because of it's and I know you're simplifying it for us but you're already describing like how much is going on in our body right I just thought I woke up like walked downstairs didn't go into a coma which I normally you know have I think obviously I never thought about that as a success but I can now see you know every half hour if I don't go into a coma like my body's doing a great job there's a lot that's going on here isn't there in order just to make sure you've got this regular amount of sugar in um in your body why does the why is the food such an important part of this story and and why um I guess why do people worry so much and talk so much about blood sugar because you might say hey yeah there's also all sorts of clever things going on inside my brain or whatever but we never think or talk about them like what is going on here that causes us to you know you to want to study it and that's to really think about this being important for how we might choose to behave yeah there's probably two main reasons why it's important to understand blood sugar one is that it gives insight into our health so if we compare people's responses to the same meal the different blood sugar responses can tell us are their muscles working well is their liver working well and then secondly the food has a direct impact on our blood sugar levels so a meal that has a lot of carbohydrate in it particularly carbohydrates that are rapidly digested will have a big increase a big impact on our blood sugar level and Javier just to make sure everyone follows this this is because basically your body takes those carbohydrates which might be like bread or pasta or rice and it's actually turning it into blood sugar right exactly yeah when we eat a meal containing any form of carbohydrate it will ultimately get broken down and converted into glucose if it's not glucose already which is essentially sugar and appears in our blood as sugar and Javier I think lots of people are listening to this and saying okay this is all very complicated but I think the thing that you said that they're going to be listening to is like what really matters is how well do I control this so I think you're saying you know if I can manage to keep this in a um in a sort of Fairly tightly controlled ban then everything is good and they're probably saying well so what happens if I can't and why is that so I think we had a lot of questions from people saying you know does my ability to control my blood sugar change with my age with menopause what's the reality about this yeah so it certainly does change over our lifespan um and one of the main terms that people might hear is something called insulin sensitivity so that is basically how how well our body is responding to that hormone insulin which is the key hormone for keeping our blood sugar under control and there are two key phases in our life where we all become slightly more insulin resistant less sensitive to that hormone insulin and that's in adolescence and also throughout menopause so um and all of us as we age will tend to become less insulin sensitive um in adolescence it's largely because of the growth hormone that you get in as you're growing in in adolescence that can reduce our insulin sensitivity it's a normal process of adolescence as we go through menopause then the hormonal changes there can also reduce our insulin sensitivity so they might be key periods of our life where we might pay particular attention to blood sugar control but all of us as we age should probably pay more attention also and Javier we've got some great research from our Zoe predict studies on the blood sugar changes that happen between um males and females as we age and also whether you're pre-perial post-menopause which fits in with exactly what you're saying so what we see is that at most stages men have a worse blood sugar response to a standard meal compared to females then females we hit the menopause and bang it goes up to the the level of men and actually worse than the level of men and we actually published some research on this recently where we also were able to look at post-menopausal or women and match them according to age so we could have a look if your post-menopausal or pre-menopausal but of a similar age do you still have a worse blood sugar response if you're post-menopausal compared to someone of a similar agent's premenopausal so that's taking away the impact of age and only looking at the impact of estrogen and we still saw a really big difference in people's blood sugar control with those that were post-menopausal having far worse blood sugar control so higher blood sugar responses to a standard meal compared to the pre-menopausal women so Sarah has suppressed us with the arrow of time and the you're okay look you're not a 45 year of your woman that's uh Spike soon nothing but that's true I'm already over 45 year old man who's been worse than you throughout my life to this point and has one of the worst blood sugar controls of anyone we've measured but I appreciate that and I I um I agree where I was thinking of going with this though a Javier is like your big area of research is actually all about exercise and how this fits with blood sugar and I think that's exciting because it's talking about things that you can do rather than just um you know what happens to us as as we age could you explain it you know and and sort of at a high level so we can we can follow along hopefully how exercise affects how our body is dealing with blood sugar yeah and it's it's probably worth considering exercise in three main phases so one is what happens to our blood sugars during exercise what happens to our blood sugars immediately after exercise and then what happens if we've done training so if you've done months and months of exercise how does that affect our body in a way that we can control our blood sugar levels so if we start with the first one during exercise um when we start any form of exercise our muscles are increasing the amount of energy that they're using so they need energy to continue the exercise and a large amount of that energy will be coming from the blue sugar in the blood so the the muscles will start taking up more sugar out of the bloodstream um and so logically you can immediately imagine that that's going to help control our blood sugar levels um it's a slightly more complicated picture in that our liver will also start producing more sugar to try and provide more fuel to the muscle but if we do that out of exercise after we've eaten a meal then compared to just resting it will tend to lower our blood sugar levels quite quite dramatically actually so it's quite a potent effect and actually there's some really interesting Recent research showing that really light intensity exercise basically fidgeting and moving your knee up and down they were calling it Soleus press-ups which is the muscle in our in our calves just if you imagine bobbing your knee up and down doing that after eating a meal could drastically lower the blood sugar response about that 30 after a meal so it can be quite a profound effect by 30 just by like fidgeting my knees around yeah yeah I always unfortunately eat my food whilst during Zoom meetings which is unfortunate for Jonathan who's normally having to watch me Munch away and then I sit there feeling like oh my gosh I'm always telling everyone go for a walk after you've eaten but what you're telling me Javier is that I can just sit here and fidget which is what I'm doing now fidget my legs and that's going to do the job exactly well I'm so glad I joined this podcast that that's phenomenal and I am a terrible fidget so I know Javier you've talked a bit about this to me uh previously and I have wondered if uh that is uh an important part of um how I appear to always be so hungry so if I was to go for a walk as we often recommend people to do after having their lunch or I was to sit at my desk and fidget for however long would that have that fidgeting have the same favorable effect in lowering my blood glucose response as to me going on the walk forget this there are other aspects of the healthiness of going on the wall just for the blood glucose response the walk is probably going to have a larger effect because you've got more muscle groups that are being recruited during the walking um and if Studies have shown just two minutes of walking every 20 minutes throughout the day lowers your blood sugar levels by about 50 percent whereas this fidgeting of the knee lowers it by about 30 so it it's hugely effective but the more muscle groups that you activate the the more effective it seems to be so basically every 20 minutes you either go to the toilet or get up from your desk and go make a cup of tea and you're on to a winner yep yep and heavy I think you always said there was going to be a there was another level of exercise you've got the fidgeting you've got going for walk there's more Beyond this yeah as if you were to do say a jog or a run and increase that intensity of exercise um then you get some other changes happening as well so you start to use up the stores of carbohydrate in your muscle and that will have effects that we can come on to after exercise um but it also produces an adrenaline response so you get that adrenaline hit and you can sometimes actually see an increase in blood sugar levels during exercise because of that adrenaline hit it makes our liver produce more sugar for our muscle to use as a fuel so it's a normal response that people shouldn't necessarily be afraid of um but can be expected with high intensity exercise and actually I was going to ask a bit about the difference between what goes on in like a short burst of exercise so let's say uh you know I just took my daughter to school this morning and I and I walked there and then I came back and then I sat down in my my chair versus something that's going on for for longer because you were talking about the way that there's only like a limited amount of sugar in my blood and even if I was eating some food you know there's only so much that's coming in I guess every few minutes so how what happens in those two situations yeah so with with your kind of lower intensity walking and that kind of thing the muscle is mainly using up um the sugars from the blood whereas when you increase the intensity it uses more of the fuels that are within the muscle itself so it uses up its own carbohydrate store and that will have more of an impact than on your blood sugar after exercise than during the exercise itself and so just to make sure that I've got this your body actually has lots of different fuel tanks so you know if I think about this as like a car we only have one place with a fuel but I think you mentioned before now you've mentioned there's like little fuel tanks in our muscles but you also mentioned that our liver is like a big fuel tank because you talked about the way that that is providing blood sugar and then also if I eat food it's either rapidly or slowly sort of coming you know out of my garden into my um my bloodstream are there even more or is that um so the the carbohydrates the sugars that we have available are in those three main sources as you say in in our muscles is actually where we store most of our sugar and we have a smaller store in the liver and then if we eat some sugars then that's the third way we can get sugars available oh that's brilliant I'm actually currently doing I'm doing the Zoe program right at the moment and as part of that I'm doing an intermittent fast for the second week which is a sort of a study that we put on the top so actually it's the first podcast I've ever done hungry and I don't know if you can hear my stomach rumbling I'm very bad at intermittent fasting this area nose but it is interesting that you know my blood sugar is basically completely flat you know from about sometime like about two in the mornings it takes a while after dinner and then basically flat interestingly it's still flat when I went on this walk and then actually it has gone up a bit afterwards as I've come back it's been snowing today it was quite a hard work pushing my my daughter there and and back again and so it's fascinating that all of that blood sugar is nothing to do with my food um you know it's all to do with what's going on with I guess these other systems Javier can you talk me through a bit I guess yeah how does it stay so flat like this and I've done a bit of exercise without fasting is that you were saying before that might be a good thing or it might not how do I how do I think about that and happy to add to that as well would be great to understand a little bit about how some people even when they haven't eaten food have changes in their blood sugar so you see some a lot of people experience a small Peak when they wake up in the morning in their blood sugar so I wonder if you can add that to Jonathan's answer as well yeah yeah sure so I'm just starting with with Jonathan there with uh if you were to fast then one of the main ways in which you're able to still maintain your blood sugar level at that in that healthy range is because your muscle will start to switch from using carbohydrate or sugars as the fuel to actually using fat as a fuel so it's no longer needing to take up as much sugar out of the bloodstream the brain still needs to use sugars but the liver is providing those sugars for the brain and if you fast for a very long time um then your liver can actually produce a different fuel for the brain known as ketones but probably a separate topic I definitely won't fast that long I'm a miserable at fasting I'm hungry as soon as this podcast is over I'm going to eat a ridiculous amount of food and see an enormous blood sugar Spike because the whole point is I just you're not supposed to just squeeze breakfast and lunch into one meal but I always do that so I know what I'm going to do I'm gonna have like this enormous meal afterwards so my brain is all right it can keep running on glucose heavier as I think the conclusion well Jonathan's one of those rare adults that really gets hungry so any parents out there know what it's like when your kids are having a too much of a fast they get hungry um having worked with Jonathan for many years as wonderful as he is he does suffer from serious cases of hunger I wouldn't have come on the podcast if I knew you were intermittent fasting Jonathan today no I think you're quite right I apologize in advance to all the listeners for the fact that I'm clearly going to be in a worse mood than normal you're being your normal Charming self I'm completely the same as well I I do prefer to eat more frequently but um when when you then did your walk and you see a spike in uh blood sugar after exercise perhaps what might have been going on there is when you do the exercise you get this adrenaline release and your liver is producing more sugar and then you stop your exercise and your muscle no longer needs that extra sugar but the liver takes a little bit of time to reset it's still producing that sugar and so you can get a rise in in the blood sugar level and it's a similar thing that might happen when you first wake up in the morning or it might also happen if you you undergo a stressful situation but you're not being physically active so um say doing a podcast um when you're sitting still and you might feel a little bit nervous then you can get a spike of adrenaline that might cause your liver to produce a bit more sugar than you actually need at that particular time and so you get a rise in your your blood sugar level and it might be one of the reasons why too much stress is a is a bad thing for our metabolic health and while we're talking on this I remember on our previous podcast where you're talking really primarily about um uh exercise you said that you've been doing this study where you'd said actually fasting and then doing exercise actually could be beneficial and I thought it sounded crazy but I did want to report back that I have tried it now um and I was terrified basically I would go and do a gym session without any food and I would just fall over and it wouldn't work and immensely to my surprise it was completely fine and actually I guess this is back to your story about actually you've got all of these reserves in your muscles it was fine and I performed completely okay and I'd always had this mind and I am someone who's proud of poor blood sugar control I do tend to get these dips as we've discovered with our more recent research that actually um I was able to function um it worked and sort of miraculously actually my before because I was sort of thinking ah but I wouldn't be able to do as well as if I'd had breakfast before because my mother definitely was you know you can't leave the house without having a proper breakfast right that was one of the the iron rules in in the house I think you know my mother has generally been right over most things I was like that must be true but I finally found something where I think she was wrong because actually it worked and um you know Javier is nodding saying this is sort of obvious but I think most people aren't aware of this yeah absolutely and I'm glad um I'm glad you found some benefits certainly our own research has found and we get we're getting onto that longer term adaptation to exercise so if you if you were to do your exercise regularly then that can have some beneficial changes in our metabolism that means we can better control our blood sugar level and some of our research has shown that that Improvement is even greater if you do your exercise regularly in that fasted state or just just before having breakfast really and um a large part of that we think is because the the muscles themselves are adapting more to the exercise when you do it in that fasted State and Javier Something That We're particularly interested in as you know uh Zoe is personalization around how we might want to give one piece of advice to to someone and different advice to someone else and there's some work I think you've done in the past looking at how timing of exercise in relation to timing of food may impact your metabolic Health um and if I remember correctly you saw differences between males and females that might suggest we should recommend different timings based on that I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that work yeah so the the only study we've done specifically on the meal timing and exercise for blood sugar control was in a very small group of men so we we do seem to think that um at least in men doing that exercise in a fasted State seems to have this this benefit um other work we've done where we've looked at the differences in metabolism of men and women and of people of just a wide range of of different demographics we find huge differences in their ability to burn fat as a fuel and so we link those two together because we think that our ability to use fat as a fuel has some link with our ability to control our blood sugar levels and so because we see large differences in people's ability to use fat as a fuel we think there could be individual differences in the response to doing your exercise before or after breakfast now the actual study on that we've got ongoing at the moment to see the men or women benefit more from this type of exercise so hopefully we'll have an answer in the next year or so but for now we we speculate that there could be differences um but yeah actively researching it amazing we're we look forward to hearing now one of the things as you know we really like to do on on this podcast is make sure we can go from sort of this Cutting Edge research to stuff that's actually actionable and I think lots of people will be listening to this and saying okay so I understand therefore that exercise is a very important component of how I might be able to better control my blood sugar and some people may know that they really need to worry about that because you know maybe they've been told they have pre-diabetes or diabetes or maybe they've done you know something like Zoe where they've got this um I think what they want to know then Javier is okay help me to understand really like what how often should I exercise how intensely do I need to exercise and then actually we had lots of questions about specific types of exercises and I may come on to those but maybe you could just sort of give some some advice to help people to think about what they should do if this is something they'd really like to um to try and improve yeah my overarching advice would be do something that that you enjoy and that you you will do regularly and there is probably an element of the personalization here as well where some people might enjoy certain forms of exercise and might even benefit from certain forms of exercise more than others and on in a similar vein I think the first point I'd make is if you are only able to do low intensity activity for whatever reason um then a good time to do that is after you've had a meal to lower that blood sugar level after each meal and that's where low intensity even the fidgeting that we discussed earlier can have quite a profound impact and Javier just before we move up just to help people understand like what is low intensity exercise I'm guessing fidgeting most of the time it's probably a bit more than that what what what could I be doing if I wanted to be doing that yes fidgeting um walking around household tours count gardening um anything like that where you're moving around but you're not really getting out of breath got it so what is then the level Beyond which I could see you you you clearly want us to achieve well I recognized obviously maybe not everybody can exactly yeah so the higher intensity activities which is when you start to become out of breath then you struggle to string sentences together and that's where you can get some of these longer lasting adaptations where your muscles and your liver and other aspects of your body have changed over time and you've got better blood sugar control in the long term so the the lower intensity activities have immediate effects whereas the higher intensity activities can actually change our physiology so that we control our blood sugar levels in the long term what about sort of uh people ask a lot of questions always about this difference between um things that seem that their high intensity so that you know things that are heavy versus things that like running which also make you breathless but but don't have that same sort of weight people often talk about like cardio versus that does it matter for this topic around blood sugar control not really they do have slightly different effects um in in during the exercise but if we think about you do your bout of exercise and then you have your meals later on in the day they then act quite similarly and what they do is that when you do your bout of exercise your muscles are taking up more sugar out the bloodstream independent of insulin and all these other hormones the the exercise itself means that it's taking up more more sugar out of the bloodstream but then a second component to that is that the muscles sensitivity to insulin is heightened over the next day to two days so it's a two-pronged effect when you do this higher intensity exercise you increase the sugar uptake into the muscle independent of insulin but you also increase the sensitivity of the muscle to insulin so that's very cool so you're saying it's not just that I get a benefit right now but actually this is having sort of this you know longer term um effect as well exactly and and some study you've shown with with very vigorous exercise so 45 minutes of pretty much running as hard as people could um their blood sugar control was improved for up to three days afterwards so the more intense the exercise the the longer that benefit can last and do we understand why this is happening both in the next few days and even sort of permanently like what is going on through the exercise it actually means because you know anything that's just a long-term benefit sounds great right rather than having to sort of do it start from the from the beginning and feel I always love these stories that you can make permanent improvements You know despite the fact that maybe you're not 21 anymore yep yep one of the well there's two main ways in which the immediate effects of exercise work one is that we increase the flow of blood the blood flow to the muscle so we're delivering that sugar to the muscle so it has more to take up and a second um is that we've reduced that store of sugar within the muscle so that fuel tank is low and that is a stimulus for the muscle to take up more sugar out in the bloodstream and store it and replenish that fuel tank um the longer term changes are mainly to do with um it's a a bit like a door that allows entry of the sugar into the muscle it's known as a glucose transporter the number of we of those that we have in the muscle can increase when we do our exercise training and so we have a greater capacity to allow the sugar into the muscle more of those Transporters more doors or to allow the sugar to enter the muscle and a Javier for someone like myself who is very busy with work and kids and doesn't particularly enjoy exercise is there any such thing as a silver bullet now I always say that isn't when it comes to nutrition but you often see on the TV new shows coming out saying oh you know do 90 seconds or three minutes a day of hit and and that's all you need to do what's your opinion on the the cheat sheet that I could do in my busy life yeah I think um rather than thinking of only exercise I think every form of physical activity that we incorporate in our life we should remember can contribute to our health um so I think people get put off by exercise because it feels like a chore it's a you have to do it for an hour go to the gym at this time of day whereas by taking an active commute to work or just going for a walk with friends and doing some of those your daily activities but making sure that you're moving whilst you're doing them if you can then that can integrate more easily into to your life and it doesn't feel like you're doing a chore and it doesn't feel like exercise but whether there's a silver bullet yeah that's what I want yeah that's what I want to live with I know that after every meal I'm gonna sit twitching my legs that's the biggest take-home for me for from this podcast that I would like to know is there anything I can do in five minutes each day alongside the fact I walk the kids to school Etc is there something I can do in a five minute break between meetings um I I be lying if there were sorry Sarah it's uh it's a great question but it sounds like um heavier sadly is just going to tell us the truth rather than um tell us a story we'd like to hear well look we've got two great tips we've got the tip every 20 minutes I'm going to run up and down the stairs because I work in the Loft so I've got two floors of stairs to run up and down to get my cup of tea I'm going to Twitch my legs every time after I eat I think if I start with those two it's all about these micro changes that we often talk about so that's two micro changes that actually aren't going to annoy me too much sounds great Sarah so before maybe wrapping up I think with Javier you may already be stealing some of his tips Sarah Javier's tips I would love to talk a little bit about the blood fats which we touched on right at the beginning so as well as blood sugar there are also these fats in our blood and I think cholesterol is the one that everybody tends to know about why does that matter and does exercise have any impact here because we tend to always just think of talk about the blood sugar but I think you said right at the beginning that actually exercise also has an effect here yeah it does and um I quite like to compare this to diet because one of the ways in which we might lower our blood sugar levels is by reducing our carbohydrate intake but if it's quite often replaced by fat intake and if you the more fat you have in a meal the higher the levels of fat in the blood after the meal the more carbohydrate in the meal sometimes the higher the blood sugar levels after the meal so there's with with diet there's sometimes a trade-off whereas with exercise exercise can lower both the levels of blood sugar and the levels of blood fat after a meal but it does happen in very different ways and over different time frames so can you explain a little bit what's going on with uh with the fats and explain a bit what they are and you know I mean we've got Sarah uh one of our world experts here to maybe just help us to um to unpick this yeah I mean do do trip into her because you are you are the expert on on this but um I guess if I just just start and you can correct me um is there are there are multiple types of fat in the blood whereas sugar is mainly circulating as a specific thing called glucose the fats come in different forms and the other difference with sugars is that fats um don't um dissolve in water very well so in our in our Bloods they need to be carried attached to other things so they're normally within proteins um or bound to other proteins and that makes them dissolve in the blood and be transported and one of the main ones is is um called the triglyceride it's a type of fat in the blood that um is released from the liver when we're not eating and goes to the other tissues to the fat tissue to be stored and also to the muscle to provide a fuel there so Jonathan what we know is when we consume fat in a meal the fat results in an increase in triglycerides that circulate in the blood just like when we consume a carbohydrate Rich meal it results in an increase in blood sugar or blood glucose as we call it but it's quite a different pattern of response whilst the blood sugar from the carbohydrate Peaks very quickly so you get a peak around 30 minutes in the blood and returns to Baseline around two hours with the fat from the meal it causes an increase in blood had fat about four to five hours after you consume the meal it doesn't return to Baseline fasting levels until about eight hours after you consume the meal now given that we consume multiple meals throughout the day what this then means is that you spend most of your time in what we call a postprandial lip mix day now I know you don't like me using complicated words like that so I'll explain what I mean so what this means is that you are spending your time in this post meal elevated fat state so let's say you have your last meal at eight in the evening and your blood fat levels don't return to fasting until eight hours later that means normally for lots of people it's only between about four in the morning until about um whenever you have your breakfast like let's say eight in the morning that your blood fat levels are ever at this kind of fasting level and we know that if you have really excessive blood fat responses then it sets off a Cascade of unfavorable effects such as oxidative stress and inflammation and this is where it's really great that there are strategies that we can bring into play that will allow us still to consume a fat containing meal without having any unfavorable health effects exercise is one of them like Javier said but also you can add other foods and nutrients to your meal that can kind of put out this unfavorable effect be like a bit of a firefighter dampening this inflammation so we know that different components in a meals like polyphenols which are chemicals from very colorful fruits and vegetables can dampen this fire but also exercise and so Sarah there will be people listening who probably say you know I've been to the doctor and he's told me I've got high cholesterol and I'm you know I've got too much um too much of the bad sorts of fats in my blood so they'll suddenly have perked up and there'll be others who don't really know because actually this postprandial effect you know what happens after you eat you would only discover for example if you do one of the Zoe tests that we built in because we we think it's very important I think you know for today what would be fascinating to understand okay how does how could exercise play into this because I think in general um you know my dad was told about this you know 40 years ago and really advised all about diet but how could you know having I mean can exercise play any role on on this as you've described it doing on blood sugar yeah it has just as much an impact on on the levels of fat in the blood as it does with sugar and it it is mainly what you've done the day before though so whereas with blood sugar control it has quite an immediate effect with a blood fat levels what you did yesterday in terms of exercise will affect your responses today so the the peak effect happens about eight hours after the last bout of exercise um again there are effects of intensity and of the total amount of exercise that you do um just before I explain the effect it's probably also worth noting that even if exercise doesn't affect the level of fat in the blood in a similar way to Sarah mentioned there with polyphenols regular exercise can increase our natural antioxidant capacity so it's a bit like you've consumed a load more fruit and vegetables your exercise increases your body's natural antioxidant capacity and so for the same level of fat in the blood you're probably protected against some of the negative effects but exercise also lowers that level yeah and that's just how the polyphenols work as well um heavier so it's the poly finals for example don't lower the amount of fat but they put out that fire in the same way that the exercise might exactly yeah and then exercise can also lower that level of fat in the blood it does require a reasonable amount of exercise so if you're doing low intensity like a walk then it needs to be about 45 minutes to an hour to have at least the effect that is seen in studies and it and it can lower it by a substantial amount by up to 50 the next day by 50 okay that's that's enormous you're not just talking about like a little effect that's that's an enormous effect it's huge and it seems to be a larger effect in the people who need it the most so the people who show the biggest blood fat response under normal conditions show the biggest reduction when they've done their exercise the day before so quite a useful effect and just you were saying they need to do a longer walk but actually if I went for a walk for 45 to 60 Minutes that could actually have this huge impact on how I'm dealing with my my fats the next day yep exactly and you might think well um is it because people are in a calorie deficit they've done some exercise they're now in a calorie deficit and so is that the only reason that they've got this better response the next day but we know that that isn't the case because when that's being controlled for in studies the the calorie deficit has some effects but exercise has an even greater effect than just the calorie deficit so it's acting in more than just the calorie deficit to lower the levels of fat in the blood Javier I'm conscious we've covered a lot of ground and I do want to to make sure that I've I've asked you specifically about your sort of three tips so people listen we picked up a bunch through this conversation imagine someone saying Okay that's really interesting I really want to do um do something that is manageable and actionable so if you had sort of three tips for people who want to manage their blood sugar maybe want to manage their blood fat as well you know using exercise what would you say yeah so I'd say try to do something every day no matter what it is would be Point number one I'd say Point number two is if that's something can only be relatively low intensity then try to do that after you've eaten a meal and then point three would be if you're able to do higher intensity activity then you should be able to get some longer lasting adaptations brilliant how are you thank you um very much I would like to try and do a sort of summary if I can and we've gone in a lot of different places so bear with me and I've got two different scientists who are going to keep me honest today so um one thing I heard is regular exercises like eating loads of fruit and veg which I love as an analogy we heard I think why blood sugar control is important because we need to sort of keep it within a reasonable um band and that actually you can change the way you're managing your blood sugar with a surprisingly low amount of intensities and then I think the last thing you said was actually you know what actually exercise can affect the way we deal with fats as well and probably you know almost everybody listening is surprised particularly because you said it sort of has this magic Delayed Reaction so that's extraordinary so I think the takeaway is as you said with your three tips do something every day no matter what it is if it's low intensity exercise try and do it after a meal but do try and do higher intensity exercise because it has this long-term effect that can really support sustain and support us brilliant Sarah was there anything else you wanted to to add no I love it I'm busy twitching my legs here have you will all be twitching our legs for the rest of the day thank you so much for coming back on and we look forward to getting you back again in the future maybe talking about some of the results of these new studies great thank you for having me thank you Javier and Sarah for joining me on Zoe science and nutrition today if based on today's conversation you'd like to understand how your own blood sugar and blood fat respond to food then you may want to try Zoe's personalized nutrition program your Zoe membership comes with our app and access to our nutrition coaches so you can learn how to change your diet and health habits and reach your long-term goals your personalized nutrition program is based on our scientific research and the results of your personal at-home test which includes blood sugar and blood fat measurements if you're interested in learning more about Zoe you can head to joinzowe.com podcast and get 10 off your purchase if you enjoyed today's episode please be sure to subscribe and leave us a review as we love reading your feedback if this episode left you with questions please send them in on Instagram or Facebook and we will try to answer them in a future episode as always I'm your host Jonathan Wolfe Zoe science and nutrition is produced by Fascinate Productions with support from Sharon feder yellow hewings Martin and Alex Jones here at Zoe see you next time [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: ZOE

Views: 335,102

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Id: IzQ7sIcRFco

Length: 47min 5sec (2825 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 23 2023