The Surprising Impact of Eating on Your Inflammation Levels | ZOE Science Podcast

hi and welcome to today's zoe podcast i'm your host jonathan wolf co-founder and ceo of zoe and i'm joined by my two guests dr sarah berry and dr will bulsawitz to discuss some groundbreaking new scientific research which was published today linking inflammation to the food we eat so today what we'd like to cover is what is inflammation why is reducing inflammation so valuable for long-term health how can the food we eat actually cause inflammation and indeed is inflammation more important than calories when we think about food finally what can you our listeners do to reduce your own inflammation my two wonderful guests today are firstly sarah berry one of the world's leading experts on large-scale human nutrition studies and on the impact of fat on metabolism and cardiometabolic disease sarah is a reader in nutritional sciences at king's college london where she has run over 30 randomized human clinical trials sarah has also helped to design and run zoe's predict studies which are the largest in-depth nutritional studies in the world we also have will will balsawicz is a practicing gastroenterologist he's an internationally recognized gut health expert and he's also the new york times best-selling author of the book fiber fueled he's also a member of zoe's scientific advice report if at any point you want to learn more about this topic then do go online to joinzoe.com forward slash podcast i hope you're as excited as me to dive into this so let's get started right at the beginning and i think let's start with this question of what is inflammation and why is it important so over to you sarah thanks jonathan and thanks a lot for introduction so inflammation is a it's important to know it's actually a normal physiological response so it's our body's actual natural defense to attack so imagine you cut your finger and it starts to swell that's actually your immediate inflammatory response to that effect you know that attack and typically it resolves very quickly but it's actually quite double-edged sword so on the one hand it's a normal physiological beneficial process but if it's prolonged over long periods of time sustained and repeated you have these repeated attacks it can actually have unfavorable effects on the body and we now know that many chronic diseases are underpinned by these what we call low-grade inflammation where you have this sustained prolonged very low-grade inflammation and these are diseases like type 2 diabetes some cancers and cardiovascular disease and will i know you deal with inflammation a lot actually coming into your normal practice is anything you sort of add as a practicing physician yeah you know i think um it's what's interesting to me is to put inflammation into an evolutionary context we evolved to have inflammation as our friends something intended to protect us you know if you think about where we were 10 000 years ago or more the number one cause of death was was uh disease was viruses and infectious disease and we developed inflammation for that and what's fascinating to me is that what was meant to be our friends has turned into in some ways the enemy within the modern world where things that happen when inflammation gets activated you know for example a couple couple things that i think are interesting we actually get more insulin resistant higher blood pressure and higher blood lipids during chronic inflammation and that was intended where if we're fighting an infection that actually increases our likelihood of survival and yet here we are in the 21st century and these things that we evolved to protect us when we were cavemen have now become the enemy because we are perpetually activating the inflammatory mechanism and those things that we were supposed to be protecting ourselves from you know for example infections or or even cancer for example when we chronically activate our immune system chronic inflammation we actually reduce our ability to fight against those things and so so part of the problem that we have in the 21st century is that rather than allowing information to work the way that it's supposed to which is acutely like work right now and then go away and get back to normal rather than that what we have is we have just perpetual ongoing persistent inflammation rising our insulin resistance rising our blood pressure rising our blood lipids and this is why you see downstream the development of these latent diseases that sarah was referring to in six six of the top ten causes of death jonathan six of the top ten causes of death are latent diseases that have been connected to increased chronic inflammation coronary artery disease cancer stroke type two diabetes alzheimer's disease and chronic kidney disease all of these things are connected to chronic inflammation not to mention autoimmune disease not to mention osteoporosis not to mention depression so the message is a bit of inflammation is good in fact it's necessary keeps us alive but this ongoing consistent inflammation is bad and something that we see underpinning a lot of these diseases so then the question i think is how does food fit into this right so i think we sort of understand this idea um that you might hurt yourself and get inflammation but how does food cause inflammation sarah and does it matter so we're starting to understand that food can be favorable in terms of inflammatory responses but also can be unfavorable so we need to think about kind of both both sides of the story and it's not necessarily the food itself that causes the inflammation but it's the metabolic processes so the processes that are involved when we digest the food that stimulate downstream inflammation okay so assuming your your breakfast contains a mixture of nutrients which most of our meals contain so we're talking fat carbohydrate protein fiber what happens is when we consume these meals in our blood we absorb glucose which comes from the carbohydrates in the meal which we tend to refer as our blood sugar response and we absorb triglycerides in the blood which comes from the fat in the meal which we can refer to as cell blood fat response and what we know is that when we consume mixed meals we have a very short sharp rise in our blood sugar response it peaks around 30 minutes returns to baseline around two hours and we have a slower more graded rise in our blood fat response peaking around four hours and returning to baseline after about eight hours now imagine how we typically eat food so we typically have maybe two to three main meals a day two to three snacks a day so what happens is over the day you've got these continual spikes in in these blood sugar circulating and then you have what this more slow graded increase in blood fat that builds up gradually over the day each time you're eating the fat in the meal is kind of adding or superimposing on to the fat response from your previous meal your blood sugar will have returned to baseline typically but then you're having this other short sharp rise and we call these postprandial responses so we refer to this as postparental glycemia which many people might have heard of which is this increase in blood sugar that circulates and we call the increase in blood fat postprandial lipemia and so postprandial is just word for meaning post eating in that immediate period but what it actually means is we spend most of our time in this postprandial state of what we call metabolic flux so we spend most of our time having just consumed meals you know in this kind of flux of blood glucose blood sugar and blood fat and what we now know is that these increases in circulating blood fat and circulating blood sugar stimulate a kind of downstream cascade of what are unfavorable effects and this culminates in an inflammatory response it culminates in the release of lots of different inflammatory mediators and so whilst again we talk about how inflammation is a normal physiological response yes this inflammation that happens after you eat is a normal physiological response to eating a meal but the problem is is when we're having these repeated excursions so these repeated peaks and dips and these repeated elevations in blood fat over the day we then go from this very short short inflammation that we talked about at the beginning to this more prolonged chronic low-grade inflammation and we now know that actually many of the unfavorable effects elicited from foods actually are underpinned by this what we call this postprandial inflammatory response i want to ask sarah a question because um you know blood sugar i think many people who are listening to this podcast are probably more familiar with the idea of blood sugar which it acutely rises it goes up very quickly after a meal comes back down and within a few hours you're back to your baseline again you know you could have breakfast and by the time you're ready to eat lunch your blood sugar is back to normal sarah can you describe for us how the the lipid response after a meal is different like what does that look like how long does it take for it to rise and when does it go back to normal so typically it will very slowly reach a peak around four hours in most people and typically it will return to baseline around eight hours but given that we typically would consume our next meal before it's returned to baseline and typically actually while it might be joined at the peak concentration you have this kind of graded step-like increase quite often over the day so it's just going up and up and up and actually for a lot of people not returning to baseline until you know way past midnight depending on when you obviously eat your last meal so so basically there's almost like a ratcheting that occurs during the course of the day you could potentially continue to ratchet up with every subsequent meal because you're within that eight hour window and and also you know thinking about this eight hours like basically it reaches a plateau right and it continues to remain elevated for eight hours before it starts to go down and many people are continuing to eat within that eight hour window literally on a 24 hour cycle every single day some people have uh just a window of six hours where they're sleeping at night and then they wake up and they start eating again so effectively they could be persistently in this cycle am i right at 100 and this is why it's really important that we think about what's happening in this postpander this post-eating state typically you're asked by your doctor you know coming faster i want to measure your fasting glucose or your fasting lipids but actually we only spend for most people about four hours where our blood is in that metabolically fasted state and it's what's happening the rest of that 18 20 hours a day that i think is really important and this is where a lot of the nutritional science evidence is now really shifting that we need to look at what's happening after you've consumed meals because it's these post-practical responses after you've consumed meals there's actually underpinning the long-term effect of foods on our health and it's a real way just just to make this understood for all of us that means we can't just think about food in terms of calories that's not the only way in which food um affects our health um you're saying that actually because of this like these long time periods particularly to do with things that have um fats with them but also um with uh with with sugars that we really need to understand how are these affecting um these mechanisms that cause inflammation and that depending upon what we eat we can have very different profile during um during 24 hours is that is that is that right absolutely so this isn't about our energy intake how many calories we're having this is about the types of foods we're eating the amount of fat and sugar um but also how we as individuals um elicit different metabolic responses to you know quite often the same food where you'll see very different inflammatory responses well and i'll just you know jump in and say as a practicing clinician the the way that we will approach these issues is typically with a fasting blood draw right so when we measure lipids we will typically measure lipids fasting including the triglycerides which is what we're looking at we're going to look at in the study in a moment typically we will measure the fasting triglycerides or you know blood sugar will measure the fasting blood sugar does that give us insights into our metabolic health yes of course it does but effectively what i'm hearing from you sarah is that we we need to start looking at these values after a meal because from a metabolic perspective this is like a stress test right so if we want to know how healthy the heart is you don't just have a person stand there and size them up and look at their blood pressure and things like that while they're standing in front of you what you do is you put them on a treadmill you make them run and then you see what the heart is capable in that functional setting right i mean is that is that kind of what we're talking about here is that we need to start thinking about postprandial as being more indicative of our metabolic health than a fasting blood draw which is what is typically being done in the clinic these days yeah i love that analogy of being someone on the treadmill i'm going to use that for my lectures in future but i think that another way of looking at it as well is it's like giving us a peek into the future so if we were to measure someone's fasting glucose you and i could have exactly the same fasting glucose so we could have similar metabolic health supposedly according to our fasting glucose similar type 2 diabetes risk cardiovascular disease risk now if we do this metabolic stress we look at our postprandial responses you might have a really different post-practical response to me and what we now know is that certainly there's evidence for this in glycemia and it's now emerging for the blood fat so the lipemia responses that if we can measure people's postprandial responses it gives us a hint you know maybe 10 20 years to what might go on to happen in the future so it allows us that better discrimination so you could have like i said you know a perfect post plant or i might have a high post we might have the same farm and then this the likelihood therefore is that i will go on to develop some of these diseases that related to this low grade inflammation and you'll be sitting happily um uh very healthily yeah and it's it's interesting you know i don't want to jump too far ahead i think we're about to get into it um in terms of the findings from your study sarah but i know that they've looked at patients who develop cardiovascular disease you know whether it's coronary artery disease or stroke and they've looked at these patients and they look in the postprandial state which by the way this is these are research studies this is not typically done in the clinic and they found that they have an exaggerated lypic response after a meal so people who are at increased risk for coronary artery disease or stroke seem to really spike their triglyceride levels after a meal more so than the average person and i think that provides us some insights and some context as we start to move into the findings from your from your study yeah absolutely and this is something that's been emerging over the last 10 years or so that we know that actually this postprandial spike in tag is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease and what we're starting to understand is it's most likely because of this downstream inflammation that we see and we we need to you said tag you're talking again about these lipids and you say triglycerides i think for our audience you know when we go and and see our physician could you give us an example of other words we're used to hearing uh when we talk about this you know is cholesterol for example is related to this can we just explain for a second yeah so um we use collectively a term called blood lipids and blood lipids is a term that we would use to encompass cholesterol that everyone's familiar with and triglycerides which i think less people are familiar with when we talk about cholesterol we often talk about hdl cholesterol ldl cholesterol and total cholesterol and this is just really referring to the particles in which cholesterol circulates in our blood so hdl cholesterol we often refer to as being good cholesterol and ldl cholesterol we refer to as being bad cholesterol and this is all related to very specialized proteins that are in these particles that actually determines where the cholesterol goes so for hdl cholesterol the cholesterol actually goes back to be removed from sites like the lining of the blood vessels but for ldl cholesterol these proteins actually deliver it to sites where we don't necessarily want it to be delivered like the lining of the blood vessels that's a really simplistic way of trying to explain it so slightly over simplistic consider the conflict that's all right sarah perfect and this is back to the same chain of this idea that if you can't metabolize this well then you start to have these sort of these negative inflammatory responses you know taking us to sort of what will was talking about about you know cardiovascular disease um i believe also potentially you know linked to um to many other diseases as well so before um maybe let's let's let's switch to talk about the the paper before we run out of time just talking about this because it's so interesting um series just published this brand new paper uh published in american journal of clinical nutrition which is one of the top uh peer-reviewed journals for nutrition in the world we start um by just explaining the study itself um and the amazing effort uh that you're involved in to measure these responses in a thousand people and then let's talk a bit about what the discoveries themselves are okay so i don't think we've actually even said what the predict program research is yet um so just to quickly let everyone know so this study came out of the predict programme of studies which are the world's largest personalized nutrition studies really aiming to unravel how we respond to food how much variability there is in our response to food and what determines this variability and this study is focusing on our predict one study which was a hugely ambitious study it was in over a thousand individuals where we undertook really um in-depth high scale high precision you know with great rep um study of people's post prandtl responses to set meals and typically and i i know you'll probably want to ask this jonathan typically the post parental studies that we do involve about 20 people so i spent 25 years studying postpartum responses to food and my most ambitious study prior to predict involved 50 people which was a big feat so i know when we first discussed this study i thought you were absolutely crazy to say that you could do a thousand people in a year um anyway we did um and so we had a thousand people complete these really tightly controlled clinic postprandial tests and these consisted of people attending a clinical research facility these were predominantly twins from the twins uk cohort and after an overnight fast we gave them standardized breakfast and a standardized lunch in the form of a muffin and these were standardized to have exactly the same macronutrients so exactly the same uh protein carbohydrate fat and fiber content and then we took sequential blood samples so about every 15 minutes over a six hour period we collected blood so that we could look in-depth you just keep sticking a needle into their arm every 15 minutes to you like a pin cushion doesn't sound like that we're not quite that mean we actually put a cannula in which is a fixed needle so we withdraw blood nearly every 15 minutes but we're not as mean to keep sticking the needle in but they're really challenging studies because for six hours someone's sitting there with a cannula in you know with blood draws being constantly taken and this is why actually so little is known about postprandial metabolism more is known about the postpartum blood sugar responses because they occur like we've discussed in that two hour period but because the blood fat responses are so prolonged they're so difficult to do to get people in to do it to run them um anyway i digress on the the challenges that i faced in my career running these studies so going back to the predict studies we collected in over a thousand people multiple samples over six hour period from which we looked at circulating fat sugar and something called metabolomics from which we were able to measure very specific inflammatory measures we also collected other data that's been important in this part of our analysis as well so we looked at something called visceral fat mass which is basically referring to the fat around your stomachs your abdominal fat we looked at their microbiome using specialized sequencing techniques which fits in with the overall predict program of research we've been doing so um in this paper we found in line with all the results that we're finding with our predict programme of research first there's huge variability in people's responses to food so we found huge variability in people's postprandial post-transgender inflammatory response and this is new because people haven't looked at this so we found more than 20-fold difference in how different individuals responded to exactly the same food in their postpartum inflammation and so this is looking over these time periods after consuming these standardized meals showing that maybe you and myself and will might have a 10 or 20 fold difference in our postprandial responses and so sarah does that mean that for example you know will who we know eats so well has no inflammatory response to something and maybe i i'm eating exactly the same thing and i have i have this really big inflammatory response is that is that how i understand what you're saying um so we don't know whether it's because willie is particularly well but what we did find is there's huge variability and we're starting to unravel what's causing that we do know for example that males have a higher postprandial inflammatory response the same meal we know postmenopausal women have a high postplant response we know that the higher your bmi so the more overweight you are and the higher your abdominal fat this fissile fat mass the higher your postprandial inflammatory response is you know what we need to do is really tease apart as well how the different types of food might impact that and that's something that we really want to go on and delve deeper into so you've done this massive research you've discovered that actually when you eat food you have this inflammatory response and you now measure that on a thousand people you've seen all of this um variation between um people um what does that mean then for uh you know how we think about the link between food and inflammation so i think many people tend to think about you know sort of food as good or bad um is that a right way to think about this you know are all foods causing dietary inflammation is there like a fixed list that we should tell everybody how what is this um what's this research telling us so i think to pick up on your point you know we would never label any food as just good or bad you know the way we consume foods is as dietary patterns so with foods have seen it having synergistic effect what this research has shown is that there is this huge variability and we've seen that one of the biggest determinants in causing this postprandial inflammatory response is the increase in circulating blood fat and so what we are able to do with this study is look at the relative contribution of the different nutrients in the meal and this is what hasn't been looked at before to look whether is it the circulating blood sugar that's important is it the circulating blood fat that's important and what we found was that whilst both were associated with this post frantic inflammatory response what was novel here is we found it was particularly the postprandial fat circulating that it was associated with the inflammation suggesting that what we should be doing then when we think of dietary strategies to reduce postpartum inflammation is yes focus on carbohydrates and focus on the glycemic response but particularly look at what's causing the increase in circulating blood fat and also how we can minimize the subsequent inflammation that this elicits so you're going to tell me that i shouldn't drink i shouldn't eat sugar all day but if i just swap to eating nothing but butter all day i'm not in a good place either is that how i understand this sarah well absolutely absolutely anyone that knows anything about nutrition um and i know you know this yourself and i'm sure many people listening will know it's about varieties so it's about having a variety of food which we know is good for our microbiome but also good for so many other aspects of our health and about consuming fat and carbohydrates the right type of fat and the right amount of fat for your unique metabolism but i think it's important to pull up on that that it might be that you have particularly pronounced postprandial fat responses and therefore for you we might need to be thinking more about how we modify that in terms of inflammation compared to will who might have a higher you know blood sugar response and might have actually very um healthy blood fat responses fantastic so um i think that's a great um transition to this question about so what can we do to reduce inflammation so i think you know i'm listening to this thinking wow like that sort of recurrent information sounds like one of the number one things that i need to worry about if i'm thinking about my long-term health um i know we've talked uh at other points about how that itself is actually linked into weight gain so which is itself tied into this um bad health so what can we what can we do to reduce inflammation and what does this research sort of um help us to understand about about the changes we can make um so i think we can think of a kind of two sort of strands of how we can reduce it so firstly we've shown that this increase in circulating blood fat and blood sugar elicits or downstream this inflammatory response so therefore what we want to do is think of what are the strategies we can do to reduce this the circulating fat and glucose so reduce what we call the lipemanoglycemia so that's one approach we can take the other is what strategies can we implement to actually attenuate so dampen down kind of turn out the fire of inflammation once it's actually occurred and so there's strategies that we know of um that will reduce lipoma and glycemia so you know we all know that um you know we should be reducing the amount of processed foods we have so we want to reduce these excursions in blood glucose responses so consuming high fiber-rich foods consuming foods in their original matrix and i know i mentioned this at the beginning so by this i mean food in their original structure breaking down the structure of food changes how we metabolize that food and we know this from work we've been doing at king's and some other researchers so if you were con to consume whole rolled oats for example versus really finely ground oats you would have a very different glycemic response the whole rolldose would actually cause quite a blunted slow response which you would therefore predict to cause less of a postprandial inflammatory response but the finely ground oats that you have in some of these processed cereals are very quickly digested causes sharp rising glucose and therefore you have this bigger inflammatory response so we can we can implement things like that to reduce our postpartum sugar response and then to reduce our postprandial fat response firstly we know that a high refined carbohydrate diet increases our fasting blood fat levels our fasting triglyceride levels which are related to the postplant response so we can minimize that but we also know there's other dietary strategies so we know that omega-3 fatty acids particularly those found in fish oil can reduce our postprandial glycemic responses we know if we minimize our alcohol intake if we consume too much that can can reduce it and also lifestyle modifications such as exercise um to reduce the inflammatory response which is that the other kind of strategy we can take we know from studies that if you consume alongside a high fat meal or a high carb meal bioactives that have antioxidant or anti-inflammatory properties you can dampen down the postprandial response so let's say i was to have a high fat meal one day and a glass of water with it um i would have the short sharp rise in the glucose and the triglycerides and i would have a big increase in this postparental inflammation let's say say the next day i had a nice glass of red wine with polyphenols or if i don't drink wine i had maybe something like a glass of orange juice that's got vitamin c and antioxidant properties um what would happen is i'd still have the same glucose and the same blood fat increase but i would have less of an inflammatory response because it interacts with the pathways and attenuates that postprandial inflammatory response so you can take away from that what you want i'm not encouraging everyone to go and drink wine with their breakfast lunch and dinner if you do make sure it's red wine cause it's got loads of polyphenols which are these bioactors we talk about but any of any of you know most plant materials that have rich pigment so you know the rich the red the greens these contain polyphenols and this is one of the reasons that we talked about earlier about the synergistic effects of foods so having your high fat meal with um you know green leafy vegetables peppers all of these polyphenol rich foods will actually counterbalance any of the harm or full effects from this inflammation brilliant thank you sarah and um maybe to sort of bring this to uh a conclusion one area we haven't really touched on very much is um is gut health and what you can do to affect the way that you have this inflammatory response is there any link between you know what we've been talking about today and a lot of the other areas of the study that are sort of feeding into all this zoe research around gut health um i think i can mention a few things on this but then i think it would be good to get will's thoughts on the broader aspects because i know this is something he's got a lot of expertise in um one of the measures that we used um to measure inflammation is something called glycae which is quite a novel measure that's emerging in research it's a novel measure of inflammation it's very robust measure of whole body inflammation and as part of the predict study we did look at the association between this novel measure of inflammation glycae and i've got microbiome and we found that it was really closely associated so we have a paper published in nature medicine on this where we found that your fasting but also your postprandial levels levels of glycae so inflammation was strongly associated with microbiome composition and specifically we found that it was strongly associated with this microbiome signature that we identified of good and bad bugs so the more glycaese the more inflammation you had the more bad bugs you had the less inflammation you had um either at fasting or postpandering the less of the good bugs you had and i don't know whether will this is something you would probably have a lot more insight into the mechanisms and why and what we can do about this yeah i mean i think that this um the findings from your study sarah are incredibly exciting because what you're showing for the first time is that this marker of inflammation glycae actually rises in the postprandial state that's never been shown before and i think that's one of the major takeaways here and this glycae this is a this is a new emerging biomarker for chronic inflammation one of the issues that we've had on the clinical side is that our markers for you know for example cardiovascular risk are imperfect so when we look at chronic inflammation we're looking at things like crp and crp can vary wildly within the exact same person you could draw two crp values at the exact same time and get two different values and so so it's exciting because now we have this this glycae and we're showing in your study that glycae is actually connected to postprandial lipemia that when your blood lipids start to rise glycae starts to rise and you know i'm sitting here and i'm thinking to myself as you're speaking sarah you're speaking about polyphenols and the protective effects of polyphenols which of course we find in plants those are the colors of the plants and i'm thinking to myself fiber fiber is another thing that is protecting us and helping to blunt these metabolic responses and it's no surprise that a overall dietary pattern that maximizes a wide variety of plants and that includes a large amount of polyphenols and fiber protects us from these chronic inflammatory diseases that we're talking about and it's no surprise that the opposite is true i mean there's certain foods that we know are not associated with a healthy dietary pattern and when we study these foods within the context of postprandial lipemia we find that their lipids go up and we study these foods with markers of inflammation we see that the the inflammatory markers are going up so i think you know one of the um major takeaways from my perspective is that we're having we're seeing this all start to fall into place the pieces of the puzzle are starting to fall into place where we're seeing this connection between the food choices that we make our overall dietary pattern our lipid response and that this connects to our inflammatory response and chronic inflammation and so i think that your your study sarah really is opening up the possibilities for future research in terms of looking at this in more detail yeah and something jonathan i know we're going to finish up soon but i think i want to jump in that we've not mentioned and that that really will brought to my mind when he was talking about this is another finding from the study was the taking the link with actual disease the world's talked about this kind of diet microbiome disease inflammation postpartum response link what we were able to look at is how do those that have a higher postplantal inflammation fare out in terms of their disease risk so we use something called the aascd risk calculator which is a way that we can look at someone's predicted risk of developing cardiovascular disease and we found that if you fell in the top ten percent of postprandial inflammatory responses so for those people the top eliciting the highest post parental inflammation we found that they had a twofold higher ascvd risk score than the rest of the people in our in our study so they were two times more likely to be predicted to develop cardiovascular disease over a certain time period than those that had the low response and i think that's quite quite nice to think of you know as we finish these discussions that we've gone you know from the beginning to kind of technical stuff to actually what does this mean in our own cohort as well as the fact that we know that this measure glycae from epidemiology you know is associated with lots of different diseases uh well did you want to pick up on that well i think the other thing that i would point out sarah is that these things we we look at them from a research perspective in isolation because we have to that's how we study things yeah but that's not the way that the body works the body is all intertwined and connected so we talk about the microbiome as if it's separate from our metabolic response we talk about our food as if it's the separate entity and yet what happens is this is all coming and merging together into one confluent process that makes you a human being and we're just kind of isolating specific things in the interest of clinical research so that we can try to understand them better but we know from your prior studies sarah with the predict using using the predict data we know from your prior studies that your dietary choices affect your gut microbiome and your gut microbiome affects your metabolism there is a chain of events or there is a chain of how these are intertwined that's critically important and then the other thing i just want to add real quick i think it's important is that we also get very interested in sort of drilling down on one particular topic from a um in popular sort of in popular fitness culture or wellness culture so people will look at you know just their blood lipid response and they get very curious or they or they'll look at just their blood glucose or and you know there's all these things there's all these microbiome tests out there the beauty of what's happening with zoe is that it's pulling all of it together in a comprehensive fashion and one of the points from this study that we found is that this is not saying that blood glucose does not matter blood glucose clearly matters we have an overwhelming amount of evidence to support that in other studies but in this particular study the blood lipid response after a meal proved to be the more important factor in terms of chronic inflammation in terms of the inflammatory response and this is why it's so important when you look at what we are doing with zoe both from a scientific perspective and in terms of being able to deliver the product to consumers so that they can get a good health outcome because that's what they want it's so important for people to see that you can't just look at one thing you can't just look at the micro bomb you can't just look at your blood glucose we are combining all of it microbiome blood glucose with the continuous monitor lipid response postprandial lipid response standardized meals so that people can actually get the information that they need because we're more complicated than just one thing i mean it's just we need all the information to really understand it yeah i think that's key well that what's so groundbreaking about the predict research and what's so exciting for me as a researcher involved in it is that we're looking at the many interrelated factors and this is what's not possible to do with many of the small scale studies where we look at single exposure single outcome you know they're still incredibly useful and i'm not diminishing their value but what i love about the work we're doing with predict is just what you said you know spot on that we are being able to look at all of these into related bothers how they interact their relative importance and then look at these many different outcomes as well and i celebrate i celebrate the fact that we have a thousand people you know that we have a thousand people when typically you would get 20 or 60 people i celebrate that we have a thousand people and can get this level of granular detail to be able to look at all these factors in combination at the same time it's amazing and we look forward to when we start to do studies with tens of thousands and indeed hundreds of thousands of people so we're at time and maybe just a wrap up uh we can leave our listeners with each of you with uh you know the one or two sentence our advice on on what would you recommend they change as a result of this study um and in my case i've been lucky enough to uh to participate in the study have uh have all the feedback and and saw that in fact um you know my glycemic responses were much worse in fact than my my fat responses so i've made pretty significant changes in terms of trying to eat a lot more healthy fat um uh in general um if you were going to to wrap up here with a with a final uh piece of advice uh sarah and then will um so i think this just adds to the whole body of research that we've been doing showing as i just said that there's many different factors so it's all multifactorial and that we shouldn't focus on a single nutrient a single food we should think of the diet as a whole improve our overall diet patterns um whilst also enjoying our food and we've got to remember that food is there to bring us pleasure it's cultural it's social it's emotional so most importantly enjoy your food whilst actually thinking of the overall dietary pattern and the synergistic effect that food has yeah so my so my takeaway from this study i i don't i apologize for opening up a can of worms literally at 11 59 before it turns midnight um but my takeaway from the study i am fascinated by the blood with the response after reading this study sarah you know i think it's so interesting to think about how because we focus on blood sugar i myself focus on blood sugar and now let's start let's start to bring awareness to our blood lipid response after meals this rise that you have described that takes four hours to peak and it stays elevated for eight hours or more i've seen other studies that say 12 hours and it stays elevated for that period of time before it starts to come back down and i think about my personal dietary choices particularly late night snacks and i'm thinking about how i need to give my body a rest from this inflammatory response that's taking place after meals and late night snacks tend to be ultra refined ultra processed foods which are more likely to ultimately give me this high lipid response and then it's going to persist through the night while i'm sleeping and so from my perspective i'm thinking about this in terms of the time restricted eating concept of eat dinner enjoy your food have dessert if you want it but for me making that rule that i'm going to try to avoid alcoholic beverages and snacks in the late evening immediately before going to bed because that may carry into the next day in terms of inflammation amazing thank you so much sarah and will i think we've left many questions open that we may be able to come back to in the future um if any of you would like to learn more about zoe about this paper or about other nutritional science uh do go to joinzoe.com that's j-o-i-n-z-o-e dot com forward slash podcast until next time thank you very much bye bye from us

Channel: ZOE

Views: 121,262

Keywords: Inflammation, personalized nutrition, personalised nutrition, inflammatory foods

Id: ol6wTjj7Y18

Length: 44min 13sec (2653 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021