Use These NUTRITION TIPS To Fix Your Health TODAY! | Rangan Chatterjee

that's going to lead to fatigue lethargy type 2 diabetes high blood pressure we know that the gut microbiome is so important for our immune system for our metabolism and body weight for our brain health it's affecting our gut microbes and so they don't know how to deal with these chemicals which are all derived from things like petrol and things that we're never supposed to eat [Music] my son um who was six months old at the time um he he had been breastfed for six months uh by my wife and we went on holiday to france just after christmas and on the first day he was wasn't so well we thought he had a cold he was bringing up a lot of mucus and and my wife didn't put him down to sleep as normally in the evening it's his mother's intuition she knew something wasn't quite right and she just kept him with her in her arms and we were in france with my friend chalet and she called out to me so wrong and wrong and you've got to come here he's not moving and basically my son had put his arms back he'd gone rigid and stiff um [Music] and wasn't really responsive now i thought maybe he's choking maybe he's choked on some of the mucus that he's been bringing up all day and i turned him over i tried to clear his airway nothing was happening if i'm honest mark i froze you thought he was gonna die yeah i froze in that moment i i wasn't a doctor with all my experience i was just a scared father and it was actually my wife he said wrong and look we've got to get into the hospital now so we drove to the hospital which wasn't far it was just two minutes down the road although i nearly killed us on the way because it just snowed and the french alps yeah i nearly turned the car over and we got there and what's really interesting is that the the doctors and the nurses were really worried you could tell they were worried because my son didn't have a temperature and you know as you all know it's not uncommon for a six month old baby to have a convulsion a febrile system yeah you know secondary to the temperature but his temperature was normal yeah and you could see the doctors wondering well his temperature just normal what is going on so they put a line in his neck you know i actually had to help hold him down while they put a line in his neck which was pretty traumatic for me yeah he had to be uh blue lighted and an ambulance down to a bigger hospital because this was a very small regional hospital yeah we got there they didn't know what was going on he had two lumbar punctures and you know my wife and i were in a bit of a state of shock what is going on you know we're a pretty health conscious family um you know why is he having this convulsion and you know we weren't sure he was gonna make it and um you know it took a few hours before a doctor came and spoke to us and said look we know why he's had a convulsion he's got very low levels of calcium in his body so he's got he had a hypocalcemic convulsion so low calcium levels is dangerous yeah to put in perspective the normal range in that french hospital of a serum calcium was 2.2 to 2.6 his level was 0.97 wow so not just low and for those non-doctors in the audience calcium is super tightly regulated in the body so any slight deviation is very serious a little high a little low and this is very low yeah and then we're trying to figure out well okay he's got a low calcium they can give him intravenous calcium but what caused the low calcium and he was getting breast milk so he's getting a lot of calcium yeah exactly right and it turned out a few hours later after these lumbar punctures and you know i i just couldn't believe that this was going on with my kids and they said look that's chassis we understand why he's had his convulsion he's got hardly any levels of vitamin d in his body good for them for testing it yeah and um that's why he's had it and then this was like what is going on you know this is a fully preventable vitamin deficiency and my son's nearly died from that now look modern medicine saved his life they gave him a calcium infusion they gave him vitamin d the acute problem was fixed yeah but then we were discharged you know five days later i was like i was reading up about video media thinking well hold on a minute if he's been deficient for the last six months if he's been deficient whilst he was in the womb what impact has that had on his immune system development could this be why he's got eczema and nobody was giving me the answers to that so i met her wife also probably had low vitamin d she had yeah she got tested she had low vitamin d and that really drove me mark because if i'm honest i had a lot of guilt i thought how did i not know this how as a you know i used to do nephrology that was what i've you know i that's what i was going to do yeah where you learn all about calcium and vitamin d i i had an i've got an immunology degree um i remember the ward college of gps with all these so-called qualifications i wasn't able to prevent my son having this preventable vitamin deficiency and there's a lot of guilt there and i thought right i'm gonna get my son back to full health as if this had never happened that was the vow i made to myself and that drove me every evening every day i'd spend two three hours on the internet in textbooks reading learning researching thinking well hold on a minute there's a lot of science out there yeah that i have not learned about as a doctor that i think is relevant for my son you mean nutrition science nutrition science you know science on the gut microbiome science on how our food choices impact our immune system etc etc that led me to come over to america to train study at conferences and the more i started to understand i put it into practice with my son he starts to get better i start to apply those principles with myself with my wife with my family we start to feel better then i start applying those same principles with my patients they're starting to feel better and i think well hold on a minute everybody's feeling better it's pretty awesome yeah and i've got to say that yes my son was the trigger for me um but you know i used to be guilt i used to feel guilty about that mark for years i think i had this guilt and i'm i'm starting to let go of that because yeah i think that helps me be the best father i can be um but now i think it was a gift what happened to my son because had he not got sick i'm not sure i would be doing what i'm doing now no yeah you know often many of us who are in this field has some crisis with ourselves our family member where we wake up and we go okay wait a minute what we learned in medical school isn't the whole story that we missed a whole lot about how to create a healthy human none of us took a class called creating healthy human 101 in medical school and yet that is the most essential thing that we need to figure out so we can live healthy vibrant long lives and most of the diseases we see today are actually the result of our environment affecting us whether it's our diet or stress or toxins infections these are things that we can actually modify and that's what you know i'm so excited about your your new book which is the stress solution um you know the truth is that you can't avoid stress stress is just a part of life and the question is you know how do you define stress how do you relate to stress how do you interact with it in a way that doesn't control you or affect you in the way that it could you know i just learned that the stress is defined as the perception of a real or imagined threat to your body or your ego so it could be a lion chasing you that's a real threat to your body or it could be you think your spouse is having an affair even if they're not your body has the same response as if it's being chased by a tiger or a lion and i think we we we don't in our society have mechanisms or systems for addressing that and and not only do we not have systems but we we are exposed to chronic unremitting stress day in day out minute to minute from the minute we wake up to a minute we go to sleep and we haven't any structures in our society for really managing that and most cultures have had ritual have had prayer have had you know ceremony have had meditation have had various kinds of rituals that take a pause in life to stop and to reset and to reconnect with what matters and we just don't do that so what what inspired you to to sort of write this book and and deal with this big un often addressed epidemic of chronic stress yeah mark i think um in my first book how to make disease disappear i spoke about what i considered to be the four sort of pillars of health as it were the four things i think have the most impacts on our health but also we've got a fair degree of control over food movement which we've been talking about for years but equally important sleep and relaxation yeah and what was quite clear to me is that people were feeding back to me that the pillar they were struggling with the most or many of them were was the whole relaxed pillar this whole piece about stress people were sort of thinking about their food and their movement but they really struggled with stress and i thought you know what food gets a lot of air time movement gets a lot of air time i don't think stress is getting the air time that it deserves and that's why i thought well i'm going to write a book on stress to really elevate it in in terms of our consciousness in terms of what we're thinking about and you mentioned in the introduction the world health organization right now if you go on their website will say that stress is the health epidemic of the 21st century now that's an alarming statement the health epidemic wow yeah i mean that's incredible and then i might fight a little bit with that i think food per food problem is big one right up there it's right up there well look i think stress and food is linked actually because actually our diet you probably know this but our diet if it's bad causes physiologic stress so when you eat sugar and crap it actually raises your cortisol and stress hormones 100 even if you're not mentally stressed it makes you physically stressed well a lot of these things actually as you know mark work both ways so yeah the poor poor dietary choices um can send stress signals up to your brain good food choices can send calm signals up to your brain or this is all to do with the gut brain axis which you know you've written about before i've written about in this book um but also i would say it works both ways so if you are chronically stressed yeah it's quite hard to make those good healthy food choices and i you know let's take january in in the uk and the us every january people are trying to get healthy i'm going to reduce my sugar intake this year i'm going to cut out alcohol this year but here's the problem i've seen is that people can use willpower for a week for two weeks maybe three weeks but if the sugar or the alcohol was being used to help them soothe the stresses in their life they're never going to maintain it long-term so i actually i agree food is a big problem but i found with some patients addressing their stress levels means they feel less of a need to you know to binge on sugar because they're not feeling as stress if you're happy you know you're not going to eat that bag of chips or cookies yeah because a lot of a lot of our food choices are dictated by our emotions and you know if we're feeling down if we're feeling stressed or we feel we've got too much on actually that sugary chocolate bar or that bag of chips actually helps us feel good in that moment so short-term benefit but long-term harm um but you know the other thing it was interesting last night i i went out i recorded my public television show for my new book and it was a very intense day and i've been really you know sort of under a fair bit of pressure writing the script and getting it all done and performing and rehearsing and you know it's a big production and like you know at the end of the day we went out and had a celebration and i had you know two tequilas which is you know for me a fair bit and i noticed last night that my sleep wasn't as good that my heart rate didn't go down enough that it was really impacting me in a negative way and today i don't feel as sharp as i normally would because i probably did something that was counterproductive to manage the quote stress of all the stuff and i was like giving myself a treat but actually maybe count counterproductive yeah but this is a story that i think many of your listeners will be able to relate to that um if i tell a story in in my book about this chap who i saw um he was a you know busy business guy in his early 50s and what was really interesting about him is that we start to measure something called heart rate variability on him so heart rate variability what is that it's you know basically it's a measure of how what what is the beat to beat variation between our heartbeats now people will think it should be like a metronome you know tick tock tick tock 70 70 70 but that's actually incorrect what we're looking for is a high degree of variability and complexity yeah complexity and it shows that we're constantly adapting and able to adapt to this changing environment around us and what was interesting and the worst heart rhythm is got no variability it's a flat line yeah so a low heart rate variability is actually indicative that we've got high stress levels in our body and this chap actually on a wednesday evening he would find that he was drinking a lot of alcohol he wasn't sleeping well he was having a lot of caffeine on thursday more alcohol on the thursday he was basically he came in he was really really stressed uh it was impacting his relationships impacting his sleep etc etc the very common story but as we start to look at his life and actually use hrv heart rate variability readings we could see that everything changed for him on a wednesday so what happened on a wednesday lunchtime he had a team meeting right he found that incredibly stressful to present to his team it was quite a high pressure meeting and that stress would last throughout the day so what would happen is on a wednesday late afternoon when he would leave work he had to compensate with that stress how would he do that alcohol alcohol so he'd open a bottle of wine he'd have a glass that glass one glass would turn into two two two would turn into three and by the end of the evening he'd had the whole bottle of wine so what happens then he doesn't sleep well on the wednesday nights so thursday morning he's feeling groggy he needs lots of coffee lots of sugar to get him through coffee in the afternoon as well which again impacts his ability to sleep on thursday nights he's not feeling good and that cycle continues where he's having a bottle of wine on thursday two bottles of wine on friday and etc etc but what did we do we identified his trigger point was a wednesday lunch time so i could show him that on the data he could see it very clearly so we we we discussed about certain things he might be able to do on a wednesday evening instead of alcohol now there was a massage well it was a yoga class very near his office so before he went home he went to the yoga class so what happens then he goes to that yoga class that helps him de-stress when he gets home he no longer feels the need to drink a bottle of wine yeah so he might have a glass but it's one glass and it stops there he sleeps well thursday he feels fresh he doesn't get as stressed at work he doesn't have as much coffee and and before you know it all we had to do was give him a yoga class on a wednesday afternoon and suddenly that changed his whole week and and people who are listening to this i'd really ask them to reflect on their own life and think actually is there a trigger point in my week where things start to go downhill yeah cause if you can identify that and change your behavior it is incredible what you can achieve it's true i mean most of us understand you know we need to eat well most of us understand how to exercise and what that means but very few of us understand how can we actually deactivate that stress response activate what we call the relaxation response or the healing response in the body in a deliberate methodical way just like we exercise or eat well and i think those are skills we never learn that are hard for people to understand how to incorporate and yet they're pretty easy to do and they're actually fun and you feel amazing after yeah but that's the beautiful thing about this is that they're not as hard as we think they're quite simple most of them i think pretty much all of the recommendations in my book i think are free like literally you don't have to buy fancy equipment or fancy apps right actually a lot of this is accessible to all of us but just to put in context at the scale of this problem mark i mentioned what the world health organizations say but there was a paper in the journal of the american medical association in 2013. it was a i think was an editorial piece which suggested that between 70 and 90 percent of what a primary care physician like me sees in any given day is in some way related to stress of course but that's these these are remarkable either caused by or made worse by stress 100 and i think once people understand i mean if you're stressed your blood sugar goes up your blood pressure goes up well your blood vessels get stiff and hard right yeah i mean i trying to explain yeah i i find that when patients understand what the stress response is i find they're really engaging trying to change it so i say to them look your stress response is ultimately trying to keep you safe it thinks it's when your body thinks you're in danger it's trying to keep you safe so let's go back 2 million years ago and then you can understand what the stress response is how it's evolved so you are in your hunter-gatherer tribe and a wild predator is is approaching right in an instant your stress response gets activated and your physiology starts to change so as you said your blood sugar goes up which is going to help deliver more glucose to the brain your blood becomes more prone to clotting so that if you get attacked by that bitten you're not going to bleed to death yeah you're going to survive you know your amygdala which is the emotional part of your brain becomes more reactive so you're hyper vigilant to all those threats around you that is an appropriate short-term response to a threat yeah the problem now mark is that for many of us our stress response has not been activated by wild predators it's been activated by our daily lives like twitter social media email inboxes by cnn fox news to-do lists right elderly parents we're looking after um you know two parents working in a family one's trying to rush home from work to pick up the kids etc etc yeah for many of us those short-term uh responses that are so helpful become harmful so if your stress stress is going up every day right and blood sugar going up for a short period of time is not a problem right but if that's happening day in day out to your email inbox well that's gonna lead to fatigue lethargy type 2 diabetes high blood pressure you know all from the stress response now we have so many more stresses than we used to right we have the culture we live in the stress we have the toxic food system we have the chronic amount of financial stress that most people feel i think you know 40 of americans can't withstand a 500 emergency 100 million live in poverty or near poverty which is hugely stressful i mean what you know one of the studies that i i found most striking a number of years ago was that more than a poor diet more than smoking more than lack of exercise that socioeconomic status and a lack of sense of control over your life really stress is the number one predictor of death and disease and i think it's something we don't really appreciate and we don't as physicians really learn how to address it how to measure it and how to help treat people yeah i i totally agree and actually the first part of my book is actually on meaning and purpose and it's relevant to this because not having that control over your life not having a sense of meaning not having something to get up for every day that is arguably the most stressful thing yeah in your life even if you're doing everything else right if you don't have that and you know a few years ago i came across this japanese concept of ikigai you know which and i know you're familiar with you know this i saw these four circles and it's where these four circles intersect in the middle is your ikigai you know when you are doing something in your life that you're good at something that you love something that the world needs and something that pays you money yeah and i thought sounds like you got that nail doctor chatted hey well look i i'm very lucky i have i now have um in my life my job i absolutely love my job that's that's for sure but what's interesting for me is i saw that and i thought yeah i want some icky guy in my life that sounds brilliant i started talking about this concept to my patients and for many of them yeah they found it a little bit intimidating they thought well how am i going to find one thing in my life to tick all those four boxes and actually when i was giving a talk in london recently um on stress this japanese student put a hand up at the end and she asked me a question she said hey that's jasji you know i've grown up with this philosophy and i've got to say i find it really stressful i find it too high a bar to live to yeah and what i did in the book is i created a new framework that i use in my patients i call it the live framework it's a much more achievable way i think for a lot of people to find their meaning and purpose and the l is for love i is for intention v is for vision e is for engage we probably can't go through all of that but you know i i sort of i use it with my patients to help them start to find meaning and purpose and the first one i think is really important love yeah right so the research on this is super clear regularly doing things that you love makes you more resilient to stress right so you mentioned a lot of americans are struggling that they don't have control over their life and this is the interesting thing about stress mark is that sometimes we can't as physicians change the stressors in our patients lives right no no you can't change what's happening out there you just change but we can make them more resilient to this yes and regularly doing things that you love makes you more resilient to stress at the same time being chronically stressed makes it harder for us to experience pleasure in day-to-day things so one of my recommendations to my patients is have a daily dose of pleasure even if it's just for five minutes you know can you each day give pleasure the same priorities you might give to the amount of vegetables you have on your plate or whether you go to the gym this could be going for a walk it could be reading a book listening to a podcast it could even be coming home from work putting on youtube watching your favorite comedian for five minutes and laughing yeah that is very important and very valuable and it makes a huge difference i mean i you know i'm not in california doing my public television show and i you know i was at the hotel and that was right on the beach and i went out to the beach and i jumped in the water swam a little bit and i came back and i literally just laid there in the sand doing absolutely nothing and i can't tell you how pleasurable that was to just be unplugged for a minute and stop and most of us just keep go go go all day long and distract distract distress well there's obviously the nature piece there as well which is very impactful for stress but let me talk about a patient i saw recently i think you'll find this interesting um 54 year old chap i think he was certainly mid 50s he was the local um he was the cfo of a local plastics company and you know he was in a good job uh earning good money uh married with two kids he came in to see me and he said dr chashi look i'm i'm sort of i'm struggling a bit i find it hard to get out of bed sometimes in the morning i find it hard to concentrate at work um you know i just feel a bit indifferent to things is this what depression is now i started to chat to him we did some tests i was looking into all aspects of his lifestyle um but ultimately one thing was quite clear to me is that he never did anything that he loved so i asked him you know how's your job he said yeah it's fine you know i don't really enjoy it but it pays the mortgage pays the bills feeds the family i said okay how's your relationship with your wife yeah so so you know i don't really see her much but it's you know it's fine i guess it was very very indifferent um i said the same about his kids and i said do you do you know have you got any hobbies i said i don't have time my words busy at the weekends i've got to do all the chores i want to take the kids to their classes and their sports games i don't have any time i said did you ever have any hobbies and he said yeah sure when i was a teenager i used to love playing with train sets i said okay fine do you do you have a train set at home he said well yeah i've got one in my attic but i haven't played with it for years and i said what i'd love you to do when you get home this evening is get get your train set out now a little more i appreciate this may not be the best on your prescription pad yeah i'm all for lifestyle prescriptions right and he play with train said three times a week but i'll tell you what happened what was fascinating is that refills unlimited exactly but you know it may not be the advice that he was expecting from his daughter but he said yeah okay sure i'll do that then this was in a conventional medical practice these were 10 minutes consultations this is in the in the national health service in the uk i we don't get the chance to follow up all our patients we see maybe 40 to 50 patients a day we simply can't follow them all up i didn't know what was going on with him three months later i finished my morning surgery and i was in the car park about to go and do my home visits and i bumped into his wife and i said hey how's your husband getting on she said dr jassy i cannot believe the difference i feel like i've got the guy i married back again my husband comes home from work he's posturing around on his train set he's always on ebay looking for collector's items and he's now subscribed to this you know this magazine i thought okay that's incredible i still haven't seen him three months after that he comes in for a well-manned check to my office and he comes in with this with his blood tests and i'm about to go through them with him and i said hey how are you doing i feel incredible i've got energy um my mood is good and i feel motivated i said how's your marriage marriage is great i'm getting on really really well with my wife how is your job love it really really enjoy the job so why is that so powerful mark is this did he have a mental health problem or train said deficiency or did he have a deficiency of passion in his life and when he corrected that passion deficiency it's true everything else starts to come back online so i want to expand the conversation about stress to go yeah sure breathing nature meditation exercise these things are fantastic and of course i talk about them and i go into the science and the practical implications of people but what about something about passion doing things that you love yeah it's just as important that's not true you know i often talk about what are the ingredients for health and one of them is meaning and purpose and i was just shocked a number of months ago to see an article in the journal the american medical association that people who lacked meaning and purpose had a higher risk of death and disease i mean it's just striking it turns out in the research that that it's not just smoking or bad diet or lack of exercise but lack of meaning and purpose that increases your risk of death i mean that's a very striking finding yeah it's amazing and obviously the way we look at health we're looking at all of these multiple inputs that play a role in someone's health and of course i'm just as passionate about food physical activity sleep you know all these things are critical but we've also got to think about those social pieces you know our community the relationships we've got um you know what why do we get up each morning do we feel that we've got control over our life or do we feel you know do we do we sit in traffic for two three hours a day in a job that we can't stand for a boss who doesn't value us the reality is if that is the case you know we're going to have to think about with our patients how we tackle that of course not all our patients can leave that job right so i'm passionate and argue i've used these tips that i've you know that the book is full of so many tips so people can literally choose the ones that are relevant for their life but i have worked in deprived areas in the uk for many years and these tips also work for people in deprived areas on low incomes because the common criticism of wellness is that it's just for the wealthy people for the middle classes and i'm passionate to say no it is applicable to everyone you give people these tools of nature of passion of um you know a quick five minute workouts even if you're living in a lifestyle that you don't enjoy that there are lots of stresses in your life you can help process that stress yeah um you really can and it can make a huge difference and one of the things that people don't realize is they think stress is subjective but it's subjective right it's the perception of how something impacts us it's our beliefs about something right so i think if if if that's true then how do we sort of create a different mindset so that when something happens you know it's not stressful i was talking to my wife this morning you know she's putting on a show a comedy show called the consciousness show and she had some issue with the tickets and she was getting stressed about it because she thought the one that were on the waiting list were actually given tickets and she was kind of freaking out and i'm like that is not really a big stressor i mean it's your belief about it it's not a big deal like there are things to really be worried about and i think for most of us we get caught in this vicious cycle of stress and worry about things that are not really worth worrying about and i think it's our beliefs about it that make it seem so and i think there are real things to worry about you know if you have income issues if you have you know real trauma in your family or i mean there are real things that are going on that are stressful like my dad died last summer and that was very stressful for me but i think there there are are ways of looking at changing our mindset so can you talk about how that how that works well i think there's a couple of things to say there i think when it comes to stresses um i think we need to think about what we can control and what we can't control many of us i have four years spent time and energy worrying about things i have no control over and that's something that i've changed a lot in my life i've really had to work hard on that and once you get into that mindset it's amazing how your stress levels just come down because so many of those things like traffic i can't do anything about traffic i just don't let it worry me anymore don't get road rage doctor strategy hey you know i i if i'm honest seven eight years ago you know when i was a carer for my dad's when i was working a busy job when my kids were very young and wasn't sleeping very much you know what if i was driving to work and someone would come in front of me or cut me up i'd probably get quite agitated if i'm honest um but now i just don't i'm like ah they're probably having a bad day if they're sort of screaming at me from the window and i'm just a lot more chilled and relaxed when you give your power over to other people if you let them affect you that way yeah for sure but it's something we have to work on and i think the reason why many for struggle with this is because of time now explain what i mean by that i think one of the biggest stresses in the modern world today in the 21st century is our lack of downtime so the modern world has stolen downtime from us it's it's gradually been eroded out of our lives i'll give you an example we're here in santa monica right in california i bet 10 years ago if we were here and we went into a local cafe to buy a coffee i bet people would be standing in line they'd be looking around they might bump into a friend they might be looking at all their or their sweet treats and they might be thinking which one am i going to have they'll be daydreaming a little bit now if you go to any cafe what's everyone doing on their phone computer yeah and look to be clear i'm not criticizing i will do that as well a lot of the time okay but my point is just lack of time it was fascinating i just went to uh give a talk at the cia the central intelligence agency and it's a highly secure building langley and there's no technology allowed so you can't bring in a phone computer nothing not even a fitbit and what was striking to me is that everybody was present i gave a lecture to 300 people and nobody was on their phone i was in a room giving a talk to 30 or 40 doctors and health professionals nobody was on their phone and everybody was focused and paying attention it was the most remarkable thing it was like it was like going back on a time machine but only a time machine of 15 years yeah and that's how quickly things are 2009. yeah that's and i don't think we've realized how toxic that is because you may you may say well why does that matter you know what's the problem that we're using this downtime to get ahead you know we're sending an email we're quickly updating our instagram well i'll tell you the problem with that there's many problems with that but we used to think that our brain went to sleep when we switched off right when we stopped focusing on a task in front of us our brain went to sleep neuroscience shows us that's not the case when we stop focusing on a task in front of us that's a part of the brain called the default mode network or the dmn that goes into overdrive now what does that part of the brain do well there's many things but two things i think listeners will find really interesting is that part of the brain helps us solve problems and helps us be more creative so this is why so many of us get our best ideas when we're out for a walk out for a run or we're in the shower i don't know if it's just me or you do you get i get my best ideas when i'm in the shower totally when i go for a run or a bike ride and i can just wander around and this is because mark our brain is trying to solve problems for us if we give it the down time to do that and i think showers are one of the few places still where our phones haven't you know we don't i don't know about you i certainly don't take my phone into the shower with me i'm sure that will change very soon yeah now the new phones they go down to four meters underwater so yeah i mean this is why we keep trying swimming actually because i think swimming is again one of those sports now where you can still do without technology you know even in the gym now people are posting selfies of them doing their workout updating their feed you know and and the dmn is a really important part of our brain and i i go into a lot of companies now to talk to them about employee well-being and one of my top tips for them is take a tech free lunch break digital detox even if it's just for 15 minutes take a tech free lunch break and last year actually i made actually was earlier this year i made an itv documentary on stress and we got to take three or four people we got to measure their stress levels minute to minute throughout the day for three days and one chap in particular he was a manager if his local company um he took his job seriously he wanted to lead by example but he was complaining of stress he was thinking he was complaining that he was drinking too much alcohol his relationship with his wife was under strain and he was always tired now we measured his stress that was it was hiv heart rate variability and we could see that actually on his work day his stress levels would climb throughout the morning at lunch time he would work through his lunch and they'd keep climbing and all afternoon as well they were just constantly elevated he would go home late he would drink alcohol to unwind he wouldn't be present with his wife that would cause issues he wouldn't sleep well and the cycle would continue all i changed within mark was i said okay look i want you to take a 15 minute break at lunch time i want you to leave your phone in your drawer and go outside for a walk he was very lucky he had a rivet nearby and we can maybe touch on why nature's so important so all he did was for 15 minutes at lunch time he went for a walk in nature without his phone now when we re-measured his data objectively his stress levels were right down but subjectively what did he say he said dr i feel like a different person yeah i'm more creative in the afternoon i enjoy my job more i'm leaving early now rather than late not just on time i'm leaving early i'm drinking less alcohol and my relationship with my wife is improved so this is what i call the ripple effects right one small thing it's powerful so when we say that wellness is for the middle classes but hold on a minute who doesn't have the ability to have a 15 minute tech free lunch break yeah right that is free that's not that's not asking a lot it's true i'm not trying to underplay this but i'm very powerful i mean i i think the whole digital detox movement's really growing and you know for my wife um for our anniversary i got her a little box and and and i said here honey here's your anniversary present and she's like oh this is such a nice little box i said no no that's not the present the present is i put my phone in the box friday night and i don't take it out till sunday night and she's like started crying like that was the best present i could give her to be present with her right the presence of presence right and and then i did it and i thought oh this is for her you know but my experience was so transformational i was like laying on the carpet playing with the cats listening to jazz just daydreaming relaxing not grabbing my phone every second and it was the most wonderful experience for me i love it and it's like a regular habit now it's it's so we leave our phones at home if we go for dinner we we don't we we um in on sunday mornings uh my wife and i will go out with our kids and we'll both leave our phone at home and you know i'd i do i do it for the whole day but often it's like four hours four five hours and what's incredible is that you come home and i feel like i've been on holiday yeah like you we don't realize how much this constantly checking our phones is draining us yeah and i got called out by this by my daughter perhaps a few years ago yeah you know i was playing with her in our living room and i can't remember what was going on but you know i kept nipping out into the kitchen to keep checking my phone and she said to me daddy you're not really here are you and that really really struck me i mean kids really can teach us how to be presents and live in the moments and i thought wow she's right i'm not really here because yes i'm in the room playing with her but my mind is actually not quite there it's thinking about what's going on on my phone and that really that really changed my behavior that'll get you that did get you that got me big time right from the mouth of babes right yeah but i think it's a very powerful um lesson for all of us and i think people need strategies because these things are designed to be addictive so you know i will not charge my phone in my bedroom anymore if i bring that phone into my bedroom right i can't resist it i simply cannot resist it's too addictive so i charge it in my kitchen yeah and so i i say to people you need to try and create a bit of tech free time in your day sure lunch break is a great time to do it but if you can't have some time ideally a golden hour in the morning and a golden hour before going to bed if a golden hour is too much start with five minutes in the morning five minutes before you go to bed well if you can't figure out how to do it for five minutes there's definitely a bigger problem in your life yeah there is but you know and also when people are commuting right that's a time when often people are on the train on a bus you know what you want to do then is instead of trying to catch up on those emails use that as a as a way of unwinding you know listen to some music do 10 minutes on your meditation app like space listen to an inspiring podcast that feels good like my one or your one or anyone that they like right use that time really value your mental space what information are you feeding it if you watch the news and you're putting toxic information right into your brain the whole time that is going to impact the way you feel your stressor was i said take the news app off your phone what i think is fascinating is that healthy dietary patterns and unhealthy dietary patterns are not related to each other they're not just the opposite of each other there'll be lots of people who have really particularly like kids have lots of healthy food at home but then they have lots of junk and processed foods when they're out and about that is still problematic for mental health there's other other that is so key so again that is really really key because i think people think i can eat what i want but if i have a bit of broccoli now and again i'm being healthy that's right and and the evidence does not support that in all of the incredibly extensive studies that we've done now we see that healthy diet and unhealthy diet wherever you sit on that scale they're both independently related to mental health outcomes so if you are having lots of healthy food but also having lots of junk and processed foods it's still going to be a problem similarly lots of older people will not be going out and having macas and you know lots of junk and processed foods but they'll be having a very limited kind of a white diet whether at home or in a nursing home or what have you and that's also problematic so they're not just the opposite of each other and we have to tackle both yeah key key points in terms of the diet that your participants in the smiles trial went on you mentioned what those foods are and you've also mentioned that we don't know what it was about it in my last book the stress solution there's a chapter on fiber and how that can help you know with the gut microbiome and therefore stress levels i quote some of your research i quote some of john cryon's research in there what's really interesting for me if we think about that diet and and i i sort of i think i wrote a paragraph on this i said for me whilst we're waiting for more research there are a couple of things there which really spring out to me is it could be making a difference you had fatty fish in there i i believe there's fatty fish in the diet what's there so yeah fatty fish and lots and lots of olive oil as well yeah so there were some omega-3s from the fatty fish you've obviously got all the benefits of olive oil so either of those independently you could you could make a case for thinking was it that that did it yeah but then the big one for me as well as that was this whole point you were encouraging a very diverse range of foods and so let's talk a little bit about diversity of foods and let's talk a little bit about the gut microbiome and why that is so important it's so critically important and it's so interesting you know we can see that medical science has been transformed a little bit in like what how physics was transformed when they discovered the ultra small particles this knowledge that these bacteria that have co-evolved with us have such an important role in our health is really giving us some new insights that we can act on to i think improve a lot of health outcomes the bacteria in your gut in particular very very simply speaking they break down the fibrous foods that our human enzymes can't break down so fiber is found in plant foods things such as vegetables fruits whole grain cereals legumes your nuts your beans and lentils etc so all sorts of different types of plant foods have dietary fiber the gut microbes break that down by a process of fermentation and in that process of fermentation they produce many many many metabolites and it's the production of these metabolites that seems to be so important and we know that they for example interact with every cell in the body through these particular receptors they influence gene activity i mean really importantly most of what we know so far comes from animal studies so we always have to be a little bit cautious but there are more and more human studies and we're doing many studies in our center that is you know looking at this that's the the food and mood center the food and mood center that's right absolutely love that name who came up with that uh well it was a joint effort between myself and the the the comms department at tegan i think that's progress in itself and in the 21st century we actually have an institution called the food and mood center i think that's progress well it's unique in the world and it's focused on nutritional psychiatry research and we've got more than 20 different projects underway at the moment many more in the planning stages trying to get funding for research of course is incredibly difficult but we've had some traction with philanthropic funding which has been great but most of the studies that we're doing are looking at this diet gut microbiome mental health triangle because we know that the gut microbiome is so important for our immune system for our metabolism and body weight for our our brain health and right across the board and we know this from number of different sources of information and there's huge amount of research that's being done across the world now in this field which is wonderful because it means that we're getting advances in our knowledge very quickly but at this point what we know is that diet is the most important thing that affects the gut microbiota and that you can change your gut microbiota and your gut health within a very short space of time like even within days by changing your diet and that's such a powerful you know thing to understand so do you have a certain recommendation you make for people in terms of diversity yeah so what we know so far and again we need more studies in humans but on the basis of some pretty good evidence in humans as well as many many studies in animals we know that obviously we need dietary fiber because the bugs can't do what they're supposed to do without the dietary fiber and you know none of us are getting enough dietary fiber not even close in australia less than half a percent of children and adolescents get their recommended intake of vegetables and legumes that's less than half a percent so this is a half a percent yes wow this is not just an issue for those of um lower educational income this is something across the board less than five percent of adults in australia so we're not getting enough dietary fiber so the bugs can't do what they're supposed to do but polyphenols seem to be really important these are the things that are in colorful fruits and vegetables and green tea and dark chocolate and things like that and coffee for like those coffee lovers out there they contain polyphenols yeah yeah and really fascinating work again in animals but showing that if you if you put one bunch of of rodents on a normal diet they don't necessarily gain weight but if you put another group on a high fat diet of course they gain a lot of weight but if you put a third group on a high fat diet and then supplement it with polyphenols they only put on about half as much weight mitigate that yeah so incredibly interesting research but then your healthy fats your mono and your polyunsaturated fats in your quality proteins but it might also be what you're not eating that's really important in your gut health again from animal studies we see that emulsifiers which are ubiquitous in processed foods seem to strip the gut lining we see that artificial sugars seem to have a negative impact on on the gut it's very complex we're really only just scratching the surface but i think the key understanding is we already know what sort of diet is consistently linked to longevity and that's a diet that is high in plant foods and high in a diversity of plant foods because the more diverse your diet the more diverse your gut microbiome and that seems to be a marker of gut health it's incredible that the hadza tribe this hunter-gatherer tribe in tanzania who's whose lives are relatively untouched by modernity i read that they're exposed to 2 000 different plant foods in their lifetime i think they eat about 800 off them um and you compare that so i think about 60 of the world's food insane comes from three plants which is it's just remarkable to see and i believe that they have between 150 grams of fiber per day yeah per day and we're lucky to get 20 in the west we're like 20. and then your microbiome you know it sort of goes down the toilet so to speak because it can't do what it's supposed to do and then you're losing microbial diversity and we also see that the the large-scale industrial food system and the changes to our global diets not only is that uh of course driving this massive increase in chronic disease but also we're seeing a lot of autoimmune conditions and allergic you know illnesses in australia where i um in melbourne it is the food allergy capital of the world and certainly one of the asthma cap capitals as well no one really understands why but we think it's linked to the early life gut microbiome because based on what we know so far the early life gut microbiota plays a really key role in the development of our immune system and also our brain development now we've just finished a really important study in pregnant women at the royal children's hospital looking at whether if you help women to change their diet during pregnancy does it affect the infant microbiome because we we need to make sure that the infant microbiome is optimized we think to ensure that that child has a strong immune system and um optimal brain development yeah i mean the implications of this are huge really because you know we stopped talking about the smiles trial so somebody who has got depression may start to get some benefit from changing their diets that's incredible in itself but but taking that research on and talking about i think about what you just said if early life is so important and if the the diet of a pregnant lady is so important you know if we're trying to get to the root of the roots of the roots of a problem yes it's great to be able to treat people who've got a problem but wouldn't it be great if the research builds up where we don't actually you know what when you're pregnant or or maybe when even pre-conceiving it's important then to focus on your health and your microbiome health the implications in terms of the downstream effects it could be profound that's right and i talk about that a lot in the book you do it's a really nice bet you know the the the metabolic state so whether parents to be are overweight or obese whether they've got high blood glucose all of those things seem to be very clearly linked to both cognition and other developmental outcomes in children we led the first study looking at the role the potential role of mother's diets during pregnancy on children's emotional health there's been many many more studies since then showing that what mothers eat during pregnancy is linked to their children's emotional health even when you take into account all sorts of other really important factors and certainly if you look at the animal studies you see that if you feed pregnant rats or mice or other non-human primates those sorts of animals a junk food western type diet during their pregnancy you see all sorts of impacts on the offspring that are relevant to mental health in humans you see it in you know we talk about diet um i wrote a chapter one touch when i was writing about stress and i was looking at this research that shows that pups who lick their offspring a lot when they're young you modify their response to stress for the rest of their life because that sort of close contact with your parents at a young age almost in many ways sets your stress responsiveness for the rest of your life it's really quite incredible but one thing felicia i think you do beautifully well in the book is you write with real compassion and when you talk about diet for pregnant women you also talk about wait a second let's not feel bad about this let's not put blame on people and i think it's really important when we're talking about what a pregnant mother is eating because a lot of people will hear that and go oh no you know when i conceived um i was having mcdonald's every day and what impacts has that had and and i think there's a well i'd love to explore what you think about that it's not about putting making people feel bad about their choices no that's right and my my jumping off point is always around public health and the fact that we need to make our environment supportive of healthful food choices so in the west now even if you go and fill up your car with petrol or anywhere you go you are bombarded with opportunities and marketing to prompt you to consume these ultra processed food products now in the us nearly 60 percent of energy intake is coming from ultra processed food products 60 of children alive today in the us will be obese not just overweight obese by the time they're 35 which is their prime child rearing years it's not quite as bad in the uk and australia but we're certainly getting there and that's because the food environment supports really poor choices we have very few limits on marketing so big food can market you know really with impunity these foods are very very cheap they're very easy to produce they've got a very long shelf life they're highly palatable i mean we are designed to want those sorts of high fat high sugar foods and they're ubiquitous they're just everywhere we can't escape them so the food environment makes it very difficult to make healthful food choices and i talk about this a lot in the book is that it's not about individuals it you know yes we want to empower people to make healthful choices in their life but it shouldn't be that hard because the environment needs to support those healthful choices i think you start off in the book talking about the victorian times don't you and that's a nice example of this well so such an interesting stuff i never i've never heard of this before no no it was a paper that i just came across and it was written by anthropologists and historians and they talked about this incredibly brief period in the mid 1800s in britain when the health of the population was exceptionally good so if people survived their first five years of life then um they had a lifespan that's similar to what we have now but their rates of degenerative disease were about 10 of what we have now now the reasons for that were very clearly the environment there were various political imperatives at the time that meant that governments were making sure that the population was getting access to the fresh food that was being grown in farms outside of the cities and brought in on trains people were growing a lot of food themselves so you know so that they were having fruit trees or growing vegetables in their backyard they had chickens people had a lot of access to seafood there was a lot of for a whole number of reasons people had access to lots of fruits and vegetables nuts when they when people did eat meat they ate all of the meat all the the organs and everything but they didn't have that much meat they of course had really um unprocessed unmilled bread and people were doing a lot of physical activity as part of their just you know working life and at the time people were exceptionally healthy and very very strong on average and then in about 1870 you started to see importation of canned meat we're very high in salt and fat canned fruit very high in sugar condensed milk white bread and white um flour these sorts of things and by the end of the century the the army had to to lower its average height intake because people were actually stunted in growth people couldn't eat meat and vegetables and nuts and things like that because their teeth were so bad because of all the sugar they were eating and it just had such a remarkable impact on the health of the population on average in such a short time span in one generation so it just says this is the food environment drives health or otherwise it really does it reminds me of conversation with dan puente on the podcast recently he studied all the blue zones around the world these little pockets of populations where they seem to live to a ripe old age and really good health and what he says is something that's been clear for it for a long time that it which is that people in those areas they're not trying to be healthy they're just getting on with their lives the environment just means that it's the easy choice and then the only choice often is the healthy choice whereas we're living in an environment now where the easy choice is often the most on uh you know the most unhelpful choice and i give an example literally last night you you met my cousin when you came in here today he's staying with me for a couple of days and we were we were driving back from a concert last night and i was chatting to him about um food and you know he's you know in his late 20s working hard um it says he commutes it's about a 10 minute drive from his office back to his his apartment and as he's driving if he finishes work at 7 30 uh he's obviously tired probably stressed out from the day and he says on the way home he he passes so many uh junk food shops um he says one roundabout in particular there's a strong smell of i won't say what brand it is but a very popular fast food chain from around the world you can actually smell the food as you're driving through it and it's it's almost as if he will have to fight temptation every single day and you ain't gonna fight temptation every single day you are gonna crack at some point absolutely and he also reports to me this is just you know we were chatting about it simply because i said oh he said oh i told him i'm interviewing you tomorrow and he was interested and he said so in the interesting way i haven't had junk food for a while i don't really crave it but once i have it once i kind of want it again later that week yeah have you studied this at all no but it makes sense because we know that the high fat and high sugar foods interact with the reward systems in the brain like any of the pleasurable activities you know whether smoking drinking gambling you know drugs all these sorts of things interact with that reward system in the brain and basically train the brain to perform actions that give that dopamine hit and food is is just another one of those sorts of uh drivers of the dopaminergic or the reward system in the brain so having that that sort of food everywhere and the smells and the the cues to consume it it's almost impossible to not consume it and so we have to change the environment do you get sam said you know you obviously this is your field you know i'm sure you practice what you preach as far as as possible you're human like the rest of us and that do you like you know you're traveling you've got jet lagged you're sleep deprived you're it's train stations today you're at airports do you find that when your defenses are down and you're traveling that you get tempted to go down an unhelpful route look i'm by no means a purist and i think it's actually really bad for your mental health to be really hung up on the details and being perfect with all your food choices i go by the 80 20 rule and certainly if 80 of my food choices are good that's going to put me way above the rest of the population based on what we know about how poorly people are eating you know i had popcorn on the way up today because i'm really really jet-lagged but i also had a big vegetable soup that i got at the station and you know i find that you can make healthy choices nowadays which is great because even 10 years ago you there were no healthy choices from takeaway but now you've got mexican you've got japanese you often can buy really nice soups you can get kombucha to drink in the you know the takeaway so things are certainly improving basically my recommendation is just try and avoid the ultra processed foods and have as much diversity and of whole foods as you can and so what we call a plant predominant diet yeah i do really worry about the low carb and the high fat diets um as i said we're about to start for longevity or for because in the short term people are getting good results on them with things like their blood sugar and and certainly weight loss for sure yeah and some are reporting improved cognition in the short term so is your worry long term or you know it's long term so what we what we see from all of the evidence is that long-term diets that are higher in complex carbohydrates and lower in animal protein and fat are linked to longevity but in the short term diets that are lower in carbohydrates and higher in animal protein and fat are linked to leaner body weight and more reproductive success i do want to touch on whole grains because whole grains have become quite a controversial area in in the diet wars and i think that's because often what we consider to be whole grains are not whole grains um so i think it's quite clear that there's pretty good research suggesting that real whole grains can have beneficial impacts on your gut microbiome and consequently on your overall health including your moods um what do you see the problem with whole grains is it that interpretation is it that the food industry are marketing refined grains as whole grains yes basically yes and i think you know people in in the us where their food system is just so broken and has been for decades to the point where nobody alive today in the u.s remembers what normal food looks like i mean it really is it's a rarity and for them whole grain might be a brown bread that's still highly refined and full of all sorts of things but if you look at certainly the epidemiological data whole grain intake is out of all of the food groups the most strongly associated with improved health outcomes if you look at the gut and what we know so far whole grains and here we're talking about things like oats and barley and freeker and spelt and and buckwheat and brown rice so things that are true whole grains are just a really valuable source of fiber for that fermentation process of of the gut but they're also anti-inflammatory yeah and you know they also help with satiety they help you to feel full now in korea they have these multi-stage meals you know and you start off with and you have about 10 dishes or you know however many depending on the meal but you start off with salads and then you move on to seafood and there may be a little bit of meat and then right at the end you'll have a small pot of mixed rice that you know wild rice and black rice and that sort of thing right at the end just to aid with satiety and that's probably how we should be eating with small amounts but lots of diversity of grains and for me what i would just say is that people half of their plate should be vegetables and salads a quarter should be a form of a whole grain a quarter should be a form of good quality protein and then topped off with some healthy oil in the form of olive oil so it can be really simple like that so that's really good simple advice i mean one thing i've seen clinically you see a lot of these case reports online but i have seen it people who've read them and have cut out all grains and they actually do feel better in the short term sometimes and i often wonder why that is is it because then i also look at the data showing that whole grains are really great for longevity in the health of the gut microbiome and so my hypothesis at the moment is that many of us have got disrupted gut microbiomes you know because of the way we're living our lives because of our diets because of our stress levels the fact that we're sleep deprived all these things that influence the gut microbiome and i think many of the patients who come to see me with who are not feeling well have already got a disrupted gut microbiome so sometimes when they eliminate certain foods in the short term actually because you could eliminate grains and eliminate a lot of the processed stuff as well and then so you start to feel great and it doesn't necessarily mean that that needs to be the long-term approach and i i think this is a key thing that i'm going to explore more in the future is the difference between a short-term approach versus what is an optimal long-term approach and i guess fodmaps might play part of this you know it might be part of the story there that's right one of my postdocs is one of the world experts on fodmap um fodmaps and fodmap low fodmap diets and the impact on the microbiome and what we know about fodmaps is that they are a primary source of fermentation for the gut microbiota in other words they're probably the best gut food gut bug food that you can feed it but as you say if you've got a gut that is not a healthy gut because of a long-term western diet and stress and all of those other things then you're going to have problems digesting those sorts of foods because your gut bugs aren't optimized to actually deal with them and then a short-term solution is the low fodmap diet but it's never intended to be a long-term thing it should only ever be a short term and then people can gradually reintroduce the fodmap foods but preferably do it i would say with fermented foods and maybe some probiotics i know that there's a lot of work going into looking at whether supplementing with probiotics and or fermented foods on reintroduction helps the bacteria to adapt so that people can tolerate those foods more but i do agree that a lot of people in the west because our diets are so low in fiber and so low in diversity they react poorly to to whole grains often to legumes and the foods that provide the substrate for the gut bacteria because their guts are just not able to deal with them yeah absolutely and i think it goes back to this whole lack of training in healthcare professionals on nutrition means that a lot of people go to their doctors they feel very frustrated that they're not being offered decent solutions that make sense to them so they're reading things online they're trying them feeling good in the short term but then continuing that long term without any support on it yes but again i'm not criticized i totally get it that's one of the reasons why i like to do these podcasts every week is to talk to world leading experts like yourself and really just tease out you know practical experience research evidence where we're at just so people can start thinking because i think the more we can empower people you know i think the better able they are to make healthy choices but i also recognize that ultimately it's a food environment that will make the biggest change please look i i could talk to you about for hours on this topic but um i think we should start wrapping it up bring it to a close first of all i want to say thank you because the smiles trial that you did literally i think will go down as being one of the most game-changing trials in terms of research on diet and mental health because it was a randomized control trial and the results were so stark so thank you for persevering and going through all the hard work and potential risk of actually falling flat on your face to go through it no so genuinely i think i think it's incredible and it's helping to give real weight globally to the the notion that our diet can improve our mood and our mental health where do you see this field developing over the next few years what's next do you think um at the food mood center as i mentioned we're doing a lot of research to try and plug some of the gaps we want to see whether what we know about the link between nutrition and mental health is true in other disorders outside of depression and come up with more prevention and treatment strategies getting to this point where we can understand what works for whom under what circumstances i think is really important and the gut microbiota is the road map by which we'll get there i think there's personalized recommendations for diet but also medication use but really my focus now is on getting clinical practice changed and so i've joined with a number of the the strongest researchers in the world doing exercise mental health research and us doing the nutrition mental health research to push for this lifestyle psychiatry this idea of lifestyle medicine is a fundamental principle and jumping off point in psychiatry not instead of other treatments but as the basis to support those treatments the bad rock upon which everything that's right and we think that not only will it have enormous benefits for individuals but it will have enormous benefits for the public purse because of the costs associated with with mental disorders particularly depression there's a you know please do tell the listeners about this conference that you're you're sort of hosting in london later this year so uh in 2013 i set up the international society for nutritional psychiatry research and that was done to try and get more people researching in this area and that now has more than 400 members from across the world and we're having our second major international conference in october between the 20th and the 22nd in london and it's got some amazing speakers it's going to be a really great conference professionals this is for yeah healthcare professionals scientists um policymakers as well sunday the opening day myself and kimberly wilson you know who does the food and psych podcast she's a previous winner of the great british bake off she's a psychologist she and i will open the conference with a with a um a session that is open to the public so yeah i think that's going to be really exciting uh for those of you listening guys everything that felice and i have spoken about today are going to be on the show notes page to this episode of the podcast which is going to be forward slash brain change it brain change is the name of your fabulous new book so definitely encourage everyone who's interested to get it it's so full of actionable information it's really it's a really good read as well it's great i think it's very fun reads um so i think people should get that but i'm also going to link to that conference so if if you are interested you can go on to chat on four slash brain changer and actually see some of the studies we talked about i'm going to link to all of those i'm also going to link to that conference so you can buy some tickets if you want to attend for sure final question this podcast is called feel better live more and and the reason is it's pretty straightforward i genuinely believe whether we're talking about mental health whether it's about anything when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of our lives and so i always love to leave the listener with some top tips tips that they can think about straight away and think oh god you know i think i could apply that into my own life immediately to change the way that i feel so i wonder if you could share you've probably covered a lot of them already but just at the end here just to inspire the listeners what are professor felice jackers top tips what you eat really does matter to your mental and brain health in the short term as well as the long term so pay attention to it you know and it doesn't need to be expensive or fussy or difficult it can just be really basic peasant food you know cooked up without much in the way of complex recipes it really does help and getting regular exercise if i don't exercise i don't sleep properly and everything falls apart so finding something that you really like doing whether it's just big walks in the park or resistance training or whatever it is just try and move because that has such a flow-on benefit to everything else sorry to interrupt if you're enjoying this conversation there's loads more like it on my channel please do press subscribe and hit that bell now back to the conversation so what is your current view on artificial sweetness all the data suggests that when you do a clinical trial and you give kids or overweight adults um either two cans of of fizzy drinks with sugar or two cans of the diet equivalent and you do that for six months or or so you do not see any difference in weight or diabetes risk or any other metabolic parameters so there's no clear benefit from swapping from someone from a sugar drink to a a diet drink except uh maybe for if you for your dentist okay so the dentists like it because definitely it it's good for your teeth and so that just that fact we don't think about it in each you know the average can will have maybe 150 calories so people have two a day at least it's 300 calories less why these why are these kids and these adults not losing some weight no it wouldn't be massive but you know we're told that that would be about 15 of our intakes right so if you believe the calories in calories out actually they should lose weight they don't so clearly in my view something else is happening metabolically to these to these individuals either their brain is being reset by the sweetness chemicals so it's at a neural level or uh something is happening metabolically and you are getting some change in insulin in ways we still don't understand and i've put myself with monitors and given myself sucralose and i can see uh i i do get a sugar peak uh my insulin peaks strangely with the sweetness which i can't explain or more likely it's affecting our gut microbes and so they don't know how to deal with these chemicals which are all derived from things like petrol and [Music] paraffin very ultra things that we're never supposed to eat and so they they produce weird chemicals in response and those chemicals then have a reaction on our body which interferes with the metabolism and in a way either makes us put on some weight or or predisposes to diabetes in the same way as the sugar so we don't know the mechanisms yet there may be differences between them they definitely work in different ways and some people might be okay with some and not with others because you know i admit everyone is unique but i think the whole idea of reducing sugar by just adding unlimited amounts of these chemicals which is you know one side effect of the sugar levy yeah has to be thought through and we should be weaning people off ultra sweetened products which make them more likely particularly kids to seek sugar and avoid sour things which may be good for them and that's my major worry so um you know i'm looking forward to seeing whether stevia for example which would appear to be the more natural of these ones does have any particular benefits but i suspect that this whole sweetness thing by artificially creating these these sort of flavors that people crave is gonna have some other knock-on effects down the line that we don't know about we should be treated teaching kids and you know adults how to go back to enjoying things that uh like water or like teas and herbal teas and things that have a bit of interest in it rather than this this blunderbuss massive amounts of sugar yeah whether it's fake or real it's amazing you know my kids are sort of ten and seven at the moment and it's amazing how many of their friends don't drink water they're allergic no you know what it's kind of it's it's it's really sad actually on on a on a deep level because i think if you think about it in in terms of our evolutionary heritage we could never have survived if we didn't drink water right you know five years ago i don't that we had the choice to not drink water whereas now we have that choice and i suspect it's because it's been conditioned out of them uh via society diverse and choices that they've been given um because i just fundamentally cannot believe that a human being cannot drink water but i but just to be super compassionate to parents who are listening who might struggle with their own children i get it i get it can be tough but actually it's very unnatural to not to not drink water no totally agree but i think it's as you said part of conditioning and uh you know i go into the water business in the book in a fair way and you know we've been conditioned that tap water is perhaps bad for us and it tastes bad or uh has metallic things in it or they've been you know history of you go abroad and never said well don't don't drink the water you know what are you gonna it could be deadly uh and that that fueled this whole rise in um mineral waters and uh this con that basically you know pepsi and coca-cola and nestle take tap water and they they just stick it through a processing plant and re-bottle it minus any taste and do that but uh and then then have to add some uh flavorings to it as they they were doing with um for kids to add a twist of fake lime or uh orange to make it palatable yeah uh no absolutely i think we really important we get kids taste back re reset the thermostat away from the super sweetness that uh is the problem because they can't then appreciate other foods because in a way everything's set so high yeah that they need it and i i love that phrase reset the thermostat that's exactly what it is really um i think i karma how i put it in my in my very first book at the i wrote about you know if a child you know 100 years ago you know the taste of a ripe peach on a some you know a nice in the peak of summer that would be like a treat it would be man this is so gorgeous and sweet whereas i think if you're used to having things like haribos or um you know every day and that becomes your definition or your normal sweetness is a packet of sweets then of course a peach no longer holds the magical of your that it used to and i think it's just been this steady downgrading of our taste buds when did you ever last have a grape that was slightly tangy you know when i was a kid they were always a bit sour and you know there was the odd sweet one but you you like that sweet sour sort of mix but they've virtually disappeared now they're all bred for super sweetness yeah and so you just can't get uh you don't we're losing that range of taste because and i think a lot of this is because of sugar and artificial sweeteners and the fact that um it is kids are brought up you know through this uh this mechanism and and that has a knock-on effect on the ability then to taste you know have bitter vegetables and uh and all these other things i think it's such a important point i want to keep just on the topic of children uh when i was refreshing myself this morning uh with the book uh just as a sort of preparation for our conversation today i don't think i'm giving away the book when i can read the last time can i read the last line of the book i think it's for me one of the most important lines in a book on foods education is our main hope we need to be teaching our children about real and fake foods with the same zeal that we teach them how to walk read and write tim that really hit me when i when i read it this morning um you know i've got two young kids until they went to school i felt we had a pretty good handle on what they were reading how much when you know you know since going to school particularly as they're getting older and older obviously that that control and maybe all parents struggle with this goes away from you somewhat but what's interesting to me is what is normal in schools now okay now i appreciate your kids are a bit older than mine so i don't know that that's changed i wonder if you had this experience when you were a dad of young kids although maybe you weren't tuned into nutrition in the same way as you are now but there's a snacking culture that's promoted right so morning break is snack time you have to have a snack right it's you know it's just it's part the school time table there's morning snack time afternoon snack time which of course we were mentioning before how snacking is a reasonably modern invention certainly to the degree that we have in this country um i know this is controversial but i wonder if you could elaborate on some of your views on nutrition in schools and what we possibly should be doing well everything you said is absolutely true around this country and probably uh very prevalent places like australia and in the us and it is different from when i was at school so we didn't have a mid-morning break for snacks we were expected to last until lunch without fainting and i think this this whole idea and it all comes to this idea that you know you you have to give kids regular food otherwise their blood sugar level drops and they're uh they can't concentrate and they run a mock and this this idea was probably capable it was a brilliant idea probably for some marketing marketing executive uh selling selling you know chocolate biscuits or you know one of these big companies and so they started it and then probably did a lot of really bad promoted a lot of bad studies in nutrition departments to show there was some correlation between uh kids who ran a mock and them not getting a snack at 10 30 right they didn't get a chocolate fix or whatever they didn't get their chocolate finger and and they did a correlation they ran a mock well the fact that little johnny ran a mock uh was the sort of kid he would just forget to to pick up his satchel or whatever um or you know had refused breakfast because he was you know a bit hyper um it was irrelevant because that became ingrained in in the pediatrics and in uh school education that it was really important to keep maintaining sort of high sugar levels uh in school and it and this is where the problems absolutely start so why why i think this is so important to him is because if kids get ingrained and conditioned with this from the age of three four five six seven it is so hard to change that conditioning later and you know we've not put this video out i meant it with it with gareth last week about you know food in schools and i personally believe in the current climate where one in three kids in the uk start secondary school overweight and obese and we know how much the environment influences our choices you know some would argue are they even choices in a very obesogenic environment i really struggled to to make the case that schools should have vending machines anymore with fizzy drinks and with chocolate bars with crisps i can't see the case for an ice cream van in the middle of a big secondary school anymore but i feel sometimes as soon as saying that if for some reason that's quite controversial to say that it's almost as if you know when i speak to teachers about it and some teachers say some teachers agree but they say i'm we're too scared of parents and what they'll say so we don't change anything and other teachers say well we want our children to have choice but i think i don't think people understand true choice i don't think they understand what goes on the bliss point of food how they're manufactured to particularly you know spike that dopamine beautifully well so you know i don't think people get it right no choice if you put a big pile of chocolate biscuits in front of me now i'd have a nibble you know yeah because they're specially designed uh for that and kids are so vulnerable um but i agree it's like a religion and and some people and many parents feel you know they've been educated the same way they've been indoctrinated the same way and they feel they would be really bad parents if they let that kid have a sugar dip or you know the energy level went down because such is this dogma that uh if you don't have some carbs you know your sugar level drops your energy goes down and and what we've shown in our recent studies in the predict study is complete opposite you actually have a sugar dip after you have a carb load so it is the complete opposite of what everyone thinks and and so what they're doing is they are giving their kid if you give your kid a chocolate biscuit or whatever it is at 10 o'clock they're going to have a sugar dip and a third of them will have real problems of fatigue and concentration for the next hour we've we've done these studies in adults not in children but it you know there are we see these sugar dippers they don't know they're dipping because we've got these monitors on them they don't know what's happening uh and they report their concentration levels their fatigue levels and it is not because they're not eating it's it's after they've had that uh sugar load uh in our case it was muffins but the point is exactly the same that it is madness to think that uh this happens and you only got to look i mean i i was in tanzania with this hunter-gatherer tribe and i get asked this all the time you know oh everyone needs breakfast otherwise you can't concentrate they didn't have a word for breakfast because it didn't exist uh no one was there you know up at dawn getting everything ready to uh otherwise they couldn't make it through the day nobody at anything before about 10 10 30 and usually just wait until lunch but the the point was that these people you know they would go hunting they didn't need they couldn't have a chocolate biscuit to uh keep them going otherwise they'd faint uh evolutions you know wouldn't do that you know it's madness and so we've actually been poisoning ourselves with the exact opposite uh and but as you as you can see from the reaction of teachers and parents it is so ingrained this idea that you're a bad parent if you don't do this yeah and what it what the other thing which happens and i know many of my listeners will resonate with this bit in particular that what it does is that when you're trying to educate and bring up your kids to know the value of food and know the value that it's for physical health mental health and mood focus concentration etc etc if you subscribe to the viewers idea that schools should be the model educationally behaviorally but also nutritionally then you just start to create that friction where well mommy and daddy are telling me one thing at home but like at school you know yesterday my son said you know i said hi guys how was it and you know at school and he goes yeah you know what you know what my friends have today they have pizza and chips for lunch um and we don't you know what's really tricky is that i'm not saying that that is something that no one should ever eat right i get it but i actually feel that schools are taking away some of their parental choice and responsibility because why not let parents decide if and when they want to give their kids a bit of sugar or uh a cake or a dessert i know what i'm saying is against the grain of what a lot of people now think um but but i really do think schools need to need to take this seriously no i think they need to take responsibility because what they are doing is is for the rest of that kid's life they're dictating what's normal exactly and and so yeah you can have parents that are stricter or more relaxed but your idea of authority and what's you know the way the rules are yeah is that the rule is little johnny has uh you know a car break at ten o'clock and another one at three o'clock and he has he can eat whatever he likes at lunch and that is just plain wrong and you know and it all and it's again because of brainwashing you know you can't blame any of these guys there is no there's no great expert that stands up there you know you know in england we got jamie oliver who who tried to do this and got a lot of you know a lot of a lot of flack for trying to to do this but he didn't take on really the whole concept of how much you need to eat during the day and you know this this idea i was brought up on uh this that grazing was better than gorging uh i talked about the book yeah and it ended up this pathetic study of about you know 10 people done 30 years ago that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny and yet this one study you know has had had ramifications because obviously this whole industry came around it and people felt you know what it's really important to keep people um you know topped up and how you're going to top up these kids because otherwise they'll go crazy and so suddenly it was a guilt thing if you if you took it away and then they did something then the parents would blame them and then that then this responsibility comes up so it's going to take someone brave to do this yeah but i just hope that some people will read the book and say okay well you can blame me now um you know some head head teacher might be listening say you know what i'm gonna change this let's give it a go for a term uh you know and uh be unpopular but give these kids something some similar as what really is normal yeah and what other kids in healthier countries are doing so there are studies tim that have shown like i've seen numerous studies where they've shown that if if if a kid has you know let's say they have breakfast before they go to school but it's let's say based on real food like you know good source of protein let's say eggs or i can't remember what exactly was in the study but it showed clearly that actually that sort of breakfast can actually not only sustain the but improve performance at school as well which again doesn't doesn't really surprise anyone if you understand the impact that nutrition can have all over the body and i agree you know maybe someone will read your book maybe your head teacher will and go you know what yeah i'm gonna do this for three three minutes i think it will take that kind of strong leadership and and and i i thought long and hard about this but i feel so strongly about it in my network which is on uh how to lose weight in a responsible and sustainable way i've got a section on schools in there and i'm going to direct people to the to my website where i've written letters that people can use to send to their headmasters to try and actually make it easy for teachers and for parents who feel strongly more for parents words to go you know what i felt i wasn't sure what to do but if i and my mum's whatsapp group we all download that letter and send it in maybe in our school this you know a change will start to happen and i i don't know if it will have an impact or not maybe we can talk about teaming up for that see if we can do something because i really think if we get it right for our kids now then maybe in 15 20 years actually they'll be the ones who are adults and they possibly won't have all the problems that much of the adult population has today but also the kids uh teach their parents yeah so i mean what we all forget is you know kids have a big influence on the family as well you know and it's not always that the other direction so i i think yeah if we keep failing our kids and you know a lot of the agenda in schools has been driven by the food companies you know this idea that you can have as much sugar as you like as long as you go to the playground yeah um just complete nonsense and it's all been funded by you know big food and drink companies and to distract us from the rubbish and distract us from the idea that you know we we're just feeding these kids rubbish food all the time they don't know what different vegetables are and they and they they're no wiser about how to cook or understand what natural ingredients are you know it really hasn't changed at all since i was at school you know if you're lucky you might be able to make a bad brownie you know that's about the extent of it and yet you know everyone really now once you get you know beyond middle age you do realize that nutrition is probably the most important thing you can be educated in yeah because you know and there's no reason that nutrition shouldn't be and food shouldn't be at the heart of the curriculum you know whether you study the science of it the ecology of it you know the environment is becoming so important um you know many things we don't need to learn in school yeah you know we hardly anyone uses algebra and yet um for the 99 of people who never use it they're told well you know let's start changing some of the um things that we do in system curricula yeah and what we're talking about schools you know same goes to medical school but you know uh in a way that's that's a whole other conversation that's the whole other conversation but i but i think you know and and in a way you know i think getting it right for schools and teachers is probably more important um and again it's this this idea of you know from the ground up i think teachers will love it tim because actually teachers will find actually that their kids because i i you know teachers probably go into education i'm guessing most of them because they enjoy imparting knowledge and wisdom and and inspiring a generation of kids to think about the world in a certain way you're going to have more engaged kids when they've been fed properly when they don't have blood sugar roller coasters in less than when they're going to be moody they're going to be more attentive and more switched on to what you're trying to teach us why actually think there are there are benefits the same goes for workplaces that they helped encourage you know no one wants to be you know no one wants their employer to tell them what to eat but there are ways to sort of not make it easy to eat junk right i think that's that's why i come down on it a little bit um but tim wright you mentioned before if we go back to your personalized nutrition studies so i can't stop thinking about what you said before that if you snack or or in some of in some patients if they snack before a meal it changes their metabolic response to that meal so i want if we could just dive into that a little bit so let's say you're going to have your dinner at 6 00 p.m but at 4 30 p.m you have i don't know a cake piece of cake you know with a cup of tea how might that impact the same meal that someone has at 6 p.m if they've not had that cake well it's gonna vary for different people because i've told you there's this uh unique response but we're generally seeing a higher uh insulin and glucose peak uh if they've snapped before they've snacked before so there'd be more stress on the body uh having snacks than if they hadn't eaten at all um it will depend on the time of day and other things like this because again it's not a simple you know black and white type relationship but everything that you eat you do before you have whatever it is you're eating has a role in that response to that meal and so for most people who have anything to eat before that time that will induce a sugar surge will cause an even bigger one in the subsequent meal okay so so this is why once you start thinking of food in a different way as a chemical reaction in your body you realize that you don't want to have these big sugar peaks these fat peaks after food you want to you know you accept some of them but you want to balance it for your body so that your body's not overreacting all the time and in a sort of stressed inflamed state which is what we think is happening for people on very bad diets they're just constantly stressing the body the insulin is being pumped up inflammation levels go up vessels start getting inflamed long-term stress equals weight gain and you know concentration problems and energy problems so what you know getting a good night's sleep having a good rest between meals trying to work out whether you should be eating your food early in the morning or late at night depending on your particular circadian rhythm all these things are important but absolutely we should be eating less meals we should be serving two decent meals a day um rather than this standard six which we are now uh being told it is still the right way to eat i want to buy that you know just happen to be this these these cheap snack foods you can you can buy that parents are told is good for their children you know and it's just complete nonsense uh we have to break that cycle realize break it down again and start you know people experimenting and getting people used to and kids particularly you know you imagine a child that's used to eating six or seven times a day how do they cope with the fast you know you know after two two hours they're conditioned to start looking for something else to eat uh whereas the french kid the spanish kid the italian kid they'll be patient they'll wait you know and they'll wait for some decent food and i think that's the other thing it's this conditioning that's yeah maybe just as bad as this metabolic uh problem yeah and i think the the uncomfortable truth for many of us as parents is that our behavior can also condition our own kids right so what they see us doing and if we've let's say picked up habits that maybe ideally we would change but we haven't yet our kids are around us and seeing it they're also going to pick up that as well and i think you know i say that as a reminder to myself just be careful how much you snack you know it's not it's not like looking down on anyone it's it's purely understanding that we're all susceptible um but these religious you know but i'm a big fan of you know fasting and virtually every religion has had fasting in there as a way of training um you know as a sort of health thing and bonding the community together but i think it's a great training for for kids uh to be able to fast for a period of time to realize that you don't you're not gonna die if you don't eat you know and you just wait until the next day or uh you know when the sun goes down or whatever it is uh and and it's very sad that we you know it's slowly being lost and suddenly in the christian world it's virtually lost uh and it's only the other other religions that do it but uh but bringing back you know some non-religious fast day yeah um for the whole family might be a fun thing that everyone should do you know that um with a big feast at the end yeah to celebrate yeah you're right this sort of feast famine type pattern that we've no doubt had an evolution how can we bring that back when you say you're a fan of fasting um what do you mean by fasting because if i don't clarify this we'll get a ton of questions afterwards what do you mean by fasting you saw my intimate fasting time restricts that he's saying how many hours you know all those questions will come up so i'd love to know what it what does professor tim spec to think of fasting well firstly everything in moderation so i'm not someone who believes in multiple day fasting you know i've never fasted for more than 24 hours and i wouldn't recommend it but i do think just in general principle the idea of going on a fast psychologically is really important so that you remember what hunger is really like and you remember that you can distract yourself from hunger and that also you can paint a nice picture of you know having this enormous breakfast the next day and amazingly you can fall asleep and get around it so until i started doing i i didn't believe that was sort of possible yeah i i thought i'm too weak i'm not going to do that but so the just the principle of any any fast um it's quite a just a thing to do for your own psychological well-being i think uh to realize that we've you know we've got this we've got these chemicals in our brain and they're telling us to do this and but you can switch them off you can divert them you know when you don't have to it's fine and most of us will come across some medical thing that we have to fast uh but you we're usually just distracted by that medical thing that we do it and if you and that's interesting that uh that's quite easy but when you do it voluntarily it's somewhere harder so the principle is i like it i was a big fan of uh intermittent fasting when it first came out because it allowed you to eat less food but not in a restricted way so you could have you could pick what the food was you're going to eat you just had only a quarter of the amount on that day and i don't think it was shown to be better than any other diets but you could stay on it for longer because you had the variety you could change it all it wasn't dull it didn't you know didn't interfere with anything else and um when you say intermittent fasting tim can you would you mind just elaborating on what that means exactly okay so intermittent fasting i'm talking about things like the 5-2 diet so you would have um two days during the week not consecutive where you would have 25 of your normal calories and or or some people would have less but it would be the idea that you'd really reduce it down um maybe just have an apple and uh a bit of clear soup and um something in the evening i always had a glass of red wine as a treat in the evening but which used up most of my uh allowance um and then the next day you could compensate do whatever you liked really so that it was a and you could do that for two days a week and most people found they did lose weight or was a way of controlling weight that didn't give you the same uh rebound that you got with uh calorie counting or doing anything like that now like all things it tends out to be not as you know amazing as as we thought but it it did allow a lot of people to carry on doing it for years and i do have people who have been doing it for years and every now and again they just say okay i'll just have a hungry day and do that and to my mind because they're not changing their food they eat it can still be healthy i like that it's not like they're having something out of a can or a you know artificial milkshake or a low-cal product they're not going and saying i'm gonna get zero calorie this and that you can have exactly normal natural foods um but what is interesting is the moment is that is time restricted feeding yeah which is a lot of the news at the moment and has very uh a lot of animal data supporting it but so far hasn't lived up to expectations in the clinical trials interestingly there's been a couple of trials recently where it hasn't shown to be as dramatic as you would expect from the um the the animal studies and it could be that again this individuality those trials always look at the averages yeah and it could be that some people would benefit from a different time scale um for some people isn't enough some people might be too much and so i would still advise everybody to give it a go and particularly this idea of whether you're a morning person or an evening person in our studies when we gave identical muffins to people every uh three hours or every four hours across the day uh most people's um metabolic peaks these these these stress peaks i was telling you about got less uh during the day um so yes so no the other way they went up during the day so three out of four people got worse during the day with the same food um one in four people actually uh got better so and i was one of them so it suggests that for some people eating later in the day would be better than eating early in the day so some people are mourning people and like the dogma tells us you metabolize better your carbohydrates in the morning you break it down quicker you get less of a sugar peak eating the identical food and we compared lots of people doing this but one in four people it's the opposite wow so some people are better off not having a large breakfast um also either skipping breakfast and having a luncheon and a big evening meal like most people in the mediterranean uh those people will do better so again it's all about self-experimentation there isn't one size fits all and there's many complicated bits go into food yeah and it's necessary to maybe deconstruct it all without losing the you know the fun bits of eating yeah because there is this huge social side that's really important mustn't lose saito but let's not stop eating breakfast just because everyone says you have to eat breakfast and they say well mommy i'm not hungry well you know try it for a week without breakfast and see you know it's not going to kill them and if it doesn't work out you you know you change your mind but generally humans are pretty good at if you listen to your body it will tell you most people are not starving when they wake up in the morning you don't wake up at 7 30 oh my god you know i've got to eat something you know and so that and some people they don't get any feeling of hunger until you know maybe 11 12 o'clock yeah i think the main thing for me is if i sort of which what i always try and do is try and relay what you're telling me from the science and this kind of cutting-edge science that you're involved with and i'm sort of trying to relay it to what i've seen with my own patients okay go how does that marry up with what i've seen it really fits so beautifully that first of all everyone's different secondly we got us i think we've got to it's about empowerment and responsibility in the sense that i think too too many of us are relying on some external source to tell us what is the right diet for us you know doctor you tell me what should i eat and i think we can provide guidance but i kind of feel the only way to really own it long term is for you to feel it and go actually you know what i don't really care what anyone else is doing because when i have my breakfast at 10 a.m and let's say i eat until i have a dinner at 7 p.m actually you know what that seems to work for me when we talk about food and health it's all on what we eat we forget about why we eat we forget about how we forget about when we eat and we forget about where we eat all of those four other factors are just as important yeah just as important as what we eat but we just don't give them enough attention well i don't know if you've heard of the french paradox but i've always loved it this idea that people in france could have apparently all these so-called unhealthy foods right you know at lunch a glass of red wine a steak a nice bit of full-fat cheese yet when they looked at the data they didn't seem to suffer from the same health problems that let's say us in the uk would suffer from if we have the same foods and there's all kinds of theories as to what's going on you know is it the fact that they're eating real food whole foods there's all kinds of things out there but i've got to be honest what i think it is more than anything it's not what they're eating it's how they're eating so it is well known in french culture meal times a sacrosanct you stop you know if you're in an office the laptop goes down the pen goes down and you go and you sit somewhere usually in company and you will enjoy your meal right it's really really interesting i did an interview with a french journalist about a year ago uh when the full pillow plan was coming out in france and at the end of the interview i asked them i said hey can i just ask you a question i'm really interested does french culture still have that now today in the 21st century and she said to me yeah absolutely it's just it's just part of what we do she said the only place she's seen that's changed is in some of the international offices in paris she said because we've got people from all over the world and that culture of sort of busyness of working at your desk getting stuff done is starting to infiltrate in and i think that's yeah that kind of says a lot it's it's you know a little bit sad that that's happening but but why should this make a difference well there's a certain mode in which we're designed to eat right we're not designed to eat when we're stressed out so if you know if you think about our stress response it evolved you know let's say a million two million years ago we're in our hunter-gatherer tribes we're trying to uh you know we're trying to get on with our business and a wild predator like a lion is approaching right in an instant our stress response kicks into gear to keep us safe right blood sugar goes up so we can run faster blood pressure goes up to get more oxygen in our brain etc etc but your body does something else it switches off your digestion because if you need to run away from a wild predator you don't need to be able to calmly and efficiently digest and process your food so your body's clap it switches it off the problem today is that our stress responses are being activated not by predators but by our daily lives so it's our email it inboxes it's our to-do list it's our social media channels right so if you are eating your healthy whole food lunch at your desk whilst also you know with the laptop on trying to answer emails again i'm not looking down at you i will do that sometimes even though i know it's not the best thing to do it's gonna have a different impact you know it it's gonna your body's gonna deal with it in a different way and so the way we eat how we eat absolutely matters and for some of my patients who want to improve their health they want to lose some of their excess weight actually how they eat is the first place they should start you know having a bit of a ritual between work time and meal time you know i i say you know an athlete doesn't just rock up to the start line they they have a process to get themselves in the right state of mind so that their body and their minds can have peak performance what i say to some of my patients i want to help you have peak performance for eating right it needs to take a few minutes it could be simple things like putting a laptop down doing one minute of 3 4 5 breathing saying one line of gratitude little things that were in our own culture just 20 30 years ago little things that are actually still in french culture today these things make a big difference and if you focus on how you eat you actually find something interesting happens you often end up eating less you're satisfied with less because you're being attentive you're allowing these signals to register you're allowing the hunger signal to register the fullness signal to register you know you're you're really feeling nourished at the end of that meal where she could have the same meal let's say the same healthy whole food meal and be trying to sort of edit your latest video or get your emails done and before you know it you've you've finished what's on your plate that's assuming you even had a plate in the first place and you don't quite know what's happened your mind hasn't registered that you've eaten it your stomach in some ways hasn't registered and then you wonder why you're snacking all afternoon right so once you understand this you can go well maybe for me how i eat is the most important thing or the thing that i want to address at the moment if i look back over the past 20 years and really trying to examine how the way i treat patients has changed i think the key thing for me is really trying to get to the root cause it's trying to get to the why okay so if we talk about let's say weight right so many people around this country around the world are actually trying to lose weight at this very moment in time a lot of them are beating themselves up right a lot of them are are feeling bad about themselves because they seem unable to do it but let's just think about this for a second right what is going on if you are watching this and you're actually trying to lose weight does me telling you that eating too many crisps or digestive biscuits or ice cream in front of the sofa in the evening is unlikely to be helping your cause it's not really new information for most people no you know it's like trying to tell the smoker that smoking's not good for the health i think every smoker who's trying to give up already knows that so it's not knowledge that's the problem you know it's it's it's why it's understanding and here's the reality with food right for the bulk of our evolution we have used foods to fill a hole in our stomachs but today we use food to fill a hole in our hearts and we wouldn't need to understand that when we're lonely we eat food when we're stressed we eat food when we're bored we eat food when we've had a rat with our partner we eat food when we've had a crap day at work we eat food right so if that's your pattern with food and you are choosing to change it right because i'm not here to tell anybody what to do if they don't want to change right if you want to change that then you've got to understand that if stress is driving your easing behavior well maybe you don't need a new diet plan maybe you need to understand how to reduce the stress and so it is i think for me in a nutshell that is one of the biggest problems we're facing today when it comes to health when it comes to excess weight and i don't think enough people are talking about it the government is certainly not talking about it you know and they should be they should be i'm not against the whole idea of personal responsibility i get that but ain't just personal responsibility you know it's easy for the middle classes to make more personally responsible decisions than it is for someone who's living in a very stressful environment where there's financial stress when there's emotional stress you know we really have to understand that we have to be a lot more compassionate about that and i don't think we are but you've really got to understand what's going on what's driving the behavior in the first place you know you don't go into you know if your car breaks down right you don't go to the mechanic and you know what you don't tell the pro you don't you know the car's not working you don't get some mechanic and the mechanic says you've got a moral problem or you didn't have enough willpower now they understand actually there's something going on with the car something's broken i need to fix it and they will then do some tests they'll run diagnostics to find out well what is the exact problem here that i need to address without knowing the problem they can't fix it that's the same when it comes to our health whether it's weight mental health whatever it is if we don't know what's causing it how are we gonna fix it so you know my approach with my patients my approach and every book that i write my approach on my podcast is always the same empower people with information don't judge them be compassionate be kind let people once they understand people will make the right choices they'll make the right choices for them over and over again i've seen this in practice you don't have to tell people long term what to do you have to empathize you have to connect with them and once you've done that when people feel hurt they get it and they start to change because they want to not because i told them to if you enjoyed that conversation i think you are going to love the one i had with the incredible immunologist jenna machoki all about the immune system it's right there so give it a click and let me know what you think and click here to download my free breathing pdf gut bugs the microbiota are one of the key educators of the immune system

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 349,279

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: WVviZgi710g

Length: 119min 50sec (7190 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 18 2021