What Foods Help You Sleep? | Dr. Neal Barnard on The Exam Room LIVE

welcome to the exam room live brought to you by the physicians committee hello once again i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll thank you so very much for raising your health iq with us now in more than 120 countries around the world making the exam room one of the most downloaded nutrition podcasts anywhere on the planet cannot thank you enough for helping us to make the world a healthier place now today we are going to be talking about sleep you know what is the connection between food and sleep how is what you eat affecting how you sleep at night like is that fourth meal your ticket to eight quality hours of slumber or is it the worst idea and the ticket to tossing and turning well we are going to find out as we welcome the man with the master plan for sleep dr neil barnard he is also the author of the book your body imbalance which delves really deeply into this topic so we're going to be covering a lot about that finding out what are the best foods for sleep which are the ones that you want to avoid also we're going to be opening up the doctor's mailbag which means that it's your opportunity to not only ask your sleep questions but literally about anything else health related that is on your mind so go ahead right now post your questions in the comments or in the chat you can also send them to me on twitter and instagram i am at chuck carroll wlc let's stuff the doctor's mailbag with as many questions as possible we'll get to as many answers as possible so let's not waste any time let's welcome on dr neil barner to the exam room live sir it's good to see you again good to see you chuck food and sleep they they seem like they go hand in hand and this morning i was doing some research before the show and according to the cdc one out of three adults in this country say that they struggle to get sleep on any given night i honestly think that that number could be a little bit higher but i mean how sleep deprived do you think we are right now as a country um i think i i agree with you chuck i think not only do do one in three people report it but there's probably another one in three who don't report it because this has become their new normal they're waking up they're not getting a good night's sleep and they thought well that's just what happens in adulthood uh but that's a problem because if you're not getting good night's sleep you're not able to integrate the things you've learned during the day your emotions are not as well integrated either and it makes life just a little more challenging well let's see if we can get some help to those one out of three and and the others who just kind of settled into that sleep deprived normal we'll take the first question from patricia and she's wondering how food affects sleep she says i don't sleep well at all if i eat junk food yeah foods affect sleep in a great many ways a couple of them are really obvious anything with caffeine caffeine people use it specifically to make sleep go away in the morning the problem is that everybody eliminates the caffeine differently there are some people who eliminate their caffeine pretty quickly after their morning cup of joe but there are other people who it's nine o'clock 10 o'clock at night and about a quarter of that cup of morning coffee that caffeine is still circulating in their blood and so their sleep ends up being a little bit lighter a little bit easier to disturb alcohol affects sleep alcohol lures you into sleep a little bit but then a little after midnight that alcohol is modified by your liver to another compound called an aldehyde as in dr jekyll aldehydes are stimulants and so you'll find your sleep gets rocky around two three four in the morning so those are some real obvious things carbohydrate generally helps sleep when i say carbohydrate starch bread that kind of thing it stimulates the production of serotonin which helps you sleep high protein foods do the opposite they make sleep less likely so uh also when you're talking about carbs i'm assuming you're talking about complex carbohydrates not necessarily those that would be found in say a doughnut um yeah and a donut is a special case because it does have some carbs in it it has some flour it's got some sugar but it's got a big load of grease baked into it and that's true for cookies cakes pies in general and that can be harmful and the next question comes to us from nyree specifically she's wondering whether there have been any studies on plant-based diets and the effect that they may have on sleep quality yeah um typically speaking when people go on vegan diets and research studies their overall quality of life improves in a lot of ways and one of those domains that we have domains that we look at is sleep and it very often does get better um why would that be some things are really really obvious if you lose a lot of weight and your sleep apnea is no longer a problem and you no longer need the device to help you to breathe and that kind of thing and you're breathing fine on your own obviously sleep people sleep much better if you've knocked out your hot flashes and chuck you know you and i have been talking about the the waves study that we did showing that a plant-based diet is really helpful against hot flashes if you're not waking up every couple hours in a in a sweat you're going to sleep better too but we think that there is also something just about the effective diet on brain chemistry so that mood is a little bit better depression is lightened up a little bit anxieties are calmed and those things seem to help sleep a little bit better too now don't get me wrong chuck i don't want to say that everybody who follows a completely plant-based vegan diet suddenly sleeps like babies because they still have the weight of the world on their shoulders too they have problems to deal with and things in the world that they want to change um and they may not have won the lottery yet either so there could still be reasons why we don't sleep very well but a plant-based diet is one of the ways that that we can be helped a little bit earlier in the show mentioned the term fourth meal which means eating late at night and that brings us to annie's question and she's wondering what is the latest we should be eating at night is there a cut-off time i don't think we have a particularly good cutoff time there are people who feel that late night eating is really really interferes with sleep it may be that it's more a question of what it is that you have um and what you were how you were doing before like let's say you had a really early dinner and it's now 9 30 and 10 you're thinking about going to sleep but you're kind of hungry um some people sleep better if they have a little bit of a meal so that they're not running really low blood sugar in the middle of the night and waking up for that reason but the quality of the meal depends matters a lot and when i say quality let's say you had a high protein meal uh meat eggs dairy products or even plant-based uh proteins like uh high uh foods in tempe with tempeh or um beans or something like that protein interferes with sleep it actually blocks the brain's ability to produce serotonin which you need when you sleep so don't do that um if instead you're hungry have something really light a piece of fruit some bread something like that and your sleep will generally be much better and what about those people who work overnight the shift workers maya is one of them she's wondering when should someone who works overnight eat i mean what what is the best schedule there that's got to be a difficult one it is and it's um much more difficult if it's intermittent so if you work in the day shift monday through friday and suddenly got to work saturday night shift your body hasn't had a chance to equilibrate if you are on night shift and it's steady you know what your pattern is you can go into the pattern and it's basically the same as during the day have your meals at regular times and normally speaking you don't want to have a heavy especially not a high protein meal just before you go to sleep if it's an intermittent kind of thing you just do your best try to eat healthful foods don't let sleep deprivation lead you into junk food eating you know what i'm talking about if you're groggy and you feel crummy because you slept poorly last night you'll eat anything just to get through the day today it's good to surround yourself with healthy foods so that you don't end up doing yourself some problems we've talked a lot about food so far but now let's talk about water paul is wondering at 1206 whether drinking water before going to bed can improve sleep quality it can if you're dehydrated but it can interfere with sleep if you're over doing it for the obvious reason is that you're going to have to get up pretty soon uh let's see here uh m knob 1206 as well do magnesium rich foods help when it comes to sleep not that i've seen uh great question but i haven't seen any evidence that uh magnesium rich foods are going to get help gerardo 1208 specifically wondering about bananas uh well a banana is famous because it's got potassium that brings your blood pressure into a healthier range that's all good but it's a great source of really healthy carbohydrate and as we mentioned a couple times already that helps your body to make serotonin and that will help you to sleep banana gets a green light we had somebody in the chat room uh earlier i'm forgive me i can't find the exact question right now but they said that every time that they eat raw greens they can't fall asleep for at least two hours i don't know if they get turbo charged on it or what but they were wondering if you had heard of that before is that normal um if it's happening to you believe it um when you're talking about raw greens let's think about what what are ingredients green vegetables like kale and collards and broccoli what do they have they've got a lot of fiber they have a surprisingly large amount of protein and they're not starchy they're not like a sweet potato so what does that mean you're getting relatively speaking a pretty high protein food that's not very high in the carbohydrates that are going to release serotonin so it's not a big surprise that that's a food that's going to interfere with sleep so what does that mean let's say it's morning morning is a good time for high protein foods not not animal protein but if in the morning you have veggie bacon veggie sausage or beans beans are a high protein food that americans tend not to eat for breakfast but everybody else does if you were in london right now or in sydney they would have beans on the breakfast buffet everywhere um if you were in mexico they would have black beans high protein foods in the morning tend to help people to kind of put the sleep behind them and wake up and do and do better which is why some people will replace bacon with say grilled tofu or uh grilled tempeh they are high protein but without the cholesterol so many great people hanging out with us in the chat room today a lot of great exam roomies suzy q forest view tofu tuesday i always love it when she's here on a wednesday uh lisa jean so many great people gina and a special hello also to lego dc thank you all so very much for hanging out with us here today dr barnard let's switch gears for a little bit we'll come back i'm sure that there will be more questions about sleep momentarily but let's take a question really quickly from ashley who is wondering whether it's okay to exercise before breakfast because you've been fasting do you need something in your stomach before you get out there and go no you don't need anything in your stomach you go if you want to exercise before breakfast you go for it absolutely that's perfectly fine why your muscles are running on glucose that's their fuel and even if you didn't have any breakfast you've got glucose because your muscles stored it it's glycogen it's there it's batteries it's charged up you are ready to go don't forget your bottle of water because you don't want to get dehydrated but no you don't need to eat uh before you go and a lot of people don't want to eat before they exercise because they don't want to have food jostling all around in their stomach when they're out between mile 3 and mile 4. so you go ahead you don't have to have breakfast before you exercise she's got to follow up as well should you then be eating extra calories after you've exercised on an empty stomach yeah absolutely and it's you don't have to do it intentionally your body knows that you just burn some calories how much about 100 calories per mile and surprise that's true whether you walked it jogged it or ran it at full tilt um about 100 calories per mile with it depends on your size and other things but your body knows that and so after your 5k your body says well i think we better have a little extra food because your body wants to to not only um have the energy that you're going to need because you've depleted some glucose but it wants to also store up some extra glycogen in your muscles and liver in case you decide to do the same thing the next day so yep you're going to be eating more and it happens automatically let's switch back to sleep the conversation continues on right now with the exam roomies in the chat some are wondering about the connection between melatonin and sleep if you could talk a little bit about that yeah um melatonin has been talked about for a long long time and there's some some best-selling books about using melatonin and some would call it a miracle i think that's overselling it but it works it's uh melatonin is something that can be used as a supplement and it does help promote sleep and it seems to be safe and uh bulim our friend uh you know he's he's the uh muscle-bound vegan uh he's wondering if tart cherries are a really good source of melatonin i would have guessed not but i think i'm gonna have to look that up and see fair enough uh let's see here um okay cherie she is transitioning right now to a plant-based diet but she said look you know i've been having these headaches since i made the switch is it possible for someone after they switch to a plant-based diet to have some headaches okay um we did a study a number of years ago on migraines and specifically we used diet changes to see if migraines could go away and by the way a migraine is not just a bad headache a migraine is a specific type it's pounding not constant it's sort of an air hammer against your head usually on one side sometimes both sides but usually one side and along with the headache comes a sense of really being sick to your stomach and it lasts a really long time it's not just a stress headache it comes and goes um and so what about diet researchers have found and and people with migraines have found that certain foods trigger their headaches dairy is probably number one but others can too two chocolate could do it for some people something like citrus fruits can do it there's about a dozen common triggers but dairy is probably the most common if you eliminate the common triggers and your migraines go away then you could put those triggers back into your diet and see which ones really are the bad triggers and which ones you can add them without a problem a lot of people do that kind of elimination diet i've written about it in my book the cheese trap in case you want to try it but now you went vegan and your headache started what's that about what i would do is i would look to see if there was something new that you added if um i'm gonna make it up let's say uh you really weren't doing tomatoes much before and now you're having lots of tomato sauces and although they're very healthy if you have a little sensitivity to them you might be having symptoms you wouldn't have had otherwise so look to see if there's something new that you've added you might eliminate that for a while see if the migraines don't get better now let's uh let's go back again to sleep hot topic still uh you mentioned that sometimes when you eat that junk food late at night you wake up and you just feel kind of ah you just bloated just not really yourself but sophie at 12 14 is wondering whether it's normal to feel a little bit dizzy after eating a lot of junk food the night before have you heard of that connection at all um let me make sure i understand so this is a person who's gone to sleep and in the middle of the night they wake up and at that point they're feeling dizzy and the room is spinning around or something um if that's the idea no i have not heard of that um if it really depends on the specifics of what you're experiencing but if you're having vertigo or something like that you might want to see a doctor trying to find out what that's about um if it's an occasional thing it doesn't really sound if it's if this is a rare case of just feeling kind of dizzy and it goes away that's not vertigo and i wouldn't worry about it uh we talked a little bit about food and mood as well earlier but our zoo is wondering specifically about the connection between a plant-based diet and anxiety is there any relief that somebody could have with an anxiety problem if they take meat they take dairy out of their diet yeah um when we did our studies with geico the geico insurance company we brought in lots of people who all worked there and they changed their diets and we noticed that anxiety was one of the things that got better in that group that wasn't the reason we did the study we did the study to help them lose weight and improve their diabetes but depression seemed to lift a bit and anxiety seemed to improve a lot as well now on the other hand let's say you made a diet change and now you're feeling a little more anxious or more on edge or something like that i suspect that that can happen if a person's diet has gone too high in carbohydrate in the morning without some protein in it now i'm not talking about animal protein what i would say is that when a person starts their day with some plant-based protein grilled tofu grilled tempeh what's grilled tempeh um go to the store you get tempeh and it for a couple seconds in soy sauce put it in your nonstick pan cook it on both sides and it's sort of like bacon except that it's it's high in protein but it doesn't have any cholesterol and no animal fat those high protein foods tofu tempeh beans veggie bacon veggie sausage if you start your day with those foods and then have the carbohydrate rich foods right afterwards oatmeal toast or fruit somehow having that pre-treatment with the plant-based protein will put you on a better a more even keel later in the day scientists explain this as the protein blocks the production of serotonin that the carbohydrate would otherwise cause and during the day that's a good change so if you're feeling a little uh not yourself a little depressed a little anxious you might try this plant protein first thing in the morning and see how you do you can have the carbs immediately afterward but have the first thing that you eat the plant protein food like tofu tempeh scrambled tofu veggie sausage veggie bacon those kinds of things let's reach into the mailbag here get a wild card question jd at 12 18 writes i've been told that mushrooms should not be eaten raw is that true uh yeah it probably is true um they probably should be cooked uh their traces of formaldehyde oh that doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun and you know you think that raw mushrooms are great you could put them on a salad but evidence suggests that generally speaking you'll want to cook them uh alicia what is the best form of b12 cyanocobalamin or methylcobalamin the best form is the one that you take um you are right there is cyanocobalamin there's methylcobalamin um you'll see both on the shelf they're both fine they're both perfectly effective the cyanocobalamin frightens people because it has the word cyan in it like cyanide um it's really just a theoretical thing the amounts they are trivial they won't they won't hurt human the b12 is good the one thing i would pay attention to is the amount you need very little um the the average person the aboriginal adult needs 2.4 micrograms it's not a gram it's not a milligram it's a microgram and you go to the store and you don't find any that are that small and you might find one that's 100 maybe 500 okay fair enough but you don't need the one that says 5 000 micrograms uh 10 000 micrograms you don't need that unless your doctor has specifically prescribed it to make up for deficiency and uh she had a follow-up she's wondering because we need so little is it okay is she getting enough if she takes 1 000 micrograms of it once a week uh probably yes or um maybe every two or three days something like that be fine nobody knows the exact number and your doctor can test very easily to see if you are in the right track but you're thinking right if you get a huge pill like a thousand is a lot um you can either split them in two but if they're really tiny that's challenging so take it every other day or every third day we have a question about selenium uh from uh live live go vegan at 12 21 uh they are wondering what foods are rich in selenium selenium is a mineral it's in the soil and so the amount in foods depends a little bit less on what food it is and a little bit more on where it was grown because the amounts are really quite variable that said if you look on just about anybody's website where they're listing selenium-rich foods the brazil nut always comes in number one um so much so that people say don't have too many because like all elements you need a little bit you don't need too much so if you have one brazil nut leave it there this is a pretty good question uh from david how can a whole food plant-based diet protect against the recurrence of lymphoma you know lymphoma is a blood cancer if that's what you have been dealing with i'm sorry that you had that challenge obviously the good news is that our medical treatments are much much better nowadays than they were before so hopefully all as well but when we're looking at recurrence of cancer we have pretty good evidence on digestive cancers like colorectal cancer and even more on hormone related cancers like prostate cancer in men breast cancer particularly in women not really good data on lymphoma and leukemia which is my way of saying i think we need a lot more research there before before we really know what the effective diet is going to be that said we do have a pattern that generally speaking a plant-based diet rich in vegetables rich in fruits rich in healthy minerals gives you what the body needs to heal and have a good immune function so it's good general advice for people in general but we really do need more studies of exactly the type that you're hinting at so that we can have better data in the future because for right now people with lymphoma people with leukemias haven't really been recruited for good studies on survival with regard to certain dietary patterns let's hop back to b12 we have a lot of follow-ups right now we'll start with uh peter at 12 23 says that his mom went vegan eight months ago and has since been diagnosed with anemia peter's wondering whether b12 may help you may um if she's anemic first of all she should be definitely seeing her doctor because the doctor will test her not just to see if she's anemic which which means you don't have enough red blood cells circulating in your body um if she thinks she's anemic because she's tired she's got to go to the doctor and see is she actually anemic because she if she is then the doctor is going to do some other tests to find out why one common form is iron deficiency anemia you're not getting enough iron and in the old days people would say you need red meat for iron you need liver for iron mistake they have iron but they end up having too much and as bad as it is to be low in iron it is just as bad to be high in iron because that increases the risk of cardiovascular disease i'm talking about heart disease and also of alzheimer's disease so you do need iron but you don't need meat you don't need liver green vegetables beans plants in general bring you plenty of iron so bring the greens into your diet and the beauty of that is that the iron that they have is a special form called non-heme iron that is more absorbable if you're low in iron and less absorbable if you've got a lot of iron on board already so it's the kind your body was really designed for make sure you got that but what if she doesn't have iron deficiency anemia what if she hasn't uh some other kind of anemia um b12 deficiency can lead to anemia some people end up anemic because they're having blood loss from the digestive tract or something else doctors need to evaluate all of those things question from lisa 1223 does age affect the amount of b12 a person would need no not really um once once you hit 18 19 years of age you're at the adult dose that it's 2.4 micrograms and even even below that um there are if you're the smaller you are the less you need um as a general rule but um but no as you reach your 30s and 40s and 50s you don't see a good change uh don't worry be happy excellent screen name 1223 can you get enough b12 if you are just drinking a few cups of fortified soy milk every day as opposed to taking a tablet uh depends on the amount um that's that it's fortified with read they're all different read the label and it will typically indicate the percentage of the daily value that one serving gives you and so you can do the math and you can see how you get the full daily serving and if you're doing that uh yes it'll work but most people don't quite get there because that cup of soy milk they put on their corn flakes in the morning does have some b12 if it's b12 fortified but probably not the full rda let's take a question from bethany and maybe this is something that came up during the waves study as well she says i love my soybeans for hot flashes which have been interrupting my sleep but i'm still gassy after several months what can i do oh okay sorry to hear that um it's first of all dose-related so the amount of soybeans that we used in the wave study was a half a cup um and if a half a cup at one time is a lot for you you can break it up into two quarter cup servings that will greatly reduce it or you could break it up even even more and use them sort of like pine nuts on your on your salad or uh you will you can roast them yourself or you can buy them pre-roasted on amazon you'll see there there's a brand called toasted t-o-s-t-e-d um or you can or you can roast them yourself 350 degrees one hour uh you put cooked soy beans on a baking sheet they come out of your instant pot they're fully cooked throw them now into your oven for an hour and they're going to come out nicely toasted the reason i'm mentioning that is now you're not gonna eat the whole half cup at one time you'll have a sort of a snack that you'll have kind of throughout the day and that'll be easier on your digestive tract um one other thing if you're if you are not cooking them thoroughly or if you bought a commercial brand that's a little crunchy you don't want al dente soybeans they are going to be a digestive challenge they should be thoroughly cooked uh let's go back to b12 here for one second marianne at 12 20 h says i've got one more b12 question uh how much is too much and what are the repercussions of overdoing it oh what a great question uh we don't know the full answer to that but a study came out probably about two years ago that seemed to suggest that people who were having very high levels of b12 were in trouble but what they were reporting was not an oral dose it was blood tests uh people who had too much b12 circulating their blood seemed to to not do as well in fact if you track them over time they seem to have higher mortality or i guess the way you put it is earlier mortality compared to other people okay so that scared everyone and made us think gee i need b12 but don't overdo it so we are now thinking instead of the thousand micrograms a day or two thousand we'd have 500 or 100 or something like that okay that's good advice but then the another page turned and that was it looked like the people who had high b12 levels in their blood were not people who were supplementing a lot they were people who had liver disease and their damaged livers were the cells were opening up and releasing b12 into their bloodstream in other words damaged cells kind of would allow the b12 to be artificially high in their bloodstream so scientists took a deep breath and came up with the following conclusion we think that it's still prudent to have the amount of b12 that you need and to not have an excess we don't know the amount of dietary intake that's excessive but your doctor can test your buttock levels and if you're really really high that you can back off and lastly we don't really have good evidence that a high level of b-12 is really toxic for you because it looks like those those studies were a little bit of a false alarm around supplementation so take your b12 keep it modest keep it regular and i would leave it at that uh let's bounce around a little bit go back to buelon he's coming strong with the good questions today uh have you seen the movie the game changers dr barnard have i seen the movie the game changers i i ask because they do a really good job of actually showing uh examples of blood viscosity and what happens when you eat this versus that so bulit's question at 12 28 he's wondering whether there's a correlation between blood viscosity and weight management oh what a great question this is really for extra credit um okay first of all for people should know what viscosity is people who change their motor oil know what viscosity is but nobody else has a clue viscosity means thickness so the motor oil analogy is if i am up in uh the frozen north land of san fargo where i grew up uh you you want an oil that isn't going to get all sludgy in the cold month uh or other places you might want that is thicker you want one that's thicker where i grow if you want is thinner your blood can be like motor oil meaning it can be thicker more viscous harder to circulate um or it can be thinner like water easy to circulate which do you want you want your blood to be more like water so that it takes the oxygen molecules out of your lungs and brings them right to your your body like brings them to your muscles brings them to your brain and if you have a fatty meal that will increase your blood viscosity and it increases it fast um thanksgiving day people have turkey with gravy the fat out of the turkey the fat and the gravy the fat that's was added unfortunately to the sweet potatoes which are otherwise healthy but the butter and stuff that's in them gets into your blood your blood becomes viscous and that causes your oxygenation to fall it interferes with athletic performance and it makes you have trouble staying awake in the afternoon so you're just not oxygenating but that's really about it um beyond those um effects i am not really aware that viscosity of the blood would affect say body weight or something like that um i'd be surprised if it did but but it does have the effects that we just described and and this is one of the reasons why when people go to a plant-based diet their blood pressure comes right down because their blood viscosity came down their blood circulates more easily in there you don't need so much pressure to keep your blood circulating that answer was on fire that was fantastic well well done sir you should be on the test i also want to give a round of applause to maria uh boy this just makes my day at 12 29 maria writes i went vegan in march cholesterol is down 40 points and i've lost 25 pounds she says your podcast gives me weekly motivation that is the best thing that i have heard all day thank you very much maria congratulations great that's that's wonderful and you know the thing that i really love best about this is chuck you do a fabulous podcast and you've been very kind to let me be part of it and it's no surprise that you've been number one in so many countries and people are following you everywhere but the very best thing the thing i like about this bet i like best about this podcast is that people tell other people about it because they learn things they learn things that you might have shared or that i might have shared or other guests have shared and it starts conversations and it starts getting people interested and treat intrigued to take better care of themselves to take better care of the planet to get the animals off their plates to do all kinds of things that really make the world a better place that's what that's what i have to say i like this absolutely uh and thank you for letting me be part of this podcast you're silly thank you for letting me do this podcast uh okay let's grab a couple of more really quickly uh rapid fire we have a question from tanya 12 29 you spoke about hormones and prostate cancer what is a good diet for mild prostate cancer prostate cancer is unlike some cancers where for many many people it it grows very slow the doctor finds it it's not really causing much harm and so doctors will take a blood test called psa prostate specific antigen and if it's not really increasing too much you can typically just leave it alone and just keep your eye on it for a long period of time fine however for some folks it's going to start to grow and if it starts to grow and it starts to spread and metastasize it can kill you so the doctors keep their eye on the blood test to make sure everything's okay dr dean ornish who was doing such wonderful work on heart disease then focused his attention on prostate cancer and found that a healthy plant-based diet vegan diet helps keep those psa levels from rising too fast in fact in the study for which he's really best known uh in this in this domain psa levels actually improved they dropped in the people following the diet so what's the best diet for a person with kind of slow growing prostate cancer no animal products at all vegetables fruits whole grains beans i would emphasize tomatoes because of their lycopene and soy because soy products seem to be associated with better survival too i would eliminate animal products completely absolutely zero dairy dairy products are associated with prostate cancer progression keep oils really low lace up your sneakers go for a run and that's that in addition to the medical care that your doctor prescribes that's a pretty good version and uh also if uh if you're curious about somebody who is eating a plant-based diet and is living with prostate cancer there's a gentleman by the name of bruce milray who is a friend of the show who's written a book called a plant-powered approach to prostate cancer really where he just documents his journey with his wife mindy a fantastic couple and uh it's a fantastic breed so if you get a chance uh definitely pick that up last question today comes from tina at 12 32 how much iodized salt is enough for iodine requirements um well iodized salt um if you to get the full day's dose of of iodine you probably haven't looked at this in a while but i would say it's probably around a half a teaspoon something like that which is more than you're actually going to typically use but you don't have to have all your iodine coming from iodized salt because you'll get some from your iodized salt some from other foods that you might eat but what typically people will say is maybe if in the course of the day you get a quarter or a third of a teaspoon of iodized salt that'll get you a long way there and the rest of your foods will probably pick it up from there all right let's sneak in one more jenny at 12 38 when is a good time to take b12 does it really matter no it doesn't matter um generally it does not matter you could take an empty stomach full stomach it doesn't matter um generally speaking when you're taking supplements unless it says you need to take it down an empty stomach i would encourage you to take supplements with food and that way all the nutrients in the food are kind of buffering each other um but no with b12 it's absorbable um with or without food all right let's go ahead and close up the doctor's mailbag for today and if you want to read more about sleep and food that connection there pick up your copy of your body and balance we will make sure to drop a link to that if you're listening to the podcast in the uh show notes and in the episode description uh a great read of fantastic free and it makes a great holiday gift why not give the gift of health uh dr neil barnard uh thank you so very much for being here my friend this has been fantastic well thank you chad all right and a happy early thanksgiving in case i don't see you before then yeah and you too all right i also want to say a big thank you to the gregory j writer memorial fund for making today's show possible uh their support of the exam room live is what helps to make this show the the juggernaut that it is worldwide this global health phenomenon it helps us all raise our health iqs and the gregory j rider memorial fund is a fun that really it supports organizations just like the physicians committee that uh really emphasize the importance of eating a plant-based diet and animal welfare and that those are things that greg thought so much of during his time on earth and now this is continuing his legacy and it is just a fantastic organization we cannot thank them enough i encourage you to visit their website please at the gregoryriderfund.org that's gregoryrider r-e-i-t-e-r-fund.org and while you're there you can subscribe to their newsletter and see everything that they have been up to so thank you very much to them and alison mahoney for their continued support you all are just incredible and for today my friends that is all the time that we have on behalf of everyone here at the physicians committee i want to say thank you again to dr neil barnard i want to say thank you to the crew behind the scenes and i want to say thank you to you the exam roomies who are here raising your health iqs with us and uh for everyone again here at the physicians committee i am the weight loss championship carol we will talk to you again soon but until then keep it plant-based

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Length: 39min 31sec (2371 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 17 2021