Podcast - How Your Gut Health Affects Your Whole Body.

Intro

Pauline
So when you're lacking in nutrients, it doesn't just go unnoticed by the body. The body tries to compensate in other ways and it whispers these little messages to you, like, I'm feeling anxious or I'm feeling tired or I can't sleep.

Giles
Welcome to Unquestionable with your hosts Charles Pauly Phillips and Sophie Green, where each week we dive into real and raw conversations with experts, creators, thought leaders and CEOs.

Sophie
With our guests, we'll be exploring some of the unquestionable truths behind psychology, mental health and relationships to gain a deeper understanding of human nature.

The Main Episode

Giles
So let's get into today's episode.

Sophie
I've been on a bit of a health investigative journey lately, but to be fair, I am also a bit of a hypochondriac, so that might be a point, but yeah, no, the whole topic really fascinates me and it wasn't until I spoke to a nutritionist that I realised how, wow, how complicated it all is. And they were throwing out all these scientific words and all this jargon at me. I was kind of like, oh, these people were super clever.

Pauline
And also how much control you have over it. You think you just eat it's fuel, it gives you energy and you're done. But actually, what you eat, massively influences.

Giles
That was going to be my first question, actually. Food as fuel. Clearly it's much more than that.

Pauline
It is much more than that. It's essentially the building blocks for everything that we are from our thoughts, because of our neurotransmitters, our brain chemistry. You need key nutrients to build your dopamine, your serotonin, and without those, you start to become lacking in them. So it can really impact your sleep because serotonin converts into melatonin, it can affect your motivation, because dopamine is your get up and go hormone. It really helps you feel strong, confident and motivated. And you need certain B vitamins and vitamin D. So when you're lacking in nutrients, it doesn't just go unnoticed by the body. The body tries to compensate in other ways and it whispers these little messages to you, like, I'm feeling anxious or I'm feeling tired or I can't sleep. 

Sophie
I think it's really uncommon for people to take anxiety or depression and then sort of associate that with your gut and your gut health. This is something that I've literally only learned in the last couple of months.

Pauline
The gut is fascinating. It's this super highway of communication between the gut and the brain. So the brain and the gut communicate via the vagus nerve, which you've probably heard of having gone down the gut health pathway. And the brain has sensors in your gut called neuropods. And these sensors will tell the brain how much amino acids you've got in your diet in your gut. It'll tell the brain about the omega three fatty acids, because, again, they're very, very important for your brain health. It senses sweet. So your gut, even without your taste buds, if you completely took your taste buds out of it, your gut would still sense sweet and your brain would enjoy it. So this is how food manufacturers can hide sugars in their foods and their products without us knowing the sugar is there, but us going, wow, I really enjoy this and I don't quite know why.

Sophie
Interesting. Is it like Pringles and stuff?

Pauline
Yeah. Food manufacturers, well, you hit the nail on the head. Food manufacturers will spend millions of pounds formulating so that you can't quite taste sweetness in pasta sauce or in crisps. But the sugar is detected by the gut and it lights up the brain.

Giles
Like refined carbohydrates, which I'm sure we can go on to. So, amino acids you touched on there?

Pauline
Yes.

Giles
Firstly, what are they and why are they so important?

Pauline
So, amino acids are the building blocks of all of pretty much every tissue in the body. So you consume proteins, your lean meats, your eggs, all these foods that contain protein break down into all these different amino acids. And then the body uses those amino acids to build neurotransmitters, skin, muscle, tendons, bones. So they're incredibly important. And most of us consume protein, but not all of us absorb the amino acids needed. So for example, as we age, our stomach acidity isn't as acidic, so we don't break down the protein as readily. If you're on a Metrozole, which is a proton pump inhibitor, which reduces makes your stomach less acidic, then you don't break down protein as readily. And lots of older individuals are on over the counter antacids or omeprazole, the proton pump inhibitors. And so they're in this catch 22 where they're getting access to less of those key amino acids and they're becoming deficient and they're eating protein, although many people don't eat enough protein, but they're not able to break that protein down. And so, sadly, protein then travels through into the digestive system and it becomes readily available for putrefication, which is rather nice, isn't it?

Pauline
So you start to have fermentation of your carbs and putrefication of protein. So you start to have issues which you become very aware of when you go to the bathroom.

Sophie
Oh, lovely.

Pauline
Yeah. Who knew we'd be going down this route?

Sophie
Because you've obviously got a microbiome in your gut and you've got kind of like good bacteria and then what you call bad bacteria. Is that where bad bacteria can become abundant or is that something completely different?

Pauline
So the microbiome has an incredibly diverse range of fungi, viruses, bacteria, and we classify some as good and bad. Now, we need the bad, but we need the good to be dominating. And it's when the bad outcrowds the good that we start to have problems. And this can be seen as thrush, for example. So a yeast infection, it can be seen as pro inflammation in the body. So these pro inflammatory microbes, so if you think of the microbes, the beneficial microbes, as little factories in your gut and they're producing all the time, these metabolites or these products that are really great for the host. So we have this amazing relationship, this symbiotic relationship with our microbes. We give them somewhere to live, they produce something beneficial for the host. However, if we take too many antibiotics or we drink lots of alcohol or we eat lots of processed food or lots of sugar, things that start to disrupt the balance of the microbiome, then the bad microbes can get a footing quicker than the good microbes to regrow or reproliferate. And so you start to get less of the good bacteria, the beneficial that's helping the host, that's producing, for example, something called short chain fatty acids to support the colon or producing butyrate, which is another short chain fatty acid that actually travels up, gets into the brain and helps to restore and regenerate the brain.

Pauline
Then, as you start to lack these key microbes, it can start to have quite profound impacts on your overall health.

Sophie
So could you give some examples of how if you've got sort of an overgrowth of bad bacteria and not so much good bacteria, or perhaps it's not as diverse, what physically might people start seeing? What are the kind of warning signs?

Pauline
It's a really good question because the gut so if you think of the gut as a closed environment, the gut supposed to have well, the gut is designed to have a semi selective membrane I e. It allows certain things to pass through into the bloodstream, but it doesn't allow other things to pass through. So it contains the microbes within the environment they're supposed to live in. Now, if you were to eat things that damage the gut, essentially make your gut lining more permeable, more don't want to use the word holy, but if you think of a brick wall with mortar and the mortar starts to erode, things can start to pass through, bits of food can pass through, which stimulate the immune system. And the immune system says, hey, this shouldn't be there. And that can cause inflammation. But also bacteria can go through or the toxins produced by bacteria. So you can start to experience things like migraines or low mood, you can start to experience anxiety, joint pains. So what's going in the gut, on in the gut is never confined just to the gut. It can be, as I said, a migraine, it can be anxiety, it can be joint pain, it can be digestive issues, it can be athletes, foot or fungal nail infection or thrush.

Pauline
But quite often with leaky gut, which is often the first thing that people start to, it's very, very common because of the types of food we eat and the fast food. We love the sugar, we love the convenience food. People will experience some signs of low level inflammation because the gut barriers aren't as integral as they should be. Does that make sense?

Sophie
Yeah. So essentially leaky gut is what it sounds like. Your gut is almost leaking bad bacteria and bits of food, but also, I presume, it's not absorbing as much of the nutrients from your food. Is that right?

Pauline
The nutrients tend to be absorbed when we have a really great stomach acidity. So if you have, say, PH, one to three is the ideal for the gut. At that acidity, the iron can be broken down. So, for example, if you ate spinach, it has a very strong cellulose cell wall, but the acidity can break that down, access your iron and help absorb it into the body. The same with protein breaking it down. The same with absorbing iron. As your stomach acidity becomes less acidic because of chronic stress, because of certain medications, because of age, all of these factors start to impact our stomach acidity. So we can become very nutrient depleted through lack of absorption. The other reason we become so depleted is because of our lifestyle. Now, magnesium is a key one, particularly for women. I always ask women about their lifestyle and diet if they present with any kind of insomnia, anxiety, cramping, constipation, because magnesium is whilst we might be eating plenty of it, we lose magnesium very readily when our blood sugars are really high. When we're inflamed, when we're stressed, we don't necessarily absorb as much of it as easily.

Pauline
So the nutrients need to be absorbed in the stomach, but they also need to be retained by the body. And if we're in this constant state of stress or inflammation or high blood sugars, then we're going to get certain nutrients being depleted at the same time. So we're trying to get more in and plug the leaks, if that makes sense.

Sophie
So, basically, if your gut microbiome and acidity and everything's not in some form of homeostasis, then you could be eating a great diet and think that you're eating really healthily and actually your body's not really absorbing all the nutrients that it needs. And so you're still feeling tired or anxious or whatever it might be.

Pauline
Absolutely. And that's quite common as well. People might be taking lots of supplements and thinking, well, it's not really doing anything, but they're not actually absorbing the nutrients from that supplement, or they're taking a supplement that's in the wrong compound and the body can't access it because it's not very bioavailable. So food is always the best source of nutrients. Supplements can be very, very helpful if they're targeted in the right kind of supplements. But you can't out supplement a bad diet, so getting your diet correct first. But stress and sleep also play havoc on the digestive system and even on the nervous system. So the nervous system will prioritise fleeing a tiger over digesting food. So we shunt blood away from the digestive system when we're in a constant state of stress. And this is why, when we're stressed, we have bowel changes, we have bloating, we start to see these digestive issues when we're in this state of stress, and when someone's in a constant state of stress, it hugely impacts their digestive system and their ability to absorb nutrients and process those nutrients. And it affects the gut microbiome as well.

Sophie
Yeah, I think people talk about there being a kind of brain gut connection and everybody has felt it themselves when they feel anxious or stressed and then you feel sick, or you might get a stomachache, or some people get stomach ulcers and stuff like that. But I'm just finding it so fascinating when you actually go into why that is and how integral your gut is to everything working correctly in your body. So I have a question that's mostly for me, but in fact, this whole interview is just for me. You can see yourself out and probably, to be fair, you might find this useful. Anyone that was sort of brought up in the if you grew up as a child with a really poor diet, is there any hope for you to have a healthy body and gut and everything, or is there such thing as irreparable damage?

Pauline
I think that's a great question, because a lot of people get to a point in their lives where they think, I've learned a lot now and I wish I could go back and make a few changes because I did not realise dot, dot, dot, dot, and I'm one of them. As a student, many, many years ago, I drink all the wrong things and have all the wrong lifestyle habits and you think, wow, I did not realise what I could have been doing. The good thing is our bodies are incredibly adaptable. They're very forgiving, particularly the liver. Now, the gut microbiome is really interesting. And it's interesting you talk about children of the even 90s, because really, back then, whilst we weren't necessarily as aware of nutrients and fish oils and essential fatty acids, our diets were quite simple. Meat, vegetables, we'd have a pudding and that'd be it till dinner time, so make sure you fill up and finish your plate, because we weren't in the generation of snacking and constantly grazing. Now, that is a real benefit to our human physiology. Our bodies don't like to be fed all the time because it has a big impact on our blood sugars.

Pauline
So the other thing I believe about children growing up in the potentially 90s, but less so, is how they embraced the outdoors more. I played in the mud a lot as a child. I'd make mud cakes and I'd make perfume from flower petals and all these.

Sophie
Different things and try to sell them to people. Oh, yes, start business.

Pauline
And I think that being outdoors is incredibly influential over your gut microbiome, having a pet in the house, playing in mud or with mud. So gardeners, for example, have a more robust microbiome because they're constantly turning up the soil and getting all these tiny little microbiome or microbes being inhaled and brought into the body.

Sophie
Really?

Pauline
So just going for a walk, being in the sea, swimming outdoors, these are all very easy wins for the gut. And you can see how they start to link with our mental health and the importance of being outside. And that's without even thinking about the daylight factor, how important daylight is for our mental well being as well. So the other side of it is how many antibiotics a child has has an influence. Diet is going to play its part, but antibiotics seem to play more of a part in terms of wiping out the microbiome. If you take it even a step further. Did you have a vaginal birth or a Caesarean section? Were you breastfed? These all influence your microbiome. So your question was more related around does your diet impact your future kind of gut health? You can influence your gut health on a daily basis. Literally. Changing your diet today will influence what your gut microbiome looks like tomorrow.

Sophie
Wow.

Pauline
So there's almost like a fingerprint of a microbiome. That's very influential from the type of birth you have, the breast milk, whether you were breastfed or not. The environment you grew up in, did you grow up in a forest versus a city? Did you have a pet at home? Who have you kissed throughout your life? What illnesses have you had? All these things influence your microbiome, but on a day to day basis, you can radically change it through increasing brightly coloured vegetables, your fermented foods, kimchi, sauerkraut, beet, cavas and kombuchas. All these amazing fermented foods and drinks that are now really readily available to us.

Sophie
Wow, that's music to my ears.

Giles
It's amazing, isn't it? Like you say that you can change it, you can start to make those things. But also, I was going to ask you, I guess there's not a set of rules for everybody. Like, we've all got different setups and stuff. And a thing I keep hearing about is blood diets. Now, I don't know if you know much about blood diets, this idea that your particular blood type might play a part in what you should be eating, inverted commas and how some if you've got type O, you should be eating more proteins, blah, blah, blah. I don't know how scientific it is, but is there a type of diet that a lot of us could be eating more certain food types we should be eating more in general to help with our absolutely.

Pauline
And you're absolutely right. There are variances with each person depending on I personally don't follow the blood diet or look into the blood diet as scientifically sound just because I don't know enough about it to comment on that. However, we definitely have genetic variances from person to person. Even men and women have different brains, we have different physiology, we have different hormones, we have different hormonal cycles, and so we have different nutritional needs, particularly with women, going through different stages of the menstrual cycle, when women are pregnant, when women are breastfeeding. So we do have very different nutritional needs at different stages of our lives. However, we could all do with a few more vegetables in our life. Fibre is incredibly important, it's very anti inflammatory, it's very important for keeping our bowels healthy and we're back to the bowels again. But really our bowels are an indication of what's going on in our body. For women, our menstrual cycle gives us a really good snapshot into how's my health doing right now. Our bowels are another way of looking at what's going on in my body and what's my body trying to tell me.

Pauline
So our bowel health, we want to be having one very good quality, healthy bowel movement a day. And if we're not, we need to be thinking, right, how do I change this situation? Because we do not want anything sat in the bowels for too long, because that's toxic waste that we're trying to eliminate and it can again with women, we can reabsorb oestrogen that's been metabolised and destined for the pan. And if it sits in the bowels too long, the bacteria untags it and allows it to be reabsorbed into the body, which is not good for our hormonal balance. So keeping our bowels or the detoxification pathways open, a healthy liver, regular bowel movements is very, very important and fibre is one of the core nutrients needed in order to help that happen.

Sophie
I have a question. I have literally been thinking about this for probably the last couple of years. Regularly at night, it keeps me awake when you eat something, say I was to eat some chips right now, how long before it comes out the other side?

Pauline
It's a good question. And it does vary from person to person. If you were to eat a piece of sweet corn and you don't eat any other sweet corn all week and you can look out for that sweet corn. It's actually a test, it's called the sweet corn test and it will tell you exactly how efficient you are. And they found that in certain tribes that still eat very congruently to our kind of primal needs, they will eat and within four or 5 hours, out it comes in our modern lives and eating habits. For some people it can be days. And that's not ideal.

Sophie
I just wondered because, you know, sometimes you eat something dodgy or like something doesn't agree with you and then you know about it. I always think, well, what was it that I ate? Was it something I ever eaten today? Or was it yesterday? Or was it something I ate last week?

Pauline
And that can be challenging because a lot of people don't associate always a sensitivity to a symptom they have two days later, you could have a headache two days after eating something that your body didn't agree with. So it is really challenging. And I think one of the things that would do us all a lot of good is to start to listen to our bodies a bit more and really start to understand the language that our body is talking to us. Rather than seeing these symptoms as an inconvenience, seeing them as, okay, my body needs a bit more support. Now, what might it need? Does it need a bit more water? Do I need to eat a few more veg? Do I need to have a bit more protein? Because often we'll crave, and that's, again, so common to crave sugar and to crave convenience foods. And it's not that our body needs that, but our brain is saying, I haven't had what I need yet. And it will keep telling you our brain is concerned with survival and reproduction. Those are the two things our brain cares about. And so it will keep telling you to do something until it gets what it needs.

Pauline
So in terms of survival, when it thinks that you're not getting what it needs, i. E. Essential fatty acids or enough amino acids, enough protein, it will say, keep eating. It's not saying to you, eat that nice piece of salmon. It's saying just eat. And you're like, okay, fine, there's a burger. I'll eat that. It doesn't satisfy you. And you're like, wow, I'm still hungry. My brain's telling me I'm still hungry. So when we revert back to eating whole foods and foods that are very nutrient dense, it's incredible how hunger levels settle, cravings settle and focus. And our mental well being just shifts up a gear. It completely changes.

Giles
Yeah, it's really interesting because having kind of gone more onto a sort of protein heavy diet away from carbohydrates, the idea around focus and brain function is actually incredible. Why is that? Why do proteins help us focus more?

Pauline
So you need protein for pretty much every tissue in the body. But the brain is the hungriest organ of our whole body. So the brain is approximately 3% in weight of the body, but takes about 25% in nutrient sorry, energy. So fuel. So it is a very hungry organ and it is demanding energy all the time. So if you're eating protein that usually has some form of healthy fat with it. Let's look at oily fish, for example. If you're having some mackerel, you're giving your brain all of a sudden it's getting the amino acids, the building blocks, to make the neurotransmitters that are needed for virtually everything going on in the brain. It's also providing the essential fatty acids which create that connection in the brain. Essential fatty acids like EPA and DHA are incredibly important for our mental wellbeing and the creating all of the membranes. They form the membranes of all the cells in the body. But the brain particularly needs those EPA and DHA for mental well being, for mood, for focus, for memory. The brain is actually about 80% fat. And so if you're not giving it the fats it needs, it starts to tell you.

Pauline
And it starts to tell you by brain fog and confusion and low mood and anxiety, anxiousness. And then when you start giving your brain what it needs, like just dietary wise, it settles the brain down and the brain could start to focus and feel like, okay, I can sleep now. And if you think about the importance of sleep, if you're not sleeping, you wake up even more anxious, your mood is even worse. Then you turn to those foods, like the sugary foods, the convenience food, maybe the caffeine, to wake you up. Not that I'm dissing caffeine because there are some great health benefits to caffeine, but we turn to foods to sort of keep us going when actually what the body truly needs is restorative, deep sleep. And that's the first thing, even as a nutritionist, it's the first thing I start with people is sleep.

Sophie
And so in terms of protein, obviously we've got this whole it seems like people are struggling a little bit because 1 minute you get told you have to be a vegan or the best diet is Mediterranean or just eat meat. Could you speak on that a little bit? And where are the best places to get protein from? And particularly if you're not eating meat or animal products, is it possible to get enough protein out of a vegan diet?

Pauline
Okay, so vegan is challenging. If you're a vegetarian, absolutely. You can still get lots of protein and eggs and cheese, feta, goats, cheese, milk. You can absolutely have adequate protein from a vegetarian diet. Vegan diets, they are much more challenging. You need to supplement if you're a vegan because you won't get certain key nutrients like your B Twelve. You'll often be low in zinc, vitamin A, and I don't mean the beta carotenes from vegetables, I mean the preformed vitamin A that you would find in liver. So it's more challenging. And I understand the ethical reasons why vegans might become vegans. But from a human health perspective, we struggle to get adequate protein without eating certain animal products. Fish is a great source of protein. Chicken is a superior source of protein and red meat. So I feel with food and Planetary Health we need to be looking at eating less meat, but better meat. So be more selective about where you're getting your meat and how it's farmed. Because truly, if our argument is we are destroying the planet, well, it's about the way we're farming that's destroying the planet, not what we're farming. Because we can quite easily destroy the planet with soy farming and all of these other crops.

Pauline
We have to look at the planet as an ecosystem in itself and create balance when it comes to farming. And as soon as we start to industrialise food like the vegan burgers and the fake meats, we are just replacing one problem with another. There is inherently a lot of good in having animals roaming and grazing. It sequesters a great deal of carbon from the environment. And as grass is growing, when animals are grazing and the grass is growing, that in itself is drawing carbon into the soil. Tilling is very bad for the environment. That releases a lot of this carbon back into the environment. And so whatever farming processes we're using, that's what we must look at. Regenerative farming is the way forward for looking after human and planetary health. What we grow from that really comes down to personal choice. But I believe we always need a balance and if someone's trying to make a decision based on human health and planetary health, I would say look at how a food's being produced and try and buy the best you can from the best producers and eat less of it. So we eat meat, but we eat meat maybe twice a week as opposed to every day, and we eat lots of vegetables, and eggs are a huge staple in our household, particularly for the kids, I guess.

Sophie
Yeah, I'm thinking just from my own personal perspective, because I'm sort of a conservationist in my other job and I've done all the diets and have tried to do the best for my body and the best for the planet and in some way they're kind of interlinked, I think. And I realised, because I've been a vegan and sometimes for stretches of time, I still am not on purpose, it's just the way that it happens. But I definitely resorted at times to those like veggie sausages, veggie burgers, just vegan junk, basically. And I realised that actually that's not so great for the environment either. And so now I personally have found a company that it's a bit like a food delivery service that delivers all small farm organic food. And there's meat, you can order meat if you want, but you don't have to, or you can order fish. And it is literally only the stuff you can buy on small organic family run farms. Like they have a baker with organic bread and lots of vegetables and eggs and even oat milk and stuff like that. And that has possibly been the best diet that I have personally found for my body, but also for the environment.

Sophie
And my conscience feels better, all my vitals are back up and so, yeah, if there's options for that, it's a little bit more expensive. But honestly, probably not that much more expensive because I eat everything that I get, I don't waste anything. Do you find that people tend to use sort of money and convenience and people have got busy schedules and work and stuff? Do you find that people sort of use that as a bit of an excuse to not do that?

Pauline
I think often people we're in the habit of convenience and snacking and overeating so much that I find. The people I work with, once, they make this shift where they eat less because they're eating in a window and then they crave less and they end up they become conscious consumers, they buy the things that they love, that their body loves, and they've ditched the junk. So from a cost analysis perspective, it probably works out about the same because all of those little Saturday treats and those impulsive buys have gone and they're much more focused on right. I'm going to get my daily sauerkraut in. I'm having my freezers full of cuts of meat that I've bought, that I found from my local butcher, that I've not just picked a certain meal that's convenient for me. But people start falling in love with food in the same way that they see the impact it's having on their body and it becomes more of a form of self respect, the way they're eating. So they become the gatekeeper to what's going into their body. And so the shift from, oh, I love spending money on this, starts to shift around to, actually, this is too important, I want to buy good meat now, or, I want to buy my organic vegetables from my local farmer.

Pauline
And then after that, they start to realise, well, actually, I'm not spending that much more because I've stopped spending on the things that I was buying. That wasn't actually making me happy, but I thought it was. I was getting that momentary happiness or pleasure from it, but it fast disappeared.

Sophie
Definitely. Could you speak on probiotics prebiotics? What are they? Should we be taking them? Is it similar to supplements where if you're taking them but you're not doing other things and they don't really work?

Pauline
Yeah, it's a fascinating subject. So prebiotics are the food that the bacteria feed on. So a very cost effective way of consuming prebiotics is eating sauerkraut. And often when I talk about sauerkraut, people slightly turn their nose up and go, oh, I've had that as a child and it was awful. But the sauerkrauts you can get now are phenomenal. You can get some incredible small producers making the most interesting sauerkrauts from red cabbage, white cabbage, even beetroot, carrot, cauliflower, like cauliflower, fermented cauliflowers. So there's a vast range now as Gut Health with kimchi, bee kimchi. Fantastic. Yes. So all I would say is, again, go for quality. And sauerkraut is not an expensive product, but if you buy it from a supermarket, it should always be in the fridge. If it's on the shelf, it won't have the live bacteria in it. So I always encourage people to go to your local health food shop or your local deli and see what they have on offer, because they'll often have the local producers who are making these incredible seaweed sauerkrauts and just turmeric and ginger. And when you add these really interesting spices and botanicals to a fermented mix, it enhances the bioavailability of the goodness within the turmeric, so the curcumin becomes more bioavailable, the allison in the garlic becomes more bioavailable.

Pauline
So sauerkraut is essentially your prebiotic and your probiotic. It's got the semidigested cabbage, which sounds really appealing, doesn't it? But it's already been broken down by the bacteria, so it's very easy to digest. And then that fibre in itself serves as a food source. So you're introducing the bacteria, but then the bacteria have something to thrive on. They've got that predigested cabage in which to feed upon. So, yes, you can very easily introduce prebiotics and probiotics in one in a form of sauerkraut. But there are many other foods that serve as a prebiotic, like your regular vegetables, they are a source of fibre for the probiotics to feed on. If you're eating an organic carrot and you don't scrub the life out of it, those little grooves of a carrot that look a little bit brown and grimy, they're going to be packed with probiotics. So eating some nice root vegetables, grating them up into a slaw, that's going to give you your probiotics and your prebiotics. Now, is there benefit in taking capsules of probiotics? There can be, absolutely. And again, it comes down to the quality of the product and the producer. But there are many products in that manner that I use for people who are taking, for example, a course of antibiotics.

Pauline
And during that course, 2 hours after the antibiotic, they might take a regenerative probiotic to support the beneficial gut bacteria. There's a condition called SIBO, which is small intestinal bacteria overgrowth. And if someone has that, then using a targeted probiotic can help to get the good bacteria recolonized and to kill off the bad bacteria. So there are absolutely cases for probiotics as certain ways of supporting certain conditions, but for everyday use, a good kimchi or a sauerkraut, your kombuchas and apple cider vinegars, all of these great ways of bringing bacteria, beneficial bacteria, into our day to day lives is really accessible to people.

Sophie
Interesting. I didn't know that.

Giles
Okay, you got to get some sauerkraut.

Sophie
Yeah, I quite like Sauerkraut.

Pauline
Yeah.

Giles
I want to talk about intermittent fasting because we did sort of touch a little bit on you talking about like, maybe people starting to realise they don't have to be eating constantly. And it's interesting about the little and often thing because people say, oh, if you want to lose weight, you should eat little and often because it's going to get your metabolism going. Sounds like an old wife's tale, really, but yet I intermittent fast. I generally don't eat a breakfast or lunch. I normally have an evening meal and then the cycle starts again and I've seen huge benefits from it. Not only like with regards to weight loss, but focus again. What is it about intermittent fasting that's so beneficial?

Pauline
So we tend to live in a world where we're constantly eating. We'll have our breakfast and we'll have our mid morning snack lunch afternoon snack, dinner, evening snack. And this impacts our blood sugars. It has an impact, particularly the types of food we eat. We are very carb heavy consumers. Our modern lives mean we like cereal and toast for breakfast, maybe an oat bar or a croissant midmorning panini crisps at lunch. We tend to consume foods that give our blood sugars a spike. And the consequence of this is, with every blood sugar spike, the pancreas has to produce insulin to help the body mop that blood sugar up and shunt it somewhere into our cells to use as energy into the liver to store as glycogen or to be converted into fat. So we can find ourselves in a position where we get away with it. Your 20s often we're very busy and we're on the go all the time and we can essentially get away with grazing all the time and eating lots of carb heavy foods. But there gets a point in life when you start to notice you're becoming more sluggish, you're becoming more tired, you're not sleeping so well, you're craving foods, and your hunger levels are just always there.

Pauline
You never seem to feel very satisfied. So at this point, you can start to find yourself becoming insulin resistant. So the blood sugars have been spiked for so long, all these continuous blood spikes have meant blood sugar spikes have meant that the insulin is trying its hardest to constantly mop up the blood sugars. So it's knocking on the door of the cell saying, come on, let this blood sugar in, we have to get rid of it. High blood sugars are toxic for the body, but after a while the cells are like, look, I'm done listening to you, I'm not taking this sugar in anymore. So it essentially puts its hands over his ears and goes, no. So these blood sugars are starting to rise. And so the pancreas is like, well, I better produce more insulin to push that door even harder to try and get the sugar in. So over time, our cells are not getting the adequate fuel that they need, particularly our brain cells. And that's when we start to get that brain fog or our mood starts to become altered. But we feel constantly hungry because we're not getting the fuel into the cells.

Pauline
Blood sugars are starting to go up. So the body's desperately trying to convert that into fat because our glycogen stores are full. So we start to find we're putting on more weight for women. We can start to get major hormonal imbalances and we're hungry all the time and we're like, Why am I hungry? I'm always eating stuff, but I'm hungry and I'm tired. So when you intermittently fast, particularly if you're eating in that window of eating things that don't really spike your blood sugars, let's say you stop eating at 05:00 or 06:00 after, say, two to 3 hours, your blood sugars will start to come down and level. At that point, the body still needs fuel, but rather than it having another Oat bar or hoik of blood sugars coming back in, it says, okay, well, I'm not getting my primary source of fuel that I've been living off for the last ten years. I'm going to use my secondary source of fuel. And this is where we tap into our primal, our ancestral health. This is where we look at us as humans having this evolutionary advantage that we can burn two forms of fuel.

Pauline
We can burn fat for fuel, we can burn sugar for fuel glucose, but we tend to be Olympic sugar burners. We rarely get into that fat burning because we're constantly our blood sugars are too high. Fat burning kicks in when the blood sugars are level, and we're not getting that extra blood sugar in. So the body says, okay, well, it's not coming. I'll feed myself from the stores I already have now, as hunter gatherers, that would have allowed us to go days without consuming anything. As we're roaming and looking for food, we've essentially stored all of this good food on us by way of fat, and our body breaks down. The fat provides us with ketones, which is instant fuel for the brain. And it's actually incredibly important to have that source of fuel for the brain, because as you become insulin resistant in the brain, the glucose doesn't get transported as readily. Ketones don't need to be transported in the brain. They will just push themselves in. And so you almost get this clarity. You may have experienced it yourself, Giles, when you started your intermittent fasting, you get this clarity in your mind and you're like, wow, I feel like my brain's been switched up a gear, and all of a sudden I can focus for longer.

Pauline
I don't have that slump that often you get after eating a heavy, that Sunday lunch feeling where you're like, I'm just going to snooze for a few hours. You don't get that because your blood sugars are staying. You'll get a bump depending on what you're eating, some vegetables and some fish or meat, you'll get a little bump, but you won't get that spike that you get with particularly very sweetened processed foods. And then the other add on with those high blood sugar spikes is you get an incredible rush of dopamine. The higher the blood sugar spike, the higher the dopamine spike. And so not only then do you get this high dopamine spike. Your body says, wow, that felt good. Because dopamine, it's an association neurotransmitter, so it tells the body, remember, that felt good. And that, again would have been one of our evolutionary advantages, eating some really sweet berries. Remember these berries? Here's where they are, these taste good. Come back next year. Well, we're getting that every second. We walk into the garage and see the chocolate bars at the counter when we walk into a supermarket and we smell the bread.

Pauline
Our brain's like, Remember, that tastes really good, you want to get that in you now. And so we have the fight of the dopamine going on and then we have this blood sugar situation where our cells are literally screaming out for fuel because we've become so insulin resistant and we're not accessing this amazing reserve of fat that we can burn for fuel.

Sophie
Wow, that's really interesting. I'm just thinking back now to times when maybe when I was a bit younger and I wouldn't eat for like half an hour to an hour, and I'd be like, shaky, oh, I've got low blood sugar, I need some food.

Giles
A miles bar quick.

Pauline
Yeah.

Sophie
What sort of schedule? Is that the right word for a fast? Would you recommend is there like a specific routine that people can get into which is sort of useful in terms of our busy schedules and our lives and stuff?

Pauline
Yes. Sophie, I just want to pick up on what you said there about you felt shaky and weak when we're used to eating sugar regularly or having snack foods regularly. It is a bit of a shock to the body when we don't eat regularly and it's one of the signs that we are sugar burners that we need. I was the same. I couldn't leave the house without food in my handbag because I'd be like, I'll feel dizzy and faint if I don't have something in my bag. It was almost like a panic thing. I need to have food around me all the time and I would get these dizzy spells and these hangry spells and I thought, this can't be right. And so you need to almost do this gradual shift at that stage. And you think, okay, well, I don't want to start feeling unwell or weak or hangry. So you want to make sure when you have your breakfast, you're getting lots of protein eggs or avocados and tomatoes with eggs. Something really hearty. The same with your lunch. I tend to eat more in the beginning and lunchtime of the day and then a little bit in the evening.

Pauline
But even if you started as just having your breakfast, lunch and dinner and cutting off and saying, right, kitchen's closed, it's 06:00, that's it. Herbal tea is fine, and your tonic, apple cider vinegar, sparkling water, fine. But really trying to find a time that works for you and saying, okay, my fast is going to start at six and I'm going to break my fast at 08:00 the next morning. That's a really good window to start to work with. And people sleep better by not eating or having that window leading up to bed. They find they wake up less hungry. And if you're sleeping better, your blood sugars are more regulated in the morning. If you've had poor sleep, you're more likely to be impacted by, let's say you had some oatmeal or some porridge in the morning. And it affects your blood sugars somewhat. If you've had a poor night's sleep, it can affect them a lot more. So we're less glucose tolerant if we've had a bad night's sleep. And the other thing I just want to make a point on with blood sugars, people are affected by different foods. You can get a continuous glucose monitor, which really looks at what foods affect you.

Pauline
But if we introduce fibre to our meal, that blunts the blood sugar spike of any food. So let's say you had a pizza and you're out with friends and you don't want to be the one saying, oh, it's too many carbs in that pizza. If you had a big plate of salad and had it with your pizza, it's going to significantly reduce the impact on your blood sugars than if you just had a pizza. That's amazing.

Sophie
So that's why I guess it's okay to eat fruit, because you've got the fibre in the fruit that helps you. But if you're juicing and you're drinking lots of fruit juice, it doesn't have fibre. 

Pauline
Lots of sugar. Absolutely. There's so many great benefits to things like blueberries and raspberries and strawberries and blackberries. So fruit has many health benefits, particularly vitamin C and polyphenols. But you're absolutely right, if we eat lots of juiced fruits, it can be really impactful for the liver and it can send our blood sugars sky high. So the fibre helps slow down the sugar release and having so even if you had a little side salad with your lunch or your dinner every day and ate it first, it's going to have a beneficial impact on your blood sugars. And then the next thing you can do is go for a walk straight after a meal, which, again, significantly blunts the blood sugars. Those two strategies alone, people can start to find they have more energy, they're reducing their chronic illness risk, because the longer and more prolonged we have these blood sugar spikes for, the more likely we are to develop insulin resistance, which leads to cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure. For women, we're particularly at risk of Alzheimer's, and high blood sugars has a very detrimental effect on our brain health. For men also. Obviously, dementia is a risk for all of us, but because of the link with Oestrogen, women are more at risk of Alzheimer's.

Pauline
So all of these things we do now, our choices today influence our tomorrows. So when we start building this pathway of good health habits, it's not about radically changing everything in one go. Just having a side salad with your meal, stopping eating at six, going for a walk after you've eaten, these all build up and make a big difference. And in a month's time you're like, wow, I feel so much better now. I think I might start going for a walk twice a day, or I might go to that class I've been thinking of doing. It becomes this gradual change that sticks. Rather than I did that for a week, it didn't work. I'm going back to what I've always done.

Sophie
And just for the apathetic out there, or people like me who have in the past had the worst diets or eaten loads of sugar, it's changeable. Your body can recover from that. Right. It's not like if you've had a childhood or your teen years where you've eaten so much sugar and junk and your blood sugar spikes have been through the roof, it's okay, you're not definitely going to get cancer or Alzheimer's or anything like that. There's still time to absolutely.

Pauline
As I said earlier, the body is very, very forgiving. The area that tends to be most affected by high sugar and not such great diets is the liver. The liver accumulates lots of fat that's converted from these excessive amounts of sugar we eat, and it's called nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. And sadly, even children are starting to show signs of that now, and it's these highly sweetened foods and it's just everywhere. It's really challenging as a parent to even shield your children from that. But the liver is just an amazing organ. It will regenerate if you give it just some care and attention. Fasting is wonderful for the liver. So as you start fasting the liver, it literally is going to start sucking out these mosaic pockets of fat. It's going to help the liver to recover. It gives it a break from doing the work it's having to do. Eggs are fantastic for the liver because they're rich in choline, which supports the liver bitters. So your rocket and beetroot tops, all these kind of bitter foods, they're again really supportive of the liver. So yes, absolutely. You can do so much to alter years of bad habits and years of poor food choices.

Pauline 
And I've been there myself, I think we've all been there because we grow up not really understanding the implications of lots of sweet foods, and particularly when you I grew up in a house where meat and veg were pretty standard, and then you move away and you think, I get to make my own choices now. And so you turn to the sweets and the easy to prepare meals and you don't feel so great, but you kind of just get on with it. And then it gets to a point, as it did with me, where I thought, wow, this is really affecting me now. And as you have Sophie, you go down this learning journey and you think, wow, I had no idea I was doing this to myself. But there's so much value in that as well, because then you can I mean, you're at an age where literally you're so young that you can impact the rest of your life. And I think it's such a gift to have this knowledge at your age versus a lot of the people I work with, and even in their seventy s and eighty s. They can make great changes, but they wish that they'd known in their 20s, their thirties.

Sophie
Oh, yeah, definitely.

Sophie
Also, one last thing, just because I'm thinking we touched on sort of how these diets can help with sort of like weight loss and metabolism and stuff like that, just for people that are listening that have a fast metabolism like me, and I know sometimes men as well like to be like big and buff. Will doing this? Will changing your diet in this way? Because for me personally, I've always been afraid of sort of fasting or not eating enough because I have a ridiculously fast metabolism and then I lose weight very, very quickly. Could you speak on that a little bit? Is that something that's going to affect your metabolism? And are you going to lose weight if you're already that way inclined, or could this help to stabilise your metabolism a little bit?

Pauline
So it's interesting, when we fast, you actually, particularly women, get a really big spike in something called growth hormone, which really helps you to build muscle. And that's very important from your 30s onwards, because we start to lose growth hormone from that point onwards, and muscle is the second biggest user of energy. We spoke about the brain earlier. Your muscles mop up lots and lots of blood sugar, so as soon as we start losing muscle mass, we have even more blood sugar now to mop up and get turned into fat. So as a female fasting, from, say, six onwards, you're going to get a boosting growth hormone, which is going to support muscle building. You just must make sure you eat adequate amounts of protein, healthy fats, your avocados, olives, drizzling, olive oil, over things, eating things like feta or goats cheese, salmon nuts are very calorific, so you can definitely make sure you're getting plenty of your calorific foods in and monitor that. But I work with a lot of Pts, and particularly females who are ultra runners, and they need lots of food, but they will still cut off their eating at a certain point in the evening because of the metabolic benefits, because of the clarity of thought, the hormonal benefits.

Pauline
They just need to fuel themselves with more in the day.

Sophie
Okay?

Pauline
And the same would go for men? Absolutely. Eating more steak and eggs and high protein foods, but also getting in those calorific like a couple of avocados, your bags of nuts. There's lots of ways of really getting your food in without it impacting your blood sugars and without it having that negative effect of just eating too late at night or eating continuously throughout the day and grazing. You're literally just bringing what you would eat usually and try and fitting it into a window that works for you and having that rest period for the digestive system. And interestingly, as you're fasting, it has this really beneficial impact on your gut microbiome as well. It's not actually selective. It will kill off part of the microbiome. But then when you're eating foods that are rich in beneficial bacteria, it helps to reintroduce the good, and then they can proliferate and outcrowd the bad.

Sophie
That's amazing. That's so interesting, isn't it?

Giles
I mean, we could talk for hours, honestly, but we haven't got hours, unfortunately. Where can people find you, Pauline, on social media, what's your handle?

Pauline
My handle is @paulinejcox for my personal Instagram, @paulinejcox for my TikTok too, and then @sowandarrow is one of my businesses that we're a low carb specialist, so we specialise in metabolic foods that promote good health. But, yes, that's where people can find.

Giles
And your book, what's the title and where can people get it?

Pauline
The next book is called Hungry Woman, and it'll be available in all major bookshops, but they'll be able to find it on Amazon and in Waterstones. You can buy the bundle from the link below:

Giles
Well, people should definitely go and check it out.

Sophie
Yeah. I've got one of your books. Obviously not this new one, but is it the Tribal?

Pauline
Primal living.

Sophie
Primal. That's it.

Pauline
Yeah. Similar, though. Primal living in a modern world. So how we can live in this modern world, but use our ancient wisdom and use technology. We have amazing technology. Use that to understand ourselves better, but still stick with the principles that our body needs to thrive.

Sophie
Yeah. Amazing. I feel like everybody should buy your books and go down this journey of discovery. Discovery, yeah. And improvement. It's just so important. It's so fascinating. So yeah. Thank you so much.

Pauline
Thank you guys. Thank you for having me.

Outro

Sophie
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