Leading Nutritional Scientist: Seed Oils Are Not Bad For You! Eating This Twice A Day Will Help Menopause! The Alarming Link Between Chewing & Belly Fat!

**Dr Sarah Berry** (0:00)
If you go on social media, cedars are toxic, cedars are going to give you Alzheimer's, cedars are going to give you cancer. But I've done lots of research, and there is absolutely no evidence to show cedars are harmful. Actually, they're beneficial for our health. And I'll come back to that. But the problem is that there is so much misinformation out there about what we eat, how we eat, and how it affects our health.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:22)
So let's go into all of that. Dr. Sarah Berry is a renowned nutrition scientist and professor. With over 20 years of research, her work has reshaped how we think about food, metabolism, and gut health. Dr. Sarah Berry, we have a lot to get through.

**Dr Sarah Berry** (0:35)
Yes.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:35)
So let's start with the food matrix.

**Dr Sarah Berry** (0:37)
That's so important because you can have two foods with identical labeling, same nutrients and calorie value, but can have entirely different impacts in terms of how you metabolize our food and how it impacts downstream health effects depending on how that food has been processed. Now, we also know the timing of when we eat is really important. For example, we found that snacking after nine o'clock was associated with unfavorable health outcomes, the worst kind of fat around your belly, for example. This was even if you were snacking on healthy snacks.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:03)
Really?

**Dr Sarah Berry** (1:04)
And we also know, on average, if you change the speed in which you eat your food by 20%, you reduce your calorie intake by about 15%. But where it gets really interesting is there's evidence to show if you chew your food 40 times versus 15 times, it can result in... And then there's the menopause. We've conducted lots of research. And one of the most exciting things is that there is principles which can reduce symptoms by about 35%.
And so they are...

**Steven Bartlett** (1:31)
This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favour before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. Dr. Sarah Berry, can you give me a little bit of an overview over what you spent the last 25 years of your career focusing on and understanding?

**Dr Sarah Berry** (2:11)
Yeah, so I've spent 25 years starting out in quite a specific area, looking at how diet impacts our cardiometabolic health. So by this, I mean lots of factors related to cardiovascular disease, like type 2 diabetes, our cholesterol, our blood pressure, our inflammation. And then more recently, I've been looking at how actually we piece together all the complexity of who we are, what we eat, how we eat, into how that actually impacts how we respond to food and the helpfulness of a food. Most of my work's been done through running clinical trials. So randomized control clinical trials where I recruit various people, get them to eat various things, do loads and loads of different measurements and look at how a food or a nutrient or a diet might impact a particular health outcome.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:58)
And how many of these individual pieces of our sort of health and lifestyle are you trying to piece together to form this picture? What are those pieces?

**Dr Sarah Berry** (3:08)
The key pieces are who you are. So it's one of the key pieces. So by that I mean your genetics, your microbiome, your age, your sex, your menopause status, all of those kind of things. The other is the food that you eat. And when we think about food, we need to think about it beyond the traditional way that we thought about food in terms of nutrients, you know, back pack labelling, fat, protein, fibre, carbohydrate. But actually thinking about food in terms of the fact that on average, each food has 70,000 different chemicals and these are contained within a very complex food structure, which we call food matrix that modulates the impact that those chemicals and nutrients have. So that's the second thing that we need to think about. So we've got who you are, the food that you're eating, but the complexity of that food, and then how you eat your food. And by how you eat your food, I'm thinking about your lifestyle. I'm thinking about, are you jet lagged? How much sleep did you have last night? You know, what's the order in which you're eating your food within a meal or over the day? How stressed are you feeling? When did you do physical activity?