On The Nutrition Couch this episode-
- We take a look at the "baked oats" TikTok trend;
- Our 'Client Case Study of the Week' is all about the pros and cons of intermittent fasting;
- Our 'Supermarket Product of the Week' is a new plant based frozen meal option; and
- We answer our listener questions about diet soft drinks; are they ok to drink and how many is too many?
So sit back, relax and enjoy this week’s episode!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Leanne Ward and I'm Susy Burrow and welcome
to the Nutrition Couch, a weekly podcast from two of
austrays leading dieticians, bringing you everything that is new in
the world of nutrition, diets and good food from the
Nutrition Couch. Today, we're chatting about another viral TikTok trend,
the baked oats, and in our clinic, our clients are
asking us about the pros and cons of intimate fasting.
(00:24):
Now to our most popular segment, the supermarket product of
the Week, we discuss a new plant based frozen meal option,
and our final segment with our listener question is all
about diet soft tricks. Can we drink them? And are
they actually good for us? And how many drinks is
too many? The first Susy, how's your week been going?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
My week has been pretty good.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
We're at the end of school holidays now, so I'm
sure many parents are at the end of their tether
with the children.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
I've really tried to keep as.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Active as I can with the kids, but one thing
that tends to go out the window when I am
doing a lot more of my own childcare is my
own activity. Because my kids are too young to come
for a rhin or come for a walk. So I
sort of am really looking forward to things getting back
to normal and packing the school lunchboxes and putting those
posts up, but getting back into my own exercise regime.
And it's always a good reminder, I think to us
(01:12):
as clinicians about the challenges busy people have when it
comes to balancing their own nutrition and their exercise. And
I think it's not that people don't want to eat
well or exercise, it's just that the family demands and
work demands can be so great. So rest assured. I'm very,
very aware that it's a juggle for all of us
and we do the best we can with what we
(01:33):
can at the time. And I for one, am really
looking forward to getting out there and pounding the pavement
when the kids are back to school. So bring it
on the end of the school holidays, definitely.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
And then this week, Susie, what is trending in the media.
It's another TikTok trend And now we've done a few
TikTok trends in the podcast. You know, I'm all for
TikTok trends. There's almost bakedotes, Susie, how can we not
talk about bakedotes. They look freakin delicious, but how healthy
are they? Actually?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
This is an ongoing issue, I think because whenever we
put on our social media any kind of baked product,
whether it's muffins or cookies or in this instance, oats
and TikTok, and I'm paying a lot more attention to TikTok,
and what's going on there is that people go crazy
for it. We love sweet treats, we love perceived healthy baking,
and so when this came up on my media feeders
(02:22):
and news item, I clicked very quickly and of course
was lured in by the gorgeous photos of skillets, you know,
with chocolates and maple syrup and banana and runny peanut butter. Like,
I completely understand why it's so popular, because it's really
our love of food and things that not only taste
grape but are visually beautiful. And of course we can
(02:43):
curate baked oats, in particular in pans to look so
gorgeous on the breakfast table. So I, like, everyone loves
a little bit of food porn, and I do like it.
But you know, when we put our nutrition hats on,
you know, a closer look at the ingredient list can
reveal that they can be really packed full of fats, sugars,
and as a reference point, if you make yourself a
(03:03):
bircher bowl or an oat bowl or in this case,
the baked oats and you as a few ingredients. You
put in some oats, You might put some yogurt base
or a little bit of milk to blend it. You
might then put some nutspread. You might put a few
chop bits to make it look pretty. You might then
add a maple syrup and then banana like you could
be looking at sixty to eighty grams of carbohydrate in
(03:24):
a single serve, not the whole tray, just a single
serve or a small bowl, which would be pretty close
to what some people need for their entire day. So
the issue with these kind of products is when we
super layer all of the ingredients, you get a super
layered calorie effect, and for most of us, we're often
not burning it off. So just be mindful. These do
(03:44):
tend to really be treats as opposed to daily foods.
And if you make it for a beautiful Instagram picture
or for your TikTok, give it away because very few
of us will be burning off that amount of calories
and carbohydrates in many of them, but it's not lost
on me.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I think they're as well.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
But a whole skillet of you know, chocchip oats. Let
a reminder, Do we regularly eat chocchips for breakfast? Probably not?
Do we regularly encourage chocolate for breakfast? Probably not. That's
wiba be the first indication that maybe these are a
bit more of the food porn side of things and
the health side of things. But I have made my
own healthy versions of these, Susie, and I would say
that they're a lot more macro friendly than the trending
(04:23):
ones you've seen on TikTok, where I just use whole
grain rolled oats, I use some skim milk, I use
either banana or eggs to bind it, and then some
fresh berries inside it, and then I bake that up.
I slice it up pretty calorie controlled, around sort of
three fifty calories per slice, and then I'll serve that
with some high protein yogurt, so I'm getting in and
maybe some cheer seas inside that as well to help
bind the oats. I'm getting in some healthy bats and fibers,
(04:43):
some carbs, and some protein compared to I think a
lot of the recipes onliner oats, milk, honey or maple syrup,
they've got choc tips in there. They're then slitherered in
maple syrup, or there's ice cream on top and there's
more chocolate on top. I've even seen variety Susie where
they have this hard chocolate shell, so they're like chocolate
shell baked oats. So they melt down chocolate plus coconut
oil together, they melt it, they pour it over the
(05:05):
top of the baked oats, they put it in the freezer,
and it creates this hard chocolate shell that then you
smash your spoon through like it looks amazing, but at
the end of the day, it's probably more of a
dessert than it is a really nourishing breakfast option.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Well, when I just put it in the search engine,
the first thing that came up was whether it was
cake or not. So definitely it assumes the profile more
of cake, and think of that with your portions. But
again I couldn't have said it better myself. If I
was adjusting it to be a bit healthier, I would
probably opt for berries which you can get frozen at
at a good cost price point at the moment to
help lower the carbohydrate content a little bit. There is
(05:40):
an increasing range of lower sugar or syrups that of
using a sweetener instead of sugar itself. So I know
maple syrup, you can find one with no actual sugar
in it, which makes it a much lighter option. And
you know with the chop bits you can place three
or four or five to present the bowl or the
baked tray looking beautiful. You don't have to pour the
packet in, which of cause is the temptation. So I
(06:03):
would say it's all about portion control or doing it
for a special occasion, And of course we love to
see beautiful food, but there's always ways we can help
the fight a little bit, and portion control is one
of the key things in using the lower sugar syrups
and lower sugar fruits will instantly reduce the calorie load
of those more indulgent baked oats trays instantly.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Absolutely, And I don't think anybody really unless you're an
iron man, needs an entire skillet of baked oas for breakfast.
So I think just what your portion saus is on
those things. I prefer to bake them in almost like
a lasagna dishoesy, and then I put them into like
six slices. That's sort of my preference, and then I
get sort of some meal prep for breakfast for the week,
and I can freeze a few portions as well. I
think just making it in a one pan skillet. I
know skillet's are very American things, so maybe for our
(06:43):
Aussie listeners, it's really those like what would you call it,
like a deep.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
It's like a heavy pann. I look like a la
croussoe pan. It's that sort of heavy one. And in America,
you right, and they tend to be really black and individual.
But I like to shut them. I like to serve
them in ramakans. You get like the little ramicans you'd
put on a serving tray. And I think that's another
way of doing it as a portion control for a
special occasion, or if you did a healthy version, just
(07:07):
keeping your portions because I find and actually what we
know from the behavioral science is what we serve or
what our food comes in, is what we will eat
their the portions. So if you prepare a whole skillet
or a whole pan, you will eat it, whether it's
going back and having an extra spoon here or there,
All the portions that you serve are bigger, So it
really is limiting portions in any way you can, because
human beings are programmed to eat what food is readily
(07:28):
available in front of them.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Absolutely, and just think about bakedotes. If you're using oats
and milk and maple syrup and bananas and then adding
chocolate chips into there, you've got an enormous load of
carbohydrate going in first thing in the morning. If you're
not someone that's very active or hasn't done a lot
of exercise in the morning, that huge load of carbohydrate
probably isn't going to be burnt off very well. It
could cause a big energy slumple more sugar craving throughout
(07:51):
the day. So my recommendation for the baked does is
always to serve them with some protein, so whether that's
some low fat cottage cheese or some high protein yogurt,
just to help the digest not that carbohydrate to slow
down a little bit. When we serve things with protein
or fiber, we can actually slow the digestion of the carbohydrate.
So my preference is to always serve some sort of
baked dose with some high protein yoga or another protein
(08:11):
source to really just optimize I guess the macronutrient profile
in that meal.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
And if you're a cottage cheese lover, if my clients
come and tell me they love.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Cottage cheese, I'm so happy because I can use that
in so many foods. And that's a perfect example. There's
also Quark, which is that sort of Scandinavian European really
tart yoga, which again is really really high in protein
and works really well. Or as we spoke about on
the podcast a few back, there's a growing range of
high protein Greek yogurts, which is fantastic. So that is
(08:41):
everything that we know on the TikTok baked oats. But
another thing we wanted to really chat about it's come
up time and time again, and we've been getting a
lot of questions on it online is about fasting. And
I guess when I trained more than twenty years ago,
we had never heard of fasting, not in a positive
way anyway. And of course the work of doctor Michael
Mosley a few years back in the five and two diets,
(09:03):
or the complete shift in mindset around quite severe calorie
restriction to induce some metabolic changes and support weight loss
and positive metabolic change over time. And now it's become
the norm for clients to come in and have tried
fasting intermittent fasting programs. The common ones, of course, are
as I've just mentioned the five and two, where you
(09:23):
have two nonconsecutive especially low calorie days five or six
hundred calories, and that appears to have some metabolic benefits
and secondary benefits based on weight loss.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
And then that what I call.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
The bustardized version, which is the sixteen eight, which is
where you have an extended period of time without eating,
which again appears to have some benefits when it comes
to resetting some of those hormones. There's definitely a number
of pros and cons that we can look at, and
I think it's a really good time for us to
discuss it in general, because I know a lot of
you will have questions about it. Who it's right for,
how often we should do it, how long we should
(09:56):
do it.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
For, should we be doing it at all? So? What
are your experience, what are your thoughts on it?
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Yeah, so let's maybe start with first, who it's not
for so, I would say anyone who does a really
heavy training load, like professional athletes or someone even if
you're training twice a day, into in fasting is not
for you. If you're a morning training person, into in
fasting isn't for you. You should not be training on
an empty stomach and then fasting for an extended period
of time after your training session as well. You're not
(10:22):
doing your body or your muscles any service in terms
of the proper recovery that it needs. So look at
your type of training. If you're someone who's an afternoon
or a night training person, maybe some min fasting might
be okay for you. It's absolutely not appropriate for pregnancy
or breastfeeding. And anyone who has a background as an
eating disorder or with disordered eating or restrictive style eating,
absolutely not for you as well, because into ind fasting
(10:45):
can very quickly lead to basically just restrictions and down
that path of disordered eating. So they're the people that
I would say definitely not for. If you are a
diabetic on inchulin, you could do some into in fasting,
but absolutely important to link with your healthcare professional to
be regularly checking your blood sugar levels throughout the day
as well anyone else. You could probably think that perhaps
(11:07):
it wouldn't be appropriate for Susie.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
I'm with you.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I think for anyone who has a history of disordered
eating and extreme dieting, promoting the five to two has
a number of negative side effects soschologically to try and
adhere to that level of restriction. Now, let's be very
clear when we look at the data, the evidence space
around intermitt and fasting is primarily around the lower calorie days.
So when we take a look at the research, it
(11:30):
was primarily for metabolic benefit, so resetting a number of
those pro inflammatory hormones helping to reduce cholesterol, blood pleasure,
insulin levels over time, and the weight loss is secondary
as the body gets a bit of a kickstart. So
a five hundred calorie day is really difficult to follow.
So it would be for example, as piccolo coffee, a
hard boiled egg and some leafy green salad vegetables and
(11:52):
then just seventy to one hundred grams of chicken breast
or whitefish with again a couple of small, plain, nonstarchy veggies.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
So it is really tight restriction.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
It is not easy to do, and so anyone who
has a history of dieting and finds that restriction model
can be setting them off for a period of dieting
is really contraindicated. And for anyone with especially high energy demands,
busy mums, people who are trying to work work out,
juggle jobs, juggle young children, anyone who is training for
(12:22):
an hour or more a day, who has a very
active job, I would straight away say it's contraindicated. Now
I do use it, but I either use it with
people who are very keen to try it and don't
have that history of dieting, or people who need to
kind of reset their diet so they're used to chronically
overeating and having a low calorie day can be a
great way to reset them and remind them what it's
(12:44):
like to be hungry. And it can also work really
well for people who have very sedentary lifestyles because they're
not getting that hunger and they're not burning a lot
of calories. Now, a lot of clients prefer the sixteen eight,
which is where you have sixteen hours overnight, usually without food,
and and what that does is again try and get
you back in touch with your natural hunger signals. It
(13:05):
means that you naturally control calories because you're eating in
a smaller period of time, and that is a raging
that you would be encouraged to do most of the time,
So it's not something you dip in and out of
the way you would the five two. And the issue
I have with that is that I find people get
used to it over time, and while they may get
results initially, those results tend to reduce over time as
their body gets used to it. And I think if
(13:26):
you're hungry in the morning, it's not a good idea
to try and avoid eating breakfast because you're trying to
get the benefits of fasting. So I would really use
it why it's working, but when it stops, I would
not feel bad about going back to eating breakfast when
you're actually hungry in the morning. And so I sort
of use it as a tool to get people over
a weight loss hurdle, to perhaps get them back in
(13:47):
touch with their hunger if they want to try it,
if it fits in with a sedentary lifestyle. But it's
not something I prescribe for everyone. It's the case with diets.
It's not a one size fits all model, and there's
got to be a reason and a benefit of so
stated with doing it rather than a blanket prescription.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
For all people.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Completely agree, and I've actually I've never prescribed the five
two into in fasting. Correct me if I'm wrong. But
the research is really in that obese population with metabolic conditions,
isn't it that that research is really strong in.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
It's interesting with fasting because the cellular benefits that come
from extended periods of time without food of anti aging
benefit to all of us.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Generally.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
It helps to keep our hormones like intil and under control.
But you're right when we look at the research, it's
generally done with overweight and obese people who are specifically
looking for those very pronounced health related benefits. It was
never written as a weight loss program. The weight loss
effects are secondary to that. So people will say, oh,
(14:45):
it's an anti aging strategy. Yes, to a certain extent.
But we've known for a long time that human beings
eat too often to allow those hormones to get back
to baseline levels. We don't go generally for longer than
a few hours without eating when the human body really
can tolerate four or five even longer without bigger meals,
or if you do eat more at night. Again, you
(15:07):
probably don't need to eat a bit later in the day,
which is.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
What we've discussed before.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
But our lifestyle has meant that fasting can be a
really powerful way to balance out the extras that go
into our day to day life. So, but you're right,
it is generally based for those metabolic benefits, and the
weight loss can be secondary.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
But I think leanne it comes back to what we
talk about A lot.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
A lot of stuff with metabolism comes down to change,
and what fasting regimes can do is create options for
change and give something a simple approach people can stick
to without having to balance out and count calories at.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Every single meal. So for its simplicity, it can be
a really powerful strategy.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Absolutely, And as I was saying, I've never actually used
five two for my clients, but I have regularly used
something like sixteen eight or ten for my clients. To
that add up, I'm not very good to massive fourteen
ten for my clients.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
I must say.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Thank God for calculators, that is all I can say.
But with the five two I do find that that's
overly restricted because I only work with females, and a
lot of my females or some of them do have
a background of just calorie deprivation and some sort of restriction.
I find the five too, is just a bit too
hardcore for my liking. I don't tend to use the
six ' eight in terms of the rigidity of the time.
Like I say to my clients, if you wake up,
(16:22):
they're not training in the morning, so that's fine. They
don't feel hungry in the morning. Some of my clients
have been flight attendants, or they're lawyers who are working
like fourteen or surgeons sixteen our days, they don't have
time to eat breakfast. They're not hungry. They're in at
work at you know, maybe four or five am in
the morning. I say, eat when you're hungry. So whether
that's after a twelve hour fast or whether that's after
sixteen hour fast. I don't get caught up in the
(16:42):
numbers or the rigidity, which I feel like unravels a
lot of people. Susie, So sixteen eight. I've seen people literally,
when I used to work at the hospital three years ago,
this was very popular fasting. I would see nurses like
counting down the seconds till twelve pm until they could eat,
and I was like, that's just ridiculous because you get
to the point where you feel so hungry that you
almost feel sick, and then when you do start eating,
(17:03):
you're just you're inhaling your food, which is not good
for anyone. And again, the weightless benefits of fasting are
going to come from generally eating in a smaller eating
window time frame, therefore eating less food, therefore eating less
calories and losing weight. But if you're going to stuff
yourself stupid because you've just fasted for an hour or
two longer than you probably should have to create that
(17:24):
just starvation effect, you're then going to eat three times
as much as you normally would at lunchtime and undo
all the all the benefits of the calorie deficit that
you may have had. So I really think that don't
be too rigid around the actual time frame. Anything more
than a twelve hour fast has been shown in the
research to be beneficial, because as you said, most of
us will graze long into the night, wake up, and
(17:45):
eat first thing in the morning, and we're barely getting
in a twelve hour fast. If that when that that
was never even considered fasting. You know how many years
ago was that you need that was just considered a
normal eating pattern. We stopped eating dinner around six or
seven o'clock. We didn't have dessert, we didn't graze and
watch Netflix for the rest of the night. We woke
up maybe you know, had breakfast when we kind of
felt hungry. These days, it's like we've been conditioned to
(18:07):
just eat the minute that we wake up and eat
right until we go to bed. We're just eating far
too much. We're eating far too often. And there is
a small amount of research, mostly in animal studies, I
will admit, but I'm really excited to see whether research
goes in the future around some gut health benefits as well,
for it, extended periods of fasting, because you're just giving
your gut time to rest. And for a lot of
(18:27):
people with irrita, a bound gut health problems and intolerances,
constantly putting food into your gut and overloading it before
it's had time to process undigest what's there is not
going to do you any benefits. So I do use
a little bit of intimate fasting from a gut health
strategy perspective with my clients as well. I'll admit that
the science isn't quite there yet. It's quite strong in
animal studies, but we really would like to see more
(18:48):
human studies in terms of gut health benefits and fasting.
But I'm definitely a fan. I just don't think it
needs to come with the rigidity of the sixteen eight
time frame or the five is too. I just think
learning to listen to your body mold should be the
biggest thing that we're really looking for in terms of
into ad fasting and learning to eat when we're hungry.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
I have to laugh because you said with lawyers, because
when I think about it, I think that the times
I've used the five two, and primarily I'll use it
to get people off a plateau, so they might have
been reducing calories or increasing activity and then all of
a sudden we might have lost five seventeen kilos and
they're plat owed. And I sometimes use it as a
little trying to break that cycle and just do two
(19:27):
lighter days, and often in line we've been they're less active.
But I think a significant proportion of those people. One's
a contact tracer, so she works in Brisbane and she'll
spend many hours sitting down, so she'll often fast on
those days because she finds it keeps her hunger away
a little bit now she's used to it.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
And lawyers.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
I do use it with my lawyers who are doing
those really really long days and they can't be active,
and they find it easy to keep their focus up
if they keep off heavy food.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Through the days.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
So that made me laugh a little bit because their
lifestyle can be so sdentary when they're working on a
big case.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
But definitely it's a stratage that I use.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
It's not a default prescription that I give. And I'm
like you, I'm trying to get people to at least
have twelve hours overnight without food. And probably the group
that I may use sixteen eight with is my insulin
resistant group who don't feel any hunger in the morning,
and so as I try and reprogram their hunger and
shift it earlier, I may say, look, I want you
to try and extend that fast overnight just to try
(20:22):
and get back in touch with those appetite signals and
get you hungry, and then over time I'll reduce it
back down to maybe more like twelve to fourteen, which
is sustainable, because yeah, it's about fitting the right approach
to different people, and in terms of longevity, benefits and
health benefits. It's interesting you spoke about studies with rats
(20:42):
or with primates, because a lot of the early research
in fasting did come from primate studies which showed that
if monkeys had twenty five percent less calories over time,
might not be exactly right, so just humor me there,
but a significant calorie reduction over a long period of
time they lived longer, so it seemed to have benefits
from a cell health perspective. And if you look at
(21:04):
what humans are eating, what an average calorie intake of
what two thousand and two and a half thousand a day,
which is when we're in positive weight gain, and a
lot of us are and overweight as adults. Again, if
we reduce that down to that twenty five percent, even
a bit more reduction, we too would get those benefits
without fully starving ourselves. So it's safe to say that
giving longer time overnight without food and keeping our calories
(21:26):
a bit lower than they are rather than being in
a constant weight gain cycle will be very powerful when
it comes to antiaging for all of us without having
to go to very extreme regimes.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Absolutely, and you know when I was our unis is
ten plus years ago, now, we were really taught that
breakfast was one of the most important meals of the day.
You know, it helps with focus, it helps with energy,
you set yourself up well for the rest of the day.
If you don't eat breakfast, you end up overeating and
other meals. We know that now that that's simply not
the case. Of course, if you're a child or a teenager,
we absolutely encourage breakfast. It has been shown to be
(21:57):
better for you know, attention and learning and that thing
at school and at university. But for adults, if you
wake up and you're genuinely not hungry, there's absolutely no
need to eat. Breakfast doesn't need to be the most
important meal of the day. So I really do encourage
you to just tune into your natural I guess hunger
and fullness signals, particularly if you've had a big weekend,
or you've had a big night, or you've had a
really heavy meal the night before. If you're waking up
(22:19):
and you're not feeling hungry, then listen and honor those
hungry signals in your body and wait till you feel
hungry to eat. It doesn't necessarily have to be a
sixteen hour fast, which means you need to get to
eleven am, twelve pm, one pm. But just if you
can hold off on your normal breakfast, which is normally
at six am, and have it at nine o'clock when
you actually feel hungry at nine o'clock, that's going to
do you the world of good just in terms of
(22:40):
tuning and listening to your body, let alone any sort
of benefits that fasting might provide. So I think that's
probably the biggest takeaway, is learning to listen to our
bodies and feeding it when it's genuinely hungry, not because
everybody else is eating around us, or not because the
clock says we should eat, or not just because it's
a bad habit and we've programmed ourselves into doing that.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
And having that research switch, particularly after the weekends, if
you are routinely having a lot of calories over the weekend,
having a light night on a Sunday night or light
day on a Monday, or having that sort of extended
period of time much longer than you normally have without eating,
would do your body the world of.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Good, definitely. And then Suzi, that brings us to our
most popular segment, our new and exciting supermarket products and
this week, you found us a new plant based frozen meal,
so the brand is Abundance feel good Food, and you
found a Japanese sturfry. Let us know about this one, Suzi.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Now.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
I was so excited about this product because I saw
an ad for it. I think it was in Woollies.
It was on one of those kind of screens where
they highlight new products. And I was so excited because
I thought, great, a new sturfry option. This one specifically
we're talking about today. It's called sorry, the Abundance Japanese
stir fry. But they're in the frozen section and there's
several different varieties and it's so colorful and pretty and
(23:54):
it looked great, and I thought, great, another convenient food
that busy people can grab and have more veggies. I
was a little bit disappointed because when I actually took
a closer look at it, it looked really good. The
ingredient list, like the vegetables come in first, with beans, mushrooms,
at a marmade, cabbage, onion capsticum. It doesn't actually have
the percentage on there which it normally would and I
(24:16):
believe probably should have it on there.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
How much actual vegetable.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
Component, and then the next ingredient after the veggies, was
cooked chimmering noodles. Now, when I look at the actual
nutritional panel, that was giving me twelve grams of protein
per serve, which is quite reasonable for a veggie based dish,
almost ten grams of fat, which is not insignificant for
a veggie based dish, But it was a massive fifty
four grams of carbohydrate, admittedly almost five grams of dietary fiber,
(24:42):
but then twelve hundred milligrams of sodium. So what's happening,
to the best of my understanding, is that, yes, this
is a frozen product that has quite a lot of vegetables,
but there's also quite a lot of carbi noodles in it,
and then they're going pretty heavy with the sauce to
obviously flavor it up, and that's really bumping up you
soda level. Now, as a reference point, we really encourage
people to not have more than two thousand milligrams of
(25:05):
sodium per day. So to have more than half that
in a vegetable based dish with fifty three grams of carbohydrate,
it's actually not a product I would probably recommend. I'm
a bit disappointed because it promised so much, and when
I took a close look, I just thought it was
pretty carby, quite a lot of sodium, and perhaps not
as healthy as I would really like it to be
(25:25):
for a vegetable based product.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Absolutely, when you sent me that, I was quite excited.
The packaging looked amazing, It looked fresh, it looked healthy.
It was a vegan based option. I thought great. In
front of the package says Japanese stir fry with turmeric noodles,
ginger mushrooms at amami and a Japanese seven spice, and
I thought, amazing. That sounds great. But as you mentioned,
the carbohydrate loaders is quite heavy. The protein, unfortunately, is
(25:48):
quite low. From the photo, I think we established that
these are probably mushrooms, but to me it looked like
tastes of vegetable protein or a bit of tofu or something.
So I would ideally like to see a little bit
more of a boost in terms of protein. Up is
it that fifteen to twenty grams or a plant based meal.
It's got a monitor around a fat in it close
to ten grams and the fiber, as we said, it's awesome.
But if you take a closer. Look at the back
(26:09):
of the packaging. It's got two serves of vegetables in
this meal, and I mean for a plant based meal.
When we're looking at you know, a minimum of five
serves of veggies a day, Susie, if not seven, eight
nine serves for honestly good gut heals, It's yeah, it's underrated,
isn't it. Really it is.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
It looks so healthy and pretty, and that's why we
were both so drawn into it. So I think the
take home message is that just because the product looks
healthy doesn't always mean that it is. And sometimes a
quick scan of that ingredient list, and when we look
at this ingredient list, you can see there's quite a
lot of additives. There's somematded sugars, there's somematted salts, there's thickness. Now,
if you're cooking a veggie sturf right at home, you
(26:46):
might have some extra vigin olive oil in the base
of your pan. You might have tons of veggies, even
if you're trying to keep it plant based, or you
might throw in some tofu or some prawns to give
you some extra protein. And then all I would add
is a little bit of soy sauce, there wouldn't be
any thickness, there wouldn't be any extra sugars. So you know,
you can eat really clean at home with very simple
products like a plain veggie stir fry and season it
(27:07):
up to taste amazing without needing to buy a process
food which has got more additives in it and more
carbohydrate than you would have if you had just made
something your cell. And yeah, just because it looks really
fresh and healthy doesn't unfortunately always mean that it is,
so we do need to be careful.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
And the other thing is it's actually quite lower calorie,
like it's three hundred and sixty calories for the serving,
but that comes with you know, fifty four grams of carbohydrates.
So if you're making this yourself at home, which would
be super simple to do, I think you could throw
this together in twenty minutes or less. I would have
the noodle. I would double the protein. So whether you're
doubling the at amamae beans or adding in a bit
of tofu or a bit of you know, lean animal
(27:44):
protein prawns or fish or chicken as Susi mentioned, to
boost that protein and really doubling the amount of veggies
in that and lightening up the source a bit. I
think you have a wonderful nourishing meal yourself, but I
guess frozen meals are. They are important. It's not the
worst frozen meal on the market, absolutely, but it probably
was a bit of a letdown. I really did think
this was something I was going to recommend. Give it
five stars, and it probably for me. Susie comes in
(28:06):
maybe three, three and a half out of five.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Put it that way, I'd give it three. I'm with you.
I'm three. I was a bit disappointed. I'm with you.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
I would half the carbohydrate down to twenty to thirty
grams per serve. And that amount of sodium in a
registerfile is just way too high. So a little bit
of soy sauce or a little bit of if you
can buy salt reduce soy because it really does pack
a great flavor, but also plenty of salt, and that
sometimes while we wake up bloated or thirsty in the
night time, because that's really really concentrated. So where you
can look for salt reduced versions of your favorite sauces,
(28:35):
that's a smart thing to do, just to keep our
overall salt intake controlled.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
And the other interesting thing I thought was the noodles
are cooked turmeric noodles, so a little bit of a marketing.
You know, people like turmeric. It's supposed to be anti inflammatory.
We do know from the research that we need black
pepper to activate the compounds in tumeric to make them bioavailable,
So no mention of black pepper on the labeling and
no mention of the amount of turmeric when we look
at the research studies. I can't quote zuzie at the
(28:59):
top of my head what amount of tumeric we actually
need for an anti inmblummetary effect. But there's no one
matt listed on that label either, So again I would
call the tumeric noodles a health halo, something that's in
there to perceive it as a healthier choice, but actually
no nutritional science based benefit for having those tumeric noodles
in there. They're just honestly, there's yellow noodles at the
end of the day, to be honest that.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
They are yellow pictorals.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
You're right, and just an offside, you're right, five grams
of fiber for that many veggies is still reasonably low
with a normal veggie sir, if I'd be one eight
to ten grams, So it's higher, but definitely you could
do better yourself at home with a lot less processing
and a lot fewer additives.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
All right.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
So our final segment, now, this is one that is
going to resonate with a lot of our listeners because
it's a question that comes up a lot for me
with my own clients. I know I've been partial to
a cheeky diet coke. Don't get me.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Wrong, I'm not proud of it.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
But there's a lot of questions we get about diet
soft drinks, and this was one that came up on
our Facebook account about you know, diet soft drinks, are
they healthier? Can we still include them because I love them?
How often should we be having them? So the good
news is I think around diet soft drinks and they're
all the same in the sense that while the colon
(30:09):
varieties we're very familiar with do also generally have caffeine
as well. They're basically all sweetened varieties. Whether they're using
a natural sweetener where they're using an artificial sweetener, different
flavors will often just be the use of different flavors
through that mix of sweetener, and sure it may be
inferred that a natural sweetener is better, but at the
end of the day, for me, they're still giving your
(30:31):
brain this really concentrated source of sweet beverage that over
time tends to drive you to want more of that
sweet food. So are they better than full strength one
hundred percent because the research shows that's full strength soft
drinks adding nine teaspoons per can or up to thirteen
for a buddy bottle, closely linked to weight gain, closely
linked to obesity, really bad for the teeth, terrible habit
(30:52):
for teenage boys. The less of them we have, the better.
So from a sugar perspective, yes, the diet varieties don't
contain calories, they're going to be better, but that doesn't
give you license, I would say, by any means to
have to drink them, because they have also been linked
to some issues with insulin response. People who have them
are not necessarily lighter in body weight, so they haven't
been shown to support weight control any more than regular
(31:14):
soft drink. My belief around that is that it primes
you to want more sweet processed food, and I would
say an occasional thing to get you through if you
really need something. But again, I don't prescribe them, I
don't encourage them. And if I've got a client who's
heavily reliant on them and say is drinking multiple per
day or really looking for it every day, I'm really
trying to reprogram the nutrition to not want them and
(31:35):
not have them as a routine part of their dietary intake.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
And I'm like you, Susie, I have occasionally had a
diet coke. If you see me at a restaurant one
day and I'm not having a glass of wine, I
might perhaps have a diet coke while I'm out as
a bit of a treat. But again that's something that
I even though it's no calories in it, I would
consider that a bit of a treat for myself because
it's something that's it's nice, it's it's sweet, it's feeling.
But when we look at the research, and I'm sure
the latest meta analysis I read on diet so drinks
(32:00):
was that it actually didn't have any real effect on
blood sugar levels, which is great for our diabetics. But
as you said, I think what a lot of people
do from a behavioral perspective is they replace the full
sugar coke with a diet coke, but then it sort
of it always gives them an excuse to then have
more sugar a little bit later on. So you know,
that's not really conclusive in the research. So we know
it doesn't really affect our blood sugar levels, which is great,
(32:21):
but it does kind of, as you mentioned, primus to
want more sweet things later on. It's also not great
for gut house because a lot of the artificial sweetness
are what we call those sugar alcohols, and they're just
not great for gut health. They can cause a lot
of bloating in wind and a lot of people. Plus
the additional carbonations from the bubbles in soft drinks can
cause a lot of bloating in problems for people with
gut house too, And just the coal of varieties of
(32:43):
diet coke I'm not really a fan of because you know,
they're not great for our teeth and they do cause
a bit of strain us erosion. Station.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Yeah, so I think that there are a few varieties,
not so much in cafes and restaurants, but if you're
looking in the diet soft drink or soft drink aisle,
there are few like diet yeh, sugar free lemonades and
that sort of thing. But my preference is generally for
my client Susie is something like a low sugar kombucha.
Of course it's not calorie free, but sort of thirty
thirty five calories a can. Whether or not there are
some god house benefits with kombucha, I really do think
(33:14):
the jury and the research is still out With that respect,
I don't think there's a huge amount of golt health
benefits in a canna kombucha, but it's definitely better than
a can of full sugar soft drink. So that's sort
of my preference for the majority of my clients. But
I do occasionally use diet soft drinks for clients who
iron a deficit and are feeling hungry, because something like
you know, a great chicken and pumpkin salad with a
(33:34):
diet coke when they're out at lunch with their friends
versus a bowl of pasta and three wines is obviously
going to be a much better choice. So again, like
you're not proud of the fact that I will occasionally
use a diet coke with clients, but I do think
they have a good time and place for the right person,
but absolutely not on a regular basis that a client
who drinks. You know, I don't personally working with private
(33:55):
clients these days, but I used to when I worked
in public health at the hospitals. You know, people would
come in with six hundal bottles of sugar you know,
full sugar coke and those puge ic coffee things in
that sort of thing, and they'd have multiple of them
per day. So getting them down off you know, one
point two five liter is a coca day. Just that
direct swop to diet coke is a great strategy to
start with, and then of course bringing down that load
across the day and across time is obviously going to
(34:17):
be a great question. So I think in terms of
are they okay to drink, yes, treat them as a treat.
Put it that way, and I would say, you know,
no more than sort of I'd say once a week.
That's sort of my opinion with those sort of diets
of drinks.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
And I think if you're routinely buying them, if they're
in the house, you'll continue to drink them. So try
to stop buying them and actually go and get one
when you really want one.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Look for the smaller cans.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
You can now get ones that are just two hundred meal,
so that's much better than a buddy bottle of course,
And I think the other trick is that if you
are really craving something like that, you need to eat
with it, So you're much better to have a cheese
and crackers or some yogurt with it to help neutralize
that sugar craving. Then just have the artificial or the
natural sweetened drink that sort of gives you the hit,
but then the body realized you don't have any fuel
(35:01):
on board and it's more likely to drive the craving,
So don't have them on their own. Always try and
have them with food, and you'll notice that change is
the taste of them and they're not so palatable. So
over time, what we're trying to do is shift your
palette away from craving that artificial or sweet flavor, and
that will help you keeping much better in control of
those cravings. And the other thing, of course, as the
weather warms uply and doing things like the iced teas
(35:22):
using the tea bag yourself, and now you can use
something like a little bit of steviea to sweeten it.
If you do an ice cream tea or at ice
there's so many flavored teas out there, and programming you
to actually add a beverage that's got some antioxidants in
it or much healthier is is a good thing to
aim for and shift your palette over time away from
craving that very very sweet beverage.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Absolutely, and there are a few good ranges of you know,
low sugar mineral waters on the market as well, like
sparkling mineral waters. And I'm quite partial to just a
soda water with a small squeeze of lime and some
fresh and mintals some fresh basil in it as well.
Particularly if I'm out and I'm choosing not to drink
that's my drink of choice, I'll get a soda water
with some you know, fresh lim and a bit of
herbs in it or something which I think is really
lovely and refreshing, particularly in summer. So I think there
(36:04):
are some definitely better options on the market. I think
diet chop drink is absolutely okay to have occasionally, but
keep it to the you know, occasional backyard barbecue or
birthday party, or if you're out to dinner with some
friends and you're choosing not to drink. Don't make it
a regular thing where you know, every single night you're
popping a can of diet coke with your dinner, because
again that tolerance to it, you'll just want more and
more and more over time, and then that becomes a
(36:25):
daily habit, and a twice daily habit, and a three
daily habit, and then before you know, you've got a
caffeine addiction plus a you know, artificial sugar free soft
drink addiction as well. Wonderful well Suzi that brings us
to the end of the nutrition catch for another week.
If you haven't done so already, Listeners, don't forget to
subscribe to us to have us deliver it in your
(36:45):
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(37:05):
So we'd really really appreciate it. If you guys ascribe
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we will see you next week, same time, same place.
Thank you for listening.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Have a great week.
Hi, I'm Leanne Ward and I'm Susy Burrow and welcome
to the Nutrition Couch, a weekly podcast from two of
austrays leading dieticians, bringing you everything that is new in
the world of nutrition, diets and good food from the
Nutrition Couch. Today, we're chatting about another viral TikTok trend,
the baked oats, and in our clinic, our clients are
asking us about the pros and cons of intimate fasting.
(00:24):
Now to our most popular segment, the supermarket product of
the Week, we discuss a new plant based frozen meal option,
and our final segment with our listener question is all
about diet soft tricks. Can we drink them? And are
they actually good for us? And how many drinks is
too many? The first Susy, how's your week been going?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
My week has been pretty good.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
We're at the end of school holidays now, so I'm
sure many parents are at the end of their tether
with the children.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
I've really tried to keep as.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Active as I can with the kids, but one thing
that tends to go out the window when I am
doing a lot more of my own childcare is my
own activity. Because my kids are too young to come
for a rhin or come for a walk. So I
sort of am really looking forward to things getting back
to normal and packing the school lunchboxes and putting those
posts up, but getting back into my own exercise regime.
And it's always a good reminder, I think to us
(01:12):
as clinicians about the challenges busy people have when it
comes to balancing their own nutrition and their exercise. And
I think it's not that people don't want to eat
well or exercise, it's just that the family demands and
work demands can be so great. So rest assured. I'm very,
very aware that it's a juggle for all of us
and we do the best we can with what we
(01:33):
can at the time. And I for one, am really
looking forward to getting out there and pounding the pavement
when the kids are back to school. So bring it
on the end of the school holidays, definitely.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
And then this week, Susie, what is trending in the media.
It's another TikTok trend And now we've done a few
TikTok trends in the podcast. You know, I'm all for
TikTok trends. There's almost bakedotes, Susie, how can we not
talk about bakedotes. They look freakin delicious, but how healthy
are they? Actually?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
This is an ongoing issue, I think because whenever we
put on our social media any kind of baked product,
whether it's muffins or cookies or in this instance, oats
and TikTok, and I'm paying a lot more attention to TikTok,
and what's going on there is that people go crazy
for it. We love sweet treats, we love perceived healthy baking,
and so when this came up on my media feeders
(02:22):
and news item, I clicked very quickly and of course
was lured in by the gorgeous photos of skillets, you know,
with chocolates and maple syrup and banana and runny peanut butter. Like,
I completely understand why it's so popular, because it's really
our love of food and things that not only taste
grape but are visually beautiful. And of course we can
(02:43):
curate baked oats, in particular in pans to look so
gorgeous on the breakfast table. So I, like, everyone loves
a little bit of food porn, and I do like it.
But you know, when we put our nutrition hats on,
you know, a closer look at the ingredient list can
reveal that they can be really packed full of fats, sugars,
and as a reference point, if you make yourself a
(03:03):
bircher bowl or an oat bowl or in this case,
the baked oats and you as a few ingredients. You
put in some oats, You might put some yogurt base
or a little bit of milk to blend it. You
might then put some nutspread. You might put a few
chop bits to make it look pretty. You might then
add a maple syrup and then banana like you could
be looking at sixty to eighty grams of carbohydrate in
(03:24):
a single serve, not the whole tray, just a single
serve or a small bowl, which would be pretty close
to what some people need for their entire day. So
the issue with these kind of products is when we
super layer all of the ingredients, you get a super
layered calorie effect, and for most of us, we're often
not burning it off. So just be mindful. These do
(03:44):
tend to really be treats as opposed to daily foods.
And if you make it for a beautiful Instagram picture
or for your TikTok, give it away because very few
of us will be burning off that amount of calories
and carbohydrates in many of them, but it's not lost
on me.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I think they're as well.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
But a whole skillet of you know, chocchip oats. Let
a reminder, Do we regularly eat chocchips for breakfast? Probably not?
Do we regularly encourage chocolate for breakfast? Probably not. That's
wiba be the first indication that maybe these are a
bit more of the food porn side of things and
the health side of things. But I have made my
own healthy versions of these, Susie, and I would say
that they're a lot more macro friendly than the trending
(04:23):
ones you've seen on TikTok, where I just use whole
grain rolled oats, I use some skim milk, I use
either banana or eggs to bind it, and then some
fresh berries inside it, and then I bake that up.
I slice it up pretty calorie controlled, around sort of
three fifty calories per slice, and then I'll serve that
with some high protein yogurt, so I'm getting in and
maybe some cheer seas inside that as well to help
bind the oats. I'm getting in some healthy bats and fibers,
(04:43):
some carbs, and some protein compared to I think a
lot of the recipes onliner oats, milk, honey or maple syrup,
they've got choc tips in there. They're then slitherered in
maple syrup, or there's ice cream on top and there's
more chocolate on top. I've even seen variety Susie where
they have this hard chocolate shell, so they're like chocolate
shell baked oats. So they melt down chocolate plus coconut
oil together, they melt it, they pour it over the
(05:05):
top of the baked oats, they put it in the freezer,
and it creates this hard chocolate shell that then you
smash your spoon through like it looks amazing, but at
the end of the day, it's probably more of a
dessert than it is a really nourishing breakfast option.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Well, when I just put it in the search engine,
the first thing that came up was whether it was
cake or not. So definitely it assumes the profile more
of cake, and think of that with your portions. But
again I couldn't have said it better myself. If I
was adjusting it to be a bit healthier, I would
probably opt for berries which you can get frozen at
at a good cost price point at the moment to
help lower the carbohydrate content a little bit. There is
(05:40):
an increasing range of lower sugar or syrups that of
using a sweetener instead of sugar itself. So I know
maple syrup, you can find one with no actual sugar
in it, which makes it a much lighter option. And
you know with the chop bits you can place three
or four or five to present the bowl or the
baked tray looking beautiful. You don't have to pour the
packet in, which of cause is the temptation. So I
(06:03):
would say it's all about portion control or doing it
for a special occasion, And of course we love to
see beautiful food, but there's always ways we can help
the fight a little bit, and portion control is one
of the key things in using the lower sugar syrups
and lower sugar fruits will instantly reduce the calorie load
of those more indulgent baked oats trays instantly.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Absolutely, And I don't think anybody really unless you're an
iron man, needs an entire skillet of baked oas for breakfast.
So I think just what your portion saus is on
those things. I prefer to bake them in almost like
a lasagna dishoesy, and then I put them into like
six slices. That's sort of my preference, and then I
get sort of some meal prep for breakfast for the week,
and I can freeze a few portions as well. I
think just making it in a one pan skillet. I
know skillet's are very American things, so maybe for our
(06:43):
Aussie listeners, it's really those like what would you call it,
like a deep.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
It's like a heavy pann. I look like a la
croussoe pan. It's that sort of heavy one. And in America,
you right, and they tend to be really black and individual.
But I like to shut them. I like to serve
them in ramakans. You get like the little ramicans you'd
put on a serving tray. And I think that's another
way of doing it as a portion control for a
special occasion, or if you did a healthy version, just
(07:07):
keeping your portions because I find and actually what we
know from the behavioral science is what we serve or
what our food comes in, is what we will eat
their the portions. So if you prepare a whole skillet
or a whole pan, you will eat it, whether it's
going back and having an extra spoon here or there,
All the portions that you serve are bigger, So it
really is limiting portions in any way you can, because
human beings are programmed to eat what food is readily
(07:28):
available in front of them.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Absolutely, and just think about bakedotes. If you're using oats
and milk and maple syrup and bananas and then adding
chocolate chips into there, you've got an enormous load of
carbohydrate going in first thing in the morning. If you're
not someone that's very active or hasn't done a lot
of exercise in the morning, that huge load of carbohydrate
probably isn't going to be burnt off very well. It
could cause a big energy slumple more sugar craving throughout
(07:51):
the day. So my recommendation for the baked does is
always to serve them with some protein, so whether that's
some low fat cottage cheese or some high protein yogurt,
just to help the digest not that carbohydrate to slow
down a little bit. When we serve things with protein
or fiber, we can actually slow the digestion of the carbohydrate.
So my preference is to always serve some sort of
baked dose with some high protein yoga or another protein
(08:11):
source to really just optimize I guess the macronutrient profile
in that meal.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
And if you're a cottage cheese lover, if my clients
come and tell me they love.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Cottage cheese, I'm so happy because I can use that
in so many foods. And that's a perfect example. There's
also Quark, which is that sort of Scandinavian European really
tart yoga, which again is really really high in protein
and works really well. Or as we spoke about on
the podcast a few back, there's a growing range of
high protein Greek yogurts, which is fantastic. So that is
(08:41):
everything that we know on the TikTok baked oats. But
another thing we wanted to really chat about it's come
up time and time again, and we've been getting a
lot of questions on it online is about fasting. And
I guess when I trained more than twenty years ago,
we had never heard of fasting, not in a positive
way anyway. And of course the work of doctor Michael
Mosley a few years back in the five and two diets,
(09:03):
or the complete shift in mindset around quite severe calorie
restriction to induce some metabolic changes and support weight loss
and positive metabolic change over time. And now it's become
the norm for clients to come in and have tried
fasting intermittent fasting programs. The common ones, of course, are
as I've just mentioned the five and two, where you
(09:23):
have two nonconsecutive especially low calorie days five or six
hundred calories, and that appears to have some metabolic benefits
and secondary benefits based on weight loss.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
And then that what I call.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
The bustardized version, which is the sixteen eight, which is
where you have an extended period of time without eating,
which again appears to have some benefits when it comes
to resetting some of those hormones. There's definitely a number
of pros and cons that we can look at, and
I think it's a really good time for us to
discuss it in general, because I know a lot of
you will have questions about it. Who it's right for,
how often we should do it, how long we should
(09:56):
do it.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
For, should we be doing it at all? So? What
are your experience, what are your thoughts on it?
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Yeah, so let's maybe start with first, who it's not
for so, I would say anyone who does a really
heavy training load, like professional athletes or someone even if
you're training twice a day, into in fasting is not
for you. If you're a morning training person, into in
fasting isn't for you. You should not be training on
an empty stomach and then fasting for an extended period
of time after your training session as well. You're not
(10:22):
doing your body or your muscles any service in terms
of the proper recovery that it needs. So look at
your type of training. If you're someone who's an afternoon
or a night training person, maybe some min fasting might
be okay for you. It's absolutely not appropriate for pregnancy
or breastfeeding. And anyone who has a background as an
eating disorder or with disordered eating or restrictive style eating,
absolutely not for you as well, because into ind fasting
(10:45):
can very quickly lead to basically just restrictions and down
that path of disordered eating. So they're the people that
I would say definitely not for. If you are a
diabetic on inchulin, you could do some into in fasting,
but absolutely important to link with your healthcare professional to
be regularly checking your blood sugar levels throughout the day
as well anyone else. You could probably think that perhaps
(11:07):
it wouldn't be appropriate for Susie.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
I'm with you.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I think for anyone who has a history of disordered
eating and extreme dieting, promoting the five to two has
a number of negative side effects soschologically to try and
adhere to that level of restriction. Now, let's be very
clear when we look at the data, the evidence space
around intermitt and fasting is primarily around the lower calorie days.
So when we take a look at the research, it
(11:30):
was primarily for metabolic benefit, so resetting a number of
those pro inflammatory hormones helping to reduce cholesterol, blood pleasure,
insulin levels over time, and the weight loss is secondary
as the body gets a bit of a kickstart. So
a five hundred calorie day is really difficult to follow.
So it would be for example, as piccolo coffee, a
hard boiled egg and some leafy green salad vegetables and
(11:52):
then just seventy to one hundred grams of chicken breast
or whitefish with again a couple of small, plain, nonstarchy veggies.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
So it is really tight restriction.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
It is not easy to do, and so anyone who
has a history of dieting and finds that restriction model
can be setting them off for a period of dieting
is really contraindicated. And for anyone with especially high energy demands,
busy mums, people who are trying to work work out,
juggle jobs, juggle young children, anyone who is training for
(12:22):
an hour or more a day, who has a very
active job, I would straight away say it's contraindicated. Now
I do use it, but I either use it with
people who are very keen to try it and don't
have that history of dieting, or people who need to
kind of reset their diet so they're used to chronically
overeating and having a low calorie day can be a
great way to reset them and remind them what it's
(12:44):
like to be hungry. And it can also work really
well for people who have very sedentary lifestyles because they're
not getting that hunger and they're not burning a lot
of calories. Now, a lot of clients prefer the sixteen eight,
which is where you have sixteen hours overnight, usually without food,
and and what that does is again try and get
you back in touch with your natural hunger signals. It
(13:05):
means that you naturally control calories because you're eating in
a smaller period of time, and that is a raging
that you would be encouraged to do most of the time,
So it's not something you dip in and out of
the way you would the five two. And the issue
I have with that is that I find people get
used to it over time, and while they may get
results initially, those results tend to reduce over time as
their body gets used to it. And I think if
(13:26):
you're hungry in the morning, it's not a good idea
to try and avoid eating breakfast because you're trying to
get the benefits of fasting. So I would really use
it why it's working, but when it stops, I would
not feel bad about going back to eating breakfast when
you're actually hungry in the morning. And so I sort
of use it as a tool to get people over
a weight loss hurdle, to perhaps get them back in
(13:47):
touch with their hunger if they want to try it,
if it fits in with a sedentary lifestyle. But it's
not something I prescribe for everyone. It's the case with diets.
It's not a one size fits all model, and there's
got to be a reason and a benefit of so
stated with doing it rather than a blanket prescription.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
For all people.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Completely agree, and I've actually I've never prescribed the five
two into in fasting. Correct me if I'm wrong. But
the research is really in that obese population with metabolic conditions,
isn't it that that research is really strong in.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
It's interesting with fasting because the cellular benefits that come
from extended periods of time without food of anti aging
benefit to all of us.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Generally.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
It helps to keep our hormones like intil and under control.
But you're right when we look at the research, it's
generally done with overweight and obese people who are specifically
looking for those very pronounced health related benefits. It was
never written as a weight loss program. The weight loss
effects are secondary to that. So people will say, oh,
(14:45):
it's an anti aging strategy. Yes, to a certain extent.
But we've known for a long time that human beings
eat too often to allow those hormones to get back
to baseline levels. We don't go generally for longer than
a few hours without eating when the human body really
can tolerate four or five even longer without bigger meals,
or if you do eat more at night. Again, you
(15:07):
probably don't need to eat a bit later in the day,
which is.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
What we've discussed before.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
But our lifestyle has meant that fasting can be a
really powerful way to balance out the extras that go
into our day to day life. So, but you're right,
it is generally based for those metabolic benefits, and the
weight loss can be secondary.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
But I think leanne it comes back to what we
talk about A lot.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
A lot of stuff with metabolism comes down to change,
and what fasting regimes can do is create options for
change and give something a simple approach people can stick
to without having to balance out and count calories at.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Every single meal. So for its simplicity, it can be
a really powerful strategy.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Absolutely, And as I was saying, I've never actually used
five two for my clients, but I have regularly used
something like sixteen eight or ten for my clients. To
that add up, I'm not very good to massive fourteen
ten for my clients.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
I must say.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Thank God for calculators, that is all I can say.
But with the five two I do find that that's
overly restricted because I only work with females, and a
lot of my females or some of them do have
a background of just calorie deprivation and some sort of restriction.
I find the five too, is just a bit too
hardcore for my liking. I don't tend to use the
six ' eight in terms of the rigidity of the time.
Like I say to my clients, if you wake up,
(16:22):
they're not training in the morning, so that's fine. They
don't feel hungry in the morning. Some of my clients
have been flight attendants, or they're lawyers who are working
like fourteen or surgeons sixteen our days, they don't have
time to eat breakfast. They're not hungry. They're in at
work at you know, maybe four or five am in
the morning. I say, eat when you're hungry. So whether
that's after a twelve hour fast or whether that's after
sixteen hour fast. I don't get caught up in the
(16:42):
numbers or the rigidity, which I feel like unravels a
lot of people. Susie, So sixteen eight. I've seen people literally,
when I used to work at the hospital three years ago,
this was very popular fasting. I would see nurses like
counting down the seconds till twelve pm until they could eat,
and I was like, that's just ridiculous because you get
to the point where you feel so hungry that you
almost feel sick, and then when you do start eating,
(17:03):
you're just you're inhaling your food, which is not good
for anyone. And again, the weightless benefits of fasting are
going to come from generally eating in a smaller eating
window time frame, therefore eating less food, therefore eating less
calories and losing weight. But if you're going to stuff
yourself stupid because you've just fasted for an hour or
two longer than you probably should have to create that
(17:24):
just starvation effect, you're then going to eat three times
as much as you normally would at lunchtime and undo
all the all the benefits of the calorie deficit that
you may have had. So I really think that don't
be too rigid around the actual time frame. Anything more
than a twelve hour fast has been shown in the
research to be beneficial, because as you said, most of
us will graze long into the night, wake up, and
(17:45):
eat first thing in the morning, and we're barely getting
in a twelve hour fast. If that when that that
was never even considered fasting. You know how many years
ago was that you need that was just considered a
normal eating pattern. We stopped eating dinner around six or
seven o'clock. We didn't have dessert, we didn't graze and
watch Netflix for the rest of the night. We woke
up maybe you know, had breakfast when we kind of
felt hungry. These days, it's like we've been conditioned to
(18:07):
just eat the minute that we wake up and eat
right until we go to bed. We're just eating far
too much. We're eating far too often. And there is
a small amount of research, mostly in animal studies, I
will admit, but I'm really excited to see whether research
goes in the future around some gut health benefits as well,
for it, extended periods of fasting, because you're just giving
your gut time to rest. And for a lot of
(18:27):
people with irrita, a bound gut health problems and intolerances,
constantly putting food into your gut and overloading it before
it's had time to process undigest what's there is not
going to do you any benefits. So I do use
a little bit of intimate fasting from a gut health
strategy perspective with my clients as well. I'll admit that
the science isn't quite there yet. It's quite strong in
animal studies, but we really would like to see more
(18:48):
human studies in terms of gut health benefits and fasting.
But I'm definitely a fan. I just don't think it
needs to come with the rigidity of the sixteen eight
time frame or the five is too. I just think
learning to listen to your body mold should be the
biggest thing that we're really looking for in terms of
into ad fasting and learning to eat when we're hungry.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
I have to laugh because you said with lawyers, because
when I think about it, I think that the times
I've used the five two, and primarily I'll use it
to get people off a plateau, so they might have
been reducing calories or increasing activity and then all of
a sudden we might have lost five seventeen kilos and
they're plat owed. And I sometimes use it as a
little trying to break that cycle and just do two
(19:27):
lighter days, and often in line we've been they're less active.
But I think a significant proportion of those people. One's
a contact tracer, so she works in Brisbane and she'll
spend many hours sitting down, so she'll often fast on
those days because she finds it keeps her hunger away
a little bit now she's used to it.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
And lawyers.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
I do use it with my lawyers who are doing
those really really long days and they can't be active,
and they find it easy to keep their focus up
if they keep off heavy food.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Through the days.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
So that made me laugh a little bit because their
lifestyle can be so sdentary when they're working on a
big case.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
But definitely it's a stratage that I use.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
It's not a default prescription that I give. And I'm
like you, I'm trying to get people to at least
have twelve hours overnight without food. And probably the group
that I may use sixteen eight with is my insulin
resistant group who don't feel any hunger in the morning,
and so as I try and reprogram their hunger and
shift it earlier, I may say, look, I want you
to try and extend that fast overnight just to try
(20:22):
and get back in touch with those appetite signals and
get you hungry, and then over time I'll reduce it
back down to maybe more like twelve to fourteen, which
is sustainable, because yeah, it's about fitting the right approach
to different people, and in terms of longevity, benefits and
health benefits. It's interesting you spoke about studies with rats
(20:42):
or with primates, because a lot of the early research
in fasting did come from primate studies which showed that
if monkeys had twenty five percent less calories over time,
might not be exactly right, so just humor me there,
but a significant calorie reduction over a long period of
time they lived longer, so it seemed to have benefits
from a cell health perspective. And if you look at
(21:04):
what humans are eating, what an average calorie intake of
what two thousand and two and a half thousand a day,
which is when we're in positive weight gain, and a
lot of us are and overweight as adults. Again, if
we reduce that down to that twenty five percent, even
a bit more reduction, we too would get those benefits
without fully starving ourselves. So it's safe to say that
giving longer time overnight without food and keeping our calories
(21:26):
a bit lower than they are rather than being in
a constant weight gain cycle will be very powerful when
it comes to antiaging for all of us without having
to go to very extreme regimes.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Absolutely, and you know when I was our unis is
ten plus years ago, now, we were really taught that
breakfast was one of the most important meals of the day.
You know, it helps with focus, it helps with energy,
you set yourself up well for the rest of the day.
If you don't eat breakfast, you end up overeating and
other meals. We know that now that that's simply not
the case. Of course, if you're a child or a teenager,
we absolutely encourage breakfast. It has been shown to be
(21:57):
better for you know, attention and learning and that thing
at school and at university. But for adults, if you
wake up and you're genuinely not hungry, there's absolutely no
need to eat. Breakfast doesn't need to be the most
important meal of the day. So I really do encourage
you to just tune into your natural I guess hunger
and fullness signals, particularly if you've had a big weekend,
or you've had a big night, or you've had a
really heavy meal the night before. If you're waking up
(22:19):
and you're not feeling hungry, then listen and honor those
hungry signals in your body and wait till you feel
hungry to eat. It doesn't necessarily have to be a
sixteen hour fast, which means you need to get to
eleven am, twelve pm, one pm. But just if you
can hold off on your normal breakfast, which is normally
at six am, and have it at nine o'clock when
you actually feel hungry at nine o'clock, that's going to
do you the world of good just in terms of
(22:40):
tuning and listening to your body, let alone any sort
of benefits that fasting might provide. So I think that's
probably the biggest takeaway, is learning to listen to our
bodies and feeding it when it's genuinely hungry, not because
everybody else is eating around us, or not because the
clock says we should eat, or not just because it's
a bad habit and we've programmed ourselves into doing that.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
And having that research switch, particularly after the weekends, if
you are routinely having a lot of calories over the weekend,
having a light night on a Sunday night or light
day on a Monday, or having that sort of extended
period of time much longer than you normally have without eating,
would do your body the world of.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Good, definitely. And then Suzi, that brings us to our
most popular segment, our new and exciting supermarket products and
this week, you found us a new plant based frozen meal,
so the brand is Abundance feel good Food, and you
found a Japanese sturfry. Let us know about this one, Suzi.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Now.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
I was so excited about this product because I saw
an ad for it. I think it was in Woollies.
It was on one of those kind of screens where
they highlight new products. And I was so excited because
I thought, great, a new sturfry option. This one specifically
we're talking about today. It's called sorry, the Abundance Japanese
stir fry. But they're in the frozen section and there's
several different varieties and it's so colorful and pretty and
(23:54):
it looked great, and I thought, great, another convenient food
that busy people can grab and have more veggies. I
was a little bit disappointed because when I actually took
a closer look at it, it looked really good. The
ingredient list, like the vegetables come in first, with beans, mushrooms,
at a marmade, cabbage, onion capsticum. It doesn't actually have
the percentage on there which it normally would and I
(24:16):
believe probably should have it on there.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
How much actual vegetable.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
Component, and then the next ingredient after the veggies, was
cooked chimmering noodles. Now, when I look at the actual
nutritional panel, that was giving me twelve grams of protein
per serve, which is quite reasonable for a veggie based dish,
almost ten grams of fat, which is not insignificant for
a veggie based dish, But it was a massive fifty
four grams of carbohydrate, admittedly almost five grams of dietary fiber,
(24:42):
but then twelve hundred milligrams of sodium. So what's happening,
to the best of my understanding, is that, yes, this
is a frozen product that has quite a lot of vegetables,
but there's also quite a lot of carbi noodles in it,
and then they're going pretty heavy with the sauce to
obviously flavor it up, and that's really bumping up you
soda level. Now, as a reference point, we really encourage
people to not have more than two thousand milligrams of
(25:05):
sodium per day. So to have more than half that
in a vegetable based dish with fifty three grams of carbohydrate,
it's actually not a product I would probably recommend. I'm
a bit disappointed because it promised so much, and when
I took a close look, I just thought it was
pretty carby, quite a lot of sodium, and perhaps not
as healthy as I would really like it to be
(25:25):
for a vegetable based product.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Absolutely, when you sent me that, I was quite excited.
The packaging looked amazing, It looked fresh, it looked healthy.
It was a vegan based option. I thought great. In
front of the package says Japanese stir fry with turmeric noodles,
ginger mushrooms at amami and a Japanese seven spice, and
I thought, amazing. That sounds great. But as you mentioned,
the carbohydrate loaders is quite heavy. The protein, unfortunately, is
(25:48):
quite low. From the photo, I think we established that
these are probably mushrooms, but to me it looked like
tastes of vegetable protein or a bit of tofu or something.
So I would ideally like to see a little bit
more of a boost in terms of protein. Up is
it that fifteen to twenty grams or a plant based meal.
It's got a monitor around a fat in it close
to ten grams and the fiber, as we said, it's awesome.
But if you take a closer. Look at the back
(26:09):
of the packaging. It's got two serves of vegetables in
this meal, and I mean for a plant based meal.
When we're looking at you know, a minimum of five
serves of veggies a day, Susie, if not seven, eight
nine serves for honestly good gut heals, It's yeah, it's underrated,
isn't it. Really it is.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
It looks so healthy and pretty, and that's why we
were both so drawn into it. So I think the
take home message is that just because the product looks
healthy doesn't always mean that it is. And sometimes a
quick scan of that ingredient list, and when we look
at this ingredient list, you can see there's quite a
lot of additives. There's somematded sugars, there's somematted salts, there's thickness. Now,
if you're cooking a veggie sturf right at home, you
(26:46):
might have some extra vigin olive oil in the base
of your pan. You might have tons of veggies, even
if you're trying to keep it plant based, or you
might throw in some tofu or some prawns to give
you some extra protein. And then all I would add
is a little bit of soy sauce, there wouldn't be
any thickness, there wouldn't be any extra sugars. So you know,
you can eat really clean at home with very simple
products like a plain veggie stir fry and season it
(27:07):
up to taste amazing without needing to buy a process
food which has got more additives in it and more
carbohydrate than you would have if you had just made
something your cell. And yeah, just because it looks really
fresh and healthy doesn't unfortunately always mean that it is,
so we do need to be careful.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
And the other thing is it's actually quite lower calorie,
like it's three hundred and sixty calories for the serving,
but that comes with you know, fifty four grams of carbohydrates.
So if you're making this yourself at home, which would
be super simple to do, I think you could throw
this together in twenty minutes or less. I would have
the noodle. I would double the protein. So whether you're
doubling the at amamae beans or adding in a bit
of tofu or a bit of you know, lean animal
(27:44):
protein prawns or fish or chicken as Susi mentioned, to
boost that protein and really doubling the amount of veggies
in that and lightening up the source a bit. I
think you have a wonderful nourishing meal yourself, but I
guess frozen meals are. They are important. It's not the
worst frozen meal on the market, absolutely, but it probably
was a bit of a letdown. I really did think
this was something I was going to recommend. Give it
five stars, and it probably for me. Susie comes in
(28:06):
maybe three, three and a half out of five.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Put it that way, I'd give it three. I'm with you.
I'm three. I was a bit disappointed. I'm with you.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
I would half the carbohydrate down to twenty to thirty
grams per serve. And that amount of sodium in a
registerfile is just way too high. So a little bit
of soy sauce or a little bit of if you
can buy salt reduce soy because it really does pack
a great flavor, but also plenty of salt, and that
sometimes while we wake up bloated or thirsty in the
night time, because that's really really concentrated. So where you
can look for salt reduced versions of your favorite sauces,
(28:35):
that's a smart thing to do, just to keep our
overall salt intake controlled.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
And the other interesting thing I thought was the noodles
are cooked turmeric noodles, so a little bit of a marketing.
You know, people like turmeric. It's supposed to be anti inflammatory.
We do know from the research that we need black
pepper to activate the compounds in tumeric to make them bioavailable,
So no mention of black pepper on the labeling and
no mention of the amount of turmeric when we look
at the research studies. I can't quote zuzie at the
(28:59):
top of my head what amount of tumeric we actually
need for an anti inmblummetary effect. But there's no one
matt listed on that label either, So again I would
call the tumeric noodles a health halo, something that's in
there to perceive it as a healthier choice, but actually
no nutritional science based benefit for having those tumeric noodles
in there. They're just honestly, there's yellow noodles at the
end of the day, to be honest that.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
They are yellow pictorals.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
You're right, and just an offside, you're right, five grams
of fiber for that many veggies is still reasonably low
with a normal veggie sir, if I'd be one eight
to ten grams, So it's higher, but definitely you could
do better yourself at home with a lot less processing
and a lot fewer additives.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
All right.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
So our final segment, now, this is one that is
going to resonate with a lot of our listeners because
it's a question that comes up a lot for me
with my own clients. I know I've been partial to
a cheeky diet coke. Don't get me.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Wrong, I'm not proud of it.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
But there's a lot of questions we get about diet
soft drinks, and this was one that came up on
our Facebook account about you know, diet soft drinks, are
they healthier? Can we still include them because I love them?
How often should we be having them? So the good
news is I think around diet soft drinks and they're
all the same in the sense that while the colon
(30:09):
varieties we're very familiar with do also generally have caffeine
as well. They're basically all sweetened varieties. Whether they're using
a natural sweetener where they're using an artificial sweetener, different
flavors will often just be the use of different flavors
through that mix of sweetener, and sure it may be
inferred that a natural sweetener is better, but at the
end of the day, for me, they're still giving your
(30:31):
brain this really concentrated source of sweet beverage that over
time tends to drive you to want more of that
sweet food. So are they better than full strength one
hundred percent because the research shows that's full strength soft
drinks adding nine teaspoons per can or up to thirteen
for a buddy bottle, closely linked to weight gain, closely
linked to obesity, really bad for the teeth, terrible habit
(30:52):
for teenage boys. The less of them we have, the better.
So from a sugar perspective, yes, the diet varieties don't
contain calories, they're going to be better, but that doesn't
give you license, I would say, by any means to
have to drink them, because they have also been linked
to some issues with insulin response. People who have them
are not necessarily lighter in body weight, so they haven't
been shown to support weight control any more than regular
(31:14):
soft drink. My belief around that is that it primes
you to want more sweet processed food, and I would
say an occasional thing to get you through if you
really need something. But again, I don't prescribe them, I
don't encourage them. And if I've got a client who's
heavily reliant on them and say is drinking multiple per
day or really looking for it every day, I'm really
trying to reprogram the nutrition to not want them and
(31:35):
not have them as a routine part of their dietary intake.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
And I'm like you, Susie, I have occasionally had a
diet coke. If you see me at a restaurant one
day and I'm not having a glass of wine, I
might perhaps have a diet coke while I'm out as
a bit of a treat. But again that's something that
I even though it's no calories in it, I would
consider that a bit of a treat for myself because
it's something that's it's nice, it's it's sweet, it's feeling.
But when we look at the research, and I'm sure
the latest meta analysis I read on diet so drinks
(32:00):
was that it actually didn't have any real effect on
blood sugar levels, which is great for our diabetics. But
as you said, I think what a lot of people
do from a behavioral perspective is they replace the full
sugar coke with a diet coke, but then it sort
of it always gives them an excuse to then have
more sugar a little bit later on. So you know,
that's not really conclusive in the research. So we know
it doesn't really affect our blood sugar levels, which is great,
(32:21):
but it does kind of, as you mentioned, primus to
want more sweet things later on. It's also not great
for gut house because a lot of the artificial sweetness
are what we call those sugar alcohols, and they're just
not great for gut health. They can cause a lot
of bloating in wind and a lot of people. Plus
the additional carbonations from the bubbles in soft drinks can
cause a lot of bloating in problems for people with
gut house too, And just the coal of varieties of
(32:43):
diet coke I'm not really a fan of because you know,
they're not great for our teeth and they do cause
a bit of strain us erosion. Station.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Yeah, so I think that there are a few varieties,
not so much in cafes and restaurants, but if you're
looking in the diet soft drink or soft drink aisle,
there are few like diet yeh, sugar free lemonades and
that sort of thing. But my preference is generally for
my client Susie is something like a low sugar kombucha.
Of course it's not calorie free, but sort of thirty
thirty five calories a can. Whether or not there are
some god house benefits with kombucha, I really do think
(33:14):
the jury and the research is still out With that respect,
I don't think there's a huge amount of golt health
benefits in a canna kombucha, but it's definitely better than
a can of full sugar soft drink. So that's sort
of my preference for the majority of my clients. But
I do occasionally use diet soft drinks for clients who
iron a deficit and are feeling hungry, because something like
you know, a great chicken and pumpkin salad with a
(33:34):
diet coke when they're out at lunch with their friends
versus a bowl of pasta and three wines is obviously
going to be a much better choice. So again, like
you're not proud of the fact that I will occasionally
use a diet coke with clients, but I do think
they have a good time and place for the right person,
but absolutely not on a regular basis that a client
who drinks. You know, I don't personally working with private
(33:55):
clients these days, but I used to when I worked
in public health at the hospitals. You know, people would
come in with six hundal bottles of sugar you know,
full sugar coke and those puge ic coffee things in
that sort of thing, and they'd have multiple of them
per day. So getting them down off you know, one
point two five liter is a coca day. Just that
direct swop to diet coke is a great strategy to
start with, and then of course bringing down that load
across the day and across time is obviously going to
(34:17):
be a great question. So I think in terms of
are they okay to drink, yes, treat them as a treat.
Put it that way, and I would say, you know,
no more than sort of I'd say once a week.
That's sort of my opinion with those sort of diets
of drinks.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
And I think if you're routinely buying them, if they're
in the house, you'll continue to drink them. So try
to stop buying them and actually go and get one
when you really want one.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Look for the smaller cans.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
You can now get ones that are just two hundred meal,
so that's much better than a buddy bottle of course,
And I think the other trick is that if you
are really craving something like that, you need to eat
with it, So you're much better to have a cheese
and crackers or some yogurt with it to help neutralize
that sugar craving. Then just have the artificial or the
natural sweetened drink that sort of gives you the hit,
but then the body realized you don't have any fuel
(35:01):
on board and it's more likely to drive the craving,
So don't have them on their own. Always try and
have them with food, and you'll notice that change is
the taste of them and they're not so palatable. So
over time, what we're trying to do is shift your
palette away from craving that artificial or sweet flavor, and
that will help you keeping much better in control of
those cravings. And the other thing, of course, as the
weather warms uply and doing things like the iced teas
(35:22):
using the tea bag yourself, and now you can use
something like a little bit of steviea to sweeten it.
If you do an ice cream tea or at ice
there's so many flavored teas out there, and programming you
to actually add a beverage that's got some antioxidants in
it or much healthier is is a good thing to
aim for and shift your palette over time away from
craving that very very sweet beverage.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Absolutely, and there are a few good ranges of you know,
low sugar mineral waters on the market as well, like
sparkling mineral waters. And I'm quite partial to just a
soda water with a small squeeze of lime and some
fresh and mintals some fresh basil in it as well.
Particularly if I'm out and I'm choosing not to drink
that's my drink of choice, I'll get a soda water
with some you know, fresh lim and a bit of
herbs in it or something which I think is really
lovely and refreshing, particularly in summer. So I think there
(36:04):
are some definitely better options on the market. I think
diet chop drink is absolutely okay to have occasionally, but
keep it to the you know, occasional backyard barbecue or
birthday party, or if you're out to dinner with some
friends and you're choosing not to drink. Don't make it
a regular thing where you know, every single night you're
popping a can of diet coke with your dinner, because
again that tolerance to it, you'll just want more and
more and more over time, and then that becomes a
(36:25):
daily habit, and a twice daily habit, and a three
daily habit, and then before you know, you've got a
caffeine addiction plus a you know, artificial sugar free soft
drink addiction as well. Wonderful well Suzi that brings us
to the end of the nutrition catch for another week.
If you haven't done so already, Listeners, don't forget to
subscribe to us to have us deliver it in your
(36:45):
inbox every Sunday morning. And we would absolutely love and
appreciate if you could leave us a five star rating
in the Purple Apple podcast app. And please do make
sure if you love the podcast, you'll subscribe, because the
subscriptions are really what drive our ratings in the chart.
So the more people that subscribe, the higher of the
charts that we rank, and the more we can get
our great messaging out to people all around the world.
(37:05):
So we'd really really appreciate it. If you guys ascribe
to the podcast, we do have Instagram and Facebook social
sites running. We're at the Nutrition Couch podcast. Send us
your questions, feedback and we will pop the photos of
product reviews up on our instagrams and Facebook as well,
so make sure you go and check them out, and guys,
we will see you next week, same time, same place.
Thank you for listening.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Have a great week.
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