Season 11 Recap

You are listening to Spot On, a health and wellness podcast that breaks through the latest media headlines to provide you with accurate and usable information that is well spot on, spot on to meet your needs. I am your host, Dr. Jones-Saljub Lake, a nutrition professor at Boston University, and the author of the College textbook called Nutrition and You, which is used in colleges across the United States and abroad. Hello Spot On listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in to season 11 of Spot On. And we're going to do a little recap. We started the season with, you know, is laughter the best medicine, and the answer is you better. On this episode, we take a deep dive into the use of laughing for both positive mental and physical attributes. Now I know why I love sitcoms. Let's listen. So what do I mean by, and what is a bout of exercise? So when you laugh, you know that it can be aggressive, and as I told you this belly laugh I was having. So you can bring up your blood pressure at that time, and your heart rate. At that time of laughter, the medicinal part comes out, and then after the bout, your last parasympathetic goes up, that's your rest and digest versus your fight and flight, your sympathetic right, your parasympathetic goes up, and your muscles are relaxed. And you're on a whole different state after about a laughter, an episode when I say about an episode of laughter. How long? Okay. In general, if you get up to, you know, five minutes of laughter, terrific, with yoga laughter, you can get to 20 minutes of laughter, sometimes at the sitcom is that funny, you're laughing number of vows within the half hour time frame. So you're spending a lot of time in that, in that laughter state. You may have heard of the need for personal diets, but is there research yet to back this up? The truth is, well, not at the moment, but it's coming. Listen to this groundbreaking study that is occurring, and soon to release, and why it's all about personalization. Question is, did genes explain why people respond differently to different diets? They might, but they might not. And so this is a different kind of study, Jones. So typically when we do a study, we test A versus B. And all let's go in and do this intervention versus that intervention. What we're doing in this study is we're subjecting people to different diets. We're measuring everything under the sun, and then we're using AI, machine learning, all the sophisticated data to see if we can go back and then predict who's going to respond to certain foods or dietary patterns. Is snacking the new dinner? Well, you got that right for some people. Just over 90% of American survey said they had replaced at least one meal weekly with a snack, with 7% saying they eat no forum meals. Yikes. This is happening, but we want to know why. And most importantly, what would be some better choices for healthier snacks, especially if you use them to skip a meal? Junein to find out more. What are consumers looking for when they're looking for a snack? Well, I think again, it depends on the purpose of the snack. There are many reasons that people might be looking to snack. It could be a meal replacement. It could be just real quick energy if you're out and you're going to have a meal later at an hour or so to get you through. It might be feeling an emotional or physical need. Like hunger or boredom, lack of energy, stress, or maybe you need quick energy because you're going to do a workout. So there's so many reasons. And depending on that, people might be looking for something different. So they might be looking for something that's nutritious and filling. If this is a menu meal, it's filling an emotional need. Maybe those aren't what they're prioritizing. But if you're multitasking or busy, it might be looking for something portable or easy to prepare, so towards the thing. When your gut is talking back to you and you don't like what it's saying, it's estimated that 10 to 20% of the population may suffer from IBS. So what exactly is this? And most importantly, how can you diet help reduce the symptoms of IBS? Let's listen. Can you tell us what is IBS? Absolutely. So irritable bowel syndrome is a chronic gastrointestinal disorder where the gut is highly sensitive and it presents with abdominal pain. So everyone with IBS has pain. And the difference is that it can have alteration and bowel habits. One person might have constipation, one person might have diarrhea, and another person altogether may have a mixed sort of presentation. So alteration and bowel habits along with pain and you're diagnosed with IBS. Can you actually eat more but way less? What? The answer is yes. A Penn State researcher explains this proven science-based strategy behind how you can eat more high-volume foods to help you better manage your weight. No, I'm not kidding. You eat more, you weigh less. It is fascinating. It's based on finding foods that help to control hunger and promote satiety. So don't diet hungry is the idea. So it's food-based. We've looked at calorie density or energy density. Same thing, one's more technical term. That's just the calories per bite of food. And they, that calorie density has a profound effect on how much we eat. And it interacts with the amount of food we are served or the portion size. So these factors, food properties are continually affecting how much we're eating. If you pack a lot of calories into each bite, you're going to be getting more because people tend to eat a pretty consistent weight or volume of food over a day or two. And then bigger portions also encourage you to eat more. Because when you eat, affect your health, the answer is absolutely yes. Your body has internal clocks and eating late at night may be wreaking havoc with your health and your body weight. Tune in to find out more. So what is this whole idea about timing of the day and interacting with what you're eating? The concept is we have these biological clocks, or we call them circadian rhythms, which is basically this 24 hour period of time where how our body changes its physiology or behavior, we sort of have these internal clock regulating it. And we know that light affects that a lot and your sleep, like light and dark and your sleep patterns. But also when you eat, perhaps too, because what's fascinating to me is that, so not only does your brain have this one clock, but it's regulating all the clocks in your body. So your organs have clocks, a lot of your tissues have clocks and it's kind of all, they're all in sync, which is really cool. So if we think about that and how that relates to eating, maybe there's something to it where it doesn't matter if we're eating late when our body is starting to feel more tired or more asleep or maybe our organs are starting to go to sleep. So there's more and more research kind of looking at that and how that affects how we eat or health in connection with our eating habits. We ended season 11 with fighting cancer with a knife and fork. This was intriguing. About 40% of cancers that occur can be reduced by changing what's on your plate. It's all about quality and quantity. Let's listen to find out how to beat cancer with a knife and a fork. You know what I really like about the direction of the science, not just specific to oncology, but is the hyper focus on it is much more important what you are including and being exposed to versus what you're removing. And so the direction of a lot of the literature we're talking about for dietary quality habits impacting our health, it really seems like it's not the ultra-possessed and certain foods that are bringing unhealthy components to our diet that are in and of themselves harmful. It's because they're also displacing exposure to the fiber and the phytochemical. when they are making up the predominant portion of the diet. So I think thinking about it in that term helps you better prepare your plate. And the plate model is something that we use all of the time in our specialty. The American Institute for Cancer Research calls it the new American plate. And this is a tool you and I know can be utilized much easier than asking people to track servings per day of what they're consuming, exact volume. You can always look down and identify if your plate is mostly being made up of plants. Whether you're preparing a meal at home for yourself or you're at a fast casual restaurant or out the Thanksgiving dinner or a barbecue, that's something you can visually always make a determination of. And it's really critical in terms of the diet pattern we see to be most risk-productive for this disease. I want to thank you again for tuning in and listening to season 11 of Spot On. And I hope that you subscribe to it on any one of the you know podcast platforms that you use. I promise to you that if you stay tuned that season 12 will even be just as informative and entertaining. Thank you again. Spot On is supported by the Boston University, Sergeant College's Master of Science degree in nutrition program. Log on to beu.edu to learn more about this fabulous nutrition graduate program. Thank you for listening to Spot On. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. This way you'll get every new episode every week. And by the way, leave us a nice review. And can you also like us on our Spot On Facebook page and suggest topics for future episodes? Please follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Joan Salgy Blake. And oh, by the way, can you send this episode to five of your friends? Do I ask a lot of you?