 So, next up we have one of our favourite podcast guests, I guess they all are, but Dr Sally Bell, she's been on the podcast twice already before and I will add her on now. Hey, how you doing? All right, thank you, yeah. Good, good, good, good, good. Really excited listening to some of your guests. Patrick was amazing. I know, I know, I feel like with Patrick you need about three hours to go through it. Just a moment. You know, it's going to be the same with you, like when we get these experts on like yourself and you all know so much, it's like one, you ask one little question, it's like, well, it can go here, here, here, we can go everywhere with it. And, yeah, no, it's, yeah, no, it's fascinating. It's good. I'm glad to hear it as well. It's interesting hearing you having used some of that with, like, aspect of the patient and the new stuff he was talking about with the female population. But let's, let's, let's, this is, this is your time. This is your time. You've been one of the only, I don't know if we had, I don't know if we said before whether we've had, you've been on the podcast twice. Yeah. And I don't know that we'd had anyone back yet before. So it was even you're one of our very special guests inside. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. You know, on a Sunday for the podcast live event, it wouldn't have been completes without we would bring together our best guests at the podcast. It wouldn't have been complete without you in the running order. And we had so much, so much amazing feedback and questions following the first interview that we did with you that we had the follow up one and then it just continued. I think that one of the great things about those conversations is the breadth and depth of it in that we are, we're not just talking of like nutrition is just one of these five foundations that you talk about. And I'm sure we'll get a number of nutritional questions as we go through this. I want to make this as interactive with the people watching as possible, but for just to set the tone, just a quick intro of Dr. Sally Bell. What is who is Dr. Sally Bell functional functional health in a nutshell and and then those and those five and those five foundations. Yeah. Yeah. A comment of what we are. Okay. So, I mean, my background is I've been in medicine conventional medicine for 21 years. And I trained in general practice. And I think even during my training in general practice I started having issues in the way we were trained where there was this big focus on seeing somebody getting their disease sort of categorized into a classification. One of the guidelines for treating that disease and I would be really frustrated that we weren't focusing on a person, we were focusing on a disease. And I think I was frustrated that it would assume that everybody's disease had the same root cause. And then I went away to Africa for a few years, worked overseas for an agency and when I came back to general practice, a whole host of other things that happened. There'd been this massive drive to sort of create guidelines for everything. And instead of guiding us as physicians, it was more law like you would be dead and step off and use your brain or your intuition. And then a lot of the guidelines were very pharmaceutically driven. So there was a lot of prescribing that I was doing that I was becoming really uncomfortable with. And I think the other thing, like in general practice, you know, here in the UK, we used to hold the whole family together. We would know you, we'd know your dad, we'd know your siblings, we'd know your situation. And I'd say I'll see you in two weeks about the other thing. And that broke down. And so I came back in 2009 for seeing 40 patients a day, 10 minutes, you know, each, they were sick of telling me their story to another doctor. I was just wanting to get them up, you know, with the prescription. And then what happened is I actually lost my own health and went through the system and came out with my diagnosis and got given drugs. And I kept thinking to myself, but you're not telling me why and unwell. And I had this moment with my neurologist where I said, is there anything I can do to get myself better? And he just slipped another prescription across the desk and said, Sally, try this. And it was the breaking point for me where I went, no, like, there has to be more. And so I stepped back. I went back to the books. I discovered a whole host of other physicians asking the same questions. And really sort of functional health is about looking upstream. Instead of treating a disease, it's about looking at your body and working out what's going on in your body and where it's gone wrong. Because as you go upstream and you correct things there, then a whole host of things gets better. And also it appreciates that the body isn't just, you know, if you have a problem with the liver, it's from the liver. If it's your skin, it's your skin. If it's your gut, it's your gut. It actually understands that we are an interconnected sort of web of relationships within our body. And that if you pin the web there, it can affect it there. And so it's a lot more integrated in terms of its approach. And so I did some training and I covered my health very quickly myself, started practicing on lots of people who anybody let me have a go. And I started seeing things get better that I got taught you could never get better, you know, autoimmune diseases and thyroid issues. And when mum got diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis, she didn't want to go down the medication route very unwell. And within weeks, we had her better and not on any medication and three years on, she is still better. So bringing, you know, coming forward five years, like I've developed a framework that I use. So when you look at chronic disease, which is a big thing that we're facing as a nation that's crippling us and robbing us of, you know, enjoying life. So chronic disease like 90% of it is lifestyle. So we are still looking for a pharmaceutical solution, but a lifestyle problem requires a lifestyle solution. And so I talk about five foundations that underpin health. I talk about sleep, movement, rest, nutrition and connection. So connection with self connection with others and connection with that sense. Just name those five again. Yes. So sleep, rest, connection, nutrition and movement being the five foundations and this beautiful science. Like when I trained in the nineties, the science wasn't there, even in nutrition. And certainly as medics, we get to know nutrition, which is just barbaric. I just can't get my head around that. And so and I use that as a simple framework because actually I'm a bit of a bottleneck in terms of reaching people and getting people better. I work a lot with health coaches now, but actually there's a whole host of stuff that we can do as individuals that can turn the tide of chronic disease. And that's my passion. I get up every day because I really believe we've found something that can help turn the tide of chronic disease. Okay. Well, can we can we unpack those five foundations a little bit more, maybe one at a time and just to encourage people. If you have specific questions, ask those in the comments. The whole point of the podcast live is that rather than it just being myself and Tim on the podcast, asking the guest the questions that you get to interact and ask those questions yourself. Those five, rest, movement, nutrition, sleep, and connection. So any questions about using those to optimize yourself, your body, then ask them, ask put those in the comments. So if we can pick each of those as we go, and as we go through them, we'll pick up with my job to try and keep an eye on all of the comments. There's a lot of people where we're signing in and waving because they're enjoying seeing you on to the podcast. But if you have specific questions for Sally, make sure you stick those in the comments and we will answer them as we go. This is what I was going to ask. Which is the most important one? The answer is, they're all important. It's fascinating. I think one of the things we need to get fundamentally in our head is that our body is wired to heal. And disease is a process. Your red light rising guy used the word epigenetics. And this is like we used to think it was all about our genes. If we knew our genetic code, we would crack it. But now we understand this thing called epigenetics, which is the kind of software around our genetics. And we know that we can manipulate that by the decisions that we make about how we interact, about how we eat, and how much our food is speaking to our genes. And it's just phenomenal. And so I think the first thing we need to understand is that we're wired to heal. And two, that we have control to manipulate our epigenetics and our health. And that disease is processed. Like a lot of people seem to think their diabetes or their cancer falls out of the sky on their lap. And it doesn't. A whole host of things, small daily decisions, take people either towards disease or towards living wholehearted lives where they feel well. And so we have the ability to control that. And so before we think about what's the best foundation to start working on. You know, we have to understand that we do have control and that we don't have to sort of abdicate responsibility to the physician or to the pharmaceutical industry to come up with some cure for things. There is so much that we can do. And I think probably I think often with a lot of my patients, if I if I'm unclear where to start, if all of their foundations are just all over the place, I will probably start with sleep. Because, you know, we know that on the whole as a nation we are sleeping like 25% less than we did 50 years ago. We know that the majority of those between 18 and sort of 30 are getting six hours or less every night. And we know it has catastrophic effects on every single aspect of our health. Whether it's our productivity or creativity or ability to fight cancer or ability to fight infection or heart disease risk or athletic performance or mental health like there isn't a bit of our body that sleep doesn't touch. And and so really sometimes and you know like weight loss, I have a lot of people coming for weight loss issues and obesity, that you cannot lose weight if you're sleep deprived. Let your whole hormones go awry and your appetite goes up and your insulin resistance goes up and your hunger goes up. And so to really starting with getting really fantastic sleep, which means prioritising it. And then there's a whole host of things we can do called sleep hygiene that can help us get really good sleep. I was going to say, John, I'm going to list give people an example of a few of those and then we'll go on to some of these questions from Alfie B Page. First of all, like you need between seven and a half and nine hours sleep. So and that's a sleep that's not in bed. So first of all, it's life that comes very inconvenient when you take sleep seriously. Like you have to turn off Netflix, you have to come off your phone, you know. So when you sleep, you get rid of your Netflix. So first of all, for some people it's just prioritising it. There's no more magic than that. If you're like me, I really struggle to get good sleep. And so there's a number of things that you can do. And this is actually captured on my website. I've got a little free cheat sheet that you can look under my resource section if people want to pick up later. That's alibel.com. And so things like routine. So your body is controlled by a whole host of clocks and it loves routine routine and how we eat and how we sleep. So creating a routine around bedtime and getting up every day can be really, really helpful. The other thing is the next thing would be caffeine. So you have something called a sleep urge that develops. There's this thing, this little molecule called adenosine and it builds up through the day and it sort of communicates to your brain as it gets to a certain point that it's time to sleep. But caffeine sits on those receptors in our brain. We can't hear it. And caffeine could sit in our body for six, sometimes 12 hours depending on the half light of caffeine. Yeah. Yeah. And it depends how you detox. You know, and a lot of people don't have enough to detoxify properly anyway. So getting caffeine out of your diet or bringing it down before midday, I think it's really helpful. So if someone's struggling to sleep after midday, try to have caffeine. If you could go caffeine free, I would go caffeine free, but sometimes caffeine is a beautiful thing. That cup of coffee in the morning, that's my little moment. It's also understanding what things like, what has kept, like, which sometimes the misconceptions that it's like, okay, coffee. And then we don't think about tea. We don't think about dark chocolate and we don't think about even green tea. Yeah. I always have my healthy ones going, oh, but I have green tea in the evening. No, that's got caffeine in too. So yeah, as you've mentioned, all of those things, chocolate has caffeine in it. Is there any other obvious ones that I've missed? I mean, pop, you've got to think, you know, so yeah, if you think you can go with cola, then you've got to think of problems. Yeah. So routine and getting caffeine out of your diet. Then the next thing is light. So again, we are created and we have had a relationship with light for thousands of years and our body has adapted and responds to it. And we have different spectrums of light and it's the blue light that you get very strong in the morning and it's the blue light that you get from your phones and from our LED lighting that tells our body that it's daytime and it suppresses a hormone called melatonin, which you want melatonin suppressed in the morning. So get out in the morning and then, you know, avoiding screens, low lighting. You know, I have a little, in the winter, I have a little routine where I'll go around to my kids' rooms. I put low lighting on, I draw the blinds and just, you know, I create the evening and get our body set to kind of getting that blue light out of our body. You can use blue block of glasses. You can buy on the internet. I use those if I've got to work or I'm doing. How effective, like, how effective are they? Are they, is that? I don't know how to measure that, Daco. Yeah. I've got a pair, but I've not really. Yeah. Like, I sort of think that there's other benefits to getting off my computer and my phone after whatever time at night, from a, getting my brain to slow down and getting ready for the run, just the blue light. We've got, we've got one of the red, the target red lights, the red light rising in our bedroom. So we don't have a normal, there's only, there's only red light, which doesn't affect. I'd love to know what your neighbours think of your bedroom set up for us. Yeah, it's just red. With the red lights. Hopefully through the curtains. Just red. We take our mouths and we go to bed. That's all that happens in there. Anyway. Yeah, so light. Yeah. And actually that goes on to my next point, that thing about how busy your heads are, Lake. Yeah. Otherwise my brain, otherwise I'm awake at three o'clock in the morning. Yeah. And my brain is just thinking. It's like having great ideas that are all not about sleeping. Yeah. And we, one of the things we've just lost the art of is actually preparing to sleep. Like we kind of go, go, go, go. And then our head hits the pillow and our brain suddenly goes, right, I have some processing to do. And you've got no time to kind of have a daydream and sort all this out. And then, you know, our heads get really busy. So preparing to sleep. And then finally. I'm reading a book. About science. With me. Called Rest. And it talks about the brain, like the measuring brain activity. Basically when you're daydreaming, like this, like you're doing as much, your brain's working just as much as when you're like doing a really difficult task. And that there's some benefits, you know, some benefits of doing some really mundane tasks, like healthy, like process loads of things and do some problem solving and go, but like that, having that time out to do that, letting as part of our being like deliberate about having some. Absolutely. And if you're. And if we never do that, I think that's when I get to that point at night where it's like, okay, we'll do all this now. And then it's like, you can't sleep. But I will fall to sleep. That's never been a problem. Is that I'll wake up in the middle of the night and that won't be as you might see, that's my problem. But I think morning waking intends to be to do with cortisol levels. So to do with your stress levels. And so again, like, you know, going through all those sleep hygiene things, we have to be aggressively like dealing with stress in our life. Because if we haven't, again, your cortisol should be the highest in the morning, like that gets you going. And then through the day, it should be like dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping. But if, you know, we're stressed about work deadlines, we're still on our computers, we're watching movies that are releasing stress, we're eating inflammatory foods that stresses out. We're arguing with our spouses, we're fed up with the dog, whatever it is, like that pushes our cortisol up. And that's when you get that early morning waking because, because really the whole point of the stress response is to keep you awake and hyper alerts that you can't perform. And if we don't stress down, then, then you get that early morning awakening. Or for some people, they get that early morning awakening because they're hungry and actually having a kind of, you know, something that's just got a sort of low GI kind of food to help through the night can really help as well. You need to play a little bit with that if you don't think it's stress. Well, we've got, I think for me it's stress. And it just makes, we've got a question about before eating before bed. So I'll answer that in a second. Just on, on that, it, we're, we, we live that lifestyle that, and you can have literally no rest during the day. And it's just like go, go, go, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight all day long. And we get to the end of the day and we're tired and we're like, let's go to, and it's like, right, we're going to sleep now. And what you've just described, what was running through my head then that you were describing, I was like, we're just not being fair to ourselves because then we're like, we're wanting ourselves to switch off and sleep. We haven't set ourselves up to do that. Like it's actually, it's not fair on ourselves. We've talked about that before on the pet podcast. It's about creating rhythms in our life that sustain us. And, and we just, you know, we cannot, modern day diseases because of our modern day living. And we cannot just expect a quick solution. They keep doing the same thing and expect a different outcome. And there is a need for a kind of revolution about how we do life and creating rhythms that sustain us and bring us joy and bring us life. And yeah, daily rhythms, weekly rhythms, you know, see, and working out what you need in order to feel good and rest. Yeah. I'll not necessarily, I'll try and go through these in the order, in order to, depending on what we're talking about. So we will get to a long question, but ran NATO, patio, pp because we're talking about sleep. How long before sleeping should we have our last meal or snack? And if we, maybe if we frame that in the context, because you've given that context of like, if you're getting that early morning, waking in that there could be something there, but if we go for a general thing around, like I'm thinking digestive health, giving your body enough time to digest so that then you can see what would be there. Yeah. So I'm a real passionate believer in time-rescripted eating. And I think the evidence around that is just phenomenal in terms of our body. And I think we're now understanding that our body is, you know, we know that there's clocks around sleep and stress, but we also starting to understand that actually even our liver and our digestive enzymes and our gut are also on a clock and that we can really maximize health by eating the way we're designed to do. And so, and time-restricted eating for those that aren't aware is just, you know, for some people, that might be 12 hours. So they only eat between 8 o'clock in the morning and 8 o'clock at night. For me, it really works that I eat from midday and I eat to about 8 o'clock and I stop. And so it's finding something that works for you, but this grazing from 7 o'clock in the morning to 10 o'clock at the night just isn't great for us. And we need to, again, just play with and create a rhythm where we start retracting that the times that we eat. It's great for weight loss, reversing, obesity, diabetes. I mean, it's just, it's just a beautiful thing. Yeah. And that's because... Like around having some time where you're allowing your digestive tract to do its job rather than just keeping putting stuff in and it never had time to... Yeah. You know, time, is that another name for intermittent fasting or is intermittent fasting separate? Yeah. No, intermittent fasting. Any form of fasting is a great benefit. So intermittent fasting and time restricted eating are similar terms in the sort of medical world. And yes, our gut needs time to do everything else because we now know that we have this whole host of, you know, bacteria there doing incredible jobs for us and a huge part of our immunity, our happy hormones are made in our gut are all found there. And so our gut has some other stuff to do. And so actually, you know, yeah, we need to eat, but we don't need to be eating all the time and we release our body to do a whole host of other things. But in terms of when to eat late at night, like I would avoid, like you don't want to be digesting when you're asleep really, like a big heavy meal because again, like sleep, it's a phenomenally active phase, you know, during our 24 hour cycle that there's lots of stuff it needs to be doing. And so I would go very light smack if you're going to smack late at night, but still bear in mind to try and fit that within your time-restricted eating pattern. And if you're having never done time-restricted eating, literally just take a couple of hours off one day, that's it. And just see how that feels and realizing that you are not going to die if you don't eat, which is a huge amount of anxiety, you know, around our relationship with food. You know, just trying that and then gradually building that up and you know, you will see the benefits. I think, you know, you've mentioned this a number of times when we've spoken before on podcast that, and you mentioned it there, like figuring out what works for you as an individual is important, you know, I've done stuff where I can feel real, like particularly like relate a lot of myself like how do I feel and how's that like when I'm training and it can be I can train fasted and feel amazing. But there's a consequence to that fasting for me that then delivers an overeating later in the day. And then I play this like catch up afterwards and I go from like, I'm having to understand that like there's quite, there's what I'm trying to say is that like I can do something that on that one for a period of that day, then I feel good, but the consequence of that later in that day and then the following day actually makes the whole experience a little bit negative for me and I have to be careful around like whether I, how I, how I'm still figuring that out against a little bit, but what I'm starting to understand is I know that when I, if I fast for too long even though I can do it and it makes me feel good in that small instance, it can then have repercussions later for me where I need to make sure I get that balance and try to encourage people to try and listen to your body and find out what's working well for you. And a big part of some of the stuff I practice were in the connection piece. Like people, they're really mad about the nutrition and you know, dealing with their stress and sleep, but actually we know that if we're disconnected from ourselves, disconnected from others and disconnected from that sense of purpose, it has a, it's a massive driver for disease. And a big part of my work with people is getting them to listen to themselves. Like actually what you need to do, Jaco, is listen, like and, and, and respect that and tune into what you intuitively probably know and what your body needs and having some kindness around that. So we have to take some time to, to take a step back in our busy life and actually give ourselves a little bit of time to process that, to take that on board and like then think about it so you can then apply it afterwards. If we, if we just keep running, you know, we don't actually ever really do, like you said, you probably know the answer yourself intuitively, but you don't get to act on that intuition if you don't take that little bit of like time out and I think that's, that made me because today about that conversation there were three different guests. They're like the same, even though all from completely different areas of like health, wellness and fitness, but like the same themes come back around. Yeah, yeah. And, and I think probably culturally we just talk to look to the institution for the answers, look to the government for the answers, look for religions for the answers. You know, constantly looking outside of ourselves and I think we're, we're raised and I think especially as women who not trust our intuition and not trust, you know, are in a voice and I, and part of, I think, wholeness is, is being really comfortable in your own skin and comfortable with your own voice and trusting that deep intuition within us. And for me, that's like full health. It's marrow, it's sort of that marriage between our physical, our emotional, spiritual sort of health and, and bringing that all together. And that's when we find fullness of life and we start really, yeah, being comfortable with who we are and enjoying life. And I think that's really the definition of health, isn't it, that enjoyment of life. And sometimes that pursuit of nutrition and training and it's just a distraction from the fact that we're lonely and disconnected and we need to ask some deeper questions, which is part of, you know, becoming healthy. Yeah, well, it's part of this. There's Alfie B. Page, that's a great question, whilst we're talking about connection. In regards to connection, does, does need lots, does that need to be lots of different people or a small group of people, okay? And at the moment with lockdown, do virtual meetings fit the bill? I imagine it's the level of connection. Is that more important, the quality? Yeah, I think, I think we're all wired differently. And so for me personally, like I'm deeply introverted, if you put me in a room with loads of people, I just shrink and I think, oh gosh, what am I going to say? You put me around a table with two or three and I feel deeply connected. And so I think, but for some other people, actually they get energy and from being in that big group and they bounce off each other and what have you. So it is a little bit about understanding how you're wired and the social isolation thing just kills me. Like, I don't think we can have that level of connection, you know, without being in the same room. Like there is even science about what happens when you're in the same room with somebody. Like I control you into my heart rate and I control you into my breath rate just by focused attention and I can bring you into my peace if you're distressed and I'm not sure that can happen like this. And then there's just the whole science around touch. I mean, it's a beautiful, beautiful stress room and it grieves me like some of these guys that are single and are living alone at home. I just find that really hard and I certainly find it really hard in my own life and I've got my kids and husband at home not being able to kind of, you know, wrap my arms around my friends and you know, I've had a couple of friends that have died this last month and it's just so hard to grieve as a community when you're separate like this. It's such a violation of our humanity. One of the things that really struck me the most about that the connection side of things was that there is, you know, now as people are delving into more and more research about these things some of the stuff that I did on my wife's functional health coach course is doing like over-hearing things where they're talking about there's some real, like the evidence of what that, the difference that connection can make to like your health. It's not just like, we know that it's good to have some close-knit friends that you can rely on for everyone agrees on that but there's like this deeper stuff like even just then you're saying when you're with someone you can, your heart rates and then isn't there like females living together they're like hormone cycles couldn't like there's stuff going on that is far deeper potentially sort of fully understand but there's I just love those ideas about there's so much other stuff going on. Absolutely, and there's some work also like Slavovich done some work and the stress lab Lab over in America and he's got some wonderful work that shows, you know, physically how social isolation drives inflammation and we know inflammation is the process in our body and it's one of the underlying mechanisms of nearly all chronic disease, you know, whether that's heart disease cancer, diabetes, that is over inflammation in our body and he's shown that you know social isolation drives that disease so again it's not this kind of fluffy we often think it's just that was just what you're eating like we know like okay what you're eating that can cause information but to think that it's just opening up the conversation of people's ideas and it goes back to what you said right at the beginning we are one, we are a whole being and that is everything like about us our thoughts, our minds all of those things very interconnected, yeah whilst we're talking about nutrition then there was two I'm going to ask one shorter one first than the longer one Loz lifts Loz which she's been to a number of hours she's been to every single retreat that we've ever done so a big shout out to her but our ground or dry versions of things like turmeric as good as the fresh raw product I'm going to throw in there like she said she said turmeric because she knows the benefits of it but throw out the truckings that mix the benefits of turmeric so I mean turmeric like it's curcumin which is the active part in turmeric and there's studies kind of at cellular level and animal levels that show that it has anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer effects, it's never been translated to humans not because the research has been done and it's disproved it's just it's just not being done and when you look at kind of the levels that they use in animals and you were to multiply that up to what a human might need if you're just doing per kg you need a lot of curcumin in order to have that same effect and so it's difficult to translate at the moment those animal studies to human studies however I would say like if again you look at ancient cultures turmeric's been a huge part of healing in a lot of those cultures and I think you know a lot of these practices we're now sort of understanding the science I know there is a study that looks at supplements compared to eating turmeric and it's anti-inflammatory effect and that actually it's in the cooking of turmeric that something happens and it's more potent if you're eating it than you're taking a supplement Did you say if you're cooking it? Cooking with it yes cooking with it is better than taking a supplement of it What about eating it raw like in a shake? I don't know that question I don't know the answer so I know of those studies so there's definitely something about consuming it in your diet compared to taking a supplement I was just interested in when you said cooking is there something in part like eating turmeric and it may be so we don't know and so yeah I have it as part of my diet and certainly like if I'm doing some immune thing I'll shove it in a shake, always sit up and get a good dose and there's lots of lovely foods that we know have very anti-inflammatory effects, anti-cancer effects so yeah So what are some of those things like I mean garlic has a lot more human studies in terms of its antibacterial anti-viral properties and you look at resveritol which is the flavonoid found in grape skins so in red wine again like resveritol has incredible anti-cancer effects but again that's in animal studies and I don't think yet they're translated back to kind of human studies I think you have to drink about 2,000 glasses of wine to get the dose that you have always got is probably not a solution you'll probably go yellow and you'll never die before you get any Because garlic, people can have garlic in their diet Yeah, you know, ginger Ginger again that's got anti-inflammatory and anti-viral effects you know coconut oil has lovely antibacterial effects, food plays a huge part like it's more than calories I go on and on about this when I'm writing and people who are following me like food is information and some people don't get this like they still haven't copped onto the fact I love that phrase food is information It is, it's information to our bodies, it is talking to us it's talking to our microbiome, it's educating and impacting the processes in our body and we need to rethink about food like that you know switching from calories and macros to nutrient density and getting a wide variety of foods that will be the building blocks that will nurture our microbiome and so that our body can do what it's brilliant at which is keep us cancer free, keep us in a good way, we've got all these mechanisms we just need to create the right environment to do that Yeah So then the other one question potentially whether it will be longer we'll see Vasik 1990 your thoughts on a purely black plant based diet please I know that we asked, we talked about this on the second podcast I think a little bit So in 21 years of medicine I would never ever recommend a vegan diet for health purposes only and that would be quite a big statement for some people so just like unpack that for us So I think first of all there's veganism which is a way of life and I'm not anti-vegan like it's an attitude like it's beautiful I've engaged with some of my vegan friends it's shaped my thinking, it's made me look at the environment different you don't have the vegan diet which you don't have to be following veganism to do that which is solely plant based and then you've got the vegan food movement and food industry which I have massive massive issue with because they are labelling processed factory food as healthy and I have an issue with that Now when I'm looking with my patients that I'm seeing what I see in our nation is that we are an obese nation that are malnourished like we do not have the vitamins and minerals and antioxidants on board for our body to function and the basic macros and we've got the wrong fat balance and so one of my issues around the vegan diet is that I'm really after sort of nutrient density so I really want to pack nutrients into people and a really quick and easy way to do that is to use meat products it's nutrient dense and the thing is with absorbing nutrition it's not only does that plant have the nutrition it's also about so I am very very pro a plant slant to diet absolutely like 70% probably what we should be eating should be a diverse range of plants I am whole hearted I think that's one of the big things a lot of people don't actually eat a wide variety they don't eat the rainbow I've changed mine over the years if I go back not that many years ago my intake of a variety of vegetables would have been abysmal and one thing about getting the message of getting more plants and more vegetables into our diet is a very positive one absolutely and the key to a healthy gut microbiome is having a plant slant to our diet and the key to all of our health is a healthy gut without a doubt but I do believe that meat has a place or fish you could go fish I would be happy if people just doing fish with a basic plant slant to their diet and address their fat balance but am I worrying and this is what I see is that for the majority of people who don't understand nutrient density and don't understand their food they're switching from a processed shitty standard western diet to a vegan diet and again is highly processed in terms of what is being put on the shelves there and that concerns me the question is more about the quality of the food and not having the processed foods and stuff that's not packed with nutrients is more of the importance is the thing I'm hearing from you and I think to a vegan it can be healthy but you have to work a lot harder to understand your macronutrients you have to understand that plant proteins aren't complete proteins you have to understand where you're going to get some of those other you know essential polyunsaturated fats like your EPA and your DHA you have to understand where you're going to get your B12 from you have to look at 45 foods and you have to supplement well so again on my website on the resource section I've got a bit about micronutrients for vegans and protein for vegans and for people to live well and you can do it but for the majority of people where life is busy it's a difficult switch and that's why I don't advocate for it on a whole but do a number of my patients a vegan and they really stretch me and challenge me and I have to think and go back to the books and work hard and I think from an environmental point of view as well like you know they bang on about they the vegan movement can you know they're advocating for us to look after environment which you know I'm whole hearted about but I think that from the wrong conclusions that animals are not the problem it's industrialised farming and actually you know it's also the way that we're producing our crops monocropping and herbicides and pesticides and all that but actually my eye is on the regenerative farming movement where they're using animals and they're using techniques that's putting carbon back into the ground and it's treating animals well and we know that the health of those animals and the impact on our health is that they've got better micronutrient profiles and fatty acid profiles and better it's back to quality over it is and so I like the people on your website www.sallybell.com you've got the information about that more because probably that things that people from vegan diet want to look out for the vegan society and the vegan society UK is a great resource as well they're sensible they're grounded you know you can now get these EPA and DHA supplements and so you just really need to get with it if you're going to do that and not just opt as a kind of healthy lifestyle yeah so I really really recommend yeah obviously follow me at Sally if you don't yet it's on Instagram it's Dr Sally Bell and you can ask her any direct questions on obviously on Instagram but check out the websites www.sallybell.com where you can get those detailed information I think it goes deeper it's beyond a sort of to and fro conversation about the overall this is what you're thinking you get to delve into some of those specifics so recommend people going over to check that out if you're interested in that there's a number of other blogs and things that you've written on all of these subjects that we've covered and more also Vakish1990 says lots of lifts thanks as well and so from us Sally thank you to you for coming on for what we can probably call officially the third time and I'm sure it won't be the last either it's great to get that interaction with people's questions live as well as you know we love catching up with you I'm going to go and work on my stress we talked a bit about my thyroid issue but then the fact that I wake up in the middle of the night is a good mark one thing actually just before we sign off is you said something to us on the podcast before that was when something flags up to you there's something out of work here when you die and you're dying or something sort of taking that as a good thing of going that's my body's way of telling me I'm going to do something about it and that's how I'm going to treat it I mean that's how I do it my history is chronic migraine if I get a migraine I go back to my foundations and go okay how's my sleep am I moving am I eating well am I connected am I resting well and you just go back to those five things or you do a reset and then your body will reset so it is befriending sometimes you've been aware of what's going wrong just come back to those five foundations start putting some things in place and your body will find it's reset it's a great message of listening to our bodies and being kind to ourselves and I think that self-awareness is a message that's come out through a number of these conversations we've had today with all the different guests and the way that you describe it there of using it being your body's way things can be stuff that I get annoyed when I don't have a good night's sleep but it's as you say befriending it and actually it's a great attitude a positive attitude towards it and then encourage us to listen to our body and then act positively on the back of it so it's a lovely message for us to finish up on yes great lovely to see you thank you so much for joining us okay bye catch you again soon, cheers