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Transcript

Michelle: All right. So, go.

Kevin: Oh my God, that was so abrupt. Yes, sir. I will go. Yes, ma'am. Hey, Michelle, how are you doing?

Michelle: Kevin, I'm so great, although it already feels like it was a million years ago now because I've been back to work. But I just recently came back from a hiking trip to Iceland.

Kevin: Yeah, you were away. We haven't talked since you came back. So, how was it?

Michelle: Oh, it was amazing. And I know I was so excited to go because I know that you've mentioned in the past that Iceland is one of your favorite places to travel to and hike. And I totally get it now.

Kevin: You can understand my fascination with that country.

Michelle: Yeah. So, we started and did some sightseeing in Reykjavik. And then I don't remember all of the Icelandic names.

Kevin: A hundred thousand consonants and vowels. Yes.

Michelle: They're very long words.

Kevin: They are.

Michelle: And when my friend Davala says the names of them, it comes out in Icelandic. It comes out so musical. Meanwhile, I'm just like, yeah, what she said. But over to the east and kind of to the upper end of the lowlands, we did a hike up that one famous mountain. And the whole island, of course, is the result of volcanic activity. So, in some parts of it, I found it very similar to Big Island, Hawaii. Just the landscape.

Kevin: Yeah, that's true.

Michelle: Although the climate was very different.

Kevin: Just a tiny bit. Just a little bit.

Michelle: Yeah, but you kind of go from one set of colors that's got pockets of lush green and browns, etc. And then you kind of go up further and it's more blues and reds because there's more silica when you go up to the highlands. And yeah, we got to go to some wonderful hot springs. I was really delighted when we were eating in restaurants, especially in Reykjavik. So many delicious plant-based options and really, really well done. So, that wasn't hard at all. It was just a little bit harder when we got going up to the highlands where you had to stop for groceries before we went up there. It was a little bit tougher in the average grocery store when you get a little further away from that center. Yeah, but overall, it was amazing. The one thing that I did find challenging, though, is we had such really long days. I just mean from a food and a health perspective, was that we ended up eating very late in the day quite often. Just because we had such long days and long hikes and it was wonderful and it was beautiful. Our amazing hosts, Val and Kate, hey, shout out to them and Nature Nurture Adventures if anybody wants to check out what they're doing. Incredible tour guides, incredible itinerary. But they were hosting some of the meals for us and so they've been tired hiking all day. We were eating sometimes like 8, 9 o'clock at night and I'm not used to that. I try to eat before 7 if at all possible because that's best supported by evidence for a whole bunch of reasons. It was tough to sleep sometimes when eating so late and it interrupted my digestion a bit. But overall, so worth it just for a short period of time.

Kevin: It's such an amazing country. It's funny, you know, if 7 o'clock is the best time to eat, then that's great because my child kind of forces me to eat at 7 o'clock. It's interesting because when we travel, we do sometimes naturally eat a little bit later and it does impact me. So it's interesting and that kind of brings us around to this episode's topic. It's a listener question. So it's like we planned it. Of course we didn't. Pure serendipity. So a listener has asked about eating habits and more specifically around there's so many different ideas around when you should eat, whether you should fast, intermittent fasting, complete fasting, whether breakfast is the most important meal of the day or whether you should skip breakfast. As you just said, whether you should eat a big dinner, a little dinner, eat a dinner late like they do in Europe, eat a dinner early like every single parent of young children. And there's a lot of confusion and I'm personally very confused about it. So I was hoping that you, Michelle, master of all knowledge, would have some insight into this.

Michelle: I'm not the smart person, I just know who the smart people are.

Kevin: Well then that in itself is being smart. So can you shed some light on eating habits and maybe cultures? We've previously discussed blue zones and other cultures. If there's any insight or history or whatever.

Michelle: Well, it's interesting that you should say that because that is obviously where I always like to go. Where are the survivors? Where are the people that are living the longest with the least instances of disease and becoming centenarians and healthy well into their old age? Because that's certainly my ideal of aging. So if we kind of go back to evolutionary, like if we just compare to how we eat today, how many meals was normal for us? And it seems like back in hunter-gatherer, the best information they have is, of course, a lot was driven by hunger and was driven by what was readily available. But the best thinking at this point is that it was probably one or two times a day. And then whatever was readily available and easy to reach for, such as fruit or nuts, that would have been their equivalent of snacking. Or even if there were times where what's available was very sporadic and food wasn't available, that's kind of why our bodies adapted to being very good at storing calories and storing fat for those times. But typically, we would have been driven by our instincts. We would have eaten when hungry. And it's only in modern times that we developed this schedule around eating. And we also, when I say schedule, I mean breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And we also, what's different than our evolutionary selves, is that we have such an incredible abundance of food available to us typically, at least in the part of the world that we enjoy living in. And then problematically, a lot of that food is engineered.

Kevin: It's all feast and no famine.

Michelle: It's engineered to stimulate cravings so that we'll want more of it by these food companies. It's enhanced with flavors and colors and preservatives and additives. And we also have an incredible snacking culture that contributes significantly to our caloric intake differently. So scientists believe that we still behave today exactly like our homo erectus ancestors or paleolithic ancestors did. It's just that we don't have to work hard for it anymore.

Kevin: We just open the fridge. We walk downstairs, open the fridge or open the pantry and grab that chocolate chip cookie.

Michelle: Or through the drive-thru or the convenience store or Uber Eats or whatever. That's kind of our instinct. And some of the modern food systems have monopolized on that knowledge. You may remember, I think it was our very first or second episode, and I'll say it again. We were designed to seek the most calorie density or nutrient density with the least amount of effort. And what used to be the most nutrient-dense or calorie-dense to reach for also used to be the most nutrient-dense to reach for. It was the most colorful, bright berries, nuts, greens, whatever that was easy for us to reach for. No longer the case. But the question was, okay, there were a couple in there. It was when to eat and what was the other? The frequency?

Kevin: Well, yeah, if there's a frequency and when to eat. And also a little bit about if fasting, like if you eat at regular intervals or if you eat fast for a while. Because I know that there's a recent trend or what I think is a recent trend among very sports-centric like marathoners or long-distance runners. Where they eat only in certain times of the day. And they fast for like eight or ten hours at a time. Oh, interesting. And apparently it has something to do with the metabolism. I'm not sure. It's been explained to me and I've forgotten, of course. And I should have taken notes.

Michelle: No, that's okay. So I know I get the essence of it. There's a couple in there. We may squeeze a couple episodes out of this, Kevin. So I'm going to preface this by saying whatever I say today, two years from now could change. Because this idea of fasting and time-restricted eating and timing of eating is such a rapidly advancing, I'm going to say rapidly advancing area of nutrition science and longevity science, too. It's not that the data changes, it's that we learn more. Sort of the professor in this space and doctor, of course, that I follow the most on this subject is Dr. Walter Longo. He is professor of gerontology, which is, of course, the study of aging and biological sciences and the director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, Los Angeles, which is one of the leading centers in the world on the research of aging and age-related diseases. So I've been following him for a number of years. And when I've gone to educational conferences on health and nutrition and the links between diet and disease, countless people are constantly referring to his research. There's also certainly, I think his name is Dr. Sachin Panda, who's also publishing a lot of papers on this. And I think there's different perspectives. One expert might say something just slightly different than the other, but like 98% of what they have researched and believe is directly in line. Just nuances might be slightly different based on where they're coming from, right? One might be coming from an aging perspective or a longevity perspective, might be coming from more of a disease treatment or prevention perspective. But focus on what's the same, and it pretty much largely is. So I'm going to jump kind of right to the punchline. It seems most recently, Walter Longo's research, he refers to intermittent fasting as time-restricted eating. And time-restricted eating is about 11 to 12 hours of eating, with fasting for 12 to 13 hours seems to be the sweet spot. So your eating window between 11 to 12 hours, your fasting window between 12 to 13. And the reason he says that is because of all of the research that they have done at the Longevity Institute and various clinical trials. They start out in, I think, mice and rats, but then the metabolism of a mouse or a rat is much faster than a human. So it's very hard to translate that to humans, but they do...

Kevin: You mean you can't compare humans and rats?

Michelle: We are not rats, remember?

Kevin: We talked about this before. We're not rats, exactly. Call back to like one of our very first episodes. I still remember.

Michelle: But I think they do a lot of study first to kind of get direction on it, and then they translate them to human dietary clinical trials. And there's a lot on this now. There's still a lot more to go, but there's a lot on this now. And what they found is that having your feeding window between 11 to 12 hours seems to work best for all purposes and for all people, no matter what their goal is. And it also seems to be the easiest for the average person to do. As opposed to, for example, some of the other views on intermittent fasting is like 5-2 fasting, where you'll eat regularly for five days, you'll fast for two. Alternate day fasting, where you'll eat one day, you'll fast another. Those are other kind of methods of fasting. But they're not supported by Longo's research, mainly because for practical reasons, it's very difficult for people to do. I'm sure. You might try it for a week or something like that, but that fasting schedule is very, very difficult. It's very demanding. It's also believed that for some people, there may be some side effects from not eating every day or just two days a week. Human behavior dictates that it's not very practical for the average person. Versus keeping your feeding window to 11 to 12 hours.

Kevin: 11 to 12 hours of eating and 12 to 13 hours of fasting is pretty much your normal day. If you wake up and start eating at 7 in the morning, as long as you're finished by around 7 at night, and you don't eat after 7 at night, you go to sleep, and you don't even realize you're fasting because you're asleep. It's almost a normal day for most people.

Michelle: Right. Yeah, exactly. Under normal circumstances, that would be true of most of us. But the truth is, in North America, generally, and even other, I'm going to say, first world countries, generally, they find that people are eating for 15 to 17 hours per day.

Kevin: Really?

Michelle: Yeah, exactly. So, if you move from 15 to 16 hours a day to 11 to 12 hours a day, those additional hours of fasting restriction makes a surprisingly huge difference. You end up with a reduction in calories, your metabolism is more efficient, and improved sleep is a big part of that. And they've proven this out, that moving from 15 to 17 to 11 to 12, in both mouse and human studies, they find the same result.

Kevin: I think we've all experienced, you know, when you have a big meal before going to bed, you don't sleep as well.

Michelle: You don't. You think, oh, my belly's full and I get sleepy, but you don't actually sleep that well, right?

Kevin: You're actually vaguely uncomfortable, and you can't, it doesn't seem like, like just, you know, evidence based on, you know, very non-scientific evidence of me eating big meals.

Michelle: Well, you know, one of the things that I found interesting about that, was that Walter Longo said that this is one of the contributors to people who wake between 2 and 3 a.m. And that explained a lot for me, because, you know, I would say the one thing that I struggle with is even despite all that I know, and doing a majority of things right with my diet, a majority of the time, I love to snack in the evening in front of the TV, with a movie, or my favorite show, right? I'm a sucker for a big, nice bowl of popcorn.

Kevin: Right, yeah.

Michelle: And things like that. And, you know, especially now that I'm in menopause, that tendency to be wakeful in the evening is much more. Like when I was younger, and, you know, working the career, and, like, at the peak height of my career, where, you know, long hours, whatever, I had no choice. The minute that my head hit the pillow, I was out.

Kevin: Because you're exhausted, you've spent all day. And I was out all night, exactly.

Michelle: And being a mom and all that comes with that, right?

Kevin: Life is busy.

Michelle: But now, I can still work, have the same type of work schedule. I don't have any other demands. But I note it's very noticeable that if I get off track of the timing of my diet during the day, I will be much more wakeful between, like, in the night. And 2 to 3 a.m., just like he says, is exactly the time. You know, there is another... I'm just going to inject this. This is not part of Walter Longo's research, but I remember studying this when I was doing... I was reading a book on sleep. And there is one perspective. I don't know if this has been proven out, but it's an interesting theory. That there is a concept that maybe back in the pre-industrial age, just the way that our lives would have worked around, whether it was farming or whether it was early industrialization, this notion of a second sleep. That we would go to sleep, and then we would wake up in the middle of the night and do some writing or other things, some thoughts, and then go back to sleep. And that that was considered to be a fairly normal behavior, apparently.

Kevin: Yeah, I've heard that. Yeah, rather than a full, like, 8 hours at once, like we do 8 or 9 hours, it was broken up into two smaller sections.

Michelle: Yeah, so I have read that in a book that I read about sleep and different theories on sleep and what helps us, you know, have improved sleep or whatever. But, you know, I would say, you know, even if you wear a smart watch as I do, like it defines a good restful sleep as a continuous uninterrupted sleep, right? Especially going through all the cycles. So anyway, but that's an insight, right? If you are the person that is having, that is struggling with that, being wakeful in the night, it could be because you are eating past 6 or 7 p.m. And like Walter Longo's kind of rule of thumb is don't eat anything 3 hours before going to bed.

Kevin: Which is what every single grandmother has ever said in the history of everything. I mean, sometimes, like, you know, what we'll call old wives tales are actually sometimes the best advice.

Michelle: Well, it's ancient wisdoms, right? And they maybe didn't have all of the academic research and stuff to back it up, but people were guided much more by what they felt and what made them productive every day. And they didn't have all of this stimulus and distraction that we have. They were much more in tune with their bodies and much more closer relationship with their food. And even, I don't know about you, Kev, but in my house growing up, I'm going to say when I was 7, 8, 9 years old, we didn't have snack foods around the house unless it was some baking that my mother had done.

Kevin: My mother didn't even bake.

Michelle: We just didn't have it.

Kevin: Yeah, I, to this day, well, it's funny because my partner snacks all the time just because he grew up in a house that always had snack food. Whereas me, my parents never had snack food. So I just, I eat my three meals a day and that's it. And I never snack. And it just never crossed my mind to come home after school and have a snack because it's just foreign to me. Whereas if you grow up in a household where you do have a lot of snacks, it just becomes habit. So it's very interesting. I had one quick follow-up question just before we continue on.

Michelle: Okay, sure.

Kevin: Just to clarify, when you say fasting, you mean food, correct? Like it's okay to drink past the 11-hour window? Okay, okay, I just wanted to make sure because sometimes fasting is defined as liquid.

Michelle: No, you need to drink your water.

Kevin: Okay, I just wanted to make sure.

Michelle: You need to drink your water.

Kevin: I've got my cup here. See, look at there. I've got my tea, so it's all good.

Michelle: And even in fasting, Val Terlonga would say that coffee and tea are okay. Just don't fill it with sugar and milk.

Kevin: Clear liquids.

Michelle: Yeah, yeah, I would say so. So just to kind of summarize what he says, that 11- to 12-hour feeding window is not only the easiest, but it's the safest. And no physician that has read the research will ever argue that it's not a good idea. There are no research papers that will contraindicate that it's not safe or effective, or even partially effective in preventing and treating a number of diseases. So it's in his opinion that 12-12 or 11-12, 12-13, wherever it's comfortable for you or wherever it lands on a given day because your schedules may be different, right? He said that in his opinion, everybody should eat this way. It is supported by epidemiological data. It's supported by clinical trials. It's also consistent, back to what you said at the very beginning, to what centenarians have been doing for more than 100 years.

Kevin: Right, right.

Michelle: And one of the pieces of magic about this is autophagy, this concept of autophagy. Is that tight? It's our bodies. It's the way our... You're such a nerd. It's the way that our bodies do like a cellular clean-up, like a cellular self-cleaning. So it breaks down and recycles cells that are damaged or cells that are like unnecessary for some reason. And it also is linked to actually stimulating stem cells when we do fasting in a consistent way that we allow the body to have its time to do that. Just as an aside, it's reminding me, I don't know whether this is related, but I can't imagine why it would not be related because it's connected very closely to having consistent deep sleep. That a lot of people don't realize we have kind of a lymphatic process that goes on in our brain, but it only occurs when we sleep. That our brain kind of takes out the garbage and cleans up, right?

Kevin: Some of us have more garbage than others to take out. My lymphoid system must be busy.

Michelle: I know that there's been times where I've missed some cellular clean-up on my brain and I sure feel it when I wake up in the morning. But I know that I have dug into that and cited the studies for our client in the past who was claiming that they didn't need more than five hours of sleep and that's just the way they were. I had to try some convincing to do that. You might be able to get by on five hours sleep and I know that I'm guilty in the past being a workaholic at different times. I've kind of considered five to be the minimum that I could get away with. But it certainly is not health-promoting. It's certainly not longevity-promoting. It's certainly not promoting the best of your mental capabilities. And I have to think that we have to get away from being myopic with our advice and our nutrition science, right? Because everything is so intricately connected because we're this complex adaptive system, right? So just on the one to two meals a day that we said might have been historical as opposed to the three meals plus snacks that are prevalent in our culture. It reminds me if I can diverge to tea for a second.

Kevin: Please do, your favorite topic.

Michelle: You're familiar with having afternoon tea?

Kevin: I am.

Michelle: Fun fact, that afternoon tea became a thing because way back then, I can't remember which queen it was exactly because there's a few significant ones in the history of tea culture because of course it came from colonialism. And queens love tea. Yes, and we can set aside all the problems with colonialism for a second and just focus on the lovely tradition of afternoon tea that resulted. That the aristocracy, especially the women, didn't have a lot to do during the day. And the queen got very, very bored. And back then, in those pre-Victorian times when this tradition started, they would break fast, which would be in the morning. And their dinner was typically late, like very late in the day. And so there was no lunch in that culture. So afternoon tea became a thing where the bored aristocracy would get together in the sitting room with their finger sandwiches and at the low tables. It's low in the day at low tables. Having a little something because she was peckish because it was a long wait until they would have dinner.

Kevin: Because they weren't following the 11 to 12 rule.

Michelle: No, and you know what? Typically, Dr. John McDougall would say a lot of the dietary problems that we see or that have resulted are the diets of kings and queens, right? It was usually the people that had the most that developed the worst behaviors about diet and nutrition.

Kevin: And then everyone, all the lower orders wanted to follow them because they thought that's high culture and that's what you're supposed to do. In which case, kings and queens could never be wrong. That's right. So people want to follow them and emulate them to try to bring up their social status. So it makes sense. Those darn kings and queens.

Michelle: Another fun fact on that. I'm glad that you mentioned high culture. That's where this idea of high tea came from which is not the same as afternoon tea. So afternoon tea is also known as low tea which is low in the day at low tables in the sitting room. And high tea is at high in the day, later in the day, at high tables and that was of the lower classes who wanted to emulate the royals but they were busy working in the factory all day. They couldn't do it in the middle of the afternoon.

Kevin: So they did it after work but call it high tea. Oh, interesting.

Michelle: Yeah, and it was usually they didn't have... You know, even the foods available to them, they didn't have like finger sandwiches and scones and things. So they would have time to make biscuits and stew and things like that. So it's funny. It's people, people of, you know, British origin who really know their history well, particularly the royal history. Well, they get, they really get a B in their bonnet when North Americans refer to afternoon tea as high tea. But anyway, I digress. But just funny, like that just kind of, I'm kind of, I piece it all together. Yeah. We, it's really not that long ago that we didn't have lunch.

Kevin: Right. Right.

Michelle: As part of our culture. So anyway. Okay. So back to Dr. Longo.

Kevin: Okay.

Michelle: The other kind of fasting type of diet that is really exciting in research and, and Longo is at the forefront of it. I think he invented the term actually, he calls it the fasting mimicking diet, the FMD.

Kevin: Okay.

Michelle: And it's in, in addition to time restricted eating, it's a very specific way of eating. Okay. So when we talk about, you know, that form of intermittent fasting, where we have a feeding window of 11 to 12 hours, we're not prescriptive about what you eat, although you shouldn't have a lot of processed foods. You should, you should focus mainly on plants, but you know, all of those good things that we say about what an ideal diet is, Canada's food guide, blah, blah, blah. But in the fasting mimicking diet, it is plant-based. It is designed to be low calorie, low sugar, low protein, and high in plant-based fats. And it has, it is being tested and researched for diabetes reversal type two, of course, pre-diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, and a host of autoimmune diseases. So it's basically, in addition to that time restriction, it is basically a calorie restricted diet with a very specific menu that physiologically mimics what the body would experience had it been doing water only fasting. So water only fasting has been proven to be a very effective method to help people with very extreme disease conditions. In fact, this has been made the most famous in our culture by the True North Health Center in Santa Rosa, California, most notably the founder, Dr. Alan Goldhammer. And he's written a lot of books on this. He lectures on it all the time. You can see him, you can hear him in podcasts and conferences like all over the place, but they run a very specific water only fasting program that is completely medically supervised. Actually, True North Health is fascinating. I want to go there at some point because I have family in Southern California. And so it would just be nice to go there because apparently a lot of celebrities and people in the nutrition world just go and stay there instead of staying in a hotel. So you can stay in True North Health Center and it's not any more expensive apparently than staying in a nice hotel room, but all of your healthy food is provided and you have access to all these other things. But if you go there as a residential person as part of their medically supervised program, you get blood work and testing and a doctor reviews everything with you. And then if you are an ideal candidate for the water only fasting, then you're fully supervised and you might stay there for 30 days or six weeks. It's kind of whatever they recommend and people come out completely transformed in their health and then they get coaching on how to do better. So because of the known efficacy of water only fasting, this fasting mimicking diet seeks to try to find that sweet spot of where they can create the same response at the marker level of blood work, et cetera, that they see as a result of that water only fasting without having to do a water only fast. Because they're trying to find a safer way, right? Like water only fasting is effective, but if you've got type 2 diabetes, for example, you don't want to go on a water fast by yourself without being medically supervised.

Kevin: Yeah. Let's just put that disclaimer in that we are not suggesting that everyone suddenly just start drinking water and you'll be magically healed. Okay. This is not, please seek medical assistance before starting anything like this. Okay.

Michelle: And that kind of goes back to Longo's initial, like the initial point that I made at the very beginning. He says this 12 hours on 12 hours off or somewhere around there is safe for everyone.

Kevin: Yes, exactly. Right.

Michelle: So, but now we're getting into more the research more around disease specific interventions and ways that fasting can be used. So, this fasting mimicking diet is fascinating. Now, so this is a big, big area of research right now. They tested it on mice, of course, as I said first, and looking for that fasting response and those markers in the blood as if they weren't eating at all.

Kevin: Okay.

Michelle: Try to find that sweet spot.

Kevin: Right.

Michelle: And yeah, they're seeing really exciting results. This is the kind of thing a couple of years from now, we'll probably have a lot more information. And for obesity and weight loss is another huge one that FMD is used for and water only fasting is used for. Just back to FMD, to fasting mimicking diet. Longo is the founder of a company that you can actually order a kit. The company is called Prolon and it's prolonlife.com. And the whole thing is philanthropic. He doesn't make any money off of it. I think it just goes to fund some of their research and things like that. But it is a kit that you can buy that almost comes with like the instant with the instructions of the times of the day that you take each package of things. So I think there's soups and other things in there. I've seen the kit. I've not tried it myself. I did present it to a client one time who wanted a very specific result in a very specific time and had very little tolerance and time to do stuff themselves. And I said, well, this is an option for you if you want to send the money into Prolon and get the kit. It's a little bit on the pricey side, but it's certainly backed scientifically better than just continuing with whatever you're doing. Yeah, than something else that you might do. And the feedback from her was that she got tremendous results. Now, I've since lost touch with that person, whether they maintained it or not. But the idea is that it encourages this autophagy, this cellular cleanup. So you do get, you know, you do feel better. You get more energy. It helps to reset your metabolism. You do get, you know, that benefit of Sten cells. So it can help like halt or reverse aging or help to slow the aging of the body. And ultimately, I think that's Dr. Walter Longo's endgame. Longevity research is his endgame. He wants to know how can we live long and healthy by doing these diet behaviors. So yeah, that's kind of the thing there. But you know, the obesity thing, since I touched on it, it really does bear us thinking about some of these behaviors a little bit. Back to the listener's question, like what's the ideal amount of time to fast or the ideal time to eat? I am going to get to the time in a bit. But did you know, Kevin, that like 65% of Canadians are obese or overweight?

Kevin: I knew it was a lot. I knew that it was a lot, like much more than it should be.

Michelle: It is. Now, we're not as bad as the Americans. Our friends to the south are 75% of the population is obese or overweight, but we're worse than Europeans who are 60%. But that's still a lot.

Kevin: That's still a lot.

Michelle: That's way more than when we were kids, right?

Kevin: Yeah, yeah. I'm surprised that Europe is as high as 60.

Michelle: That's... I know. And in Canada, the data says it's men more likely than women. 39.7% of men are more likely to be overweight and obese, and 31.3% of women. The lowest prevalence of obesity in our culture is those that are between 18 and 34 years old, the 22.5% in that age category, and those that are over 80 years old, 21.2%. So, we happen to be in the highest risk category, Kevin.

Kevin: Uh-oh. Well, I'm going to go for a jog after this podcast or do some workout or something.

Michelle: What that tells me is that our world, like the most fortunate people in our planet that have abundance of food, obesity is very, very prevalent.

Kevin: But that goes back to what you'd mentioned earlier in the episode about just food is everywhere, and food that is marketed to kind of our basest needs, and food that's easy to get but isn't necessarily the healthiest to get.

Michelle: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Kevin: It's everywhere, and it's easy. So, you know, and quite often the easiest food to get is the food that's going to contribute the most to our business. Yeah, exactly. Well, a lot more than just that. We shouldn't just call out Snickers bars, but yeah. It's so easy.

Michelle: It's that whole, everything that you find in the same area of the grocery store is Snickers bars.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Michelle: Goes back to you should shop around the outside, right?

Kevin: Yes.

Michelle: Go to the outside inn.

Kevin: All the fresh stuff.

Michelle: Now, you mentioned something about eight hours or someone that you knew that, was that an eight-hour feeding window or eight-hour fasting window?

Kevin: No, it was an eight-hour fasting window. And I believe what it is now is I believe he would wake up in the morning and he would not eat until noon. And then he'd eat normally from noon until like seven or eight. So he was doing, I think what it wasn't intermittent fasting. I think it's just he was taking this window and compressing it to like maybe five or six hours of eating and then like 18 hours of fasting or something. So it was just sort of taking the 10 to the 11 to 12 hours of eating and pressing it down into. But he did have a specific start time. It wouldn't just be any random five or six hours. It would always start at noon. It would be like noon to six or something.

Michelle: And, you know, I haven't really heard of an eight-hour fasting window. I have it is common to restrict your eating to a six to eight-hour feeding window and having a longer fasting time frame. Right. That's a very common method of internet and fasting. And I think there's people that have a lot of success with that. It's just that Longo has found looking broadly at all of the research and all the clinical trials that that's what the sweet spot is that will work for everyone. But, you know, if a six to eight-hour feeding window works for you and makes you feel good, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I jotted down one time this one study, the Nutrition and Healthy Aging Journal, 2018. There was a study over 12 weeks, like trying to see what would happen to people over a period of months as opposed to just a period of weeks if they were to do some sort of rigorous time-restricted eating. So they took a bunch of people over an eight-hour time-restricted feeding window and they looked at the effects on body weight, metabolic disease risk factors in obese adults. Right. And what they found was that over that 12-week or three-month period, is that three months? Three-month period, they lost seven pounds without changing what they ate at all.

Kevin: Okay, okay.

Michelle: So the only thing they changed was the timing of the feeding window.

Kevin: Okay, interesting.

Michelle: You know, I'm probably, I think I'm just going to have to be a part two to this, Kevin. I think I'm going to have to talk about chronobiology specifically to explain why that's important because that is incredibly key. It's not just that they compress their eating into a shorter period of time, it's incredibly important not just what you eat but when you eat, which I think is important to your listener's question. So, yeah. So, you know what? Why don't I just save that? Why don't we, because I would really love to dive into that.

Kevin: Part two, yeah. Okay, that sounds great. But before we wrap this up and we'll go into the chronobiology in a part two episode, I just want to harken back to the original question because there was one extra layer to that which I was curious about personally. My partner and I always have disagreements about the size of breakfast you should have. I eat a big breakfast and I often skip lunch because I'm simply not hungry. Whereas, he tends to eat a very light breakfast and then lo and behold by like 10 or 11 in the morning, he's hungry and snacking. And I'm not saying one is right or wrong, but is one right or wrong?

Michelle: Yeah. You know, it's a very widely debated thing that varies across people because you come across people that say they don't typically have breakfast and they feel good and then the people that have a big breakfast and they feel good. You know, what the evidence bears out the most is that you should eat the most before you do the most. And the very, very common phrase that you hear in nutrition circles is that you should eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen, and dinner like a pauper.

Kevin: Right. I've heard that before.

Michelle: So that would indicate that you're right, Kevin. Yay!

Kevin: There's going to be some gloating tonight.

Michelle: You're better served to have a big breakfast and a smaller dinner. Now, some people have a big dinner and they feel fine and they do okay. But, you know, if we kind of look across population and optimal results, generally speaking, it's better to have breakfast be your biggest meal or lunch if you're eating two meals a day, right? Whatever your first meal is and then have a smaller meal later. And, you know, that actually that's not new. You know, the person who popularized that phrase, it was actually a nutritionist and an American writer named Adele Davis.

Kevin: Okay.

Michelle: And she was on fire and way ahead of her time, in my opinion. She wrote many, many books on many nutrition topics. And one fascinating thing about Adele Davis, she was also one of the first people to criticize the food industry for promoting bad eating habits and misleading advertising and called it propaganda. And that we're literally all at the mercy of unethical, refined food industry who take all the vitamins and minerals out of food. God, lover.

Kevin: You go, girl, Adele.

Michelle: I know. Like, yes, snap. The third book that she wrote called Let's Eat Right and Keep Fit. She originally wrote this was her third book. She wrote it in 1954 when this and I believe that's the book where this term became popularized. But she did update and revise the book in 1970. And it is considered to be the basic primer on nutrition for the lay person. And she indicated in that book, like many case studies and histories and practice footnoted from medical journals. But, you know, I think the long and the short of it is that, you know, what Adele Davis laid out, that idea of breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen, dinner like a popper, nutritionists sense have been in agreement and have recited that almost like it's, you know, it's just common knowledge now that that is considered to be the ideal way for us to eat. So, you know, a lot of it has to do with satiety. Like you said, you said your partner gets hungry, right?

Kevin: Right.

Michelle: That if you don't eat well enough at breakfast and you save your big meal for dinner, you often have difficulty feeling satiated. And this has to do with this chronobiology.

Kevin: Right. Right.

Michelle: Yeah.

Kevin: But it sounds like I'm actually doing it wrong because I have a big breakfast. I'm not hungry for lunch. And then I have like an average dinner. I don't pig out at dinner, but I have an average dinner.

Michelle: But I don't think you're doing it wrong because our ancestors would have only had two meals a day.

Kevin: Oh, good for our ancestors. Yes, cave people.

Michelle: I think, you know, and that's where I am at that personally. Like if I just kind of distill everything that I've learned about this, whether it's two meals a day or three meals a day, I don't think there's a right or wrong. It's about what you eat and when you eat it. That is far more important. And, you know, if anything, I would argue, I mean, I happen to know what your diet is basically like and you are healthier than most people, Kevin. And at times you're even healthier than me.

Kevin: I find that very hard to believe.

Michelle: But well, you know, I just think about over the years, like you were eating healthy before I was before I ever went to nutrition school.

Kevin: Right, right.

Michelle: And I'm just the one that became an evangelist a little bit over the deep end. But you probably take in less total calories as a result of only focusing on two meals.

Kevin: Right. Most likely.

Michelle: Right. So that's probably why you're so slim and trim. Nobody's ever I'm going to have to post to pick that. We had a picture of us recently that was actually really cute. I'm going to post it on our Facebook page.

Kevin: Oh, no, no, don't do that. Remember when we went out to dinner?

Michelle: I remember.

Kevin: Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly. At that restaurant that was not a healthy restaurant.

Michelle: We won't. We yeah, well, we did the best we could with what was on the menu.

Kevin: Exactly. Exactly.

Michelle: We got to live in the real world, Kev.

Kevin: You know it. You know what we do. OK, well, thank you. So next episode will be chronobiology.

Michelle: Chronobiology, baby. And it's a really excellent companion to this episode. I think it'll make it'll help make meaning of some of the other bits because I really want the listeners to understand it's never just about one thing. All of these concepts all string together in a really meaningful way. And it's the same that you you know, you don't focus on like the vitamin C. You focus on the category of vitamin C foods, right? You don't right. You know, you think you have to have things in context because that's how our bodies work. Our bodies don't work as isolated little mechanisms. It's one very complex machine.

Kevin: Big hole. Exactly, exactly. OK, well, until then, it's time for the dreaded dad joke. Gosh, I haven't heard one in a while. I know. Lucky you. But now we're going to break that. OK, so I have got one from my son who tends to be the source of a lot of my dad jokes.

Michelle: I love him.

Kevin: And he is big into soccer, although he would kill me if I said that. But I mean, football, but.

Michelle: Oh, you know, is he calling it football now?

Kevin: Oh, yes, yes. And whenever I call it soccer, he gets so offended. But, you know, for our listeners, since football generally has another connotation, I wanted to clarify the one with the round black and white ball. Yeah, that's what he's into. OK, yes.

Michelle: The Ted Lasso version.

Kevin: Yes, exactly. Exactly. So why was Cinderella so bad at soccer?

Michelle: Why was Cinderella so bad at soccer, Kevin?

Kevin: She kept running away from the ball. Oh, that's cute. It's it made me laugh. It's it's a good one. OK, well, thank you, Michelle. And thank you for our listener for the question.

Michelle: And yeah, thanks for sending me down a rabbit hole.

Kevin: Exactly. Well, as I was joking before this recording, we will have to call you Alice because you love going down the rabbit holes.

Michelle: I do. That would make you my white rabbit.

Kevin: Exactly.

Michelle: I'm late.

Kevin: I'm late for a very important date. OK, well, until then, don't forget to eat your greens.

Michelle: And always be real.

Kevin: Always. This has been Nutrition for Noobs. We hope you're a bit more enlightened about how your fantastic and complicated body works with the food you put into it. If you have a question or a topic you'd like Michelle to discuss, drop us a line at n4noobs at gmail.com. That's the letter N, the number four, N-O-O-B-S at gmail.com. If you haven't already, you can subscribe to the podcast on whatever your favorite platform might be. Also, please consider leaving a review or telling your friends. That's the best way to spread the word. We'll see you next time with another interesting topic. The views and opinions expressed on Nutrition for Noobs are those of the hosts. It is not intended to be a substitute for medical, nutritional or health advice. Listeners should seek a personal consultation with a qualified practitioner if they have any concerns or before commencing any actions mentioned in the podcast. And... Oh, sorry. Excuse me. I love that word. I love that word. I don't even know what it means, but it sounds amazing.

Michelle: I told you what it meant.

Kevin: You told me what it means, but...

Michelle: Cellular self-cleaning.

Kevin: Yes, exactly, which clearly I think I need. My brain needs some cellular self-cleaning because I love this horrible humor of making words into sneeze sounds.