Episode 134. The Hope Molecule & The Australian Health Star Rating System.
Episode 134. The Hope Molecule & The Australian Health Star Rating System.
In this episode, we discuss a recent article highlighting that our bodies can produce "hope molecules" that help us cope with stress and anxiety. These molecules, called neuropeptides, are produced in response to positive experiences and thoughts. The article cites several studies showing that neuropeptides can have a variety of beneficial effects on the body, including reducing inflammation and improving mood. The author suggests that by focusing on positive experiences and thoughts, we can help our bodies produce more of these hope molecules and improve our overall well-being. The article concludes by highlighting the importance of exercise and muscle contraction in maintaining good physical and mental health.
Lastly, we discuss the Australian health star rating system is a front-of-pack labelling scheme designed to help consumers make more informed choices about the nutritional value of packaged foods. The rating is calculated based on the amount of energy, saturated fat, sugars, sodium, protein, fibre, and other nutrients present in the food—the more favourable the nutrient composition, the higher the rating. The Australian government developed the system in collaboration with the food industry, consumer groups, and public health experts. It aims to encourage food manufacturers to reformulate their products to improve their nutritional quality and make it easier for consumers to make healthier choices.
However, it's important to note that the health star rating system has limitations. For instance, it doesn't consider some factors that may impact the healthfulness of a food product, such as the presence of preservatives, colours, and flavours. Additionally, the system is voluntary, and not all manufacturers choose to use it. Additionally, the system compares foods in the same categories, meaning that plain yogurt might receive a lower rating than a sugary, artificially-flavoured milk drink as they are in different categories, therefore not compared against one another. Given these limitations, it's understandable that some people have questions about the effectiveness and accuracy of the health star system.
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Enjoy.
Episode Relevant Links:
Hope Molecule Article: https://medium.com/curious/your-body-can-produce-hope-molecules-9b015ce088e1
Substack Article: https://open.substack.com/pub/neuroathletics/p/why-the-processed-food-industry-has?r=1gqycs&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Food Switch App: https://apps.apple.com/au/app/foodswitch/id1059284559
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What is up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Insitu Health and Fitness podcast. On this show, we give you everything you need to live a long, healthy and happy life.
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Yes, welcome back everybody, to yet another episode. First up, I just wanted to say a big thanks to everybody who have been giving this podcast 5 star rating and positive comments wherever you can. A few of you have reached out and said it's been a little hard to find where or that you can't find where to give it a 5 star rating where you're listening to the podcast. I don't know why some platforms make it so hard to find, but I have to agree sometimes I couldn't find it. And some of them quite dark. Mac, can I just say, if you ever don't know something, I can't find anything, just Google it guys. Google or YouTube usually helps. Ask Mac, Mac or Google it and Mac will send you Google's answer. But if you can't, don't stress honestly, we do this show to help people with the health and fitness. I don't really care about becoming the best podcast out there, the number one health and fitness podcast, all that sort of stuff. If you do want to help this podcast grow, just pass this podcast onto somebody that you think would benefit from it. That's all I ask. That means more to me than a 5 star rating because I know you benefited, benefited, benefited from the podcast and I know somebody else will. So and that's why we do this podcast. That's the number one reason why we started and that's the number one reason why we continue doing it so. Pass it on to somebody else, just copy and paste the link and send it in a text message and say shut up and listen to this. That's all. Again, that means more to me than a 5 star review. So again, a big thank you to the people that have been doing that. All right. Let's get into today's topics.
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OK. What do you got me. Yeah, you go first. I've got the hope. Molecule. Molecule. Hmm. So this is a term I come across. I thought it was just somebody being. You know. Optimistic. Or just having their say on something, but it actually turns out doctors are starting to use this term, the hope molecule. And here's a little. Excerpt from this article every time we move our muscles, we are giving ourselves an intravenous dose of hope. This is a doctor, Kelly.
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I'm going to get you to.
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Mcgonagall Mcgonagall thinks so. Was that name from Harry Potter so mcgonnigal? So this article is done on Doctor Kelly's work and then Doctor Kelly has been studying this for a little while and there is also references to a lot of. Studies that do big groups of people. Meta analysis, meta analysis. So I thought this was good because a couple of months ago, if you remember, I'm putting you on the spot, but you brought up a topic about how activating muscles helps the brain function better. Yeah, yeah. Do you remember it? Because that would directly relate to this article. I can't remember the exact thing but that I brought up. But I can speak about it in general. Yeah. So if you remember what was that sort of article or in general, honestly, I can't remember. But in general, when you activate your muscles and you trigger your muscle fibres, it sends a signal of dopamine to your brain so you feel good, like the same as listening to your favorite. Wrong. Or eating a piece of chocolate, or whatever it is that makes you feel happy. Exercise actually does the same thing whether you notice it immediately or not, and it also does compound. So if you exercise regularly, then you will generally just feel happier because you're sending the signal to your brain more often that things are great. You know, life's great. I can't remember the actual. Name of the neurotransmitter that happens with the whole process because I've just been on uni break and I haven't practiced anything, but that's the basic gist, yeah. So this article basically all Doctor Kelly's work follows on from that. Basically is following on from that. So every time you contract your muscles it is releasing chemicals within your body. And some of those chemicals actually get to your brain and cross the brain. Blood brain, blood barrier. Blood brain barrier. That's the one I was going for. Hmm. And give you gives you all these benefits and. Again, some of those benefits. Right.
05:04
Can improve your heart health, immune function, and some of them can even kill cancer cells. So all this sort of stuff. And this is where hope comes into it as well. So the hope molecule is what it's called because every time you do contract your muscles and I'll get into what that means in a second. You're releasing all these chemicals that do such good things for your body and this is just another reason to do resistance training or some type of activity. I just can't stress that enough and I just. Come across this article on what this is perfect it's called the hope molecule, and if you're lacking a little bit of hope in your life, or you're not feeling the best, all you need to do is exercise. This is from Doctor Kelly again, if you go for a walk or a run or you lift weights. You contract your muscles and they secrete these proteins into your bloodstream and they travel across the blood brain barrier into your brain and. Act as an antidepressant. Like, I can't pronounce this one, but it's basically the same as a well, it is an antidepressant drug. So basically what she's saying is working your muscles.
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Secrets. These certain proteins that go into your brain and act exactly the same as a antidepressant drug. Yes. What? What the heck I can't for the life of me think about. What I found? About this that you just said bring up. I'm going to have to go back and listen to a few podcasts. Yeah, so everybody listening, I'd recommend reading this article if you want to dive a bit deeper. They refer to Doctor Kelly's work and some of the meta analysis if you want to dive a little bit deeper. But it just brings up this whole thing of exercising is. Good for your health? Yes, because again, it brings up this whole thing. A lot of people exercise these days to look better, but there's so much going on in your body that benefits your body for long term health. Short term health. And very short term health, because literally if you're feeling down in the dumps and you're not feeling well and anxiety is up, depressions up a little bit because everybody struggles with it. It's it's a part of life part a lot. Yeah. So you can literally just go and do a few push-ups. And it can help you break that cycle of being unhappy honestly since moving, moving is a very stressful as you all know moving states, cities is even more stressful. And Jack and I have even been frequently reminded every time we go to the gym because we don't have a gym membership where we're staying at the minute. We're just floated. We're floaters. So we haven't been going to the gym as often as we like. We've been walking a lot, but I will say going to the gym and. Lifting weights has a far greater. I don't know if it's to do
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with the duration we're at the gym or the fact that we're lifting weights, but it has a far greater impact on my mood than going for a walk. Like going for a walk definitely still improves my mood. But. Actually, lifting some weights makes me feel like there's no problems in my. Not that I have big problems, but nothing matters anymore, you know what I mean? Everything's great. Yeah. And sorry, I forgot all about it. And I was going to bring that up about stimulating muscles and what that actually means. So in some of the studies, they go into a bit. But like Max said, it's going to be different for everybody because we are so used to walking. Walking doesn't really stimulate our muscles anymore because it's something we do every single day and we do a fair bit of it not. You know. Crazy amounts, but we walk every single day for at least 30 to 45 minutes, so our body is used to that. So yes, it doesn't give us much muscle stimulus. It still activates our muscles, gets us out in the sun in the morning, all that sort of stuff. But going to the gym and lifting weights does stimulate our muscles so we get that more of a dopamine hit. Not dopamine, even all these other chemicals. We get more of a hit doing that because we're trying a lot harder. So what does that mean for the listener? You guys listening along at home, you just need to do a little bit more than what you're doing now because like Mac just said, we're not you in the gym that much, so we're going about twice a week and that's. You know, we don't have to try that hard because we're only going twice a week. We're just lifting a little bit of weight and that's enough to stimulate our muscles. For you. It might just literally be a set of two or dumbbells at home and just pushing them up and down like a shoulder press or something like that. Anything you need to do to just stimulate your muscles. It's going to be different for everybody where if you go to like a power lifter that has been powerlifting for 10 years, they're going to need to do a whole lot more than us. And a whole lot more work than they normally do to stimulate their muscle growth because their muscles are so used to it. So again, it's very different for everybody and it's very important to
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take that into account when you're reading these studies because a lot of them will go into like hit training. Hit training is again a great way to stimulate muscle growth. Get all the chemical hits we're talking about, but I strongly don't recommend it for newbies because the risk of injury is higher than the reward. So. That power lifter that's been trained for 10 years and is actually an athlete? Yeah, I'd say go do a hit session and they'd get all the dopamine hits and all the chemicals. But for somebody just starting out, don't do a hit training session because you'll hurt yourself when you won't be able to exercise as much and you'll think that exercise is bad. So if you are a beginner, a walk, a couple of push-ups, a couple of body weight exercises, anything just to stimulate your muscles is going to break you out of that cycle, put you in a better mood, and increase all your health markets. So there's not. Little side tangent, there's no there isn't a drug out there on the market that is as effective as resistance training and for your overall health, I was going to say that exercise in general is the best antidepressant drug. Is better than any antidepressant drug that you can find for long term health because, if you like, are anxious or do suffer from depression. Drugs might may need to be an option at some point, but they're not a long term solution, whereas there's so much research like this coming out now about how exercise. Can have the same if not greater benefits than a drug and you can do it forever or as you can't or I would not recommend taking a drug forever. Yeah exactly. I do always, always tweet and post on my stories because I rely on this sometimes for motivation and it is when you don't feel like exercising for your body. Remember you can exercise for your brain because like you said at the
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very beginning, a lot of people. Relate exercise directly to how they look and sometimes if you aren't feeling great about your body image, like you might be feeling anxious or down about your body image. It's very hard to go and get into the gym and want to do something positive for your body, so just think about how it's going to benefit your brain. Yep, right and. A little bit is better than nothing. Yeah, like I said, 10. Just go and do 10 pushups. You might be like, why the **** would I bother doing 10 push-ups? But there will be a lot of benefit in trying to do 10 perfect reps could you gonna burn your shoulders out if you do slow controlled reps? I don't care who you are after 10 your shoulders are going to burn. Yeah, you might be on your knees to start with. You might be pushing up against the wall. Whatever, stimulate your muscles. 10 reps that is more than enough. You don't have to go like people go Oh well, if I can't go do a full workout, I'm not going to bother. 10 push-ups, it's like it. Think about it like it's a compounding. Like if you're trying to save for a holiday, every piece of spare change you have, you put in a jar, right $0.50 put it in the jar. Like that $0.50 could represent doing 5 push-ups or going to for a gym session could be the equivalent of putting $10 the jar. You know what I mean? It all adds up at the end of the day. So if you can think about it like every little piece that you're going to do is going to bring you some sort of benefit, whether it's brain health, body health. Muscle health, joint health, anything, it all adds up. Yep, and let's see if there, because we could just get going on about how you, if you're not already you should be doing some type of exercise. Just again, like I said, a little bit more than what you're doing now. Yeah,
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what do you got? Ohh, I've got a good one this week. So sometimes I don't have topics and I have to go searching for topics to talk about on the podcast because I was unorganized, which is rare. However that occurred this week. So I went searching on sub stack, which is like a what would you call sub stack? Like a place where people collect their mailing lists and you can read previous ones. Anyway, I came across an. Old e-mail from Neuro Athletics which I highly recommend that newsletter if anyone is interested in neuroscience but. It's spoke about. A what do you call it? Something, a new law that they passed in the US in September so the end of last year about food guidelines. And so the US has changed their food guidelines. I don't even know what it was previously, to be honest. But now it's called the food compass. So it's a compass system and it's designed to direct you. That's what compasses do in the right direction for what foods you should be eating, right? But the more I looked into it, the more I googled it and you tubed it and everything. There is a lot of controversy around it, like any food guidelines in any country. And so I've just got a few examples of how it's bad now before you leave, because I'm talking about American guidelines, just hang on. I've done a bunch of research on Australian guidelines as well to make this relatable, but I thought that this American one was still relevant because to be honest, Australia is a following country in general. So if this is what America is doing, then at some point we'll probably end up doing something similar, right? So.
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What this is is it rates foods on a scale of 1 to 101 hundred. So anything above 75 you should consider consuming all the time and then anything within a bracket of between. 74 and I think is sometimes foods and then anything that scores lower than. 44 is a rare occasion. Food. OK, does that make sense? Yep. So I've got a graph here and it's got foods rated from to 0 and then their color code like green, yellow, red as they do. OK, so on the top of the graph, this is the example that they have on their website is watermelon rated So you should eat that as much as you can essentially. And then kale. And then I actually cut off the numbers, damn it. And then frosted mini wheats which is an American food, but it's a cereal rat in the green, the third down from the top. So it's 90. It's rated 97 out of 100. So that means you should consume it all of the time. Well, I'm happy to do that. Sounds great. And then below that there's like unsweetened almond milk, non fat frozen yogurt, chocolate covered almonds. So we haven't there is in the green, these are all above 75. Points out of 100 Honey Nut Cheerios 76 points. Just wait though, it gets worse. Egg substitute fried in vegetable oil is rated 61 points, while a boiled egg is rated 49. So. So this is telling you that you should have an egg substitute fried in vegetable oil before you have a whole boiled egg. What the what? What is even an egg substitute? I'm not entirely sure. And then? On the very bottom. So rated 28
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and 26 out of 100 in red to be minimized? Cheese. Ground beef. So you should eat more frosted mini wheats, more honey Nut Cheerios, more almonds, Lucky Charms, more chocolate covered almonds, more almond M&M's. Then you should eat ground beef, eggs and cheese. What is happening they might like we don't actually watch a lot of news and all that sort of stuff, but where we're staying at the moment, the news is regularly on and there must be a discussion in Australia about it as well because I've seen this one of the morning shows we're interviewing a. Nutritionist and they they're trying to change it here again. I feel like it comes around all the time. The government's some lobbyists some people somewhere trying to change it all the time. I think every five years you mental review it and I felt sorry for this nutritionist because the lady just the. Host interviewing her just had no idea about nutrition and was just like well what's wrong with the fight because we have a 5 star rating here. Yeah, I've got so many notes on that and and the ladies like what's wrong with it? And the and the and the nutritionist like well look there's nothing wrong with it, but what makes up the five stars and exactly what you were just saying. Like there's some foods that. Have a 5 star rating, but shouldn't because they're so processed, but because they're healthy processed. And I use quotations there. They're up. You can have them as much as you want. And yeah, this nutritionist was just trying to explain this, but it's just so hard to explain to somebody that just hasn't got any idea about nutrition. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I've got a bit to talk about the fire, the Health star rating because even just being here running into people that I know, common questions just come up about packaged food because it's just there's just
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a massive big question mark on it in relation to is it good for you. But anyway, before we move on to the Australian system.
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There was. I watched a doctor of YouTube video of a doctor. Um, talking about the new this new release, like he said that the doctor, I've got his name here. Most, safest, most. I don't know. Anyway, he's a he's a professor out of Turf's School of nutrition in the US and the Doctor that I watched on YouTube said he regarded him quite highly until now. And he's like, what the heck is going on? So this whole system, like, they do explain the whole system on their website, it's confusing as heck. I don't know how the general public is supposed to know what is going on, but. They. The doctor that I watched on YouTube just brought up a really interesting topic about how the government is always in charge of this kind of stuff, and at the end of the day, it always comes down to favoring packaged foods because that's where they make their money, right? And the the point that he brought up was all of the foods that they favor. Like, the watermelon and the cereals and stuff are not satiating at all. They're not filling. Like you want to go back for more food. A bowl of cereal is not satisfying, satisfying for 10 minutes and then you're hungry again, and so. Like, what is the underlying motivation to this whole system? Eat more food, eat more food. That's the whole underlying system. And they just so completely undervalue protein in this completely undervalue protein and probably give too much value to fruit. Like, I'm all about eating fruit, yes. But you could live a perfectly healthy life if you never ate a piece of fruit again in your life. But you ate protein, vegetables, fats and carbs, right? Yep,
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easily so. Yeah. I don't know. It just really grinds my gears. I'm just gonna put my conspiracy cap on. Go on. But. If you look into the wheat industry, it's huge and this is what a lot of people don't realize how big the wheat industry is, wheat, corn, those sort of grain grains that are in everything, flour like it's huge. And if that collapsed, we would literally have. Like the world. The Western world, I should say, would collapse as well because it is so huge and so many other industries rely on it. So if they pushed people away from it, that's going to decline, which would have rippled through. Huge ripples through the stock market, everything. So I can see why they're doing it, but I just hate it because everybody listens to them and it's not the way you should eat. Well, the whole there's that whole saying you should listen to the experts. How can do you even? Who are you supposed to trust? Who is considered an expert? Bacon and eggs. We've talked about this on the show before bacon. Bacon was not a breakfast staple, but there was a pig farmer. In America, back in the 20s or 30s, I think it was who needed to sell more bacon. So he just created this whole campaign about having bacon at breakfast. Bacon and eggs is healthy, like having the Big Breakfast, all that sort of stuff. And he did it to make more money and it was all marketing. There's like, that's where it come from. So it's like when people are giving you all this information, all these things, flashing all these things in front of your face, saying eat this way, this is what. Recommend just. Stop and have a think about why they're telling you that. Yeah, and I say that about our podcast all the time. You shouldn't just go ohh. Jack and Max said this. I'm doing this. We want
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we bring up all these topics so you can think for yourself and actually think about these topics for yourself and try and implement what is best for you. Get all of the facts and then make your own decision. Yeah, you shouldn't let anybody tell you what. Like how to make your own mind up, right? OK, so moving on to the Australian Health Star rating, here we go, here we go. So. Personally, I don't. I've never really got it. Like, I get it, but I still don't really get it, if you know what I mean. I don't have all the answers to about the health star rating. I mostly have questions, but I'm just going to try and clarify as best as I can. So for starters, I think the biggest confusion with the Health star rating is that it's not a rating among all packaged foods. It's a rating among foods. In certain categories, right. So you might get pick up a plain yogurt and it's 1.5 stars and you're like, Oh well that's not that healthy. But then you can go and pick up, just get this product that I found zoopa, doopa, bubble gum, milk. Four stars? That's OK. So isn't that extremely confusing if you're just a general Australian citizen? Five stars better one star. Five stars is the best what? So you should consume stuff that's five stars as much as you like. That's the gist of it. But like if I was just, if I had no idea about the five star rating and I went and got. What I say first plain yogurt which is rated 1.5 stars, and then I went and I got this super duper milk and is rated four stars. I would be like ohh OK, so I should consume more super duper bubble gum milk. Then I consume plain yogurt, OK and that's because they're not in the same category. So milk is in a category of its own. So I still don't really know like. Zipper dupa
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bubble gum milk is being compared to plain milk. So how the heck is it? Four stars? I don't know. But then yogurt. So plain yogurt is being compared to like ricotta and Greek yogurt and flavoured yogurt. yogurt. 2 yogurts like dairy products like that are in a group, then liquid dairy products are in a group, then soft drinks are in a group, then chips are in a group. Muesli bars are in like the same group as say rollups. So. I'm usually bothered isn't actually that healthy and is probably very high in sugar. Might look healthy with the star rating and be rated 4, but that's because you're comparing the Muesli bar to A roll up, which would be rated say A1. And this is where knowledge about calorie and I know everybody gets. Answer about cannon calories. But this is where it comes important, because full fat milk. If you get the full fat milk, it would be more calories than that bubble gum milk. Hmm. So that's probably why full cream milk isn't as high. Yeah, because it's more calories per hundred meals or whatever they're measuring. So what they take into account is kilojoules, saturated fats, sugars. And protein, they do not take into account preservatives, colours or flavours, exactly. And that's what I mean. So that bubble gum milk is going to be lower in fat, lowering calories, lower in saturated fats as well and they're not necessarily bad. Like you get full cream milk is the best milk you can have because it is unprocessed, has no **** in it, all that sort of stuff. So. This is, This is why it's so very, very confusing to the public. And the other thing I found upon digging was that it is voluntary. So you if you have said that on the TV show the other day, yeah, you can choose which. So let's take carmens Muesli bars for example, which I've got an example of how to read a food label from a carmens,
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I think. You can choose any product you put on the market. You can choose if you have the health star rating on your product or not. So when I was looking around. The Woolies website. I noticed that a few carmens music bars have the health star rating and they're generally 4 out of five. But there is a lot of Colman's music bars that don't have the rating and that's because they're going to get a bad score. So then why would they put that on the package? Yeah, well, and that's another thing this lady said, like the ones that don't have it look healthier on the packages than the ones that do have it. So there's no star rating, but it looks healthier on the package and all that sort of stuff. People are buying it. It's just yeah, it's it's just a mess. So what I would suggest is just don't even look at the health star rating. Look at it if you wanna laugh. Don't look at it for actual advice at all. And. Yeah, I don't know, just try and get foods. I know that this is not suitable for everybody and everyone's lifestyle, but try and get foods that don't even require a health star rating. Like, I know they put a health star rating on milk, but milk should just be milk. Rice should be rice. A can of crushed tomatoes should just be a can of crushed tomatoes. Try and get foods that don't can't really be rated like that. You know what I mean? An apple is an apple. An apple is an apple. OK, so let's just quickly debunk how the heck to read a food label then if we're not going to rely on. Health star rating. So I've got I thought I had a carmens music, but I got an uncle Tobys rolled oats Muesli bar because it was. Rated The same. Health stars as a Commons music bar, so Commons musically bars are decent for music bars in general. As far as music bars go, they're all pretty bad. But Commons have the least ingredients, the least preservatives, colours and flavours. But they have the same health star rating as an uncle Tobys Muesli bar,
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which has all of the numbers, colours, flavours, preservatives, whatever, right? But they're rated the same, so. You know, not to me anyway. So the first thing you want to look at when you were. Read a label is, I would say, the first three ingredients listed. Ideally, Jack and I don't buy things that really have more than three ingredients in them. Can you think of something? I'm usually bar occasionally when we're starving to death. I get like maybe yogurt because it's got like. Even yogurt, it's usually milk and live cultures. If you just get a plain yogurt, yeah, sometimes it'll have. An extra thing, yeah, but three. So the first three ingredients is what is mostly in the product. So if rolled oats are listed first in the usually bar, then the product is made mostly of rolled oats and the ingredients should be listed. In order of how much of that thing is present in the food, right? So just for an example, this Uncle Tobys rolled oats. This is a weird label. I should have picked this one, but it's also a good example of how misleading they can be. But Uncle Tobys rolled oats is the first ingredient, then wheat, then breakfast cereal, then whole meal wheat. It just says breakfast cereal. It just says breakfast cereal. But what keeps going? There's so much wheat. So we've got rolled oats, wheat breakfast cereal, whole meal, wheat flour, wheat bran. It's the first six ingredients are all different kinds of wheat and then it goes into sugar and 492 when sunflower and all this other stuff right but. Yeah. First three ingredients is what it's mostly made of. I don't even know what half of the different types of wheat are. So once you have decided that you are happy with the ingredients, three or less or no preservatives is just what we go off. You don't have to do that, but that's how we like to do it. Then
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you would read the actual nutrition label, right. Which is also confusing as heck, because we always talk about calories and most packages are in kilojoules. It's a whole, it's a whole. I don't know why don't we get this talk this in school, but anyway, that's what I'm here for, OK? So if you're comparing, say, say, 2 packets of Muesli bars, compare them by 1. Quantity per 100 grams not serving size because serving sizes are always different. And you want to look at the calorie content, which is usually the KJ content and the less calories, if your goal is weight loss, obviously the better, right? And then you want to look at the protein probably to see how much protein is in the product. And then because protein is going to fill you up, just pause on that for a second. So if you're choosing your measly bar and suddenly got 2 grams of protein compared to one that isn't as good as you think, but it's got 10 grams of protein, it's going to fill you up. So you're not going to want to eat. 6 Music bars. You'll be hopefully satisfied after one. So we're looking at the kilojoules or calories 1st and then the protein and then. I would go to the sugar. Hmm, so. Like per serving size, this music bar that I'm reading that Uncle Toby's one has 5 grams of sugar per serving. But if you're comparing 2 Muesli bars, you want to look at per 100 grams, which is 17 grams of sugar, and then you can pick can compare that 100 grams to a carmens which is generally a little less sugar. So there are three things on the label that I would recommend looking for. Dietary fiber is another good one because it's just good for your gut health and digestion and then saturated fats. Probably lower. Just aim for lower saturated fats in general. But if you are having foods that have three ingredients and lower in sugar, lower in saturated fats, higher in protein. Calories
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depends on what your goals are. They're the things that you should keep in mind. Now if that all seems like way too much, it's too hard. I'm going to figure out all of this. How the heck am I going to do this? In supermarket? There's a really great app called Food Switch and you can scan the product and it will give you. Um, Red, orange, green lights around all of the nutrition sections on the label and it will suggest other products that are better. Which is great. Like so good. I wish that the packages could just do this, but. Lucky we have smartphones now, right? I still can't figure out how breakfast cereal can be a ingredient. Yeah, I don't really. I'm not really sure. But that's but they. This is again this is just a trick that people use Uncle Toby's. To hide other ingredients. So there could be more sugar within that ingredient that they don't have to list lists. Or there might be more preservatives and additives that they don't then don't have to list because they've said breakfast cereal and it's just under that umbrella. They don't have to list it in the ingredients. So that's just a dirty trick that I hate people do. But they do it and they're allowed to. Yeah, Australian and American. Food label laws are very, very flexible. Also. I know that in Europe in general it is a lot more strict and I think that the food labeling system is a lot more clear for the public. And also there's a lot of products that are banned in Europe and a lot of flavours and colours and preservatives that are banned in Europe that are in a lot of Australian products a lot. And that just scares the crap out of me. Like what does Europe know that Australia doesn't give a crap? Every day they know it here, but it's just like, well, we can make money so people need it, so who cares? Alright, we better do the listener
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questions. Alright, what do you got? OK.
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I have what are the best foods to support mental health?
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I'd say Whole Foods, no processed foods. Yeah, I would say literally just minimize processed foods as much as you possibly can. That includes processed meats. Anything that doesn't just grow in the ground, but I'm pretty sure in my brain health. Um podcast. Didn't I go over all of the foods that are really good for your brain? If you have a healthy brain, then you're going to have generally good mental health unless you have a lot of external factors that are not in your control that are negatively affecting your mental health. Yeah, I was going to say exactly that, because there's it's. It's proven now. It's not just people talking about it or a conspiracy theory or anything like that. If you eat **** food, it stuffs up your microbiome, and your microbiome is directly linked to your brain. So the healthy your gut, the healthier your gut is, the better your brain's going to be. And the healthier your brain is, the healthier it functions and the happy you are like, that's that's not me talking to you. That is how it is. Yeah. So cut out processed foods. All that sort of stuff. And yet sometimes external factors do weigh in. But that's a whole nother topic. Yeah, I'll just if anyone hasn't listened to that podcast. I did do a podcast on brain health, and it goes over more than just nutrition, but I'll just quickly give like my top five foods for a healthy brain, which ultimately should lead to good mental health. But fatty fish? Obviously we talk about Omega Threes all of the time for brain health. Blueberries. Broccoli or just any dark leafy greens. Super high in vitamins and minerals. Really good for your brain health.
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Eggs because they contain chlorine, which I went into in detail in the podcast, and also probably nuts and seeds because they just have a different they just have different vitamins and minerals too. Probably all the other vegetables and stuff you're eating. But the client that asked his question also said if I don't have time to. One down or to disconnect. How can my nutrition best support my mental health? And I would say there's only so much your nutrition can do. You just you just have to make time to if you're doing all of the right things. If you're exercising, if you're eating a balanced diet, if you're minimizing processed food, you just have to make time to do whatever it is that helps you feel less anxious, whether that is writing stuff down. Whether that's meditating, going for a walk, sitting in the sun. Whatever it is, find it. Work on it to get it. Like be able to do it in the short amount of time as possible, but you need to do it. You can't just avoid it. It's still part of being healthy human, right? Yeah, just reminds me of a quote that I've seen in a book the other day and it is busy is a decision. There's a whole reason why it goes into that, but I won't bore you with it. But basically. If you stop and think about the things that you spend time on, yes, there are things that you know. There might be kids, family, work, all that sort of stuff that you do have to spend time on and does require time. But there's a lot of other things that you might be doing. And it could be watching your favorite Netflix show scroll on social media. You could get rid of some of that and. Food prep or whatever. Yeah, awesome. Done. That'll do. Yeah. Great. Again, thank you everybody for your questions. As always, if you want to hit us up with a question, keep an eye on our social media or you can just send us a message on Instagram, you'll find me at
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Jackl Graham and.
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Ohh, Mac, Mac_in situ and you can give us your questions there. Thanks again and we'll talk to you all in the next episode. Bye.
