Leah:
Hello and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. I’m Leah Heigel and I’m here with my co-host Aidan Muir. And today we will be discussing nutrition for shift workers. So, I have a ton of clients that are shift workers, a lot of nurses, police officers, all sorts of shift workers. And honestly, one of the hardest things about navigating nutrition for them is like logistically, how do we work around their schedule and make everything fit them? It’s definitely, it can be a little bit harder and a different approach to shift workers as compared to people that work a regular nine to five. So, I think this episode is going to be particularly helpful for those people. But just generally, rather than us focusing on all the downsides of shift work, what we want to do is just go through and talk about, well, what can we do to make this easier and what nutrition interventions would we recommend?
Aidan:
So, I’m going to start with some thoughts on specific strategies that are common recommendations because pretty much everybody who works in shift work will have heard some form of strategy or whatever they should do. Whether this is coming from colleagues who have experienced et cetera, or whether it’s even coming from there’s a common theme amongst employers of trying to be like, how do we make this better? How do we manage this? And they’ll often provide some form of education around it and stuff like that. But I want to focus more on the stronger recommendations of very specific strategies. So, there’s a few that I hear, and two, because I don’t want to list heaps and heaps. I’m just going to list two and then we’ll kind of talk through these two. So, one is that we should change our intake based on stuff like insulin sensitivity at different times of the days or other stuff like logical phrases that are chucked out there.
We shouldn’t eat overnight because our body is meant to be sleeping and it isn’t designed to digest food well at that time. I’m going to start with the insulin aspect and we’ll cover the other aspects too. But starting with the insulin aspect. In non shift workers, I don’t do anything in relation to insulin sensitivity being different at different times of the day. We know from research that on average insulin sensitivity is a bit higher in the morning than it is in the evening. So, theoretically you could start making strategies around that, but why don’t I then? Why don’t I do that for non shift workers and they’ll bring it back to shift workers? Basically, the research also shows that just doesn’t matter for stuff like body composition, if total calories and protein are the same. Otherwise, we would be seeing pretty clearly that people who eat more calories and more carbs earlier in the day, having different body composition to those who do it later in the day.
And you can combine individual studies that make it look like this makes a difference. But when you put all of the research together, it comes out the same. And I personally believe that the same concept would apply for shift work. And okay, if we’re not talking about body composition, we’re talking about overall health and stuff like that, I can see potential relevance for situations like diabetes for example. But then that leads to my next point of any changes that you make to account for these differences in insulin sensitivity is going to have a bigger impact on the big picture regardless. For example, using non shift workers, if you stop eating carbs after 5:00 PM because insulin sensitivity is lower in the evening, you’re probably going to reduce your carbon calorie intake. Vice versa, if you eat way less carbs when you’re on an overnight shift, you’re probably going to change your overall intake by a more significant amount than the actual change itself makes.
Leah:
So, let’s address the not sleeping overnight concept as well. So, I think we have pretty similar thoughts on this send in terms of what you spoke about just then. But if you don’t eat overnight during your shift and then you also try to sleep for ideally eight hours a day, when do you actually get in time to eat? When do you eat? You end up eating all of your food in this very condensed period of time just so you can have a normal calorie intake and meet your requirements. And depending on your goals, this can be a potential issue for many reasons. So, just to name a few that I come across is, well not able to get enough calories in to meet your needs. Obviously if you’re eating in a very condensed period of time. From a weight and fat loss perspective, I see the issue of just not managing appetite well and this leading to not ideal food choices and particularly very large intakes of non-ideal, highly palatable food choices.
So, even from a weight loss, fat loss phase perspective, that can have consequences. Obviously not for everyone, but that is something that I do see quite often. Digestive issues from eating so much in a very small window of time is always a possibility. And also just potentially big peaks and troughs in energy levels due to just consistent food and carb intake. Especially if you’re not eating throughout an entire shift, your energy levels are probably going to be quite poor and you’re probably going to have to rely pretty heavily on caffeine, which is something that we will talk about as well. And honestly, probably a lot more could be said about this, but those are the main things I see as a general issue for operating in that way as a shift worker.
Aidan:
Yeah, using the condensed saving window, it’s kind of intimate fasting, but you’re shifting your fasting window to also include your entire work shift as well.
I don’t know, for some people that would be okay, but I think it’s hard to put that as a broad scale recommendation to every shift worker.
Leah:
A hundred percent. I think there’s so many reasons why it wouldn’t work as well.
Aidan:
Yeah, and touching on that, one of the things that’s really hard for me with this topic is some of these recommendations broader than what we even just talked about we just talked about too, but there’s obviously heaps. I don’t do anything with them, but that doesn’t mean they’re incorrect, they don’t come from a place of merit or anything like that. There’s pros and cons basically. So, looking from another angle, if I don’t recommend any specific strategies like that, what do I actually recommend? This is going to sound oversimplified, so I’ll try and add a bit of context to it. But what I actually recommend is you keep your 24 intake, 24 hour intake, similar to usual. Ideally you want to consume a similar amount of calories, protein, fiber and micronutrients to normal. Obviously that comes with a lot of logistical challenges, but we’re going to use that as a starting point as what I theoretically recommend in a lot of cases.
Potentially you try and keep your meal frequency the same as normal as well. If you normally consume three meals and two snacks, for example, in each 24 hour period, you can try and keep that the same. But there are some cases where that would be really silly. For example, it depends on the length of your shift when you’re able to get breaks, all of these kind of things. When do you wake up, when do you go to sleep? There’s a bunch of factors. So, in the cases where it would be silly, I encourage rearranging to whatever works best for you. That’s obviously very individualized and everything like that, and it’s pretty broad advice, but there are logistical challenges even beyond the shifts and stuff like that. What if you do not feel like a large meal in the middle of the night? What if you’re just not hungry at that time? What could you do? Could you replace it with snacks? Could you replace it with, I don’t know, a shake or something like that? Could you have two smaller meals? Does that fit your schedule?
There’s a bunch of things, but it makes sense to restructure it based on your own position. And then the next thing is, I use 24 hours, but what if that just doesn’t fit at all? Right? What if that is just skewed by your schedule? I’d switch it to a 48-hour timeframe. So, it’s like let’s say, I don’t know, people don’t track, right? But let’s say, well, not everyone tracks, but say you are using MyFitnessPal that would involve aiming for the same calories, macros, and also micronutrients and fiber and everything like that over a 48-hour period, so just double the numbers kind of thing. And I’ve used MyFitnessPal as an example, but the concept applies without tracking obviously. The concept is just the same thing, you just would have doubled the intake of a 24-hour period over a 48-hour period. It sounds complex when I put it like that, but it’s just trying to keep things steady, so that you end up with a roughly similar intake to what you would’ve been doing without the shift work.
Leah:
Yeah, and I find that protocol or that intervention particularly useful for people who are shifting from day shift to night shift where they’ll have one really long day and one really short day. For them it does make sense to have more food on the long day and less food on the short day. But over that 48 hour period, it’s roughly the same amount. And it’s not necessarily that you have to look at calories, but even maybe one whole meal is shifted from one day to the other and then one day has a meal less and looking at yeah, just the meal frequency over that 48 hour period.
So, another aspect we’re going to cover briefly is caffeine. So, even though caffeine does make it a lot easier to get through shift work and get through a night shift, particularly I’d still follow similar principles of trying to keep it ar around six hours away from going to bed. Sleep can already be an issue for shift workers and you don’t necessarily want to add onto that issue with caffeine usage on top. So, ideally you want to be, I suppose ideally in a perfect world, fueling yourself well enough through your shift through food where caffeine doesn’t have to be this kind of crux that you rely on, so then it doesn’t interfere with your sleep and then have this cyclic domino effect where you’re drinking so much caffeine, it’s affecting your sleep, and then your need for more caffeine increases. So, that’s kind of where I stand on caffeine intake. You can use it, but just be mindful of it.
Aidan:
So, the too long didn’t read version of this is mostly try to keep things the same as you normally would over a 24 to 48-hour period without shift work. But also having empathy and acknowledging the logistical challenge of doing so, particularly with that missing a meal you kind of talked about if that happens or whatever, you might be way hungrier and that is a challenge that comes alongside this. It sounds incredibly simple and I wonder if people came into listening to this podcast hoping for a little bit more, but firstly, I just wanted to share my perspective for a few reasons. One, both myself and Leah are very caring people. My first 10 shift workers I worked with, I tried so hard.
I tried creating individualized plans. There were some nurses I worked with who were doing three different shifts. They’d do a morning shift and afternoon shift and a night shift. And I was given three different plans and everything like that. And I spent so much time on all of this and it did not get any better results than this concept of me being like, Hey, just trying to keep everything the same over each 24 hour period. And then as the logistical issues come up, we’re trying to address those. If they don’t want that big meal in the middle of the night, it’s like, okay, well what can we do to get around that problem?
Leah:
I think sometimes it’s all about maybe not over complicating it and then looking at your own personal logistic issues and just addressing those one by one.
Aidan:
Yeah, for sure. Another reason why I wanted to do this was I was on Bec Hardgrave’s podcast, what’s it called? Fit and Full of It, I think it’s called. And they were doing a rapid fire questions and in the middle of it they just chucked in what should shift workers do? I cannot answer this in two seconds, but I did want to share my perspective if anybody was listening. Have you got any thoughts to wrap it up on?
Leah:
No, I think that sounds pretty good to me.
Aidan:
Well, this has been episode 93 of the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. Thank you to everybody who has listened, and as always, if you could please lead a rating and review, that would be greatly appreciated.