Leah:
Hello and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. I’m Leah Higl and I’m here with my co-host Aidan Muir and today is our seventh Q&A episode. So we’ve been doing quite a few Q&A episodes over the course of what, last three years. This is number seven, which we love because it gives us a chance to stop thinking about content topics after 150-something episodes. And kind of puts the onus on you guys to tell us what to talk about. So we’re gonna go through a few questions today and yeah, just give some answers.
Aidan:
So the first question we got is, is there any difference in effect for carb loading an athlete with insulin resistant PCOS? Have you ever heard anyone ask this question before?
Leah:
I actually haven’t and I’m actually surprised that I’ve never had this question.
Aidan:
Yeah, I thought the same. So it’s interesting and I obviously have my own thoughts but I also was looking into it and I didn’t see anybody else talking about it either. So just going with my own theoretical thinking. I don’t see any reason why there will be change in effect from a performance perspective. We can still maximise glycogen source, which is the goal of carb loading in somebody who’s insulin resistant PCOS. So no change from a performance perspective that I could see. I could see some arguments from other perspectives. I could see arguments for being a little bit more conservative from a carb loading perspective, going slightly lower, but that would also be detrimental for performance. Like I just see that more from maybe a health perspective.
I can see the logic of prioritising lower GI carbohydrates, but once again, that would make it more difficult to get enough total carbohydrates in. So that could also be detrimental for performance. I can see more of a conscious effort being worthwhile from spreading carbohydrates throughout the day. There’d be no downside to doing that. How much would that really benefit from a PCOS perspective? Like I can’t imagine it makes a huge, huge difference.
But for me, like, I only ever use carb loading infrequently. Like if somebody, say somebody runs two marathons in a year or something like that, I’ll carb load for those. How big of an impact is that going to have on somebody’s overall management of their condition? It’s unlikely to make a big difference. We’re not necessarily talking about somebody with say type two diabetes where there would be a huge increase in blood glucose levels and everything like that. Assuming they’re not using insulin. I don’t see much of a difference, but it is definitely an interesting question. There’s a lot that could be said. I could see why people would have different opinions to me as well.
Leah:
Yeah, absolutely. I think from my perspective, I see carb loading is like such a it’s such a short period of time that you’re doing infrequently. So the chance of harm in this context is really, really low to like negligible. The next question we have is definitely a good one for me. And that is, is eating high volumes of soy or tofu bad for you?
Obviously I work in plant-based arena with plant -based vegan athletes. So I am very big on recommending soy, given that it is such a high quality plant-based protein, really good amino acid profile, really versatile, et cetera, et cetera. But I do get the question a lot around the intake of soy potentially having harm or being negative for health in the long term. So my kind of brief answer to this is that,
Most of this comes from the fact that there is something in soy called phytoestrogens. And whilst these can mimic the effects of oestrogen in the body, it’s in a very mild way. Then it’s also only on some bodily tissues and only in some people. So I think overall, the role of phytoestrogens and the physiological mechanisms is quite complex, but it’s often very much oversimplified and people just see the word oestrogen and kind of like panic and go, like, this must be bad for me, particularly like men being worried about like feminising effects and things like that.
And then other people worried about higher cancer risks, particularly breast cancer and whatnot and any tissues that are like reproductive. But if we look at, if we like go away from the mechanistic phytoestrogen stuff and look at actual population data, we can see that soy intakes have been associated with decreased risk of breast cancer, decreased risk of prostate cancer, overall better health outcomes in populations that eat a greater amount of soy and overall plant-based products, reduced menopausal symptoms, including hot flushes, improvements in fertility. So like overall, like soy appears to be very health promoting and we don’t have any kind of really solid data to say that it would be negative in any way, especially from a feminising effects in men or increasing circulating oestrogen levels in men.
We just know that that doesn’t happen. If you wanted to know more about this soy stuff and kind of delve into the research, I did just put out a little bit of a plug, but I did put out a podcast episode for the Plant Strong Co podcast, which is fully about plant-based nutrition. We do a whole like 45 minutes on this particular topic. So if you want to know more, we’ll put it in the show notes and you can kind of just go have a listen to that. But overall, no, my answer is no.
Aidan:
I know you’re not super active on TikTok, but if you ever want to bait engagement on TikTok, just talk about soy protein. But like don’t talk about it in a negative light. Don’t go overly positive. Just talk about a product that contains soy protein and you’ll get a stream of comments from guys being like, this contains soy protein though.
Leah:
It’s gonna give me man boobs. We have a lot of research on soy intake and even like high amounts of soy and like we just don’t see it in the research. So it’s yeah, anyway. I get very heated.
Aidan:
So the next question we’ve got is, did either of you have any weird nutritional habits when starting out? We’ll probably just go back and forth a little bit on this one. I’m going to skip through my first one a little bit but because I’ve spoken about it on the podcast, but the classic one I always go to is I used to drink olive oil just straight from the bottle because I learned about like if it fits your macros and like I’d have like 10 grams of fat left for the day. So I’d just say. Better get it in. So I was like, and the best bit with all of mine is like it’s not disordered eating related in any way shape or form I just like thought that the 10 grams of fat was gonna help me get jacked I was like sick.
The next one I’ve got once again Which is why I like the caveat of none of this is to sort of eating related is that? When I first moved out of home like I’d been pretty blessed in that I had Been cooking throughout my teenage years. My parents obviously valued that and stuff like that, but I’ve got I Definitely still like the taste of nice tasting food, but I just think less than the average
I just care about it less. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about it. Just less than the average person. And my first few years living out of home, I had a combo of because I come from a pretty low-income type of background with my family, I valued money from a freedom perspective. I was like, I am not going to run out of money because I do not want to move home. That’s so fair. So I was trying to save money wherever I could. And I was having plain chicken, rice and frozen veg for like multiple years for a large percentage of my meals because chicken is like the cheapest protein, it’s also close to a per gram of protein, rice is obviously super cheap, and then frozen vegetables was the cheapest way to get vegetables, macronutrients in. And I was not getting sauces. I wasn’t getting herbs. I wasn’t getting spices just because I was like…
Leah:
No, plain. Like actually plain.
Aidan:
Just straight up plain. Like just straight up plain. And about two years into this, I was at one of my mate’s places and he saw me cooking and he’s like, bro, bro, try this. He gave me like lemon pepper. Like your whole world changed. I was like, my God. And that’s when I first started using herbs and spices.
Leah:
As someone from a European Croatian background that mortifies me.
Aidan:
It mortifies most to be honest.
Leah:
That’s insane. So you go with one? Yeah, so I mean, I definitely don’t see the things that I’m going to talk about as disordered eating in more. So like these were periods of my life where I was learning, just starting to learn about nutrition in my teenage years. I was very interested in nutrition early on and I would just try like weird stuff.
One of those things was, I mean, I guess very kind of similar to your plain chicken rice and frozen veg thing, but I went down that bro, like I was very much on bodybuilding .com, like that very kind of bro-y kind of way of life. So I went down like the clean eating thing before I went into like, if it fits your macros, where I was just like, everything I eat has to be like basically chicken, rice, and like broccoli.
So not overly weird, but it was like quite restrictive in a way that like didn’t make sense like I could have met my nutritional requirements without being that restrictive but at the time that’s kind of the route that I took. Where it got a little bit weirder though is when I like when I became vegan, that was the time of like Freelee the Banana Girl and like anyone who is vegan or was vegan around that time will like know exactly what I’m talking about, but I did go raw till four for a couple of months.
I’m talking like I ate a quarter of a massive watermelon for lunch kind of vibe. So it was so bad. I only did it for like maybe a couple of months because I have IBS and it made it way worse. It was so bad. So yeah, I guess I’ve taken some extreme approaches in my time before I had the knowledge that I didn’t need to take an extreme approach to reach my goals, essentially.
Aidan:
Is she still around? Really?
Leah:
I think so. I think she’s still making content, but I don’t think people are paying as much attention to her. Like she’s definitely not like, you know, high on your list of influences. Likely, I hope, I hope.
Aidan:
Yeah. I’m only going to do one more. So the other one I’m going to go with is once again, just coming back from that like background of trying to save as much money as possible. One of the first jobs I got as a dietitian, I was doing home visits for a living. So I was just always driving around all the time.
That therefore meant I was also stopping at service stations all the time and I cared about getting my protein in, eating healthy, et cetera. And one kind of what I view at the time as like a bad habit that I was getting into is because I was stopping at service stations all the time, there’d be times where I’d be like, I don’t feel like I’ve had enough protein for the day. So I’d like buy protein bars and stuff like that. And I was like, I don’t know, these are like $5. I’m sure that’s a cheaper way to get 20 grams of protein. So I had what I’d call in the back of my car at emergency tuna so like just tins of tuna that I just keep in the back of my car and it would always be a reminder just being like every time I’d like to stop at the service station being like is this really about the protein because if it is I’ve got emergency tuna in the back of my car. You’re like or do I just want something sweet like a protein bite like is it worth it? Yeah and like it really just reminds me of just being like sometimes I just want the protein but it’s not actually just that I’ve just been lying to myself and saying it’s about the protein.
Leah:
Justifying it yeah.
Yeah. But once again, the tuna like you get them if they’re on special it was like 90 cents for a tin of tuna.
Leah:
Yeah, so cheap. Yeah. Yeah at the time. I’m sure it’s more now.
Aidan:
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if you do this but like because I’ve been a dietitian since 2016 I have a lot of spiels that are just like ingrained in me that just like say the same things over and over and over again. And inflation has hit hard these last few years. And there’s a lot of things being like, the price difference is only this. And I’m like, I actually have to look this up again.
Aidan:
Yeah, I should double check.
Aidan:
Like, I used to always be like, I just get some $20 scales from Kmart. I’m like, are they still $20?
Leah:
You’ve got to check these things. Inflation is crazy right now. The next question we have is, what are common mistakes you see people making when trying to eat healthier? So we’ve expanded this a little bit and also add lose weight, because a lot of the time people use eat healthier and lose weight interchangeably, even though they are separate things. So we’re gonna like touch on both. But I think from a health perspective, I definitely see people, I mean, doing what I did early on, it’s like having an all or nothing mentality or taking like an extreme approach when realistically there’s no need for an extreme approach.
Like we could still eat healthier, be healthy without cutting out food groups is one that I see all the time. Like cutting out dairy, cutting out wheat, cutting out carbs, cutting out all processed foods, grouping foods in a good or bad category and only eating things from the good category. I think like from a healthy eating perspective that includes both the nutrient intake overall, but also your relationship with food. So to be healthy, you need to consider both of those things. And I think I just see a lot of people taking a super extreme approach to health where it’s not great for their relationship with food overall. And I wouldn’t deem that as healthy overall. So that’s kind of where I would see people going wrong most in that regard.
Would you add anything to that?
Aidan:
I think that’s it. That covers it for me.
Leah:
Yeah. And then weight loss. Now people can definitely take a whole lot of approaches here and they can be like, there’s a lot of overlap. Like people can still take too extreme of an approach, cut out unnecessary food groups, et cetera. But the things that I’ll see most often when people try to lose weight on their own is trying to go way lower calorie than is needed. So that kind of traditional like 1200 calorie diet where maybe that is like, way too much of a deficit for that person to adhere to for even a short period of time.
And there is just like so much restriction that it’s not even sustainable for the period of time that they want to reach their goal where if they’d taken a more moderate approach, it would have been sustainable for that period of time and they would have gotten from A to B as opposed to like giving up in a couple of weeks or going down the process of having that like restrict and binge cycle starting.
So yeah, restricting too hard, going way too low calorie. Then on the flip side of that, we have other people that largely ignore calories and just like quote on quote eat healthy to lose weight, which is an approach that can sometimes work if you’re doing that in a particular way, but just because you’re eating more healthy foods doesn’t necessarily mean that we are reducing calorie intake overall. So I feel like sometimes, that eating healthy and losing weight can be like meshed together in a way that is unhelpful.
Aidan:
Yeah. And I have so much empathy for why people go down the routes of doing those things. Like I get where it comes from. It also, there’s so many easy wins in there. There’s so many easy wins. Just being like, if like the same thing with the healthy, like if you have some awareness of calories, if you don’t restrict too, too hard, like you do some level of restraint, but you don’t go all the way and with the lower calorie one, that’s like one of the biggest ones for me, just being like, there’s a lot of people who are just creating massive deficits and then it is hard because it is hard.
Then they go back to doing what they were previously doing. I’m like, you could have made it half as hard.
Leah:
And then, and stuck to it.
Aidan:
Yeah. Just got away. Yeah. You could have done it for way longer. The next question we’ve got is, do you recommend magnesium before bed to help with sleep? I don’t know. Have we done a podcast on this? I think it’s been, I think we’ve done a sleep podcast and maybe discussed it there. Yeah. So, recapping this, this is a topic that I care about. I think there are gaps in the research and I’m always a little bit cautious with what I say on this topic because of those gaps in the research. But I’m also pretty comfortable just saying what I slash we know. There is minimal research on magnesium before sleep in people who do not have insomnia. We have a bit on people who have insomnia and the research looks promising there, but we don’t have much of people who don’t have insomnia.
First thing to chuck out there is like, it’s really interesting when you hear people with real, like speak with really high degrees of confidence being like magnesium before bed will help you sleep. And then the next level is like people saying what specific type of magnesium, just being like, we haven’t even, this hasn’t even been studied, let alone the type of magnesium. And even if you look at all the research on magnesium before bed in all of these various different types of studies that we do have. I’ve read some of these papers like all the way through and they don’t even say the type that is used, which I find interesting. I’m sure I could like hit up the authors, but like, I don’t know. Like, I don’t think that people –
Leah:
Do we care about it that much?
Aidan:
Yeah, I don’t think the people who are saying these things have hit up the authors either. That’s for real. Anyway, so there are still only a few randomised control trials on people with insomnia, but it is promising in that on average you see a 17 minute reduction in the time taken to get to sleep and a 16 minute increase in total time spent asleep.
I don’t know if that sounds super impressive to the guys or people listening to this, but I think it’s worthwhile. Like that’s a nice benefit. If I had insomnia, I’m like, I’d try it. I don’t see any reason why not to. It’s also one of those things that’s like, if you didn’t notice a difference, you’re like, would you have noticed a difference if it was like 16 minutes total extra sleep? I don’t know. We also have clear research showing that higher dietary intake of magnesium is linked with improved sleep, but that creates the other issue of being like, well, if you have a high dietary intake of magnesium, you are also doing a lot of other habits that could be associated with this.
Like you likely have a higher dietary intake of a lot of other things that could be associated with improved sleep as well, which then makes us jump to the anecdotal stuff, which is part of why I’m so open-minded with this as well. Anecdotally, a lot of people who track their sleep quality and quantity get improvements when they take magnesium. The difficult thing there is obviously, we would much rather research comparing placebo to that because if I take anything that I believe is going to help me sleep, the odds of me getting better sleep probably get a little bit higher as well.
Another thing that I’m a little bit passionate about is that a lot of people just have suboptimal intakes of magnesium in general. And this is something that I always question in terms of working with my own clients being like, obviously I’m putting together plans that are covering every micronutrient where possible, making sure they have a good intake of magnesium. Since we already have research showing that high dietary intake of magnesium is already linked to improved sleep.
Is it worth chucking a supplement on top of that? Which is part of why I say it’s not my go -to strategy. My first priority is increasing dietary intake. But then the next thing is like, is there a downside of doing this either? Like if somebody happened to be keen on trialing magnesium before bed, and I can’t see a downside for them, particularly with the type of magnesium that we’re using as well, it is an option that I actually do have some people do. It’s just not my go-to option.
Leah:
Yeah, when I see someone taking magnesium, it’s not like I’m going to be like, don’t do that. It doesn’t work or anything. Like if they think, if they think it’s helping, I’m like, go for it. Especially if they are in some sort of caloric deficit where maybe they’re not getting as many magnesium-rich foods in like, especially from a plant-based perspective, like we’re kind of like reducing nuts, seeds and whole grains usually in a caloric deficit. So like it makes sense to maybe just like leave it in there because maybe their dietary intake is suboptimal and yeah.
So, second last question, is there actually stuff you can do to increase testosterone naturally in men? I think some people are not going to like this answer because it’s like pretty simple in a way, but yes, there are things that you can do if your levels are low at baseline. But if you are someone who already has good testosterone levels, like healthy testosterone levels, there’s not much we can really do like quote on quote, naturally to elevate it like beyond that range or, you know, something akin to what we would see in like TRT or those kinds of like hormone replacement therapies.
But if you have low testosterone and that’s something that you want to fix, just being a bit rapid-fire with things that you could focus on from a nutrition lifestyle perspective would be avoid being too lean. So having some level of body fat, typically for men, this is like over that 10 % range. If you’re sub 10%, that’s often where it starts to get a little dicey. Avoid having too much body fat. So having excess adipose tissue can be a negative thing for testosterone levels. Avoid dietary fat intake being excessively low. So dietary fat is very important for the production of testosterone.
So when that is very, very low, so below that kind of 0.5, 0.6 grams per kilo body weight per day level, it can start to interfere with hormone production and that can be an issue. Also avoid low vitamin D levels. So ensure that on a blood test, your vitamin D is within the healthy range. Consume a sufficient amount of zinc. I see this a lot in my plant-based men because zinc requirements are so much higher when you are plant-based, but zinc is again really important for the production of testosterone as well alongside fat. So if you’re not consuming an adequate amount of zinc or supplementing, then that could be an issue affecting your testosterone levels.
In some of my plant-based athletes, I have seen men who have had such a low intake of zinc that that alone has decreased their testosterone levels to below the healthy range. And then just adding a zinc supplement has fixed it. So it’s something that I see in practice. Also, consume a sufficient amount of magnesium. So again, going back to magnesium links with testosterone as well. And then the final one of this rapid-fire would be ashwagandha. So ashwagandha has been found to increase testosterone in men in quite a few studies, but I would say this probably is due to things like stress reduction or better sleep as more of like a bit of a domino effect than a direct effect potentially.
So even just looking at like, if you have a lot of stress in your life, if you’re not getting very good sleep, like those lifestyle factors would potentially make a difference. So having a focus there could be beneficial.
Aidan:
Yeah, that’s a cool summary. This here, so I want to add to that, but I’m like, this could drag out. There’s so much we could say. Like, we could go so deep on that. So I think I’m going to go on to the next one and talk about the next question is does eating breakfast help with weight loss? We’re gonna actually talk about this more in the next podcast. So I’ll try to be a little bit brief here.
I’m just gonna go through some just top points that I’ve got on this to try and keep it brief. So it doesn’t do anything to speed up metabolism based on research where total intake is matched. There can be caveats there in individual variation. For example, some people feel better when they have breakfast and they feel more energised and they’ll move differently throughout the day. When I say metabolism, you could interpret that as resting metabolic rate, which probably won’t be influenced too much here.
But you could also interpret it as total daily energy expenditure, how much energy you’re burning throughout the day. If you happened to move significantly differently because you have breakfast, then that could be a different story. That research has been done, like they’ve looked at that on average and it doesn’t seem to be a big difference on average, but there is individual response, obviously. Having breakfast could also influence other eating behaviours. There is that classic story of skipping breakfast, then being starving later on and then making poorer food choices or having higher calorie foods, etc, etc. That’s another thing, but we can also look at data on that type of stuff as well. So a 2019 meta analysis found that those who eat breakfast average slightly higher calorie intakes than those who don’t.
Really, that’s not super surprising because it’s just like another eating window. If you’re eating more times throughout the day, like it kind of makes sense. On average, it came out as 260 calories more. That’s not a huge difference. If you once again, going into that research, their breakfast was more than 260 calories. So it’s like, both are true in a way. Or it’s like, they added calories by eating breakfast, but that did result in them reducing calories throughout the rest of the day. It just didn’t reduce the calorie intake by more than the amount that they had at breakfast. They also found that people who ate breakfast were on average 0.44 kilo heavier. I wouldn’t read too much into that. It’s a tiny difference.
To be clear though, those are simply averages. Once again, individual variation, different things work for different people but it’s super clear that total intake clearly matters way more than if you eat breakfast. Personally, I don’t know about you, but like I do have almost all of my clients have breakfast. Not because it’s better, but largely because I see it as another opportunity to tick some nutrition boxes that might not be ticked elsewhere. A lot of people have different foods for breakfast and I see it as another opportunity to get different types of fibre in, different micronutrients in, maybe some extra protein.
It could also be relevant for performance-related reasons depending on what time you train. For example, if somebody’s training at some stage in the morning, I probably want them to have breakfast as well. A lot of people I work with do train at least once a day or at least a couple of times a week. So I see that as another reason as well.
Leah:
Yeah, I think it’s very personal. Like in terms of weight loss, some of my clients that are weight loss specifically will have breakfast and others will have that as a fasting window because that works for them. So again, we’ll go over that more in the next podcast, but I think that’s a great little summary.
Aidan:
Yeah. And to be clear, like even though I do have a lot of my clients have breakfast, I’m not opposed to not having it. Totally fine. I just, I found this works very well for a lot of people I work with.
Leah:
I don’t feel strongly either way. It depends on the person sitting in front of me. But this has been episode 152 of the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. If you haven’t yet left a rating or review, it’s always greatly appreciated for you to do so and you can keep an eye out for the next time we do a Q&A. We put that up on our Instagrams, specifically Aidan. So Aidan underscore the underscore dietitian in case you want to submit some questions for next time. But otherwise, thanks for tuning in.