Episode 395: Intestinal Microbiota Study, Probiotics, Hunger Hormones, Protein Pacing, Paradigm Shifting Science, Over Fasting, Being Cold, And More!
Welcome to Episode 395 of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast, hosted by Melanie Avalon, author of What When Wine Diet: Lose Weight And Feel Great With Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, And Wine and Vanessa Spina, author of Keto Essentials: 150 Ketogenic Recipes to Revitalize, Heal, and Shed Weight.
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Listener Q&A: Heather - Cold like Elsa
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TRANSCRIPT
(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)
Melanie Avalon:
Welcome to Episode 395 of The Intermittent Fasting Podcast. If you want to burn fat, gain energy, and enhance your health by changing when you eat, not what you eat with no calorie counting, then this show is for you. I'm Melanie Avalon, biohacker, author of "What, When, Wine" and creator of the supplement line AvalonX. And I'm here with my co-host, Vanessa Spina, sports nutrition specialist, author of "Keto Essentials" and creator of the Tone Breath Ketone Analyzer and Tone Lux Red Light Therapy Panels. For more on us, check out ifpodcast.com, melanieavalon.com, and ketogenicgirl.com. Please remember, the thoughts and opinions on this show do not constitute medical advice or treatment. To be featured on the show, email us your questions to questions@ifpodcast.com. We would love to hear from you. So pour yourself a mug of black coffee, a cup of tea, or even a glass of wine, if it's that time, and get ready for The Intermittent Fasting Podcast.
Melanie Avalon:
Hi, everybody, and welcome. This is episode number 395 of the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. I'm Melanie Avalon, and I'm here with Vanessa Spina. Hello, everyone. How are you today, Vanessa? I'm feeling great.
Vanessa Spina:
How are you feeling?
Melanie Avalon:
I am good. I've had a crazy few couple of nights the past few nights, some of which I will not share on the podcast, but some of which include my power went out again. Do you guys get power outages in Europe?
Vanessa Spina:
No, in Asia, we did all the time. We had backup generators and stuff on our house, but here, not really.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh really? Oh wait, that's so interesting. It's like a common thing in Asia.
Vanessa Spina:
Uh-huh. Yeah, they're like called rolling blackouts or brownouts or when I lived in Manila in the Philippines, we had backup generators on the house. So like the power would go out a few times a week and you would just like everything would turn off and then a few minutes later it would turn back on with the generators and yeah, very common. A few times a week? Yeah, it was very normal. Just like part of life, especially in Southeast Asia. I don't know if it's the same now. Like that was when I was in high school. So it might be better now. Yeah. And China sometimes, not as much, but yeah. But in Europe so far, no. Do you get a lot of them where you are?
Melanie Avalon:
Well, wait, quick question in Europe, are the power lines above ground or underground?
Vanessa Spina:
above ground. But I don't know because I don't actually, you know how in North America, you kind of like see these big power stations. Actually, there is one. I found one on a hike. Not too far. And it was out. Yeah, it was above ground. Yeah.
Melanie Avalon:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. My apartment complex here must just be, I don't know, it keeps happening. When I grew up, our house was on a hospital line. So we never got power outages ever because of the hospital. I remember when I was a little kid, it made me so sad because I like wanted a power outage. Like I wanted to like camp in the house and like all the things. And now I'm like, Oh my goodness. Like it goes out for a second and I panic. Yes. Just gives me gratitude for modern day life. I don't think I could do like the old days. I mean, I guess I could.
Vanessa Spina:
Yeah, absolutely. I think every day the way that we live is so amazing and it's like the richest kings and queens or emperors of the past couldn't even have some of the small things that everyone has these days that we take for granted, like indoor plumbing, like a dryer. Actually, those are a luxury item in Europe. Not everyone has dryers, but having a dryer is a huge luxury. Just having appliances, power, lights, yeah, all the things. Although on the other side, our technology is also creating really unnatural situations for us. I read yesterday that blue light is causing the eye to attack itself. It's just like...
Melanie Avalon:
Oh, like an autoimmune condition in the eye?
Vanessa Spina:
Yeah, I mean, I actually only read the headlines. I didn't read the study yet, but I was like, oh my goodness, but it doesn't surprise me because our environments are so...
Melanie Avalon:
unnatural. I used to literally get in arguments with chat GPT like every night. I'm like, what is modern life? I'm like arguing with a computer and then feeling bad about arguing with it and apologizing to it.
Vanessa Spina:
So, are you having some bad nights of sleep or?
Melanie Avalon:
No, I'm actually pretty, I'm pretty good with sleep. I mean, that's another ironic thing about the technology that like we probably slept better as, you know, before all of this, but I can use all of the modern technology to help myself sleep, like the cooling mattress, the cooling blankets, the, you know, all the things.
Vanessa Spina:
It's really funny how we have to hack our way back to nature. I was telling my father-in-law, as we were walking in the forest last weekend, and I was telling him all about grounding and how amazing it is and how I kind of dismissed it as kind of an airy fairy thing. Like, I don't know, just a nonsense pseudoscience years ago. And then it turns out that, you know, apparently in Russia, kids learn in school that the earth is negatively charged and the atmosphere is positively charged. And we used to believe that it was a sodium gradient, you know, on cells, although this is still taught in textbooks. So I guess we still believe it that the reason why our cells have negative voltage, like negative 70, negative 80, negative 90, a hundred voltage on our cells is because of the sodium differential, the ion differential between the sodium potassium inside and outside the cell.But turns out it's actually this crystalline water that is holding charge and really healthy cells have a negative charge on them and positive. And they've done studies where they've looked at the cancerous cells have really positive charges on them and grounding because the earth is negatively charged is a way that you can get rid of excess negative charges. I know you know this well, but I was explaining it to him and I'm like, he's a rocket scientist, so he's really smart. And, you know, I'm, I'm trying to make it sound not woo woo, but he also gets quantum mechanics and how fascinating it is. So he's very open-minded about stuff. But yeah, it was, it's just funny how there's all these things that I think in previously we knew and cultures that were really advanced had this knowledge too, and we're sort of rediscovering it. It feels like we're just rediscovering a lot of it right now. Oh my God.
Melanie Avalon:
So, the episode that Scott and I just recorded for the Mind Blown podcast plug, we did it on out of place artifacts. Have you gone down that rabbit hole? Oh, it's so interesting. There's all these different artifacts that we found historically that don't, like, either they don't match timelines of what we thought. They indicate technology like way before we thought people had technology, or they indicate advanced civilizations, or they indicate people being places that... It's crazy. It was really interesting. So, it's things like there's this map that was created in the 1500s that shows an accurate depiction of Antarctica, which makes no sense because they hadn't been to Antarctica, and Antarctica at that time was under snow, yet it shows the shape of Antarctica, which there's literally no way they could have known that. So, it's like, where did this map come from? Things like that, and things like there's the Baghdad Battery, which is like an ancient battery, which indicates some sort of civilization had electric power ability. Yeah, it's stuff like that. You would really like it. It's a rabbit hole for sure.
Vanessa Spina:
Yeah, my father-in-law was also telling me that, you know, Pangaea, I thought that was just one time that the Earth was one continent or one unified landmass, but there's been like seven. Like back and forth? Yeah, and it goes back and forth, and he was telling me the names of all the different ones. Like, I only learned about Pangaea in school, but there's seven others, and the landmass on the Earth keeps growing apart and then going back together, and it's all because of like the fault lines and everything. I had no idea, and it's one of those facts, like some of the things you're talking about where you just go through your whole life thinking one thing, and then someone drops something on you, and you're like, what, there's seven others, there were seven others? Like, it's just, yeah, that sounds like a really, really fun episode.
Melanie Avalon:
What's weird is that modern-day archaeologists tend to be really resistant to the ideas because it disrupts the timeline that's assumed. But there's just so much evidence, like there's literally, we just find stuff that doesn't match the timeline. But so they'll like try to fit, they'll like try to come up with theories that explain away all these artifacts when maybe they just indicate that things were different. I don't know why it's so shocking that there would have been an advanced civilization that got like wiped out. Like, I don't know why that has to be controversial.
Vanessa Spina:
Yeah, I've always thought that there was. It probably has to do with our egos, but I always thought that there were civilizations that were more advanced, been completely wiped out that we don't even know about. It's one of those things that's so hard for people to change their thinking, especially when they've built their careers on it. Like when I was talking about, you know, some of the things we're learning about this fourth phase of water, this crystalline water, this water that's inside our bodies, it's like this gel-like water, it can actually hold charge. It can actually, one of the experiments they did, it powered a battery, speaking of batteries. And this knowledge means that we have to completely rewrite all biology, physiology, biochemistry, all the textbooks have to be rewritten.It's like, who wants to do that? So none of the scientists who built their careers on established ways of thinking, they don't want to go back and say that all their work was wrong. You know, it takes a lot to have a paradigm shift, but it's also very exciting when a paradigm shift does happen. And at some point, it's almost like it gets to a point where you can't resist it anymore. It has to sort of manifest, which is really interesting. We're totally on some wild tangents
Melanie Avalon:
Well, I was thinking I was thinking that the related theme is I bet the one thing we have been doing a long time is fasting. Maybe I wonder if these ancient civilizations. Hmm, who knows?
Vanessa Spina:
I know in Rome, I read about how the Romans used to do something called the Senna. Have you heard of this? It's C-E-N-A, and it meant one meal a day, and they would eat one meal a day. And I got really into this when I was doing OMAD, and they would basically have one principal meal in a day. Sometimes they would snack. It's very sort of awful, Ori, not awful, Ori, awful maker, awful hoary maker, Ori, awful maker. But during the time that I was doing OMAD, I remember researching it. Yeah, it was very much like most Romans could only afford to have like one main meal a day. And that seems similar to probably how a lot of us ate, or a lot of not us, but humans ate in the past, because if you were hunting and gathering, like you just didn't have that consistent food supply, you kind of had to fast.We were watching a nature documentary with Luca yesterday, and it was talking about the lion diet, which is like they basically hunt and have to have a big kill every two days. So they feast, and then they don't, on meat, and then they don't eat for two days, usually two or three days, depending. But I was saying to Pete, I'm like, I wonder if they had access to food around the clock. Would they eat around the clock, or would they still just eat every two, three days?
Melanie Avalon:
That is really interesting.
Vanessa Spina:
you probably could tell that from a zoo. Yeah. I'm going to ask the zoo because sometimes we go, they'll be like feeding the tiger, the lion. Like I should ask them if they eat every couple of days or if they eat every day because they're at the zoo.
Melanie Avalon:
I know that like zoo animals get a lot of mental, like they'll get like mental health issue problems and things that wild animals don't get, which is not surprising. Can you imagine your life in a exhibit?
Vanessa Spina:
No, it's horrible. Yeah, living in captivity. I think there are some animals, I remember in Vancouver where I lived, and this will be the last thing I'll say about totally off the wall topics, but they had an aquarium in Vancouver that was the world's first aquarium that every single, like most of the animals, I don't know if every single, but most animals there, the large mammals, they were all rescues. So they rescued them from the ocean and helped rehabilitate them. So every single one of them were rescues. I think some of the animals they say, especially at the Prague Zoo that we go to, that a lot of them are endangered, so they're helping them reproduce and build up their population. So it does make me feel better about it, but otherwise I get really depressed at some of the exhibits because I don't like seeing them in captivity. It's much better. When we went to the safari, we got to see them all in the wild and that was much more exciting, which I definitely wanted to do again.
Melanie Avalon:
And you can't really release them after they're in captivity because they can't handle the real world. I was reading about that in one of the authors that I interviewed. She was talking about basically this idealized view we have of the animal species that's just not accurate. We use it as a model for what is natural human behavior, but she makes the argument that animals don't actually act that way like we think they do. It's a whole tangent. But we'll use examples of how different animals seem to be inherently empathetic, but she makes arguments that it's not empathy. It's just the way the social structure and hierarchy is. But in any case, apparently you can't really release the animals that are in the zoo because they can't reintegrate into the social hierarchies and or they come back when the free willy-whale made me so sad. Hey, go. So yeah, on that note, animals fasting.
Vanessa Spina:
I was going to go into another weird tangent about what I learned about killer whales.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh my goodness, wait, tell me really quickly. What?
Vanessa Spina:
They're not that nice. They're killers. They kill seals and all kinds of other dolphins. They kill dolphins. We saw that in the nature documentary we were watching sometime in the last year. It really upset me. We all kill, I guess, to eat, but they were killing them for fun, for sport. So yeah, kind of changed my opinion.
Melanie Avalon:
There's been like, I've been seeing, well, not, I haven't been seeing them, but I've been hearing people talk on podcasts about recent videos of whales attacking, recently a whale just attacked a boat, a killer whale.
Vanessa Spina:
I remember that when that was happening, like it started surging or something. They were having these big attacks.
Melanie Avalon:
Can you imagine being on a boat and just, Oh my goodness. That's terrifying.
Vanessa Spina:
Terrifying. All right, I shared my last random.
Melanie Avalon:
I love it. I could talk about it all day. Shall we jump into some fasting-relieving things? Yes, I would love to. All right. So to start things off, we have a quick study to discuss. This is called Reprocussions of Intermittent Fasting on the Intestinal Microbiotic Community and Body Composition, a Systemic Review. So this was published in Nutrition Reviews in March of 2022. And long story short, it ended up looking at 17 studies. What I thought was actually really interesting in the beginning was of these studies. It said most of them were either alternate-day fasting or time-restricted feeding setups. I just thought it was interesting because they make a conclusion right at the beginning of those two different approaches and the two different ways that those affect metabolic signaling throughout the body.And they said that time-restricted feeding, which tends to be what people listening to this show are often doing, it's where you're eating in time windows during the day, right? That's the definition that we agreed upon from that article, Vanessa, essentially. Yes. Yeah. We recently, we'll put a link to it in the show notes, we recently talked about a study that gave official definitions to all the different types of fasting. So that was helpful.
Vanessa Spina:
I just have to quickly say that I interviewed the author, one of the main authors, and he said that he was also frustrated with some of the terms. But he said, at least it's something, you know, it's some kind of consensus. And I was like, okay, I'm just glad we're on the same page. But I'm going to be interviewing him for this podcast.
Melanie Avalon:
Yes, thank you. That's amazing.
Vanessa Spina:
Listeners submit questions for him. That's Dr. Grant Tinsley. He spearheaded that consensus on fasting terms, but he's also done a lot of really interesting intermittent fasting research.
Melanie Avalon:
Did he not like how some of the fasting definitions included? He's also, yeah.
Vanessa Spina:
He's also a purist like me, so we kind of got to bond over that.
Melanie Avalon:
Did he say other people felt that way as well?
Vanessa Spina:
No, he just said, so I just said, look, to me, it's like, okay, it's similar to saying you have sleeping, and then you have modified sleeping, which is laying in a bed, like listening to a book. And I'm like, but that's resting, it's not sleeping. So to me, that's like saying modified fasting is eating periodically something even if it's low in one macro, you know, or if it's even just only one macro when it's like a fat fast. And he was like, I love that analogy, I'm going to use it. He's like, I also feel the same way. But I understand. I mean, they had a lot of experts on the panel. And anyway, I just wanted to, yeah, let you guys know after I interviewed him what, yeah, if what his thoughts were on that.
Melanie Avalon:
That's amazing. I love that. That's so fun. Were there any other fun takeaways?
Vanessa Spina:
From not really on the the fasting study, I think they just had so many experts on it. And, you know, they just really saw a need to have consensus. So hopefully, it'll be the start of something. And I think that they were able to like something like protein pacing, which is a really cool study that I loved, but to me was not intermittent fasting, because they were eating protein every so many hours. To me, that shouldn't be in the category of intermittent fasting. It should be called something else like protein pacing, which is so cool as a concept on its own. So something like that, I don't think would fit into that definition if people now are using that consensus. And because there were so many experts on that panel, it should have a lot of influence on people who are publishing studies on fasting, whether or not they can use the term fasting or not, which will cause a lot less confusion.
Melanie Avalon:
It's so interesting how debated it is, like I recently interviewed Katherine Arnston again on my show for Energy Bits for her spirulina, and she's all about, for example, that spirulina doesn't break the fast, but it's like a fasting-friendly food, and I just think it's such a different — because I don't agree with that — I just think it's such a different paradigm. There's definitely like two types of people, like people who think fasting is, you know, just water, essentially, or coffee, and then gray zones.
Vanessa Spina:
Yeah, I'm about to interview her again, too.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh, cool. Cool, cool. Yeah, she's really up to this up on the science of spirulina. It's really impressive.
Vanessa Spina:
She really should get like an honorary PhD, although I think she is going for her PhD. Oh really? But she should get like some kind of Nobel prize or something for her work on algae, it is amazing.
Melanie Avalon:
It is. It's really, I'm really grateful for everything she's doing for sure. So okay, going back to the study, like I said, what I thought was interesting was they concluded right at the beginning that time restricted feeding influences weight control and biochemical parameters by regulating the circadian system. So our sleep-wake cycle, improving satiety control systems, oh, and improving satiety control systems by acting on leptin. So basically they were saying time-restricted feeding works because it affects our circadian rhythm and it affects our hormone that makes us feel full, which is leptin. They said on the other hand, ADF leads to a reduction of around 75% of all energy consumption regardless of dietary composition in addition to promoting hormonal adjustments that promote weight control.So for ADF, they were saying it was calorie restriction and hormones adjusting. I just thought that was really interesting that they, especially because we've been talking about you know, is intermittent fasting, the effects, are they just due to calorie restriction or are they different? I thought it was interesting that this study, even though it wasn't even looking at that, made that conclusion about those two approaches. In any case though, one of the major takeaways, and it was a long study, but the main takeaway is they were looking at how fasting affects the gut microbiome and the intestinal microbiota community in your body, specifically the firmicutes bacteroides ratio, which is the dominant strains. And so these strains are not strains that you can take in a probiotic. They actually represent around 90% of our gut microbiome, but they are not, like I said, they're not transient and they're not something you can take in a probiotic pill.So there's the gram-positive firmicutes and the gram-negative bacteroides. I always struggle with saying that. And their composition and relationship has a huge role in obesity-related metabolic changes and weight loss in the immune system and all the things. And the takeaway of the study was that fasting seemed to really beneficially affect that ratio in our body for the better for our metabolic health. So their conclusion, for example, they said, in short, the ADF and time restricted feeding protocols have a positive effect on the remodeling of the intestinal microbiota and can possibly be used to control body adiposity, improve insulin sensitivity, and achieve other obesity-related metabolic changes. These fasting protocols demonstrated a positive effect on the intestinal environment, specifically on the quality of the intestinal microbiota, which in turn has been associated with the amelioration of several diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and changes in the gut-brain axis.So yes, do you have thoughts on this study, Vanessa?
Vanessa Spina:
I thought it was an absolutely amazing review. I had read different papers over the years that talked about this and anything that has a positive influence on the microbiome in that way, especially with regards to that population and the ratio of fermicutes and bactroides because it does have an influence on body composition really fascinatingly. I just thought it was such an amazing review because it really summarizes some of the benefits that are not talked about as much when it comes to intermittent fasting or time restricted eating, which these days are really equated a lot with caloric restriction. And so it would be interesting to know how much of the effect is from time restricted eating or ADF versus caloric reduction. If there is how much overlap, how much of the benefits happening when it comes to the intestinal microbiota are coming just from the fasting and how much is from the caloric restriction aspect of the fasting, if you know what I'm saying.
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, exactly. And what's interesting is, that's why I thought it was so interesting. In the beginning, what they said where they separated ADF from time restricted feeding, because they don't even mention calorie restriction as part of my restricted feedings, like mechanism of action. You know, that's really, really interesting.
Vanessa Spina:
It is and it also I think I was listening to a researcher who's I'm interviewing in a couple days on intermittent fasting and he was saying what's super interesting about ADF is some people like they're talking about in the study do reduce their caloric intake by as much as 75%. Then other people will do a fast for 24 hours and in their own mad they'll overcompensate to eat and match the calories that they would have missed from their whole 24 hour fast and it kind of depends on the person but I think in general most people significantly reduce their caloric intake from that from a man yep.
Melanie Avalon:
It's, it's so, so fascinating. And I think it's also a good clarification. I mentioned this already, but I think with the microbiome, I don't think a lot of people have a realization about these essentially indigenous bacteria populations that we can't modulate them really through like probiotic supplementation and such. So it's, it's really interesting that fasting can have such an effect on them and weight loss and weight gain. For example, when we take probiotics, those are different strains that can survive in oxygen. They tend to be transient. That's why you have to keep taking them. They don't, they don't colonize your, you know, gut and stay there and you're good. You have to like keep taking them. So for example, like today's episode is actually sponsored and part by seed, which is now my like favorite probiotic ever.Like I've experienced so many benefits from it. And I don't like to blanket prescribe probiotics to people because like I said, there's so many different strains and different things work for different people, but their company that their entire mission is researching the science of probiotic strains and what helps people. And they have so many studies. For me, I've noticed a lot with my skin and my GI health. And I mean, I just love them. So I tell everybody about them. People can try them out at seed.com/ifpodcast and they can use the code to five. I have podcast to get 25% off their first month of DS zero one, which is their, their probiotic. So I highly recommend that again. So I think like the, it sounds like an amazing approach to really optimizing our gut microbiome, which we know affects so many things is not just our food and the probiotics we take, but the, the fasting as well. So basically you could be 24 seven improving your gut microbiome, I think by fasting and then making supportive food choices in your eating window. So that's really, really, really exciting. Especially if you dive deep into this article, they talk about all the different effects that the gut microbiome has on, you know, other hormones like our, you know, ghrelin or hunger hormone, leptin or satiety hormone, GLP one. So people are, you know, familiar with GLP one agonist, their, their effects on GLP one from gut microbiome, another peptide called peptide P Y Y appetite control, and then inflammatory markers. So many things. So we're talking, we're talking in the beginning about what we don't know about the past and history. There's also so much we don't know just inside of our bodies with our microbiome. That's a whole civilization inside of us.
Vanessa Spina:
Yeah, it's amazing. And I'm so glad that you shared this review because it really is a really excellent one summarizing all the benefits, especially when people, you know, critique or reduce intermittent fasting or time restriction to just, you know, the caloric reduction.
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah I think it's so so much more. Okie dokie, shall we get into some listener questions?
Vanessa Spina:
I would love to. I just wanted to mention that have you seen that Firmicutes and Bactroides have been rebranded?
Melanie Avalon:
No.
Vanessa Spina:
So, I interviewed this expert on the microbiota. She was actually an exercise physiologist that studied the impact of exercise on the microbiome. She was really fascinating. And when I was interviewing her, she told me it was kind of funny because there were a lot of articles about how this renaming caused this massive uproar because people were really annoyed by it. Anyway, so for Mikutis was renamed basiota, basilota, B-A-C-I-L-L-O-T-A because it contains the genus basilis and Bacteroides was reclassified and split into two, Prevotella melaninogenica and Prevotella intermediate.
Melanie Avalon:
Okay, I have seen those words.
Vanessa Spina:
Yeah. So it's like, I don't know why they need to do that. You know, it doesn't make much sense to me when, you know, everyone knows these names, is pretty familiar with them. But yeah, formicutes, basiota and proteobacteria. Yeah, it's, it caused an uproar in the scientific community. It's kind of like, it reminds me of when, you know, when they declassified Pluto as a planet, it was like, oh, it's like so sad. But when they just make these big changes and you're like, what committee decided this and why are they spending their time on this? But, you know, maybe, maybe the new names will be more beneficial in terms of understanding what they're actually made up of. So I guess the point with formicutes was that because they contain bacillus, their basiota. So anyway, maybe they'll catch on, but I don't think a lot of people know that they've been renamed. When was that? You said, I think it was in 2022. So it's been a couple years of people are, you know, this review was 2022.
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, I wonder if it was like right after this.
Vanessa Spina:
Yeah, probably. But also, I just don't think a lot of people know.
Melanie Avalon:
I've definitely seen those words. It's interesting because it's kind of like, oh, okay. So I heard this on a podcast recently. I don't remember who was talking about it. And I didn't go look up the origin story of it. It was a, and it was a passing comment, but the passing comment was something about how we call it adrenaline or we call it like norepinephrine or epinephrine. Wait.
Vanessa Spina:
nore or noradrenaline epinephrine norepinephrine you had it pretty much
Melanie Avalon:
Okay, so the passing comment was that the reason for that is like it just comes down to like a personal thing that happened, like a drama situation type thing, you know, like different opinions. It just came to like down to a personality drama thing in the past for why that happened. I feel like there's like a lot of drama in the science world, you know, like it's just like any other social group. So, it really makes you wonder like, you know, decisions we've reached and ideas we have. What are the stories behind all of them? Yeah, good things have been different ways. It kind of ties into our theme in the beginning about, you know, being presented. It's like such a theme. I love that. Me too. No, thank you for sharing that. That's interesting. And that explains now why I've seen those words.
Vanessa Spina:
Now we all know, but are we going to use those terms? I still call Twitter, Twitter.
Melanie Avalon:
X I don't think Twitter's ever gonna I'm like how long is it gonna be like the formerly known as Twitter or like Twitter aka X like is it gonna change I don't
Vanessa Spina:
I do it on purpose because I just think it's so inane to change it. And you know, I'm a huge Elon Musk fan and I still like purposely call it Twitter because I'm like, no, I'm just gonna change the name on me. Yeah.
Melanie Avalon:
What do they call it now? They call it tweeting? What do they call it instead? Exing?
Vanessa Spina:
Right. I should ask my husband because he's a big Twitter person, ex-person. I'll ask him, but it's probably tweet. I don't tweet a lot. I literally just use Twitter to go on there and connect with scientists that I want to meet for the podcast. Because a lot of them, they're not on Instagram or TikTok. They kind of, I think, look down on it because it's like, you know, there's a whole mess of things on there that are pseudoscientific, but a lot of them do hang out on Twitter. So I go on there just to check messages. And then sometimes I go on and there'll be some scientists who's like, yes, I'm available this week. And I'm like, oh no, this is like five months ago.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh my gosh. I feel like you should have changed it to something more analogous like chirper or something like something that would be
Vanessa Spina:
Even Exer, like anything.
Melanie Avalon:
Anything not just not x I don't go there so I don't I get scared
Vanessa Spina:
Yeah, it all goes back to, you know, naming things and
Melanie Avalon:
If you just sit back and think about the concept of virtual communities, it's kind of mind-blowing. It's not even a real place, but it's this fake place in our minds that we somehow connect with other people and we never even meet them in real life. It's kind of mind-blowing.
Vanessa Spina:
It is and it can totally take over your life. Like there was a point in my life when I got so involved with my online community that I was really neglecting like my in-person life community. And I had to make like an intentional change to stop, like focusing so much on the online. Cause it's like, I barely ever get to meet people online in real life. And like, yeah, we talk all the time, but I need, I need to start investing in like community locally. And I had to make that intentional shift. And it's been so wonderful to actually invest more in my community locally. And it's nothing against online community. It's just sometimes it can draw you in so much that it can sort of take over where you're like, I don't really need to invest in my real life community because I have such a vibrant online, you know, community.And, but we need, you know, in like real life connection, meeting up with people, having friendships and stuff on people that you can actually see on a regular basis to connect with this. There's so much that goes on when you're in person with someone compared to online.
Melanie Avalon:
There was one study on longevity, and they were looking at different populations, and in that study, the factor correlated the highest to longevity, I think, was, it wasn't the quality of social interactions, it was the number of social interactions, in-person social interactions, which could be like, is it just the number of people you meet in real life, or is that because in order to meet a lot of people daily, that means you're like going out and, you know, moving around and getting food and, you know, things like that, I thought that was really interesting. So, oh, we're about to answer a question, yes. So, our first question comes from Heather, and the subject is Cold Like Elsa, which I love that title, and she said, hi, with lots of exclamation points. She said, I've been fasting for about two months now, I average 19 hour fasts, around hour 16, I start to get very cold, is this normal? Could this be when my body enters ketosis? Cold, do you have thoughts on cold and keto? Ketosis.
Vanessa Spina:
So I don't know if any data is showing a link between cold and ketosis, but what comes to mind is that the body might be just going into some form of like energy preservation. That's what I would think is happening because one of the things that the body can do to save on energy is to shut off heat production. And so it could just be that towards that part of the fast, you're running low on like stored glycogen. So maybe you're it's, it's connected to switching into fat burning, which that could then be entering into ketosis depending on the person. So I think it's, it's a good idea. I don't know of like actual any, I don't know of any research saying that the body gets cold at that point, probably because it hasn't been measured that I'm aware of, although it could have been measured and I'm just not aware of it. Maybe Melanie, you know something about that.
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, so honestly, I thought this was going to be easier to find information on than it was. What I did find that I thought was really interesting, I found a study called core body temperature energy expenditure. And there it is epinephrine during fasting, eukaryotic feeding and overfeeding and healthy adult men evidence for a ceiling effect for human thermogenic response to diet. It was actually looking at the changes in core body temperature and the thermic effect of food based on the meals you eat, but they did look at bi temperature while fasting. And some of the explanatory information was actually helpful for me. So they talked about how half, this is interesting. So half of our metabolism is actually go actually goes towards maintaining a stable core body temperature, which I did not realize.The reason I think that's really interesting to think about is that means that's a big, that's a big ratio of energy in our metabolism that can be sort of tweaked or played with depending on I'm not trying to make this too casual, but depending on the brain's interpretation of how it's responding to an energy deficit and where it wants to make adjustments accordingly. And that was my first thought when I read that. But then as I kept reading it kind of supported that because it talked about how there are there's this theory that people are either have like a spin thrift, like a, like a thrifty metabolism or not. So basically some people's metabolism seem to be, if, if there's like an energy deprivation, they kind of lock down and don't as freely burn energy anymore. And those people can be more resistant to weight loss and more prone to weight gain.And so people who have this like thrifty metabolism, it says, it literally says that it's defined by a greater decrease in energy expenditure during fasting and that these people have a lower core body temperature. So basically, if you are the type of person who has a more genetically thrifty metabolism, it's likely that while fasting, you'll get colder because your body is going to just willingly decrease energy expenditure. And that's going to directly affect core body temperature since 50% of our energy expenditure goes towards our core body temperature. And we also talked in another prior episode about fastings effect on thyroid hormones. And a lot of the studies we looked did see a decrease in T3 without an overall negative impact on the thyroid. It was just like a transient decrease in T3 and T3 raises body temperature. So fasting lowers that.That would be another reason you might, you know, get cold while fasting. So basically, it seems like it is a normal response and it can vary based on the individual. If you want to feel warmer, I have some suggestions. So ironically, doing cryotherapy, which is deliberate cold exposure every day, that actually increases your brown adipose tissue, which is your type of body fat that's purpose is to keep you warm. It actually has more mitochondria and it generates heat to keep you warm. And cold exposure can increase that throughout your body. So you can actually build up your inner thermostat in a way by building up this brown adipose tissue. And it's not necessarily gaining weight. It's more transforming your current white adipose tissue to brown adipose tissue. Also, what you eat in your eating window can have a big effect on your body temperature during the fast. At least this is just me speaking from my personal experience. But for me, it's so obvious. So if I eat like a lower protein, if I have a lower protein night, I will be colder the next day. If I have a higher protein, I'll be warmer the next day. It's shocking the difference. If you want to really heat up, add some MCT oil to your meals. At least for me, that turns me into a generator and I'm so hot the next day. So I don't like being hot. I prefer being cold. It just feels intuitively better. So I actually really like, I don't like it when I, because of my meal, have residual effects of feeling hot the next day, especially in the summer. But yeah, so I do think it is a normal response. I think it depends on your personal metabolism. Of course, if you're over restricting, over fasting, overdoing it, you could be entering a place where it's too much for your body and that cold is a problem. I don't know if she was concerned about it. I think she was just asking, but those are my thoughts on cold during fasting. Do you have any other thoughts?
Vanessa Spina:
So I was going to say it used to be my issue for most of my life. I was always the cold person and I hated it except for in the summer because I was always very comfortable. And now I am always the warmest person because I eat so much protein. And in the winter, it's fantastic. It makes me cold adapted. I don't have to wear a lot of layers. Actually my friends constantly remark on how I'm wearing a tank top in winter. I mean, I will usually put a jacket on, but sometimes I will walk out without it. And I feel amazing. I love it in the winter this summer. We've had a really hot summer in Europe and I have been not liking it, not enjoying it at all, especially on really hot days. I just get so hot and like I'm showering a couple times a day and I just don't, I really don't like being hot, you know, getting too hot as well.So I need to find ways to cool off. And, you know, it's the one thing I've been thinking about a lot this summer. I'm like, I love everything about my high protein diet except for this. And this is the first summer that it's really bothered me where I'm like, maybe because I'm also wearing my baby a lot, like in the baby carrier. So that adds a lot of the keys really warm. So when I'm walking around the city, I have this like little heat pack on me on top of that and it makes me long for the days when I was fasting all the time and under eating protein and I was freezing. Like there's been a couple of days where I'm like, man, just want to like fast for a day just to be cold. But thankfully we had a bunch of rainstorms on the weekend and the temperature is finally cooling off.It's going back to a nice cooler temp, but on the hot, hot days, it is not great. I have to say I have to, it's something I still have to hack and figure out like how can I do high protein, get all the benefits except for this raging thermic effect in the summertime.
Melanie Avalon:
we know that decreased metabolism and like a lower, a lower metabolism throughout your life without a negative thyroid function is linked to longevity, which is a little bit counterintuitive. And we talked about that on a prior podcast. But for me, this is why just like the cold, it just feels like less inflamed. I just don't like feeling hot. I just, I really don't like not a fan. Do you get hot at night? I do.
Vanessa Spina:
but we keep a really cold room. And actually I had some of the better sleeps I've had all summer because the temperature finally cooled off. So we had the AC on top of that, but we like, I would sleep in like 16 Celsius. I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit. I can Google it, but it is 16 Celsius is 60.
Melanie Avalon:
Okay, yeah, that's, yes, we would get along really well. That's what I pretty much sleep in.
Vanessa Spina:
Yeah, so how do you stay cold even though you eat so much protein? I need your help. Like right before I go to bed? I mean, just all the time, like during the day, like on a hot day.
Melanie Avalon:
Just to show you how much I, because I eat right before bed, so that's when I'm like at my hottest. So I have the air conditioning on, I have a cooling mattress. And now I have this Hylu blanket, which I'm obsessed with. I talked about it earlier, but it's made of graphene fiber fabric. And it, because of the nature of that fabric, from what I understand, that fabric wants to exist at 64 degrees. So whatever it's touching, it either like gives energy or pulls away energy to make that thing 64 degrees. So if you're hot, even though it's a blanket, it pulls heat out of your body. It's amazing. I'm so obsessed with it. And so listeners, if they're interested, you can go to melanieavalon.com/hilu, H-I-L-U, use the coupon code MelanieAvalon for 15% off. What's fascinating about it is it's really thin. Like it's so magical. I'm like, how is this magical, thin, smooth thing like changing my body temperature? It's really heavy too.
Vanessa Spina:
But how do you stay, okay, how do you stay cold during the day?
Melanie Avalon:
one less comment about that. So no, no, no, no worries. Just to show how important this is to me. So when my AC went out the other day, because it went out at like, or AC, okay, that's how much I value the AC. It wasn't the AC, it was the power. But as a consequence, the AC, it went out at like 7pm. And I was like, okay, it'll probably come back on in an hour or two. I wasn't getting updates. Normally they give us updates. So by like 10 or 11pm, I'd already gone to my parents, recorded a podcast, come back. Then I was like, I guess I got to go sleep with my parents because I can't sleep without like air conditioning. So I went back to my parents at like midnight.And then I got a text being like, it's coming back on at 3am. So then I was like sitting at my parents at midnight and I was like, do I just go back and wait it out so I can also have my cooling mattress and my so I did I literally went back and forth multiple times and I came back and sat in the dark from like 1am to 3am just sat on the couch like praying for it to come back on. But I needed my cooling mattress and my highly blanket.
Vanessa Spina:
I understand now why you're feeling a little rough when we started.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh, no. This was a few nights ago. Yeah. So no, I'm pretty much always exhausted in the morning. I just not sometimes I'm better at hiding it than others. But what you asked about during the day.
Vanessa Spina:
Yeah, because the nighttime I'm good, it's like during the day.
Melanie Avalon:
I honestly, I, so if I were to add, this is a reason that I eat high protein, low fat. Another reason, because I find that if I eat high protein, like high fruit and lower fat, and this is just me. So friends don't like take this as gospel. That combination, especially if it's, okay, actually, you know what, I have found that different types of protein have different heating versus cooling effects. And this is a thing in Chinese medicine, and like I have this massive book, it's called like healing with whole foods. It's this massive manual that goes through basically every food ever created, and the TCM interpretation of those foods. And foods are considered in TCM to be either like cooling or warming. And so I have found that fish protein, normally the majority of my protein is fish.So it's scallops, bare moon tea, a little bit of salmon. If I eat high fish protein, I don't get massively hot. If I eat a ton of chicken, for example, I'm like burning up or like steak burning up, even though it's the same amount of protein, which is really, really interesting to me. So if my diet is high protein, but from fish and fruit and low fat, I'm okay with the temperature. But if it's like lots of chicken and steak, I'll be pretty hot. So I eat less of that during the summer months. It's okay, like you were saying during the winter.
Vanessa Spina:
Chicken is crazy because when I weed chicken breasts, I eat a lot of it and I get so hot from it. I should just do that in the winter. Chicken is steak and try to do more shrimp and fish in the summer. I love salmon. I eat it quite a bit, but I'm going to try that on really hot days. Last week, we had a week where it was over 100 every day Fahrenheit. Yeah, it's just hot. If I was cold, it makes me want to do some kind of fasting routine or something just to feel cool because I miss that feeling of just never feeling overheated no matter how hot it was outside. It's just a nice thing to be comfortable. I'm going to try that.
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, you should go down the rabbit hole of Googling the different the TCM temperature of the different foods. So like shrimp is actually hot in TCM, but scallops are neutral. Chicken. Let's see. I love this conversation. No, literally, Vanessa, I went through a period of my time where I was obsessed with this, like while I was eating, I would have that manual and I would just read about the foods.
Vanessa Spina:
They know so much. When I was doing my biomedical science program at U of T, they had an option after to do TCM, and I really considered it. I still think about it sometimes. But one of my favorite things I learned from that is food combining. You know, they're like, don't combine fruit.
Melanie Avalon:
with meat. Yeah, I know. I disagree.
Vanessa Spina:
I thought you might, but yeah, I love the knowledge from that. So that's, that's really cool. I want to know which are the cooling foods. I'm totally going to try it all out.
Melanie Avalon:
It's a thing. Okay, so chicken, this makes sense. So chicken and TCM, it's known for its ability to tonify blood. I can't say these words. Key and Jing. Okay. But it helps to regulate blood and expel cold. Literally.
Vanessa Spina:
Expelled cold.
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. So literally it's making you hot. Let's look at steak. Steak, also tonify, same thing. And it's also, yeah, it's warm. What's the other thing? Salmon. I think salmon, pretty sure salmon's, oh, salmon is considered warm in temperature.
Vanessa Spina:
So it's like other kinds of fish.
Melanie Avalon:
Bear Moondi. Let's see. I think it's like whitefish. Whitefish is neutral.
Vanessa Spina:
So my thing with whitefish is I have to add something to it like hollandaise because chicken and beef I can just have lean but fish like white salmon I can have it you know it's got some fat in it but it's relatively lean but whitefish I need something with it just like flavor wise or something.
Melanie Avalon:
Have you tried bare moon tea that I talk about all the time? Do they have it there though? Australia's bare moon.
Vanessa Spina:
should look. I remember wanting to look it up after our first podcast together, yeah, a few years ago.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh my goodness, I'm that obsessed with it. I'm talking about it all the time. Yeah, the problem is they probably don't have that Australia's brand and I want to be super clear with listeners. This is not all bare moondi because the Australia's brand is the one that raises it in tanks and they monitor it for mercury, but it's a fatty whitefish. It's a lean, fatty whitefish. It has the highest omega-3 content of any whitefish. It's delicious.
Vanessa Spina:
And obviously it's probably a little mercury.
Melanie Avalon:
Yes, yes, they literally, they monitor it for that.
Vanessa Spina:
So if I were to find Barramundi here, I would want it to be from Australia.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh no, no, sorry. Australia's is the brand. Oh, and they don't even call it that anymore. So glad we're talking about this. It's called The Better Fish now is the brand.
Vanessa Spina:
I just found it. The better fish. Okay. Astralis.
Melanie Avalon:
Do they have it?
Vanessa Spina:
in Prague? Yeah, I don't know. It's probably it's a dot com. So I will try it. And if not, I'll try it when we're home. But I love this conversation.
Melanie Avalon:
Me too. Oh my gosh, we like talked the rest of the episode. Yeah, I am.
Vanessa Spina:
I think it was important though, because other people doing high protein have got to be dealing with this in the summer as well.
Melanie Avalon:
I think it's so fascinating because I think people don't like if you didn't realize this was all a thing that these foods have different temperature effects, you wouldn't know that you could actually biohack the protein you're eating to change your body temperature.
Vanessa Spina:
Is that the only cooling one? The whitefish?
Melanie Avalon:
So whitefish was neutral, scallops were neutral. I think, let's see what egg is. Egg white, oh, egg white is known for its ability to clear heat. I have done some clear heat, clear, yeah, get rid of it.
Vanessa Spina:
heat. Okay, because before they were saying like clear cold or something clear heat, they were expelled cold. Okay, so this is expelling heat. That's what I want. Egg whites, I eat so many egg whites. So maybe I just have egg whites.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh, chicken was saying that it expelled cold, but it was warming. Wait, wait, but that, oh, wait, that makes sense. Yes. Okay. Right. These are opposites. Okay. I was thinking that they were supposed to be the same thing. Yes. These are opposites. So chicken like warmed you up and egg whites literally cool you down.
Vanessa Spina:
I'm going to try the next time we have a really hot day because it, yeah, it really affects me. So I'm definitely going to try it.
Melanie Avalon:
I think you'll find if you, okay, so say you have like a day where you just eat, and I have tried this before, right? Just had egg whites as my protein and I will be cold the next day.
Vanessa Spina:
egg whites and white fish. I could do scallops and then it would affect me the next day, not that, not the day of the next day.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh, well, I'm doing it in my perspective of I eat before bed and then it's like the residual effects. Yeah.
Vanessa Spina:
Well, I'm going to take notes and I'm going to report back. Please do. Yeah.
Melanie Avalon:
I will. This is so fun. Let's look at what looks like. I wonder if they have whey protein. Let's see. Oh yeah. So in TCM, dairy products are seen as, I can't say that word, phlegm producers, not a fun word. Oh, here it is. Cow's milk is considered warm and sweet. Yeah, I don't know.
Vanessa Spina:
Well, thank you for sharing all that. I have hope for my super hot days and you know, we really delve deep on this question.
Melanie Avalon:
I know. You have to try some experimentation and report back, so and listeners as well. And for listeners, if you would like to submit your own questions for the show, you can directly email questions at ifpodcast.com or you can go to ifpodcast.com and you can submit questions there. The show notes for today's episode will be at ifpodcast.com/episode395. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about. So definitely check that out. And you can follow us on Instagram. We are I have podcast. I am Melanie Avalon. Vanessa is ketogenic girl. And I think that is all the things. So anything from you, Vanessa, before we go.
Vanessa Spina:
I had so much fun. I loved the question we talked about on the episode and the theme of the podcast today was super fun, esoteric information, really enjoyed it and can't wait for the next one. Likewise.
Melanie Avalon:
Have a good rest of your night, and I will talk to you next week. Sounds good. You too. Bye. Bye.
Melanie Avalon:
Thank you so much for listening to the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Please remember, everything we discussed on this show does not constitute medical advice and no patient-doctor relationship is formed. If you enjoyed the show, please consider writing a review on iTunes. We couldn't do this without our amazing team. Editing by Podcast Doctors, show notes and artwork by Brianna Joyner, and original theme composed by Leland Cox and recomposed by Steve Saunders.
Check out the Stuff We Like page for links to any of the books/supplements/products etc. mentioned on the podcast that we like!
LINKS
BUY:
Melanie's What When Wine Diet: Lose Weight And Feel Great With Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, And Wine
Vanessa's Keto Essentials: 150 Ketogenic Recipes to Revitalize, Heal, and Shed Weight
The Tone Device Breath Ketone Analyzer
The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast
More on Melanie: MelanieAvalon.com
More on Vanessa: ketogenicgirl.com
Original theme composed by Leland Cox and recomposed by Steve Saunders.
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