What do you say?

Yeah.

So my origin story, as it were, um, you know, I went to medical school, um, for six years, learnt all the quen- conventional ways of doing things, and it wasn't until I got ill myself, as a previously fit, uh, 24-year-old with no medical issues, uh, I got diagnosed with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation.

For those of you who don't know, that's where your heart beats irregularly and, in my case, very fast.

I was going at 200 beats per minute.

It would happen sporadically.

The first time it happened, I was actually in the middle of a shift at Basildon Medical Hospital, so I was admitted to my own medical assessment unit late on a Sunday afternoon after I was, I was doing late shifts at the time.

Because presumably the disjunct between the knowledge about good eating and the delivery in the hospital canteen is just the, the budgets and the economics and the, uh, all the middle management's layers in between.

Like as in like maybe it's least delicate as possible.

Yeah, yeah, becoming more resilient.

So it- it's kinda down to these principles.

So we talked about protein, talked about fiber, and fiber largely from whole foods gives you diversity and makes your gut microbiome a lot more robust because a large proportion of our immune cells are actually produced in our gut.

And because we've seen a gradual decline in that diversity, uh, that again could be one of the explanations as to why we're seeing a rise in things like autoimmunity and, uh, allergic conditions.

The other thing is, um, our gut microbiome in- innately involved in, um, sugar regulation, inflammation regulation, communicates to our brain.

Like there's so much more to fiber and the gut microbiome than most people realize, and this is why it was coined like the forgotten organ in this BMJ paper from like 20 years ago.

Wow.

sort of warm and everything else everyone's probably drinking a lot more water than usual i have that's for sure and this very topic crossed my mind actually uh last week uh funnily enough um so the timing is uh is really interesting but we've got uh an expert we're going to speak to dr uh rupi alger who's going to tell us a bit more about the rundown where the uh the so-called best uh drinking water is in in the uk so welcome to the show dr great to be on board what does the report tell us in terms of sort of drinking water

Yeah, so the research that was commissioned by OutUp really spotlighted Britain's growing water confidence divide.

So everyone's had this experience where they go to someone else's house, maybe in a different part of the country, and the water tastes different.

And it's not all in our heads.

There are literal differences in the quality of the water, the taste of our water up and down the country.

Now, I want to say something up the top.

Just to remind people that the quality of tap water in the UK is amongst the safest in the world.

Is there any sort of strategy you can think about, Doctor, in terms of our listeners, in terms of making sure they don't wait until they get dehydrated to sort of start drinking?

I would say I

can see why people might have that understanding.

And look, Mike, we both work in health and health communication.

So for us, it seems really obvious.

But I really do feel like we work in a bubble.

So when I was working full time as an NHS GP, the number of people that would see across from my desk who would tell me that they eat a healthy diet.

It completely, you know, honestly and earnestly.

The station that makes you feel good.

So, you know, how does unprocessing your diet fit in with us consuming less calories?

So the mechanisms that exist that explain why ultra-processed foods are damaging our, for our health are multifactorial.

One of the key things I think, and the probably the simplistic explanation, the Occam's razor approach if you like, is that it actually leads to overconsumption of these foods.

Because they're so hyperpalatable, because they light up the reward systems within our brain, we generally overconsume calories.

And this is a bit of um, uh...

This is a bit of a conundrum for folks like us, right? Because on the one hand, we understand the reasons and the biological reasons as to why this leads to, um, ill effects like weight gain.

But the, on the other hand, it kinda gives food companies a bit of a way out.

Once that packet opens, doesn't take long before it's empty.