Boost English And Unmask Carbs-Ultimate Dual Win Ep 652

Learn English Language: Are Your Meal Choices Shortening Your Life?

Could cutting carbs be your golden ticket to longevity? Do we unknowingly sacrifice health for Western diet's taste? Enhance your English language skills while delving into the effects of carbohydrates on your health - one power-packed lesson! Level up your language and lifestyle with our lessons! #adeptenglish

👇 Here's a glimpse of what awaits:

• 🗣️ Amplify your English vocabulary, pronunciation, and comprehension.
• 🔬 Unearth the effects of carbs on your body * no complex jargon!
• 🌈 Experience learning like never before. Infuse fun into your journey!

✔Lesson transcript: https://adeptenglish.com/lessons/learn-english-language-carbohydrates-health/

We are what we eat and what we speak.
⭐ Margaret Mead

Speak English? Yes. Age brilliantly? Absolutely. This lesson? Your passport. Listen, learn, thrive - in the language of the Brits. Join us, enrich your vocabulary, embrace youth. It's not just English, it's your future. Time to listen? Decode the mystery of carbs while enhancing your English skills! #britishenglish

In this lesson, we blend English learning with health wisdom - a unique combo that'll make your friends envy your language fluency and youthful spirit. This isn't just another English lesson; it's an adventure into knowledge, spoken in the King's English. Let's delve in, shall we? Your future self will thank you for the wisdom you're about to uncover! Don't just learn English, live it with our engaging health-focused content. #englishlesson

Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food.
⭐ Hippocrates

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💡 Learn English while demystifying carbs. Seize the chance to morph two daunting tasks into an invigorating journey of discovery and growth! 📈

More About This Lesson

Today's English language podcast is an interesting English language journey designed not just to improve your English fluency but also to unveil secrets about your own health. Our lessons, which are primarily British English, will open new windows to language learning and health knowledge for you.

Good for the body is the work of the body, and good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other.
⭐ Henry David Thoreau

Things you will learn listening to this English lesson:, you will

1. Unlock better language skills with a balanced diet.
2. Boost your English vocabulary while you munch on your pasta.
3. Improve your pronunciation over a plate of spaghetti.
4. Learn the influence of diet on language acquisition.
5. Explore how the foods you eat impact your English learning journey.
6. Can carbs improve your language learning speed? Explore the science!
7. English proficiency and your diet, see the surprising connection.
8. Discover linguistic insights as you snack on a bagel.
9. Learn English better and faster with the right diet.

Benefits of our listen & learn approach to learning

This English lesson is designed to boost your proficiency while alleviating common issues and concerns associated with learning a new language:

• Learn British English effortlessly
• Boost your health knowledge
• Gain confidence in speaking English like a native
• Engage in an active learning community
• Gain practical knowledge that you can apply in real-life situations

Learning English, or any new language, can significantly improve your cognitive abilities. By incorporating health-related topics into language learning, you not only expand your vocabulary but also gain knowledge beneficial to your well-being. For instance, understanding topics related to diabetes, which is increasing globally, or understanding the influence of dietary habits on health. Therefore, you're not just learning a language; you're gaining crucial life skills.

Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.
⭐ Confucius

Are you ready to revolutionize your language learning and health perception simultaneously? Don't miss this chance to become a confident English speaker and a knowledgeable health enthusiast. Follow and subscribe to our podcast now and embark on this journey towards a healthier lifestyle. Boost your English & health knowledge! Understand carbs and blood sugar while enhancing your English skills.

Questions You Might Have...

This English lesson is like a treasure map to two unexplored islands. One island is a sanctuary of well-being where understanding the terrain of carbohydrates can lead to an enhanced health status, like discovering hidden healing herbs. The other is a linguistic island, filled with the riches of English vocabulary - each word is like a precious gem to be unearthed. As you navigate between these two islands, your boat of knowledge will become richer, not just with health insights but with linguistic wealth too. And as you journey, the waters of British English will become less intimidating, morphing from stormy and challenging to calm and navigable. So, are you ready to set sail?

1. How does learning about carbohydrates help with English fluency? By studying a topic you're interested in, like carbohydrates and health, in English, you naturally improve your English fluency. You also gain topic-specific vocabulary and contextual understanding that aid in real-life conversations.
2. How can this English language lesson improve my health? This lesson incorporates health education alongside English language learning. You learn about the effects of carbohydrates, helping you make informed dietary choices.
3. What vocabulary will I learn in this English lesson? This lesson will familiarize you with vocabulary related to nutrition, health, and carbohydrates. It's a great way to learn practical English terms that can be used in everyday conversations about health and diet.
4. Is this lesson suitable for beginners learning British English? Absolutely! The lesson is designed to be accessible to all English language learners, whether you're a beginner or more advanced. The health content and British English accents also make it uniquely practical for daily use.
5. Why should I learn English through this topic-oriented approach? Learning English through topics of personal interest makes the learning process more engaging. This method helps you retain new vocabulary and structures better, resulting in more fluent and natural English conversations.

Most Unusual Words:

• Synapse: A tiny gap where information passes from one nerve cell to another.
• Neurotransmitter: A chemical that sends signals in the brain.
• Biochemistry: The study of chemical processes in living organisms.
• Linguistics: The scientific study of language and its structure.
• Cognitive: Related to thinking or conscious mental processes.
• Glucose: A type of sugar that gives energy to the cells in your body.
• Endorphin: A natural substance in the body that helps you feel happy and relaxed.
• Insulin: A hormone that controls the amount of sugar in your blood.
• Metabolism: The process your body uses to get or make energy from the food you eat.
• Polyglot: A person who knows and is able to use several languages.

Most Frequently Used Words:

Listen To The Audio Lesson Now

Transcript: Boost English And Unmask Carbs-Ultimate Dual Win

Is our 'healthy diet' actually shortening our lives?

Hi there. Imagine a lovely loaf of brown bread. Does that seem like a healthy food to you? Certainly I thought so! But in this podcast, you'll find out about the often overlooked impact of carbohydrates on your health, you'll gain some personal insight into the preventative measures you can take for your health. And you'll explore the world of Continuous Glucose Monitors - you’ll find out what they are. They can revolutionise your health and your eating. All this with a focus on personal responsibility and the power you hold in taking control of your health.

Hello, I’m Hilary, and you’re listening to Adept English. We will help you to speak English fluently. All you have to do is listen. So start listening now and find out how it works.

Have you ever thought that eating your daily bread could be damaging your health? Or wondered if the health advice you've been following for years might be outdated? Tune into this podcast and get ready to question the effect of carbohydrates and sugars on your health!

Now I’ve done podcasts before on diet and health - in podcast 605 I talked about my experience with the NHS advice on cholesterol which contradicted more recent research about how dietary fat and cholesterol are now NOT thought to be linked. Well, today I’m talking about wearing a CGM or ‘Continuous Glucose Monitor’. It looks like a bottle top, stuck to the top of my arm! But this device is measuring my blood sugar level continuously and it’s going to be there for a fortnight - that’s FORTNIGHT, which means 14 days. I get the data from my CGM on my phone - and it’s full of interesting information. I don’t have diabetes, that’s DIABETES, which is the illness or condition which you would usually associate with blood sugar problems. I don’t have diabetes, so why am I doing this? What is the benefit - and how might such a thing be of benefit to you too? Listen on to find out and I’ll give you my personal take on ‘preventative medicine’ and why that is such a good thing - at the end of this podcast.

Did you know that you could learn a language for many years and still not know the basics?

Before we do any of that, did you know that language learners can be learning a language for a long time - several years or more, without ever learning all of the basic most common words? And this ends up being an obstacle, an obstruction to their learning and their fluency. Don’t make that mistake. Make sure YOU know all the basic vocabulary of the English language with our course ‘The Most Common 500 Words in English’. It’s a ‘Listen & Learn’ course, just like all of our material, but this course really does cover just the most common words in English. On this course, there are only the most common words. Actually as a bonus, you get the most common 600 words in this course, as an added extra in the final chapters. So go to our website at adeptenglish.com and our ‘Courses’ page to find out more and make sure you’ve got that all the basic English vocabulary covered.

Boost Your Learning With Adept English

Could a glucose monitor help improve your health?

So today I’m talking about my Continuous Glucose Monitor or CGM. I’m talking about carbohydrate and the level of glucose in your blood. Vocabulary here - ‘continuous’ just means ‘continuing - an action which keeps on and on’. ‘Glucose’, GLUCOSE is the scientific name for sugar. And we all have a ‘blood glucose level’ - the level of sugar in the blood which can be monitored or measured. And a ‘monitor’, MONITOR here just means ‘a device for monitoring, for measuring, for recording’. If you have diabetes, that’s DIABETES - then your blood sugar level is something you’ll already be concerned with. And as I said, I don’t have diabetes, and yet for the last week, I’ve been using one of these devices. Why?

I did a podcast recently, number 645, talking about your microbiome, your ‘gut bacteria’ and how important this is to your health. And how you can influence it with food. So today, I’m talking about a slightly different aspect of diet - the eating of carbohydrate foods and sugars and the effect on the amount of glucose or sugar in our blood. If you’ve listened to podcast 605, the one about cholesterol, I talk about how science around diet and obesity - that’s OBESITY, that means ‘having a weight problem’, ‘having too much weight’, that’s obesity…. - around diet and obesity and related health conditions, the science has changed the picture in the last few years. It used to be said that fat, FAT in your diet, particularly ‘animal fat’ was the problem - and that we should be eating more carbohydrates, less fat. But now the consensus is that it’s not fat in your diet that’s the problem, it’s high carbohydrate and sugars. ‘Carbohydrate’, that’s CARBOHYDRATE - examples are bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, noodles, pizza base, dough balls, cake, biscuits, pastries. Things that we eat all the time. A lot of those products are made with white flour.

Listening Lessons

Is your 'western diet' leading you to chronic diseases?

And the link with ‘obesity’, being overweight and poor health in many of the developed nations? Well, some of it is to do with too much carbohydrate in our diets. Particularly when we eat sugary things, or things with high carbohydrate content, where the sugars are easily released. So a carrot contains sugar - as do all root vegetables, vegetables that grow beneath the ground - but a carrot is unlikely to do you harm, because your body has to work hard at digesting that carrot. It has to work a fair bit to get those sugars out. But if you drink a can of coke - or ‘soda’, as you might say in the US, which is full of sugar - then those sugars are very easily released. It’s likely that even if you are healthy, the glucose level in your blood will rise sharply when you drink one of these drinks. Then your body needs to produce a substance called ‘insulin’, that’s INSULIN to counteract the sugar. And of course, if there is constant high sugar and constant need for your body to produce insulin, then eventually this process stops working properly - that’s what’s wrong if you have type 2 diabetes. And actually, it turns out, a whole host of other health problems too. It’s now believed that diets high in sugar and ‘fast-sugar-release’ carbohydrates are behind many of the diseases that we get in mid-life and in old age - the conditions and diseases effectively that people most often die from. Heart disease, strokes, dementia, kidney failure and cancer too. And that most of us who consume a western diet are shortening our lives by eating too much sugar and too much carbohydrate. Do most of us realise the long-term effects of our eating habits? And that we may be able to make better choices and change things?

So this may be a good reason monitor your blood glucose level, even if you’re normal and healthy. Well, Many of us are consuming what’s termed ‘a western diet’ - so one high in sugar and carbohydrates that are processed and which therefore release their sugars really quickly. There’s a big difference between eating an apple (slow release sugar) and eating a slice of white bread. It’s the white bread that’s much more of a problem, not the apple! Yet high carbohydrate eating is normalised in our society. It’s been encouraged for years. And it’s usually part of what’s called ‘a healthy, balanced diet’’. And as I’ve said before, it’s still what’s advised by organisations like the NHS. But a high carbohydrate diet contains lots of foods that don’t really do us a favour health-wise. For many of us, these foods are part of our everyday diet and aren’t foods that we really think of as harmful.

Research studies back this up

According to one study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, reducing your intake of certain high-glycaemic foods, that’s high-sugar foods like bread and pasta - can decrease your risk of developing Type 2 diabetes by up to 30%. (Link in the transcript, if you’re interested) and that’s only one of many, many studies, which arrive at the same conclusion. So that's right, the pasta you're enjoying could be increasing your risk of a serious health condition by up to a third! There are many other studies which back this up!

My personal experience - can foods we think are healthy spike your blood sugar levels?

So I’m wearing a Continuous Glucose Monitor or CGM for two weeks to see what happens to my blood glucose levels, my blood sugar levels when I eat certain foods. I’m not intending to wear one longer than that - there’s no point. I’m just wearing it for a short time to learn about how my body reacts to particular foods, so that I can change my diet, alter course if you like. If there are foods that spike my blood sugar, I can choose to eat less of them or eat them less often. If we talk about ‘a spike’ or the verb ‘to spike’, SPIKE in this context - it means ‘to raise very sharply, very dramatically’. And that’s what can happen to your blood sugar, when you eat certain foods. Diabetes is not a condition that you want to have - there are all kinds of difficult health consequences. And type 2 diabetes, it’s not been established is almost entirely to do with diet and exercise. So I haven’t got diabetes yet - but this exercise will tell me whether I’m in danger of developing it - and how to change in my diet to avoid that, before it happens. So far, I’ve discovered that eating bread, even healthy brown bread massively spikes up my blood sugar level - and it takes quite a few hours for it to come down again. Yet egg noodles - they’re not so bad for me. And neither is fruit or dark chocolate. Yipee! My blood sugar goes up slightly, but not out of the good range - and it recovers quickly. But if I eat a slice of ‘healthy’ brown bread at lunchtime - my blood sugar takes several hours to recover and it makes a huge spike. That’s worth knowing! As Tim Spector says, we all react differently to different foods, especially in terms of our blood sugar spikes. Our body’s response is different for different people. What I’ve also discovered is that my baseline blood glucose level - the level I have when I haven’t eaten for a few hours or overnight - well, it’s just slightly higher that what’s recommended. So although I don’t have diabetes, I may be on the way to getting some of these problems in later life. So it’s good to know now, so that I can take care of it and watch my sugar and carbohydrate levels, while I can still do something about it.

Boost English And Unmask Carbs-Ultimate Dual Win Ep 652 Article Image

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Preventative medicine - the way forward?

That’s the whole reason why I’m wearing a CGM. I’m a big believer in first of all, personal responsibility - I try to take responsibility for my own health. And secondly, I’m a big believer in what we call ‘preventative medicine’. ‘Preventative’ - that’s an adjective meaning ‘designed or intended to prevent’. And the verb ‘to prevent’, PREVENT means ‘to stop something happening’. So the idea of ‘preventative medicine’ is rather than simply treating diseases once you’ve got them - usually with medicines or pills - it’s better to try to stop the disease happening in the first place. More and more we are discovering that health is down to genetics, but also diet and lifestyle. Health isn’t just a lottery - good luck or bad luck. We can actively influence our own health and take responsibility for it.

Download The Podcast Audio & Transcript

Like many healthcare systems in the world, the NHS doesn’t really do ‘preventative medicine’. If I went and asked my doctor for a CGM device, they wouldn’t give one to me, because I don’t yet have diabetes. The NHS is much more geared around treating people who’re already ill. Of course, that’s a worthy priority and money or funding is limited. But wearing a CGM, just for a short time - can really help influence your food choices. You might make different decisions because you’re informed before it’s too late and you become ill or ‘get sick’ as they’d say in the US. So I’m learning what eating patterns are good for me. I can see the benefit of an overnight fast. And the benefit of not eating between meals, not ‘snacking’ as we call it in English. I know I’m lucky to have access to a device like this - they haven’t been around very long. But it’s also part of taking a personality responsibility for my health. That’s good for the NHS too - hopefully I’ll rely upon it less, if I’m healthy!

Standard health tests are a ‘snapshot’ in time

Another important thing about devices like this CGM - as I’ve discovered, the level of sugar or glucose in your blood goes up and down all the time, so monitoring for a fortnight is much better than a single test that your doctor may give you. A blood glucose test from your doctor just gives you one reading, a ‘snapshot’ in time. It really doesn’t tell you very much - and certainly won’t educate you in how to improve your diet. It’s a bit like when they take your blood pressure or your BP - what measurement you get probably depends to some extent on what kind of day you’ve had, whether you were stressed out trying to find a parking space before coming into the GP appointment!

Scientific advances are wondering things!

How wonderful it is that in this day and age, we have access to scientific devices like these to help us take better care of ourselves - and access to the knowledge which enables us to make changes for the better. I hope in time, more people will have access to this type of device and will be able to avoid future health problems and live as long as they can!

Goodbye

Let us know if you found this podcast interesting - and whether you’ve any experience with this too.

Enough for now. Have a lovely day. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.

Thank you so much for listening. Please help me tell others about this podcast by reviewing or rating it. And, please share it on social media. You can find more listening lessons and a free English course at adeptenglish.com

Links

• Podcast Ep 645
• Podcast Ep 605
• Whitehall II Study
• Low-carb diet as cure for obesity and type 2 diabetes
• What predicts drug-free type 2 diabetes remission?
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