Anyone that comes over to Shapi Low's residents. By the way, listeners, that's our ship name, Shapiro Low's. If you come over to our house, there's a few cupboards you could open up if you're like looking for a wine cup or whatever. That just supplements are going to come poor house.
Well, you know, eight percent of Americans use some sort of sleep aid, according to the National Center of Sleep Statistics.
And Nielsen says that we spend over a billion. Yeah, baby, that's a billion with a B dollars a year on melatonin alone.
WHOA.
People will do just about anything to get a good night's sleep.
It's the whole thing.
Hey, it's Katie Low's and I'm Adam Shapiro and this is Chasing Sleep, a production of Ruby Studios from iHeartMedia in partnership with Mattress Firm.
On this episode, we want to talk about nutrition and fitness and quality sleep. Let's just call it the holistic health triangle.
We are busy people, actors, entrepreneurs, parents, podcast hosts, and sleep is like really really important to us.
Yes, And because our health and our families health is so important. That's why I've been looking forward to this episode. Our guests include doctor Chris Winter, a sleep neurologist and scientist who has authored.
Two books about sleep.
Chris is at the forefront of research and studies about the science behind sleep supplements.
Welcome Chris.
I'm excited to be back. This is a fantastic topic.
Chris advises a lot of athletes and professional sports teams on how quality sleep can help maximize performance.
Yes, and I even understand that you worked with my hometown heroes, the Philadelphia Phillies.
And Danielle la Fata is also with us. She's director of Performance Nutrition for the Phoenix Suns. She figures out what these top athletes need to be eating to be their best and making sure that they get good quality sleep so that they can return to the play offs again next year. Welcome Danielle, so nice to meet you.
It's nice to meet you guys as well.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you so much Danielle and Chris for being here to talk about sleep and supplements, which is a hot button topic amongst me and all my mom friends and my mom herself included.
Chris, We're gonna get started with you, nutrition, fitness, sleep.
Let's talk about the holistic health triangle.
As I recall my high school geometry, is this an equilateral triangle?
Hold on a second, Adam, you took high school geometry and you remember any of it?
Yes? I did, Katie, Okay, I didn't say I did well in it.
Chris, tell us about this holistic health triangle.
I always think about it as four legs of a table, so I'm more of a quad guy. I think about exercise, nutrition, mindfulness, and then sleep. I think mindfulness really starts with trying to understand not only your own sleep and maybe issues you may be having with your sleep, but also the emotion that you're bringing with it. Those are sort of my four I think. You know, if you take one of those legs away, the table collapses.
Chris, how do you define sleep supplements?
I think the best way to define supplement is something that's taking a process that's hopefully already pretty healthy and making it even a little bit more healthy. So what we're looking at is a biochemical reaction that starts from the time we ingest food to the point we're actually making chemicals in our brain that support sleep. Serotone and melatone and dopamine or rexin. There's a bunch of them, and along each pathway you're taking the proteins in milk
and breaking them down to an amino acid. That trip to fan gets converted into something else, and eventually you get melatonin. And there's all these steps and all these cofactors and minerals that are important to support that process. And for an elite athlete like Danielle's working for, that matters a tremendous amount. But if you're listening to this thinking, oh, how much magnism do I need to get so I can get some sleep, there's a reason why we don't
call them treatments. We understand very clearly how these things are best used and where they're not going to be particularly helpful.
And Danielle, you help manage all three or even four of these, which Chris has mentioned the mindfulness part. The three I'm talking about are the nutrition, fitness, and sleep you manage. These were top athletes who compete at their physical and mental best. Let's just like get into this. Do you recommend supplements?
Yes?
I do.
I am still food first, supplement second, but I always talk about being smart with our supplementation. Chris can talk to this a little bit more, right, they're also phases of sleep. Are you having a hard time falling asleep or are you having time staying asleep? And so then that's where food, nutrition, hydration at a potential supplement could come in. So just really understanding what's going on and what's needed.
What would you say are the connections between nutrition and quality sleep.
Well, it's finding that sweet spot for people where you can have a light snack one to two hours before going to bed if needed. When I speak with my athletes, whether it's my bench guys, and they didn't play very many minutes, but they still had a warm up, and they still went in earlier in the morning, and they're still not going to bed until one or two o'clock after the game.
They still need to eat.
So maybe it's more of an in between meal, not so much as a real heavy dinner, but it's not a light snack somewhere in between for them, whereas my starters or my high minutes players.
Yes, they'll need to eat post game.
So it's explaining to them that because they're like, oh, I shouldn't eat late at night, I can't eat late at night. Well, you've been active for the last five six hours and now you're not going to go to sleep for another couple hours because you're all revveed up. So it's looking at each individual and seeing where you're at your physical activity or non activity throughout the day, and how we could adjust your meal patterning.
I'm just getting flashbacks to Adam in my honeymoon in Italy, where we romantically thought it was going to be amazing and it was. I mean, honey, don't get me wrong, it was amazing, but we had to sleep sitting up for so much of it because we were eating.
Red wine and red sauce and red tomatoes.
You just pasta red wine meals and like trying to lay down on it. I mean, I still like it rises up into my throat when I even think about It's so grossy.
Yes, we should have done those big Florentine stakes at lunch.
Yes, sure, Chris.
The athletes you work with and me too, like we love to travel. In your experience flying with athletes in and out of different time zones and dealing with different types of sleep schedules to get them on the right sleep schedule, what do you do with all of the teams that are flying around and changing time zones? Constantly.
It depends on a couple things. The first is what is your mission. If the mission is to fly to London, give a lecture and go right back home, then you may not really want to acclimate to the time zone right. A great example is, you know, a lot of times a team will play a preseason game in Mumbai, India. They want people not to get hurt, not to lose a player, and just reacclimate to that time zone they've
come from as quickly as possible. Or you're trying to get to a place and actually enjoy it, like Italy, you know, and the meal is so interesting. It's like, let's all meet back here at three o'clock in the morning on this zoom call and have like heavy alfredo and see how our bodies adjust to it. It's like we could do it if we did it every night, three m alfredo, big pasta dinner, we'd eventually get used to it. But this is kind of what we're looking at.
We're trying to adjust to a different timing for our athleticism, a different timing for our eating, and a different timing for our sleep. So there's all kinds of interventions you can use to speed that process up. But it's different for every athlete. But there's all kinds of interventions that can adjust our circadian rhythm a little bit faster than it would typically if we did nothing in the direction
of travel matters. It's easier for us to stay a little bit later than to go to bed early right before we're ready, so that that kind of plays a role in it as well too.
This is like an example. We love our whole families on the East Coast. We live on the West Coast, so I always say, bring your kids to New York. Instead of giving them dinner at five o'clock, which is what we do here, you know, let them eat at eight pm with the whole family and then they sleep later too.
We love an East coast trip.
What would be some examples of ways that you could supplement if you were going to intervene and try to change someone's sleep schedule for a different time.
Yeah, I think there's lots of ways to do it.
Now.
I like to be thoughtful. What are you giving your child right before they get on the plane. I love there's little hummus bowls with the little pretzel chips. Hummus is a ton of trip to fan in it. So we always talk about trip to fan and the Thanksgiving turkey. There's way more trip to fan in chickpeas and hummus than there is in a traditional store bought turkey. So
I like cam and meal tea. Like you got to be careful, you know, want to give the kids, you know, green tea or caffeinated tea, but maybe you make a little thing of you know, camimeal tea or ice it and you have that in their sippy cups. And Okay, we're gonna drink our relaxing teas before we get on there. I mean, none of those things are going to hurt. And again, might you know, create a little bit more relaxation, a little bit more sedation that this sort of helps the plane flight a little bit.
So one easy thing is not even a supplement, but a juice. Right, tart cherry juice is blown up all over the place. I've been using it for about ten years with my athletes.
What I've never heard of this?
Did you say tart cherry juice?
Tart cherry juice, not the sweet bing cherries. It has to be the tart Montmorency cherries.
Wow.
Yes, the science shows us that it's fifty cherries, whether they're frozen, dried, or squeezed into an eight ounced juice. There's naturally occurring melatonin in the cherries, and it's kind of like a time release, and then there's also some
extra antioxidant, so that could really help. I do want to say, if you're having issues with your sugars and there's some pre diabetes or anything, you're definitely going to want to figure out how to blend that with you know, some proteins and some fats and fibers so that sugar doesn't dump right into your system.
But yes, that's a really easy thing to do.
And a lot of my athletes and non athletes, they swear by it.
I swear by it. It works really well.
Whow Yes.
Yeah, you can take it anytime to day. You can take it at night, you can take it in the morning.
Where do you buy it? Any grocery store, any grocery store.
And you know, I worked with the US men's national soccer team and I introduced it to them as well. So there were a few of us with soccer. We would come together in different cities or countries, and so we would do a nightcap and we would do little shots of tar cherry juice.
So that was our way of getting it, very different than what I've ever done experienced. I'm interested that was our nightcap in this on this same subject. And please both of you feel free to answer. What are the minerals, vitamins, nutrients that people could try or that you suggest before resorting to a sleep supplement. This tart cherry juice is one of them. Yes, what are other things on the list?
Yes, I'd recommend camin meal tea would be fantastic. High magnesium foods, so your nuts, in your seeds, magnesiums.
Are great, just overall relaxing. And then Chris, when we're resorting to the supplements, what is that? Are we talking like natural like magnesium powder, magnesium pills? What are people doing?
I would say that magnesium is important for the support of good sleep. Neurologists that used to work with said, you know what, brains love magnesium. So to me, what I would say to a patient who may be struggling with sleep is have you had your magnesium checked. I've been educated by a lot of dieticians and nutritions out there that say, you'd be surprised how many elite level basketball players show up at training camp and they're magnesium deficient.
So I would say this is a great thing to test for, and the people who are deficient, maybe magnesium supplementation could be helpful or you're not going to get into a lot of trouble just taking a reasonable supplement of magnesium yourself. To me, it's all about expectation.
I think where we run.
Into trouble is I have been struggling with sleep for years. I am lucky if I get two hours of sleep. I have this terrible, anxiety fraught relationship with sleep. How about magnesium. I don't think magnesium is going to touch that.
I think Chris brings up a great point, right, you want to get to the root of what it is and where in your sleep what's happening, and then that way you can start little things and maybe a supplement is or is not part of your program, but it's just a band aid.
Really, Okay, I went on a huge melatonin kick. I've been on the magnesium powder kick. I've been on the CBD kick. I'm trying to think. I think that might be Adam, you think that's it. I feel like those are my three.
Well, what's the sleepy tea. Is that a high magnesium.
Tea Cammeo passion flower, Valerian.
Usually, Oh yeah, Valerian Root.
There's another one, yeah, Valerian Root. But how are those things working?
I mean, what about nighttime rituals, something that you can put into your routine that may help with your sleep.
Are you a tea person?
Oh yeah, My wife's a big tea person. In fact, I grow camrameal. I think it's fun to grow it and dry it out and grind it up and stick.
It a little thing.
So I think that's great. I mean, I think when you're looking at well, Chris, I'd like to know more about supplements and figure out ways to integrate them into a healthier sleep lifestyle. I think bedtime routine is a huge place for it. So there's the tea Camimeo passion Flower, Valerian Root. I think nothing's better than every evening you're settling down to watch your episode of whatever or read your chapter of whatever, and you enjoy your camerameal tea.
We used to do that with our kids, like we would make you tea and kind of deliver it to their bedrooms when they were doing homework and calculus just kind of Okay, let's dim some lights here, let's get the phones hooked up downstairs. Here's your tea. Just this kind of it kind of creates this rhythm ah when you smell the tea and you feel the warmth and
you taste the cammeal. Maybe the cammeal has some sort of relaxing property improves your sleep, but it does always serve as that queue to oh, tasting the cam meal, it's about time to go to bed. It's like the lavender spray on your pillow. I love lattes and I would drink a latte every night if it didn't screw up my sleep. So my newest one is it's got all kinds of different eshwagandha and all these different alfhienine I think in mushroom optogens and all these things that
sort of support sleep no caffeine. So I think that's where you can really find a solid hook into the supplement world. Is trying to kind of build these things into a routine to support not only better sleep, it's better health.
I think this is a fascinating discussion, and we are not done more to come.
Welcome back to Chasing Sleep. In this episode, we are aiming for peak performance. We're talking about sleep and supplements with Danielle Lafata, who helps the Phoenix suns eat well and get good sleep, and sleep specialist doctor Chris Winter, who works with lots of pro athletes too along with regular people like us. What do you think, Chris, what should our listeners consider when looking at supplements.
Yeah, it's a tough thing. And I'll say right off the bat, you know, I tend to be pretty much a stickler for research, but you know, in terms of great research behind sleep, I would say that's a little lacking. I think it's important to understand that just because there isn't research behind something doesn't mean it's not true. It just means we can't say with a lot of authority
about that. You know, certain ingredients maybe in my non latte latte may kind of fall into that category of maybe in five years we're talking about, Wow, the adaptogens were so important. I think this is where consumer technology sort of comes in and really works at its best when you're asking it a question. So why he says, us, sleep's terrible? So I bought this thing. I'll put it on my wrist, do the experiment. Hey, Okay, take the supplement,
the magnesium. I like to change one variable to time, So pick some weeks that things are pretty steady at work, and for this two weeks you're going to take magnesium, and for these two weeks you're not, And see what happens with your sleep.
Tracker, Daniel. Are these supplements safe to take?
The supplement industry is wild. It's the wild wild West. So anything you pull off the shelf, don't think that what it says on the bottle is actually what is on the bottle. And I've been preaching this for over
fifteen years now. In the sports world, we have NSF Certified for Sport or Informed Choice or Informed Sport certified, so they're a third party company and they make sure that what it says on the label is actually in the bottle, and then they test it against all of the two hundred band substances on the World Anti Doping Agency list. I only recommend those supplements to my athletes, and the FDA doesn't have enough manpower and they don't
have them enough money to regulate this industry. So you have to be the sleuth or find the professionals that will do that for you.
Not to get too far off. There's a great study that just came out that supplemented another study from twenty seventeen in Canada. So basically, if you're taking melaton, you have no idea what's in it. They took thirty commercial brands and actually looked at them, and the variance was comical. In fact, one had no melatonin. It just had CBD in it.
Okay, I think we have to ask what's the story with CBD?
Okay?
It is everywhere, literally everywhere I look. Is there any research on this? What is CBD all about?
Yeah? So I did a deep dive on this, you know, right before I went to Major League Baseball training camp, to have that ready for every baseball player that asked about it. You know, CBD, cambinoids, THCHCCBN. You know. My takeaway is this, we can't really say a lot about it right now because it's just known in relationship to sleep. I actually feel like in certain chronic pain sort of situations, even something like generalized anxiety, I think there's some promise there.
And I think that when we are in any one of those subjects, I feel like I'm a little bit out of my expertise. Realm if I'm talking about general as anxiety as where I'm a sleep specialist tenurologist, I think we can say pretty definitively at this point there's not any real great data support chronic use of any of these products as something that would relate to better sleep. Now, where you get into the weeds a little bit is as we've talked about before on the show, great sleep
kind of relies on mindfulness. I think for individuals who have struggled for a very long time with their sleep, there's an inevitable anxiety about sleep, and so it's hard sometimes to separate out. If you can control anxiety, specifically anxiety around the process of sleeping, you'll often and either facilitate maybe a marginally better sleep, but almost always a better perception of the sleep.
Obviously, falling asleep is so much different, I guess than staying asleep, because I have tons of friends that can fall asleep right away, but they can't get connective sleep. You know, if they wake up the middle of the night, their mind starts racing it's over and then they're up from you know, two am to seven am, Versus my friends who lay there for one hundred hours can't turn it off. Are there supplements that are helpful for one
problem versus the other? Which supplements and if any would be needed?
Again, this is not That's probably not a process or a problem that I would look to, Oh, you have trouble staying asleep with then you should take this supplement versus that. I mean to me, that problem starts with the conversation of how long has this been going on? What is it that wakes you up? How many times are you waking up? How do you feel the next day. So, in that sort of flow chart of working through that problem, if supplement is in this flow chart, it is very
very near the bottom. It's not the initial thing that I would try. So it's like we were always taught as a neurologist about headaches. A new onset headache or a change in headache character needs to be evaluated immediately. I would kind of say the same thing about sleep versus well, I'm not going to get any evaluation. I'll just try to find a supplement that sedates me through this issue. I mean a lot of times, you know, going right to some sort of treatment like that obscures
the actual problem. And that's the reason why probably the average personal sleep out and is taken three to five years to get treatment because they're not going right to the source. They're like, well, I started taking melatonin and that seemed to work for a while, or I was taking more sedating drug that I used in the past
for anxiety. Well what are you doing? So to me, anybody who's in that position of struggling to fall asleep, struggling and stay sleep o, you know, getting some professional help for the problem first might actually eventually involve a supplement, but that's not what I would jump straight to.
Also, because I was curious, like do I need this because it's actually helping, or do I need this because now I'm so stressed? So I do understand this cyclical problem.
What about the prescription drugs?
Though I've mom, this one's for you and every woman who's ever gone through menopause. Honestly, yes, Like my mom gets on a soapbox saying, if you are a woman of a certain age and you have dealt with hot flashes for fifteen years, you have tried every supplement and done prescriptive drugs. Because I shouldn't be driving behind the wheel of a car. That's how little sleep I've gotten because I'm so hot and my hormones are so messed up. You're welcome.
Mom.
She really wanted you all to know that.
She did. She left us note this morning.
Yeah. I mean that's a massive it's a massive topic, and you throw menopause in there. It's its own separate issue. It's a very very meaningful and problematic thing to people. And we give terrible advice to individuals who are struggling with sleep with menopause, and the advice usually becomes some sort of sleeping pill. And when you start can get sleeping pills, they don't really change sleep that much. You're gonna fall asleep, what five minutes faster sleep in additional
seven minutes Like that's the data. But more importantly is this, There's never been a sleeping pill that shows improve performance. So when patients come to see me, well, listen, Chris, I don't want to take the ambient, but I've got to perform at my best or terrible things happen. Well, while you're looking for that study that shows that the pill you're taking, whatever it is, makes you perform better,
I'll finding twenty studies to show it doesn't. So this idea that we needed to perform our best.
No.
And this is a terrible sort of thought pervasive thing that's in medicine in general about sleeping pills, because so many clinicians have no real training in sleep. Even though of the top seven complaints you will find in a clinic, one is I can't sleep and two as I'm too tired during the day. So again, that perception can be really problematic if we don't ask some questions, if we just assume, oh, well, she doesn't sleep, so let's give her a pillar a supplement, that can be the beginning
of bad things. Sleep is a skill we're trying to build that there's no shortcut to it.
And Danielle, how would you rate some of these supplements or let's say, do you personally suggest meditation versus a prescription? I start with have you done a breathing exercise?
Have you journaled?
I start with all the sleep hygiene. Again, I'm not on Chris's level. I'm more of like a look at me as like I try to screen for these things and I know the basics. So you breathing technique or
a yoga or a meditation huge for me. Calming things like althenine, that's why teas are great, you know, doing a couple of green teas in the morning or you know, camo meal at night because of this protein or amino acid called althenine, which helps us to get in two hour rest and digest or parasympathetic nervous system.
So I'll kind of start there with something light.
Magnesium is always good, especially if you're deficient in magnesium. It will really you'll really feel that relaxing, and I think that's why after a couple of weeks it kind of stops, because you might have your stores all all bound up with with that, I don't go right to melatonin. There are a lot of sleep products for us on NSF and that Informed Sport certified, but everything has melatonin
in it, and I don't think everybody needs melatonin. And a lot of times my clients that I see the bet their wits end and they've been doing so much and they are stressed out and the mind is going, so they're looking at every they want a little bit of the brain and the body relaxation, you know, to help. They'll do the meditation and they'll do everything, and they know that it's just for a short period of the
time until they can get going back again. It's not something that they hang on and that they need to do every night.
Right right, everything that we just talked about.
It works just the same for us as it does for my elite athletes. Also, it's what they're willing to work on, right. Are they willing to meditate? Are they willing to journal? Are they willing to get in some yoga? Are they willing to just do exercise in general? So just helping them create a behavior, picking one thing to
work on to start working towards that. And of course it's also working with people that want to look at the root cause or want to find what the problem is and then want to make those gradual steps to get to a place where they don't need these crutches.
What do you see down the pipe?
What's in the supplement future, Chris?
What are you seeing? What does the future of supplements look like?
That's a great question in terms of I always think that you can answer any question about what does the future of X look like by evaluating the past. And so you know, in the time that I've been in this space since the early nineties, is there a supplement that has come along that has changed everything? Like for the positive. Now that's different from you know, MELTONA came along and everybody's on it. Is it truly meaningfully changing things for the positive or is it just sort of
a distraction until the next thing comes along? You know? I think that magnesium could certainly be in there for some people. I think that generally, when you eat well and you eat a relatively normal diet, you get what you need. Science has a way of surprising people. But as of right now, I think it'll just be sort of or more.
What it is right Is the supplement future just looking boisterous.
I think supplements there just there's always going to be something. The CBD is really huge, but still in its infancy. I thought years ago I got a handle on there's always something new coming out. We do talk about these supplements that are out there, the ones that are a combo products of magnesium and alpenine and another compound GABBA, which is a brain transmitter.
Is that a pill?
Uh?
Yeah, you could take it as a pill, And that's controversial because it's this big molecule that whether we take it through supplements or you can't really get it in food. It's what the body makes inside by a bunch of different vitamins and amino acids and whatnot.
Wait, what brain transmitter? Okay, Chris, can you break this down for us?
Gabba compounds. That's a tricky one. Gabba is an intermediate in the synthesis of things like serotonin and melotonin. Problem is, it's also not entirely clear if the preparation that you're consuming is able to cross the blood brain barrier. These are real chemicals and they're important in that sort of biochemical cascade. The real issue is are you consuming enough to make a difference? And number two, is it really even bioavailable getting absorbed into your bloodstream making it to
your brain to make any kind of difference. Those are the questions more for a chemist, I think I.
Would say keep coming back to are you doing it safely and smartly and using something that you know is real and not just a bunch of you know, rice powder and pixie.
Dust, snake oil, snake oil.
Yes, love this, look at them. We could live like an athlete tonight, Honey, Danielle and Chris. This is massive. I mean, every single person I know is struggling with anxiety around sleep, getting sleep, the quality of sleep. What should they be taking. Is it supplemental? Is it natural? It's a lot. So thank you for being on Chasing Sleep and for spending time with us and getting into it same.
It's a lot of fun, my pleasure.
Huge takeaway from today's episode four legs holding up the table that is you. One of those legs is nutrition, one is fitness, one is mindfulness, and one is sleep. I mean, that's the holy grail, is it not.
It is really important to take a step back and really think about what we're saying here. We're saying supplements are supplemental things.
Right.
The words that Danielle used were like crutch band aid.
Right.
We need to think about what is the root problem and if the root problem is not a super easy thing to take care of, then yeah, there are supplements that can help while we're trying to figure out the root problem.
So for example, when we're traveling.
That's a great time to supplement our needs. And sleep is a skill.
That we can actually work on.
We have to develop it like any other skill.
It takes work, it takes time. That's right.
We hope that this podcast has become a supplement to your other podcast listening.
See what I did there gain.
Eight, Adam, sometimes your jokes could be classified sleep supplements.
Whatever I can do to help people sleep better.
We hope you'll go into your podcast player, rate and review the show and tell us what you think.
You know.
You can always find me on the instagrams at ktq.
Low's and you can find me at Shabby Shafts, and don't forget to follow or subscribe to make sure that you get our next episode.
When we commune with nature.
Yes, or like, we live in Los Angeles and maybe we should be playing ocean sounds when we're sleeping instead of hearing city sounds or birds chirping. I think nature has a huge effect on quality of s.
I'd like it.
Next time it's sleep and Nature on Chasing Sleep. Until next time, hope you are living your best while sleeping your best.
Chasing Sleep is a production of Ruby Studios from iHeartMedia in partnership with Mattress Firm. Our executive producer is Molly Soshia.
This show was written and produced by sal Matt Brands, Dave be Sing, Jason Jackson, and Michelle Rice.
Chasing Sleep is hosted by Katie Lows and Adam Shapiro.
That's Us thank you to our partners at Mattress Firm,