The Dr. Jules Plant-Based Podcast
Hey, I’m Dr. Jules! I’m a medical doctor, teacher, nutritionist, naturopath, plant-based dad and 3X world championships qualified athlete. On this podcast we’ll discuss the latest in evidence-based and plant-based nutrition, including common nutrition myths, FAQs and tips on how to transition towards a healthier dietary pattern and lifestyle that creates little friction with your busy life!
The Dr. Jules Plant-Based Podcast
The Silent Danger: How Sleep Apnea Impacts Your Health
Are you constantly tired despite getting "enough" sleep? Do you wake with headaches or find yourself nodding off during the day? You might be among the one-fifth of adults suffering from sleep apnea without even knowing it.
Sleep apnea isn't just about snoring or poor sleep – it's a potentially dangerous condition where breathing repeatedly stops throughout the night, preventing your body from reaching the deep, restorative sleep stages where physical and emotional repair occur. Each breathing interruption triggers a cascade of physiological responses that strain your heart, spike stress hormones, and create chronic inflammation throughout your body.
We dive deep into the two types of sleep apnea (obstructive and central), revealing why this condition dramatically increases risks for heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cognitive decline. You'll learn how sleep apnea disrupts critical hormones that control hunger and satiety, explaining why poor sleep quality typically leads to overeating by 300-400 calories the next day, especially craving carbs and sugar. The connection between sleep apnea and gut health is particularly fascinating – fragmented sleep may actually reduce microbial diversity and increase gut permeability, further driving systemic inflammation.
The good news? Sleep apnea is both diagnosable and treatable. We explore diagnostic testing options and break down treatment approaches from CPAP therapy to lifestyle modifications. You'll discover how plant-based nutrition creates a powerful foundation for addressing sleep apnea through sustainable weight management, reduced inflammation, and improved gut health. Whether you're concerned about your own sleep or someone you care about, this episode provides actionable steps to recognize, address, and potentially reverse this common but serious condition.
Don't accept chronic fatigue as normal. Your body might be trying to tell you something important during the night that you're missing while asleep. Listen to this episode, recognize the warning signs, and take control of your sleep health today.
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Peace, love, plants!
Dr. Jules
Hey everyone, welcome to Season 2 of the Dr Jules Plant-Based Podcast, where we discuss everything from plant-based nutrition to the main pillars of lifestyle medicine. Yo, plant-based buddies, welcome back to another episode. Today we're going to be talking about a subject that impacts millions of people. Most of them don't even know about it Sleep apnea. Now, it's loud, it's sneaky and it doesn't just mess with your sleep. It can actually impact your heart, your brain, your metabolism, even your mood. So today we'll be covering a whole bunch of information. We'll talk about what sleep apnea is and how to recognize it, the difference between obstructive and central sleep apnea, and why sleep apnea is dangerous, even deadly if it's left untreated. We'll talk about how it impacts your hormones, your heart and your brain, and lifestyle and dietary strategies that can improve it, and when you should try a CPAP or even consider getting tested and getting diagnosed.
Speaker 1:Sleep apnea is a disorder where your breathing repeatedly stops and starts while you sleep, and the word apnea literally means no breathing. Now, there are two types of sleep apnea obstructive sleep apnea and central sleep apnea. Obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA, is the most common and is caused by soft tissues in your throat that collapse and block airflow. Central sleep apnea is a lot rarer and is basically the brain that fails to send proper signals to breathe. Today, we'll focus mostly on OSA obstructive sleep apnea which impacts almost 20% of adults one out of five and most people don't even know that they have it. Now, the symptoms of sleep apnea could include loud snoring, gasping or even choking for air during sleep. A lot of people will report excessive daytime fatigue. They're nodding off and falling asleep during the day when they're driving and when they're sitting on the couch watching television, not stimulated. Some people will wake up with morning headaches or dry mouth, and a lot of people have trouble focusing, will have mood swings or even symptoms of anxiety or depression. Now, the thing is that a lot of people report sleeping seven or eight hours per night, but still feeling tired and exhausted the next day, and that's probably because they have good sleep quantity but they do not have sleep quality. Now, if you recall my episode on sleep, we reviewed sleep stages, sleep cycles and the different benefits of each of these stages of sleep, including stage N3 and REM sleep. Now, stage N3, which we call deep sleep or slow-wave sleep, is where physical repair happens, and your REM sleep is where emotional repair happens, physical repair happens and your REM sleep is where emotional repair happens. So when people experience sleep apnea, they just never make it to deep sleep stages and REM sleep in sufficient quantity so that repair can happen.
Speaker 1:Now sleep apnea is not just annoying, it's actually a very serious health condition. When you stop breathing, your oxygen drops and then your brain freaks out and jolts you awake, even if you don't remember it. Now this could happen dozens of times per night or hundreds of times per night, and apneas are actually measured in events per hour. So if you get tested and get a score of 22, it's not that you've had 22 apneas or hypopneas per night. You've had them per hour, and that's how we grade severity of sleep apnea.
Speaker 1:Now, having these apneas during night will trigger a cascade of health problems that include increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, a strain on your heart, and you'll get a higher risk of arrhythmias, heart failure and even stroke. But it also messes with your mind. It messes with memory and cognition. Poor oxygen levels in your brain will fragment your sleep and also will impact your brain long term. You might feel groggy the next day. You might actually have low concentration or tension levels. Poor sleep will also increase cortisol and insulin resistance. It can even make you pre-diabetic or make diabetics have a harder time to control their blood sugar. Now let's not forget about daytime drowsiness. It increases the risk of accidents or falling asleep at a wheel and if it's untreated, sleep apnea will raise your risk of heart disease, of cancer, of early death, of diabetes and even obesity.
Speaker 1:Sleep apnea can wreak havoc on many of your body's functions, including hormones and inflammation. Now sleep apnea when it disrupts your natural sleep architecture, it actually alters hormone production, and that includes leptin and ghrelin. Now these are two hormones that regulate your hunger and your satiety, and these hormones get flipped. The ghrelin increases and your leptin goes down. So the next day, after you've slept poor sleep because of sleep apnea or any other cause, you will crave more calories, especially from carbs and sugar. Some studies have shown that people who have poor, disrupted sleep will overeat by anything from 300 to 400 calories. The next day, as your stress hormones increase, your cortisol spikes, you'll feel more stressed. You'll even have increased insulin resistance. That'll make your blood sugars harder to regulate. Some people, when we in studies we sleep, deprive them on purpose. Their insulin resistance shoots up through the roof and we can actually make patients pre-diabetic, or we can worsen blood sugar control in diabetics simply by restricting their sleep.
Speaker 1:Now inflammatory markers even go up, like CRP interleukin-6. That creates a low-grade, chronic inflammatory state, and that's not great for long-term health. We know that chronic inflammation is at the root of most of our chronic diseases, so much so that I actually have an episode both in season one and in season two. I think I have two episodes in English and two in French which review inflammation. It's a very important thing to keep at bay Now. Inflammation in the short term is an acute and protective mechanism that we use to help heal and ward off bugs and infections, but low-grade, chronic inflammation is actually negative for our health. Now there's even new research showing that sleep disruption may actually negatively impact our gut microbiome. Now studies suggest that fragmenting your sleep will cause intermittent hypoxia. Hypoxia simply means low oxygen, and low oxygen levels in your body could potentially reduce microbial diversity and even increase what we call gut permeability, or leaky gut as it's called. Now that's linked to chronic inflammation and, although we need more research, it's just another reason to take your sleep very seriously Now.
Speaker 1:Typical people who would be considered at higher risk for sleep apnea are people who are obese, especially those who have a lot of visceral fat, or what we call central adiposity fat that's accumulated around their abdomen, inside of their organs, and also people who have accumulated a lot of fat around the neck. Now this increases the likelihood of your airways collapsing when you're sleeping. Now, although we know that postmenopausal women tend to have an increased risk of sleep apnea than premenopausal women, being a male increases the risk drastically. Anyone over 40 tends to have lower muscle mass, lower BMR and higher adiposity. So just age is considered a risk factor for sleep apnea and there are also anatomical variabilities or variations that could increase your risk. So people that have large neck circumference, narrow airways and people who, when we examine them, we do a throat exam we can't see their tonsils or the back of their throat, and we also know that people who drink, use alcohol, sedatives before going to bed, like sleeping pills, also will have a higher risk of having sleep apnea.
Speaker 1:How do we diagnose sleep apnea? Talk to your doctor about a sleep study if either you or your partner notices symptoms. Now this would mean having either a full sleep lab study In New Brunswick, where I practice they're quite in high demand and quite difficult to access quickly, but we can do home sleep apnea tests. A lot of different companies offer these tests. Typically they're free. They'll measure your breathing, they'll measure your heart rate, they'll measure your snoring, they'll measure your oxygen. They'll measure your oxygen. They'll measure your um sleeping position, because sleep apnea tends to be worse for most people when laying flat on your back, um. And then they'll produce a report which is sent to the doctor's office with either an interpretation by the sleep specialist or with the pure data that the doctor himself could interpret. Basically, they'll measure something called the apnea-hypopnea index or AHI, that's the number of apneas or shallow breaths per hour.
Speaker 1:Now, typically we would notice having less than 5 apneas per hour in the normal person. Mild sleep apnea would be considered 5 to 14 events per hour. Moderate sleep apnea would be considered 15 to about 30 apneas per hour and severe sleep apnea would be over 30. Now the treatment will depend on the severity and on the cause. The gold standard for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea is a CPAP. A CPAP also called a continuous positive airway pressure. It gently blows air either in your nose or your mouth and it keeps your airway open. It's highly effective but not always comfortable and people need to wear a mask and it's not necessarily sexy and a lot of ego plays into it. A lot of people they need weeks and sometimes even months to get used to the machine and some people simply cannot get used to it. It's like walking against the wind. It's loud, it's cumbersome and a lot of people, even with the best of intentions, end up giving up. Other options for treatment will include oral appliances like a retainer, or devices that reposition your jaw.
Speaker 1:You can consider positional therapy. Basically, some people only have sleep apnea in certain sleeping positions. Some people will only have it on their backs and if so, they could maybe try positional therapy. Back in the day. They would tell you to put a golf shirt with a pocket in front, put a tennis ball in it, turn it around. So you simply are made uncomfortable when trying to sleep on your back because there's a tennis ball poking you in the back, when trying to sleep on your back because there's a tennis ball poking you in the back. Now we have more intelligent devices or belts that people, or chest straps that people can wear where it vibrates when you're exerting pressure on it, or pads that you can put on your back. Basically, it sends you a signal or a vibration to try to wake you up. If you sleep on your back, that keeps people on their stomachs or on their sides and hopefully helps reduce positional obstructive sleep apnea. Now, in certain cases, people can even have surgery. I've had a few patients that have had a uvulopalatinoplasty, or UVP. It's a surgery that basically opens up your soft palate and basically creates more space in the back of your throat, so there's no obstruction or narrowing when you're sleeping.
Speaker 1:Although there's a million different things that we can do for sleep apnea, we cannot forget lifestyle. Just losing 10 to 15% of your weight if you are overweight or obese, can significantly improve sleep apnea. Exercising, especially cardio and resistance training, can help you reduce your rates of sleep apnea, also increases weight loss and will diminish the negative impacts throughout the day of living with sleep apnea. Now you should also consider avoiding alcohol and sedatives before going to bed and avoid getting caught in that vicious cycle where people who have sleep apnea are tired and because they're tired, they feel they don't sleep as well. So they take sleeping pills or sedatives before going to bed or drink alcohol to help them fall asleep, but that increases the severity of their sleep apnea. So although they claim to be sleeping enough in terms of quantity, they are getting very poor quality of sleep because of the frequent apneas and so they're not making it in stage N3 of deep sleep where physical repair happens. They're not getting the right proportions of REM sleep where emotional repair happens, and they often wake up irritable, with low concentration, short fuse, and they tend to snap and become very angry very quickly.
Speaker 1:Now some people will also recommend nasal sprays, nasal strips or saline rinses for those who are congested and are breathing from their mouths. Typically we put patients on trials of either saline rinses or nasal steroids for a few months to see if that helps. But we also want to focus on better sleep hygiene Now a regular bedtime, no screens, a few hours before going to bed and sleeping in a cool, dark room. Basically, what I want for my patients is to synchronize their circadian rhythms with their sleep hormones, so I want them to be less exposed to light after supper so that their melatonin can naturally rise. As melatonin cues your body for sleep and you unwind through your sleep routine, cortisol and other stress hormones go down and that helps you fall asleep and that simply leads to better progression towards stage 1, 2, and 3, and then REM sleep. You'll just get better sleep if your sleep hormones are aligned.
Speaker 1:Now, can a plant-based diet help with sleep apnea? The short answer is absolutely yes. A whole food plant-based diet helps by promoting healthy weight loss through a nutrient-dense diet that's also poor in calorie density, so it's a high-volume diet where each bite of food contains less calories than ultra-processed foods or animal products. So that helps promote healthy weight loss while having people feel full and feel satisfied with the diet they're on. Plant-based diets will also help reduce inflammation, and we know that high inflammation is often caused by sleep apnea or sleep deprivation. Now, a healthy plant-based diet also will contain a lot of fiber and prebiotics. These are compounds that feed your gut bugs, and a healthy microbiome will also reduce inflammation, improve insulin sensitivity. Basically, your gut bug will ferment the fiber and feed off of it and then reward you by producing short-chain fatty acids and other bioactive compounds that get reabsorbed in your circulation flow throughout your body, cross the blood-brain barrier and impact your mood, concentration, appetite and decision-making. Basically, every single function in your body is improved by having healthy gut bugs. Unlike fad diets, plant-based diets are much more sustainable and they improve multiple pillars of health, not just sleep apnea.
Speaker 1:One study found that people who ate plant-based dietary patterns had a lower risk of developing sleep apnea, likely because they have lower BMIs, lower neck fat and lower systemic inflammation. So here's the game plan If you snore, if you wake up gasping or choking or feeling tired all day, nodding off, having headaches in the morning, talk to your doctor, don't brush it off. Sleep apnea is a serious health risk and I've diagnosed it in a whole bunch of different patients, from a very lean 6'2 patient that weighs 160 pounds to seeing someone who had an AHI index of over 100. Basically, he was never making it to deep sleep, that's for sure. That patient was on four medications for their blood pressure. Even that didn't control it and that's what kind of cued us into checking for sleep apnea. And not surprisingly, we found very severe sleep apnea and still to this day, that patient still is poorly compliant to a CPAP.
Speaker 1:But I mean, the goal is not to force people to wear a CPAP if they don't want to wear one. The goal is to diagnose and at least have answers that could explain some of the symptoms or metabolic impacts that people have. They sometimes will double down on lifestyle measures because they're concerned about the health implications of living with untreated obstructive sleep apnea. Now, it's a serious condition. It does pose a serious health risk, but it's treatable and it's reversible and even preventable with lifestyle change. Diet, exercise and good sleep hygiene can absolutely help, and if you need a CPAP, it's not a failure, it's a great tool for healing. But that doesn't mean that you can't set forth changes that may help you get rid of it. I have a patient that lost so much weight that her sleep apnea basically went away. So there are a lot of success stories with people who change their lifestyle. I mean, it's not easy, but it is simple, right on.
Speaker 1:So if you think you may suffer from sleep apnea or know someone who does, or notice your partner gasping for air during sleep, have them checked. The test is non-invasive For most people. It's free. You sleep with some machinery linked to your body and to your finger. Your doctor gets a graph of the data a few weeks after and then you get a proper diagnosis. So then we can decide what do we do, and the treatment will basically be determined by the severity of the sleep apnea, and the severity of the sleep apnea will typically be measured in terms of apneas per hour, by a number that can range from 0 to 5 if you don't have sleep apnea, 5 to 15 for mild, 15 to 30 for moderate and over 30 events per hour for severe sleep apnea.
Speaker 1:Right on, I hope this makes sense. It is a very under-recognized and under-diagnosed condition. Talk to your doctor about it if you think this episode applies to you. One out of five people suffer from some form of sleep apnea after the age of 40. So get checked right on. You have an awesome day. Thanks for tuning in. I hope to see you at the next episode. Peace me. On Facebook and Instagram at Dr Jules Cormier, and on YouTube at Plant-Based Dr Jules.
